Starling House, page 2
There it is: a single high window glowing gold through the dusk, like a lighthouse that wandered too far from the coast.
Except lighthouses are supposed to warn you away, rather than draw you closer. I hop the gully at the side of the road and run my hand along the wall until the brick gives way to cold iron.
The gates of Starling House don’t look like much from a distance—just a dense tangle of metal half-eaten by rust and ivy, held shut by a padlock so large it almost feels rude—but up close you can make out individual shapes: clawed feet and legs with too many joints, scaled backs and mouths full of teeth, heads with empty holes for eyes. I’ve heard people call them devils or, more damningly, modern art, but they remind me of the Beasts in The Underland, which is a nice way of saying they’re unsettling as all hell.
I can still see the shine of the window through the gate. I step closer, weaving my fingers between the open jaws and curling tails, staring up at that light and wishing, childishly, that it was shining for me. Like a porch light left on to welcome me home after a long day.
I have no home, no porch light. But I have what I need, and it’s enough.
It’s just that, sometimes, God help me, I want more.
I’m so close to the gate now that my breath pearls against the cold metal. I know I should let go—the dark is deepening and Jasper needs dinner and my feet are numb with cold—but I keep standing, staring, haunted by a hunger I can’t even properly name.
It occurs to me that I was right: dreams are just like stray cats. If you don’t feed them they get lean and clever and sharp-clawed, and come for the jugular when you least expect it.
I don’t realize how tight I’m gripping the gate until I feel the bite of iron and the wet heat of blood. I’m swearing and wadding the sleeve of my hoodie against the gash, wondering how much the health clinic charges for tetanus shots and why the air smells suddenly rich and sweet—when I realize two things simultaneously.
First, that the light in the window has gone out.
And second, that there is someone standing on the other side of the gates of Starling House.
* * *
There are never any guests at Starling House. There are no private parties or visiting relatives, no HVAC repair vans or delivery trucks. Sometimes in a fit of hormonal frustration a pack of high schoolers will talk about climbing the wall and sneaking up to the house itself, but then the mist rises or the wind blows sideways and the dare is never quite made. Groceries are piled outside the gate once a week, the milk sweating through brown paper sacks, and every now and then a sleek black car parks across the road and idles for an hour or two without anyone getting in or out. I doubt whether any outsider has set foot on Starling land in the last decade.
Which means there’s exactly one person who could be standing on the other side of the gate.
The latest Starling lives entirely alone, a Boo Radley–ish creature who was damned first by his pretentious name (Alistair or Alfred, no one can ever agree which), second by his haircut (unkempt enough to imply unfortunate politics, when last seen), and third by the dark rumor that his parents died strangely, and strangely young.4
But the heir to Starling House doesn’t look like a rich recluse or a murderer; he looks like an underfed crow wearing a button-up that doesn’t quite fit, his shoulders hunched against the seams. His face is all hard angles and sullen bones split by a beak of a nose, and his hair is a tattered wing an inch shy of becoming a mullet. His eyes are clawing into mine.
I become aware that I’m staring back at him from a feral crouch, like a possum caught raiding the motel dumpsters. I wasn’t doing anything illegal, but I don’t have a fantastic explanation for why I’m standing at the end of his driveway just after dusk, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance he actually is a murderer, so I do what Mom did whenever she got herself in a tight spot, which was every day: I smile.
“Oh, I didn’t see you there!” I clutch my chest and give a girly little laugh. “I was just passing by and thought I’d take a closer look at these gates. They’re so fancy. Anyway, I didn’t mean to bother you, so I’ll head on my way.”
