Starling House(20)
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?
And I know without knowing how—unless it’s something in the stark shape of the lettering or the black of the ink—that E. Starling wrote this note.
A throat clears behind me. I jump so badly I drop the book.
Arthur Starling is watching me, Bond-villain-ly, from the shadows of a wingback armchair. There are dozens of books piled around him, bristling with sticky notes, and a stack of neatly labeled folders. Tsa-me-tsa and Pearl Starling, 1906–1929. Ulysses Starling, 1930–1943. Etsuko Starling, 1943–1955.9
Arthur has a thick yellow pad of paper balanced on his knee. His left pinky is silvery gray with graphite, and his sleeves are rolled to the elbow. His wrists look stronger than I would expect from someone whose main hobbies are skulking and frowning, the bones wrapped in stringy muscle and scarred flesh.
“Oh, hi!” I reshelve Ovid and give him an innocent wave. “What you got there?”
His face twists. “Nothing.”
I tilt my head to see the page better. There are notes at the top, tally marks and dates mostly, but the lower half of the page has been overtaken by crosshatching and graphite. “Looks pretty good from here. Is that the sycamore out front?”
He flips the pad over, glowering.
“Are those tattoos?” There are dark lines of ink slinking out from under the rolled cuffs of his shirt, tangling with the jagged lines of scars. I can’t make out any images, but the shapes remind me of the carvings on the front door: eyes and open palms, crosses and spirals.
Arthur rolls his sleeves back down and buttons them pointedly. “I’m paying you for a specific purpose, Miss Opal.” His voice is frigid. “Shouldn’t you be cleaning something?”
That night I leave Starling House with a pair of candlesticks and a fountain pen rolled up in my hoodie, because fuck him.
At least I don’t have to see him very often. Whole weeks pass without an exchange of words longer than “Good morning” when he unlocks the door, and “Well, I’m headed out” as I leave. Every now and then I take a wrong turn and catch a glimpse of hunched shoulders and uncombed hair, but usually the only sign that the house is occupied are the occasional thumps and murmurs from the attic above me, and the slow accretion of dishes in the sink. I might find a fresh pot of coffee or a soup pot still simmering on the stove, smelling wholesome and home-cooked in a way that’s completely foreign to me, but I don’t touch any of it, thinking vaguely of burrows and mounds and what happens to the idiots who eat the fairy king’s food.