Starling House, page 32
“You’re sure they knew?” I shouldn’t have asked, but some part of me is still in desperate, nauseous denial. “They knew that he was your—that you were—”
Eleanor’s lip curls in an expression of chill disdain no natural child has ever worn before. “Of course they knew. My father greeted me by name on the riverboat. Half the county called me ‘the Gravely girl’ rather than learn my name. But when my uncle John asked them to look aside—when they weighed my life against his coal company, his generous donations to charity and his big white house on the hill—they did not hesitate.”
I open my mouth, close it, and say again, “I’m sorry.”
Eleanor gives me an up-and-down look, her eyes picking out each torn seam, each stain. “You grew up here, didn’t you? You should know.”
And I do know. I know what it is for your own people to turn their backs on you as easily as turning a page. I know all about cold shoulders and sideways looks, about being the only girl in sixth grade who didn’t get a birthday invitation. I know the way people talk loud and slow to my brother, as if he might not speak English, the way they watch him in grocery stores even though everybody knows I’m the thief. Now I know about my mother, who was cast out for the ordinary sin of sex, and the far greater sin of refusing to be sorry about it.
The circle of sky I can see through the attic windows is boiling black now. In the world above, you could see the power plant from here, an unwavering light, but not here.
I press my forehead to the glass of the round window and look down. The Beasts are larger and brighter than they were before, their limbs long and thin as femurs. They seethe and twist, a writhing mass of beautiful, monstrous flesh. They’re gathered around something, but I can’t see it clearly, and I can’t seem to remember what it is.
I picture them running loose in the world above. Perhaps chasing down the county road after Constable Mayhew. Perhaps plucking Don Gravely from his big house like the soft meat of an oyster from its shell. They would deserve it, God knows.
“You could stay here with me, you know.” Eleanor’s voice slinks over my shoulder like a warm hand. “A few others have found their way down here—lost children who went too deep in the mines, treasure hunters who followed strange stories—but they didn’t last long.”
“What do you mean?”
“Their dreams were weak, unformed things, too soft to survive in my Underland.” I can hear the shrug in her voice. “But you—you’re hungry, and you like the dark. You’re like me.”
“I’m not like you.” It sounds good—a vehement denial, each word hard and certain as a gavel striking—but of course it does. I’ve always been a good liar.
I’d felt the truth every time I read The Underland as a kid, every time I traced the sharp white angles of Nora Lee’s face on the page. Her eyes were drawn in uneven black ink, like a pair of holes torn in the paper, but I pretended she was looking straight out at me, smiling that sly little smile.
At night I’d dreamed of rivers and doors and houses that weren’t mine, a dark and quiet place where I could sleep, safe at last, finally sated. In the morning I had wept from the certainty I could never really run away, never follow any Beast down to Underland, because who would microwave Jasper’s instant oatmeal then? Who would zip his sleeping bag all the way up on cold nights, and steal him hot chocolate packets from Bev’s continental breakfast?
And then there was Bev herself, and Charlotte, and the hellcat, a whole string of things that needed me, or things that I needed, each one tied tight around my wrist. Then came Starling House, grand and broken and beautiful, and then came—
Arthur.
His name rings in my ears like a church bell, high and clear. I remember, suddenly, that he’s here with me in Underland, that I left him battling the Beasts. I look down at them again and this time I catch the thrust of a sword, a glimpse of dark hair. Arthur looks like a toy soldier from up here, far too small and fragile for the task, but unable to run away.
I reel away from the window, hand already reaching for the door, but it isn’t there. The walls are all smooth white plaster, as if they were built that way, as if there has never been a way in or out of this room.
Two breaths, ragged, overloud. I turn slowly back to face the narrow iron bed, and the girl still sitting with her legs crossed neatly at the ankle.
“Let me go.” I say it calmly, with authority, as if I’m talking to a child who has locked the bathroom door.
Eleanor’s eyelids lower, heavy with scorn. “Why? So you can go save a little boy still scared of the dark?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t need him.” A vicious flick of her fingers, as if Arthur is a toy or a treat.
