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11

Sour Times

As they walked deeper into the woods, the trees seemed to grow taller, the understory thicker. The air was cold and damp now—humid, like in a rainforest. There came with it an almost narcotic effect. Lulling. Hypnotizing. No longer pushing Owen down, it seemed instead to be drawing him deeper.

He couldn’t chew his fingernails, given how he was dragging his bag now with both hands. So instead he gnawed his lower lip. Nibbled a piece of skin off it. Tasted a hint of fresh blood and winced.

Next to him, Hamish hauled his own suitcase through the brush, branches and twigs crashing. He looked over at Owen and asked, “You pissed at me too, dude?”

“No,” Owen said. “We’re good, why?”

“Lore’s mad at me, obviously, and Nick is salty, too.”

“About what?”

“I dunno. That I guess I never really responded to any of his emails.” Hamish paused, looking around the woods. “You?”

“Respond to his emails? Sure, sometimes.” Nick sent emails around any time he had some new theory about Matty or about the staircase. He always wanted them to get together, even if just on a Zoom call or whatever, but Owen always told him no, he was busy. Even though I wasn’t busy, Owen thought.

“I should’ve, I guess. Fuck.” Hamish sighed. “You know, it’s just like, I guess I thought that chapter was closed. It happened. It was fucked. But we can’t go back and change things like that. But I figured I could change myself, right? I improved myself, I worked hard on myself, and—and Nick is still Nick, still stuck back then, still living in the past…and god, now he’s dying. But I’m healthy now, you know? Real healthy. A good mindset. And I think we just need to move forward instead of always looking back—”

At that, a cold wind crawled through the trees. Even in the heat, it sent chills up Owen’s arms, his neck. Like ticks crawling.

Hamish kept on rambling. That familiar Hamish cadence, but now more anxious, more irritatingly self-assuring, as if he was trying to talk himself out of something—out of feeling bad, out of being Lore’s punching bag, out of being here at all. He used to be all Cool, man, whatever, but now he was dragging around more than that one carry-on, wasn’t he?

Still, Owen tuned it out. Mumbled an uh-huh or a mmm here and there, nodding along, but all the while pushing on through the woods, his legs burning, his shoulder aching, wanting to chew his fingers down to the first knuckle.

—

Onward they went. The four of them trudged through the woods. A half hour, then forty-five minutes, then an hour. They were all mostly quiet now—Owen thought, We’re already tired of one another’s company, though he wasn’t sure that was it, not exactly. Owen was swatting away mosquitoes. He already had a couple good-sized bites on his neck. He was sweating. Sticky with spider web. An elbow, etched with thorn, a streak of blood smeared there when he wiped at it. But it was more than that, too—in the space between his heart and his stomach was a roiling, tightening bundle, like a knot of starving tapeworms looking for egress.

Close to that hour mark, Nick must’ve felt their agitation, and he called out: “We’re almost there, me hearties! Just imagine the cold beer!”

He kept on. Hamish just after.

Everything in him screamed to turn around. Go home, Owen . Even though for him, home was an alien concept. His apartment was a box, a cube, a place for function and not for comfort. And growing up, home was…

Well, it was no home at all. It was a place to escape from. That was all.

Sweat ran down his back, cold as ice. The hairs on his neck and arms all rose to standing like the living dead. His gorge rose as his guts flopped inside him like a dying fish. At first he thought, I’m getting sick, and that just sent a new ripple of panic through him—getting sick out here? In the woods? An hour from the highway? And if he was really, really sick, like norovirus or, fucking hell, COVID, how would he even get back? I could die out here, he thought, almost absurdly.

But then it hit him—he’d felt this feeling before, and not when he was sick with something. No, this was different. This was special.

And it was way, way worse.

He hadn’t felt this in over twenty years.

“Something’s wrong,” he said, his lips dry as Bible pages.

“I don’t feel good,” Hamish said quietly.

Owen’s hand let his bag go—a reflexive action, one he didn’t even think about—as he hurried to catch up to the others. “Lore,” he said, in a loud, hissed whisper. “Lore! Lore, I think—”

“Fuck,” Lore said. And he heard the urgency in her voice.

Ahead, she and Nick stared into a wider, more open space—what looked to be a clearing. Lit with bright, cold light.

He and Hamish headed toward them—

But even from here, Owen could see what Lore was seeing: the top of it, poking out of the trees, just a glimpse of an old railing, the final right angle of the last step, the dark wood, the crooked balusters—

Lore staggered forward, eyes fixed on a distant point.

Owen went with, his guts churning. Next to Nick now, the four of them stood in a line, gazing into a clearing where the sunlight seemed to be a spotlight, a great garish beam illuminating a single, horrible, impossible thing:

A staircase in the woods.