Starling House, page 5
I spend the first hour or two just wandering. Rooms sprout from the halls at random, branching and splitting like the patternless roots of a tree: sitting rooms and parlors, cramped offices and tiled washrooms, closets beneath staircases and ballrooms beneath ribs of rafters. I’ve never been lost in my life—getting lost in Eden would be like getting lost inside my own skin—but I find myself wishing for a spool of red thread to string behind me.
The house is well past dirty and headed for derelict, the sort of filthy that blurs the line between inside and outside. Dust lies so thick on the floors that it gives beneath my shoes, like soil. Wallpaper bubbles and peels. Mold blooms like black eyes in the folds of curtains and corners of couches. Some rooms are torn apart—the furniture overturned and the rugs rucked, mirrors ripped from the walls and shattered, still surrounded by sharp skirts of glass—and some are perversely neat. On the second floor I find a dining room with the table still set for two, spoons and forks laid on napkins the color of lichen. Chicken bones smile up from the plate, thin and yellow.
I back quietly out of that room, pausing only to shove a set of tarnished silver spoons in my back pocket. I figure if you call someone a stray, you should expect a consequence or two.
Beneath all the filth there are problems no amount of housekeeping could address: cracked windowpanes, dripping pipes, floors slanted so badly I feel off-balance. In one room the plaster has fallen away like a calving glacier, so that you can see the studs and lath boards, crusted iron pipes and fat, flaky wasp nests. There are strange white cords wrapped around everything, like oversized cobwebs; it takes a moment for me to recognize them as roots. Those honeysuckle vines must have wriggled their way through the limestone.
The next room is small and bright, with pastel wallpaper and a squashy couch. There are portraits on the walls, their faces filmed with dust. If I squint it could almost be cozy, except for the dirt and mold and the drifts of cicada shells in the windowsills. The couch exhales a stale sweetness when I sit down, as if it remembers open windows and spring breezes.
I should probably be freaked out—this place is eerie and endless, a rotting labyrinth—but mostly I just feel sorry for it. Starling House makes me think of an underfed pet or a broken doll, a thing unloved by the person who promised to love it best.
I give the couch cushion an uncertain pat. “We’ll set you right. Don’t worry.” It’s probably a coincidence that a draft flutters the curtains.
The kitchen is just around the next corner: grimy tile with footprints smeared between the sink and the fridge, a rusted cookstove, a Paleolithic microwave set to the wrong time. The promised cleaning supplies consist of a half-rotten mop chewed into a mouse nest and a box of spray bottles that have melted into a single Chernobyl-like blob, so I end up tearing a curtain into rags and filling a bucket at the sink. The tap hiccups but the water runs clear. The Starlings must have a well or a spring; county water comes out brackish gray and leaves crusted chemical rings in the bathtub.
I return to the almost-cozy sitting room and run my rag over the wainscoting. In two swipes the wash water is black and silty, fly wings and pill bugs bobbing on the surface. I dump it and do it all again, and again, and again. The hours fall into a rhythm of scrubbing, wringing, dumping, filling, the hiss of the tap and the wet slap of the rag. My knees ache. My hands are scoured pink; the cut on my left palm shreds open again. The blood soaks into the floorboards before I can wipe it away.
I scrub the wavering glass of the windowpanes, the wallpaper, the floors; I wipe the rag lightly over the portraits, revealing a dozen mismatched faces.
None of the paintings are labeled or signed.8 None of their subjects share even a slight family resemblance, but they still strike me as pieces of the same set. It’s the intensity of their stares, the sense that they were each interrupted at a delicate and important task. It’s the bare silver sword in every single portrait, held flat across their knees or hanging on the wall behind them, unchanged by the passage of time.
The oldest one shows a ghostly, dark-eyed Victorian woman who must be Eleanor Starling herself, much older than the picture on her Wiki page. There’s a young man with strange white patches on his skin, like a human calico; an unsmiling pair of sisters with long black hair and striped blankets around their shoulders; a Black teenager in a Depression-era derby hat; two women with their arms around one another’s waists; a whole family in crisp fifties outfits. The newest portrait shows a white couple: a broad-shouldered woman with a familiar lumpiness to her face, as if she was born with twice the usual amount of cheekbone, and a gangling man with an affable smile.
