Starling House, page 6
Bev spits a black stream into her coke can and says, obliquely, “People talk. You know how it is.”
I don’t know how it is, actually, because people only talk to me when they’re cornered. Small towns are supposed to be cozy and friendly, like perfect little snow globes, but me and Jasper have always been kept on the other side of the glass. Maybe because I only showed up at church for the pancake breakfasts and Thanksgiving dinners, or maybe because of Mom, with her lipstick and her shirts that didn’t quite meet the top of her jeans and the pills she sold sometimes in little plastic baggies. Or maybe because people in Eden like to know your whole family tree for three generations on both sides and the only family we ever knew was each other.
I pick at a snowflake of doughnut glaze on the box. “Will you tell me what you know?”
“No.” Bev heaves a sigh that bears an uncanny resemblance to Arthur Starling’s before he offered me a job, infinitely harassed. The TV is old enough to make a faint electric pop when she turns it off. “But I’ll tell you a story.”
This is the story of Starling House.
People tell it different ways, but this is how my granddaddy always told it. He was a liar, but the best liars are the ones that stick closest to the truth, so I believe it.
It goes like this: Once in the wayback times there was three brothers by the name of Gravely who made a fortune digging coal out of the riverbank. They were good, honest boys, brought low by the same thing that always comes for honest men with a little money: a dishonest woman.
Eleanor Starling came from nowhere in particular and had no particular beauty, but she wormed her way into the Gravely household anyhow. She was an odd girl, silent and waifish, prone to melancholy, but the Gravely boys doted on her. It wasn’t long after she arrived that they found the oldest Gravely facedown in the Mud River. There wasn’t a mark on him, but they say his face was stretched and racked, like a man looking upon an unspeakable horror.
At the time it was considered a tragic accident, but when the middle brother announced his engagement to little Eleanor Starling a few weeks later, people started talking, as people will. They started asking themselves just how the oldest Gravely boy wound up in the Mud River, when he was known to be a sober and careful man. They wondered if perhaps he had learned something about Miss Starling that she didn’t like, or simply resisted her wiles. But people kept their suspicions to themselves; Eden has always prided itself on its good manners, and good manners are mostly keeping your mouth shut and your mind on your own business.
John Gravely wouldn’t have listened to them, anyway; he was thoroughly taken with Eleanor, or, it was murmured behind his back, taken in. On their wedding day she stood wanly at his side, too forgettable even to achieve ugliness, but John Gravely looked at her like she was ice water in July.
The fog rose that night, thick and sudden. When it burned away they found John Gravely lying dead down at the bottom of his own mine shaft, wearing an expression just as ghastly as his poor brother’s. Eleanor Starling was nowhere to be found, but the men said they saw small bare footprints that led down into the deep dark and did not come out again.
Most people hoped she would have the good grace to disappear and let the last Gravely mourn in peace, but three days later Eleanor was seen wandering the hills and hollows of her husband’s land, still wearing her wedding gown. The farmhands that found her said her skirt slapped heavy and wet against her ankles, the hem gray with silt, as if she’d walked straight out of the river. They said, too, that she was laughing, light and joyful as a child.
The new widow told the sheriff she went for a walk on her wedding night and got lost, and had no earthly idea what happened to her poor, poor husband. No one believed her, but no judge could convict her, so the town could only watch and whisper as she used up all her husband’s money—and a hundred and sixty-six acres of his richest coal country, right across the river from the mines themselves—to build herself a house so vast it was written up in The Courier-Journal and The Lexington Daily Press.
She chose a strange site to build: a damp, low hollow so deep in the woods the house itself couldn’t be seen from the road. The townsfolk knew it existed only by the workers that came and went: surveyors and architects, carpenters and masons, roofers and painters. She hired them and fired them within days—because she didn’t want them getting too friendly with the locals, people said, or because she was mad. Why else would she hire four separate locksmiths, and order each of them to melt their molds afterward? The last person she employed was a blacksmith who came all the way from Cincinnati to hang the front gates.
