Page 134 of The Staircase in the Woods

“Sure thing,” he said, lifting an arm with a loose, rolling wrist—the hand at that arm, half-human fingers and half wood, gestured at them with an unlit pipe. “None of you are sooties, are you? This is a white neighborhood, after all.” Then he laughed—his teeth snapped together as he did so,tick-a-clack. “Oh I’m just joshing you. Come on in, come on in. No need to be chicken. You’re not a bunch of cluckers, are you? I should think not. You made it this far, after all. Tells me you’ve got a heapin’ helping ofmoxie.”

Still, they didn’t move.

His fixed smile suddenly twitched and cracked like a breaking branch—then it was a frown.

“Well, maybe youarecluckers.”

Shawcatch stood suddenly. His body rattled and clattered like a bunch of bowling pins knocking together as he stood—and thewayhe stood was like a marionette pulled to its feet. A herky-jerky motion, led by the shoulders.

He took an erratic step toward them. Then another. Each time his hips twitching, his legs plucked up in the air and thrust forward.

“I see you,” he said, his voice suddenly tinny, like it was playing out of a cheap speaker somewhere deep in his chest. “Been watching you all this time. Been sneakin’ around your rooms sure as you’ve been sneakin’ around mine.”

“You’re not Shawcatch,” Lore said.

And Owen realized she was right.

“You’re the house,” Owen said.

The Shawcatch automaton winked—his eyelids clicking together as he did—and then went slack. The life out of him, like a robot unplugged.

Then a voice from the other side of the room—a child’s voice.

“Right on the nose, cookie,” said a little tousle-haired boy in his teddy bear pajamas. He, like Alfie Shawcatch, seemed to be half human, half automaton. Cabinet knob eyes and stucco cheeks. A vent in the real flesh of his throat from which hung red curtain fabric. Next to him, another child, a little smaller, with darker hair. His face looked painted on, with shiny semi-gloss house paint. The two of them judder-stepped forward, toward their father’s limp, lifeless form.

“We just wanna leave,” Hamish said, a bleat of desperation.

“Door’s right behind you,” the dark-haired boy said.

They turned to look—

But the front door was gone.

And when they turned to look back at them—

The door was behind Shawcatch. Impossibly placed at a cockeyed angle in the set of windows—as if someone had hacked a game ofThe Simsand simply plunked it into a place it shouldn’t have been allowed to go.

The father’s head jerked upright again, the jaw clacking. “Oh, gosh, me oh my, the door’sherenow, forgive my wool-headed nature.”

“Get out of our way and let us through,” Lore said.

Now, from the hallway off to the side, another shape: a woman. The wife, Judy. The blood coming out of the stab wounds that peppered her body hung in gleaming plastic beads, like cheap fakecostume rubies. She brushed back her dish-towel hair. “Can’t let you pass, doll.”

“Fuck you, bitch,” Lore hissed.

Then Nick stepped up. Hamish tried to pull him back, but Nick pulled away and staggered forward. He shuffled toward Shawcatch, and they all looked to one another, unsure what to do next. Nick walked right up to Shawcatch, whose rickety, loose-socket head turned right toward him, eye to eye.

Alfie Shawcatch, Judy Shawcatch, and the two little boys all said the same thing, in unison. In the voice of the house, they sang:

“Welcome back, my boy.”

Then they went slack, and Nick turned toward them all, grinning.

80

The Trap

Lore thought,No, no, no, please, no,and she prayed to all the gods she did not believe in that Nick had done something to turn off the Shawcatch automatons, to rebuke the house, to pave the way forward—that the grin on his face was because somehow, inexplicably, they had won.