Starling House, page 10
“Is that how she picked Jasper’s name, too?”
His name runs through me in a dark current, tensing my jaw, curling my fingers into fists. When I open my eyes Baine is smiling again. This one says: Bingo. “There’s no need to be alarmed. We’re a research group. We just did our research.” Her tone is soothing, hands palm up. “And we were hoping you would help us do a little more.”
“I don’t un-understand.” My tongue feels foreign in my mouth, a wet muscle fumbling against my teeth.
Baine slides the tablet off my knees and swipes through several screens very quickly. “It won’t take much of your time. We just want to know more about your employer and his residence. If you could just answer a few questions for us, keep in touch—maybe send a few pictures, tell us if you see anything interesting—we would be very grateful.” On the word “grateful” she shows me the tablet again. The URL blurs unpleasantly in my vision, but I’m pretty sure I’m looking at my own PayPal account, except there’s an extra comma in the balance. My stomach coils tight.
I don’t know what she wants, but I already know what I’m going to say. When somebody turns up in a fancy car and knows way too much about you—where you work and how your mother died and your little brother’s given name—you say whatever will get them to leave you the hell alone.
It shouldn’t even be hard. What do I care if some out-of-towners get pictures of Starling House? What do I owe Arthur, other than forty hours a week of housecleaning?
But the answer gets lost somewhere between my brain and my tongue, caught in my throat. His coat feels very heavy on my shoulders.
Baine takes her tablet back. “Oh, and if you bring anything else off the property, we’d like to purchase it from you.” The gate key burns cold against my breastbone. I’m careful not to reach for it. “There will be no need for Jasper to list anything else on eBay. Stonewood has very high standards of behavior, after all.” Her voice is delicate, almost apologetic, as if she dislikes the game she is playing but is obliged to win it anyway.
Somewhere beneath the haze of panic and fury, I almost admire her efficiency. She might be a doctor reading an X-ray of my innards, pointing precisely to each wound and fissure. My answer comes out soft and easy, then. “Okay.”
Baine pats my knee. Hal pulls over near the front gates and idles while I tell them everything I’ve seen or thought or guessed about Starling House. I do a pretty shitty job of it—telling things out of order and doubling back, stumbling over my consonants and trailing off, my thoughts derailed by the sour taste of betrayal and fake apple flavoring—but they don’t seem to care. A little red light winks at me from the tablet.
Eventually I run out of words and sit swaying and blinking in the sickly heat. Baine reaches across me to open the door. “Thank you, Opal. We’ll talk more soon.” I scrabble back into the clean winter light, feeling the air like cold hands cupping my face.
The trees shiver above me. A cloud of birds rises from the branches, scatters, coalesces, screams down at us.
Baine leans out the window, watching.
“They do it to evade predators, apparently.” I cannot, in that moment, imagine what she could be talking about. “The way they flock. We brought in an ornithologist, and he said these are a genetically distinct population, but not a remarkable one. Except that they do this”—a nod at the sky, where the starlings twist and wheel like smoke in the wind—“more often than is typical, given the low number of natural predators nearby.”
I blink at her, swaying. “So?”
Her eyes move finally away from the sky to land on me. I can still see the dark, wild shape of the birds reflected in her sclera. “So we’d very much like to know if they have any unnatural predators.” Baine gives me a false, concerned frown as the window glides up. “You don’t look well. Take it easy, okay?”
I watch the car disappear over the crest of a hill. I try to count to ten in my head, but the numbers won’t stay where they belong, so I give up and pull the key out from under my collar. It rests heavy in my hand.
The driveway feels shorter today, a quick twist through the woods that leaves me dizzy and panting on the front steps. I raise my fist to knock, but the door whips open before my knuckles land.
Arthur glowers down at me, heavy-browed and sullen, even more hunched-up than usual. There’s a bruise yellowing along his jaw and a burst blood vessel in one eye. He gives me an insolent once-over, mouth twisting. “You’re late.”
The idea of him skulking on the other side of the door, waiting for me to show up just so he can give me shit about it, strikes me as very funny, so I laugh at him.
