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ilonga · 3 months ago

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Spiral Staircase

[Disclaimer: This might be my creepiest weird short story. It features some urban legend-type scary stories in-universe, and there's an implication of the protagonist's being suicidal. You have been warned.]

Some people say that it’s simply the last vestige of a long-since rotted-away building. Others say that it’s something more sinister, a portal to no one knows where. Everyone says to stay far away from it. Don’t linger long enough to snap a picture. Don’t even look too long. Just keep walking.

I’m walking this afternoon, plunging deep into the woods. And I won’t stop until I find the spiral staircase. I don’t care. I must climb it. I have no choice.

There’s no one here to notice me and issue an unwelcome warning. Even the animals keep their distance. Hints of birdsong are so faint they might as well come from another world. Only the rustle of foliage beneath my stumbling feet follows me like a persistent ghost. If there ever were a path, it has long since decomposed into mulch, but I charge through anyway, ignoring the branches that slap me for invading their privacy. My clothes are dirt-smudged and a little tattered by now. Cuts sting my arms and face.

I don’t mind. It’s a relief to feel something, anything. If the woods are fighting me, at least it means that they have bothered to note my presence.

As I trudge, my eyes shift back and forth, scanning the gaps in the willows for any glimpse of my destination. I’m aware that it will be metal, the work of human—well, of someone’s—hands, in the middle of these acres of living, uncrafted nature. But nothing could have prepared me for the sight of a spiral staircase standing alone in a clearing as nonchalantly as if it had grown there.

It’s an ordinary staircase like I’ve seen many times before. The tall grass doesn’t overgrow it. The rampant willow fronds haven’t dared to wind a tendril among the rusty brown curlicues of the balusters. No animal has left its mark there. The banisters have not a speck of dust, and although fallen leaves carpet the ground all around, none of them lie on the stairs. A single beam of light pours down on the staircase like an invitation.

Nothing that has belonged to the woods for as long as anyone can remember can possibly remain so pristine. It looks as if it’s been transported from some well-kept residence not five minutes ago. There’s nothing threatening about an innocent staircase, but I find I can’t move any closer at first. I stare and stare and gradually realize that somewhere the birds have stopped singing.

If the spiral staircase can unsettle me so thoroughly, that’s a good sign. It means that the stairs are as otherworldly as the stories claim. It would be disappointing to come all this way to find only the crumbling relic of some mundane old house. But here I can do exactly what I came for.

I square my shoulders and step into the circle of light around the base of the staircase. I hardly feel the sun on my face; I hardly feel anything. This is normal. I can do this.

The crunching of the leaves under my feet crashes into my ears like thunder. Surely the entire forest can hear me about to approach the forbidden staircase. Part of me expects some hiker, ranger, or bear to jump out from behind a tree and try to stop me. No one does. I am alone in the woods. I could climb these stairs, and no one will ever know.

I didn’t leave a note when I went out this morning. There’s no way anyone could contact me, even if they wanted to. Solitude brings a kind of freedom, and I’m about to become freer than I have ever been. And no one will ever know. This doesn’t make me feel sad. In fact, something comes over me, and I giggle at my own audacity.

I shut off my brain and set foot on the first step—and then another. It’s exactly like stepping onto any other staircase. Nothing happens, except that I now view the world from a few inches higher than I had a moment ago. So I keep stepping. The spiral staircase does not tip over beneath my weight. I don’t know what holds it up, and I don’t dare think too hard about it. Instinctively, I reach for the banister as I continue up, then remember that the metal will be piping hot under the sun. But when my hand makes contact, the banister is as cool as if I’ve found it in mid-January. I shiver through my jacket.

At the first bend, I wonder how many other people have made it this far. They say that my childhood best friend’s brother’s cousin’s neighbor came here on a dare on Halloween. He brought a lantern and a cold can stolen from his parents’ refrigerator and planned to have a drink at the top of the spiral staircase. My friend’s brother said his cousin watched from behind three layers of willows away as the boy made the first turn—and then his lantern blew out like a candle.

It was a battery-powered lantern.

Unable to see any further, my friend’s brother’s cousin ran home. The next morning, there was an empty can a few yards from the spiral staircase, but no one ever saw that boy or his lantern again.

As I continue, I watch my step, in case I stumble over the lantern. Or worse.

But that seems unlikely. I’ve never seen cleaner stairs. Wherever they lead, nothing gets left behind. For someone like me, that sounds welcoming. I have nothing worth going back to. Whatever awaits at the top of the spiral staircase cannot possibly be worse than what I left below.

