Starling House, page 4
“Well, nobody ever saw them inside a church.” I remain silent until Lacey recalls that I don’t go to church, either. Mom went before I was born, she said, but once you’re on the outside, the only way back in is on your knees; neither of us ever liked crawling.
Lacey rushes to add, “And they were always wandering around at night. And they kept strange animals, likely for sacrifices.”
“Sounds messy. Bet they could use a housekeeper.”
Lacey gives me a disapproving look that would have made her meemaw proud, and I spend the rest of my shift restocking and mopping. I clock out without even bothering to dip a hand in the drawer because maybe—assuming this isn’t an elaborate prank or a Satanist ritual or a weird sex thing—I don’t have to anymore.
By the time I get back to room 12, Jasper is passed out in a gangly diagonal across his bed, headphones mashed sideways, the nape of his neck soft and exposed. He must have finished his homework, because his favorite off-brand editing app is up on his screen.
He’s always taking little videos—tree limbs crisscrossing in the wind, tadpoles wriggling in a drying puddle, his own feet running on cracked pavement. Standard moody-teen art, basically, but the angles are odd and unsettling, and he layers so many filters over the images that they acquire a spectral unreality. Lately he’s been stitching them together, weaving them into tiny, strange narratives.
In one of them, a giggling white girl is carving a heart into the trunk of a tree. Dark liquid wells up from the wood, but she ignores it, carving until her hands are slicked red to the wrist. The final shot is her turning to the camera, mouthing I love you.
In the latest one, you see a pair of brown hands lowering a dead bird into the river. The footage does a funny little skip, and then a hand reaches back out of the water, covered in wet black feathers. The hands clasp tight; with passion or violence, it’s impossible to say.
Jasper had red welts all over the backs of his hands for days, where the superglue had taken off bits of skin.
He won’t show me this new one yet. The frames on his screen now are just a series of empty white squares, like fogged-up windows.
I hold the doorknob to muffle the latch behind me, but Jasper stirs, squinting up at me with his curls squashed flat on one side. “You just now getting home?” I flinch a little; room 12 isn’t a home so much as a place we happen to be, like a bus stop or a gas station.
“Frank kept us late.”
Actually I’d spent an extra hour shivering on the old railroad bridge, watching the oily rainbow sheen of the water and wondering if I’d just done something incredibly stupid. In the end I decided I probably had, but that was hardly a first, and at least this time it might be worth it.
I flop beside him on the bed. “Did Miss Hudson get your book report back?”
“Yeah, I got an A.” Jasper appears to struggle with himself before adding, “Minus.”
“I assume you’re trying to signal some sort of hostage situation. Blink twice if you’re being blackmailed.”
“It wasn’t fair! We were supposed to say whether we thought it was a horror novel or a romance, right? And I said both, because it is, and she took off five points.”
I offer to TP Miss Hudson’s house, which Jasper feels would not affect his GPA favorably, so we compromise by calling her bad names until both of us feel better. Afterward he sinks into his amateur-filmmaker forums. (I used to worry about how much time he spent online. Last year I tried to bully him into joining the high school movie club until Jasper explained, patiently, that he’d been a member up until Ronnie Hopkins asked him to write the Spanish lines for a character in his screenplay listed as “CARTEL THUG #3.” I said, defensively, that I was just trying to help, and Jasper said that would be the title of his next horror short. I surrendered.)
Now he scrolls contentedly while I open three packs of store-brand Pop-Tarts (dinner) and microwave tap water for hot chocolate (dessert).
For some reason I feel like singing, so I do, one of Mom’s old sweet songs about apples in the summertime and peaches in the fall. I don’t know where she was from originally—one of my earliest memories is watching the telephone lines lope alongside the car while Mom drove us from nowhere to nowhere—but her accent was green and southern, just like mine. Her voice was better, though: low, smoke-bitten.
Jasper slides me a look, but his mouth is too full to say anything.