The heir to Starling House doesn’t smile back. He doesn’t look like he’s ever smiled at anything, actually, or ever will, as if he were carved from bitter stone rather than born in the usual way. His eyes move to my left hand, where the blood has soaked through the wadded sleeve to drip dramatically from my fingertips. “Oh, shit.” I make an abortive effort to shove the hand into my pocket, which hurts. “I mean, that’s nothing. I tripped earlier, see, and—”
He moves so quickly I barely have time to gasp. His hand darts through the gate and catches mine, and I know I should snatch it back—when you grow up on your own from the age of fifteen you learn not to let strange men grab ahold of any part of you—but there’s an enormous padlock between us and his skin is so warm and mine is so damn cold. He turns my hand palm up in his and I hear a low hiss of breath.
I lift one shoulder. “It’s fine.” It’s not fine: my hand is gummy mess of red, the flesh gaping in a way that makes me think superglue and peroxide might be insufficient. “My brother will patch me up. He’s waiting for me, by the way, so I really should get going.”
He doesn’t let go. I don’t pull away. His thumb hovers over the jagged line of the cut, not-quite-touching it, and I realize abruptly that his fingers are trembling, shaking around mine. Maybe he’s one of those people who faint at the sight of blood, or maybe eccentric recluses aren’t accustomed to young women bleeding all over their front gates.
“It’s no big deal.” I don’t generally do sincerity, except for Jasper, but I feel a certain sympathy for him. Or it might be symmetry: he’s about my age, underdressed and shivering, hated by half the town. “I’m really fine.”
He looks up, and as I meet his eyes I know with sudden and terrible clarity that I was mistaken. His hands aren’t shaking with nerves or cold: they’re shaking with rage.
His skin is bloodless, stretched tight over the bleak bones of his face, and his lips are peeled away from his teeth in an animal snarl. His eyes are the starless black of caves.
I reel back as if shoved, my smile abandoned, my good hand fumbling for the motel key in my pocket. He might be taller but I’d bet money I fight dirtier.
But he doesn’t open the gate. He leans closer, forehead pressing hard against the iron, fingers wrapping whitely around the bars. My blood is slick and shining across his knuckles.
“Run,” he grates.
I run.
Hard and fast, with my left hand curled tight to my chest, still throbbing, but not quite as cold as it was before.
* * *
The heir to Starling House watches her run from him, and does not regret it.
He doesn’t regret the way she ripped her hand from his, or the way her eyes flashed at him before she ran, hard and flat as beaten nails. He especially does not regret the sudden departure of that bright, bold smile, which had never been real in the first place.
He wrestles with a brief, absurd urge to shout after her—wait, he might say, or maybe even come back—before he reminds himself that he doesn’t want her to come back at all. He wants her to run and keep running, as fast and far as she can. He wants her to pack her things and buy a Greyhound ticket at the Waffle House and ride out of Eden without looking back once.
She won’t do it, of course. The House wants her, and the House is stubborn. Already her blood has vanished from the gate as if an invisible tongue licked it clean.
He doesn’t know why it would want her, of all people: a freckled scarecrow of a girl with crooked teeth and holes in the knees of her jeans, entirely unremarkable except for the steel in her eyes. And perhaps for the way she stood her ground against him. He is a ghost, a rumor, a story whispered after the children have gone to bed, and she was cold and hurt, all alone in the rising dark—and yet she hadn’t run from him until he told her to. The House has always had a taste for the brave ones.
But Arthur Starling swore on his parents’ graves that he would be the last Warden of Starling House. He is many things—a coward, a fool, a terrible failure—but he is not a man to break his word. No one else will lie awake every night listening for the scrape of claws and the pant of breath. No one else will spend their lives fighting an invisible war, rewarded either with the silence of victory or the too-high cost of failure. No one else will bear the Starling sword after him.
Certainly not a scrawny girl with hard eyes and a liar’s smile.
Arthur unpeels his forehead from the gate and turns away, his shoulders hunched in a manner that would have made his mother narrow her eyes, if she still had eyes to narrow.
The walk back to the House takes longer than it ought to, the drive twisting and coiling more than it should, the ground rougher and the night darker. His legs are aching by the time he steps across the threshold of the House.
