Page 116 of The Staircase in the Woods

He grunted and pushed back against her a little, getting more comfortable but also allowing his head up, more. She gave him some water, then, from a plastic water bottle. He sipped weakly at it, then said: “We get out of here, we work on it together. Like we always said we would. That’d be nice. For me, anyway.”

“It’d be nice for me, too. We were hot shit together, man. Somewhere I lost that. I thought I had to do it all myself. That I wasbetterdoing it that way.”

“You were better than me. I couldn’t get my shit together on my own. I always needed a crutch. Someone to lean on. Someone to carry me.”

“It wasn’t like that,” she said, even though it was. It wasn’t that Owen was a burden. But he needed her more than she needed him most times and that started to sour how she felt about him. It felt imbalanced. Unequal. But she could’ve been less shitty about it. “I shouldn’t have just discarded you. Like trash. I’m good at that. Good at just moving past things. Moving past…people. Like Matty.”

“Like I said, Lore, we were just kids. Losing Matty and then having everyone think we killed him—the way peoplelookedat us. Jesus. That would’ve fucked anybody up. We gave up on each other because it was easier than staying together and being reminded of what we lost.”

“We should’ve gone after him. Like Nick wanted.” She paused then. Asked the question she didn’t want to ask. “Owen. Where’s Nick?”

At that, Owen’s eyes pressed shut. In pain, but a different kind of pain. Something deeper. Something sadder. “He led us all here, Lore. The house had him. He was alone, and it took him.” He seemed inagony thinking about it. Owen’s eyes shined with tears. “Maybe that’s how we didn’t lose ourselves,” Owen said to her in a low whisper. “We weren’t alone in here like Nick would’ve been the first time. He asked us to help him find Matty and we never did. We all abandoned one another. And he came in here by himself and the house got him. But when we came in together, it was different. We weren’t alone. I know when it was just me, when he left me…the house had its chance. I could feel it, Lore. It wasn’t just creeping around. It wasconfident. It opened me up and walked right in. But Nick, though? How long was he in here? By himself? What did that do to him?”

Lore tried to imagine it but couldn’t. It was too awful to think about. Especially because though he led them here—they’d let him come in alone the first time. They just hadn’t realized it.

Shit,she thought.

This really is all our fault.

“We broke the Covenant,” she said.

“Yeah. We did.” Owen sighed. “Nick said Matty was dead. He found him. He died in here. I think that was what did Nick in, at the end.”

“We couldn’t save Matty.”

It pained her, saying that out loud. Admitting something was too late, that there was something you fucked up that you could not fix.

“We couldn’t save Matty, but you saved me. And we might still be able to save Nick. If he’s still here. If we can find him.”

“Then that’s the plan,” she said. “We find Nick. We free him from this place, somehow, some way.”

“The Covenant,” Owen said.

“Motherfucking Covenant.”

And with that, Owen passed out in her lap.

67

An Extended Stay

They told Hamish the plan. To find Nick. TosaveNick, or try, at least.The Covenant,they said to him, each intoned like an oath, like a prayer.

“Fuck that,” Hamish said, shaking his head. “No, no, no. No. He did this to us. He lied about his cancer, he lied about this place. Heledus here. I mean, fuck. How can I let that go? My wife. Mykids. I wanna see them again and because ofhim,because of that little prick—”

His voice broke under the assault of both grief and anger. Both born of the betrayal he felt. Owen understood it. Hamish had been close to Nick. The two of them shared parts of friendship that Owen and Ham couldn’t—and a lot of the time, Owen hated that. He didn’t understand that friendship wasn’t a one-to-one deal, that you didn’t have to beall inevery second of every relationship like that. People got to share different parts of themselves with different people. Hamish had Nick for some of that. And now Nick had done this to them.

So Hamish said, “I’m not here to save him. I’m here to get out.”

“He didn’t know,” Owen said. “The house…it’s alive. Some kind of mind. Some kind of entity. I wasn’t myself anymore. It started to take ownership. So when he did what he did to us, who knows how much of it was Nick and how much of it was the house? We lost Matty and Nick went after him, and that’s how he got this way. So we can’t lose Nick the same way. We gotta fix it.”

Hamish scowled. “Okay. Okay, yeah. Fine. In the meantime, we just…what? We wait?”

“We survive,” Lore said.

—

They went over the rules.