Starling House(51)

He should look like a fool—a boy standing in his own yard long after midnight, his shirt misbuttoned, one sock missing, wielding a sword against nothing at all—and he does, but the kind of fool that breaks your heart. I don’t know what he’s fighting or why, but I know he’s losing.

“Arthur?” I say his name softly, carefully, remembering the chill of his blade passing inches away from my face.

His spine goes rigid. His head lifts, turns very slowly toward me. I expect him to be angry—I have, after all, trespassed on his property twice in one night, this time while wearing gym shorts and an undershirt—but he looks closer to despairing.

“No.” He says it very firmly, like he thinks I’m an apparition he might banish with sufficient effort.

“Look, I know I shouldn’t have come, but I had this dream and I thought—is that blood?” One of his sleeves is blotted black, the fabric clinging to his flesh. There’s more of it shining down one temple, matting his hair, slicking his hands around the hilt.

“Opal, you have to go now—” His sword tip wavers as he says it, sagging slightly.

That’s when it happens. A sudden, invisible strike, an attack from nowhere that sends him staggering to one knee. A fresh wound appears in its wake, four deep scores dug across his throat. Blood floods down his neck, a black sheet that soaks his shirt and pools in the hollow between his collarbones.

The sword makes a dull clatter as it hits the gravel. Arthur follows it, his body folding gently, his eyes on mine.

I think I must be screaming, but I can’t hear it over the wild moaning of Starling House. It’s as if every loose floorboard has creaked at once, as if every joist and rafter warped themselves against the grain. Shingles hit the ground like fists beating uselessly against the earth.

I am abruptly aware that my knees are studded with stones. That my hands are snarled in cotton, wet and warm. That I’m saying silly, useless things like “no, no” and “hey, come on” and his name, over and over.

I haul him onto his back and he blinks up at me, eyes fogged and faraway. One of his hands lifts sluggishly into the air and comes to rest against the tangled nest of my hair. He says, in a voice like a rusted saw blade, “Thought I told you to run.” Surely, if he were truly dying, he could not manage to sound so profoundly exasperated with me.

I cover his hand with mine, turning my face in to the heat of his palm, aware that I am completely and permanently blowing my cover as a disinterested housekeeper but unable in this moment to care. “I did.” I push harder against his hand, pressing our skin together. “You goddamn fool.”

“Thought . . . never come back . . . was implied.”

I shift so that I’m holding his hand in mine, our thumbs hooked around each other’s wrists. The salt of his blood stings my scraped palms, but I don’t let go. “You’re coming too. I don’t know what the hell is going on, but—”

I stop talking, because something strange is happening to me. It begins in my palm, at the precise place where my blood mingles with Arthur’s: a spreading chill, a deadening cold. It flows up my wrist, laps across my sternum. I feel like I’m walking slowly into a cold river, the water rising fast.

Arthur is saying something, pulling weakly at my shoulders. I hardly hear him. I’m too busy staring at the mist that surrounds us, which is suddenly much more than mist. Somewhere beneath the terror I feel a distant, childish disappointment; I’d always thought Eleanor Starling was a writer of pure imagination, a liar of the highest order, just like me.

Now I know she never told anything but the truth.

I used to have nightmares about the Beasts of Underland.

Honestly, who didn’t? I read somewhere there was an animated adaptation in the works back in the eighties, but little kids puked during the early screeners so the whole project was pulled. I don’t know if that’s true, but I know I used to stare at E. Starling’s illustrations and imagine that the Beasts had moved since the last time I’d looked, as if they might creep off the page on those racked and tortured limbs.

The creature that crouches on the steps of Starling House—its body the color of mist, its eyes the color of midnight, its legs bent beneath it like fractured bones—is far worse than any of my nightmares or daydreams. It’s as if someone had given a child a piece of white chalk and told her to draw a wolf, but the only thing she knew about wolves was that they frightened her. There are teeth. There are claws. There is a long, lupine skull. But the spine is warped, and the fur drifts and twists like mist in a gentle wind, faintly translucent. Also, it’s way, way too big.

I don’t understand how a picture-book monster came to be standing in the ordinary springtime moonlight of Eden, Kentucky, but I know this is when I run. This moment, right here—as the Beast is gathering itself, as its lips peel away from its canines and its tendons flex beneath translucent flesh—is exactly when a girl like me splits. This is the river closing over my head, the cold filling my lungs, my own death staring at me with black and pitiless eyes. Last time I let go of my mother’s hand and left her to die alone, and I know with weary certainty that I’m going to do it again.

I pull my hand away from Arthur’s. Our blood separates with a faint, gluey pop.

I rise to a crouch. The Beast lowers its head, shoulder blades high and jagged on either side of its spine. There’s a wariness to it, as if it doesn’t much like Arthur or his sword. For the first time I notice the wounds along its flanks, and the mats of silvery fur caught around the doorway. There’s a pool of pale mist spilled across the threshold, as if the Beast had to fight its way free of Starling House. Even now I see vines creeping across the steps, coiling around its claws only to be ripped away.