Starling House, page 14
I slip past the door to grab my shoes and slide into the cab of the truck. I press my forehead hard against the steering wheel, digging the plastic into my skull, and remind myself very firmly that I am in this for the money. That Arthur Starling and his mysteries and his stupid-ass eyes—however ardent, however ravenous—are not on my list. That today is Friday and Elizabeth Baine will be expecting a reply.
I pull out my phone and open her last email. Sorry, tried my best! I type back. No luck. I add an insincere frowny face and—before I can think twice, or even once—I hit send.
There’s no response that night. For a little while, I can pretend there won’t be one at all.
FOURTEEN
I’ve dodged enough consequences to know when there’s one coming. I feel it as a weight in the air, a thundercloud massing above me, raising the small hairs on my arms.
I spend the weekend waiting for the lightning to strike, checking my phone too often and sniping at Jasper over nothing. I try to make it up to him by driving him to Bowling Green to see a movie, but he’s fidgety and distracted the whole time, and when the credits come up he “doesn’t feel like” sneaking into the new slasher movie playing on the next screen over, even though the poster is scary enough that I see a mom shielding her kid’s eyes as they pass.
He makes me wait, blinking and sweating outside the Greenwood Mall, while he films some ants swarming over a half-eaten apple.
“How’s the video coming? The new one, I mean,” I ask.
“Is that really what you want to talk about?” His tone is perfectly neutral.
“Look, I don’t know what’s up with you, but—”
“Finished it last week.” He passes his phone over, casually, as if he hasn’t shown me all his other projects just as soon as he finishes them.
I step into the shade and hit play.
A young Black girl standing in the middle of the road, her back turned. The camera circles, bringing her face into view: eyes tightly closed, mouth seamed shut. I recognize her from Ashley Caldwell’s Facebook posts—one of their foster kids, kept for a while and returned, like wrong-sized clothing. The camera gets closer and closer, until the girl’s face fills the screen, her face tight as a fist.
Then she opens her mouth. I can tell she’s screaming, hard and long, but no sound comes out. Instead, a stream of white smoke pours out of her mouth. It rises and thickens, obscuring her features, swallowing the frame until there’s nothing but swirling white.
I wait, staring, nerves singing. Just when I’ve decided the video must have glitched, something moves in the mist.
An animal. A long jawbone, opening wide. A snap of teeth, and the screen goes dark.
I exhale for a long time. “Fuck, dude.”
Jasper smiles for the first time all weekend, shy and pleased. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I mean, how did you even—those effects were unreal.”
The smile turns young and eager, the way it only does when he talks about film. “First I tried renting a fog machine, but it looked like ass. Dry ice was better, but in the end I just had to wait for actual mist. Making it come out of Joy’s mouth like that was basically just trial and error—”
“No, I meant the thing at the end.”
Jasper’s smile fades. “What thing at the end?”
“The…” I don’t know what to call it. I thought it was an animal, but the shape doesn’t make sense in my memory. The neck was long and doe-like, but there were so many teeth, and the eyes were so far apart.
“Were you even paying attention?” Jasper takes the phone out of my hands, shoulders slouched again. “Christ, it was only like a minute and a half long.”
“Yes I was—”
But he’s already striding back to the truck.
We drive back in silence. I break it only once, to ask if we should stop for pizza rolls in Drakesboro. He shrugs with the perfect, insolent nihilism of teenagerhood, and I very seriously consider dumping the last of my Sprite down his shirt.
Later that night, Jasper makes a vending machine run and leaves his phone lying on the bedside table. I snatch it, tapping through folders until I find a file named “scream_FINAL_ACTUAL FINAL DRAFT.mov.” I watch it on a loop, endlessly repeating. I don’t see the animal again.
* * *
On Monday I approach Starling House more warily than I have in a while. I hold my breath when I knock, braced for some sort of excruciating scene of confession or accusation, but Arthur merely opens the door, gives me an unusually arctic “Good morning,” and turns around without once meeting my eyes. I exhale at his back, unsure whether I’m relieved or annoyed.
