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No, not on the wood - the wood itself! It is rather subtle, but the grain of the wood is ... wrong. All around the gouge, the grain is running in a completely different direction as the rest of the board. That ... you are not particularly well versed in trees, but you are almost certain that doesn't happen. Or at the very least, it is anomalous when it happens. In fact, it looks like the wood around the gouge is bowed out from the board, well past the other vagarities of the wood. The saw that cut this board, surely it would have shorn it down … unless of course, this suspiciously placed lump came onto the board only after it was cut. Is that the way of it? The mark was made by some … 'Wood Filler'? A mysterious device to make wood on top of existing wood? Well, one thing is for certain, this isn't the place to think about it.
That said by the time you are stepping off of the beam, you are nearly certain of your initial assessment of what the Instrument or Implement was. Now back on the landing, you try to bend over so you may rebind and rewrap your left foot. Annoyingly, however, the hallway you find yourself in now is just as wide as the stairs, so you really don't have much room to work with, even when you are bending in line with the 'travel' of the hall, instead of across it. Ultimately, you end up having to sit down on the top step of the stairs to attend your wrapping. As your hands puzzle out the way of it, relying on the well-worn creases in the graying and fraying - linen, your mind is at work on its own puzzle; the order of Estrangement. It is not crucial or critical, but if you were able to figure out what happened on this stair, you might be in a better position to figure out what happened in the rest of the house. Was the Implement or Instrument that was responsible for the 'filling in' also responsible for all of the Strangeness on the wall here, or just the patches immediately around the gouges?
If the irregular patches around the gouges were communicable , then it could be that the process of 'filling in' dumped all of the Strangeness that you see here … but it is equally possible that the irregular patches are caused by the Strangeness in a Second-Degree communicable state getting 'hemmed in' by the Strangeness that is in a First-Degree non-communicable state. If you continued to dump the Strangeness in the Second-Degree, eventually you would turn the First-Degree portions into Second-Degree, and from there, it could spread again. But until then, it would stopped, or at least slowed. This is the reason why the entire world is completely subsumed in the Strangeness right now.
So then ... even if you went back there and tested the irregular patches by touching it with something – suffice to say, a prospect that you are not keen on – it wouldn't even be conclusive that one breach preceded the other – or that there were even two separate breaches. Damn it all.
