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Gone, Matty, Gone

June 6, 1998.

Just after midnight.

Matty Shiffman went up the stairs, jumped into nowhere, and was gone.

Just after that, there was a moment when none of them were looking directly at the staircase. Owen was bent over, throwing up. Lauren was looking at the trees in the darkness, watching the shadows shimmy and swim and sway, and she was sure that when they moved just such a way, she would see Matty out there playing hide-and-seek, all while she did her very best to try to remember you’re on drugs you’re on drugs none of this is real Matty is still here you’re just hallucinating really fucking badly . Hamish ran around the back side of the staircase, yelling for Matty. And Nick? Well, all Nick had to do was blink one long blink.

And when they looked at the staircase again, it was gone.

—

One a.m.

Lauren screamed into the woods. The woods screamed back, taking her voice and turning it into an arrow and firing it into her ear, an ear that drizzled blood now. So she screamed louder. A fox screamed back. A fox with a human face but sharp, sharp fox teeth. Beyond the human-faced sharp-toothed fox, Lauren thought she saw a staircase rise up out of the dark, and beyond the fox’s screams and the fox’s cackles, she was sure she heard Matty calling her name, and she ran toward it, she ran top speed because she wanted to climb the staircase and be with him, and she was so, so, so sorry that she screwed things up for them, and her legs burned and she charged hard toward the stairs and toward the voice and then—

A dark shape, the fox with a human face, no, a wolf, a werewolf, a creature dark and hirsute, slammed into her, knocking her to the ground.

The beast’s face resolved into Owen.

“You almost ran off the cliff,” he said, breathless.

“Fuck you,” she whimpered, because though she did not know it was a cliff, maybe that’s where the staircase was. Maybe it was out there, over the edge. Maybe that’s where Matty went. He went over the cliff. I want to go over the cliff too. I want to fly like Matty did . Fly, climb, fall, die. Absurd, that. She was sure he was dead but sure he was alive. What did that mean? What could that possibly mean? It means you want to join him, she thought. Wherever he was.

And at that moment and in all the moments for years to come she would always think, I made him do it, I pushed him away, and if I hadn’t acted like such a dick that night, he would not have gone up that staircase like a cocky angry show-off . He is dead and gone, and I should be dead and gone too.

She struggled and tried to push Owen away. Her skin felt hot and crawling. He was a heavy shadow, a cruel presence. He told her it was fine. He said it would be over soon. Lauren wasn’t sure what that meant, not exactly, but somehow in those words she found the deepest lake of darkest comfort and she stopped struggling, instead choosing to sink into the waters of his words.

—

Three a.m.

The flashlight beam cut a swath through the woods. Hamish held the light. Nick followed behind, his Zippo in hand, its flame starting to gutter.

“It has to be a prank,” Nick said. That was his take on it, and over the last few hours, he assured everyone, assured them 120 percent, that Matty was cleverer than all of them and that somehow he’d rigged a staircase to appear and disappear, and he went with it. Never mind that Matty had never shown any aptitude for magic. But he was a prankster sometimes, and so Nick was sold on this. He said, “You’ll see. Morning comes, that clever prick will pop out of a tree stump like a Keebler elf, and we will shit our pants and we’ll laugh and cry and punch that fucker in the shoulder for what he put us through.” Hamish said he wasn’t so sure. Nick told him he was a na?ve fucking idiot. “You’ll all see.”

—

Five-thirty a.m.

The sun was just starting to burn the edge of the paper of the universe. In the growing light of day, the four of them stood in the spot in the woods where Matty Shiffman had climbed a mysterious staircase and jumped off into nothing.

“You can come out now!” Nick screamed into the woods. His voice was hoarse. All their voices were rough from yelling for Matty all night long, their vocal cords rubbed raw by the belt sander of fear and desperation.

Nick and Hamish did most of the searching.

Owen stayed with Lauren, who was coming down off her trip and now sat in the leaves, her cheeks and forehead streaked with dirt, staring at the space where once a staircase stood.

In the slanted morning light, the intersection of reality and unreality was dizzying. The truth of their situation felt more and more like a dream, as if Matty had never existed at all.

“We have to tell someone,” Owen said.