I listen for his steps all day, hoping for a chance to stash his keys back in his desk drawer, but he remains locked in the attic like the mad wife in a Gothic novel. I don’t see him again until evening, when he withdraws an envelope from his back pocket and hesitates. He rubs his thumb along the edge and says, abruptly, “I’m sorry. If I frightened you.”
It should have frightened me—smashing windows is classically beastly behavior, of the kind that only men are allowed to indulge in—but all I felt at the time was an aching, echoing sadness, like grief. I had worried later whether he washed the dirt out of his cuts properly, which strikes me now as a pretty bad sign for Team I’m Just In It for the Money.
Today his left hand is a wad of gauze tied several inches up his wrist in a clumsy knot. I clear my throat. “I’m pretty good at that stuff, if you want help changing the bandages.”
Arthur looks down at his own hand, then at mine, and visibly shudders. “No. God.” Then, as if he’d prepared a script and refuses to be derailed from it, he says stiffly, “If you would like to end our arrangement, I understand. It’s not like there’s much left to clean, is there.” Apparently his question marks are still lost at sea, all souls feared lost.
I search his face for regret or hope, not knowing which I’d rather see, but he’s doing his best gargoyle impression, his eyes fixed stonily on the wallpaper. “Guess not,” I say, and he nods twice, very quickly, in the manner of a man who has received a poor diagnosis at the doctor’s office and refuses to have a single public emotion about it. He reaches the envelope at me, blindly, and it slips from his fingers to the floor.
Both of us stare at it for a charged moment before I pick it up and fold it carefully into my pocket. “But there’s the window trim to paint.” My voice is profoundly bland. “And I was planning to rent a power washer for the front steps. They’re pretty gross, honestly.” The overhead light gives a defensive flicker.
His eyes meet mine for the first time all day, a brief, striking look that reminds me for no reason at all of the scrape of a match against stone. He nods a third time. “Well. The vines need trimming. While you’re at it.”
I am tempted to ask him exactly what the hell his deal is. Why my picture is hanging in his room and why there’s the tiniest, invisible hook of a smile on his lips right now and why he wastes his life locked up in this big, mad, beautiful house, so ferociously alone.
But what if he answered? What if, God forbid, he trusted me enough to tell me truth, and gave me some secret that would make the Innovative Solutions Consulting Group wet its collective pants? And what if—even worse—I was stupid enough to keep his secrets?
So I shrug, doing my best impression of Jasper, and leave him standing in the half-light with a tiny indentation in his left cheek which might, or might not, be a dimple.
* * *
I’m halfway down the county road that evening when the consequence finally catches up with me. It’s standing a couple of feet past the painted white line, where the asphalt sags into dandelions and gravel, with its thumb pointed at the sky.
I hit the brakes so hard I smell rubber. “Jasper? What the hell are you doing here?”
He yanks open the passenger door and slides onto the seat with his backpack cradled in his lap and his hair standing in frazzled curls. He slams the door in a way that tells me he’s progressed from sullen to pissed sometime in the last eight hours. “I might ask you the same thing, except you’d just bullshit me so I don’t know why I’d bother.”
A lot of good lies are wasted because people go belly-up at the first sign of trouble. I hold one hand up in a peacemaking gesture, speaking in the voice I learned from the high school guidance counselor. “Okay, I can see you’re upset.” (“Upset!”) “I don’t know what’s happened, but I—”
Jasper thumps the dashboard. “Let me tell you what happened, then. Today in fifth period I got called to the principal’s office.” This would not have been noteworthy for me, who spent at least thirty percent of my brief academic career in the principal’s office, but the only time Jasper’s ever been in trouble was when Mrs. Fulton accused him of cheating because he got a perfect score on her stupid math quiz. “But when I got there Mr. Jackson wasn’t behind his desk. Instead it was this uptight corporate bitch”—a rushing sound fills my skull, along with the syrupy smell of fake apples—“who told me she was worried about you, and hoped I could, and I’m quoting here, ‘remind you of your obligations.’ What kind of mafia bullshit is that? Since when do schools let strange adults talk to students alone? She locked the door, for fuck’s sake. And she had—she said she liked my videos.” His outrage wobbles, tilting toward simple fear. “I haven’t even posted that last one yet.”