He pauses to rest a hand on the doorframe. Her blood cracks and flakes from his skin. “Leave her be,” he says softly. They haven’t addressed one another in civil terms for years, but for some reason he’s compelled to add a single, stiff “Please.”
The floorboards creak and wail. A petulant door slams down some distant hall.
Arthur slouches upstairs and falls into bed fully clothed but still shivering, half expecting a pipe to spring a spiteful leak above his pillow, or a loose shutter to slap arrhythmically against a sill.
Instead, there are only the dreams. Always, the damn dreams.
He is five, and the House is whole and hale. There are no cracks in the plaster, no broken balusters or dripping faucets. To Arthur, it is not a house so much as a country, an endless map made up of secret rooms and creaking stairs, leaf-shadowed floorboards and sun-faded armchairs. Every day he goes exploring, fortified by the peanut-butter-and-jellies his father packs him, and every night the starlings sing him to sleep. He does not even know how lonely he is.
He is eight, and his mother is shaping his fingers around the hilt, straightening his thin wrists when they want to bend. You love our home, don’t you? Her face is grave and tired. She was always tired. You have to fight for what you love.
Arthur wakes then, sweating, and does not sleep again. He stares out the round window of his attic room, watching the silver sway of the trees, thinking of his mother, of all the Wardens before her—of the girl.
His last, hopeful thought before dawn is that there was a cleverness to her, a canniness, and surely only the very worst of fools would ever return to Starling House.
THREE
I will never, ever—no matter how lonesome or tired I get, no matter how pretty the light looks through the trees—return to Starling House. His voice chases me all the way back to the motel, echoing in my ears like a second pulse: run, run, run.
It fades only when I step into the soft lamplight of room 12, panting and shaking, my shoes splattering slush across the carpet.
Jasper greets me without taking off his headphones, his attention on the grayscale frames of whatever video he’s been editing. “You took forever so I went ahead and ate the last picante chicken ramen. If you snooze you lo—” He glances up. He slides the headphones around his neck, smug expression falling off his face. “What happened to you?”
I lean against the door, hoping I look nonchalant rather than very close to passing out. “Did you really think I would leave the last picante chicken in plain sight? I have my own supply.”
“Opal—”
“I’ll never tell you where. Death first.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing! I just jogged home.”
“You … jogged … home.” He stretches the word “jogged” into three skeptical syllables. I shrug. He gives me a long, pursed-lip stare, then looks pointedly at the floor beside me. “And I guess that’s ketchup you’re dripping all over the carpet?”
“Nah.” I shove my treacherous left hand in my hoodie pocket and dive for the bathroom. “Sriracha.”
Jasper thumps and hollers and issues vague threats against my person, but I turn on the overhead fan and the shower until he gives up. I sag onto the toilet seat and let the shakes move from my legs to my shoulders to my fingertips. I should probably feel panicky or pissed or at least confused, but all I can summon is the dull, aggrieved sense of having been fucked with and not liking it much.
The effort of actually undressing and getting into the shower overwhelms me, so I skin out of my hoodie and hold my hand under the spray until the water runs mostly clear down the drain. It isn’t as deep as I’d thought, actually: just a ragged line slicing ominously across my life and love lines. (I don’t go in for palmistry, but Mom ate all that shit with a spoon. She couldn’t remember court dates or parent-teacher meetings, but she knew our star charts by heart.)
I dump half a bottle of peroxide over the cut and fish around for a Band-Aid that could conceivably cover it. I wind up tearing strips off an old sheet and wrapping them around my hand, like I did the year Jasper went as a mummy for Halloween.
By the time I open the door the room is dark, the walls tiger-striped by the shine of parking lot lights through the blinds. Jasper is in bed but not actually asleep—his asthma makes him snore—but I creep into my twin as if he were.
I lie listening to him listening to me, trying not to notice the throb of my own pulse in my hand or remember the black of those eyes boring into mine.
“Are you okay?” Jasper’s voice has a wobble to it that makes me want to crawl into his bed and sleep spine-to-spine, the way we used to back when there were still three of us and only two beds. And later, after the dreams started.