Eleanor moved into the house the day after the gates were hung and was never seen again. For the following twenty years, the only sign of her continued survival was the shine of her windows at night, peering through the trees like the amber eyes of some restless animal.
The town thrived in her absence. They survived the Grant administration and the Freedmen’s Bureau; they made peace with the carpetbaggers and war with the tax collectors. The youngest Gravely boy kept the family business afloat, opening new coalfields and laying railroad tracks across the river. He married well and smiled often, and people began to believe Eleanor Starling would leave him in peace.
But then, on one of those sickly spring nights when the fog comes off the river in great white curls like wood shavings under a knife, bad luck came for the last Gravely brother.
He told his wife he would be out late on company business, and rode off on his favorite horse, a glossy thoroughbred named Stonewall who cost more than most men made in a year. Stonewall was a sure-footed creature, but that night he must have caught a hoof between the railroad ties, or turned an ankle. Or maybe he saw something moving in the mist ahead and refused to take another step. All anybody knew for sure was that Stonewall and his rider were both standing on the tracks when the midnight coal train came through.
There was no proof it was the widow’s work. But after that night, Starling House went dark.
There were several competing theories about this: maybe Eleanor had run away, her grim work finally completed; maybe the spirits of the three brothers had found some revenge of their own; maybe she hanged herself in sudden remorse, or maybe she simply fell down one of her own twisting staircases and lay at the bottom, broke-necked.
Eventually the sheriff took it upon himself to investigate—although whether he was more interested in discovering the state of Eleanor’s body or her fortune, I couldn’t tell you—but the gates were locked and the walls were high. He returned to town briar-bitten and muddy, with an expression of distant confusion, as if he’d walked into a room and couldn’t remember why.
Eden might have forgotten about the widow and her strange house, given time, and returned their minds once again to their own business, but you already know they didn’t. They couldn’t, for three very good reasons.
The first was the unpleasant discovery that Eleanor had, without anyone’s say-so or approval, become slightly famous. That book of hers—a morbid, unsettling thing that everyone did their best to ignore—made her name linger longer than anyone wanted, like an ill-mannered houseguest.
The second reason was the raggedy young man who arrived in Eden the following spring. He called himself a Starling, and maybe he was; all the town knew for sure is that the gates opened for him, and there were lights in the woods again, after that.
The third reason is rarely spoken of, and only slantwise, by suggestion and intimation. It’s something about the way the shadows fell in Eden, after Eleanor died. It’s the way everything soured: the river ran darker and the clouds hung lower; rich coal seams went dry and healthy children sickened; good luck went bad and sweet dreams spoiled. It’s the way Starling House crouches just out of sight, watching us all.
It’s the way the fog still rises, on chill and rotten nights. Some people think it’s just weather, but my granddaddy always said it was her: Eleanor Starling, whittled down to nothing but malice and mist, still thirsty for Gravely blood, haunting the town that still hates her.
SEVEN
I didn’t plan to stay up late again, but here I am: sitting with the laptop screen angled away from Jasper’s bed, typing up a story that shouldn’t matter to me at all.
I couldn’t sleep, not even after reading six chapters of a racy “Beauty and the Beast” retelling I’d had on hold for weeks. Bev’s story seemed to bleed through the pages, so that I saw a house swallowed by honeysuckle instead of a castle covered in roses. I could almost hear her voice: the rhythm of it, the slight slur of the tobacco tucked in her lip.
Eventually I gave up. I opened the file I’d saved as “document 4,” buried in a series of folders with boring names, and typed it all out. I told myself that writing down somebody else’s story wasn’t as bad as making up my own, the way repeating a lie isn’t as bad as telling one; I told myself it was probably all horseshit, anyway.
Before I had gone back to my room, I’d asked Bev if she thought any of it was true. She tilted her chin one way, then the other. “Enough, I’d say.”
“Enough to what?”
“Enough to steer clear of those people. I don’t think this town is cursed by anything but coal, and I don’t know if all the Starlings are as bad as the first one was, but I’ll tell you something: I don’t trust the boy who lives there now.”
