Starling House, page 7
And I know without knowing how—unless it’s something in the stark shape of the lettering or the black of the ink—that E. Starling wrote this note.
A throat clears behind me. I jump so badly I drop the book.
Arthur Starling is watching me, Bond-villain-ly, from the shadows of a wingback armchair. There are dozens of books piled around him, bristling with sticky notes, and a stack of neatly labeled folders. Tsa-me-tsa and Pearl Starling, 1906–1929. Ulysses Starling, 1930–1943. Etsuko Starling, 1943–1955.9
Arthur has a thick yellow pad of paper balanced on his knee. His left pinky is silvery gray with graphite, and his sleeves are rolled to the elbow. His wrists look stronger than I would expect from someone whose main hobbies are skulking and frowning, the bones wrapped in stringy muscle and scarred flesh.
“Oh, hi!” I reshelve Ovid and give him an innocent wave. “What you got there?”
His face twists. “Nothing.”
I tilt my head to see the page better. There are notes at the top, tally marks and dates mostly, but the lower half of the page has been overtaken by crosshatching and graphite. “Looks pretty good from here. Is that the sycamore out front?”
He flips the pad over, glowering.
“Are those tattoos?” There are dark lines of ink slinking out from under the rolled cuffs of his shirt, tangling with the jagged lines of scars. I can’t make out any images, but the shapes remind me of the carvings on the front door: eyes and open palms, crosses and spirals.
Arthur rolls his sleeves back down and buttons them pointedly. “I’m paying you for a specific purpose, Miss Opal.” His voice is frigid. “Shouldn’t you be cleaning something?”
That night I leave Starling House with a pair of candlesticks and a fountain pen rolled up in my hoodie, because fuck him.
At least I don’t have to see him very often. Whole weeks pass without an exchange of words longer than “Good morning” when he unlocks the door, and “Well, I’m headed out” as I leave. Every now and then I take a wrong turn and catch a glimpse of hunched shoulders and uncombed hair, but usually the only sign that the house is occupied are the occasional thumps and murmurs from the attic above me, and the slow accretion of dishes in the sink. I might find a fresh pot of coffee or a soup pot still simmering on the stove, smelling wholesome and home-cooked in a way that’s completely foreign to me, but I don’t touch any of it, thinking vaguely of burrows and mounds and what happens to the idiots who eat the fairy king’s food.
Time already passes strangely in Starling House. Sometimes the hours slouch by, and I find myself indulging in little-girl fantasies to occupy myself (I’m Cinderella, forced to scrub the grout lines by my evil stepmother; I’m Beauty, trapped in an enchanted castle by a Beast with a face like a crow’s skull). Sometimes the hours skitter away into grimy corners and stained baseboards, and I look up from a gray bucket of water to find the sun hanging near the horizon, and realize the house has swallowed another day, another week.
The only reliable measurement of time is the state of the place.
By the end of February the first floor is almost livable. There’s still a thriving population of spiders and mice, and I can’t do anything about the hunks of plaster that sometimes fall from the ceilings, or the way the floors all seem to slant toward some central point, as if the whole house is collapsing in on itself, but walking down the halls no longer feels like touring a crypt. The tabletops gleam and the windowpanes wink. The rugs are red and blue and deep green, rather than gray, and the smell of bleach and tile cleaner has driven back the black smell of mildew.
The house seems to appreciate all the attention. The exterior is still stained and gloomy, but the vines are greening faintly, supple and alive, and there are fresh bird’s nests in the eaves. The floor still provides an entire symphony of groans and creaks, but I swear it’s no longer in a minor key.
Sometimes I catch myself humming along with it, weirdly content. Mostly it’s just the money, which in my experience will solve all ninety-nine of your problems, but it’s also Starling House itself: the way the walls feel like cupped palms around me, the way the doorknob fits in my hand, the absurd, childish feeling that I belong there.