Then I puke across his shoes.
* * *
Arthur didn’t sleep the night before. The mist had risen for the second time in a single week—an unsettling coincidence which had happened more and more often these last few years—and he’d spent hours stalking the halls, blade held high, listening hard for the sound of something that shouldn’t exist: the susurration of scales against wallpaper, the tap-tap of claws across hardwood floors. He found it on the spiral stairs, still half-formed and weak, lost in the clever maze of the House, and sent it scattering into nothing once more.
After that he’d sagged onto his mother’s couch, watched by all the Wardens that came before him, and waited for the sun to rise. For Opal to arrive with her overloud knock and her overbright smile, for the House to fill with her relentless humming.
The sun came, wan but warm; Opal did not.
He supposes it’s possible that she’s grown tired of wasting her days with housekeeping and petty theft, that she’d waltzed out the door the previous evening with her paycheck and her crooked teeth, never intending to return. This is, of course, his dearest ambition, and does not distress him in the least.
He begins to pace, glaring out windows, scratching at the scabbed lines of the Gorgoneion. The House is restless, too, settling and shifting beneath his feet. The fire won’t stay lit and the forks clink tunelessly in their drawers. The light in the kitchen pops as he passes beneath it, the bulb staring down at him like a mournful gray eye.
He finds himself staring out a third-floor window, scowling at the horizon. A black rush of birds startles into the sky near the road, just above the gates. Arthur knows just by the shape of them, the outraged pattern they make against the gray, and that those people must have come back.
He’s felt them circling, watching, buzzing like flies against the property lines. He’s seen the vehicles idling at the gates and ripped out the sensors and wires they leave behind. He’s found the elegant business cards wedged in the front gates and received the bland corporate letters, and he’s burned them both.
Arthur has read enough records from the previous Wardens to know they aren’t the first outsiders to come calling. There have been explorers and journalists, cultists and spies, generations of Gravelys and their damn lawyers. All of them want the same thing: to exploit, to extract, to profit, to throw open doors that should remain closed. So they followed the stories and starlings to his front gates.
They’ve never gotten any farther. Part of the duty of the Warden is to ward the walls, to feed the land a few drops of blood, fresh and hot, so that it never forgets who is and isn’t a Starling.15 Elizabeth Baine will never set foot on his property, unless she is much cleverer than she seems.
Or, he supposes, simply patient. She would have to wait until Arthur has found a way past that final door, the one that has no key. Until he’s descended into the dark and done what none of the previous Wardens have ever managed. The gate would swing wide for her then, but it wouldn’t matter, because the House would be only a house, with nothing beneath it but worms and wisteria roots.
The starlings settle back into the branches. The car is gone.
A moment later, Arthur feels the gates open. He presses his forehead hard against the glass.
A figure emerges from the woods, a scrawny shape swallowed by the black square of his coat, her face white beneath the red blaze of her hair. The sight strikes him as entirely and dangerously correct, as if she should always be wearing his clothes, walking toward his House. It’s difficult to tell, but he thinks her face might be tilted up toward his; the possibility makes all his scars itch.
It’s not an itch, of course. It’s that tedious, boyish hunger, which he hasn’t indulged since he returned from school. Luke sent a few letters, but Arthur burned them unopened. Luke had always been too soft, too sweet; after an hour in Starling House he would have run screaming and never come back.
He watches Opal walk closer and thinks, inanely: She keeps coming back.
The House sighs around him. He raps his knuckles against the sill hard enough to sting, unsure which of them he’s trying to reprimand.
He tries to make himself as forbidding and unpleasant as possible when he opens the door, but Opal doesn’t notice. She looks up at him with her eyes gone odd and dark, her freckles stark against bloodless cheeks. She laughs at him. And then—
Arthur stares down at his shoes, spattered with stringy bile.
Opal wipes her mouth on her sleeve, swaying a little, and whispers, hoarsely, “Sorry.”
He gestures her wordlessly into the hall. She stumbles a little over the threshold and his hands give a traitorous twitch. “Bathroom?” His voice is indifferent. She nods, lips white.
