Starling house, p.15
Starling House, page 15
There is nothing on the third floor, or the second. There’s a tugging sensation in the back of his skull, like the trembling of a spider’s web, that leads him to the kitchen, but it’s empty except for the faint phosphorescence of the microwave clock.
Something clicks, like the shutter of a camera. It comes from the pantry.
He opens the door and light glances off rusted cans and old jars, their contents gray and glutinous. The rug has been rolled back, and beneath it there is a perfect square of darkness in the floor.
The trapdoor is open.
Arthur has seen it open only once before, when he was eleven. His mother had waited until high noon on the summer solstice before she knelt on the floor and unlocked it. Then she took his hand and led him down, down into the dark.
He remembers the steps, slick and endless. He remembers trailing a hand along the walls and finding them wet, weeping cold water. He remembers crying, and his mother noticing, but not stopping.
He doesn’t understand how the door was opened again—he keeps the keys safe in his room, and these aren’t the sort of locks that can be picked—but his thoughts have become very slow, very simple. He is the Warden of Starling House, and the locks have failed.
Arthur goes down beneath Starling House for the second time in his life, his heart beating evenly, his tattoos burning into his skin.
The walls are smooth limestone, untouched by picks or chisels; it’s like the world split open and someone built stairs in the gap. It should be completely black, but the mist has its own ghostly fox-fire glow.
The sound comes again, that unnatural click. Arthur braces his sword before him and walks faster.
The stairs don’t lead to a room or a chamber; they simply end, running straight into the great slab of the first door. He sees the chains still stretched taut across the surface, and the lock still shut, but there’s a shape standing before it, pale in the mist-light.
Arthur does not hesitate. He lunges down the last few stairs and swings. It’s an ugly swing, a woodcutter’s downward chop, but it would have been enough to sunder a fresh-hatched nightmare. Except he slips on the damp stone, or the stone slides out from under his foot, and the sword goes wide. It skrees off the limestone in a spray of white sparks.
His body slams into the shape and he flinches, expecting rending teeth and gouging claws, the scuttling, scrabbling attack of a creature with too many joints and limbs—
It doesn’t come. Instead, a voice says, fervently, “Christ on a bicycle.”
Arthur doesn’t move. He doesn’t breathe. He is reasonably sure that his heart does not beat. “Opal?”
The pale shape lifts its head and he sees a pointed chin, a freckled pair of cheeks, gray irises rimmed with white. “Opal. God—are you alright? Did I—” His hand spasms and the sword clatters to the ground. He runs his fingers frantically up the bare skin of her arms, over her shoulders, dreading the tacky heat of blood.
“I’m fine. It’s okay.” It’s only when she speaks, when he feels the warmth her breath on his face, that he realizes he has her pinned against the door. That his thumb is resting in the hollow between her collarbones, just over the wild rhythm of her pulse. That the expression in her eyes should be fear, but isn’t.
He steps back, too fast, and something gives an expensive-sounding crunch beneath his left foot. “What are you doing here?”
His tone is menacing, but she answers easily. “Cleaning. You owe me overtime, bud.”
Arthur decides the heat coursing through his limbs is anger. It makes his voice shake. “I told you never to come here at night. I told you—”
“You’re standing on my phone.”
He exhales. Bends to retrieve her phone from beneath his left foot. Looks down at the spiderwebbed screen, breathing hard.
“Give it here.”
Her photos are displayed on the screen in a neat grid. One of them appears to be the front gates of Starling House. The next one is the front door, with several close-ups of the wards. Then the library, the sitting room, the kitchen, the mudroom. “What … what are these?” His voice sounds muffled in his ears, as if he’s speaking under water.
“Pictures.” He can hear the sullen set of her chin.