EIGHT
By the middle of March the sparrows are bathing in the potholes and the daffodils are peeking cautiously through the matted leaves. It’s still cold, but the world smells muddy and awake, and I’m inspired to drag the rugs and couch cushions outside for an airing. I prop them against the biggest, oldest sycamore and beat them with my new broomstick until dust fogs the woods and sweat stings my skin, despite the chill.
I leave the cushions to air out and head back up the steps, kicking aside the leaves and curled-up grubs. It’s only when I reach for the doorknob that I realize it’s locked itself behind me.
I pound on the door a few times, annoyed and embarrassed and wishing very much that I was wearing my hoodie rather than just a bleach-spotted Bible study T-shirt. The wind pokes icy fingers through the holes in the collar. I knock again.
After an amount of time that makes it clear Arthur isn’t coming—either because he can’t hear me or because he’s a prick—I get more than annoyed. God, I hate the cold. It makes me think of the river closing over my head, the stars vanishing, the world ending. I haven’t gone swimming in eleven years.10
Classic PTSD, Mr. Cole called it, as if that helped at all.
I stomp and swear at the house. I try my gate key in the lock, but it won’t turn. I remind the house in a wheedling voice of all the hard work I’ve been doing on its behalf, feeling stupid for talking to a house but not stupid enough to stop. There’s a shiver in my jaw, as if my teeth want to chatter, and the wind has turned my sweat clammy. The door remains serenely shut.
I flex my left hand. The cut is mostly healed now, and it seems a shame to split it back open, so I bite my lower lip until I taste salt and meat. My fingertips come away red.
I’m about to smear my own blood across the lock like some ancient cultist blessing a household when I hear boots on the steps behind me. I drop my broomstick and spin around to find Arthur Starling displaying his particular habit of turning up when I’m doing something especially embarrassing.
He’s wearing a long dark coat of the kind I’ve only seen in spy movies and on the covers of pulpy mystery novels, his hair stuffed messily beneath a high collar, his face flushed with fresh air. He’s looking down at me the way I look at the hellcat when she gets her claws stuck in the screen, as if he can’t understand how he got saddled with such a piteous, hapless creature.
He sighs at me. “Please stop bleeding on my house.”
I suck resentfully at my lip. “Where did you come from?”
“Walking the walls.”
I squint around him at the winter woods, shadowed and empty except for the white bones of sycamores, and remind myself that this boy and his spooky shit are not my problem. “Of course.”
“You’re cold,” he observes. He’s mocking me, standing there all cozy in his rich-kid coat, his shoulders safe and square against the winter light while I shiver in my secondhand T-shirt, remembering what I’d rather forget, and I’m suddenly, thoroughly, absolutely over it.
“No shit.” I use my real voice rather than my cashier’s chirp. His eyes widen gratifyingly. “See, when you get locked outside by a haunted house in the middle of March, and nobody is around to let you back in because they’re busy doing God knows what—”
He moves past me in two long strides, keys clinking in his hand. He unlocks the door with his face half-hidden behind his collar.
I follow him back into the humid dark of the house, wondering if he’s about to fire me and wishing I didn’t have to care, wishing I’d stolen every last spoon in his stupid house.
But he doesn’t say anything. We stand awkwardly in the hall, not looking at one another. The heat makes me colder somehow, the shivers moving from my jaw to my belly, rattling my ribs. He slides out of his jacket and makes an abortive gesture in my direction before folding it stiffly over his arm.
He scowls at the floor and asks petulantly, “Why can’t you wear a coat?”
I repeat Jasper’s name in my head three times to prevent myself from saying anything nasty. “Because,” I answer, with only the slightest rasp of asperity in my voice, “my brother is using it.”
Arthur’s eyes cross mine, flashing with that terrible guilt. “You have a brother.”
“Yep. Ten years younger.”
His throat bobs. “And you, the two of you live with your father? Your parents, I mean.”
