Starling House(13)
The book was adapted as a serialized graphic novel in the 2010s.
The Norman Rockwell Museum organized an art exhibition in 2015 titled Starling’s Heirs: A History of Dark Fantasy Illustration, which included works by Rovina Cai, Brom, and Jenna Barton.
Further Reading [edit]
??Mandelo, L. (1996). “Beastly Appetites: Queer Monstrosity in E. Starling’s Text.” In The Southern Gothic Critical Reader. Salem Press.
??Liddell, Dr. A. (2016). “From Wonderland to Underland: White Femininity and the Politics of Escape.” American Literary History. 24 (3): 221–234.
??Atwood, N. (2002). Gothic Children’s Illustration from Starling to Burton. Houghton Mifflin.
FIVE
I don’t dream of the house that night. I don’t dream at all, actually, which is weird for me; I often wake up with the taste of river water and blood in my mouth, broken glass in my hair, a scream drowning in my chest. But that morning, the first one after I set foot on Starling land, there’s nothing but a deep quiet inside me, like the dead air between radio stations.
The gates of Starling House greet me with their empty iron eyes. My left hand aches, but this time I have the key strung around my neck on a red lanyard. The thunk of tumblers turning feels more dramatic than it is, a tectonic shifting I can feel through my shoes, and then I’m walking up the drive with the key knocking against my breastbone.
Starling House still looks like God scooped it up from the cover of a Gothic novel and dropped it on the banks of the Mud River, and I still like it far more than I should. I pretend the busted windowpanes are jagged little mouths, grinning at me.
Arthur Starling answers the door in a rumpled sweater that doesn’t fit, his eyes the resentful red of someone who does not appreciate being conscious before noon.
I give him several thousand watts of cheery smile and a merciless “Good morning!” I squint up at the sun, gleaming reluctantly through the branches. “You said anytime after dawn was fine.”
His eyes narrow to bitter slits.
“Can I come in? Where should I start?”
He closes his eyes completely, as if he is preventing himself from slamming the door in my face only through devout prayer, and steps aside.
Walking across the threshold of Starling House is like stepping from winter straight into summer: the air is sweet and rich and warm. It slides down my throat, goes straight to my head. The walls seem to lean toward me. My feet feel rooted in place—I have a vision of vines pushing up between the floorboards to twine around my ankles, nails driving up through the soft flesh of my feet—
The door snaps shut behind me, sharp as a slap. The walls straighten up.
I turn to see Arthur watching me from the dimness, his expression flat and unreadable, his palm flat on the door. This side is carved up just like the outside, except the neat rows of signs and symbols have been interrupted by a random crosshatch of deep, ragged lines, almost like claw marks.
I nod to the door, grasping at normalcy. “You got a dog?”
“No.” I wait, hoping he’s about to add some perfectly reasonable explanation about a rabid raccoon or an accident with a hatchet, but all he says is “Mother said we had enough to take care of without getting a pet.”
“In my experience you don’t get pets, they get you.” When I left this morning the hellcat was watching me with her usual deranged intensity from under the dumpster. “Don’t you ever have any strays turn up around here?” There are always strays in Eden, kittens with oozy eyes and yellow dogs with ribs like the tines of a pitchfork.
“No.” His eyes flick over me, lingering pointedly on the holes in my jeans, and his upper lip curls. “At least, not until recently.”
I don’t have much of a temper. People like me learn to send their tempers down and inward, where they won’t get you fired or arrested or cussed out. But the haughty curl of his lip sends a white lick of fury up my spine.
I’m opening my mouth to say something I’ll regret—which begins listen here, asshole—when he sweeps past me and on down the hall. He lifts a lazy hand. “There’s a broom in the kitchen closet and supplies under the sink. I’m sure you’ll find your way around.”
His steps creak and ache into the shadows, and then I’m all alone in Starling House.
The air hangs thick and expectant around me. A mirror watches me with my own eyes, spooked gray. I wonder what color Eleanor Starling’s eyes were, and how she died, and how her husband died, and if their bones are buried now beneath the floorboards. Halfway down the hall a door opens with a Hollywood creak, and I swallow the urge to run screaming.
I raise both hands in the air. “Look, I don’t want any trouble.” I don’t believe in ghosts, demons, possessions, aliens, astrology, witchcraft, or vampires, but I know that the person who walks into the haunted house and loudly proclaims that they don’t believe in ghosts is the first one to get gruesomely murdered. “I’m just here to clean, okay?” I’m answered by a meek moan, like a stair beneath a tiptoed foot. I decide to interpret it as permission.
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.