Starling House, page 17
Arthur tries to hold his body away from mine and I elbow him. “Don’t be weird, just do it.” His protest strikes me as half-hearted.
We lurch together into Starling House, the sword point striking sparks against the stone. The front steps are somehow only two or three stairs long and the front door swings open before I can touch it. I stroke the frame as we pass and the wood creaks worriedly at me. The carved symbols are still very slightly luminescent, like glow sticks the day after a sleepover.
I don’t know where we’re headed or which of us is steering, but the first room we stumble into is the cozy parlor with the squashy couch. I dump Arthur on the cushions and his palm skims the back of my arm as we part. I walk away without looking at him.
There are an unlikely number of freshly laundered washcloths in the kitchen. In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet is already open, displaying a slightly frantic array of antibiotics and disinfectants. “It’s alright,” I say. “He’ll be okay.” The ceiling shudders.
Arthur does a very unconvincing I-don’t-need-you-I-can-do-this-myself act when I return to the parlor, but his skin is the color of old mushrooms and his pupils are swollen and shocky and there are bruises blooming beneath his tattoos. The hellcat ends the argument by materializing on his lap and curling into a ball, like a furry land mine.
I slap Arthur’s hand away from my stack of washcloths and shove him back against the couch. Maybe I should be a little gentler but he did recently kiss me with ardent desperation before suffering a sudden change of heart and apologizing for it, so the way I see it he’s lucky I’m not scrubbing salt in his wounds.
I begin roughly, sitting on the coffee table while I swipe ruthlessly at dirt and blood, wringing gory brown water back into the bowl. Arthur bears it with perfect stoicism, his breath barely hitching even when I drag the cloth over the tattered skin of his throat. The only time he flinches is when my knuckles brush the underside of his jaw.
“Sorry,” I say, not meaning it. He makes a hoarse, wordless sound and tilts his head against the couch with his eyes firmly closed. His pulse is quick and uneven beneath the rag.
Under the blood I find other, older marks. Scars, jagged and knotted; yellowed bruises and lines of scabs like scattered ellipses; tattoos he inked himself, the lines shaky over the bones, where it must have stung most. There’s a crooked cross visible beneath his torn collar, a constellation on his left shoulder, an open eye where his collarbones meet. That one must have hurt. All of it must have hurt: his skin is a map of suffering, a litany of pain. I’m plenty familiar with pain, with scars that never heal quite right and still ache sometimes on misty nights, but at least I’ve always had Jasper. At least I’ve always had a reason.
My hands are slowing, gentling against my will. “Jesus, Arthur. What have you done to yourself?” He doesn’t answer. I want to shake him, hold him, touch him. I unscrew the cap on the hydrogen peroxide instead. “Why don’t you leave?”
“I did, once.” He’s speaking to the ceiling, eyes still closed as I dab peroxide on his throat. It hisses and bubbles, foaming pink. “I came back. Not that I don’t dream about selling this place and getting an apartment in Phoenix.” The curtains give a small, offended huff.
“Phoenix?”
He must hear the laugh in my voice because he shrugs defensively. “It seems nice. Hot, dry. Bet there’s never any fog.”
“So what are you still doing here?”
He straightens and opens his eyes, but can’t seem to look me in the face. His gaze lands to my left, where my hair corkscrews past my ear, and his face twists with that awful guilt. “I have … responsibilities.”
It’s a statement that would have been obnoxiously cryptic before I saw him bloodied and beaten, brought to his knees but still trying desperately to protect me from a creature that shouldn’t exist at all. The memory of it—the unwavering line of his spine, the way he glared up at the Beast as if he would fight it with his bare teeth before he let it past him—does something painful to my lungs. “I … thanks. Thank you.”
“You should go. Please, go.” His voice has none of the snarling, theatrical fury it did when he told me to run earlier. This isn’t a command or a scare tactic or a show; it’s a plea, weary and sincere, which any decent person would honor.