A little chill ran down my breastbone. I kept my voice light and curious. “Why’s that?”
Bev watched me closely when she answered. “His parents, they weren’t too bad. People will tell you all kinds of nonsense about them—Bitsy Simmons swears up and down they kept Siberian tigers, says she saw a big white thing in the woods one night—but I don’t believe it. The husband, he used to drive this beat-up old truck around, and he always waved when he passed the motel … Anyway, both of them turned up dead, eleven or twelve years ago. And the boy, he doesn’t even call the police, not for days.”
The chill settled low and heavy in my stomach. Bev continued, softly, “The animals had been at them so bad the coroner said he couldn’t tell what killed them in the first place. Hell, maybe they did keep tigers. But the coroner said that boy didn’t shed a tear the whole time. Just asked if he was finished yet, because it was past his suppertime.”
After a long, unpleasant silence, I managed a hoarse “Huh.”
Bev clicked the TV back on while I gathered up my books and junk mail.
She waited until I was halfway out her office door before she said, low and serious, “Stay away from Starling House, Opal.”
I crossed the parking lot with my neck bent and my hands shoved deep in my pockets. The mist was just slithering up the riverbank, pooling in the potholes and dips of the road.
It’s higher now. The streetlights have gone hazy and spectral, like low-hanging planets, and the fancy SUVs are animals crouched beneath them. By tomorrow, there will be little flecks of rust on the rims, and the fine leather seats will smell green and rotten.
Mom always said nights like this were unlucky. She wouldn’t place a bet or cut a deal until the mist burned off the next day.
I don’t believe in luck, but it was misty the night Mom died, and I sometimes think if it hadn’t been—or if she hadn’t had a few and announced, with her usual sincerity, that she was going to turn our lives around, or if I’d argued with her instead of pretending I still believed her, or if she hadn’t been driving that damn Corvette, or if that whatever-it-was hadn’t run across the road—well. Maybe she would be the one telling me to stay away from Starling House, instead of Bev.
And maybe she’d be right. I don’t much like the idea of cleaning the house of a woman who murdered her husband for his money, or a pair of women who kidnapped a kid, or a boy who looked down at his parents’ bodies with dry eyes. I have the sudden urge to take a shower, to scrub the dirt of Starling House out from under my nails and never go back.
A noise from the other side of the room: a high, wavering whistle. The note stops, rushes out, starts again. It sounds like a teapot just coming to boil, but it’s not: it’s a sixteen-year-old trying to breathe through bronchial tubes that are swelling shut.
The first time Jasper had an asthma attack I was twelve. It was three in the morning and Mom wasn’t in her bed and I didn’t want to call 911 because I knew ambulances were expensive. I turned all the faucets on as hot as they would go and shut the bathroom door. I held him in the steam—his ribs heaving, his muscles trembling under soft baby fat—until I realized he wasn’t going to get better and Mom wasn’t going to show up. When the dispatcher answered I said, calmly, “I don’t know what to do.”
I know what to do, now. I get out of bed and put an inhaler in Jasper’s hand before he’s fully awake. I count two pumps, five breaths, two pumps more. Jasper doesn’t say anything, but his eyes are steady on mine.
I dump two scoops of instant coffee in a Waffle House mug and microwave it on high, then stir in all four packets of hot chocolate. Google says caffeine helps, but Jasper can’t stand the taste.
He drinks it. We wait. Every five minutes or so I snap my fingers and he lets me check to make sure the beds of his fingernails aren’t turning blue.
Eventually the whistle goes flat, falling down the scale until it’s just air again, rushing in and out.
“I’m good.” Jasper’s voice is still a little strained, but he hates when I baby him.
I get back in bed and pretend to sleep, listening until his breathing turns deep. I think about the banner on Stonewood Academy’s site: the clean blue of the sky, the healthful green of the lawn. I hold it in my head like a promise, like a map to the real Eden, until the colors oversaturate in my head, unreal.
I don’t think about ghost stories or murder mysteries, sins or starlings, because none of it matters. I’m going back to Starling House, because I have to.
