Starling House(10)
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?”
“Well, nobody ever saw them inside a church.” I remain silent until Lacey recalls that I don’t go to church, either. Mom went before I was born, she said, but once you’re on the outside, the only way back in is on your knees; neither of us ever liked crawling.
Lacey rushes to add, “And they were always wandering around at night. And they kept strange animals, likely for sacrifices.”
“Sounds messy. Bet they could use a housekeeper.”
Lacey gives me a disapproving look that would have made her meemaw proud, and I spend the rest of my shift restocking and mopping. I clock out without even bothering to dip a hand in the drawer because maybe—assuming this isn’t an elaborate prank or a Satanist ritual or a weird sex thing—I don’t have to anymore.
By the time I get back to room 12, Jasper is passed out in a gangly diagonal across his bed, headphones mashed sideways, the nape of his neck soft and exposed. He must have finished his homework, because his favorite off-brand editing app is up on his screen.
He’s always taking little videos—tree limbs crisscrossing in the wind, tadpoles wriggling in a drying puddle, his own feet running on cracked pavement. Standard moody-teen art, basically, but the angles are odd and unsettling, and he layers so many filters over the images that they acquire a spectral unreality. Lately he’s been stitching them together, weaving them into tiny, strange narratives.
In one of them, a giggling white girl is carving a heart into the trunk of a tree. Dark liquid wells up from the wood, but she ignores it, carving until her hands are slicked red to the wrist. The final shot is her turning to the camera, mouthing I love you.
In the latest one, you see a pair of brown hands lowering a dead bird into the river. The footage does a funny little skip, and then a hand reaches back out of the water, covered in wet black feathers. The hands clasp tight; with passion or violence, it’s impossible to say.