The Staircase in the Woods

by Chuck Wendig

Genres: Horror; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

A group of friends investigates the mystery of a strange staircase in the woods in this mesmerizing horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Accidents.

“Chuck Wendig weaves his magic once more, turning a lonely staircase in the woods into a searing, propulsive, dread-filled exploration of the horrors of knowing and being known.”—Kiersten White, author of Hide and Lucy Undying

Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what.

Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something extraordinary: a mysterious staircase to nowhere.

One friend walks up—and never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears.

Twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy—and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods. . . .

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Release date: April 29, 2025

Publisher: Del Rey

Print pages: 400

Sample

0

 

The Heart of It

“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, all the awful feelings, all that resentment, building up like carbon monoxide. Friendship, like a house, can go bad, too. That air you share? Goes sour. Dry rot here, black mold there, and if you don’t remediate, it just grows and grows. Gets bad enough, one or all of you have to move out. And then the place just fucking sits there, abandoned. Empty and gutted. Another ruin left to that force in the world that wants everything to fall apart. You can move back into a place like that, sometimes. But only if you tear it all down and start again.”

 

1

 

Owen

May 30

Pittsburgh, PA

Owen 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 COVID—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.”

“Fuck.”

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.

 

2

 

The Email

 

From: Nick Lobell

To: Owen Zuikas; Lauren Banks; Hamish Moore; Matty Shiffman

Subject: You are cordially invited to my funeral

So, I’m dying from pancreatic cancer! It’s not too bad yet, but they say it’s going to get real bad, real fast, and that this fucker is going to kill me quick as shit. As such, I’d like to see you jerks one more time before I waltz my way off this mortal coil. So consider this a formal invitation to my funeral, or pre-funeral, or still-making-memories-memorial-service, or whatever. I’d rather give you a chance to pretend I’m a good guy and you still like me while we’re all still alive than when the cremation furnace turns me to human kitty litter. It’ll be fun! I’m up in New Hampshire now. I bought you all plane tickets, which I attached as PDFs. Nonrefundable, in case you need that additional dose of guilt. It’s a long drive from Logan, so I’ll get a driver for you. I hope I get to see you all one last time. If not, I understand. Actually, fuck that—if I’m dying, I might as well go out honest: If you don’t come, fuck you. In fact?

I’m invoking the Covenant.

Be here or get fucked. Love you lots.

P.S. Hey, Nailbiter, I know you’re not going to want to get on a plane, but you gotta get on that plane, I don’t care if you chew your fingers to stumps.

P.P.S. Lauren, I’m not calling you “Lore,” and you can’t make me.

P.P.P.S. Hamish, you dick, bring weed. NH hasn’t legalized yet.

P.P.P.P.S Matty, miss you, brother.

—nick

3

 

Invocation

Finally, Lore must’ve lost her patience. His phone vibrated. He didn’t want to answer it. Didn’t want to talk to her. Every part of him itched with anxiety just seeing her name there on his phone.

But he knew Lore too well. She would call and call and call. The woman would fly here herself and rappel in through the window like SWAT. Lore was a Hunter-Killer drone on a kill streak. It was why she was successful at, well, everything.

“What the shit,” she said when he answered. “You planning on calling me back or what?”

“Yeah. I dunno. Sorry.” He didn’t want to get into why he didn’t want to talk to her. So instead he said, “I just keep reading it. I can’t stop reading it.”

“Owen gonna Owen. Always tonguing that broken tooth.”

“Don’t.”

A pause. “Sorry.” Another pause. “Hey, so we’re doing this, right?”

“Going? To his…” Funeral, he tried to say but couldn’t.

“Yeah. To fucking New Hampshire, of all the places.”

“I dunno, Lore. I dunno.”

Silence on the other end. “You do know. You gotta go. We all do. Nick is sick. We owe him this. Don’t we?”

