Starling House(56)
The House thrived under their stewardship. The floors didn’t creak and the windows didn’t whistle in winter; the kitchen always smelled like lemons and the wisteria was always in bloom. Lynn and Oscar loved Starling House, and they fought for what they loved.
Their son was less worthy. He was a weak and selfish young man, given to fanciful drawings and silly daydreams. He denied his fate as long as he could. He thought for a while the House would find someone else, someone braver—until he saw the cost of his cowardice.
Lynn and Oscar Starling died in 2007. That very night he made his oath and became the new Warden of Starling House.
But he swore a second, private oath: that he would be the last.
SEVENTEEN
I saw this old map of the Mississippi once. The cartographer drew the river as it actually is, but he also drew all the previous routes and channels the river had taken over the last thousand years. The result was a mess of lines and labels, a tangle of rivers that no longer existed except for the faint scars they left behind. It was difficult to make out the true shape of the river beneath the weight of its own ghosts.
That’s how the history of Starling House feels to me now, like a story told so many times the truth is obscured, caught only in slantwise glimpses. Maybe that’s how every history is.
The Starlings are watching me from their portraits, unalike but all the same. Each of them drawn here by their dreams, each of them bound to a battle I still don’t understand. Each of them buried before their time.
Arthur is watching me, too. His eyes are red, sunk deep in the uneven planes of his face. Watery blood is seeping from his throat again but he keeps his chin high and his spine stiff. He looks cold and a little cruel, except for the slight tremble in his hands. His tell, Mom would call it.
“So, the last Warden. That’s you, isn’t it?” My voice is loud in the hush of the house. “What did you mean, last?”
“I meant,” Arthur says, “that there wouldn’t be another Warden after me.”
“Oh? You don’t think there’s anybody out there having strange dreams about a big empty house?” Arthur was born to this house, but maybe I was chosen for it. Maybe I don’t have to be a Gravely, after all. “You don’t think maybe somebody will come along after you—”
“The Starlings have been fighting this war for generations!” His hands are shaking worse, his tone vicious. “They’ve bled for this place, died for it, and it’s not enough. It’s getting—” Arthur bites the sentence off, looking up at the portraits with his lips pale and hard. “Someone has to end it.”
“And that’s going to be you.” As I watch, a little blood drips from his collar onto the hellcat. “And what army?”
Arthur’s lips go even paler, pressed tight. “I don’t require an army. Every Starling has found new wards and spells, weapons that work against the Beasts. I’ve taken their studies further.” He rubs his wrist as he talks, thumb digging into his tattoos hard enough to hurt. The wind moves mournfully under the eaves. “All I need is a way through that damn door.”
There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of doors in Starling House, but I know which one he means. “And you don’t have the key.”
“No.”
“And you can’t pick the lock.”
“No.”
“And you can’t, I don’t know, blow it up?”
His mouth ripples. “I would think, by now, that you would know the laws of physics do not always apply in this house.”
I’m about to ask if he’s tried “open sesame” when a rhyme goes lilting through my mind: she buried the key by the sycamore tree. “Have you dug around the sycamore? That big old one out front?” I regret the question as soon as I ask it, because what if I’m right? What if I’ve just handed Arthur the key to Hell? I have a sudden, mad urge to circle my fingers around his wrists, to hold him here with me in the world above.
But Arthur makes a small, exasperated noise. “Eleanor Starling left all her drafts and sketches of that book in this house. I’ve read each version fifty times. I’ve examined the drawings under microscopes and black lights. Of course I’ve dug around the sycamore.” The exasperation subsides. In its absence he merely sounds tired. “There’s nothing there. If there ever was a key, Eleanor must have destroyed it. She wanted the way to Underland to remain closed.”
Relief moves through me in a searing wave, far too intense. I swallow and say, somewhat at random, “I don’t know. What about the dedication?”
Arthur is frowning at me. “It doesn’t have a dedication.”
“Yes it—” I close my mouth. Maybe Eleanor Starling’s drafts and manuscripts didn’t include the dedication; maybe Arthur hasn’t read the later editions. I hope, suddenly and desperately, that he hasn’t. “I still don’t understand why you’d want to go down there in the first place. I mean, look at you.” I let my eyes move over him, lingering on the oozing red furrows along his neck, the rusty patches on the couch where blood has dried and flaked from his skin. “Why are you doing any of this?”
The small muscles of his jaw clench. “It’s the duty of the Warden to wield the sword,” he says stiffly. “To keep the House and ward the walls and do your damnedest to keep the Beasts from breaching the gates.”