Strange stairs in the woods have long been a source of fear and fascination to members of this forum so I humbly present another reason to treat them with extreme caution.
Document notes: Transcript of a series of notes anonymously delivered to PO box. Documents were rolled into a narrow tube and tied with string. String fell apart with attempts to untie it. Paper is yellowed but otherwise in good condition. Appears to have been torn out of a ruled 110 x 210 mm notebook and written in black water-soluble ink. Estimated to have been from the early 20th century– contents indicate it was written as early as September 1916. No attribution. Author is presumed long lost.
“I sent my second-to-last hot air balloon up hours ago. Quick wax marker notes on chips of brown stone with estimates of current depth and measurements of the decreasing width of the spiral stairs.
Useless.
Pretentious.
I tell myself I’m writing this in the hope that it will be found along with my living… sane person in the near future. If this staircase has a bottom or if my pursuer cries off its hunt, I might see the light of day again and I must have a record. Though even then dehydration and exhaustion might take their toll on my body.
What lies at the center of an ammonite’s shell? What meets an eye that follows the sublime curve from where some ancient animal looked out upon its ocean, twisting along its back to the place where the spiral becomes an indistinguishable pinprick? Does it simply end? Does the journey that eye takes along a stone flashing with marvelous hues of red, green yellow and something darker between them all simply come to an abrupt stop?
I found the spiral stair nearly two weeks ago. It lay in an expanse of sand dunes amid a pine forest that I had been frequenting for many years, since leaving my childhood home to pursue my own studies of the natural sciences. It has yielded an impressive microecology of insects and other invertebrates that thrive mainly on the space between forest and sand, which was likely deposited by a glacier many thousands of years before.
It is a beautiful place, heavy with the spice of pine sap and warmed by a September sun. The forest remains unnamed by the farmers who live in its shadow, and I, living only a few kilometers downwind, still have never heard it referred to with any proper nouns other than “the pine forest.” And the dunes.
That day was much like the day before it: I rode my bicycle past acres of corn and ditches, leaned it against a dry rotted fence post and continued on foot until I hit sand. I was intent on capturing a particularly exquisite beetle I had spotted the day before, a shining blue specimen that burrowed into the sand before I could capture much more than a glimpse.
So, net in hand, I began my walk around the edges of the dunes with all my attention focused at my feet. I was thusly unaware of the stairs until I nearly stumbled down them.
After drawing up short and even taking a few steps back from this sudden hole that had appeared in my sanctuary, my surprise was replaced by indignance: what I had at first taken to be a natural sinkhole showed itself to be something of certainly manmade regularity. Who would dare upset such a delicate ecosystem with a 10-meter diameter hole, and why? And… how?
A raised lip of dark brown stone—nearly black—kept any sand from pouring into the depths of the hole. That same brown stone—a solid piece or else of some kind of poured concrete, for it had no seams as you’d find on regular masonry—formed a 63.3 cm-wide stair that descended into onto another, then another. Then another.
My eye followed these around and around until they faded into complete darkness. This hole—this staircase—went deep. And had seemingly appeared overnight. I imagined men pulling a huge metal disc off the top of the stair like a manhole cover. A cursory glance yielded no evidence of such a work crew or object, but it was all I could think of as an explanation for it’s sudden appearance. I had walked over this space countless times before and it had been the same as any other stretch of sand around it.
I brushed my hand across the stone of the construction: cool, smooth, almost so smooth it was slippery. The colour was not quite uniformly brown, but had flecks or inclusions of darker material that occasionally caught the light with faint flashes of the rainbow. I dug my hand in where it met the sand and felt it continue down into the ground at least a dozen centimeters as a long, hollow pillar.
Stray sand gritted on its surface as I took an experimental step onto the top stair. I moved slowly so as not slip on that carefully polished surface and took a few more steps down. There was no railing. My heart beat hard and steady in my chest as I ventured down a single revolution of the spiraling arm.