There’s something ghoulish about the paintings, the way the faces of the dead are arranged like taxidermy on the wall, a museum exhibit of people who couldn’t safely walk down the streets of Eden. I wonder how they ended up here; I wonder how they died.
I can feel their eyes on me while I work.
The sun is fat and low by the time I pause to crack my spine and eat a slightly squashed Pop-Tart. My heart sinks: less than half the room could be called clean, and only by someone with a very generous definition of the word “clean.” Standing there with the shadows stretching long and my right arm swinging on the sore hinge of my shoulder, I understand that I wasn’t given a job after all: I was given an impossible task, of the kind a king might set for his daughter’s unwanted suitors or a god might give to a sinful soul. It would take fleets of professionals and several industrial dumpsters and possibly an exorcist to make this place livable, and I’m just a girl who cleans a couple of cheap motel rooms over the holidays, when Gloria and her mama fly back to Michoacán and Bev needs a hand.
I should quit. I should beg Frank for extra shifts. But I can’t pay for Stonewood on minimum wage, and the gate key feels cold and sweet against my chest, and anyway I can’t give the Starling boy the satisfaction of watching me run from him a second time.
I text Jasper—working late tonight, I hid the last picante chicken in the tampon box under the sink—and wring out my rag again. The house sighs around me.
* * *
Just before dusk Arthur finds himself standing alone in his mother’s favorite room.
He didn’t intend to be there; he left the library headed for the third-floor bathroom and wound up on the first floor instead, staring at the sagging couch his mother ordered from a catalog. She wasn’t a person who permitted herself many indulgences, but sometimes after a hard night she would sit on that couch and wait for dawn to drive back the mist. Arthur knew she wasn’t a pretty woman, but on those mornings—with her face golden and battle-weary in the rising sun, her knuckles bloody around the hilt of the Starling sword—she was somewhere beyond beauty, tilting toward mythic.
Arthur has let this room rot for almost a decade.
Now it shines fresh and bright, as if all those years were scrubbed out of it. As if his mother might step around the corner at any moment, smiling her soldier’s smile, and his father might call from the kitchen. Arthur takes a step back and the eyes of the former Wardens seem to follow him from their frames, weighing him, finding him wanting.
The floor creaks behind him and Arthur whirls, one hand flinching toward his hip.
Opal is in the doorway, staring at him. Her hoodie is balled up under one arm and her T-shirt is smeared with grime. She’s tied a scrap of something that looks like his kitchen curtain around her left palm, and her hair curls at her temples, dark as blood.
Opal’s eyes flick to his hand, splayed at his hip, then away. She nods at the setting sun. “I’m heading out.”
He tucks the hand very casually in his pocket and adopts his archest tone. “And what did you think of your first day?”
That wry twist of her lips, a glimpse of crooked teeth. “I think I’ll ask Mr. Augeas if he needs his stables cleaned next. Be a piece of cake after this place.”
Arthur blinks at her several times. He doesn’t know what to say, so he says, obnoxiously, “It’s pronounced Aw-gee-us.”
Her smile goes hard and fake. “Oh! My apologies. I must’ve dropped out before we got to ancient Greek.” She shifts the hoodie beneath her arm. It makes a muffled clanking sound.
“I didn’t mean—it’s just that mythology is something of a…”—calling, duty, obsession—“… hobby. In my family.” Arthur finds he can’t look at her. He withdraws a heavy envelope and thrusts it blindly in her direction. “Your pay.”
Opal folds the envelope into her back pocket and holds her hand out flat for more. “I’ll need extra for supplies.” Her voice is syrup-sweet.
“So you’re coming back. Tomorrow.” Arthur tries to sound neither pleased nor sorry and winds up sounding bored.
“Yep.”