I laugh in his face. “Absolutely the fuck not.”
“Miss Opal—”
“If you call me that again, I will do you a harm.”
That treacherous not-quite-a-dimple crimps the corner of his mouth. “You wouldn’t hurt an injured man.”
“I would change your ringtone to Kid Rock and call you every day at dawn for a decade. My hand to God.”
“I would simply turn it off.”
I tilt my head. “Would you?”
His eyes move to mine, then away, dimple vanishing. “No,” he says quietly. “God, just go home. Please”—his throat moves—“Opal.”
I settle on the other side of the couch and pull my feet up on the cushions. “Number one, I don’t have a home.” I wonder suddenly if that’s still true, if the Gravely name could change more than my past. I imagine squashing that thought into a grocery bag and shoving it very deep under my bed. “And number two, I’m not leaving until you explain.”
“Explain what?” he asks, which is weak even for him.
I gesture at the sword lying on the floor, the bloodied rags, the mad, impossible house all around us. “Everything.”
He looks like he’s planning to say no. To tell me that he can’t, or it’s none of my business, or make some snide comment perfectly calculated to send me storming out of the house. I can tell by the set of his jaw that he won’t be swayed by lies or wiles or charming smiles.
So I tell him the truth. “Look, both of us almost died tonight and I don’t know why or how. I’m sure you’ve got your reasons for keeping secrets and God knows I’m not trustworthy, but I’m pretty freaked out right now. I’m confused and angry and”—admitting it feels like calling my own bluff, like laying out a pair of sevens after talking a big game—“scared.”
A ripple moves through his limbs. The hellcat extends her claws. Arthur places his hands carefully on the cushion, palms down. “I’m sorry.” He slants me a look of such grievous bafflement that I almost laugh. “You know, usually when people are scared, they leave. Why won’t you? Why haven’t you?”
“Because…” Because the money is good. Because I had to, for Jasper’s sake.
The answers come to me quick and easy, but then, lying always has.
The truth is harder: Because I dreamed of Starling House long before I ever saw it. Because sometimes when the light slants soft through the west windows and turns the dust motes into tiny golden fireflies I like to pretend the house belongs to me, or that I belong to it. Because Arthur Starling gave me a coat when I was cold and a truck when I was tired and he uses way too much punctuation in his texts.
I hitch a smile at him, too crooked to be charming. “Because I’m a meathead, I guess.”
He looks at my mouth, then away. “Alright.” He sighs for a very long time. “Alright. How much do you know already?”
“I’ve done some googling, heard some stories.” The narratives run together in my head like a song sung in the round, different words to the same tune. Starlings and Boones and—the melody sours in my head—Gravelys. “I’d like to hear yours.”
“I’m sick of stories.” Arthur’s voice is distant, a little dry. “My … antecessors were obsessed with them. Myths and fairy tales, folklore, parables. What I’ve been studying—what I’ve been assembling—is history. The facts.”
“So give me the facts.”
“Oh, it’s not—” He fidgets, looking suddenly like Jasper when I ask to see the first draft of an essay. “There are still some gaps, and I haven’t got it all organized yet—” He’s interrupted by the drawer of the end table beside the couch, which has suddenly fallen open at his elbow. A stack of folders rests neatly inside. There’s a thick yellow pad of paper on top, covered in Arthur’s precise handwriting.
Arthur frowns repressively at the end table. I make a grab for the notepad but Arthur beats me to it. He clutches it close to his chest, looking thoroughly harassed. “Alright! Fine.”
“Is that, ‘Alright, fine, I’ll tell you everything’?”
His eyes don’t meet mine. He flips fastidiously through the pages instead. He wets his lips once, and then he tells me everything.
This is the history of Starling House.
On May 11, 1869, a young woman named Eleanor Starling was married to a local businessman named John Peabody Gravely. The morning after their wedding, John Gravely was found dead. The coroner listed the cause of death as heart failure, but noted that he was a healthy man of no more than forty-five. From this, and from the subject of Eleanor Starling’s later obsessions, we can surmise two things: that his death was not a natural one, and that Eleanor knew it.