Each step lifts me a little further from the world, until I no longer feel like I belong to it. I exist in a place that’s neither earth nor sky, a narrow, winding path that spools me closer and closer to release. I now understand the story of Noemie.

No one is sure who Noemie was, but the stories all agree that over a hundred years ago, she came into the woods with her sweetheart, a boy her wealthy parents disapproved of. It had begun to rain when they were crossing the creek on stepping stones, and by the time the couple were halfway across, the trickle became a torrent. The boy lost his footing on the now slippery rocks and plunged into the overflowing waters. He tried to swim, and Noemie tried to rescue him from the bank, but lightning split the sky, and she lost him.

Distraught, she tried to find her way out of the woods but couldn’t. What she did find was the spiral staircase, and she heard her sweetheart’s voice at the top, calling to her. Without a second thought, she ran up the stairs with open arms.

They found her sweetheart’s drowned and lightning-struck body in the creek, but they never found Noemie.

A torn and sodden dress lay discarded beneath the spiral staircase. Noemie didn’t need it anymore. She had found something better. At least, that’s what I always like to think. She never had to go home and grieve.

I strain my ears, in case someone might be calling me from the top too. But as I stand still, I can’t hear anything. The entire world has gone eerily quiet, as if holding its breath, waiting for me to arrive at whatever awaits me. I breathe a little louder and stomp my feet against the metal to hear the reassuring clang of my unechoed steps.

By now, I don’t know how many turns I’ve taken. I’ve spun round and round on this staircase like a carousel until I’ve lost all sense of direction. From the ground, the spiral staircase didn’t seem so high, but now it seems to go on for maybe a few stories. My legs are starting to ache. Not much farther, and I’ll find out what’s really at the top.

My insides constrict, just like they did many years ago when I first heard whispers of the spiral staircase. Everyone hears this story first. And everyone remembers it when they venture too far into the woods.

The spiral staircase was first spotted hundreds of years ago. A family went into the woods—the stories don’t agree why, maybe to pick nuts and berries. The three children scampered ahead, and by the time the parents caught up to them, they had reached the clearing of the spiral staircase and ran up the steps, hoping to get closer to the branches. The parents called to them but got no answer. They approached the stairs, but a sudden, intense revulsion prevented them from climbing. Instead, they circled the perimeter, hoping to catch sight of the children, but saw nothing. The children had not climbed over into the willows. They had completely vanished.

The parents never saw them again.

But the next day, there were three new headstones in the local graveyard that had not been there before. They bore the names of the missing children, the birth and death dates, and the words “Beloved Child.” When the horrified and curious townspeople dug in front of the headstones, they found three coffins. And when they opened the coffins, they found nothing but the bones of a hand in each, with a rusty brown mark across each palm, just the width of a banister.

I guess I never really bought that story. It’s improbable even for a spiral staircase legend. But I’ve seen the headstones and can’t get them out of my head as I take the last steps to the top of the stairs. Of course, nothing will appear in town in memory of me now that I’ve taken the climb. Is it wrong to wish that something might anyway? Even if it is just my hand. I won’t need it anyway.

I can’t bring myself to look as I wind around the last bend. It’s taking everything I have not to get sick. Yet my legs keep moving automatically, as if something beyond the synapses of my brain compelled them. I’ve come too far, and the spiral staircase is claiming me as its own.

This is what I came here for. I didn’t realize then how much it hurts, how much I miss standing on the same solid ground as a whole earth’s worth of other people. But I’ve come all this way, and I accept my only choice.

I open my eyes.

I’m standing on a little bit of landing at the top of the spiral staircase. There is nothing up here. No other person. No message left behind by previous climbers. No portal to another world. No sign of life at all. Nothing but the tops of trees in the distance and, in front of my toes, a sheer drop-off of hundreds of feet to the forest floor below.

One step further, and my destination is obvious.

This is what I came here for?

After all the bone-chilling stories, after all the courage it took to find this place, after every unexplained facet of this staircase’s existence—it is nothing more than a spiral staircase to nowhere out in the woods. I might as well have climbed a tree. I might as well—

One foot moves forward…

And back again. I thunder down the steps of the spiral staircase as if chased by those spectral lost climbers themselves.

Nothing I left outside the woods could be as empty as what I left at the top of the stairs.

Back on solid ground, I glance around to get my bearings. There’s the gap in the elms that I came through, although I don’t remember its being so open. The clouds didn’t seem so thick at the top of the stairs. They must have rolled in quickly.

I square my shoulders and set my sights on the pathway home.

It begins to rain.

#original fiction #this is very cool <3

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