Starling House(14)

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.