Starling House, page 30
The current is fast but strangely glutinous, slurried. The water is sickly gray, like the Mud River after a big storm, when the utility company has to send out boil advisories. There’s a thin layer of fog lying on the river’s surface. By its pale, dreaming light I can see two shapes caught beneath the current.
Bodies. Eyes closed. Limbs drifting.
One of them is a woman, middle-aged, a little ugly, wearing a long colorless dress that strikes me as a costume, a prop from the Old Time Photo Booth down in Gatlinburg. Except I know it isn’t, because I recognize her. Her mouth hard and small as an early apple, her face overlong, her sleeves stained with ink. I have her picture saved on Jasper’s laptop, copied and pasted from her Wiki page.
Eleanor Starling ought to be nothing but dirt by now—maybe a few molars and metatarsals, the half-moon of a skull—but her skin is smooth and pliant under the water, as if she’s simply sleeping.
The other person, of course, is Arthur Starling. It’s harder to make out his features because the water runs rougher above him, as if his body is a jagged stone. It almost seems to be boiling, and beneath the torrent his tattoos look blistered, raw, as if the river doesn’t like the signs he carved into his skin and wants to wash them away.
I walk into the current without deciding to. The water is precisely the same temperature as my skin, so that I can see it rising up my legs—ankles, shins, knees, thighs—but barely feel it. I reach for Arthur’s collar, holding my chin just above the surface, and tug hard.
He doesn’t move. It’s like his pockets are filled with stones, like his hands are fisted in the riverbed, holding him fast. I try Eleanor next, because why not, because there’s nothing I won’t try now. I’m half expecting her flesh to tear away under my touch, like one of those mummies exposed to light after thousands of years, but she feels exactly like Arthur: soft and alive, but anchored.
I shout one, vicious “No!” and punch my fist into the river. The water splashes into my face, runs into my mouth. It tastes wrong. Sweet and rich and metal, like honey and blood. I swallow reflexively and the river leaves an oily trail down my throat.
A sickly drowsiness washes through me. I have an urge to lie down in the water, warm as skin, and sleep. I resist it, thinking of Dorothy and Rip Van Winkle and all the fools who fell asleep in fairy rings.
But then I think of older stories. I think of the five rivers of the underworld: oblivion, woe, wailing, fury, fire. I think of that handwritten note I found so long ago in the margins of Ovid: a sixth river?
The only way into the underworld is to cross a river; the only way into faerie is to fall asleep. I am not in Underland yet, but I know how to get there.
I scoop the water into my hands, a palmful of silver, and drink deep.
Sleep moves through me, tidal, inexorable. I lie back and feel my hair lift from my scalp to float around my face in a bloody halo. I close my eyes and open my mouth, and the river comes in. It fills my mouth, slips between my teeth, slides like warm syrup into my lungs.
My hand finds Arthur’s. I lie down beside him on the riverbed, and sleep.
* * *
I am awake. (I am still sleeping.)
I am standing before Starling House, the sky the color of shale, the air hot and motionless. (I am still lying on the riverbed. There is silt beneath my spine and water in my throat.)
Arthur is here, too. He isn’t, I know he isn’t—somewhere above myself I can still feel his fingers beneath mine—but here, in Underland, he’s awake.
He is standing with his back to me, a little ways up the drive. All I can see is his silhouette, but I know him by the too-long tangle of his hair and the set of his jaw, the way his heels are dug into the dirt and his shoulders are braced. He looks like a person who has chosen his direction and will not change it.
Standing between Arthur and the House, watching him with the black pits of their eyes, are the Beasts. They’re more substantial down here, more real and more awful for their reality. They aren’t made of mist now but of meat—I can see sinews moving beneath milky skin, knobs of bone at every joint, claws flattening the long grass. None of them are moving, but all of them are watching the man standing at their feet.
“Arthur!”
It’s just like that awful night when he fought the Beast before. He wasn’t moving, but a new and awful stillness falls over him. When his head turns toward me it looks unnatural, grindingly slow, like a statue looking over one shoulder. His lips move, and it might be the word how. It might be the first syllable of my name. I decide it doesn’t matter.
