Page 109 of The Staircase in the Woods

These thoughts chewed at Owen like rats. Pushing into him, like roaches into his ears. Behind him, the dead infant struggled in the tub water. A flurry of bubbles burping up.Ignore it. Don’t look.He wanted to find Nick. Wanted to kill Nick. Beat his head into a red mess the same as he tried to do to Owen.

Owen eased both of the blood plugs free from his nose. They looked like caterpillars of dried meat. Fresh blood flowed.Fuck.

He stuffed toilet paper up there to stop it up.

The dead infant twitched, one hand splashing.

Shut up, shut up, shut up.

He looked at himself in the mirror.

His face was wrecked. Swollen and misshapen like an old Halloween pumpkin.Ugly as you deserve,he thought.Nick should’ve killed you. You deserve it. But you’re still here and you’ll find him and kill him first. He felt something crawling around inside his head. Settling in. Putting up shelves. Hanging photos of its family. Magnets on the fucking fridge and everything.

—

Still woozy, he leaned on a doorjamb and cycled rooms, dancing unsteadily in and out of each doorway, dizzier and dizzier with each turn of the ever-changing maze:

—The Too Many Guns Room—

—The Broken Wall and Broken Bottles Room—

—The Hanging Man in His Home Office Room, his toes tickling the keys of his laptop—

—The Dead Rabbits Room—

—The Flashback Home Theater Room, screen showing a penknife filleting flaps of skin off pale, exposed biceps—

—The Garage with No Garage Door Room—

—The Stuffed Animals with Real Eyes Room—

—The Deafening Arcade Room—

—The Neat-and-Nifty Storage Room, everything in its place, neatly arranged, 1990s vacuum, Tupperware, plastic bins, various wicker baskets, a glass pickle jar with a severed hand floating in the brine—

—The Blood Spatter Music Room, teenager playing an electric guitar, fingers ruined and bloody, the blood spraying with every power chord, rock on, kid—

—The Black Mold Bedroom—

—and then, finally, Owen stepped through one door, sweat slicking his brow, his heart thundering in his chest. His mind felt as though it were swimming outside of him, alongside his body as it moved. It was a long hallway clad in art nouveau wallpaper, green-and-gold leaves layered upon leaves layered upon leaves and as he looked up, he saw two others at the other end of the hall, walking away from him. At first he thought,What ghosts are you—

But they were no ghosts.

Lore. Hamish.

I found you.

Lore was already at the door at the far end of the hall.

Owen called out to her—

But his voice was a strangled croak, the weak bleat of a frog under a crushing foot. Darkness bled inward from the edges of his vision as he staggered forward, calling out again—“Lore. Hamish.”—but once again the voice was weak, too weak, run across a rasp until it was just sawdust. He reached for them. Willed his arm to stretch out like Mister Fantastic, shrinking the hallway with his mind as if they were on one of those moving walkways at the airport. He fell to his knees. Owen imagined them getting closer to him but still they opened the door at the other end of the hall. They went through it.They escaped me.They weren’t getting closer to him at all.Just a hallucination,he thought.They’re not even here. They’re not even real.The door at the far end began to close. He launched himself to his feet once more, crying out as he hard-charged down the hallway, the green-and-gold leaves to his left and right peeling off the wall toward him, like thescales of a great beast rippling, and he reached the door and threw it open—

Beyond that door waited a finished basement. Wood paneling and a beat-up couch, and Lore and Hamish were nowhere to be found.

Owen stepped through it, still alone.

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