“No.” My voice is still calm, so calm. “But I want him.” The two words have lost their distinction in my mind, merging into a single bright hunger.
Eleanor pauses to study me, with the expression of a predator looking for a limp or a scar, some old injury that never quite healed. “He’ll leave you, too, you know,” she says, and I can’t help it: I flinch. She moves her head forward, scenting pain. “Everyone else has, haven’t they? One day he’ll do the same, and then you’ll be all alone again.”
A century swimming in her own nightmares has made her very good at this. Her voice has a prophetic weight, a certainty that sinks straight through my breastbone. Except: I wouldn’t be alone, would I? Even then, I would have Jasper and Bev and Charlotte and the hellcat.
I look back at Eleanor, my head tilting like I’m playing one of those spot-the-difference games in an issue of Highlights. But it no longer seems difficult to tell the two of us apart. Eleanor never had a home, no matter how hard she tried to make one; I had the backseat of Mom’s red Corvette, and then room 12, and then the House itself, a series of homes made out of wishful thinking and love. Eleanor was always alone; I never was.
An uncomfortable emotion moves through me, hot and prickling. It feels a little like pity, but it’s hard to pity someone you see so clearly. “Eleanor. I’m not staying. And neither should you. You’ve been here a long, long time—”
“No.” Her voice is high and shrill, as if I’m waving a knife or a gun at her. “This is my home, and I will stay here until Gravely and his children and his children’s children are dead, until their gravestones are too worn even to be read.” The Beast is growling at her back, its jaw lengthening, its claws tearing into the floorboards; I wonder if it can smell the Gravely blood in my veins, the inheritance I never asked for. “I will scour Eden itself from the earth, every house and every name. They tried to bury me, but I will bury them all in the end.”
It’s a curse, the kind you neither break nor escape, the kind I never quite believed in. “No,” I say. I don’t sound very convincing.
“Yes,” Eleanor says. “The river has been running high and fat for a long time now, did you know that? The mist rises thick now, and often.”
I picture Arthur, surrounded by gravestones. Jasper, telling me the Wardens don’t last as long as they used to. “Why?”
“The Beasts have told me about the black lake they built on the surface, where they keep all their corrupted water.”
“The—are you talking about the ash pond?” I feel my brain twisting, worlds converging. “People say it leaks, but the power company says—”
“Of course it leaks.” Eleanor’s tone is almost amused. “The earth here is porous, full of caves and graves. It leaks all the way down to the river, to me, and we feast on it.” And she actually licks her lips, as if the tailings from a power plant are a special treat. “And now, tonight—with the Warden gone, and the gates unlocked…”
She trails away, but I can see it unfolding before me: the Beasts running loose down the streets of Eden. Fires, floods, disasters and deaths out of season. An assault so terrible the town is abandoned, undone, given over to the honeysuckle and kudzu. Soon there will be nothing left but the mist, padding down empty streets on silent feet.
The room darkens around us. The windows blacken, not with night, but with the sleek obsidian bodies of birds, rushing past the panes in an endless flock. Eleanor is watching me, smiling a little.
I feel my chin jutting, my fingers curling into fists. “No,” I say again, but this time I stamp my foot, like a child. The floorboards ripple beneath me. The birds wheel back from the windows.
A small shock moves across Eleanor’s face, there and gone again, replaced quickly by malice. Her Beast rises, filling the room, lips peeling back over long dog’s teeth. And I think: The only monsters here are the ones we make.
That Beast is just a little girl’s dream. So are the walls around us, the windows, the sky. Well, I have dreams, too, even if I spent half my life trying to forget them. I ignored them and mistreated them, did my best to burn them, but they persisted. Even now I can feel them just beneath the surface of my skin, hungering.
It’s easy, really. All I have to do is want.
* * *
I close my eyes, and when I open them again, the room is changed.