I run to him, stumbling over the darkened drive. He catches me awkwardly against his chest, one-handed, because there is a sword in his other hand. Old and battered, inlaid with strange silver shapes that glow very faintly: the Starling sword, the same one I left abandoned in the world above.
Arthur pulls away, his hand gripping hard on my shoulder. “What are you doing here? How did you—I made sure—”
“Shut up. Shut up!” All my terror and panic and pain, everything I’ve felt since I reached for him in the night and found nothing but cold sheets, comes boiling to the surface. I know we’re in an eerie not-quite-dream with monsters poised to strike, but I’m so angry I can feel it like a second pulse beating in my skull. I can’t speak so I punch him, good and hard, right where his ribs meet.
“Ow—”
“You deserve it! You left me up there all alone, after we—just when I thought maybe somebody gave a shit about me—”
“I do, that’s why I had to—”
“Leave me? With nothing but a sword and a fucking will?”
“I was trying—I didn’t want—”
But I don’t want him to explain or apologize, because I’m still pissed. Because if I stop being pissed for even a second, I’ll start crying. “Well, I don’t want it. I never did. I wanted you, you bastard, you goddamn fool, and if you didn’t want me to follow you down here maybe you shouldn’t have left.”
He stops trying to explain and kisses me instead. It starts rough—a bruising collision of lips and teeth, the taste of blood and fury like hot metal in our mouths—but then his hand slides from my shoulder to the back of my neck, his thumb framing my jaw. His mouth softens against mine.
When he pulls away, his voice is hoarse. “I didn’t want you to follow me.” He rests his forehead heavy against mine and breathes the next words against my skin. “Thank God you did.”
I discover that my hands are fisted in his shirt. I flatten them against the place I punched him, not quite sorry. “Where are we?” I look up at the Beasts, still motionless, still watching us like hunting birds waiting for a pair of mice to scurry out into the open.
“I don’t know.” Arthur’s body tilts back to face the Beasts. “I thought if I found out where they came from I could end it, like stepping on a wasp nest. I thought I would find another world, not…” His eyes flick up to the familiar shape of Starling House looming behind the Beasts.
I follow his gaze and see something small and pale in one of the windows. A face. A girl.
She’s gaunt and fragile-looking, with skin so pale it approaches translucence and shoulders so sharp they look like the folded wings of some small, dark bird. She’s wearing an old-fashioned dress with a high collar, and she’s watching us with no expression at all.
I find Arthur’s wrist and squeeze it once. I know the second he sees the girl, because a shiver runs through his frame.
“What happens if you go toward the House?” I ask.
“They attack.” Arthur’s chin points at one of the Beasts, a feathered thing with too many teeth. It holds one of its legs curled into the white down of its chest. Its blood is a startling red in this colorless place.
“Ah,” I say. I stare hard at the girl in the window and make a guess, lifting my voice. “Nora Lee?”
I shouted the name, but the girl doesn’t flinch. I know I’m right, though—I’ve seen that small, angled face in the pages of The Underland, I’ve dreamed myself wearing that fusty old dress, running down and away from everything.
I glare until her face begins to blur in my vision. It merges with the face that glared down at me from the portrait in Starling House, the face I saw sleeping in the river. I already knew their stories were distorted reflections of each other, like a single girl reflected in a cracked mirror. The letters of her name dance in my head, pirouetting gracefully to new positions.
“Eleanor?” I don’t yell it this time, but I don’t have to. The girl cringes back from the window, and her eyes meet mine.
THIRTY
Until I said her name, Eleanor Starling’s face was entirely empty, her eyes like a pair of hard black periods typed in the center of a blank page. She looked down at the gathered Beasts without dismay or surprise. I wondered if she could still feel anything at all, or if this place had reduced her to a thin illustration rather than a person.
But the sound of her true name hits her like a fist through a window. Her eyes widen. Her lips part, as if she can taste the word through the glass. She looks at me intently, almost hungrily, before turning abruptly away. She vanishes into the shadows of the House.
“Arthur, I think—” I begin, but a sound interrupts me. A high, wavering howl, like a cornered cat, or a distant coyote.