Historical evidence cannot tell us whether the young widow mourned her husband, but grief would explain several of her subsequent actions. She chose to remain in Eden, despite having no blood relations or family ties in the area. She never remarried, despite her youth. And she built Starling House on her husband’s property, in close proximity to the mines, and directly above the source of his death.
Construction began by the summer of ’68. The original blueprints were either burned or never made in the first place; several later Starlings have attempted to map the House, but none of their drawings are in agreement, and several of them appear to have changed over time. Eleanor Starling left no record of why she built such a vast and strange house, but the oldest and best-loved book in her collection was a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It has been suggested by subsequent Starlings that she was not building a house but a labyrinth, for much the same reason the King of Crete once did: to protect the world from the thing that lived inside it.
When the house was complete, in February of 1870, Eleanor Starling took up residence and stayed there until her death in 1886. There is substantial evidence that she devoted the remaining years of her life to the study of the place she later called “Underland.” She believed, according to the notes and journals found by her successors, that there was another world beneath, or maybe beside, our own—a terrible, vicious world, populated by monstrous beings. She believed that there were cracks between that world and our own, places where things might leak through, and that one of these rifts lay underneath Eden, Kentucky.
It was not the only such place, by her reckoning. She was convinced that these holes in reality were the source of every ghost story and monster tale, every legend about creatures that crawl out of the dark. She filled her library with folklore and fables, rhymes and songs. She studied them not as fictions, but as records, hints, the faded footprints scattered across time and space.
From her studies she learned that Beasts might be fought. Every culture seemed to have its own defenses against them: silver bullets, crosses, holy words, hamsas, circles of salt, cold iron, blessed water, wards and runes and rituals, a hundred ways of driving back the dark.
In 1877, she was confident enough in her research to commission the making of a sword. It was forged from pure silver by a blacksmith who claimed to have once served the King of Benin. She had it stamped with a dozen different symbols and quenched in water from St. George’s Well and the Ganges. In her papers there was a letter from a convent in France suggesting it had been blessed by a living saint.
From the existence of the sword we can surmise that she planned a great battle. From her sudden disappearance in 1886, we can surmise that she lost. While it’s possible that she ran away, it seems likelier that she was finally taken by the very Beasts she had studied for so long, leaving Starling House empty behind her.
But Starling House was no longer just a house. What had begun as stone and mortar had become something more, with ribs for rafters and stone for skin. It has no heart, but it feels; it has no brain, but it dreams.
In the census of 1880, Eleanor Starling listed her occupation as “Warden of Starling House.” When she died, the House chose a new Warden for itself.
Less than a year after her death, a young gentleman named Alabaster Clay arrived at Starling House. In his letters to his sister he recounted the bad dreams that plagued him, full of hallways and staircases and black birds with black eyes. He said he woke every morning full of yearning for a house he’d never seen.
Eventually, he followed those dreams to Eden. The gates opened for him, and so did the doors. Inside he found a deed in his name, a ring of three iron keys, and a sword. All his subsequent letters to his sister were signed Alabaster Starling.
After Alabaster’s tenure ended, others came. Whenever one Warden fell, another was chosen to take up the sword. Some of them found something like happiness, at least for a while. They’ve married, raised children, watched the passage of time from the windows of Starling House: the building of the power plant across the river, the veins of telephone lines spreading across the county, the rise and fall of Big Jack. They’ve walked the wards and kept the Beasts at bay.
But the Beasts always take them, in the end.
The most recent Warden arrived in 1985, all the way from North Carolina. She and her husband met at a pork-processing plant—Lynn Lewis worked on the kill floor and Oscar was a janitor. But Oscar was let go after he hurt his back and, following some sort of violent altercation with management, so was Lynn. The two of them lingered as long as they could, until the electric company shut off the lights and the bank boarded up the windows, and then they drifted from job listing to job listing, aimless and homeless. A few months later the Warden began to dream of a big house behind high iron gates. They followed the dreams west, and when they arrived they found a ring of keys and a deed waiting for them.