Her footsteps are usually light and furtive, like those of an animal ready to bolt, but now she walks heavily, bones loose, shoes scuffing. Arthur’s arm hovers at her back, not quite touching her.
“Sorry man. I mean Arthur. I mean Mr. Starling. About your shoes I didn’t mean to.” Her sentences run in a strange, flat rhythm, as if someone shook the punctuation out of them. “I’ll clean it up just give me a sec.”
There’s an anxious note in her voice that makes his stomach twist with guilt. As if he cares about the state of the House, as if he hasn’t purposefully overfilled the tub when it annoyed him, watching the water drip through the ceiling with black delight.
In the bathroom he settles her on the closed lid of the toilet and hands her a cup of tap water. She drinks and he kneels awkwardly on the tile, close enough to catch the sugary, chemical scent on her clothes. The room is much smaller than he remembers it; he grinds an elbow surreptitiously into the wall. It takes no notice.
“Thanks. Sorry about the mess. I’ll take care of—”
He makes an embarrassed grimace. “Don’t worry about it.”
She nods sloppily, sloshing water. “Okay. Okay sure.” Her forehead is sheened with sweat, her throat flushed.
“May I take your coat? Here.” Arthur reaches up for the top button, but Opal jerks back so hard she rocks the porcelain tank behind her.
“No. It’s mine.” She frowns down at him, blinking as if she can’t quite focus on his features. Up close her eyes look wrong, her pupils swollen and glassy, her irises reduced to slim rings of silver.
“Are you—are you high?” Arthur is almost relieved; so few of his problems are mundane.
She blinks, then she laughs again. It echoes off the tile, hollow and brittle, and leaves her panting. “Oh, go to hell Arthur Starling.” She swallows hard. “Sorry sorry don’t fire me I’m just a little carsick or something because Hal is a shitty driver and I had to read all those headlines. Which is funny because most of the bad luck in this town never even makes it into the headlines. In third grade the ceiling collapsed like three feet from Jasper’s desk16 and the last time I went swimming I got my foot caught in an old trotline and nearly drowned and—” She’s forced to pause for air. “—and I never looked at any pictures of the accident before—it was an accident, Constable Mayhew can go fuck himself—” She pinches her own lips together, hard.
Acid guilt rises from Arthur’s stomach to his throat. There are no accidents in Eden.
Opal unpinches her lips. “I’m not feeling great. And I didn’t really want to spend the morning playing twenty questions about you and your creepy-ass house.”
The pipes whine in the walls and Opal pats the cast-iron lip of the bathtub in absent-minded apology. Arthur pretends not to notice.
He takes the cup from her hands and says, mildly, “Someone was asking about me?”
“Yeah. I was walking along and this corporate lady pulls up in a nice car with a cheap air freshener and tells me—”
“You were walking?”
Opal gives him another unsteady frown. “I just said that.”
“Why were you walking?” He doesn’t know where she and her brother live, but the nearest house is at least a mile away, and it was chilly this morning.
“Because,” she enunciates very clearly, as if Arthur is the one who is drugged, “I had to get to work.”
“Well why didn’t you—” He feels suddenly very stupid. “You don’t have a car.”
Opal curls her lip. “Anyway this lady gave me a ride and then she gave me money to spy on you and that’s why I’m late.”
Arthur’s fingers go numb. He thinks, distantly, that Elizabeth Baine must be cleverer than she seems.
He looks up at Opal, her hands gripping her own knees, her clothes reeking of something sick and sweet, her frown not quite covering the black memory of terror in her eyes.
He recalls in that moment the real reason his mother forbade him from getting a pet: once you open the door, you never know what else might come in. Or what might get out.
As a boy he’d thrown fits over her rules, beating his heels against the walls, half mad with loneliness, but now—shaking with rage on his bathroom floor beside a girl who is not as brave as she pretends, who lies and steals and walks in the cold without a coat to earn money that isn’t for her—he knows his mother was right.
He stands abruptly. The boundary walls will need walking, the wards tending. “I have to go.”