Another Beast picks it up, and another. A ripple moves through them. A hoof hits the earth. They are not impassive anymore.
I make a noise somewhere between a sob and a snort. “I thought you befriended them, or whatever.”
“Apparently it didn’t stick.” Arthur’s voice is dry but he’s lifting the sword again, one elbow high, blade laid flat across his forearm. “Get to the House, Opal.”
My eyes slide between the Beasts, stalking closer, and the hard knot of his face. “Because you think that’s the way out of here or because you’re being a jackass again?”
Half his mouth curves, joylessly. “Yes.” The curve flattens. “Please, Opal. This time, just this one time, will you go when I ask you to?”
The thing is: I think he’s right. I think if there’s a way to destroy this place or escape it, Eleanor Starling knows it. I take a breath, short and hard. “Okay. Alright. But don’t—you can’t—” Swallowing is harder than it should be. “I’m not letting you kill yourself fighting these things. I don’t even think that sword is real—”
Arthur takes a wide warning swing at one of the Beasts and it hisses, recoiling. “Real enough,” he says.
“Fine! Whatever! But I’m coming back for you, and if you’re dead, I’ll kill you.”
He smiles that small, bitter smile, so I hit him again. “I’m not joking. I’ll go, if you swear to stay.”
Maybe it’s the way my voice splits on the last word. Maybe he just wants me to go. But he meets my eyes and nods once, so deeply it’s almost a bow, or a vow.
It’s not enough; it’s all we get before the Beasts are on us. It’s hell—lips retracting over long pearled canines, muscles coiling, talons extending—but so is Arthur Starling. The sword arcs and bites, hacks and sings, cutting so quickly through the air it leaves a silvered trail behind it. There’s no beauty to his movements, no grace. He doesn’t look like a dancer. He looks like a boy who wanted to grow flowers but was handed a sword instead. He looks like a man who gave up on hope a long time ago, but who keeps fighting anyway, on and on. He looks like a Warden of Starling House, gone to war.
Arthur takes two steps forward, another to the left. He slashes, fast and brutal, and wrenches the blade out of splintered bone. The Beasts draw away from him, just a little, and there it is: a way to the House.
I don’t hesitate. I run, arms tucked tight to my chest, head ducked low.
My feet slap on stone. I fly up the steps of Starling House and hit the door hard. It’s locked.
But surely, even in whatever upside-down sideways version of the world we’re in, Starling House won’t turn against me. For months now I’ve fed it my sweat and time, my love and blood. My name is on the deed and my hand held the sword; I am the Warden.
I press my palm to the scarred wood and say, softly, “Please.” I pour all my wanting into the word, all my foolish hope.
I feel a softening of space around me, a sense of unreality, like being in a dream and realizing, suddenly, that you’re dreaming. The world bends for me.
The lock clicks. The door opens. I look back once at Arthur—my brave, stupid knight, my perfect goddamn fool, still fighting, his form vanishing beneath a snarling, ravening wave of Beasts—before I slip inside Starling House.
* * *
This is a different Starling House from the one I know. The trim is yardstick-straight and the wallpaper is crisp, unmarred by light switches or outlets. Every piece of furniture is polished and every floorboard gleams. It looks fresh-built, as if the painters left an hour ago. It’s beautiful, but I find myself looking for cobwebs and stains with a weird ache in my chest. The House feels like a mere house, a dead structure that hasn’t yet learned how to dream.
Eleanor isn’t in the hallway, but my feet know where to go. Up one set of stairs, and another, and another, into the attic room that now belongs to Arthur, but didn’t always.
It looks bleak and bare in his absence. There are no pictures tacked to the wall, no warm lamps lit. There’s just a narrow iron bed where Eleanor sits with her ankles crossed and her hands folded. Behind her, its body curled protectively around her, its dimensions hideously distorted to fit inside the room, is a Beast. This one has the short, curved horns of a goat, but its body is sinuous, almost catlike. It makes no move to attack me, but merely watches, vertebrae twitching.