We spend the evening cocooned in our sleeping bags, headachey and sticky-fingered from sugar. It’s cold enough that frost spangles the window and the heater rattles, so I cave and let the hellcat inside, an act of generosity which she repays by slinking under the bed and hissing every time the mattress creaks. I plug in the Christmas lights and the room goes hazy gold, and I wonder what a stranger would see if they cupped their hands against the glass: the two of us huddled in our hideout like Lost Boys or Boxcar Children, a couple of homeless kids playing a defiant game of house.
Sometime after midnight Jasper switches to a playlist called “peaceful beach waves.” It sounds like static to me, but Jasper’s always wanted to see the ocean. And he will, I swear he will. Maybe I’ll even go with him.
I try to picture it: shoving my clothes in a backpack and driving across the county line, leaving room 12 empty and anonymous behind me. It feels fantastical, unnatural, like a tree dreaming of ripping up its roots and walking down the highway.
Which is stupid because I don’t have roots; I was born in the backseat of Mom’s ’94 Corvette. I remember bugging her when I was little, asking if we were going to stay in the motel forever, if Eden was our new home. I remember the brittle sound of her laugh, the hard line of her jaw when she stopped. Home is just wherever you get stuck.
I wait until Jasper’s breathing rasps into snores before sliding the laptop off his bed. The hellcat gives a perfunctory hiss.
I click in aimless patterns for a while, as if there’s someone watching over my shoulder and I have to prove how little I care. After the third game of Minesweeper I open a private tab and type two words into the search bar: starling house.
The image results are the same as always: mostly birds, vast murmurations hanging in the sky like desaturated auroras, with one or two grainy photos of the Starling House gates, or the historical plaque on the side of the road. Those pictures lead me to a haunted house blog that rates Starling House eight out of ten ghost emojis but doesn’t seem to have much actual information, and the Kentucky State Historical Society, whose website is listed as “coming soon” as of four years ago.
Lower down in the search results there’s an amber daguerreotype of a not-very-pretty girl wearing an old-fashioned wedding dress. A middle-aged man stands beside her with his hand on her shoulder, his hair a colorless gray that might be blond or red. It’s hard to tell, but I think the girl might be leaning very slightly away from him.
My copy of The Underland doesn’t have author photos, but I know who she is even before I click the link. It’s the wild, abyssal look in her eyes that gives her away, and the ink-stained tips of her fingers.
The photo takes me to the Wiki page for Eden, Kentucky. I scroll through the history section, which gives me the story everybody already knows: the opening of the first mines; the founding of Gravely Power; the Ajax 3850-B, biggest power shovel in the whole world, called “Big Jack” by locals; seventy thousand acres dug up and wrung dry; that one Prine song that everybody still hates;7 a few pictures of Big Jack digging its own grave in the eighties, with a huddle of smaller shovels gathered around it like pallbearers.
I remember once when I was hanging around the motel office as a kid, Bev told me about the time her daddy took her up to the top of Big Jack. She said you could see miles and miles in every direction, the whole county laid out like a patchwork quilt. Her face was soft and handsome for a minute, remembering, before she told me to go get the Windex and a roll of paper towels if I didn’t have anything better to do.
E. Starling’s name is linked only once, in the “Notable people” section.
Her page has a little exclamation point at the top advising readers that the article needs additional citations for verification. I read it with something strange and electric running through me, an itch I can’t explain.
I open an empty document and the cursor blinks at me, an invitation in Morse code. I haven’t written anything except résumés and forgeries in eight years—because Jasper deserves more than make-believe, and because even the Lost Boys had to grow up in the end—but tonight I’m tempted. Maybe it’s the memory of Starling House, vast and ruinous against the winter sky. Maybe it’s the bare facts of E. Starling’s life, a dissatisfying arc that could be fixed in fiction. Maybe it’s the damn dreams.
In the end I only permit myself to copy and paste the Wiki page into the document, telling myself it’s research, before shutting the laptop so firmly that Jasper stirs in his sleep.
