Page 94 of The Staircase in the Woods

Nick looked like he had just beenactuallypunched.

Like something had rocked him, knocking his head for a loop.

He said nothing, just offered a small, sad little nod, then stared down into the tube of cheese balls like he was an oracle reading the future in cheese pollen.

What the fuck was all that about, anyway?

Impatience suddenly nagged at Owen, so he said, “I’m gonnaopen the door, see where we landed, at least, and then we should get back to it.”

Nick, in a small voice: “Sure thing.”

Owen went and opened the door and—

And his breath was nearly stolen from his chest.

Because he was staring into—

52

Reiteration

It was Marshie’s room.

The teen girl’s bedroom. Though presently, she was nowhere to be seen. Owen saw all of it was the same otherwise: the bed, the computer. Still bloody handprints on the floor. Still a glitching spray of pixels on the monitor.

“Holy shit,” he said. “Nick, you need to see this.”

He felt Nick behind him already. “Hey, isn’t that—”

“It’s her room. The girl, the dead girl. We’re back to it.”

“Okay. That’s weird.”

Owen almost laughed. “It’s not weird, it’s—it’s a good thing. An amazing thing. It means this place isn’tinfinite.”

“How d’ya figure?”

“The chances of cycling to the same room again are infinitesimal—if this place is endless and infinite. But we found her room again.”

“And again, that’s good how?”

“Nick, it means we might see our friends again. There’s an actual chance we’ll run into them. It also means—maybe there’s a way out. That this isn’t just some unspooling nightmare but a…a system, a design, a blueprint that makes sense somehow, to someone. Like Lore said: a game. Just a really fucked-up one.”In which we’re the player characters.And if there are player characters, that means…

Nick, still seeming to be uncomfortable after the end of theirconfrontation, muttered an “okay” and then added, “But let’s cycle past this fuckin’ room.”

“No,” Owen said.

“What?”

“I want to go in.”

“The fuck? Why?”

Because I want to try something.

“Just trust me.”

And then Owen stepped through into the dead girl’s room.