The Staircase in the Woods

by Chuck Wendig

(Next to it: a little cairn of bitten fingernail slivers.)

You're keeping them?

The cursor, aptly named, for it cursed her.

Ugh

Glitchhikers was already a game. She liked Bitchhikers, but that didn’t really mean anything except sounding edgy for the sake of edgy, and besides, ByteDog wasn’t going to publish it with that name. They wanted to call it Hellhiker, which she hated.

You hate the best and most appropriate name?

Still, that capsule she just took? It was her last. Time to cook, she thought in her best Walter White voice.

Well, you're perspective is going to be awful to read from.

He’s better off on his own, better off not needing me, not using me like a crutch, because he ended up resenting her, and then she ended up resenting him,

Maybe you shouldn't be using shrooms as a crutch.

Capsules that, when it came time to catch her flight, she left there on the counter, because if she was already hallucinating, what was the fucking point?

Not sure what the point was to begin with.

The blood was red as a clown’s balloon.

It's blood. It's red. Who makes comparisons like this to themselves?

What Owen wanted was this:

Oh, you're going to spoon feed it to us.

She loved debate class in high school and could debate you about anything—from why Star Wars was more politically relevant than Star Trek to how hatred of MSG in food was a white supremacist tool. She got off on getting her opponents to tap out. And even when they did, sometimes she kept going.

"Discussion" is fun. Debaters who want/need to win at all costs are not. I despise this character as much as I despise irl people like her.

“C’mon, you posted it to Facebook and shit. You had the red hat selfies and went to one of his Nazi rallies and everything.” “Maybe it was just a Phillies cap.” “It wasn’t—no,

I thought this book was supposed to be based on the staircase in the woods lore. She better die first.

“Dude,” Hamish said, half pleading. Owen felt cowardly. But sometimes you just wanted to stay out of Lore’s way.

Or maybe someone should put her in her place.

as if he was still the same kid who stole his neighbor’s lawn mower and drove it nine miles to the mall, then left it there and took a bus home. Everything for shits and giggles.

I'm going to hate all these characters, aren't I.

He just grinned like the same guy he always was, the kind of guy who would sneak acid into your iced tea. (Which he had done.) (More than once.)

Ok book, let's start dropping bodies. Chop chop.

“Fine. Maybe you are. A little. But you’re jealous, too. What I’ve achieved, where I’m at. This was supposed to be you. Or you always thought it would be you. And I think that fucks with you.”

Just do shrooms, Owen, and you'll be as creative as her.

Dragging behind her, slowing her down, her having to wade through his mental emotional bullshit all the time. But then again, that’s what friends were supposed to do, wasn’t it?

Yeah, typically friends are supposed to acknowledge one another's mental health issues and support one another.

They had a lot of bad blood between them. And it was building up inside them. The only way to get it out was to cut it out. And that meant Lore showing up with her knives out.

Is that so? You're an expert?

“Hey, man,” Lore said to him. “You good?” “Not now,” he snapped at her. Well, that’s not very Hamish of you, she thought, and then he headed toward Owen instead. “Well, fuck you, too,” she said under her breath,

Bitch! You just got done attacking him earlier and you expect him to be civil with you?!

“Something’s wrong,” he said, his lips dry as Bible pages.

The author is going to have to explain this one to me. Edit: Ok, I get it, but jeeze, the prose in this book is rough sometimes.

On student council. Part of the honor society. Gifted class. And roundly, routinely liked.

I don't know. Based on his friends, we'll see about that..

Hamish was like an orangutan chasing a ferret, pawing clumsily for the thief that was his friend.

The prose is pretty awful.

They kissed. Hard. They made out like bandits.

What the hell is that supposed to mean? Edit: Didn't get it until I consulted my sister. I get it now, but again, the way it's used . . .

“You don’t mean—Laur, I can’t drop acid.” “Sure you can. It’s easy. Just pop the sugar cube in your mouth. Yum.” “No, I mean—I don’t do LSD, I can’t—” She rubbed his arm to comfort him, but also, okay, in a condescending way. You poor sweet fool, she thought.

What an awful person, and such a betrayal of their relationship.

Besides, I want us both…to be open for this. Wide open, all the way. Like, a commitment of sorts.”

And you can only accomplish that with drugs?

Her disappointment gave way to anger. You might be okay with this sort of thing— I have a future to think about— What, like she didn’t? She wanted to scream at him: I’m ambitious, too. I’m smart and I get what I want. I don’t need you, Matty Shiffman.

You were being manipulative and not open to his feelings!

Can’t hurt me if I don’t care, asshole. “Fuck it,” she said to herself in a happy-bitter voice.