Owen tried to imagine Nick being sick. Nick was like a human cigarette. All tar and nicotine. Was it possible for cancer to get cancer? But then his mind put Nick in a bed. Frail and crooked—the man-sized cigarette cooked down to the filter, the rest of him ash. Same way Owen’s own father went out. The way most people seemed to go out. In a hospital bed, like a wilting plant in a pot of dry, dead dirt. Owen tried to shake the image. He chewed a thumbnail.

It was clear Lore couldn’t abide the silence. So she filled it with:

“The Covenant, Owen. Nick invoked the Covenant.”

“So what? The Covenant’s been broken since…” He couldn’t finish that sentence. They’d all broken it in their own ways.

Her especially, he thought, but dared not say.

“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.”

“Lore—”

“Shut up. You’re going. We’re all going.”

Dog with a bone.

He sighed. “Yeah. Okay. Yeah.”

A pause.

“You think Hamish will come?” she asked.

“I have no idea.” And he didn’t. He’d last seen Hamish on that Zoom call, and nothing since. Those bridges had burned long ago, leaving only the chasm. “I dunno if you check his socials, but Hamish is different these days.”

“Seems like.”

Seems like. Sounded like Lore hadn’t been talking to him either. Which made him grotesquely, uncomfortably happy. Owen would’ve been jealous to learn they’d been talking still. That somehow he had been the one left out. Of course thinking that just made him feel extra shitty. But what didn’t?

“Flight’s tomorrow,”

she said, filling the void of silence Owen had accidentally left wide open.

“Wait, what? Tomorrow? Shit.”

“Oh, what? Got something big going on?”

You know I don’t, he thought bitterly, but didn’t say that. Instead he deflected: “I have a shift at the bookstore. But I figured you’d be the one who was busy. All the stuff you’ve got going on—I mean, it’s impressive. It’s great. I’m happy for you.” Saying those things felt like acid on his tongue. He felt weak, like he was capitulating. Like he was just a shadow cast by her light. “Seriously, I mean it,” he added, wincing. Really gilding that lily, Nailbiter.

“Hey, thanks. It’s been good. But I can make the time for this.”

“Good to be the boss.”

“Sure.” But the way she said it sounded like she didn’t mean it. Or she didn’t like him saying that. Owen couldn’t tell, and he wasn’t comfortable enough to probe for the truth. “You saw he cc’d Matty, right?” she asked.

“He, ah, he does that sometimes.”

A pause. She didn’t know that Nick did that sometimes. Which meant—what, Nick wasn’t emailing her? Just him? Huh.

She finally said, “I can’t tell if it’s sad or sweet or just fucked up.”

“I think it’s all of the above.”

“Yeah. Well.” A sound like her sucking air between her teeth. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, Owen.”

“See you tomorrow, Lore.”

When the call ended, he bit down and ripped off a half-moon of thumbnail in one go. It bled.

---

—

Owen looked around his apartment, which he could do from the edge of his bed. It was essentially one room, not more than five hundred square feet. Place was a mess. Not a hoarder’s mess, not a filth pit, either. Just clutter at the edges because he was trying to live an adult life in a place that was too small for it, and no amount of Marie Kondo was going to fit his existence into an apartment this miserably cramped. Didn’t help that his computer—a gaming rig, mostly, a Frankenstein monster of bartered or refurbished parts—took up a good chunk of the desk. (Next to it: a little cairn of bitten fingernail slivers.)

He stood up and went to the corner of the room next to his shitty IKEA dresser. There, under a pile of old Omni magazines, was a file box. He hooked it with a foot and pulled it out. The magazines slid to the floor in a pile, and he didn’t bother to pick them up. Owen knelt and lifted the lid of that box with some trepidation, as if it were the Ark of the Covenant and opening it would release the souls of the damned, eager to melt the face off his skull.

But the dead souls that awaited inside were just stacks of old notebooks from high school and from college. They were not his notebooks, not entirely—and they were not Lore’s notebooks, either. They were theirs, shared property, or so he’d always believed them to be. All throughout school, the two of them used these books for an unholy host of purposes: to write shared stories, to design adventures and characters for D&D, to draw stupid shit and share stupider jokes, and of course to design games. Pen-and-paper games, board games, but mostly video games. Inside were maps, lines from text adventures they programmed in fucking BASIC, bits of dialogue, little sketches of everything from Pokémon rip-offs to riffs on Fallout-style power armor. Half of it was derivative shit, they both knew it. But there was good stuff in there, too. Original stuff. Real stuff.

