A new work by Alexander Zhitinsky “Quicksand” was written as a kind of continuation of the famous story “The Staircase”, created forty years ago and circulated in samizdat, subsequently translated into several languages and filmed by Mosfilm in 1989 with Oleg Menshikov, Elena Yakovleva and Leonid Kuravlev starring. The hero is no longer about thirty, as he was then, but close to seventy, but the house in which he lives is still full of mysteries and dangers... The story "The Staircase" in this edition is published for the first time in the first author's edition. It was in this form that the text was distributed in Leningrad samizdat in the 70s and was shortened at the request of the editors during its first publication in the Neva magazine in 1980. The story was republished in an abridged form in the future. Illustrations by Alexander Yakovlev