There are a pair of twin beds pressed against the walls, the covers rumpled. There’s a microwave from the late eighties sitting beside a half-sized plastic coffeemaker. There are water stains on the ceiling, a map of dark brown blooms I know by heart.
We’re in room 12 of the Garden of Eden, the way I remember it, the way it will be only in dreams, now.
Eleanor is standing now, glaring hard, panting. She looks wildly out of place, like a Victorian portrait come to awkward life. She curls her lip and spits, once, viciously.
I recoil, but she wasn’t aiming at me. She was aiming at the thin carpet of the motel. The spit hisses where it lands. A curl of smoke rises, followed by a thin blue flame. Then fire is racing across the floor unnaturally fast, crawling up the walls, leaping from bed to bed like a mischievous child.
I think: Not again. I close my eyes, but I can’t seem to think beyond the glow of the flames against my eyelids, the heat of my only home burning.
I fumble for the door, fall out into the twilit parking lot.
It’s full of people. Some I know well and some I don’t, all as familiar as the sound of the river or the shine of the streetlights. The mailman. The cook at the Mexican place. Bev and Charlotte. The girl who ratted me out to the teacher in sixth grade. Don Gravely, Mr. Cole, Constable Mayhew, Ashley Caldwell, Arthur. Jasper.
None of them are moving. None of them are speaking. They’re watching me with damp, incurious eyes. I’m choking on smoke, coughing out words like please and help. Surely someone will call 911 or find a hose or at least reach their hand out to me and tell me it’s alright, even though it isn’t.
I should have known better. This is a town that turns away from anything troubling or unpleasant, anything that threatens their belief in themselves as decent, upstanding folk: off-season hunting and illegal dumping, hungry dogs and children with five-fingered bruises, even their own poisonous history. Why did I think I would be an exception?
The people in the parking lot turn their backs to me in eerie unison and walk away. Even Jasper.
I feel my attention snag. I stop coughing. Jasper might sulk or swear at me—he might steal the last pack of good ramen or ignore my texts or apply to jobs behind my back—but he would never turn his back and leave me like this.
This is just a bad dream. I have better ones. I close my eyes and reach for something else, a memory so polished and golden it’s become a fantasy. When I open my eyes, the parking lot is gone.
I’m standing on the banks of the Mud River. The sun is dipping low, striking bright sparks off the water. It’s dark enough that the swallows are out, and the fireflies are gleaming in the low places beneath the trees. It feels like the very end of June or the beginning of July, when you’ve lost track of time and it doesn’t matter because you have nowhere in particular to be, when summer stretches so luxuriantly on either side of you that you begin to doubt the existence of other seasons.
Eleanor is standing beside me. Her feet are small and bare in the mud. She’s not glaring at me anymore, but looking out at the river with a helpless, aggrieved kind of love, as if she would carve the love out of her chest if she knew how. She slips her hand into mine and I hold it reflexively, because it’s small and cold, because it reminds me of waiting with Jasper for the bus. I rub my thumb along her knuckles.
Eleanor makes a small noise of disgust, as if she cannot believe anyone would be that stupid, before she pulls me into the river.
The water should be warm as spit this time of year, but it isn’t. It’s a stinging, sapping cold, the kind that cramps muscles and stops hearts. I wrench at our joined hands but Eleanor is unnaturally strong. Her fingernails dig blue crescents into my wrist, pulling me deeper, deeper, until I’m drowning again except this time I want to let go and can’t. This time there’s no one to pull me back to the surface and curl his body around mine.
I catch the edge of that image and hold on to it. Arthur, warm and alive. Arthur holding me while the word “home” ricochets through the cavity of my chest like a stray bullet.
I am not drowning anymore. I open my eyes and I am standing in the cozy sitting room of Starling House, the one with the squashy couch and the pastel wallpaper and the portraits of the Wardens. Except it hasn’t acquired any of those things yet. The floors are shining with fresh polish and the plaster is perfectly intact. The only portrait on the wall is Eleanor herself.
“Really, Opal? Here?” The real Eleanor laughs. “This is my home.”