“Tell them what, exactly?” Nick asked. “ We found a magical staircase and our friend went up it and fucked off to Fairyland. I’m sure he’ll be back in school on Monday, don’t sweat it ?”

“No one’s going to believe us,” Lauren said in a voice so quiet and so ragged, it sounded like a smoker’s whisper. “I don’t even believe us.”

Hamish kicked a rock and started sobbing.

Owen got up and put his arm around him, had him sit down next to Lauren. It just made Hamish weep all the more. They all watched it and waited for the storm to pass before they spoke again.

Nick said, “We’re going to need a plan.”

“Why?” Owen asked.

“Jesus, Zuikas. Because—because Matty is missing. He’s now a missing person, like, in a crime. Who do you think they’re going to blame for that?”

At that, Hamish’s head lifted off his chest, a look of hope brightening his face. “What if he’s back home? Like, what if he just went home? We’re up here in the woods and—what if he’s at his house?”

“I mean, I guess he could be,” Owen said.

Lauren shook her head. “He’s not. He’s gone. Just gone.”

“She’s right,” Nick said. “Matty is gone. Okay? Let’s say he is back home, then that’s great, then we don’t say shit and we just kick his ass for fucking with us. But if he’s not there—and we don’t have a story? Then they’re going to say we murdered him. We’re going to be in jail. Even if they never find him or find a body, then—”

“What if he fell off the cliff?” Owen asked, suddenly.

“That’s the story you want to go with?”

“No, I mean—last night. Laur almost fell, what if he…”

Looks of horror crossed their faces. The thought that Matty somehow stumbled away into the woods and off the edge of the cliff—

That, then, was the next round of searching. Now in the light of day. Walking the perimeter of Highchair Rocks. Looking down over the edges for some sign of him. Some part of all of them thought they’d find him down there, a broken body, bent every which way atop the boulders. It took hours.

But still no Matty.

—

Ten a.m.

Nobody was eating. Or drinking. They were back at the camp now. The fire had gone to dead gray ash. Everything looked sad and empty and ruined.

“It’s gotta be simple,” Nick said, of the story they needed to tell.

“I don’t see why we need a story,” Owen said again.

“Because of the Satanic Panic. Because of the West Memphis Three. Because just last year, remember in Perkasie those three kids who went missing? Kids younger than us. They were killed on a turf farm up there by a couple of twenty-year-old pot dealers who lured them there and stabbed them, chucked them in a fucking water tank . They’re gonna think we lured our very successful, most excellent friend up here and executed him. They’ll look at Owen, with his black clothing, they’ll look at me and see some skeevy scumlord, they’ll see that Lauren was high on acid and Hamish was stoned and drunk and they’ll say, Those kids killed their good friend, Matthew Shiffman, who would never drink a drink or eat a drug. They sacrificed him to the devil up there at Highchair Rocks . And god fucking forbid we say something about a mysterious staircase that came and went and took our best friend with it. That isn’t credible, you understand? They’ll hang us.”

That sold it.

They needed a story.

It would be a simple one, they decided. Too complicated and that meant nobody would remember it, and it might strain credibility.

At some point that night, they just couldn’t find Matty. He’d taken some of his stuff and gone. They’d throw some of his things off the edge of a cliff to make it look like maybe he fell.

“We can’t do that,” Owen said. “That is a crime. That means we’re committing a crime. Right?”

Hamish agreed. He sniffed and said, “And if they think Matty is dead, they’ll—they’ll stop lookin’ for him.”

“Where do you think they’re going to find him?” Lauren asked. “Up the staircase? There is no staircase. It’s gone.”

“Maybe there never was one,” Hamish said, stammering. “Maybe we were all too drunk and high and we imagined it. Like, like, mass hysteria. A shared hallucination, you know? Weird shit happens like that. And maybe Matty really is out there somewhere. Lost and alone. Maybe we should just tell them. His family. The police. Maybe we should tell them he just wandered off, and they can look for him, too. We can all look for him.”

“Fuck that,” Nick said. “The cops are shit. Cops don’t wanna do that work. They’ll want to pin it on us. We have to do this right.”

Lauren agreed with him.

Owen and Hamish shot each other dubious looks.

But the train was moving. The ride was starting.

And they were all on it, like it or not.

And so, the Second Covenant was born.