“Oh, are we doing small talk now? Shouldn’t I be cleaning something?” He flinches again, mouth half opening, and I cut across him before he can decide to fire me after all. “Last I heard my dad was driving trucks in Tennessee, but the Child Support people left him alone when I turned eighteen.” I’d been fifteen, actually, but it was worth losing those checks to keep Jasper. “And we don’t know about Jasper’s dad.”
Mom told us he was staying at the Garden of Eden for the summer. She said she liked him because he smelled like fresh-cut tobacco and always opened her beer first, like a real gentleman. Jasper used to ask around every August, until the lady who runs the Mexican place told him that the county sheriff started showing up in the fields and demanding H-2A visas. She heard Jasper’s father went back to Managua.
“And our mom…” I look away from Arthur and let my voice wobble. “She’s dead. Car wreck.” Nobody fires you after you tell them your mom’s dead.
I can’t see his face, but I know how people look at you when they find out: with pity, and horror, and that strange, secondhand embarrassment, as if they’ve peeked inside your medicine cabinet and found something shameful inside it. Next will come the stilted apologies and the condolences, eleven years too late.
Instead, Arthur says, “Oh.”
A small silence. For some reason, I fill it. “She wasn’t drunk. I know what people say, but she was a damn good driver. Just—just unlucky, I guess.”
She didn’t think so; she used to list all her near-misses and close calls—the laced pills that landed her in the ER, the jealous boyfriend that barely missed, the fox she’d swerved to avoid—and say she was the luckiest woman alive. I argued that a lucky woman wouldn’t have a list like that. I guess I won in the end.
Arthur has been working on a response for some time. Finally, he manages, “My mother,” and stops. Then, “Her, too.”
And then there’s something sickeningly close to sympathy stuck in my throat, a terrible urge to reach toward him. I clear my throat. “I’m—look, I’m sorry—”
He interrupts, stiff and cold again, “I believe I pay you enough to buy a second coat.”
I want to laugh at him. I want to explain about people like me, about the two lists we have to make and the one list we get to keep, the everything we give up for the one thing we can’t. The way Jasper chews on one knuckle when he edits his videos and the way he stares sometimes at the horizon when he thinks I’m not looking, world-hungry and half-starved, and the email I received last night confirming his enrollment for the fall term. There had even been a personal note from the director of admissions, telling me how happy they were to welcome “students like Jasper” and asking me to send along a photo for their website. I’d sent an old yearbook picture, a few shots of him and Logan at their laptops, a hilarious one where he’s leaning against the hotel in a hoodie, looking like an album cover.
I settle for a shrug. “The money’s not for that.”
“Not for what? Coats?”
“Me.” I try to say it like a joke, but it comes out sounding like what it is: the flat truth. Arthur responds with a cold “I see” that makes me think he doesn’t see at all, and stalks off, coat still trailing over one arm.
I don’t run into him again for the rest of the day. Usually he turns up before sundown, but that evening the house remains hollow and quiet. I find my envelope waiting for me on the sitting room couch.
Beneath the envelope, neatly folded, smelling faintly of winter air and woodsmoke and something else, is a long woolen coat.
* * *
Arthur tells himself, firmly and repeatedly, that it doesn’t matter. It’s only a coat. So it was the last thing his mother ever gave him. So he had found her letter in its pocket after the burial, as if she’d climbed out of her grave and slipped it there herself.
(He knew it had been the House playing its little tricks, and in that moment he’d wanted to burn it to the ground for simply existing, for not fighting hard enough for what it loved. He’d torn the letter into two neat halves, instead.)
Still. It’s only a coat.
But a sickly guilt trails him all evening, nipping at his conscience. He knows what to do with guilt.
He takes the sword to a large, empty room that only ever seems to exist when he’s like this: restless and tense, his bones buzzing under his skin. He moves through his drills with a ruthless, graceless efficiency. His mother had been a natural to the sword, as if she had spent her whole life waiting for someone to put a hilt in her hands. She fought like an apocalypse, like a great and inevitable ending. Arthur fights like a butcher, fast and ugly. But still: he works until his shoulders shake and his tendons are hot wires around his wrists.
