Starling House(96)

The wood crumbles in my hands, spilling rich earth and pill bugs down my sleeves. The air that rushes from the mine is stale and fetid, a motel room left all summer with the AC off and the windows shut. The hole I’ve made shows me nothing but featureless black, a darkness so complete it seems almost solid.

I kick through the last of the boards and step into the mines. I have no light, no map, no plan except to place one hand on the dewy stone wall and walk, feeling like a kid who took a dare she shouldn’t have and wants badly to back down.

The floor is uncomfortably soft, my toes sinking into alluvial drifts of soil and fungus, followed by sudden hills of sharp rock, then clammy limestone. I crack my shin hard on a fallen timber and climb over it awkwardly, blindly. In some places the walls have collapsed inward, so that I have to crawl over the pile with my spine scraping the ceiling. The air is cool and foul on my face. The wall vanishes beneath my hand sometimes, when a tunnel branches off, but I never hesitate long. I choose whichever direction leads me down.

I go deeper. Deeper still. I picture weight accumulating above me: dirt and tree roots, paved parking lots, the great metal bones of Big Jack himself.

The tunnel narrows, and the timbers grow sporadic, less square. Soon the shaft is no wider than my shoulders, a rathole carved roughly into the earth. I think of the story Charlotte played for me in the library, that old woman’s voice shaking with a fear that had been passed down through her family like slow poison. Under my palm—raw and stinging now, from dragging along the stone—I can feel the desperate scars of picks and drills, the scratch marks of men driven beyond themselves, into madness.

I think of the Gravelys with their grand columned house and their Sunday dinners, surrounded by an entire town that admires and resents and relies on them, that never thinks for a single minute about this place. This mine, buried beneath them like a body, like a sin tucked under a mattress. I have the sudden, ugly sense that Eden deserved every year of foul luck, every bad dream, every Beast that padded down the streets.

Ahead of me, I see light. The faintest phosphorescence, like the dying hours of a glow stick. After so long in the black I don’t trust it, but it disappears when I close my eyes and returns when I open them.

The light gets brighter. The shaft gets smaller. The air clots in my throat, thick and wet, and a noise rises from the stones, a ceaseless rush. My foot lands on something smooth and hollow, which cracks like an egg. In the eerie half-light I can make out an eye socket, half a grin, a jumble of vertebrae and phalanges. They seem terribly small. From somewhere far away, high above me, comes the somewhat hysterical desire to take a picture and text it to Lacey, as proof that Willy Floyd wasn’t sacrificed in a Satanic ritual.

I step over Willy’s bones and turn sideways to scrape around a final bend, contorting myself through a last desperate crack, and then I’m stumbling into open space. My knees hit stone, and I throw my arms high, expecting teeth or claws, some attack by whatever lives down in this hell below the world.

But it’s no hell. It’s a long cavern, receding into darkness in either direction. On the opposite wall there is an arched doorway set in the wall and a set of stairs rising into the dark. The steps pull at me, strangely familiar, and I know they lead up to a locked door and a cellar full of rubble, to a house collapsing like an old soldier after a long war.

And between the stairs and me, running like a pale ribbon down the middle of the cave, is a river.

I think, distantly, that I should have guessed. I should have known by the sycamores that line the drive to Starling House, the wisteria that riddles its walls. Things that prefer creeksides and swamps, low hollows and valleys that never quite dry out. Their roots have made it all the way down here, worming through the cave ceiling to trail their white fingers in this underground river, drinking deep.

The current is fast but strangely glutinous, slurried. The water is sickly gray, like the Mud River after a big storm, when the utility company has to send out boil advisories. There’s a thin layer of fog lying on the river’s surface. By its pale, dreaming light I can see two shapes caught beneath the current.

Bodies. Eyes closed. Limbs drifting.

One of them is a woman, middle-aged, a little ugly, wearing a long colorless dress that strikes me as a costume, a prop from the Old Time Photo Booth down in Gatlinburg. Except I know it isn’t, because I recognize her. Her mouth hard and small as an early apple, her face overlong, her sleeves stained with ink. I have her picture saved on Jasper’s laptop, copied and pasted from her Wiki page.

Eleanor Starling ought to be nothing but dirt by now—maybe a few molars and metatarsals, the half-moon of a skull—but her skin is smooth and pliant under the water, as if she’s simply sleeping.

The other person, of course, is Arthur Starling. It’s harder to make out his features because the water runs rougher above him, as if his body is a jagged stone. It almost seems to be boiling, and beneath the torrent his tattoos look blistered, raw, as if the river doesn’t like the signs he carved into his skin and wants to wash them away.

I walk into the current without deciding to. The water is precisely the same temperature as my skin, so that I can see it rising up my legs—ankles, shins, knees, thighs—but barely feel it. I reach for Arthur’s collar, holding my chin just above the surface, and tug hard.

He doesn’t move. It’s like his pockets are filled with stones, like his hands are fisted in the riverbed, holding him fast. I try Eleanor next, because why not, because there’s nothing I won’t try now. I’m half expecting her flesh to tear away under my touch, like one of those mummies exposed to light after thousands of years, but she feels exactly like Arthur: soft and alive, but anchored.