And it was supposed to be theirs.

Not his, not hers.

Theirs.

Of course, Lore went off and did it all, didn’t she? Conquered the world. Hunter-Killer, hungry for that streak. And all he’d conquered was a shitty apartment and an endless series of dead-end jobs. She left me behind, he thought with no small bitterness. She’s living our dream. Without me.

Though, of course, it was way worse than that, wasn’t it?

He needed to pack, but instead he stood there, paralyzed.

Looking out the window in his apartment meant looking at algae-stained brick. He sometimes searched for patterns in the brickwork: faces, animals, landscapes, anything to help him not doomscroll on his phone and get lost in an endless loop of bad news. He stared now, trying to find something to take his mind off tomorrow, but the only pattern that emerged from the smears of seasick green and the lines of rust-red brick was a staircase in the middle of nowhere, leading to nothing, calling his name.

 

4

 

Lore

May 30

Seattle, WA

The cursor, aptly named, for it cursed her. A blinking line in the empty white void, mocking Lore from the laptop screen sitting on the kitchen nook table. At the top of the document, a name: hitchhikers_guide_thru_hell_DESIGNDOCv1usethisone. A placeholder name, obviously, even though it was (or rather, would become) a game about literally hitchhiking your way through literal Hell. Lore didn’t know what it would end up being called. 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. What if I make the player protagonist a witch, and we call it Witchhiker? she’d asked. They’d all made a face, the same face, a sour, just-tongue-kissed-a-dead-fish face. So, not that, then.

Cursor, cursing her. Blank document, a hole in the universe.

The document always started off blank, she knew. Day one, every document was blank. Problem was, this wasn’t day one.

The document had been blank for six months.

In her hand, a single capsule, the color of sawdust. Lore got water from the fridge dispenser, popped the capsule, drank it back. Something to open her up. Keep the ants in her brain moving, keep them lined up and productive.

She needed it. They’d paid her a lot of money for this game.

And so far, she had nothing to show for it.

It’s fine, she told herself. You’re just fucked up about Nick. And fucked up about having to travel today. And fucked up about having talked to Owen. And seeing Hamish soon. And then Matty…

You’re just fucked up is the answer, she knew.

Still. She’d never had this before. Never had real writer’s block or coder’s block or art block or any kind of block. Sure, maybe for an hour. Maybe, maybe a day. But more than that? Nah, never. There was always a way through. Shoulder to the door, fist through a window, hard head slamming forward into drywall, whatever it took. Lore knew she was fucked in a lot of ways, but this was never one of them. And these little microdose motherfuckers, they were one way to clear her mental pathways.

They hadn’t worked this time.

But they could. They would.

She’d do work on the plane. A change of perspective, in her head and out, would help. And maybe, in a weird way, seeing the others would fix some shit, too.

Still, that capsule she just took? It was her last.

Time to cook, she thought in her best Walter White voice.

---

—

I need a big kitchen, Lore had said when she was on a hunt for a house. A chef’s kitchen, she added, emphasis on chef’s, even though she was no such thing. This house, a Craftsman-style home in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle, fit the bill with its broad-shouldered kitchen, which was good because Lore loved to cook, even if she didn’t love to eat. Cooking was sensual, tactile, beautiful; eating was crude, sticky, texturally upsetting. The feel of it in her mouth made her shudder as if she were sucking down spider eggs and broken glass. She liked meal replacement shakes and breakfast cereal. Everything else could go. But cooking—an 

act of arrangement and creation—brought her, well, not joy, exactly, but something resembling satisfaction. She didn’t eat her food. She didn’t play the games she made. Didn’t read her own writing or ever look through her sketchbook. What she made was for others.

True for most things, but not all things.