He scrolls up. There are pictures of every oddity in the House: claw marks scored in the wallpaper, books in dead languages, charms and spells. It’s strange to see it this way, all the evidence of his family’s long, mad war captured in bright arrangements of pixels. The most recent picture is a gray stone door crisscrossed with chains. There is a ring of three iron keys dangling from the padlock. One of them is jammed awkwardly into the keyhole, although he knows the lock won’t turn. Arthur has wasted hours trying.
When his mother showed him this door, she asked him how many locks Starling House had. He counted in his head: gates, front door, cellar, and the stone door beneath it all. Four, he answered. Then his mother held up the ring of keys and asked how many keys Eleanor had made.
Three, he said. And then, daringly, he asked why.
Because this lock was never meant to be opened.
After nearly a decade spent searching for that fourth key, he has concluded that his mother was telling the truth. But he believes there is another way through. If he didn’t—if he thought he and every Starling after him would be stuck forever fighting this foolish war—he isn’t certain he would get out of bed in the morning.
Arthur exhales carefully. “You stole the keys. From my room.” He doesn’t know why his voice should sound so wounded. He knew what Opal was: a drowning girl who would do anything to keep afloat, a thief and a liar who owed him less than nothing.
Opal doesn’t answer, but the skin of her throat moves as she swallows. His fingers twitch.
“You’ve sent all these pictures to them.”
“So what if I did?”
Arthur doesn’t like the look in her face—guilty and angry but still, even now, not quite afraid—so he closes his eyes.
Opal continues, gathering speed. “So what if people have questions about this place? I have a few questions myself, actually.”
“Don’t. Please.” He isn’t sure if he says the words out loud or merely thinks them.
“For example: Where the hell does this door lead? Why did I dream about it before I ever saw it? Why did you almost behead me just now?”
“I didn’t mean—”
She drives forward, voice high. “Why do you have a goddamn sword in the first place? What happened to your parents? What happened to Eleanor Starling?”
“How in hell should I know?” Arthur’s mother taught him very young how to keep secrets. How to discourage questions and prying eyes, how to drive away the curious and clever. She had not prepared him for Opal. “Do you think Eleanor explained? She disappeared and left her heir nothing but a sword and a fucking children’s book.”
He is surprised to find he is standing very close to Opal again, looming over her. The defiance in her face makes his voice crack. “I should never have let you into the House. I just thought—I thought—” He’d told himself at the time that it was guilt that made him do it, the memory of his second-worst failure and what it had cost her, but that was a child’s lie: he just hadn’t wanted to be alone anymore.
An awful tenderness crosses Opal’s face, that soft streak she tries so hard to hide. “Arthur, I’m sorry. About the pictures. I didn’t want to, but they told me—”
It’s at that moment that Arthur hears another sound: a thin scratching, like nails on the wrong side of a door.
His left hand fists in the worn cotton of Opal’s shirt. He feels the flesh of his palm splitting. She looks down at his hand and back at him, and he refuses to interpret her expression, refuses to think about the swell of her pupils or the infinitesimal slant of her face toward his.
He hauls her past him, away from the stone door, and shoves her roughly up the stairs.
“Okay, what the hell—”
“Get out. Go home. Don’t stop, and don’t look back.” He retrieves his sword and sets his feet, facing the door with the blade half-raised.
Opal hasn’t moved. She’s looking down at him with the same beaten-nail eyes he remembers from the first night he found her outside his gates, like she doesn’t know what’s coming but she’s ready to split her knuckles about it. There’s a smear of his blood on her shirt.
For the second time, he summons all the malice and madness he can, and says, “Run.”
For the second time, he watches her run away from him, and does not regret it.
FIFTEEN
I drive too fast and park shittily, cutting slantwise across two spots in the motel lot. I sit listening to the tick of the engine and the muffled screaming of the crickets, shaking very slightly. I say, softly, “What the hell.” It feels good so I say it a couple more times with differing emphases. “What the hell. What the hell.”
“Hey, you alright in there?” It’s Bev, thumping on the hood, wearing boxer shorts and a ratty tank top. The mist laps at her bare ankles, thickening fast.
