The Stairs in the Woods

Jason didn’t really know why Dad was so mad about his younger sister, Karen, insisting on wearing a boys bathing suit. Instead of listening to Mom and Dad fight about it as they built the tent, Jason led Karen down a trail into the woods. They had been coming to Algonquin Park every summer, even before Jason was born his mother had told him. More than ten years.

When they were far enough away that they couldn’t hear mom or dad anymore, Karen clamped her hands over her eyes and started counting out loud for a game of hide and seek. Jason ran through the woods, jumping over fallen logs and weaving around trees. The thick bed of leaves crunched underfoot.

“Ready or not, here I come!” Karen shouted, pulling up her shorts. She usually wore Jason’s hand me downs. His father didn’t like it. His mother was still certain it was just a phase.

Jason slipped behind a large beech tree, the smooth bark marred by lemon shaped scars and scratches going up the trunk. Algonquin Park had black bears but Jason had never seen any. He took a peek around the large tree, his sister was calling his name as she kicked leaves around. He pressed his back against the tree, wiping his nose on his batman tshirt. He had always liked the woods. There was always something new to find.

“Jay,” his sister called, the crunching of leaves coming closer. He looked around for somewhere new to hide, a glimmer of black paint catching his eye. Jason took a few steps closer, moving a few branches aside. He could just make out a spiral stairwell with a wrought iron railing hidden in a small clearing. Karen jumped out from behind the tree, “Found you!”

“But you have to catch me first!” Jason teased, running to the stairs. He put a hand on the railing, the metal cold to the touch despite how hot humidity of the day. His sister stuck out her lower lip, “No fair. It’s hide and seek. Not tag.”

“Common Karen,” Jason teased, starting to climb the steps. They didn’t lead anywhere, just dead space. There were no leaves or other signs of wear on the stairs. The paint glimmered, perfect and glossy, as if a fresh coat had been applied only a few hours earlier.

Karen whined, “Jason!”

“You can catch me now, can’t you?” He didn’t look down, just kept putting one foot in front of the other until he had almost reached the top. He took a breath, his heart starting to pound in his chest. Slowly, he lifted a foot onto the final step. When his runners touched the top step it was like time froze. All the noise of the world went silent—the song birds, insects and rustling leaves. He looked down to where his sister stood, an icy chill running down his spine. It wasn’t just sound. She was gone. Colour had been completely sucked from the world. In the blink of an eye the trees had morphed from tall and green to blackened, hollow trunks. The dried leaf litter was now ash grey and the sky felt oppressively dark—cloudless yet heavy.

A jolt of fear shot all the way down to Jason’s heels as grey skinned humanoids lifted gangly, long limbed bodies to look at him. One climbed from the standing hollow of a tree while others scented the air with nose less heads. Some had no eyes at all, their heads baring only mouths of needle-sharp teeth. Others had large insectoid eyes. Their ribs and pelvises sharp against ash grey skin. All of them creeped forward on four impossibly long limbs, saliva dripping from their mouths while Jason stared in horror. He could not move. He had nowhere to go.

One of the eyeless monsters had made it to the base of the stairs, strings of saliva dripping from crowded bone white teeth. Its long-fingered hands wrapped around the wrought iron railing. Long nails scraped the paint. The other monsters gathered in a cluster below the stairwell, climbing over one another with lips peeling back and long rope-like tongues reaching out. Black and slimy. The staircase shuddered as the eyeless one climbed the railing, reaching for Jason. Jason screamed as the entire world seemed to tilt and he was thrown from the top step. He landed with a hard crunch, still screaming, eyes screwed shut. Panting, he laid on the ground for a long time, waiting to feel those long-fingered hands. What he imagined would be hot and rotten smelling breath. He didn’t feel any of that though. Instead, a shooting flash of pain as he tried to move his arm. He could hear his mom shouting his name, leaves crunching as he tried to get up.

He carefully opened one eye, the forest was full of shadows now, but the trees were as they should be. Green and rustling, a little bird flitting from one branch to the other. Jason gingerly touched his arm.

