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“Friendship is like a house,” she said to him, his head cradled in her lap. “You move into this place together. You find your own room there, and they find theirs, but there’s all this common space, all these shared places. And you each put into it all the things you love, all the things you are. Your air becomes their air. You put your hearts on the coffee table, next to the remote control, vulnerable and beautiful and bloody. And this friendship, this house, it’s a place of laughter and fun and togetherness too. But there’s frustration sometimes. Agitation. Sometimes that gets big, too big,
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Stairs that shuddered and whispered words he couldn’t understand, in a voice he recognized, a voice of a friend long gone, a friend abandoned.
The Covenant. As if that was even a thing anymore. That, a bone long broken, left unhealed.
“Maybe this is how we fix it. Even a little. We gave it a name, not to make it real, but because it was real. Once upon a time.”
They’d crash together, and maybe it would be weird and maybe it would be messy, but they’d sort through it all, the good and the bad. But that wasn’t possible. Because the bad was so bad, it made the good seem impossible, as if it had never been present in the first place. The good was a guttering candle against the cold wind of a deep dark moonless winter night. It never had a chance.
People are allowed to change, he thought, less like a belief he agreed with and more like an argument he was desperately trying to make to the jury of himself.
“I brought you here because we fucked up. We broke the Covenant. And now we have the chance to fix it.”
The body was an endless expanse of opportunities to pick and pluck and bite and peel. It made him feel better. It made him feel worse. He did it anyway because he couldn’t help it.
That phrase. The Covenant. The promise that bound them all. The thing that made them more than just friends—that made them a real, true crew. Bonafide.
They found one another through the years, not all at once. Lore and Owen in elementary school. Then Hamish. Nick and Matty in junior high. They were each the other’s respite. A safe space, a found family, a real home, existing wherever they each were at any time—they could always shelter in place with one another.
The staircase didn’t belong here. It didn’t belong in a way that went far deeper than just a staircase shouldn’t be out in the woods. This felt like something weirder, something worse. Like this staircase did not belong here in the world at all.
It’s Owen, actually, who names it. They’re watching Raiders of the Lost Ark and Matty asks what a “covenant” is, and Owen explains it: “It’s like a promise, a rock-solid, die-hard, go-to-the-grave promise. A bond you can’t get out of. It’s like what we all have.” And that’s when they start calling it that. The Covenant. It’s how they’re there for one another. How they’ll do anything for one another. Get revenge. Take a beating. Do what needs doing.
It becomes a shorthand, those two words. Not just I need you. But maybe I need to hear something nice. Or I need the truth from you right now. Or even Hey, you’re pushing too hard, you’re actually upsetting me, I need you to dial it down. That is, to them, the Covenant.
“Matty called on us to come with him that night. He said it, he invoked our bond, the Covenant, in calling us to that staircase. And we didn’t go. We fucked around while our friend went up those steps and disappeared. And in the years after? Did we look for him? Did we stay together, work together, find him together? As friends? As family? No. We didn’t. We didn’t do shit except fall apart and fuck off. But now here’s our chance. I found this staircase. And I got us all together, here, today.”
The silence always felt loud. The air always felt empty and cold, like you were stranded on another world, with no one coming to get you. It wasn’t just that it was lonely—it was that she always felt like the last person alive.
For her, crisis mode was evaluation and action. One without the other was no good. Act without evaluation and you were likely to run into traffic. Evaluate without acting and the problem was going to bury you.
But she ignored him and pushed past. Then she said to the other two, “This isn’t a regular house. It’s not a haunted house. It’s a game.”
You cannot hear their words, only the soft murmur and mumble of the voices themselves. And in that sound, you can detect emotion, you can hear the rhythm and the rise and the fall, but you can’t make out what they’re actually saying.
That was the funny thing about a fear of the dark: you weren’t really afraid of it, but rather what lurked within it. A perfect emblem of the fear of the unknown.
Again that warning: THIS PLACE HATES YOU. Hate was active. Vigorous. Not a passive thing—but an emotion. Something had to feel that emotion. Maybe that warning was more than something theatrical, more than something metaphorical.
She and Hamish looked to each other, then promptly began opening all the cabinets, and in several of them, Matty had carved other—other what? Messages? Warnings? Deranged ramblings?
He never necessarily believed that all of life was a simulation—but it was a sort of comforting, modern, almost techno-spiritual view of the world, right? It provided a kind of faith-based structure. Instead of there being a Heaven or Hell or ghosts or demons, you instead believed that you were a part of a created, manufactured world, and that there had to be a real world, a true world, beyond it.
(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.)
Owen said the thing he didn’t want to say out loud: “You’ve been here before.”
Nick was right up on him now. The light from the Zippo casting his face in a hellish glow. “I found the truth, is what I found. I found the body. Matty’s dead, kid. I wish this place would’ve killed me, too, but it won’t let me die. It emptied me out. Filled me up. Painted me the black of fire-char, the red of blood. This is home for me, now. I’m home. I’m home.”
The house doesn’t hate me, he realized. He’d been wrong. They’d all been wrong. Whoever carved the message in the very first room they found had been wrong, wrong, wrong. The house did not hate them. Not at all. No, the house loved them.
The house was not in their heads here, but it had still done its job. It was emptying them out. First of hope. Then everything else could go, too, drained out like blood from a butchered deer.
All that effervescent rage. All that crushing despair. Flourishing. Festering. Dreams curdling fast into nightmares. It’s where home stops being where the heart is. Home is where the hurt is. Where the horror lives. Home becomes another name for that place where monsters go to hide and do their terrible work.
