Page 133 of The Staircase in the Woods

“Everybody okay?” he asked.

Hamish gave a half-hearted nod, but then darted his eyes to Nick, whose eyes had lost all focus. His skin had turned the color of Sheetrock. When he blinked, Owen thought he saw in his eyes a flashing of window glass. And something moving behind that glass.

Lore said nothing. She just stared at the house, a panic buzzing around her like a cloud of flies.

“You okay?” he asked her directly.

“I hoped we were getting out.”

“It’s not over yet.” He lowered his voice. “Nick isn’t doing well, Lore. We need to…I don’t know what we need to do, but we need to do it soon.”

“Is this it?” Hamish asked, rubbing his neck and staring at the house. “The house inside the house? The Dreamboat model from Harrowstown?”

“Home is where the heart is,” Owen said, without even really meaning to. “The heart is where the home is. That’s what this is. This is the heart of it.”

“The center of the labyrinth,” Lore said. “Heart of the beast.”

Hamish walked to the mailbox, and sure enough, painted purposefully on the side, in nice writing, was a name:

Shawcatch.

“It’s Shawcatch’s name on the mailbox,” Hamish said. “So what do we do now?”

Just then, down the walkway, the front door gently and silently opened.

Owen took a deep breath. “I think we go inside.”

79

The Host

What they were to expect, Owen could not have said—this house, the heart of the larger house, the center of the labyrinth, seemed as though it should’ve been a place of great and grave horror. But stepping through the front door, across the threshold, gave no such impression, at least not at first.

The house that awaited them offered one larger room, bisected by half of a brick wall, into which was built a small fireplace at the fore, and a set of shelves at the back. To the left of the brick sat a broad-shouldered galley kitchen, nearly all white, pristine in its cleanliness, with a small cutout two-chair breakfast nook. Right of the brick was the living room, where a round coffee table sat on a simple tan rug over speckled black linoleum. And orbiting them a long squared-off diamond sofa, a pair of smooth wooden chairs and, in the far corner, a chunky teal sitting chair with requisite ottoman. The back wall on the right was nearly all windows—though all that showed through them was darkness.

It was in the corner chair that someone sat.

He was slumped over so Owen almost didn’t notice him at first.

But as they stepped inside the house—

His head snapped up, to attention.

“Ah, guests,” the man said. He leaned forward, reaching up to the tall reading lamp that teetered next to the chair—and when he turned it on, the man was revealed to be someone in his mid-thirties.Square-jawed, with chestnut hair in a cresting rise over his head, slicked back. “Welcome to my home.”

But when he spoke these last four words—

Owen saw that he was not entirely…a person. Notmadeof person things, like skin, or hair, or teeth. Some of him was.

But notenoughof him.

When he talked, his jaw moved like a puppet’s mouth—as if the jaw were just a square block set in his long head, juggling up and down. The lips looked real. They glistened as they remained stretched out in what looked to be a permanent smile. His teeth were too white, too plastic-looking. The eyes looked real, too, but they were set back in skin that looked less like skin and more like wood and leather.

“Come in,” he said. “Come on in, and have a seat.”

They all looked to one another. Nobody moved.

“Alfie Shawcatch,” Hamish said, spoken like an invocation.