Page 97 of The Staircase in the Woods

He certainly wasn’t sure that any of this was fake.

It felt real. Horribly, profoundly real.

But it also felt impossible, and that made him pause and really think for the first time since they got here, what, a week ago? Two? He didn’t even know anymore.

What if none of this was really real—and the way to escape was to figure that out? What if he just needed to find proof?

Like in a game, that meanttrying things.

So Owen walked over to the bed, and around to the side whereHamish once sat. He stood next to the bloody handprints dried into the carpet.

“Zuikas,” Nick cautioned.

“It’s fine. I…got this.”

He wasn’t sure he did. Owen felt every part of him resisting, everycellin rebellion against the action he was about to take.You’re being foolish,his brain screamed at him, which was a helluva thing, that your brain can basically scream at you, the you that is also your brain—your mind going to war against itself. (But that, he supposed, was what it meant to be human. To exist in constant opposition to yourself, you as your very best friend at the exact same time you were your own worst enemy. Oh, how stupid it was to be a person.) What he was doing was foolish because if he was wrong, what then? The stakes were either very high, or entirely imaginary.Maybe I’ll die,he thought, which made him want to throw up.Maybe I’ll die and wake up from this place,was the next thought, and that thought only terrified him further.

Owen took a deep breath—

And got down on his knees on the floor.

Then he slid his legs out and got down on his belly.

All so that he could be facing the shadows under the girl’s bed.

“Hello, Marshie,” he said in a trembling voice.

A white smile and eyes like moons opened in the darkness.

55

Clipping

If she was being honest with herself, Lore was happy for the mystery of the crawlspace. It allowed her—just like when writing, or designing a game, or throwing paint on a canvas—to simplybepresentand focus on what was in front of her rather than life’s many grievances and inadequacies. It was comforting to put all the bullshit and the garbage outside the bubble ofmaking something. And making something felt like progress.

It felt like moving forward.

And in designing games—hell, in playing them, too—the greatest joy was exactly that. Find a path, and go down it.

You had a progress bar. A percentage of the game complete. Parts of the map uncovered. Secrets revealed, items discovered.

So this was her focus. Progress. For now, that meant the task ahead was simple:

Examine the crawlspace.

Like a mission in a game. A task to complete with a checkbox right next to it, enticingly empty and desperate to be checked off.

The crawlspace was, as Hamish explained, wide—too wide, really. And it seemed to be one continuous space, unlike the rooms, which were defined by their doors. Not just doorways, butdoorsthat could be opened and closed. But this went on and on, and formed junctures—crossroads, really—between rooms. Except it didn’t necessarily seem to retain the same physical structure of the rooms, either. When the Bottle Room ended, there should’ve been a turn inthe crawlspace. But there wasn’t. It kept going straight and went left and right farther on.

“Clipping,” she said, idly.

“Huh?” Hamish asked, just ahead of her.

“Like in graphics. In a game. Clipping.”

“Lore, dude, I don’t speak this language.”

She explained: “In a game, you have your defined areas, right? The player areas, where they’re going to travel, where they can interact with things. You define this as a clip region, and outside of that is where all the excess visual and programmatic garbage gets, well, clipped. Cut off. You don’t want to expend computing power rendering things into infinity, you only need to render where the functional game space ‘exists.’ But sometimes a player breaks that accidentally or on purpose, like with anoclipcheat, and ends up…essentially here. Beyond the borders of the game. In the walls.”