Like, for example, what sat out in front of her now:

A little bag of brown powder; a small digital kitchen scale; a small electric coffee grinder (cheap, not a burr grinder); a pill bottle of niacin, aka vitamin B₃; a screw-top jar of empty vegan gel capsules. What she would make of these things would be for her and her alone.

She had all of these spaced out in front of her on a lava stone countertop glazed the brightest robin’s-egg blue.

Missing one thing, though, wasn’t it?

Back to the bedroom she went. Up the bending staircase, an assault of colors along the way, because everything in this world was trending toward that gray-brown greige awfulness and she fucking hated it. Houses bled of life by the vampires of capitalism, a trend made into a trend by people who would make you pay top price for something that cost them less to make because they didn’t have to paint it or glaze it or stain it. Lore couldn’t stand that shit. So she put as much color into her house as possible. A fucking riot of color: kitchen the color of sun and sky, bathroom like a mermaid’s tail, bedroom painted in blood. Art everywhere, too. Book covers, game covers, weird-ass modernist abstract pop art, too. None of it her own because, JFC, she wasn’t a narcissist.

Now: the bedroom.

Again, red. Red as a Ruby Slipper apple, so red it was almost black.

She paused for a moment to look to her bed, with its black silk sheets, under which slept two of her recent lovers: the first, Cedar, lying face down, tall, thin, and lissome like a sylph, the light catching in the long trench of their spine; the second, Shar, face up, tits out, splayed out like a starfish, long black hair swallowing the pillows beneath and behind her. Cedar was timid and gentle, while Shar was eager and hungry, though both deferred to Lore’s chaotic neutral energy. All around them were the tools and devices 

of another night spent well: two kinds of lube, ten feet of rainbow jute shibari rope, a vibrating cock ring, a cold metal butt plug, a glittery green dildo made to look like a dragon’s cock.

A good night. Though one whose memory was already fading, like the taste of dessert lost to a sip of water. That’s how it goes. Nothing lasts, Lore thought.

Into the walk-in she went, confronted with a tall mirror she used to get ready when she had to do events, be they in-person or virtual. In that mirror she could also see the bed at the far end of the bedroom behind her. Gently, Cedar stirred. They didn’t sleep deeply, though Shar you had to wake up by practically waterboarding her with a wet washcloth. Lore took a moment to watch Cedar gently uncoiling, still not all the way awake yet. Mumbling. Murmuring.

Lore reached up to the top shelf, finding the little ornately carved wooden box—an old box, one that she’d had since she was a teenager. The carvings on it were vaguely Celtic-ish, with all its whorls knotted together. Once she kept tarot cards in here, alongside a little thin sachet of purifying herbs—supposed to magically keep the cards free and clear of negative energy, which was probably nonsense. Eventually she ditched the cards and kept weed in there. These days, no more weed—weed made her weird, made her paranoid, made her slow, and Lore needed to keep sharp, sharp as a thumbtack in your eye. As such, in the box was where she kept a baggie of dried mushrooms that looked not entirely unlike shiitake but were, in fact, a fifty-fifty split of Psilocybe cubensis and Psilocybe cyanescens.

She held the box in her hand. The wood felt warm. The whiff of the ghost of that herb sachet tickled her nose: patchouli and cloves and lavender.

It was in that moment the sense memory brought another memory along for the ride, one she’d forgotten:

Owen had bought her this box, hadn’t he? That day down in New Hope, at the little hippie occult head shop. She didn’t have money and he had a little, so he bought it for her. Gods, she’d forgotten. So much from that time was foggy now. Hard to access. For good reason, probably. Owen, she thought. Her middle was suddenly a bundle of snakes, twisting around one another. Gods, she missed him sometimes. But she wasn’t good for him. That’s what she told herself, that’s what she always defaulted to. 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, and it was just a sucking and slurping resentment sixty-nine.

Two thoughts at the same time:

Fuck you, Owen.

I miss you, Owen.

She stepped back from the shelf, the box in her hand, and then she caught a glimpse of the mirror reflecting the bedroom behind her—she saw the bed and its occupants, Cedar, Shar, but also—

A third person. ...