Starling House, page 3
So here I am, using my Monday lunch break to glare at the gates of Starling House.
The gates glare back at me, the beastly shapes nothing but iron by the cold light of day. I run my tongue over my lips, half scared and half something else. “Open sesame. Or whatever.”
Nothing happens, because of course nothing happens, because I’m not in one of my silly childhood stories and there’s no such thing as magic words or haunted houses, and even if there were they wouldn’t have anything to do with someone like me.
I look down at my left hand, fresh-wrapped this morning, then up and down the road, the way a person does when they’re about to do something ridiculous and don’t want to be seen.
A pickup chugs past me. I give it a cheery, nothing-to-see-here wave and catch a pair of averted eyes in the rearview mirror. This town is good at looking away.
The truck disappears around the bend and I unwind the white cotton bandaging—the cut is still exactly as wide and tattered as it was six days before, still oozing watery blood—and press my palm to the front gates. I feel a thrill of recognition, like when you spot a face you know in a crowded room, and the gates swing open.
My heart does a double-thud. “Okay.” I’m not sure if I’m talking to myself or the gates. “Okay. Sure.”
It’s probably just motion sensors or cameras or rigged pulleys or some other totally rational explanation. But it doesn’t feel totally rational. It feels like the beginning of a mystery novel, when you’re screaming at the plucky protagonist to run but sort of hoping she doesn’t, because you want the story to start.
I take a little breath and step through the gates onto Starling land.
The driveway doesn’t look like it’s ever been paved, or even graveled. It’s just a pair of tire ruts dug into red clay, divided by a scraggled line of dead grass. Pools of rainwater gather in the low places, reflecting the winter-white sky like the scattered shards of a broken mirror. Trees crowd close overhead, as if they’re trying to catch glimpses of themselves. Birds’ eyes glitter at me from the woods, black and wet.
In my dreams the drive is dark and twisting, but in reality I turn a single curve and there it is.5
Starling House.
The windows are filmy eyes above rotten sills. Empty nests sag from the eaves. The foundation is cracked and slanted, as if the entire thing is sliding into the open mouth of the earth. The stone walls are covered with the bare, twisting tendons of some creeping vine—honeysuckle, I figure, which is only ever a show tune away from gaining sentience and demanding to be fed. The only sign that anyone lives inside is the slow bleed of woodsmoke from a leaning chimney.
The rational half of my brain recognizes that this place is a wreck and an eyesore that should be condemned by the health department and shoved into the nearest sinkhole; the less rational part of me thinks about every haunted house movie I’ve ever seen, every pulpy book cover with a hot white woman running away from a silhouetted mansion.
An even less rational part of me is curious.
I don’t know why—maybe the shape of it reminds me of an E. Starling illustration, all strange angles and deep shadows, like a poorly kept secret. Maybe I just have a soft spot for the neglected and abandoned.
The front steps are slick with matted black leaves. The door is an imperious arch that might once have been red or brown but is now the nothing-color of afternoon rain. The surface is scarred and stained; it’s only up close that I see there are tiny shapes carved roughly into the wood. Hundreds of them—horseshoes and crooked crosses and open eyes, spirals and circles and malformed hands that run in long rows like hieroglyphs, or lines of code. Some of them I almost recognize from Mom’s tarot decks and astrology charts, but most of them are unfamiliar, like letters from an alphabet I don’t know. There’s a derangement to them, a desperation that tells me I should leave before I wind up ritually beheaded or sacrificed on a stone altar in the basement.
I step closer instead.
I lift my hand and knock three times at the door to Starling House. I give him a couple of minutes—I figure it’ll take a second to finish up his brooding or lurking or whatever it is he does in there—before knocking again. I shuffle through the dead leaves, wondering if he’s gone out for a drive, and then if he even has a license. I try and fail to picture him practicing his parallel parking with Mr. Cole in the passenger seat.
I’m about to knock a third time when the door whips open in a rush of heat, and there he is.
The heir to Starling House is even uglier by daylight: his brows flat and heavy over a twisted nose, his eyes like a pair of mine shafts burrowed into a chalk cliff. The eyes widen.
I wait for him to say something normal, like Hello? or Can I help you?, but he merely stares down at me in mute horror, like a human gargoyle.
I go for a breezy smile. “Morning! Or afternoon, I guess. We met the other night, but I thought I’d come introduce myself properly. My name’s Opal.”
He blinks several times at my outstretched hand. He crosses his arms without shaking it. “I believe,” he grates, “I advised you to run.”
I smile a little harder. “I did.”
“I thought ‘and never come back’ was implied.”
His voice is so dry, so thoroughly harassed, that my smile goes briefly crooked. I iron it straight. “Well, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m here because”—your goddamn house is haunting me—“because I’m taking an architecture class online, and I was hoping to take some pictures for my project?” I don’t even know if the community college offers online classes in architecture, but I figure it’s a good excuse to go poking around, driving the dream-house out of my head and replacing it with the dull facts of dirty wallpaper and creaking stairs.
“You want to take … pictures. For your”—his scowl deepens by several degrees—“architecture class.”
“Yep. Can we talk inside?”
“No.”
I give the slightly theatrical shiver that generally compels men to drape their sweaters around my shoulders. “It’s pretty chilly out here.” It’s freezing, actually, one of those mean February days when the sun never quite rises and the wind has white teeth.
“Then,” he says, biting into each word, “you should have worn a coat.”
It’s an effort to keep my voice sweet and stupid. “Look, I just need a couple of pictures. Please?” I gesture at the house, the hall vanishing into cobwebs and shadows behind the line of his shoulders. His eyes follow the arc of my hand and linger on the fresh gleam of blood. I tuck it beneath my apron.
His gaze returns to my face. “No,” he says again, but this time his tone is almost apologetic.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” I threaten. “And the day after, and the day after that, until you let me in.”
The heir to Starling House gives me another long, ugly stare, as if he thinks I’ll go scampering back down the drive if he’s sufficiently unpleasant, as if eight years of retail hasn’t given me a spine of sugar and steel.
I count slowly to ten. A loose shutter slaps above us.
He appears to struggle with himself, lips twisting before he says carefully, “It wouldn’t … help.” I wonder if he somehow knows about the dreams, about the way I wake in the night with tears sliding down my temples and someone else’s name on my lips. I wonder if this has happened before, to other people.
The hair on my arms stands up. I keep my voice very reasonable. “What would help?”
“I don’t know.” From the sour shape of his mouth I get the impression he dislikes not knowing things. “Perhaps if you gave it time…”
I check my phone, a lock of hair sliding out from under my hood. “Well, I have to be back in twenty minutes and I have a double shift tomorrow.”
He blinks at me as if he’s not sure what a shift is or why one would double it. Then his eyes move somewhere to the left of mine and land on that wayward curl of hair.
The rims of his nostrils go white. Suddenly he’s made of still water instead of stone, and I can see a series of emotions rippling across his surface: terrible suspicion, shock, grief, abyssal guilt.
I have the feeling he’s about to scream or hiss or tear his hair in a fit of madness, and I don’t know whether to run toward him or away—but he merely swallows hard and closes his eyes.
When he opens them his face is perfectly opaque once more. “Or perhaps, Miss…?”
Mom picked her last name according to her mood (Jewell Star, Jewell Calamity, Jewell Lucky). I generally stick with unremarkable Scots-Irish names (McCoy, Boyd, Campbell), to match my hair, but for some reason I say, “Just Opal.”
He doesn’t seem to like that much. His mouth ripples, reaches a compromise: “Miss Opal.” He pauses here for a very long sigh, as if me and my Tractor Supply apron are a burden of unfathomable proportions. “Perhaps I could offer you a job.”
FOUR
Arthur regrets the words as soon as they leave his lips. He bites down on his tongue, very hard, to prevent himself from saying anything worse.
“A job?” The girl’s—Opal’s—voice is bright, but her eyes on him are cold silver. “Doing what?”
“Ah.” Arthur considers and rejects several terrible ideas before saying, coolly, “… Housekeeping.” He wonders briefly about the etymology of the word— has there ever been a house that required such rigorous keeping as this one?—and shivers. “Cleaning, I mean.” He makes a disdainful gesture at the floor, nearly invisible beneath geological layers of grit and dust.
The filth doesn’t particularly bother him— it’s one of his many weapons in the long and petty war between himself and the House—but removing it might serve several purposes: the House might be soothed by the attention, lulled by the false promise of a more satisfactory Warden;
the girl might be driven away by the drudgery; and he might pay some small part of the hideous debt he has incurred against her.
Arthur hadn’t recognized her the night before, with her hair tucked under the hood of her sweatshirt, but now he remembers that hair straggling down her neck, clinging to her pale cheeks, soaking the front of his shirt. He couldn’t tell the color of it until the first ambulance rounded the corner. In the sudden glare of the headlights her hair became a bed of coals in his arms, or a field of poppies blooming out of season.
It occurs to him that her presence on his doorstep this morning might be part of some long and involved revenge plot, that inviting her into his home might have been a grave miscalculation, but her expression is still cool, mistrustful. “That’s nice,” she says carefully, “but I already have a job?”
Arthur flicks his fingers at her. “I’ll pay you, of course.”
A cold flash in her eyes, like light on a fresh-minted dime. “How much?”
“However much you want.” The Starling fortune has diminished substantially over the years, but Arthur won’t need it for much longer, and the debt he owes her has no dollar value. She would be within her rights if she asked him to leap into the Mud River with stones in his pockets, whether she knows it or not.
Opal says a number and tilts her chin up in some obscure challenge. “That’s per week.”
“Fine.”
He expects another smile, maybe even a real one—judging by the state of her shoes and the sharp bones of her wrists she could use the money—but she takes an almost-imperceptible step away from him instead. Her voice goes low and edged in a way that makes him wish she’d taken several more steps back. “Is this a joke?”
“No?”
Opal doesn’t seem relieved. Her eyes roam across his face as if looking for the lie. “Just cleaning. Nothing else.”
Arthur feels like an actor whose partner has departed from the script. “Well, it might need some extra work here and there. The House has been somewhat neglected.” The wind whistles forlornly through a missing windowpane. He grinds his heel into the floor. The wind dies.
She wants to say yes. He can see it in the tilt of her body and the hunger in her face, but she says very clearly, “I mean nothing else.” He stares. She licks her lower lip. “Nothing for you.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”
She looks away from him, squinting instead into the empty space above his left ear. “See, when a rich man offers a young woman a lot of money out of the blue, and doesn’t ask for her housekeeping résumé—I’ve been cleaning rooms at the motel for years, not that you care—that young woman might have cause to wonder if he expects her to do more than clean. If maybe he has a weird thing for redheads.” She tucks her hair self-consciously back under her hood. “If, in fact, he expects her to f—”
“Oh God, no.” Arthur wishes very much that his voice hadn’t cracked on the last syllable. “This isn’t—I’m not—” He closes his eyes in brief, mortal humiliation.
When he opens them Opal is smiling. He thinks it’s probably the only genuine smile he’s seen from her: a sly twist of her lips, wry and sharp. “Then sure. I accept.” A wave of warmth rolls down the hall and sighs out the door, smelling of woodsmoke and wisteria. Her smile widens, revealing three crooked teeth. “When do I start?”
Arthur exhales. “Tomorrow. If you like.”
“You got cleaning supplies?”
“Yes.” He’s pretty sure there are some bluish spray bottles beneath a sink somewhere, and a mop in the third-floor bathtub, although he’s never used either. He isn’t sure his parents did either; the House simply had a shine to it, back then.
“What are my hours?”
“You may arrive any time after dawn and leave before sunset.”
Wariness slides like a fox across her face, there and gone again. “What a super normal way of putting it. See you tomorrow, then.”
She’s turning away when he says, “Wait.”
Arthur draws a jangling metal ring from his pocket. There are three keys on the ring, although there should be four, each fashioned with long black teeth and a stylized, snakelike S. He removes a single key and extends his hand to Opal. She flinches, and he thinks sourly that she is much more frightened by him than she’s pretending to be, and much less than she should be.
He dangles the key. “For the front gate. Don’t lose it.”
She takes it from him without touching his skin; he wonders if her hands are still cold, and why she can’t be bothered to wear a proper coat.
Opal runs her thumb over the shaft of the key with the corner of her mouth hooked in an expression slightly too sad to be a smile. “Just like the book, huh?”
Arthur feels himself stiffen. “No.”
He tries to shut the door in her face, but it won’t latch. It jams for no reason at all, as if the frame has swollen or the floor has warped in the few minutes since he opened it.
Opal’s face slides into the gap. The House casts blue shadows across her skin, swallowing her freckles. “What’s your name?”
He glowers. She slouches one shoulder insolently against the frame, as if prepared to wait, and it occurs to him that this entire absurd scheme relies on Opal being the sort of person who learns lessons, who lets things lie; he wonders, too late, if he made a mistake.
“Arthur,” he says, and the syllables sound foreign in his mouth. He can’t recall the last time he said it out loud.
He gets a final glimpse of her face, the wary shape of her eyes and the quick pulse at her throat, that single damned curl escaping again from her ratty hood—red as clay, red as rust—before the door comes abruptly unstuck.
The latch gives a contented click and Arthur is alone in Starling House once more. He doesn’t mind it—after a certain number of years the loneliness becomes so dense and rancid it’s almost a companion in itself, which creeps and oozes at your heels—but now the hall seems hollow. There’s a forlorn slant to the walls, and dust hangs like ash in the air.
“Tomorrow,” he says, quietly. The dust motes dance.
* * *
Walking away from Starling House feels like climbing back through the wardrobe or up the rabbit hole, waking up from some heady dream. It seems impossible it could exist in the same world as abandoned Burger Kings and cigarette butts and the candy-red logo of Tractor Supply. But there’s the key in my hand, heavy and cold and very real, like something plucked from the pages of The Underland.
I wonder if Arthur’s read it as many times as I have. If he ever dreams in black-and-white, if he ever feels a watchful weight on the nape of his neck, the imaginary pressure of animal eyes.
I slip the key in my apron pocket before I clock in.
“You’re late.” Lacey says it just loud enough for the manager to hear, but not loud enough to be accused of snitching.
“Yeah, I just swung by the Starling place on the way back. Thought I’d see if they were hiring.” Once you’ve established a reputation for dishonesty, it becomes possible to lie simply by stating the flat truth.
Lacey’s mouth bends in a glossy bow. “That’s not funny. My meemaw says there were two Starlings living there back in her day, a pair of women.” Her voice lowers, bowing beneath the weight of implication. “Neither of them ever married.” I would like to ask Lacey’s meemaw if she’d considered the quality of potential husbands available in Muhlenberg County, but I suppose, given the existence of Lacey, that she must have made certain compromises. “And one day, they just disappeared. Gone. And that was the very same day that little Willy Floyd went missing.” 6 This correlation is presented with all the gravity of a lawyer revealing damning evidence to the jury.
“Didn’t Willy’s friends say he went down the old mines on a dare?”
Lacey has to pause to ring up two bags of dog food and a clearance birdhouse. “My meemaw says they were Satanists, who needed Floyd for a blood ritual.”
Arthur hadn’t struck me as a cultist, but neither had he seemed like an upstanding Baptist. I don’t think they’re allowed to grow their hair past their chins. “What are the signs that someone’s a Satanist, Lace?”
