Page 103 of The Staircase in the Woods

“You’re not real,” he said again. But suddenly, he wasn’t so sure.

“Your father’s in here, Owen. He’s real, isn’t he?”

Owen could barely find his voice when he said, “My father’s dead.”

“And yet, he’s waiting for you. So is the knife, Owen. So are your bitten fingernails. So is Lauren. Your mind is a house of pain, Owen. Let me add its rooms to mine. And let me add my rooms to yours.” And then the chorus of voices pared away until there was only one voice left—not Marshie’s voice, no, even though it came out of her. “I wish you were never born,” said his father.

His words. Her mouth.

He hadn’t heard his father’s words since that day in his bedroom. And those words—I wish you were never born—were the last things Owen heard before—

No, don’t think it, don’t go there, you think about it it’ll never stop, that thought will never leave—like a vampire, once you invited it in, it could always come in, would never ever leave.

Instead, he pushed past Nick and opened the door—pulling his friend through and slamming the door shut behind them.

59

Checks and Cross-Checks

Soon as they came back out into the house, Lore felt it. Like getting into cold, slick pond water—sinking into oily foulness, drowning in toxic runoff. Hamish didn’t need to say anything—it was clear he felt it, too. He looked sallow-cheeked. Almost like he was getting sick, like a fever was on its way. A hint of jaundice to his pallor. A sheen of sweat.

Lore sniffed and looked at the bookshelves in front of them.

“There was a book here,” Lore said to him, as she stood by those shelves, scanning them first with her eyes, then with a finger running across their spines.

Hamish didn’t hear her at first—he was instead on his hands and knees, looking back into the opening leading to the crawlspace. “What?”

“A book. By me.”Sort of.

“Wait, there was a book by…you? Here? In this room?” He grunted as he stood. “That seems fuckin’ goofy.”

“Yeaaaaah. Yeah.” She chewed on her lower lip. “I wrote a book once about game design.The Crazy Bitch’s Guide to…whatever. And it was here, and I flipped through it, but it wasn’t entirely my book. It had other things in it. Hateful things. About me, mostly. Stuff I’d seen online or gotten over email. Gross sexist shit. Death threats. Doxxing. I dunno why it was here. And you’re right. I can’t find it now, but…it’s insane it was here in the first place.” She used the toe of oneof her boots to move the books on the floor to see if one of those was hers. Didn’t look like it.

“Maybe it was real, now it’s gone. Maybe it wasn’t real in the first place.”

“What do you mean? Say more.”

“Uhh. I dunno. I just figure—so, like, this is a room, and it feels like a real room that exists. Or…existed.”

“Like the ghost of a room. Or a copy of one.”

“Maybe a ghostisjust a copy.”

Lore felt a little rocked by that comment. “God. Maybe. That’s pretty smart thinking, Hamish. So these rooms are or were real, but maybe they’re not the actual rooms. They’re ghosts of rooms, copies of rooms, programs of rooms. So why would my book not be here anymore?”

“Like, maybe it was just put here to fuck with you.”

She nodded. That felt right, didn’t it?

“This place hates you. Gets inside you. Like Matty—or whoever—wrote on those cabinets. If this place wanted to get inside me? Well, it would probably show me a book full of people who hate me. It would deliver that hate in a form I would not easily be able to deny. I’d definitely reach for a book I wrote, because, let’s be honest, I’m a raging narcissist.” Hamish looked like he was about to protest, but she shook her head. “It’s okay, I already know it. This place served my anxiety to me on a silver platter of my own making.”

“It’s…been fucking with me, too. The first bathroom we found—the one off this very room?” He walked over to that door, not yet opening it. “That was the bathroom I died in. At the party. Just some dude’s bathroom. I…I didn’t even realize it at first but then it hit me, that’s where I died. The mirror was broken because I broke it that day. With my head, when I passed out.”

“Jesus, Ham.”

“Yeah.”

He winced, and then threw the door open. The door that once led to that bathroom of which he spoke.