I consider telling her the truth, I really do, but at this point it would take a bulleted multilevel list to account for all the fuckery I have engineered and endured over the last eight hours.
1) My little brother yelled at me, which sucked, but he had a point, which sucked more;
2) I failed to accomplish the task Baine assigned to me, which means:
A) She’s going to do something slimy and awful that might lose me custody of Jasper, which means:
i) I’ll have a homicide to plan on top of everything else.
3) Arthur Starling almost murdered me and then almost kissed me and then tossed me aside like used gum, and I’m not sure which of those things upsets me more.
I settle for “I’m fine. Go back to bed.”
Bev glares through the windshield for another second. “Okay.” She thumps the hood again. “Learn to park, meathead.”
There’s a plastic crate waiting outside my door with a sticky note on top that says Gravely collection, Box #1 in Charlotte’s neat handwriting. I open the door and kick the box across the threshold.
Room 12 is stuffy and mildewy. There’s a faint, hormonal funk in the air that tells me Jasper swung by at some point, either to make up or to grab his stuff, but I was busy housebreaking and getting busted and probably losing my job. The thought is sudden and chilling. How could Arthur keep paying me after he caught me stealing his keys and spying on the side? How could he ever let me set foot inside Starling House again?
It occurs to me that a normal person wouldn’t have this number and intensity of emotions if they lost a housekeeping job. I tell myself it’s just that the money was good and I don’t know how I’m going to pay Jasper’s tuition next year. It’s just that I was going to power-wash the steps and trim back the vines, hang fresh curtains and patch the broken bits of crown molding. It’s just that I’ll miss the warm weight of the walls around me and the irritable sound of Arthur’s footsteps on the stairs.
I want to storm back to Starling House and thump Arthur’s head against the wall until he forgives me or apologizes or presses his mouth against mine just to shut me up. I want to drive over to Logan’s and have a big, loud fight with Jasper, in front of God and everybody. I want to lean my forehead against Mom’s breastbone and cry, and feel the slick lacquer of her fingernails against my cheek as she lies to me. Everything’s okay, babydoll.
I open the storage crate instead, pawing through it at random. Somehow I end up cross-legged with the Gravely family photo album in my lap. I turn the pages slowly, feeling something sharp and green gathering in my throat. Envy, maybe. We never had a family photo album. I used to sneak onto Mom’s phone and scroll back as far as I could in her pictures, but there weren’t any from before I was born. It’s like she sprang from the skull of the world, fully formed and laughing, a woman without a history.
The Gravelys have history. The whole town still tells stories about them, and the photo album shows me a parade of family dogs and Christmas trees and birthday cakes. Cousins and uncles and dour-looking grandparents all standing in front of that big brand-new house.
The last picture in the book is a teenage girl leaning against a car the color of a maraschino cherry. Her legs are long and freckled, crossed at the ankle. Her face looks different, younger and softer than I’d ever seen it, but her smile has a brazen, reckless tilt I know better than the backs of my own hands, and her hair—you don’t forget hair like that. It’s redder than the car, haloed gold by the sun, so that she looks like a woman on fire.
Mom. My mom. Standing beside the ’94 Corvette that was always too nice for her.
It took me a couple of weeks after the funeral to make myself go out to the junkyard to collect her stuff. By then the inside of the car was black with mold, the seats lightly furred. Greasy brown water poured out of the glove box when I opened it. I grabbed the dream catcher and signed the rest over for scrap.
I find, somewhat to my surprise, that my hands are moving. They’re sliding the picture out of the plastic and flipping it over. On the back of the photo someone has written Delilah Jewell Gravely, 16 in blue ballpoint.
I think: I always hated my middle name. Then I stop thinking.
But my body is still moving. It’s kneeling on the motel carpet, right on the bare spot where my feet land every morning. It’s reaching under the bed, toward something I haven’t touched in eleven years and—when did I lose track of the days? When did my life become more than a long tally of days endured?
