Page 82 of The Staircase in the Woods

She stood up slowly and said to him, “Why are you doing this, Nick? Matty didn’t even like you that much.”

It looked as though she’d just hit him without ever throwing a punch.

But Nick screwed up his resolve then and told them all: “Matty was a better friend to me than you know. Better than any of you ever were.”

Hamish protested—the two were close, after all—but Nick told him to fuck off. Told Owen to kill himself. Told Lauren to go ruin someone else’s life.

And then he was gone. Stormed off.

He didn’t have to say it.

Didn’t have to say what this meant for them, for the Covenant.

—

They all walked away and went away. Hamish went to Virginia Tech. Lauren—Lore, soon—and Owen went to Sarah Lawrence. Nick went nowhere, at least not for a long time. And Matty was, after all, already long gone.

The three of them, without Nick, saw one another at holidays at first, but already by their second year in college, Owen and Lore and Hamish stopped coming home. Why would they? Whatwashome to them, anyway, except a place that reminded them constantly how much it didn’t care about them?

And soon even Owen and Lore were done with each other.

So withered the Covenant.

Brittle, poisoned, broken.

Though, perhaps, not forgotten.

48

In the Mansion of Sleep

Owen slept, and in the darkness of sleep, he saw a house.

He was above it. Outside of it. It floated in a crimson void, the house a mutant shape of jagged roofs and gabled peaks. Siding rippled. All of it strained and stretched and bulged. The house had no windows, and no doors. It turned in void space, rotating on every axis.

It was awake, and aware.

And it was growing.

When its siding swelled and buckled, a shape would burst out of it—like a swiftly growing tumor, a pillar of wet cement and raw flesh hardening with callus and chitin, wrapping itself in a skin of brick, of stucco, of crackling slate. Whole rooms grew this way, one next to the other, until its exterior was again flush and level before another growth burst forth.

Then, a single window—a shifting window that was first a bay window, then a circular porthole, then a casement, a transom—appeared in its center. But it was no window. Not really. It was an eye. It saw him. It knew him. He felt himself itch. Heard his father mumbling in the dark. Asking him to come inside. To come home. To a room whose floor was bitten fingernails, whose walls were lacerated skin.

Come inside,the voice said again.

Then the same voice,Let me in.

Knock-knock.

Suddenly, Owen found himself wandering the ever-shifting rooms of this place, but they were half formless, bubbling and melting even as he passed through them, like the sloppy hallucinations of so-called artificial intelligence. Eyes bursting in electrical sockets, heating vents like grinning mouths, torn wallpaper showing gleaming threads of muscle. Doorways danced away from him. Trapdoors opened beneath him.

A voice, again partly his father’s, but also a hundred voices singing together with it, braiding together:

Look at the room in which you rest your head, Owen.

The voice faded and what was left was one sound: the soft sobs of a crying woman. The kind of weeping that was like a storm—the crashing rain and the howling wind and the lash of rising waters. He couldn’t help but follow it forward and up and down. Stairs underneath his feet turned to wet, clayey mud. The floor buckled and turned to splinters, sinking deep into the soles of his feet. Streaks of blood trailed behind him in his wake. But still he went, moving forward, almost tumbling, like something had him by the throat—a noose dragging him through the house, because that’s what this was, a house, one big endless nightmare house. And then it dragged him through a door, one last door, and as he bouldered into it, it burst open and—

The playroom again. The same room in which he slept. But he wasn’t there. And the Christmas tree had not lost its needles. Lights danced up and down it.

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