It isn’t enough. He turns to books next, dragging himself through a tacky guidebook to European cryptids. He pauses to sketch an eighteenth-century headstone, engraved with a depiction of the twisted, sinuous animal that—one foggy night—supposedly dragged a woman to her death. The guidebook claims it was an enormous, bloodthirsty otter, but the locals used the word “beithíoch.”
Arthur opens a bound journal and records the coordinates, the proximity of the water, the fog, the symbols the natives carved above their doorways for good luck. There are hundreds of other entries, going back all the way to Eleanor Starling herself, generations of frantic research collected into an eccentric bestiary.
But Arthur has added a new column to his pages, titled “Present Activity.” He refers back to the guidebook; the last reported attack was in 1927.
None, he writes, and feels a strange, sharp ache in his chest, almost like hope. Even bad stories end.
If he’s careful—if he doesn’t waver, if he isn’t distracted—he will end this one.
Arthur opens his desk drawer and removes a glass jar of ink, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a set of long steel needles with sharp starburst tips. He’d done his first tattoos with a ballpoint pen and a sewing needle, but he’s more careful now.
He’s running out of space. His arms and chest are crosshatched with stippled lines, the flesh knotted where he’d pushed the needle too deep. But if he rolls up his shirt and twists in the chair, he can reach a palm-sized stretch of skin between a pair of magpies, just below a set of crossed swords.
He chooses a Gorgoneion this time, a woman’s face wreathed in serpents.
At first, tattooing was just another cold calculation, a logical piece of his plans. But he’s come to enjoy it. The pop of parting skin, the sting of ink, the release. The feeling that he is slowly erasing everything soft and vulnerable, forging himself into the weapon he needs.
After a long time, he wipes the beaded blood away and checks his work in the mirror. He’s copied the design well, except for a few accidental variations in the woman’s face. Her chin is too sharp, and the hard line of her mouth ends in a wry, crooked twist.
* * *
I don’t mind the walk to Starling House so much anymore. Wearing Arthur’s coat is like wearing a small house, with shiny buttons for doorknobs and stiff woolen walls to keep out the chill. For the first time I understand how anybody could actually like winter; it’s a delicious defiance to be warm when the world is cold.
I’m careful not to wear it when Jasper might see. He’s good about not asking questions, but there’s no reason to worry him, so I wait until the school bus is pulling out of the parking lot in the mornings before I slide my arms into the sleeves and square the collar against the late-March wind.
I’m just leaving the motel parking lot when a voice says, “Opal? Opal McCoy?”
I turn to find a pretty white woman striding toward me. She’s smiling like she just caught me by chance, but her steps are hard and purposeful on the pavement. Her teeth look expensive.
“Yes, ma’am?” The words taste young and country in my mouth. “Ma’am” is for schoolteachers and hairdressers and harassed-looking moms at the grocery store; this woman is in some other category entirely. Her haircut is blunt and modern, and she wears a watch with the face turned to the inside of her wrist.
“I’m Elizabeth Baine.” She pronounces every syllable of her name in a way that tells me no one has ever called her Liz. “I was hoping we could have a chat.”
“Uh. About what? I’m headed to work right now, actually—”
“I’ll be quick, then,” Baine says, and smiles some more. It’s a well-practiced expression, an efficient arrangement of muscles meant to make me smile back. It’s alright, this smile says, you can trust me. The hair prickles on the backs of my hands. “You work at Starling House, don’t you?”
I haven’t told anyone where I’ve been working—not Jasper, not Bev or Charlotte, not even the hellcat—and the idea of Arthur gossiping casually about his new housekeeper makes my brain cramp.
The prickles spread up my arms and down my spine. “Maybe I do.”
“Oh, don’t worry.” She steps closer and touches my shoulder. She smells like the JCPenney’s in E-town: sterile, steam-pressed. “We keep track of things like that.”
