Page 105 of The Staircase in the Woods

Hamish nodded.

Lore stared him up and down. “All your life, you just thought you were some dumb, fat kid, didn’t you?”

He sighed. “Mostly. Not when I was with you guys, though. You know. Back when. I felt pretty good about myself then. But later…I dunno. With Matty gone and everything. I just felt worse.”

“Same here,” she said. It wasn’t a lie, not entirely. She’d found a better life. But had she ever felt as good as she did when she had her friends? When they were bound by the Covenant? She didn’t think so. “All right. We’ll keep looking for Matty. And more importantly, for Nick and Owen. Good?”

“Good.”

As they headed to the door to cycle the shifting rooms—

A stray thought pinged her. A phrase from the originalLegend of Zeldagame. Right at the start, a cryptic old man hands Link, the protagonist, a sword. It’s just a wooden sword, but it’s enough. And when he hands it over, he says:

It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this.

And that’s the thought that hit her.

It was dangerous to go alone. If Hamish were alone in here, he would’ve killed himself. If she were alone, who knows what would happen. The house would have its way, she feared. Climbing a ladder made of her worst thoughts. Crawling around in her mental attic like rabid rats.

She nodded to Hamish, and reached for the door.

60

The Light Reveals What We Don’t (Want to) See

Owen didn’t want to talk, and Nick didn’t seem inclined to push. Instead, they walked into the next room—a child’s bedroom with many empty beds, all of them spattered with blood—and he pressed the heels of his hands against his temples, trying to sort through what had just happened. Marsha wasn’t real. Her knife wasn’t real. But then she spoke. With not just her voice but—

The house’s voice.

It’s talking to me.

Why now?

Because he saw through the illusion. Saw through to something else—some truth he hadn’t yet grasped. To Nick, he started to say, “That was my father’s voice there. At the end. I don’t know how—”

But Nick barely seemed to be listening to him. He seemed off, like the experience with the dead girl, Marsha, had done something to him. Nick was not one for being quiet.

“I’m hungry,” Nick said. His voice cold and flat.

“What?”

“I’m hungry, Nailbiter. I need food. Let’s find food.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

Owen realized thathewas hungry, too. How long had it been since they’d eaten? Did that matter? They didn’t have any more food on them, but cycling rooms seemed to work well enough in getting them to find food. “We’ll find some food, then figure out…what comes next.”

It took them four cycles (first three rooms: a long hallway with something moving behind the fleur-de-lis wallpaper; a dusty old study with walls of books, one of which Owen justknewwas bound in human skin, and he had no idea how he knew this; and a basement room where the water heater was hissing and clanking, something dripping from the corroded underneath, something red and rusty, and once more Owen knew something, and that something wasthere’s a body in the water heater)—and then they had it. A walk-in pantry.

At least, that’s what Owen thought it was. Hard to tell—the bare bulb at the top was dim, slick with what might’ve been grease, and flickering.

Still. Had to give it a shot.

So, in they went. The shelves that lined each wall on both sides were metal, but covered in what looked to be a white enamel. And those white wire shelves were lined with boxes, cans, bags. Owen pulled them out one by one, squinting through the half dark to try to make them out.

One box was the size for cereal, and rattled accordingly.

He said as much to Nick, who grunted.