I put the truck in gear and pull back onto the road. I should be inventing some comforting cover story, but there are exactly two thoughts in my brain, swelling like tumors: first, that Jasper swears with significantly more familiarity than I’d previously suspected, and second, that I am going to dismember Elizabeth Baine and leave her remains for the fucking crows.
“What did you say to her?”
I’m not looking at him, but I can feel the seismic roll of his eyes. “I said yes, ma’am, thank you and booked it as soon as the bell rang. I’m not stupid.”
“Good boy.” It occurs to me that he didn’t run to, say, Tractor Supply Company. “And did she tell you where to find me? Where I’m working?”
His second eye roll would probably register on the Richter scale. “Did you really think I didn’t know? One of those candlesticks had an S stamped on it, for the love of God. And you’re always texting people who aren’t me—why is there someone named Heathcliff in your contacts?—and you have like zero friends. So I called Tractor Supply a month ago and Lacey told me you hadn’t worked there since February. She says she’s praying for you, by the way.”
“Wow, okay. Wow.”
“Anyway I thought it was really dumb, but like, you seemed happy and at least you weren’t getting groped by Lance Wilson anymore.”
“Hey, how did you know—it was a mutual groping, for the record.”
“A good summary of every relationship you’ve ever had.”
I feel dimly that the ref should blow a whistle and call foul on that one, because it’s not so much a comeback as a disembowelment. I’m left scooping my guts off the floor, spluttering. “As if you have any idea—you don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“I am literally begging you not enlighten me. Jesus, Opal.” Jasper sags back against the seat with a middle-aged sigh, infinitely wearied. A half mile passes in near silence, except for the rattle of the engine and the wet whine of spring peepers through the window. “I kept waiting for you to tell me what was up.” Jasper says it to the roof, his neck draped over the headrest. “The night we got pizza. The day at the movies. I thought you were psyching yourself up for it, but you never did. Instead I had to hear it from a stranger in an ugly-ass pantsuit.”
It’s a cool evening, and the fog is already rising off the river in pale tongues, licking over the land. It looks strangely solid in the glow of the headlights, as if I’m driving among the slick white flanks of animals. “Look, Jasper.” I wet my lips, dredging every ounce of sincerity out of my insincere soul. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
I chance a glance at him at the next stop sign. He’s still staring meditatively at the roof. “Are you? Or are you just sorry you got caught?” I don’t answer. He sighs again, far longer than seems physically possible. “That house is bad news. You know that, right?”
“It’s just talk.” I do a gentle, condescending snort, like a skeptic making fun of a fortune teller. “I’ve been working there for months and the worst thing I’ve ever seen is Arthur Starling in a towel.”
I’d opened a door I was positive had been a closet the day before and found Arthur toweling his hair in a second-floor bathroom. He’d made a sound like a wounded car horn, a sort of strangled bleat, and I’d slammed the door so fast I stubbed my own toes. I’d spent the rest of the afternoon blinking away the bright purple afterimages of his tattoos: crossed spears and spirals, a snake bent in a figure eight, a sharp-faced Medusa grinning between two birds.
Jasper’s eyebrows are in danger of disappearing into his hairline. With the air of a person stepping carefully over something unmentionably gross, he says, “And what if it’s not just talk? You know Mrs. Gutiérrez, at Las Palmas? She told me her brother-in-law was driving past the gates one night and he saw that guy in the driveway. Swinging a sword around, at nothing. Looked right at him as he passed. And that same night, her brother-in-law has a heart attack.”20
I offer no comment, trying very hard not to think of the scars on Arthur’s knuckles, the sword hanging in his bedroom.