The plastic bags have gone brittle. The dream catcher is cracked and broken, the beads dangling on loose threads. The book looks different than I remember, smaller and shabbier. There are fractal blooms of mold across the cover, bruise-black, and the pages have the rotten smell of clogged gutters. But the title is still stitched along the spine in bright silver—The Underland—and the initials on the inside cover are still the same: DJG.
I asked Mom once if she was DJG. She laughed and called me Little Miss Encyclopedia Brown, which is what she called me when I was being nosy. I asked what her real initials were, and she said whatever the hell I want them to be with such an edge to her voice that I shut up.
Now I kneel on the floor with names tumbling through my skull like dominoes, or Old Testament genealogies. John Peabody Gravely was the brother of Robert Gravely who begat Donald Gravely Sr. who begat Old Leon who begat Don Jr., brother of Delilah Jewell Gravely, who begat me, Opal Delilah—
I balk. I’m no Gravely.
I’m a cheat and a liar, a trickster and a tale-teller, a girl born on the ugly underside of everything. I’m nobody, just like my mother before me.
But that name would make us somebodies. I can feel my own story shifting around me, the arc of my life bending out of true.
Maybe that’s why I turn the page. Maybe I’m looking for a story that still feels familiar, or maybe it’s just muscle memory.
The next page is empty except for the dedication, which always felt like secret code, a letter written specifically to me:
To every child who needs a way into Underland. Befriend the Beasts, children, and follow them down.
I turn the next page, and the next, reading until all I can see are monsters drawn in scrabbling black ink, until all I can hear is my mother’s voice, soft and warm as cigarette ash.
Once there was a little girl named Nora Lee who had bad, bad dreams. The dreams were full of blood and teeth, and they frightened her very much, but I will tell you a secret: she loved them, too, because in her dreams the teeth belonged to her.
You see, Nora Lee had been left in the woods when she was a baby, where a wicked fox found her. The fox took her back to his home and fed her sweets and watched her with hungry eyes. She knew one day soon he would gobble her up.
Nora Lee begged the other animals to help her, but no one listened. The fox always wore a coat and tails when he left the house, and smiled often, and no one believed that the owner of such a fine coat and such a wide smile could have such unseemly appetites. They told Nora Lee to hush and be a good girl.
So Nora Lee, who was not a good girl, ran away.
She ran until she came to a wide green river. She didn’t know how to swim, but she thought a wide green river must be better than a fox. Just as she was about to walk into the water, a hare passed by.
“Little girl,” he said, “what are you doing?”
So Nora Lee told him about the bad dreams and the wicked fox.
As it happened, the hare did not much like the fox either. So he told her about a place—a secret place hidden way down deep below the world—where even the darkest dreams might come true. He called it the Underland.
She asked the hare how to find Underland, and he told her to follow the river down. “Follow it deeper than the deepest burrow,” he said, “deeper than the longest roots of the oldest oak.”
So Nora Lee followed the river to the place where it disappeared into the earth, and then she followed it further. And somewhere far below everything, south of the southernmost cellar, deeper than the deepest worm, she found Underland waiting for her.
For a moment she thought she had fallen asleep, because all around her she saw the terrible creatures from her nightmares, monstrous and wrong-shaped. But the beasts in her dreams were not real; the Beasts of Underland were as real as bones or dirt or foxes.
A good girl ought to be frightened of them. She ought to run away.
But Nora Lee, who was not a good girl and never would be, did not run away. She whispered her story to the Beasts of Underland, and they rushed past her into the night, baying for blood.
When Nora Lee climbed out of Underland the next morning she found there was nothing left of the wicked fox but a clean white skull, still smiling that wide smile. For the first time, she smiled back.
Nora Lee supposed this was the part of the story where she lived happily ever after, but she didn’t seem to have a knack for it. She tried, truly she did. She kept quiet and minded her manners. She built a big stone house and a big stone door. She locked the way to Underland and then she buried the key by the sycamore tree.
