Thirty seconds ago, within the narrow confines of Will’s flashlight beam, the thing had exploded from a razor-thin shadow. Will had drawn in breath for a scream that never came.
God alone knew what the monster was; the old house had gathered unnumbered stories to itself in the twenty--or eighty? or a thousand?--years since the last residents had abandoned it. Randy and Will were only the latest of many boys to have been dared into exploring the woods house.
Now Randy alone was the latest, having somehow made his way up the treacherous and canted steps into the kitchen and through a propped-open door into what must have been a sitting room.
His breath, thunderous in his own ears, was an inaudible wheeze as adrenaline squeezed his lungs nearly shut. In his mind he repeated, God God God God, and that was the closest thing to coherent thought he could muster. While his body, airless and rubber-legged, tried to betray him, his mind devoted every cell to survival. God alone knew what the thing was, because Randy couldn’t care less.
Bestial? He didn’t care, as long as it didn’t get him. A boarded door in front of him offered a nanosecond of hope before his hypersensitive mind rejected it and sent him flopping up the stairs to his left. He hated stairs.
All his short life, he’d hated stairs, because he knew that the monster could get you on the stairs. He couldn’t hear it behind him, but he knew as he clambered up that just as he reached the top, he’d feel its clawed hand grab his ankle and its merciless arm pull him back to--
Running or climbing, whatever it took, his ten-year-old body seemed to fight him at every opportunity. He pitched on his baseball team; why couldn’t he seem to muster the necessary coordination to simply breathe? He was reaching the top of the stairs now; he felt like he’d climbed a mountain. There was a brief moment of sharper panic when he toppled a table at the summit, followed by a half-heartbeat of fierce exultation when it fell down the steps, into the monster’s path.
There was a shimmer of light coming through the boarded-up windows at the east end of the hall, the sun rising out there in the real world. It had been nearly dawn when Will and Randy had set out for the woods house; the Dare House, it was sometimes called, because there wasn’t a boy in the town for the last million years who hadn’t been cajoled into it by tauntings and chicken-noises. The sun was rising and Randy aimed for it.
He slowly--it seemed slow to him, who’d aged a lifetime in thirty seconds--realized that he hadn’t breathed at all since mounting the stairs. A memory shot through his mind, of his older brother hiding under their own basement stairs, reaching though to snag a five-year-old’s foot or leg and elicit a terrified scream. Randy wished he could scream now, but only briefly.
Was that the sound of the beast padding furiously behind? Through the window, only to land in a crumpled heap twenty feet below, surrounded by glass and splintered wood? The monster couldn’t follow, he was sure; it lived in the house, and the house alone.
If he failed, though, if the wood was stronger than a crazed boy, then he would fall back, mutely screaming as the thing drooled over him and, in the end, devoured him. God alone knew what it was, but Randy had no doubts as to its purpose. A monster may scare, it may chase, but its ultimate intent was to eat.
He saw, with senses insanely lucid, that the boards were nailed from the inside, and if he flung himself into them, they would only throw him to the musty thin carpet. They were only false hopes, and served the monster well.
There was, though, a shaft of light from the left of the window. A stairwell led upward to some unknown destination; a ruined attic perhaps, or the aerie of the noble eagles. A second and a half after stumbling at the top of one stairwell, he turned to bull his way up another, into the light that banished all fears. Light, he knew, was the great equalizer, the one thing that made it safe for boys to brave the darkness.
Up, up, the stairs apparently their own destination, providing their own illumination, because they seemed cruelly endless. Randy had never heard of Zeno’s Paradox, but he understood it, the agony of traveling halfway to the top, only to face half the remaining distance, and so on into infinity, never reaching his destination. His heels itched in expectation of claws entering them, pulling him down by his worn Reeboks.
Finally he stuck his head through Zeno’s maddening logic and into the sunlit upper room. The roof had caved on the south side, and bloody dawn poured over the exposed trusses. Maniacally, he struggled to bring the rest of his body into salvation of light. He knew that monsters loved to wait until only a foot was left in their lair before wrenching that foot downward and dragging the poor soul from its imagined safety and into mad death. It was the law of the stairs.
His head, then an arm, then both shoulders emerged from darkness. His legs screamed with the imagined pain fear lent them. He fought gravity and the paralysis of terror, finally throwing himself from the darkness. There he landed, gasping, at the feet of the monster, who crouched in the wan sunlight, where it had waited for him.