Looking up, the stairs above bellied out from the sides of the shaft at an angle, with less than adequate headspace. To move was to risk hitting the side of your skull against the bottom of the step above. I kept my head tilted to one side as I continued. I noted there was no movement of air as you might find in an open tunnel.
I had to push away the thought of falling down that central shaft and breaking my already tense neck on the unseen bottom. I kept descending.
After a while my legs began to burn with the effort of taking those careful steps downward. I looked back to the top of the shaft and was startled to see how far I had come: the sky was a blue coin surrounded by a golden spiral of sunlight on the oblique face of the staircase. I carefully leaned out to look below: still complete darkness.
I was indecisive. I was losing light the further I went, and every step taken down would increase the difficulty of ascending twofold at least. However, the curiosity at my core was burning to a nearly feverish degree. I had to see what lay at the bottom of this shaft. An art installation? A military bunker, even more complex than the rabbit warrens of Verdun?
I patted down my pockets and shoulder bag for something inconsequential. I settled on yanking free the top button of my blouse and, leaning out ever so carefully, pitched it into the centre of the shaft with a slight flick of the wrist. It fell completely without sound. My first hysterical thought was that the shaft was bottomless, but of course, that was impossible.
Despite the echoing scrape of each of my footsteps, such a small thing would surely make no noise if it hit a pile of sand that had streamed in from above. My rationalization did very little to settle my uneasiness. No, too weak a word: I felt seized by this strange structure. A certainty fell on me that if I took one more step down I’d be committed to walking until the bottom.
This was… at the time at least—not a superstitious fear, but a logical one. I have been known to become infatuated with a subject, once taken to sitting out in the dead of winter to observe the comings and goings of snowshoe hares. I nearly lost a toe on that particular expedition. Preparation was key.
I spared a few more moments gazing into the pit where my button disappeared before I reluctantly turned around.
The ascent was more difficult than it should have been. The toes of my boots seemed to catch nearly every stair. The sand I tracked down—surely it couldn’t have been that much, though maybe some more had been carried in by a breeze after me—slid under my feet.
There was a half-dozen heart-stopping moments where I was certain I was going to fall one way or the other, either to a jaw-shattering stop on a step ahead of me or over the edge into pitch blackness. My neck, strained on one side from the walk down, now got to experience the same pain on the other side as I backtracked.
It took me the better part of an hour to make it back up to the top, by which time I was sweating profusely and nearly exhausted: still, my mind raced.
I sat on a spongey stump just within the shelter of the pines to catch my breath and contemplate my discovery. I drank from my nearly empty canteen but didn’t take my eyes off the hole; the dark I had found in the spiral stair seemed to permeate the day up above, despite a cloudless sky.
Once the feeling of jelly-leggedness subsided, I took one last long glance at the spiral stair and trudged back out of the woods. By happenstance a tractor driven by a young farmhand passed as I was preparing to mount my bicycle. I waved him down and asked if he knew of any construction occurring out in the woods, any sound or sight of a crew and its equipment.
He answered in the negative, and then not without some pretense of masculine authority (I was easily five years his senior), suggested it wasn’t safe for a young woman to be alone in such a place. I took that as I usually do and lied about being there as an assistant to some suitably manly professor and bid a dry goodbye.
He called something after me—something possibly vulgar, something about staying away from “men and their holes,” spoken with the cadence of an old adage.
The ride home was long, but still felt shorter and less exhausting than that treacherous ascent. The whole time I ruminated on how much more difficult it was to climb a stair than it was to go down them.
I made one more partial expedition after a fruitless afternoon spent asking other residents about the hole and sleepless night contemplating its depths. My legs were back up to full strength on that day and I was optimistic: I packed a field kit with a larger canteen of water, a new notebook and pen, a flashlight, a rock hammer, and a cheese sandwich.
I swapped my leather-soled work boots with a pair of tennis shoes I still hadn’t taken to the court, but were equipped with a rubber heel—something I hoped would yield more traction on the smooth steps.
