Starling House(99)
This is a different Starling House from the one I know. The trim is yardstick-straight and the wallpaper is crisp, unmarred by light switches or outlets. Every piece of furniture is polished and every floorboard gleams. It looks fresh-built, as if the painters left an hour ago. It’s beautiful, but I find myself looking for cobwebs and stains with a weird ache in my chest. The House feels like a mere house, a dead structure that hasn’t yet learned how to dream.
Eleanor isn’t in the hallway, but my feet know where to go. Up one set of stairs, and another, and another, into the attic room that now belongs to Arthur, but didn’t always.
It looks bleak and bare in his absence. There are no pictures tacked to the wall, no warm lamps lit. There’s just a narrow iron bed where Eleanor sits with her ankles crossed and her hands folded. Behind her, its body curled protectively around her, its dimensions hideously distorted to fit inside the room, is a Beast. This one has the short, curved horns of a goat, but its body is sinuous, almost catlike. It makes no move to attack me, but merely watches, vertebrae twitching.
“Hi,” I say, very awkwardly, because I don’t know what you’re supposed to say to a girl who is also a grown woman, a fictional character who is also a person, a villain who might also be a victim.
It seems I chose poorly, because Eleanor doesn’t answer. She doesn’t even blink, just watches me with those hard black eyes.
“I’m Opal.” I hesitate, uncertain whether the names Gravely or Starling would please her or upset her, and leave my first name unaccompanied.
Still, Eleanor watches me. I’m suddenly very tired of this haunted Gothic orphan performance, tired of waiting politely while Arthur bleeds below us. “Listen, I’m sorry to bother you, but I need you to call off your, uh, friends.” I gesture uncomfortably to the Beast still curled at her back. “That man down there isn’t your enemy.”
“No?” Some rational part of my brain flinches away from the sound of her voice. It’s too low, too precise, too knowing—an adult’s voice in the mouth of a little girl. “He came to make war on my poor Beasts, did he not?”
“No. Well, maybe, yes, but he has to. Do you know what they do, up there? They kill people. They—my mother—” I feel it again, the weight of the river on my chest, the chill of the water in my lungs.
An odd, furtive look crosses Eleanor’s features. It makes me think of Jasper when he let the hellcat into room 12 even when he knew she had fleas. It’s the first time Eleanor has looked like an actual child. “It’s in their nature.” It’s almost a pout.
I cross my arms and use the same voice I used on Jasper. “What are they, Eleanor? What is Underland? Is this—are we in another world?” I feel stupid saying the words, but I’m also standing in the ghost of a house that hasn’t existed for more than a century.
Eleanor has turned away from me to smooth her hand over the gray seam of her quilt. “I used to think so.”
I want to cross the room and shake her, hard, but her Beast is watching me with an eye like a dead coal. I wait her out, instead.
Eleanor strokes the ridge of its skull, almost lovingly. “I used to think the Beasts came from somewhere else—Hell, I thought at first, then Heaven, then history, then myth—but now I know better. Now I know they only ever came from me.”
“What,” I say, with a degree of patience I find admirable, given that I left most of my heart on the grass three floors below us. “Does that mean.”
Eleanor tilts her head, her tone cooling. “If this river had a name like its sisters in the underworld, it would be Phantasos, or maybe Hypnos, and it would belong to Morpheus.” I’m flipping through threadbare memories of Edith Hamilton and Metamorphoses,trying and failing to understand, when Eleanor says, softy, “It is the river of dreams.”
The word “dreams” strikes me like a thrown stone. It sinks into my mind easily, as if I were expecting it, leaving no ripples behind.
“What does that mean?” I ask, but I already know the answer.
“It means these waters give form to our dreams, however foul. It means the only monsters here are the ones we make.” Eleanor looks at her Beast again, her small hand vanishing between the white blades of its hackles. The look in her eyes is almost tender, as a mother to a child, or as a dreamer to their favorite dream.
Repulsion rises in me, and anger. “You made them? You—why?”
Her head twists on the fragile stalk of her neck, uncannily quick. Her eyes are mean slivers. “You don’t care.” It sounds like a well-worn complaint, whetted by years of use. “No one ever did before, no one does now. None of you know the truth of it, and you prefer it that way.”
The words strike an uncomfortable resonance in my skull. I swallow twice, dry-mouthed, and say, “So tell me.”
“You won’t listen.” Her tone is still low and vicious, but there’s a new emotion rising from the mean depths of her eyes. An old and desperate hunger, a want she tried and failed to bury.
I walk across the floor, which doesn’t creak here, and kneel beside the bed. “Tell me, Eleanor. I’ll listen.”
She fights it, but the hunger wins in the end.
This is my story.
No one listened to it before, and if they listened they did not believe it, and if they believed it they did not care. I am certain you are the same, but I will tell it anyway, because it has been so long since I had anyone to tell.