Starling House(46)
I offer no comment, trying very hard not to think of the scars on Arthur’s knuckles, the sword hanging in his bedroom.
“And that house is just—not right.” A strange expression crosses his face then, rigid and inward-facing. I’ve sat through over a hundred horror movies with him, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him afraid.
“Look, it’s nothing, okay? I should have told you, but I didn’t want you to worry.”
“Opal . . .” A considerable pause, then: “I’m not your son.”
“First of all, ew—”
“And I’m not your job. Do you get that?”
“Yeah. Yes, I do.” I’m not lying, but I can’t seem to tell him the truth. How do you tell a sixteen-year-old that he was the only reason you got out of bed for weeks and weeks after the crash? That the whole world was sour and ashen except for him, so you committed every kind of forgery and falsification to make sure they could never take him away from you? That he is the only thing on the only list that will ever matter?
We’re on Cemetery Road now, climbing the hill past the Dollar General and the funeral home. “It’s just that you deserve a whole lot more than all this.” I gesture out the window at Eden. At the flickering neon of the drugstore and the fog-choked sidewalks, empty except for mean bursts of thistles and the amber halos of streetlights. “You’re so smart, and your grades are so good—”
“Why do you think that is?” Jasper straightens, staring at the side of my face with a strange, coaxing urgency. “Why do you think I work twice as hard as anybody else in class?”
“Because you want out of here. I know. I’m working on it, just give me a little more—”
Jasper shakes his head and thumps his back against the seat. His mouth is a furious slash in the rearview mirror. “You know what? I’m staying at Logan’s tonight, stop here.”
“Jasper, hey, come on—” But he’s already fumbling for the latch. He stumbles onto the curb while the truck is still moving and gives the door a one-handed slap. He turns back once. “Oh, that lady gave me a message for you.” He says it with the profound disgust of someone who is too old for secret messages and codes and can’t quite believe he’s being forced to participate. “The message is: ten, ten, ninety-three.”
He leaves, hands jammed hard in his pockets, backpack slung over one shoulder.
I idle on the side of the road for so long that the cab fills with greasy fumes and the sky turns to star-flecked soot. I wonder how Elizabeth Baine found out, and if Jasper recognized the numbers, or if even he has forgotten my real birth date. I wonder if the state would let me appeal his guardianship now that I’m a legal adult, or whether they’d whisk Jasper away from me with bonus misdemeanors for forgery and identity theft.
These thoughts are idle, distant things, because I already know what I’m going to do. I’ve known since the second Baine said my brother’s name in the back of her car, weeks ago. Everything since then has been playing pretend, dreaming about an old house and a grand mystery and a boy with secrets and scars. People like me should know better than to dream.
Sometime before midnight I pull away from the curb and make a wide U-turn in the empty street. I drive back to Starling House with Arthur’s keys pressing against my hip like cold fingers.
During the day the House could be mistaken for a mere building; at night, it never could. It has the obscure topography of a dream or a body, with endless, sinuous hallways and stairs that climb at unnatural angles. The walls heave in and out, a vast rib cage, and Arthur suspects if he were to press his ear to the plaster he would hear the subtle beating of a heart somewhere beneath all the oak and pine and plaster.
Most nights Arthur finds it soothing—it’s nice to imagine that he doesn’t stand alone against the Beasts, even if his only ally is a foolish old house with ambitions of sentience—but tonight the House is restless. Every nail turns fretfully in its hole and the roof tiles clack like chattering teeth. A drainpipe bangs against the wall in the anxious rhythm of a woman drumming her nails on the table. Arthur soothes it as best he can, renewing wards and double-checking charms, but the weather is mild and the doors are locked. He lies awake for a long time, listening, and falls asleep only when Baast curls on his chest.
When he wakes, Baast is standing over him with her back arched and her tail rigid. Arthur’s skin is prickling, as if a chill draft has blown through, and he is suddenly aware that the front gates have been opened. So has the front door. He looks out his round window long enough to see the ghostly creep of fog along the ground, and then he’s running barefoot down the steps with the sword aching in his bandaged hand.
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.