For Jasper.
The words are comfortable, familiar, the easy answer to every question I’ve ever asked myself. But for the first time they ring a little rote, a little thin, as if there’s some shadowy part of me that doesn’t believe them. That smiles and whispers in my ear: Liar.
* * *
I show up even earlier on my second morning, my wrists scored by the weight of shopping bags, my shoulders bruised by the handles of a broom and mop. I knock more times than is strictly necessary, loud enough to set the starlings screaming. Bev hates them because they eat her persimmons and sound like dial-up internet, but I’ve always liked them. Every now and then you see them at dusk, rising and falling in these grand, twisting patterns over the pits and marshes Big Jack left behind him, and you think if you stare at them long enough you’ll make sense of them, read whatever it is they’re writing on the sky, but you never do.
I jump when Arthur opens the door. He doesn’t bother to speak this time, only stares at me with grim resignation. There’s a line of fresh scabs along his jaw, and bluish hollows beneath his eyes, like he gets even less sleep than everybody else in Eden.
I hesitate on the threshold, wondering if I’m about to slide sideways into dreamland, sucked under the strange currents of this strange house, until Arthur sighs at me. I quash a strong urge to stick my tongue out at him. Instead I hand him the heaviest shopping bags and march past him to the kitchen. It takes an embarrassing number of twists and about-faces before I find it, Arthur trailing behind me like a mocking shadow, plastic bags shushing against his knees.
He piles his bags on the cookstove and looks almost fearfully at the bottles of bleach and borax and off-brand Windex. I stole most of it from Bev’s supply closet—I consider Arthur’s second twenty a tip for rudeness—but I bought the mop and broom brand-new at the Dollar General, along with an Ale-8 and a candy bar for lunch.
Arthur retreats upstairs to do whatever he does during the day, which I assume involves a coffin filled with grave dirt, and I set to work on the sitting room again. It looks better than I remembered, still shabby but approaching habitable. I spend the rest of the day scrubbing grime from the baseboards and rubbing oil soap into the floor, and if there’s anything haunting Starling House it has the decency to let me work in peace. I go home sore and proud with another envelope in my back pocket. I mail the second payment to Stonewood that night.
The rest of the week goes the same way. On Thursday I fill three trash bags with mouse-chewed sheets and mud dauber nests, dragging them behind me down the long drive. On Friday I soak ten sets of yellowed curtains in bleach water and hang them to dry on the backs of dining room chairs, so that it looks as if a family of ghosts has come for supper. On Saturday—I hadn’t asked if I was working weekends, but I need the money and Arthur doesn’t seem to know what day of the week it is—I sweep out the pantry and find a trapdoor poorly hidden beneath a rug.
The handle is recessed into the floor, fitted with a cartoonishly large padlock, and there are symbols carved into the wood. It feels like discovering a clue in a video game, a giant glowing arrow inviting me to come closer, dig deeper, learn more. I lay the rug flat again and leave the pantry half-cleaned. I sing to myself all that afternoon, about dreams and thunder and old houses burning down.
On Sunday I wander up to the third floor looking for a stepladder and wind up in a high-ceilinged room full of armchairs and shelves and more books than the public library.
It’s the sort of place I didn’t know existed outside of movie sets, all mullioned windows and oak paneling and leather-bound spines. I see folklore and mythology, collections of fairy tales and children’s rhymes, horror novels and history books and fat Latin dictionaries with half the pages dog-eared. My stomach twists with longing and resentment and wonder.
I snatch a book off the shelf, not even pausing to read the title.
It’s a super old edition of Ovid, written in that awful verse where everything rhymes and “over” is spelled “o’er.” The book falls open to a page titled “The House of Sleep,” followed by a long passage about a drowsing god in a cave. The word “Lethe” is underlined more times than seems strictly sane, the page so deeply indented it’s torn a little. In the margin beside it someone has written a list of Latin names: Acheron, Styx, Cocytus, Pyriphlegethon, Lethe, and then: a sixth river?