He puts a twenty in her outstretched hand. The hand doesn’t move. He adds another twenty.
The cash disappears into a different pocket and Opal gives him a switchblade smile as she turns away. “That’s the thing about strays.” Her voice echoes back to him over her shoulder. “We don’t quit.”
He’d said it because it was a cruel thing to say. Because it would hurt, and people hate what hurts them, and if she hated him maybe she would run before she got hurt much worse. So there’s no reason regret should crawl up his throat. No reason he should swallow hard and say, far too quietly, “I’m sorry.”
There’s no reason he should wish she’d heard him.
He lingers, after she leaves, breathing in the smell of soap and clean wood. The House shifts subtly, the light tilting and the air chilling, so that the room is precisely as it was that last day. Damn you, he thinks, but the memory is already rising around him, closing like jaws.
He is fourteen. His mother is lying silently on her yellow couch while his father carefully stitches a flap of her scalp back into place. The battle had been a long and brutal one—had it always been this bad? was the mist rising more than it should?—and the skin over her cheekbones is white.
Arthur watches them for a while. His father’s long-fingered hands—the hands of a painter or a pianist, bent instead to the bloody, endless work of keeping his wife alive. His mother, a knotted scar of a woman, already going gray. Her right hand is still resting on the hilt, restless, ready.
Without quite planning to, Arthur announces that he is leaving.
His mother opens her eyes. How dare you, she says. She’s always been stern, but she’s never spoken to him like this, with this furious contempt. They took my home from me—you think you can just walk away from yours—this is your birthright—
His father says her name, gently, and her mouth shuts as if sewn, the stitches overtight. You’re not going anywhere, she says.
But Arthur had. That very night, he’d climbed out the library window and down the wisteria, while the House moaned and wailed. He thought it would try to stop him, but when his foot slipped, his fingers had found an old trellis in just the right place, and when he slid into his father’s truck, he found a backpack full of peanut-butter-and-jellies.
He’d driven himself to the bus station with a heady, dangerous glee, as if he were a kite with its strings cut.
The next time he saw his mother, there had been a thistle pushing gently through the socket of her right eye.
The House shifts again and the memory falls away. Arthur is twenty-eight. He is alone, and he is grateful.
SIX
I toss the spoons on Jasper’s bed when I get back to room 12 that evening. “Put ’em on eBay, please and thank you. The antiques account.”
Jasper appraises the spoons with a clinical eye. He draws a finger down the silver and withdraws it, frowning. “You didn’t get these at Tractor Supply,” he observes.
It’s my personal ambition never to set foot in a Tractor Supply again, actually.
As soon as I counted Arthur’s money I texted Lacey tell Frank i quit:) and called Stonewood Academy to find out where I should send my first payment. The lady on the phone repeated “In … cash?” with audible ellipses and helpfully reminded me of the final deadline, as if I didn’t already know it. As if I didn’t repeat the date in my head every time I passed the smokestacks.
“Nope,” I say.
Jasper looks like he might have a few follow-up questions, but we have a deal where he doesn’t ask me anything he doesn’t want answered, so he merely mentions his fervent hope that I’m not doing anything illegal.
I press a hand to my chest, mortally wounded. “Me?”
“Or dangerous.”
He sounds worried enough that I give him my most earnest smile. “I’m not. For real.” It might even be true. I mean, if houses can be haunted, Starling House absolutely is, but so far all it’s done to me is moan and creak. And I’m pretty sure Arthur is just a garden-variety asshole rather than, say, a sexual predator, or a vampire. “Pretty please?” I nudge the spoons with my knee. “My phone camera sucks.”
Jasper holds eye contact for another moment, just to let me know that he’s not buying what I’m selling, before flopping dramatically back against the mattress. “I would, but Bev turned the internet off again.”
“Did you ask her to turn it back on?”
He opens one scandalized eye. “I thought you loved me. I thought you wanted me to survive to my senior year—”
I whump a pillow at him and he wheezes theatrically. It sounds a little more real than he meant it to, the breath whistling in his throat.