“And that house is just—not right.” A strange expression crosses his face then, rigid and inward-facing. I’ve sat through over a hundred horror movies with him, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him afraid.
“Look, it’s nothing, okay? I should have told you, but I didn’t want you to worry.”
“Opal…” A considerable pause, then: “I’m not your son.”
“First of all, ew—”
“And I’m not your job. Do you get that?”
“Yeah. Yes, I do.” I’m not lying, but I can’t seem to tell him the truth. How do you tell a sixteen-year-old that he was the only reason you got out of bed for weeks and weeks after the crash? That the whole world was sour and ashen except for him, so you committed every kind of forgery and falsification to make sure they could never take him away from you? That he is the only thing on the only list that will ever matter?
We’re on Cemetery Road now, climbing the hill past the Dollar General and the funeral home. “It’s just that you deserve a whole lot more than all this.” I gesture out the window at Eden. At the flickering neon of the drugstore and the fog-choked sidewalks, empty except for mean bursts of thistles and the amber halos of streetlights. “You’re so smart, and your grades are so good—”
“Why do you think that is?” Jasper straightens, staring at the side of my face with a strange, coaxing urgency. “Why do you think I work twice as hard as anybody else in class?”
“Because you want out of here. I know. I’m working on it, just give me a little more—”
Jasper shakes his head and thumps his back against the seat. His mouth is a furious slash in the rearview mirror. “You know what? I’m staying at Logan’s tonight, stop here.”
“Jasper, hey, come on—” But he’s already fumbling for the latch. He stumbles onto the curb while the truck is still moving and gives the door a one-handed slap. He turns back once. “Oh, that lady gave me a message for you.” He says it with the profound disgust of someone who is too old for secret messages and codes and can’t quite believe he’s being forced to participate. “The message is: ten, ten, ninety-three.”
He leaves, hands jammed hard in his pockets, backpack slung over one shoulder.
I idle on the side of the road for so long that the cab fills with greasy fumes and the sky turns to star-flecked soot. I wonder how Elizabeth Baine found out, and if Jasper recognized the numbers, or if even he has forgotten my real birth date. I wonder if the state would let me appeal his guardianship now that I’m a legal adult, or whether they’d whisk Jasper away from me with bonus misdemeanors for forgery and identity theft.
These thoughts are idle, distant things, because I already know what I’m going to do. I’ve known since the second Baine said my brother’s name in the back of her car, weeks ago. Everything since then has been playing pretend, dreaming about an old house and a grand mystery and a boy with secrets and scars. People like me should know better than to dream.
Sometime before midnight I pull away from the curb and make a wide U-turn in the empty street. I drive back to Starling House with Arthur’s keys pressing against my hip like cold fingers.
* * *
During the day the House could be mistaken for a mere building; at night, it never could. It has the obscure topography of a dream or a body, with endless, sinuous hallways and stairs that climb at unnatural angles. The walls heave in and out, a vast rib cage, and Arthur suspects if he were to press his ear to the plaster he would hear the subtle beating of a heart somewhere beneath all the oak and pine and plaster.
Most nights Arthur finds it soothing—it’s nice to imagine that he doesn’t stand alone against the Beasts, even if his only ally is a foolish old house with ambitions of sentience—but tonight the House is restless. Every nail turns fretfully in its hole and the roof tiles clack like chattering teeth. A drainpipe bangs against the wall in the anxious rhythm of a woman drumming her nails on the table. Arthur soothes it as best he can, renewing wards and double-checking charms, but the weather is mild and the doors are locked. He lies awake for a long time, listening, and falls asleep only when Baast curls on his chest.
When he wakes, Baast is standing over him with her back arched and her tail rigid. Arthur’s skin is prickling, as if a chill draft has blown through, and he is suddenly aware that the front gates have been opened. So has the front door. He looks out his round window long enough to see the ghostly creep of fog along the ground, and then he’s running barefoot down the steps with the sword aching in his bandaged hand.