“Jason! Where are you?” His mother called, footsteps coming closer.

Jason’s voice was a harsh whisper. He picked up a rock and threw it against a tree as hard as he could. She must have seen it because his mother soon rushed over, “Hon? Are you okay? We’ve been looking for you for hours!”

“There were monsters everywhere,” Jason started to cry. It had been the most terrifying two minutes he had ever experienced. Scarier than secretly watching dad’s horror movies with the lights off.

“Monsters? It’s just wolves. You’ve heard them howling before,” she looked around, “Did you fall out of a tree?”

“I fell off the stairs. My arm really hurts.”

“What stairs?”

“The stairs right over—” Jason looked around, but the spiral staircase had vanished. Even the cleared circle of leaves around it was no longer there. Jason’s pants felt hot and wet, urine stinging his nose.

“Oh honey, it’s going to be okay. Can you walk? Let’s get you back to the campsite and out of those wet clothes.”

Jason, tears streaming down his face, clutched his mom’s hand as they walked back to the campsite, “I climbed the stairs and the monsters tried to get me…”

His mother shushed him. After changing his pants all of them piled into the car and made the long drive to the nearest hospital. Every bump brought fresh tears to Jason’s face. Karen gave Jason her favourite action figure to squeeze. After x-rays and getting his arm put in a sling the whole family cut their camping trip short and returned home to Peterborough. They set up a lawn chair in the living room for him so he could sleep sitting up, a bag of frozen peas resting on his arm. Karen carefully placed her Pokémon, hot wheels, and other toy figurines around the chair.

“For protection,” she said. Karen fiddled with them for a long time, not saying anything more until mom and dad told her it was time for bed. Jason pretended to sleep as his parents talking in hushed voices about what had happened. They thought he was making it up. He didn’t want to explain or thinking about it. He definitely didn’t want to sleep. Every time Jason closed his eyes he saw those monsters. Felt their black tongues wrapping around him.

After a week of sleeping in the living room on the lawn chair, Jason found himself standing at the bottom of the stairs in a fog. The hallway was dark at the top. His bedroom was right around the corner. Hot urine snaked down his leg, soaking his pants as he thought about what could happen if he climbed to the top step.

“Kiddo? What’s going on?” His father asked, wiping his hands on a dish rag.

“I need to go upstairs.”

“Um, okay. Why don’t you go upstairs then?”

Jason started to cry, “I can’t.”

His father sighed, “We don’t have any monsters here bud. It’s just your imagination, I’ll show you.”

His dad climbed up the stairs two steps at a time, moving out of sight and returning a short time later holding a superman t-shirt and shorts for Jason, “See? Nothing happened.”

He took Jason into the bathroom to get him cleaned up, carefully avoiding the sling as he helped Jason get changed. His father asked him what he had seen in the woods, “A bear maybe?”

“No.”

“It wasn’t a bear?”

“No.”

“A different animal? A wolf or a really big cat?”

“No!”

“Okay. Something scary though?”

Jason nodded, tears starting to stream down his face again, “Really scary Daddy. Can I go watch cartoons now?”

“Sure bud, but it is bedtime in an hour. You have to try to sleep. I promise it will make you feel better.”

Jason wiped his nose on his shirt and went back to the living room while his father finished cleaning up in the bathroom. He still had trouble sleeping as the days stretched into months. Jason had moved from sleeping on the lawn chair to the couch. His mother would help him wash his hair in the kitchen sink rather than making him climb the stairs to the shower.

His father, having stepped on a sharp eared Pikachu again, had had enough. He grabbed Jason by his good arm and dragged him to the stairs, “There is nothing to be afraid of.”

Jason resisted but, unable to break from his father’s grasp, finally complied. He squeezed his eyes shut, taking one step at a time. When he reached the top, he tried to go back down but his father pushed him forward. Jason stood at the top, the hallway stretching into a colorless blackness. There was an awful slurping sound as he turned. His father was no longer his father. It was one of the monsters with massive eyes where ears should be, it’s body thin and bony. The top of the skull split open to reveal long pointed teeth.