I stepped confidently into the hole on that second bright morning, shoes gripping the stair firmly and flashlight in hand. I had been startled by the unexplained materialization of this strange thing the day before but I would maintain a scientific mindset on this descent.
I would emerge from the hole over twelve hours later, crawling, swaying with dizziness and in the middle of a moonless night. I dragged myself to a mat of pine needles and moss and collapsed into a fitful sleep, where I fell twisting down a dark pit that occasionally flashed with colours of the rainbow.
I didn’t go back for a week. I spent nearly two days in my bed, body wracked by muscle spasms, especially in my legs and lower back. My feet were blistered. My throat felt raw. My head had bumps from where I must have hit it against the underside of the stair. My neck wouldn’t move. I had to shuffle to my kitchen and bathroom to take care of my basic needs.
I had done a bicycle tour as a younger woman that left me in a similar state of soreness and incapacity but I had never felt so… so afflicted as I was, when I had denied the hole and my curiosity a second time. I was sick with it.
I remember very little of that descent. I interpreted this as a sign of my exhaustion and for the complete monotony of descending those stairs. I know I took a sample from the edge of the structure with my rock hammer. It chipped off in a thick flake that I stored carefully in my bag, wrapped in oilcloth.
It, along with my new notebook, were not there when I finally daned to check days after returning home. So I went back. I wanted another sample. I could send it off to my university connections and have it analyzed. I could write letters. I could tell someone, bring someone to the spiral stair and we could go down together and learn what lay at the bottom. What this thing was for. And then maybe I could begin the process of forgetting it.
But first I needed that sample. I packed a new kit, another notebook. Dry batteries. Flashlight. Rock hammer. Food. Water. Steel matchbook. String. Crepe paper. Candles cut into short disks. All too much for what was supposed to be one small thumb-sized flake of rock chipped off the first step. I rode out and parked my machine in the same place I always did.
I walked the same path I had trod into the forest floor that I had always walked. I entered the clearing of dunes in the same place I always had. The hole lay there, new but familiar. I took my sample from the same place I had before, on the outside lip of the tower that burrowed into the Earth.
I wrapped that sun-warmed piece in oilcloth and put it in my breast pocket, then stood, staring, into the hole. I was done here. I had my sample. I would not go down. I might not even come back, just send off my curious little piece of rock and let the more qualified analyze and quantify this unimportant little find. I stared into the hole.
I had just about taken my first step away from the stairs when the sense of being profoundly naked, exposed out there in the middle of the dunes flooded my body. I had been sweating in the afternoon sun—the sun which was alarmingly close to the top of the trees, I was dismayed to note—and felt a chill work its way in from the top of my collar and up sleeves of my shirt. It crawled its way into my spine where it settled with the deep certainty that I was being watched. I cast a glance around the clearing. The treeline was very dark. My heart began to race. The spiral stair now looked like shelter, like safety in the face of this new thing that was stalking me from the pines. I refuse to believe the hole felt like home, but I think if I had waited much longer it might have. A breeze whispered across the tops of the tress and then dropped. In the silence of its wake I heard clearly the rustle-snap of something moving across the forest floor towards me and the hole. I was finally gripped by true terror.
I was a child again, running up the stairs after dark and throwing myself beneath the bedsheets before something could grab my ankles. This time I was running down the stairs, with some infernal presence rushing out from the pines to embrace me. My feet stuttered on the steps as the sound of breaking branches now gave way to the hiss of parting dunes. A curtain of sand cascaded by my shoulder as I ran down those treacherous steps and into darkness.
I came out of my panic suddenly aware of the blackness pushing in on my eyes and the silence from above twisting in my ears. I had been running blind for what must have been minutes, miraculously never losing a single step. I slowed to a stop and chanced a look up. Vertigo struck me as I contemplated nothing but more inky blackness. The involuntary cry I made when seeing this echoed back mockingly. I fumbled in my bag for my flashlight, clicked it on, and waved it above my head. It illuminated the sides of the shaft and returned small splashes of orange and green flecks, but diffused into nothingness after twenty or thirty meters.
