Excerpt
The Staircase in the Woods
1OwenMay 30Pittsburgh, PAOwen slept in the midst of mess and wreckage, as he did most nights.
Sometimes it was the tangle of a forever unmade bed, other times pages torn from notebooks out of frustration, pages scrawled with erratic, mutant half-formed almost-ideas. But last night, as with many, it was computer parts—parts old and new: a vintage Sound Blaster sound card rescued from a first-gen Pentium; a baggie of RAM chips like loose teeth; a snarl of cables; a PowerColor Red Dragon AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT GPU that he’d managed to buy off Craigslist, of all places, since the guy who’d had it didn’t know what he had, meaning Owen got it for a song.
His body slept, bent into shape around the chaos, careful even in the night not to kick anything off the bed. He didn’t writhe. He slept like the dead. Even when the dreams came—the same dreams that were just another kind of mess and wreckage, dreams of a set of stairs, sometimes in the middle of the street, sometimes descending down into the forest floor, sometimes in the middle of his high school gym, sometimes floating there in the big black nothing. Stairs that in the dream he never walked up or down, even though he knew he was supposed to. Stairs he was too scared to touch with even the front of his foot. 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.
Then—
Bvvt, bvvt. Bvvt, bvvt.
The sound from an older-model iPhone as it vibrated. It slowly scurried its way across a crowded nightstand, its suicide blocked by the obstacle of mess on the floor: to-be-read books, a coffee mug, a blister pack of melatonin, a half-empty bottle of trazodone.
The sound dragged Owen out of the depths of that dark dream. The sour feeling of it remained, stuck to him like tree sap. He pawed at the nightstand, extracting himself from the chaos of computer parts and tangled sheets. Wincing in the harsh platinum light of late morning, he looked at the phone, then sat up.
The caller:
Lore.
Panic laced through his chest, tightening it. Not just panic. Anger, too.
He cleared his throat, went to answer, then paused. Should he? Could he?
Owen denied the call, kept the phone face down against his chest. He looked around his apartment—a spare, bland, chaotic space, because he did little to organize it, little to decorate it, little of anything. It was just the bleak place in which he existed, the place he slept in and showered in and ate gussied-up instant ramen in.
. . .
because you don’t deserve anything better. The thought circled his brain again and again like an EDM loop.
He thought about burying his head under the pillow again, but he checked the phone for a voicemail—
But instead, it rang again. Lore.
Shit.If she’s calling, it’s important.
Biting his teeth, he answered it.
“Lore,” he said, his throat still full of morning gravel.
“Can you believe it?” she asked.
“What?”
“What what?”
“Okay, let’s start over. Oh, hello, Lore,” Owen said, more smart-assedly than he meant it to be. “It’s nice to talk to you. It’s been a long time. May I ask what this is in reference to—”
“Jesus, you didn’t check your email.”
“What? No.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands before popping her onto speaker. “It’s still . . . early.”
“It’s ten a.m.”
“Like I said, early.”
He flicked to his email.
Nothing new had come in.
“There’s no—” he started to say.
“It’s to us. To the—to all of us.” There was a beat before she said: “The Covenant.”
The Covenant. As if that was even a thing anymore. That, a bone long broken, left unhealed. Hell, when was the last time he had heard from her? Three years now? Four? Right. He’d last heard from Lore right at the start of the pandemic—she thought maybe it would be the thing that got them all talking again. They did one Zoom call, all of them, and that was the end of it.
He was about to say,
Nope, no email, but then,
ding: one appeared.
“It’s from Nick,” he said, as if she didn’t already know.
Blinking more sleep crust from his eyes, Owen squinted at the email, scanning it—
It didn’t take long to see.
Hell, Nick put it in the first line.
“Holy shit,” Owen said.
“Yeah.”
“F***.”
His heart, which had been racing, now felt like—well, like it had stopped. As if it had died in his chest. Maybe it wasn’t even there anymore, had fallen down some elevator shaft deep within him, gone forever, never to be seen again, beyond rescue.
Just like Matty—No.Don’t do that.Don’t go there.“I need a minute,” Owen said.
“Sure. Yeah. Cool. But not too long.”
He thought he’d call her back in five minutes.
Maybe ten.
But he sat there on the bed for an hour.
He read and reread the email. It felt unreal. It felt impossible. Owen kept reading it, thinking that the text would change suddenly, that it would delete itself or dissolve like the residue of a lost dream.
But the email remained.
And with it, the news.