I can't believe this asshole is throwing a fit over their long term booty call not doing drugs with them. He's not rejecting who you are, you're rejecting who he is.

to finally have them as girlfriend-boyfriend. But along she comes and tries to get him to do, gasp, drugs, bad drugs, your brain as a fried egg, your mind as a glass of OJ knocked off the kitchen table, and Golden Boy Matty doesn’t like that.

Maybe respect his freaking boundaries.

She was going to go up the staircase with Matty, and whether this was to join him or spite him, she didn’t yet know. No matter what, she was better than him,

Because you do drugs? That's why you're better than him? You delusional psycho?

Hamish, still looking up, said quietly, maybe to Owen, maybe to the others, maybe to the staircase itself: “We lost more than just Matty that day.” And then he started to walk up the steps.

No thought for your wife and kids? Ok.

the glass of the monster cracked, the desktop tower on the floor having fallen over in a tangle of its wires, like a soldier who’d died in a pile of his own guts.

Terrible metaphor and a bit too dramatic for the situation.

“So you’re right. Literally not the same door.”

Who's right? Hammish is the one saying this and he's the one who was right - so who is he referring to.

Hamish said, and she would never forget this, “Yeah, but we had fun, and we all gotta die sometime.” Then he laughed and took another epic hit off his bong. Gurgle, gurgle. What a difference then and now, she thought

He's got kids now.

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.

Yeah . . .

Alone was always how Lore worked best—without distraction, without nonsense, without other people’s bullshit. She needed that clarity to figure out how they were going to get out of this place—

Don't you need drugs too? You don't seem capable of doing anything without drugs.

A prayer, maybe. God, he was a Christian now?

The irony of that sentence.

when Owen and Lore got an apartment off campus, they had a cat—a silky black shadow named Invader Zim who bit them all the time.

Sounds like you were bad pet owners who didn't give your cat enough attention.

“Trying to, like, min-max hack my health.” “Is it working?” Her turn to laugh. “Probably not. I still have a BP high enough that I could probably squirt blood out of the corners of my eyes, like a lizard.”

Maybe try not doing drugs.

And what was this place, anyway? As in, why did it exist? Where did it come from? Was it even real?

Yeah, maybe you're just high Lore.

But a staircase is stable. Has to be. It’s a bedrock part of the house. And it’s protected from the outside world by the walls—until they fall. So the staircase stays behind, for a while at least, even as the rest of the house goes away, gets eaten by the roots and the dirt and whatever.

I don't think that's true.

Lauren whispered to the other two during it all, “Notice none of these things are about Matty. Not really. They’re about his accomplishments.” That’s all Matty was to them, she said. He was like a gold medal they could hang around their necks—a shining example of the family, a human trophy.

That may be true, but I hear a lot about his success and accomplishments from this group too. And I don't think Lore knows him as well as she thinks she does when he reacted as badly as he did to her suggestion of taking LSD together.

This, then, was Hamish:

Randomly? More than halfway through the book?

Jennifer, his wife? Well, he loved her and she loved him, but then why was he cheating on her? Why had he cheated on her with three other women in the past?

Oh great!

“Dude, I—I think this is Hell. I think it’s my Hell. A real, actual Hell.” “Of course, a mediocre white man would think it’s his Hell—maybe it’s my Hell, you ever think that? Maybe you’re in my Purgatory.”

Wow, Lore, it's always gotta be about you.

in part because she was always having to carry weak men, carry them and accommodate them and soothe their tender stupid hearts. (Like Owen, she thought, cruelly.)

You all have issues! Stop acting like you're the only one that matters! You threw a hissy fit when the guy you liked didn't want to take LSD with you!

Soon, they would come to hate one another.

They already hated each other.

how Hamish had literally died from an overdose, and at the moment, he felt such immense sadness about that. Sadness that was now a kind of disdain, for how weak it was that his friend had done that. How pathetic.

Of all people, Owen should be more sympathetic.

He is its agent. Poisoned by it for so long it’s hard to know where the poison ends and where Nick begins.” She crossed her arms. “How do we fix that?”

How were you expecting to save Matty?

It was reborn a cursed thing.

You can't tell me this was the first house? Surely household tragedies predate WWII and it was a ranch-style, right? Where did the stairs come from?

They rose together in the void, sometimes one room, sometimes many, drifting toward the original house—Dan Harrow’s Dreamboat model—called

How the heck was it the first?

It was born—or reborn or whatever—in the late forties, on the heels of World War II, and it was forged in that pain. And it’s why we don’t see any rooms in here from before that point, right?” “Or rooms that aren’t American,” Owen added.

I call bullshit