Opal flinches back from the sudden grate of his voice. On any other day she would hide her feelings behind an artificial smile, but now she gives him an honest glare. There’s reproach and betrayal in her face, as if she forgot for a few minutes to be afraid of him and resents the reminder. “I didn’t—” She tucks a coil of hair behind one ear. “I didn’t tell them anything. Promise.”
The words sound cheap and plastic, like fake pearls; whatever they gave her must interfere with her natural talent for lying. He molds his face into a careless sneer. “Can’t see why I’d care. Tell them whatever you want.”
He tries very hard to mean it. To recall that it doesn’t matter who they harass or drug or threaten, so long as the gates remain locked. That he is the Warden—the last Warden—and there is more at stake than the well-being of one girl, no matter how many times she comes back.
He leaves her sick and lost-looking in the bathroom, her arms crossed over her middle. Bits of plaster crumble from the ceiling, rapping against his skull like flicked fingers, and he digs his thumbnail into the wallpaper as he passes.
ELEVEN
I spend the next couple of hours laid out flat on the sofa, my face buried in the cushions, letting the springtime smell of the house drive the syrupy taste out of my mouth. I sort of hope Arthur will stomp back in to bitch at me, but he stays away. I hear the front door open two or three times, and the low rumble of his voice, as if he’s speaking on the phone he doesn’t have.
Around noon I get up, puke in the kitchen sink, and drag myself to the front hall with a bucket and a rag. But my mess has already been scrubbed away, leaving nothing but a damp spot and a faint lemony smell.
The rest of the afternoon passes slowly. I swipe half-heartedly at cobwebs and dust things I’ve already dusted. Mostly I just wander, leaning sometimes against the walls, running my palms along the banisters, as if the house is a pet or a person.
If the wall gives a little beneath my shoulder, if the wood feels warm under my hands, I tell myself it’s a side effect of whatever the hell was in that air freshener.
I wind up in the library again. I often do, by the end of the day. It’s the smell, all dust and light, or maybe it’s the quiet I like. There are no echoes or creaks or sudden noises in this room; I have the sense that I could put two fingers in my mouth and whistle, and the room would muffle the sound before it left my lips.
I pick a book not quite at random. I’ve gotten into this weird habit of letting my fingers trail along the spines until one of them feels right, a sort of staticky heat against my palm. (Arthur caught me doing this once and said What are you doing? And I said Nothing! and he glared very hard at the bookshelf, as if letting it know he had his eye on it.)
I settle into the best armchair, the one where the sun always seems to be falling obliquely across the page, and let the book fall open.
It’s a collection of Hopi folklore, printed on cheap yellow paper that flakes and cracks under my hands. The pages are heavily annotated, with the word “sipapú” circled and starred throughout.17 I’m too tired and headachey to actually read much, but something slips out of the pages onto my lap.
It’s a single sheet of notebook paper, pressed flat but deeply grooved, as if it was folded and refolded several hundred times. The handwriting is square and plain. The bottom half has been torn away.
The first two words on the page are Dear Arthur.
Later, I’ll wish I hesitated. I’ll wish I was the kind of person who thought about decency and privacy, right and wrong—but I’m not.
I slide my arms into Arthur’s coat and shove the page deep into the pocket. I walk calmly to the sitting room to collect my pay, and then I leave. The air swallows the sound of my steps.
I pause only once, at the front door. I tell myself I’m just tired and dreading the walk back to the motel, but the truth is that I don’t want to leave, don’t want to step back into that map scattered with red dots, each one a disaster.
I call myself several bad names, including chickenshit and fool, and leave.
There’s a dark shape waiting under the trees. I have a split second’s impression of headlights and tires, Starling House reflected in a wide windshield, and very nearly panic—but the thing parked in the drive is not sleek and black. It is in fact the vehicular opposite of Elizabeth Baine’s car: a prehistoric pickup, its hood dented, its paint gone a powdery periwinkle with age. The tires are matte black, brand-new, but there are orange patches of rust around each wheel well, and spidery lines of dirt crisscrossing every window, as if the entire thing had been overgrown with vines until very recently.
