Page 126 of The Staircase in the Woods

What kind of world is this?he wondered, never out loud.

As his sleep frittered away, so did his mental state.

Soon he stopped sleeping altogether.

And on one dark summer night, Alfie did something terrible. He got up out of bed, dazed, weary, seventy-two hours straight without sleep. He took out the paratrooper knife from under his pillow—not even sure when he’d put it there—and stuck it in his wife’s throat. No logic to it. No thinking she was an enemy soldier, no hallucinating her as some kind of foul thing. Best that can be surmised, he had all that pain, all that bad stuff inside him, and it built up like an infection. Swelling and swelling until it popped. Until the rage needed somewhere to go.

Judy didn’t get to scream.

Then he went after his children. Frankie and Ollie slept in one room, Marie in another, because the Dreamboat was one of those blessed three-bedroom models, wasn’t it? A real beaut, that house. Powder-blue walls in the boys’ room, suddenly sprayed red with what was kept inside them.Theyscreamed.Theyfought. Like good boys, Alfie knew. Good boys knew to fight. Even when the fight was a losing one. And then, finally, Marie.

He went to find her in her bed, but she was gone.

She’d seen him, he realized. Seen him and crawled into the small attic of the house, and then slipped down into the crawlspace—like a little rat. He promised her if she came out, he would do okay by her. He would keep her safe and even bring her mother and her brothers back to life again. But Marie refused. Because Marie was smart. And that’s when Alfie knew, only one way to get out a rat like that. He’d smoke her out. So he set a fire in the attic and waited for her to show herself, and ohh, that fire spread mighty quick. But Alfie wasn’t about to leave and miss her sneaking out, so he stayed there in the house as it burned down around him, as it blocked the doors and choked him with smoke. Soon, it had him, too, the fire crawling up his legs and setting his hair ablaze. That’s how Alfie met his end.

—

(Marie escaped via a panel in the back meant to access the basement.)

(She lived, though her family did not.)

—

The house watched it all.

It may seem strange to think of a house watching anything, but when a house becomes a home, it becomesimbuedwith life. Alive in an almost literal way—and certainly aware. If a house becomes haunted, it is not haunted by the ghosts of its inhabitants but rather by thememoriesof those inhabitants—it is the house that remembers, and the house that records and replays the lives lived there.

Houses, in this way, are like vessels. Waiting to be filled up. And what fills them can spill out—be it love, be it pain, be it hate.

And Alfred Shawcatch filled that house, his Dreamboat, with the blood of his family, the screams of his children, and the nightmares of war.

—

When the house burned, it was gone. Cooked to the earth—naught but a few black-char splinters sticking up from the ground like the teeth of a beast.

But gone is not alwaysgone.

And in the great void where dead things go, the house was reborn.

—

It was reborn a cursed thing. It went to its death splashed with blood and burned with fire. It came alive in the dark, the prefab structure redrawn first as a mere sketch, but soon with walls and slab and glass. It became fully aware—with only hatred as its guide. Hatred for Alfie Shawcatch and what he had done to his family.

It was hateful, yes.

But it was also alone. And houses—homes—crave company. To be empty is the worst fate, and so the house, whether consciously or not, called out.

It sang a hammer-and-saw song to other homes like it.

A song of blood and fire.

—

The wages of civilization and the vagaries of the twentieth century saw more and more people, meaning more and more houses, more and morehomes,and in the uncaring churn of industry and the ever-steady march of war, trauma and pain radiated out—the glassy, brassy pealing of a bell. More homes were filled with nightmares instead of dreams, and when some of those homes died—be they burned, demolished, abandoned—they sometimes could come back. They rose together in the void, sometimes one room, sometimes many, drifting toward the original house—Dan Harrow’s Dreamboat model—called by its grim gravity. It reached for them, and they for it. They joined with it, room by room.

And as they did, its power grew.

Its hunger, too, in equal measure.