I shrug at the ceiling instead. “I’m always okay.”
The polyester sighs as he rolls to face the wall. “You’re a pretty good liar”—I’m a fantastic liar—“but that’s for everybody else. Not family.”
The innocence of it makes me want to laugh, or maybe cry. The biggest lies are always for the ones you love the most. I’ll take care of you. It’ll be fine. Everything’s okay.
I swallow hard. “Everything’s okay.” His disbelief is palpable, a chill emanating from the other side of the room. “Anyway, it’s over.” I don’t know if he believes it, but I do.
Until the dream.
It isn’t like the others. The others had a soft, sepia light to them, like old home movies or fond memories you’ve half forgotten. This one is like diving into cold water on a hot day, crossing from one world to another.
I’m back at the gates of Starling House, but this time the padlock falls open and the gates swing wide before me. I walk down the dark throat of the drive, thorns tugging at my sleeves, trees tangling their fingers in my hair. Starling House emerges from the dark like a vast animal from its den: a gabled spine, wings of pale stone, a tower with a single amber eye. Steep steps curl like a tail around its feet.
The front door is unlocked, too. I sweep across the threshold into a maze of mirrors and windows, halls that branch and split and switchback, staircases that end in empty walls or closed doors. I walk faster and faster, shoving through each door and rushing to the next as if there is something I want desperately to find.
The air grows colder and wetter as I go deeper. A pale mist seeps up from the floorboards, coiling around my ankles. At some point, I realize I am running.
I stumble through a trapdoor, down the stone stairs, down and down. Roots crawl like veins across the floor, and I have the confused thought that they must belong to the house itself, as if dead lumber and nails could come alive given enough time.
I shouldn’t be able to see anything in the darkness, but I see the stairs end abruptly in a door. A crude stone door crisscrossed with silver chains. Another padlock dangles from the chains. The lock is open. The door is cracked.
Cold fog pours through the gap and I know with the strange fatalism of dreams that I am too late, that something terrible has already happened.
I reach for the door, choked with a grief I don’t understand, shouting a name I don’t know—
And then I’m awake, and my mouth tastes like tears. I must have clenched my fists in my sleep, because blood has soaked through the bandaging and pooled around my left hand.
It’s still dark, but I pull on yesterday’s jeans—the cuffs still wet with slush, the pockets full of stolen cash—and slip outside with a spare sleeping bag draped over my shoulders. I sit with my back against the concrete block and let the hellcat climb into my lap, alternately purring and growling, while I wait for the sun to rise and the dream to fade like the others.
Except it doesn’t. It lingers like a bad cold, settling deep in my chest. All that day I feel the press of invisible walls against my shoulders, the weight of rafters overhead. The scattered leaves make wallpaper patterns against the pavement, and the scuffed linoleum of Tractor Supply seems to creak beneath my feet, like old wood.
That night I stay up too late reading a Regency romance by the parking lot lights, trying to drive the house out of my head, or at least get rid of that aching, senseless grief. But the dream takes me as soon as I close my eyes, pulling me through the same tangled halls and twisting stairs, ending with the same unlocked door.
* * *
Six and a half days after I ran away from it, I return to Starling House.
Look: I didn’t plan on it. I was going to walk the extra half mile to and from work for the rest of my natural life specifically so that I never had to come within a hundred yards of Starling land again. I was going to bum rides from Lacey, or maybe steal a bike. I’m no coward, but Jasper’s made me watch enough horror movies to recognize a red flag when it holds my hand and tells me to run.
But after six nights of wrecked sleep—followed by six and a half days of dodging worried looks from Jasper and taking the long way to work, of mistaking the bathroom mirrors for rows of windows and looking over my shoulder for doorways that don’t exist—I fold. I’m tired, and I’m moderately freaked out, and I’m running out of old sheets to rip up into bandages because the cut on my hand won’t seem to close.
