Page 104 of The Staircase in the Woods

She walked up behind him to see what room it had become.

Now it was a garage. No garage door—just a cinder block wall. An early nineties minivan sat there, running. The smell of exhaust was thick, choking, and they had just enough time to see the shadow of a body slumped over the wheel before Hamish slammed the door shut.

Another body.

A suicide.

Torment and tragedy.

A show put on for us. But why?

What was it Matty had carved into the cabinets?

It wants to get inside them.

It wants to move in.

Hamish said, “We saw that home gym, earlier, too. Remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“That was from our first house. Before we had our first kid, Tyler.”

“Okay. Why…would it show you that? What happened there, Ham?”

He hesitated. “That’s the thing. Nothing. Not really. It’s where I really started working out. Where I changed my body from that fat kid to…this. Except…that room, it’s where I learned to really hate myself, Lore. Where I learned to hate the way I looked, where I punished the fuckingshitout of my body. I would stay down there for hours. Guzzling energy drinks and pushing and pushing and pushing. I put up all these mirrors in that room too so I could look at myself and—and I told myself it was because I wanted to see how much I was improving, but every time I looked, it was never enough. Never. I’d stare in those mirrors and I’d say the worst things to myself. Things you’d never say to your worst enemy, man. I hated myself in that room. That’s when I figured…you know, this house was Hell, literal Hell. And that maybe I died way back when. I dunno.” This was hard for him. Lore could see that.

“Let’s refocus. Let’s talk about what we know. The place hates us. Wants to get inside us.You’ll become the house,whatever that means.”

“Yeah. And that thing about the eyes.”

“You can tell by the eyes.”

“Tell what, then?”

“I dunno. Maybe…the eyes of the ghosts here? The copies? Maybe you can see something in there. Something that tells you…it’s not real? They’re not real?”Just NPCs,she thought.

“Or maybe it’s about the eyes of people the house…infects.”

At that, she shuddered. A new fate for Matty revealed itself to her:It got in him, filled all his rooms up. Just like it might do to them. She could feel it even now. Like furniture moving inside her head. Like footsteps. Hands rattling the knobs of her many doors. She wanted to go back into the crawlspace, and said as much.

“Me too,” Hamish said. “The crawlspace—has it changed?”

They each got down and checked, peering into it. There was enough light from the Greige Room to show that it hadn’t.

“The rooms shift. But the crawlspace doesn’t,” she said.

Hamish said, “You know anything about mortgages?”

“Delightfully little.”

“Well.” He dusted off his pants. “So, like, with mortgage rates, there are two primary kinds: fixed rate versus variable. Fixed rate means you know what you’re charged every month. Variable goes up or down on you, though truthfully, it pretty much always goesup. Swells like a balloon. So. Fixed rate is what you want. And it’s kinda true here, too. You want a fixed place, a constant doorway. Like the crawlspace.” He hesitated. “I dunno. It’s dumb. Listen, at work I’m just a monkey, I punch people’s info into the computer and it calculates if they get a mortgage—”

“It’s not dumb,” she said. And it wasn’t. “You step through a door, it’s like pulling a slot machine lever. It’s a random draw. But the crawlspace doesn’t change. It stays, like you said, fixed. Or in my world: a constant. In math, science, or fuck, in programming especially—a constant is a thing that stays the same, and cannot be changed by internal forces. It’s a thing thatremains true. Sometimes even against external forces, if it’s final.” Shehmmed. “I don’t know how it all addsup yet. But I know we need to get back to the crawlspace. That place is safe. And out here…I can feel how this place hates us. It’s like something worse than white noise.Black noise. Empty noise. But in there I felt free of it. I felt more clear. Did you?”

“Yeah. We’re gonna need lights in there, though.”

“Right. Right. Okay. We go through some more rooms. Cycle them, see if we can’t find some gear. Flashlights, phone chargers, extension cords.”