I head back across the empty parking lot to the front office, where Bev is busy yelling at Jeopardy!, pausing only to spit tobacco juice into an empty coke can. She’s probably not even fifty, but she has the social habits and haircut of a ninety-year-old man.
We have our traditional argument: she maintains that the internet is for paying customers and not for depraved freeloading teenagers; I swear at her; she threatens to throw us out into the street; I swear again; she flips me off and turns the power strip back on. I steal four packets of Swiss Miss from the folding card table she has the audacity to advertise as a breakfast bar.
“Those are also for paying customers, by the way.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have any of those, do you?”
Bev scowls at the TV and says, “Those Gravely Power people are back,” which explains her sour mood. The only thing Bev hates more than me and Jasper are actual guests, who sometimes have the nerve to ask for things like reliable hot water and room service, and the only thing she hates more than guests is Gravely Power, which, as far as I can tell, she holds personally responsible for every social, environmental, and economic problem in the state. None of the executives actually live in Eden, obviously—Don Gravely has a brand-new house right outside the city limits, with seven bathrooms and white columns and one of those awful lawn jockeys out front, smiling a false red smile—but a bunch of them come into town every year for their annual meeting or whatever, and there’s nowhere for them to stay except the Garden of Eden Motel. Bev’s only comfort is that they always leave with a thick layer of bird shit caked over their windshields.
Bev looks away from Jeopardy! to glare between the blinds at the line of expensive SUVs in her parking lot. “They’re talking about expanding, did you know that? One of them was going on about doubling capacity and opening new fields and all that. They’re going to build a whole new fly ash pond, the woman told me.” She adds, reflexively, “Goddamn vultures.”
“Careful, that’s Muhlenberg County’s number one job creator you’re talking about.” I don’t like them much either—maybe if they put filters on their smokestacks rather than just paying EPA fines every year, Jasper could actually breathe, and I wouldn’t have to clean a haunted house so I could afford to get him out of here—but I like watching Bev’s face turn red.
“We used to have luna moths when I was a kid. You ever seen one of them?”
“No?”
“Exactly.” She seems to feel she’s won the argument, because she thumps a pile of my mail on the counter and returns to her show.
There’s a stack of library holds from Charlotte, which she doesn’t have to deliver to the motel but does anyway; a couple of notices from debt collectors who are shit out of luck; some junk mail; and an envelope from the Department for Community Based Services with RETURN SERVICE REQUESTED printed in all capitals. That last one makes me swallow and tuck my hair behind my ear—my only tell, Mom used to say.
Trebek is sneering his way through a $400 question when I clear my throat. “Hey, Bev?”
She slides half a box of glazed doughnuts across the counter without looking away from the television. “They were going stale anyway.”
“Actually, I was wondering—you know the Starlings?”
She turns away from the Daily Double, frowning. I have an encyclopedic familiarity with Bev’s frowns, ranging from “turn that damn music down” to “have you been in the petty cash jar again, you reprobate,” but this one is new. It’s wary, almost worried, although the only things Bev typically worries about are bedbugs and tax audits. “What about them?”
“I was just thinking about them, is all. About that house.”
She grunts again. “Been a long time since you bugged me about the Starling place, kid. You never used to shut up about it.”
I remember myself as a girl, scab-kneed and quick, hungry even when my belly was full. Mom and me didn’t always live in room 12—I remember other hotels, an RV or two, a couple of months sleeping on couches that belonged to men who liked the color of Mom’s hair and the careless way she laughed, but never liked me much—but the motel was the first place we stayed for more than a few months.
Bev had mostly glared at me out the front office window until the day I poked a wasp nest and got stung twice, once on each arm. Mom wasn’t around so I was just sitting on the curb, tasting tears in the back of my throat, when Bev strolled over and slapped a wet mat of chewing tobacco over the stings. She gave me a lot of shit about not having the sense God gave a flea, but the pain eased.
“Yeah, well, I googled it the other day, just out of curiosity, and didn’t find much. I thought maybe you would know something about it.”
