It’s there one minute, and gone the next. What is it? No, not life. Let’s not make this an existential thing, although to be fair, the question lends itself to that. I’m talking about the staircase to the attic at my place.
I’m talking literally here – sometimes it’s there, and other times it’s not. Can you think of anything more selfie-worthy in the lead up to Halloween? It’s got all the ingredients of a classic haunted house scenario: an attic, a phantom furnishing, even a disconcerting reddish glow reminiscent of the devil himself. Not that I’ve encountered the devil himself, exactly. But it’s the glow I imagine his eyes have while he’s winding up a particularly fiendish day of carving unearthly sigils into Sumerian artefacts to confuse archaeologists.
Anyway. Does anyone know what the go is with these stairs? I haven’t been game to climb them, partly because there’s a gaping inter-dimensional portal where there should at least be a glass balustrade, and partly because it looks hot to the touch. Besides, it’s not like I ever used the attic. I’ve never even been up there, to be honest. Now that I think about it, I guess that means there could be anything up there – Sumerian artefacts, souls lost in fields of eternal damnation, maybe some weird old dolls or books in dead languages.
Despite their fire-ice appearance, the steps do seem to be made of glass, so I tried getting in a glazier. For commercial jobs, Melbourne has plenty of glass experts willing to deal with phantom stairs, at least according to the one message board I was able to find on the topic. But apparently it’s a different story when it comes to residential. Nobody wanted anything to do with it, and one guy even ran off screaming. It’s like, calm down… have people not seen this sort of thing before or what?
Look, I don’t entirely blame people for not wanting to touch this thing. It looks a tad burnt.