The House thrived under their stewardship. The floors didn’t creak and the windows didn’t whistle in winter; the kitchen always smelled like lemons and the wisteria was always in bloom. Lynn and Oscar loved Starling House, and they fought for what they loved.
Their son was less worthy. He was a weak and selfish young man, given to fanciful drawings and silly daydreams. He denied his fate as long as he could. He thought for a while the House would find someone else, someone braver—until he saw the cost of his cowardice.
Lynn and Oscar Starling died in 2007. That very night he made his oath and became the new Warden of Starling House.
But he swore a second, private oath: that he would be the last.
SEVENTEEN
I saw this old map of the Mississippi once. The cartographer drew the river as it actually is, but he also drew all the previous routes and channels the river had taken over the last thousand years. The result was a mess of lines and labels, a tangle of rivers that no longer existed except for the faint scars they left behind. It was difficult to make out the true shape of the river beneath the weight of its own ghosts.
That’s how the history of Starling House feels to me now, like a story told so many times the truth is obscured, caught only in slantwise glimpses. Maybe that’s how every history is.
The Starlings are watching me from their portraits, unalike but all the same. Each of them drawn here by their dreams, each of them bound to a battle I still don’t understand. Each of them buried before their time.
Arthur is watching me, too. His eyes are red, sunk deep in the uneven planes of his face. Watery blood is seeping from his throat again but he keeps his chin high and his spine stiff. He looks cold and a little cruel, except for the slight tremble in his hands. His tell, Mom would call it.
“So, the last Warden. That’s you, isn’t it?” My voice is loud in the hush of the house. “What did you mean, last?”
“I meant,” Arthur says, “that there wouldn’t be another Warden after me.”
“Oh? You don’t think there’s anybody out there having strange dreams about a big empty house?” Arthur was born to this house, but maybe I was chosen for it. Maybe I don’t have to be a Gravely, after all. “You don’t think maybe somebody will come along after you—”
“The Starlings have been fighting this war for generations!” His hands are shaking worse, his tone vicious. “They’ve bled for this place, died for it, and it’s not enough. It’s getting—” Arthur bites the sentence off, looking up at the portraits with his lips pale and hard. “Someone has to end it.”
“And that’s going to be you.” As I watch, a little blood drips from his collar onto the hellcat. “And what army?”
Arthur’s lips go even paler, pressed tight. “I don’t require an army. Every Starling has found new wards and spells, weapons that work against the Beasts. I’ve taken their studies further.” He rubs his wrist as he talks, thumb digging into his tattoos hard enough to hurt. The wind moves mournfully under the eaves. “All I need is a way through that damn door.”
There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of doors in Starling House, but I know which one he means. “And you don’t have the key.”
“No.”
“And you can’t pick the lock.”
“No.”
“And you can’t, I don’t know, blow it up?”
His mouth ripples. “I would think, by now, that you would know the laws of physics do not always apply in this house.”
I’m about to ask if he’s tried “open sesame” when a rhyme goes lilting through my mind: she buried the key by the sycamore tree. “Have you dug around the sycamore? That big old one out front?” I regret the question as soon as I ask it, because what if I’m right? What if I’ve just handed Arthur the key to Hell? I have a sudden, mad urge to circle my fingers around his wrists, to hold him here with me in the world above.
But Arthur makes a small, exasperated noise. “Eleanor Starling left all her drafts and sketches of that book in this house. I’ve read each version fifty times. I’ve examined the drawings under microscopes and black lights. Of course I’ve dug around the sycamore.” The exasperation subsides. In its absence he merely sounds tired. “There’s nothing there. If there ever was a key, Eleanor must have destroyed it. She wanted the way to Underland to remain closed.”
