The Staircase in the Woods

by Chuck Wendig

Ahead of her waited a room so messy it verged on a hoarder’s labyrinth: dead plants and open, half-eaten boxes of butter round crackers and shit bought from

cheap Chinese internet companies (spatula, blouse, spice grinder, Hummel knock-offs, Bluetooth headphones) still in their packaging.

His father’s skin was the color of the pages of a paperback book soaked in piss—a gray-yellow jaundice. That, the work of the cancer, a cancer that had crawled its way through all parts of him, and was now perhaps the only thing holding him together.

he was stone against this current—it splashed against him, cold, and he let it come and let it go.

since seeing the copy (because that’s how she thinks of them, as copies, not as ghosts, copypasta, creepypasta) of her mother in that room.

Lore stayed up. She was a natural night owl, a habit born from years of insomnia—her brain would not quiet itself and so she often used it to work.

This is like Hell, but not for you, not for me. This is the hell of bad houses. Where broken, hate-poisoned places go after they die.