The Missing Step

• 3 minute read
• Ages 9-13
• Horror Stories for Kids

There were thirteen steps up to our flat.

I knew that the way you know your own name. I had gone up them every day of my life, and I could do it in the dark without touching the rail, and I always counted without meaning to.

Thirteen.

The night I counted fourteen

I came home late from my cousin's and the stairwell light was out, which happened often enough.

I went up in the dark. Six, seven, eight.

Twelve. Thirteen.

And then my foot went down for the landing and found another step.

Fourteen.

I stood there with one foot on a step that should not have been there and did not move for a long time. Then I went up it, and there was the landing and there was our door, exactly where it always was.

I told my mother. She said I had miscounted in the dark.

I had not miscounted. But it was late, and I let it go.

Counting

After that I counted every time, deliberately, and for eleven days it was thirteen.

On the twelfth day it was fourteen again.

It was the middle of the afternoon and the light was on and I could see the whole staircase in front of me, thirteen steps, exactly as it had always been, and I counted fourteen going up.

I counted them again coming down and got thirteen.

Nadia

I told my friend Nadia, who lived in the flat below and had lived there longer.

She did not laugh. She went very still, and then she asked which step it was.

"What do you mean, which step?"

"When it happens," she said. "Is the extra one at the top or somewhere in the middle?"

I said I did not know. I had never thought about it. It had always just been at the end, an extra one before the landing.

"It is not at the end," said Nadia. "It only feels like it is because that is where you run out. My grandmother told me about this. It is in the middle, and you have already gone over it by the time you notice."

I asked what happened if you stopped on it.

Nadia said her grandmother had never told her that part, and that she had asked twice.

After

We moved the following year, for ordinary reasons.

And I have thought about it since, and there is one thing I keep coming back to, and it is not the extra step.

It is that I only ever counted fourteen going up.

Coming down was always thirteen. Every time, for months.

Which means that on those days, whatever I stepped over on my way up, I did not step over on my way back down.