“Hi,” I say, very awkwardly, because I don’t know what you’re supposed to say to a girl who is also a grown woman, a fictional character who is also a person, a villain who might also be a victim.
It seems I chose poorly, because Eleanor doesn’t answer. She doesn’t even blink, just watches me with those hard black eyes.
“I’m Opal.” I hesitate, uncertain whether the names Gravely or Starling would please her or upset her, and leave my first name unaccompanied.
Still, Eleanor watches me. I’m suddenly very tired of this haunted Gothic orphan performance, tired of waiting politely while Arthur bleeds below us. “Listen, I’m sorry to bother you, but I need you to call off your, uh, friends.” I gesture uncomfortably to the Beast still curled at her back. “That man down there isn’t your enemy.”
“No?” Some rational part of my brain flinches away from the sound of her voice. It’s too low, too precise, too knowing—an adult’s voice in the mouth of a little girl. “He came to make war on my poor Beasts, did he not?”
“No. Well, maybe, yes, but he has to. Do you know what they do, up there? They kill people. They—my mother—” I feel it again, the weight of the river on my chest, the chill of the water in my lungs.
An odd, furtive look crosses Eleanor’s features. It makes me think of Jasper when he let the hellcat into room 12 even when he knew she had fleas. It’s the first time Eleanor has looked like an actual child. “It’s in their nature.” It’s almost a pout.
I cross my arms and use the same voice I used on Jasper. “What are they, Eleanor? What is Underland? Is this—are we in another world?” I feel stupid saying the words, but I’m also standing in the ghost of a house that hasn’t existed for more than a century.
Eleanor has turned away from me to smooth her hand over the gray seam of her quilt. “I used to think so.”
I want to cross the room and shake her, hard, but her Beast is watching me with an eye like a dead coal. I wait her out, instead.
Eleanor strokes the ridge of its skull, almost lovingly. “I used to think the Beasts came from somewhere else—Hell, I thought at first, then Heaven, then history, then myth—but now I know better. Now I know they only ever came from me.”
“What,” I say, with a degree of patience I find admirable, given that I left most of my heart on the grass three floors below us. “Does that mean.”
Eleanor tilts her head, her tone cooling. “If this river had a name like its sisters in the underworld, it would be Phantasos, or maybe Hypnos, and it would belong to Morpheus.” I’m flipping through threadbare memories of Edith Hamilton and Metamorphoses, trying and failing to understand, when Eleanor says, softy, “It is the river of dreams.”
The word “dreams” strikes me like a thrown stone. It sinks into my mind easily, as if I were expecting it, leaving no ripples behind.
“What does that mean?” I ask, but I already know the answer.
“It means these waters give form to our dreams, however foul. It means the only monsters here are the ones we make.” Eleanor looks at her Beast again, her small hand vanishing between the white blades of its hackles. The look in her eyes is almost tender, as a mother to a child, or as a dreamer to their favorite dream.
Repulsion rises in me, and anger. “You made them? You—why?”
Her head twists on the fragile stalk of her neck, uncannily quick. Her eyes are mean slivers. “You don’t care.” It sounds like a well-worn complaint, whetted by years of use. “No one ever did before, no one does now. None of you know the truth of it, and you prefer it that way.”
The words strike an uncomfortable resonance in my skull. I swallow twice, dry-mouthed, and say, “So tell me.”
“You won’t listen.” Her tone is still low and vicious, but there’s a new emotion rising from the mean depths of her eyes. An old and desperate hunger, a want she tried and failed to bury.
I walk across the floor, which doesn’t creak here, and kneel beside the bed. “Tell me, Eleanor. I’ll listen.”
She fights it, but the hunger wins in the end.
This is my story.
No one listened to it before, and if they listened they did not believe it, and if they believed it they did not care. I am certain you are the same, but I will tell it anyway, because it has been so long since I had anyone to tell.
My story begins with my mother’s story, like everyone’s does. It goes like this: Once upon a time there was a rich young woman who thought she was in love. But as soon as the marriage license was signed—or, more specifically, as soon as all her accounts were placed in her husband’s name—the young man vanished. He left her lonely and laughed-at, further along than she ought to be.
