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16

The First Staircase

After the trail reached its peak and leveled out, it turned to the east, but dead ahead sat the staircase. The stairs and risers were pale and faded, like old bones. The paint, cracked and chipping. The wood, not soft, not rotten, but worn. The balusters—though Owen would not have had that name for them, not then—were twisted into spirals. The railing, too, screwed into a spiral at the end, like water going down a drain. The structure rose up out of nothing, and went to nothing. A staircase to nowhere.

Tall trees on either side of it cast mottled shadows on the pale staircase. The wind stirred debris on those stairs, an invisible broom sweeping them clean. It howled through the balusters, like someone whistling through stiff grass.

Owen shivered looking upon it. It felt wrong. Like it didn’t belong.

Matty came up to Owen, gave him a gentle elbow to the ribs. “You see this? This is nuts, right?”

“Yeah,” Owen said. He had to admit it felt good to be noticed by Matty. Like you were in his light, made brighter by it, less scared, less stupid. Matty never really belonged with the rest of them: They were kinda freaks and he was, well, not. Sure, they all pretended they were equals to him, but in the deepest parts of themselves they all had to know, right? That Matty was better? That he was above them, or at least that he was the first among them? The one, Owen thought, who mattered the most? Dear leader, he thought.

“You like weird shit,” Matty said. “Right? Horror stories and stuff. Urban legends and all that. You ever hear of this sort of thing?”

“No. I—I don’t think so.”

Then Lauren was next to them. Out of nowhere, popping up next to Matty on the other side. “I like that kind of stuff, too, you know,” she said. It sounded to Owen like a kind of pleading—a bid for attention. It’s pathetic, he thought, and then hated himself for thinking that. No, she wasn’t pathetic. He was the pathetic one. Just let her have this, you asshole. Then he heard Hamish’s voice in his head, chiding him. Just friends. Yeah, right.

“Let’s fuckin’ climb it,” Hamish said, his words mumbled as he spoke around the Camel cigarette he’d just twisted between his lips. He fumbled for a Bic lighter as Nick snatched the cancer stick out of his mouth and popped it in his own. Hamish went after him, but Nick was fast and nimble, ducking and feinting before snaking around the trunks of trees—Hamish was like an orangutan chasing a ferret, pawing clumsily for the thief that was his friend. Those two were always fucking with each other. Well, Nick was usually the one fucking with Hamish, because that was Nick, and that was Hamish.

The fucker and the fucked-with.

“Don’t climb it,” Matty cautioned. “You’ll get hurt and mess up the whole weekend.”

“Who knows how long it’s been here?” Lauren said.

As Nick was dodging Hamish’s every attempt to reclaim his cigarette, he was saying, “I’ve been up this trail a dozen times. Fuck, I was just fuckin’ here like, a month ago. And this staircase? It wasn’t here. It wasn’t here! I swear to it!”

“Bullshit,” Matty said.

“It’s true! Not lying.”

Hamish finally gave up the chase, and Nick leered at him, finally pulling out his own lighter—his lucky Zippo, chrome with the Jack Kenny whiskey logo on it. He flicked it open with Andrew Dice Clay panache and lit the cigarette.

Owen shrugged. “Maybe you came up a different trail. There’re a lot of paths up here. And it’s not like there’s…much to differentiate them, right? Trees and rocks and whatever.”

“That’s what it is,” Hamish said before trying one last time to snatch the now-lit cigarette out of Nick’s mouth, but Nick did a juke and got away clean again. “Dude. Gimme that back. That’s the last in the pack. It’s the lucky one.”

“No, bitch, I got the lucky lighter, it’s mine.” He blew a cloud of smoke at Hamish and chuckled. To the others, Nick said, “Whatever. This is the same trail I always come up. I’m telling you. It’s fucking marked at the bottom, you dickheads. It’s the start of the Lambert Loop trail. These stairs were not here before.”

Lauren waved him off. “Come on, the trail loops around this area and goes back down the other side. You probably came up that way every other time and you were too high or drunk to know the difference.”

Everyone laughed at that, except Owen. Owen couldn’t take his gaze away from the staircase. If it had been here before, wouldn’t vines be climbing it? Poison ivy, honeysuckle, stuff like that? Wouldn’tthere be dead leaves glued to the stairs by time and rot? How would it even be here? There should be a house. If time took the house, how did it not take the stairs? For a moment, as Owen beheld the stairway, it seemed to lengthen—stretching out in front of him, adding stairs upon stairs, as if it were climbing itself. As if it were going somewhere, punching a hole in the distance, in reality, in the universe. It made him dizzy.

The staircase didn’t belong here. It didn’t belong in a way that went far deeper than just a staircase shouldn’t be out in the woods . This felt like something weirder, something worse. Like this staircase did not belong here in the world at all.

It’s not from here, he thought—an absurd notion. And yet.

“All right, let’s set up camp,” Matty was saying, “enough with the stupid staircase,” and of course everyone listened, because Matty told them to, and they knew to listen to Matty. Out of the corner of his eye, Owen saw Nick start to grab one of the tents, and Hamish nabbed the other. Lauren lingered, waiting for Matty to follow—

But Owen was transfixed on the staircase, and Matty was transfixed on Owen. “Hey, man, you okay?” Matty asked him.

“What? Oh. Um. Yeah.”

Matty said in a low voice, “It really is strange, right? The staircase. There’s no…house here. I don’t see the frame of a foundation or anything. No other ruins or the remains of any other structure.”

“Yeah.” Owen shook himself from the reverie. “I’m sure there’s a normal explanation, though. A…prank or something. I wouldn’t put it past Nick to mess with us.”

“Totally.” Here, Matty blocked Owen from following the others, though—not really in an aggressive way, per se. Just easing in front of him. “Hey, I wanted to ask—we cool?”

“What?”

“I mean like, we haven’t hung out as much lately.”

“Oh, shit, yeah. It’s just been—” It’s just been that you and Lauren have been up each other’s asses, and also you have sports, and you have the play, and, and, and . “It’s been a lot going on. Next year’s our last, and I guess we’re all just trying to get through it.”

“Yeah, man. I hear that. But!” Matty clapped Owen hard on the arm— whap . Matty was big and tall, and he’d always been a bit rough-and-tumble. A bro who was a nerd, a nerd who was a bro. “Fuck it, that’s why we’re doing this campout. Hang out, drink some drinks, tell some scary stories—and I brought my Magic deck, man. I’m gonna finally kick your ass tonight—it’s a red-green-artifact steamroller and you do not stand a chance.”

“We’ll see,” Owen said, a gleam in his eye. It was rare to kick Matty’s ass at anything, but Magic: The Gathering was one place where Owen could do just that. (That and maybe Doom deathmatch.)

“All right, come on, let’s catch up with the others.” But Lauren wasn’t far—she was waiting for them both a little farther down the trail. Not for us, Owen thought. For him . That was fine. It was what it was. He didn’t really have feelings for her anyway, he told himself.

He looked once more over his shoulder at the staircase.

And for a moment, he thought he saw it shudder—not like in a hard wind or as if the ground shook. But shuddering like a wolf waking up—a stretch and a flex, as if ready for the hunt. It’s just your imagination, he told himself. And he turned his back on the stairs, even though he really, really didn’t want to.