The Staircase in the Woods

by Chuck Wendig

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.

world was fucked up, everything was fundamentally broken, and she was upset all of the time. As such, it was easy for her to simply disassociate—she disentangled herself from the world, freeing herself from its foul roots and grasping claws before falling into dreamless sleep like a vampire when the sun rose.

“You fucking assholes, Nick has cancer!” And then, quiet. No cars on the road, no wind, no birds, nothing but the distant roar of a plane somewhere. The air was still and filled with the tragedy of reality.

Later, Hamish blew it off, made it seem like he was trying to be funny, but Lauren said it meant Hamish had “a core of anger somewhere deep down.”

The fucker and the fucked-with.

He looked once more over his shoulder at the staircase. And for a moment, he thought he saw it shudder—not like in a hard wind or as if the ground shook. But shuddering like a wolf waking up—a stretch and a flex, as if ready for the hunt.

She took both of the acid-drop sugar cubes and popped them in her mouth. She let them melt before crunching the last of the sugar granules between her teeth. Lauren imagined them as tiny bones. Matty’s finger bones, she thought, and it was a dark, insane, totally fucked thought, and she loved

Beneath Matty’s feet, the floorboards groaned like a child in pain.

It’s like what someone cut into the wall in that hallway: It hates us. I can feel it now. I didn’t know that I could, but it’s there, like the sound of a chainsaw or a leaf blower in the distance. Both a sound and a pressure. The hate. Can you feel it? It’s not just me, is it?”

or fuck, the worst of all, the bedroom with the distant sound of a chirping smoke detector, letting all the cosmos know, My battery is dead, my battery is dead, and now this sound lives in your head, my battery is dead, my battery is dead, I’ll chirp forever wherever you tread!

He dreamed of the house they were in. Rooms they’d seen. He wandered the house when he was awake, and his dreaming mind did the same. These rooms? They never left him. It was like this awful nowhere house was opening up spaces inside him. Demoing everything to make room for itself. This place was building rooms inside him. As he walked through it, it walked through him. Tunneling through him. Laying pipe. Stringing wire. Digging out a foundation, a hollow space in his dirt, and building on top of that void. New construction! Move-in ready!

Sometimes friendships didn’t break in some big dramatic way. Sometimes they just dried out, curled up like a leaf on the ground, and turned to dirt. Like all things inevitably did.

She’d heard stories about those poor bastards social media companies hired—first in America, later in other countries, because of course, fuck those people, right—whose sole job was to go through all the horrendous, heinous, awful shit that saturated social media. Not just the trolling and the doxxing and the death threats. But like, the real dark shit. Videos of beheadings. Child porn. Animal abuse. Nightmares from the deepest, most fucked X-chan mines. It broke those people. Broke down their walls. Shattered the foundations of their minds. That’s what was happening to them in here.

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.

“Ham, I do mean it, and I want to give you this moment right now, I do, but therapy time has to be over, and we need to solve the mystery of this awful place. Can you please push past this and just poke the fucking book?”

But he never did it. Never managed. Never had the courage, he knew. Because that was Owen. Too scared to get it done, to see it through. Always easier to fail, and even better not to ever try in the first place.

it’s bad for her, dude. Being alone like that. And it was bad for you in the house. And I bet it was bad for Matty. Fuck. Alone. Alone, alone, alone.