There was no nights’ sky. No hint of what lay above me. Below was more of the same. I had been lured, chased, and trapped by this devilish hole.
Days have passed, though at one point I realized I had failed to wind my watch so I relied on my consumption of rations and my dwindling energy reserves to tell the time. Since then I have been obsessed with numbers. It must have been eight days at least. The stairwell and the thing above allowed for three periods of broken sleep in the beginning, though now I have been awake for over forty hours. I chipped off more samples of the stairwell, wrote my feeble estimation of depth—first 200 meters, then 700, then over a kilometer. Around 4500 meters I became aware of a subtle tapering of the walls. That’s where I remeasured stairs and made a note on the other side of a rock sample.
I sent it up tied to my little floating hot air balloons rudely fashioned from paper and string. I still don’t know if they made it out of the shaft. I had watched the first dozen drift upwards until they faded completely from my vision, disappearing into the darkness that blocks out the sun– which by my watch I know must have risen and set at least seven times since I began.
I sent six longer notes on pieces of paper torn from my notebook, letters, really, to my old professors. To the police. To my mother. The candle that powers each of my little messages could light them aflame, could light the whole forest above aflame. All the better—perhaps an inferno above would be bright enough to light the hell I’ve walked down into, or maybe draw the fire brigade out here to come to my rescue.
I still feel watched. At first I thought the presence that chased me into the pit was a glamor projected by the hole itself, but… something is above me, maybe the same black cloud that stops the sun casting its rays into this godforsaken place. I try to listen for footsteps but they stop every time I do. Maybe whatever it is is eating the paper balloons I send up past it, snatching them out of the air and folding them into its maw like communion wafers.
I’ve rested enough. There’s no more sleeping here, the stairs are too narrow. Only fifty centimeters at this point. The shaft itself is also narrowing, with the gap only seven meters across by my estimate. Every time I doze off I bolt awake feeling as if I’m already falling, or else sense my unseen pursuers eyes on me as it peers over the edge of the stair just above my head.
I will write quickly. My legs are trembling and my abdomen jumps as I try to balance this notebook on it. I understand a little more now, here, at as close to a bottom as I can come while still writing my notes. The stairs wanted a meditative, steady decent into it’s belly. It wanted me to contemplate my journey like the desert hermits who walked themselves into sainthood.
Since I noted the steady tapering of this passageway the inevitability of it has haunted me with each step; an inevitability I have reached now, with my feet braced on one side of the shaft and my back set firmly against the other. The stairs, you see, have narrowed past parody and straight into a gullet. It became difficult to walk at forty centimeters wide. Dangerous at twenty. Impossible at five. I climbed down on one side for a time, using my shrinking hand holds as a rock climber would until I was able to just barely brace my arms against either side of the shaft and continue inching my way down.
Cold comfort.
I believe now it truly is bottomless. I dropped my empty canteens down as I ran dry and still no sound echoes up to me. Before my final descent I plan on offering the void my lit flashlight in hopes that I will catch a glimpse of something, anything, below. Though dropping into an endless abyss feels like a mercy compared to the fate I have been contemplating of late.
A pit stretches out below me. A stalker moves above me. And the tunnel I traverse will soon be so narrow that I will become wedged between those horrors. I believe I am fated to die with my chest squeezed by unyielding stone, arms and legs pinned and with every sparse movement securing me more tightly within my tomb.
Rest for now. Breathe while I can. Pray to God that when I let myself fall I will wake up having only fallen from my bed back home.
I have seen it above me. It didn’t even blink when the flashlight struck its face. It’s eyes are–I will send these notes up on my last balloon. Might be too heavy. It might bat it from the air. But I will try. I will not be found.
I am sorry. The eyes. I can’t bear to face it when I take the plunge.
I’ll go head first.”