E. Starling (author)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Eleanor Starling (1851–4 May 1886) was a nineteenth-century American children’s author and illustrator who published under the name of E. Starling. Though initially poorly received, her picture book The Underland enjoyed a twentieth-century revival and is now frequently included in lists of America’s most influential children’s literature.
Biography [edit]
There is no record of Eleanor Starling’s birth.[1] Her first appearance in the historical record is the announcement of her engagement to John Peabody Gravely, founder and co-owner of Gravely Bros. Coal & Power Co. (now Gravely Power).[2] The two were married in 1869, but John Gravely died shortly afterward, leaving the company to his surviving brother, Robert Gravely, and the fortune to his wife.
Starling, who never received formal training in art or literature, submitted the manuscript of The Underland to more than thirty publishers. Julius Donohue of Cox & Donohue recalled receiving a package containing twenty-six illustrations “so amateurish and upsetting” that he hid them in the bottom drawer of his desk and forgot them.[3] Several months later, when his six-year-old daughter begged for “the nightmare book” at bedtime, he realized the pages had been discovered.[3] Cox & Donohue offered Starling a modest contract and published The Underland in the spring of 1881.
Eleanor Starling never met with her editors or readers. She refused all interviews, and all correspondence addressed to her was returned unopened. She was declared dead in 1886. Her work was held in trust until it fell out of copyright in 1956. Her home in Muhlenberg County is marked by the Kentucky State Historical Society.
Critical Reception [edit]
The Underland was considered both a critical and commercial failure upon publication. A reviewer for the Boston Times described it as “deliberately unsettling” and “a transparent theft from Mr. Carroll,”[4] while the Christian Children’s Union petitioned several state governments to ban the book for the promotion of immorality. Donohue defended it in an open letter, asking how a book could be immoral when it contained no nudity, violence, sex, alcohol, or profanity. In response the Children’s Union cited the “horrific anatomy” of the Beasts of Underland and the “general aura of dread.”[5]
The book developed a quiet following over subsequent decades. By the early 1900s a number of artists and writers were citing E. Starling as an early influence.[6] Her artwork, initially dismissed as clumsy and untrained, was lauded for its stark composition and intensity of emotion. Her sparsely told tale, which described a little girl named Nora Lee who fell into “Underland,” was recognized for its engagement with themes of fear, isolation, and monstrosity.
Since then Underland has gained acclaim as an early work in the neo-Gothic and modernist movements, and is considered a cultural turning point when children’s literature abandoned the strict moral clarity of the nineteenth century for darker, more ambiguous themes.[6] Director Guillermo del Toro has praised E. Starling’s work, and thanked her for teaching him that “the purpose of fantasy is not to make the world prettier, but to lay it bare.”[7]
Adaptations and Related Works [edit]
The Underland was adapted as a stage play of the same name in 1932 at the Public Theater in New York City, and revived in 1944 and again in 1959. The 1959 production ended after only three nights, and was the subject of a House Un-American Activities Committee report citing its “hostility to American values, traditional family structures, and commerce.”
The Underland was produced as a feature film in 1983, but never released. A documentary about the filming of the movie, Unearthing Underland, was nominated for an IDA Award in 2000.
In 2003, the song “Nora Lee & Me” was produced as a hidden track on Josh Ritter’s third studio album, Hello Starling. The bluegrass girl group the Common Wealth also cites the book as an influence on their 2008 alt-country album, follow them down.
The book was adapted as a serialized graphic novel in the 2010s.
The Norman Rockwell Museum organized an art exhibition in 2015 titled Starling’s Heirs: A History of Dark Fantasy Illustration, which included works by Rovina Cai, Brom, and Jenna Barton.
Further Reading [edit]
Mandelo, L. (1996). “Beastly Appetites: Queer Monstrosity in E. Starling’s Text.” In The Southern Gothic Critical Reader. Salem Press.
Liddell, Dr. A. (2016). “From Wonderland to Underland: White Femininity and the Politics of Escape.” American Literary History. 24 (3): 221–234.