Jason screamed, dodging long pale limbs and falling back down the stairs. The effect was immediate. Colour came back into the world, his father became human again. A very angry human. Jason hid in the backyard the rest of the day, even avoiding eye contact when they all gathered around the table for dinner.

His parents didn’t fight that night. Instead, the house was eerily silent. His sister came down the stairs late that night, tugging a blanket behind her. She was wearing dark blue pyjamas with fire trucks. They had been her favourite even though they were worn out and faded now. Rubbing her eyes and yawning she grabbed one of moms decorative pillows from one of the chairs and laid on the ground, next to the couch.

“Mommy and Daddy didn’t fight after supper.”

“Yeah,” Jason said.

“It’s my fault,” she whispered.

Jason leaned over the edge of the couch, “No its not.”

“Daddy doesn’t like me because I’m a boy even though I look like a girl.”

“Dad loves you. I love you. I don’t care if you are a girl, or a boy or a hairy monkey.”

Karen giggled, “If I was a hairy monkey, I’d be Donkey Kong. Then I could scare away the bad things for you.”

“No way, I’d be Donkey Kong and you would by Diddy Kong because I’m the big brother and you are the little brother.”

She hadn’t seen the monsters and refused to call them anything other than the bad things. Karen yawned again, whispered, “Yeah.”

Jason could hear the soft sounds of sleep coming from her. He must have fallen asleep as well because when he woke up next he could hear the crackle and fizzle of bacon, the smell of waffles. Karen and Jason sat at the breakfast table, drinking apple juice. When everything was plated, Jason cut a square from his syrup doused waffle.

“Kids,” their father started, “Mom and Dad are getting a divorce.”

Jason looked down at the syrup flowing from the waffle across his plate, towards his bacon. He decided waffles were no longer his favourite food.

“It isn’t your fault,” their mother was saying, “You’ll still see your dad every other month and you’ll get to have two bedrooms. Won’t that be nice?”

It wasn’t nice but at least Mom had gotten a place that didn’t have any stairs—just a basement that Jason never went into. It was like an unspoken rule. Neither of them spent much time with their dad after that—Jason still refused to sleep upstairs in his bedroom. He didn’t even help them pack anything from his old room while Karen leaned even harder into everything that screamed, “I’m a boy.”

She tried to shave her head with dads’ razor and started trying on boys names like clothing. One day it was Jack, the next day it was Eric. Jason went along with it, calling her Emerson. Their mom still got the pronouns mixed up, but the name Emerson seemed to stick. She left the waffle maker at dads’ house.

Years later, Jason had managed to avoid stairs for much of his life. At 21 he found an old single story cottage on Rice Lake, a bit of a fixer upper situation. He had taken some college courses online—finance, business, even engineering but nothing really stuck. He spent most of his time working shifts at the Time Hortons and doing odd jobs for his neighbours. Mowing lawns and planting flowers in the summer, clearing snow and making sure pipes didn’t freeze in the winter when most of the cottages were empty.

His sister—who had started doing hormone replacement therapy and went by Emerson instead of Karen would come to visit. They would sit on the back patio looking out at the water, drinking beers together.

“Are you seeing anyone?” Emerson asked one night after trying to toss a beer cap into a dented coffee can that Jason kept near the fire pit. Jason shrugged. He had been, a girl in Peterborough.

Emerson pulled out his phone, “I’ve got my profile on Tinder.”

Jason flipped through the photos, thinking back to when Emerson would wear his hand-me-downs. Now he looked more like he belonged in a punk band.

“Jay, what happened in the woods that day?”

Jason looked up, they hadn’t talked about that in years. Like a silent pact.

“When you broke your arm.”

Jason handed back Emerson’s phone, “It’s getting late. You better head home.”

_________________________________________

This fiction was written for the podcast Believing the Bizarre and is available as a theatrical reading. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts and follow the show on Insta @believingthebizarre.

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Written by Kelsey Reich on May 23/2021 in Ontario, Canada.