She wants to say yes. He can see it in the tilt of her body and the hunger in her face, but she says very clearly, “I mean nothing else.” He stares. She licks her lower lip. “Nothing for you.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”
She looks away from him, squinting instead into the empty space above his left ear. “See, when a rich man offers a young woman a lot of money out of the blue, and doesn’t ask for her housekeeping résumé—I’ve been cleaning rooms at the motel for years, not that you care—that young woman might have cause to wonder if he expects her to do more than clean. If maybe he has a weird thing for redheads.” She tucks her hair self-consciously back under her hood. “If, in fact, he expects her to f—”
“Oh God, no.” Arthur wishes very much that his voice hadn’t cracked on the last syllable. “This isn’t—I’m not—” He closes his eyes in brief, mortal humiliation.
When he opens them Opal is smiling. He thinks it’s probably the only genuine smile he’s seen from her: a sly twist of her lips, wry and sharp. “Then sure. I accept.” A wave of warmth rolls down the hall and sighs out the door, smelling of woodsmoke and wisteria. Her smile widens, revealing three crooked teeth. “When do I start?”
Arthur exhales. “Tomorrow. If you like.”
“You got cleaning supplies?”
“Yes.” He’s pretty sure there are some bluish spray bottles beneath a sink somewhere, and a mop in the third-floor bathtub, although he’s never used either. He isn’t sure his parents did either; the House simply had a shine to it, back then.
“What are my hours?”
“You may arrive any time after dawn and leave before sunset.”
Wariness slides like a fox across her face, there and gone again. “What a super normal way of putting it. See you tomorrow, then.”
She’s turning away when he says, “Wait.”
Arthur draws a jangling metal ring from his pocket. There are three keys on the ring, although there should be four, each fashioned with long black teeth and a stylized, snakelike S. He removes a single key and extends his hand to Opal. She flinches, and he thinks sourly that she is much more frightened by him than she’s pretending to be, and much less than she should be.
He dangles the key. “For the front gate. Don’t lose it.”
She takes it from him without touching his skin; he wonders if her hands are still cold, and why she can’t be bothered to wear a proper coat.
Opal runs her thumb over the shaft of the key with the corner of her mouth hooked in an expression slightly too sad to be a smile. “Just like the book, huh?”
Arthur feels himself stiffen. “No.”
He tries to shut the door in her face, but it won’t latch. It jams for no reason at all, as if the frame has swollen or the floor has warped in the few minutes since he opened it.
Opal’s face slides into the gap. The House casts blue shadows across her skin, swallowing her freckles. “What’s your name?”
He glowers. She slouches one shoulder insolently against the frame, as if prepared to wait, and it occurs to him that this entire absurd scheme relies on Opal being the sort of person who learns lessons, who lets things lie; he wonders, too late, if he made a mistake.
“Arthur,” he says, and the syllables sound foreign in his mouth. He can’t recall the last time he said it out loud.
He gets a final glimpse of her face, the wary shape of her eyes and the quick pulse at her throat, that single damned curl escaping again from her ratty hood—red as clay, red as rust—before the door comes abruptly unstuck.
The latch gives a contented click and Arthur is alone in Starling House once more. He doesn’t mind it—after a certain number of years the loneliness becomes so dense and rancid it’s almost a companion in itself, which creeps and oozes at your heels—but now the hall seems hollow. There’s a forlorn slant to the walls, and dust hangs like ash in the air.
“Tomorrow,” he says, quietly. The dust motes dance.
Walking away from Starling House feels like climbing back through the wardrobe or up the rabbit hole, waking up from some heady dream. It seems impossible it could exist in the same world as abandoned Burger Kings and cigarette butts and the candy-red logo of Tractor Supply. But there’s the key in my hand, heavy and cold and very real, like something plucked from the pages of The Underland.
I wonder if Arthur’s read it as many times as I have. If he ever dreams in black-and-white, if he ever feels a watchful weight on the nape of his neck, the imaginary pressure of animal eyes.