Atwood, N. (2002). Gothic Children’s Illustration from Starling to Burton. Houghton Mifflin.
FIVE
I don’t dream of the house that night. I don’t dream at all, actually, which is weird for me; I often wake up with the taste of river water and blood in my mouth, broken glass in my hair, a scream drowning in my chest. But that morning, the first one after I set foot on Starling land, there’s nothing but a deep quiet inside me, like the dead air between radio stations.
The gates of Starling House greet me with their empty iron eyes. My left hand aches, but this time I have the key strung around my neck on a red lanyard. The thunk of tumblers turning feels more dramatic than it is, a tectonic shifting I can feel through my shoes, and then I’m walking up the drive with the key knocking against my breastbone.
Starling House still looks like God scooped it up from the cover of a Gothic novel and dropped it on the banks of the Mud River, and I still like it far more than I should. I pretend the busted windowpanes are jagged little mouths, grinning at me.
Arthur Starling answers the door in a rumpled sweater that doesn’t fit, his eyes the resentful red of someone who does not appreciate being conscious before noon.
I give him several thousand watts of cheery smile and a merciless “Good morning!” I squint up at the sun, gleaming reluctantly through the branches. “You said anytime after dawn was fine.”
His eyes narrow to bitter slits.
“Can I come in? Where should I start?”
He closes his eyes completely, as if he is preventing himself from slamming the door in my face only through devout prayer, and steps aside.
Walking across the threshold of Starling House is like stepping from winter straight into summer: the air is sweet and rich and warm. It slides down my throat, goes straight to my head. The walls seem to lean toward me. My feet feel rooted in place—I have a vision of vines pushing up between the floorboards to twine around my ankles, nails driving up through the soft flesh of my feet—
The door snaps shut behind me, sharp as a slap. The walls straighten up.
I turn to see Arthur watching me from the dimness, his expression flat and unreadable, his palm flat on the door. This side is carved up just like the outside, except the neat rows of signs and symbols have been interrupted by a random crosshatch of deep, ragged lines, almost like claw marks.
I nod to the door, grasping at normalcy. “You got a dog?”
“No.” I wait, hoping he’s about to add some perfectly reasonable explanation about a rabid raccoon or an accident with a hatchet, but all he says is “Mother said we had enough to take care of without getting a pet.”
“In my experience you don’t get pets, they get you.” When I left this morning the hellcat was watching me with her usual deranged intensity from under the dumpster. “Don’t you ever have any strays turn up around here?” There are always strays in Eden, kittens with oozy eyes and yellow dogs with ribs like the tines of a pitchfork.
“No.” His eyes flick over me, lingering pointedly on the holes in my jeans, and his upper lip curls. “At least, not until recently.”
I don’t have much of a temper. People like me learn to send their tempers down and inward, where they won’t get you fired or arrested or cussed out. But the haughty curl of his lip sends a white lick of fury up my spine.
I’m opening my mouth to say something I’ll regret—which begins listen here, asshole—when he sweeps past me and on down the hall. He lifts a lazy hand. “There’s a broom in the kitchen closet and supplies under the sink. I’m sure you’ll find your way around.”
His steps creak and ache into the shadows, and then I’m all alone in Starling House.
The air hangs thick and expectant around me. A mirror watches me with my own eyes, spooked gray. I wonder what color Eleanor Starling’s eyes were, and how she died, and how her husband died, and if their bones are buried now beneath the floorboards. Halfway down the hall a door opens with a Hollywood creak, and I swallow the urge to run screaming.
I raise both hands in the air. “Look, I don’t want any trouble.” I don’t believe in ghosts, demons, possessions, aliens, astrology, witchcraft, or vampires, but I know that the person who walks into the haunted house and loudly proclaims that they don’t believe in ghosts is the first one to get gruesomely murdered. “I’m just here to clean, okay?” I’m answered by a meek moan, like a stair beneath a tiptoed foot. I decide to interpret it as permission.