I face her, sick of her mean little laugh and her cold little eyes. “No, it isn’t. I mean maybe it used to be, but not anymore.” Her mouth gets very small and hard in her soft child’s face, like the seed in the center of a persimmon, so I keep going. “You left it behind and it became somebody else’s home, over and over again, and all of them loved it just as much as you did. Probably more.”
Her tiny persimmon-seed mouth moves. “No they didn’t.”
“They did. And you know what? It loved them back. It was just a house when you lived in it, a big dead thing full of other dead things, but it’s woken up over the years. Or maybe gone to sleep, I don’t know which.” I think of those long ivory roots trailing in the water, drinking deep from the river of dreams. I think of the wisteria wound around every part of the House, running under the skin of it like veins. Dead things don’t dream, but the House did, and so it was no longer dead. It spent a hundred and fifty years drinking the water and dreaming whatever houses dream—fires in hearths, dishes in sinks, lights in windows—and when it found itself empty it called another hungry, homeless person to itself, and did its best to keep them safe. Until it couldn’t.
I always thought of it like a lighthouse, but it was more like a siren: a beautiful thing perched above certain death, a sweet and deadly voice in the night.
But I swear there will be no more portraits on the wall, no more graves to tend. I swear I will end this, here and now. I will be the last Warden of Starling House.
Eleanor is backed against a wall, her arms outstretched as if she can hold her house still, unchanging. I feel sorry for her. “The House sent me dreams before I ever saw it. It needed me, and I needed it.” I remember the window shining through the trees like a lighthouse. Arthur’s face on the other side of the gates, furious and alone. Motes of dust sparking in slantwise light. My blood soaking into the floorboards.
The sitting room shifts around us, becoming the room I know in the world above. The wallpaper fades and the plaster cracks. The floor polish turns dull and scratched and stains bloom on the bare wood. The narrow Victorian furniture is replaced by a sagging couch, and the walls are crowded with mismatched portraits. The atmosphere shifts, accumulating years of long sunsets and deep winter evenings, rainy afternoons and bitter midnights, decades of striving and hungering and fucking and letting the coffee go cold because your book just got good. Whole generations of living, leading down to Arthur, and then to me.
“Starling House might have been yours in the beginning, Eleanor, but it’s mine now.” I say it as gently as I can, but Eleanor flinches as from a hard slap.
But she bares her small, sharp teeth at me, and says, “Take it, then. I don’t care.” Her eyes shine with an awful light. “You already lost everything else.”
Then she runs from me, disappearing into the House, and I follow.
* * *
I don’t have to hurry. I can hear Eleanor’s small feet slapping the stairs, doors slamming behind her, but this is my House now. It will take me wherever I want to be, and no lock will hold against me.
I find her back in the attic room, perched back on her bed with her Beast beside her. The Beast is small and fragile now, like an underfed stray, and it watches me from beneath the safety of Eleanor’s elbow.
“What did you mean?” I ask her, and I am calm, so calm.
That mad gleam still shines in her eyes, triumphal, terrible. “I mean it’s over. I mean that black lake—the ash pond, you called it?—was never built the way it should have been. So many little cracks and fissures, so many places it could break, with just a little bad luck.”
How many times has Bev ranted along the same lines? All anybody has to do is say “coal keeps the lights on” in her hearing and she’s off, showing them pictures of Martin County on her phone. The dirt turned to gray sludge, the houses stained with arsenic and mercury, the ghostly white bellies of the fish floating for miles down the Big Sandy.
The House shakes around me. I breathe carefully. “Eleanor, listen to me. If that stuff hits the river—”
“Then they’ll get what they deserve.”
“Who will, for fuck’s sake?” I’m not breathing carefully anymore. The pipes are whining in the walls, the curtains billowing. “Not Gravely Power, that’s for damn sure. They’ll pay a fine and reopen in two weeks.”
For the first time, Eleanor looks unsure. I sit beside her on the bed, the mattress dipping beneath me. “Why did you stay in Eden, Eleanor?”
