The Stairs in the Woods

Chapter 3-Now

"C'mon, Jules, we gotta go."

Aja's nudging me gently with her elbow. Each time she touches me, I can feel electricity ripple across my skin. Not the good kind, though. More the kind of electricity that pools in your gut when you're in a free-fall.

They took the kid's body away. The cops came, took some pictures. The area's been plastered with caution tape, and now it flutters in the breeze like a banner. Aja and I are the only ones left here.

I walk away from her and pace back and forth. "Nuh-uh. I'm not leaving. I can't. Not yet. Not until—" I cut myself off. I can't keep up with the words. My brain's running too fast.

"Until what?" Aja asks. She's getting a bit irritated, I can tell. "Maybe it's not the same place. Maybe you're remembering it wrong. Look, we found the kid. The cops'll deal with the rest. We've done everything we can, and staying here—I don't think it's good for you right now."

"'Remembering it wrong?'" The laugh I let out isn't something I ever want to hear again. "I haven't been able to forget it for ten years. A decade. Aja. It's—this is—" I walk up to the stairs.

Part of me is tempted to touch them. Feel the old concrete beneath my fingertips, maybe hop up a step or two. But something deep in my bones holds me back. It's the same kind of gut sense of wrongness that I felt those years ago. The same kind of wrongness I've felt over and over again working as a park ranger, every time I heard a sound I couldn't explain or saw something I'd much rather forget.

Alice didn't have the same intuition as me, clearly.

"She walked up these steps ten years ago," I say quietly. I'm not sure when I walked up to them, but I'm right in front of them now. "She was... laughing. She made her way all the way up to the top. She seemed fine. And then she just—" I shake my head sadly. "These are those stairs. I know it."

"Okay," Aja replies. She sounds like she's talking to a wounded animal. "Okay. Fine. But what's the point of staying out here? How's that gonna help anything?"

I run my hands through my short hair. "I don't know, alright?" Frustrated tears sting my eyes. "I don't—I don't know."

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

But I can't leave now. This is the closest I've been to Alice in so, so long—I can't just walk away.

Aja sighs. "You're gonna have to leave eventually."

"I'm not really in a place to deal with eventually right now, thanks."

"Julia."

"What?" I rip my gaze away from the stairs and look up at her. If I went up, would I find her? "Just—just a few minutes longer," I plead. "It's not like I'm hurting anyone by being here."

Her shoulders slump. "You're hurting yourself," she points out.

She's right.

I fucking hate that she's right.

I pull my phone out and take a picture of the stairs. Best to have some proof, at least. I drew the stairs back when I was sixteen, back when I'd first lost Alice—I'd draw them over and over again, scared I'd lose the details. I have sketches of them now. I can compare the drawings and the pictures. See if anything's changed.

I know that if I leave the stairs now I won't find them again. It's practically unheard of to find the same set of stairs twice, much less three times. And Alice was here—Alice was here. This was the last place I saw her. If I leave it'll be like losing her all over again.