Page 106 of The Staircase in the Woods

“What’s up with you?” Owen asked him.

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit.”

“Leave it, Zuikas.”

“I don’t wanna leave it. Here—maybe it’s like those stupid candy bar commercials. The Snickers ones. You need something to eat.”

He popped the top of the cereal box, ripping it open, finding the bag inside closed. Tearing that, he reached his hand in and ate a fistful of stale cereal. He handed another box to Nick, who held it, but didn’t open it.

So Owen kept looking, even as he downed another mouthful of what tasted like store-brand Cap’n Crunch. It tore at the roof of his mouth. It felt weirdly good, that pain. Like it helped to break thecircuit of his looping thoughts, the ones that kept replaying his father’s voice in his head,wish you were never born, wish you were never born, wishyouwereneverborn, neverborn, neverborn,and flashing up images of his father deliquescing there in his bed, the cancer pulping him like a juiced fruit, next to the bed that little blue suede bag…

That’s when his foot hit something. A dull crunch that gave way. Like a pillow or couch stuffed with driveway gravel.Kkkrrrch. He squinted in the dim, erratic light. It was a bag of something. Dog food, by the look of it. Two bags, actually. “I don’t think you want to eat—”

Dog food,he was about to say.

But something between the two bags—there, on the floor—glinted.

Something metal. Squarish.

Owen stooped to pick it up and—

It was a lighter. A metal lighter.

He picked it up. It felt cold in his hand, and a chill grappled up his arm, all the way to his neck, where the hairs rose like the restless dead.

Idly, his heart in his throat, he flicked the lighter open and sparked it.

Fire danced in the dark. Owen tilted the lighter just so—and the flame illuminated the side of the lighter, where it showed the Jack Kenny whiskey logo. He ran his thumb along the underside of the lighter, praying he didn’t feel what he was about to feel: four letters etched into the metal there.

N I C K.

It’s like the penknife,he knew. Just another trick. An illusion. It was never here.This isn’t really in my hand, and the fire isn’t even burning.

But he could see Nick staring at it. Transfixed.

“Nick,” Owen said, cautiously. “I found something.”

“Yeah. Yeah you did.”

Nick’s eyes were wide, unblinking.

And in them, Owen thought he saw something. No—not just one something, but many somethings, little flashes, pulses, images in the dark of his pupil.

Paisley wallpaper in one eye.

A doorknob in the other, tarnished brass.

The horizontal slats of a heating vent.

The black hole of a garbage disposal.

And then they were both, for a moment, the same image:

Each pupil a hole, and in each hole a set of steps. Staircases in the deep dark of his gaze.Starecases,Owen thought, madly.

Owen said the thing he didn’t want to say out loud: