Starling House, page 35
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Harrow, Alix E., author.
Title: Starling house / Alix E. Harrow.
Description: First edition. | New York: Tor Publishing Group, 2023.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023026718 (print) | LCCN 2023026719 (ebook) | ISBN 9781250799050 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250338440 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781250799074 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Gothic fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3608.A783854 S73 2023 (print) | LCC PS3608.A783854 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20230609
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023026718
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023026719
eISBN 9781250799074
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First Edition: 2023
1. According to Lyle Reynolds, the Gravely Power meter man from 1987–2017, Starling House was never connected to the electric grid or the municipal water system. The telephone company sued for the right to place poles on Starling land in 1947, but the project was abandoned after a series of ugly accidents that left three employees hospitalized.
2. This is false. Between 2006 and 2009, Opal used the staff printer at the public library to print several pieces of short fiction. In ’08, she received a personal rejection from a literary magazine which said that, regrettably, they did not publish fantasy, horror, or “whatever this is supposed to be.”
3. Willy Floyd, 13, went missing on April 13, 1989; the old mine shaft was boarded up four years before Opal was born. Perhaps she merely dreamed of it, and mistook the dream for a memory.
4. Lynn and Oscar Starling died sometime in October of 2007. The coroner was not able to determine a more precise date of death; his autopsy report cites the unfortunate delay, and the “goddamned state of them.”
5. Satellite images of the property are notoriously unreliable. If you were to type the address into your phone you would see nothing but slate rooftops and blurry, recalcitrant green, which would never quite come into focus.
6. Odessa and Madge Starling, who lived in the house between 1971 and 1989, were last seen alive behind the old middle school. The school janitor told the sheriff they were chasing something. A dog, he originally stated, but in a later deposition he claimed it was Willy and his friends. Neither Willy nor the Starlings were ever seen again, although there have been reports of whimpering sounds echoing from the mouth of the old mine shaft.
7. Opal is referring to John Prine’s 1971 song “Paradise,” recorded on his debut album. Gravely Power took considerable offense to the line “Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking / Old Gravely’s coal train has hauled it away,” resulting in several lawsuits and a brochure titled “Facts vs. Prine.” “Ironically,” the brochure begins, “we probably helped supply the energy to make that recording that so unfairly maligns us.”
8. Despite exhaustive research, including consultations with art historians and curators, it has proven impossible to determine the original painters of these portraits. There are no records of commissions, no recognizable styles, no identifiable pigments. It is as if the paintings simply manifested, one by one, on the walls of Starling House.
9. None of the persons mentioned were born with the name Starling, but all of them were buried with it. Though they were not related by blood, they all shared a tendency to keep excellent records, to which the present Warden of Starling House has been generous enough to grant me access.
10. In addition to its being several degrees cooler than the surrounding waters, there is a countywide advisory against swimming in the Mud River. The advisory cites the presence of mercury and arsenic, but there are also a statistically unlikely number of drownings reported each year. One survivor swore he felt a hand around his ankle, pulling him down; he said the fingers were small and fragile, like a little girl’s.
11. The original Gravely Manor sat very near the site of the power plant. It was abandoned following the death of the youngest Gravely brother in 1886 and caught fire shortly afterward. No member of the Gravely family has lived in Eden since, and few of them visit for more than a day or two.
12. The burial was, by all accounts, a frustrating event. The operator worried that the substrate was porous and friable, causing a series of small landslides that constantly refilled the grave. The reporters complained about the wait, and the weather. The fog wasn’t good for their cameras.
13. This should not be mistaken for a demographic accident. Kentucky—the thirteenth star on the Confederate flag, the birthplace of both Davis and Lincoln, and the home to over two hundred thousand enslaved men, women, and children—went unmentioned in the Emancipation Proclamation, and was later excluded from Reconstruction. Many freedmen fled, and Kentucky buried their tracks quite efficiently. Their names were forgotten and their homes were torn down; their graveyards were left untended, swallowed up by poison ivy and ironweed, until eventually they were paved over for used car lots or strip malls. Their memories are preserved only by their kin, in the stories told by those who stayed, and those who left.
14. The Gravely Sanatorium was established in 1928 by Donald Gravely, Sr., as an ill-fated attempt to find profit in Eden’s disused mines. After several obliging doctors testified to the healing properties of subterranean life, fifteen tuberculosis patients were lowered into the mines, where they lived in cramped underground huts. None of them survived the winter, but Donald Gravely never considered it a total failure, as he was then able to offer ghost tours for a quarter a head. Several participants claimed they could still hear coughing down in the mines, and heavy, panting breath.
15. In 1970, for example, a young man named Steve Burroughs became convinced that Starling House was a site of “significant spiritual energy.” Having been rebuffed at the front gates, he attempted to tunnel beneath the eastern wall. He went missing for three weeks. Upon his return, he fulfilled his mother’s greatest wish and joined the clergy. When asked why, he said that—having seen Hell—it seemed only fair to see Heaven. The relevant entry in Eva Starling’s journal reads only, House: 1, Jackasses: 0.
16. Jasper was actually in fifth grade when a portion of the Muhlenberg Elementary School roof collapsed. A state audit came to no definitive conclusions; they suggested that perhaps an animal had died above the fifth-grade classroom, given the degree of rot and mold present in the debris.
17. Sipapú is a Hopi word roughly translating to “the place of emergence,” and is generally characterized as a hole in the earth, or a deep cave.
18. Mrs. Caldwell’s uncle might have been referring to Etsuko and John Sugita, first- and second-generation Japanese Americans who became Starlings in 1943. Etsuko drowned in 1955, and the rest of the family relocated to a modest cottage on the coast of Maine. Her daughters, now in their early seventies, remember the house fondly, but were never tempted to return. “No home,” one of them told me, “should cost that much.”
19. Karst topography is characterized by large deposits of limestone and is very favorable for the development of caves and sinkholes. There have never been any significant caves discovered in Eden, but a local motel owner has no doubt of their existence: “Between the caves and the damn mines, if you yell at one end of Kentucky, you’ll hear it on the other.”
20. Mrs. Gutiérrez’s brother-in-law made a full recovery. He ascribes his survival to his grandmother’s crucifix, which he wears tucked beneath his collar on a slim gold chain.
21. The hunter, Dennis Roark, later claimed he was shooting at a doe and missed, and further alleged that it was Jasper’s fault for going out in deer season without wearing orange. Dennis’s mother, Mrs. Roark, said she told him not to go out hunting on such a foggy evening.
22. There is an ongoing and extremely contentious legal case debating whether Opal has a genuine legal claim to the Gravely name. On the one hand, Jewell Gravely never used the name after she left her father’s household—the Corvette was registered to Jewell Wild, and the motel room was originally booked under a Jewell Weary—and marked an X on Opal’s birth certificate. On the other, as several witnesses testified, “She’s a Gravely, alright. Just look at that damn hair.”
Alix E. Harrow, Starling House
