I don’t remember the rest of the day, but I remember the light changing: noon to dusk, dusk to twilight, twilight to night. My uncle John stood up from the dinner table and held out his hand, as if I would take it, as if I would follow him to his bed like a sow to slaughter.
I ran. He followed.
He followed me to his own mine, and hesitated at the edge of the dark. I heard him calling after me, cajoling, pleading, cursing, demanding, but I did not stop. I went down, and down, and down.
I found the river. I drank the smallest sip, like the boatman told me, and fell into Underland. And there were the creatures from my nightmares, animals made of teeth and claws, fury and justice. They looked at me as if they’d been waiting for me. I wept with joy, with terror, with awful love. I told them about my uncle and showed them the ring on my finger, and they ran into the darkness. When they returned, their muzzles were wet and red. I wiped them clean with the muddy hem of my wedding dress. Then I slept, at peace.
I woke up at the bottom of the river. I crawled to the shore, retching, coughing. I was too frightened to return to the mines—what if it had all been a lovely dream? what if my uncle was still alive, calling for me?—but the boatman had told me there was another way out. A natural cave that twisted up to a sinkhole on the north side of town. I didn’t know till later it was on Gravely land.
It was a hard climb back to the surface. By the time I saw the sun again my palms were raw and my dress was ragged. I crawled out into the dusking light and lay in the wet grass. I saw five birds cross the sky above me. All birds are black at that hour, but I decided they were my birds. Starlings, my father had called them, purchased only because he liked the look of caged things. But they were free now, and so was I.
They say I was laughing when they found me. I don’t recall. I don’t recall much of the court proceedings, either. All of it felt mystical to me, a series of rituals that led to my own metamorphosis. I had been a nameless little girl, and now I was a rich widow. I had been trapped, and now I was not.
I could have gone anywhere in the world, do you know that? I could have run away from Eden and lived off my mother’s stolen fortune until I forgot the sound of the river above and the taste of the river below. But I stayed. God help me, I stayed.
As my uncle’s widow, I had a claim on Gravely land. I let Uncle Robert skulk off with the more valuable half—the mines and the big house—but I kept the acreage on the north side of the river. They made out the deed to my married name first, but the sight of it sickened me, so I tore it up and had them write another. To my maiden name,I said. Eleanor Starling. The name tasted clean in my mouth.
I hired an architect as soon as the deed was signed. I’d never had a home, you see. My mother and I had moved from rented room to wayhouse, dodging rumors and surviving on what little my father left us, and the white house on the hill was merely a place I couldn’t leave. So I built myself everything I’d ever dreamed I would have: drawing rooms and ballrooms, libraries and parlors, hallways full of doors that only I could unlock.
It was more than a home, of course. It was a labyrinth, with the way to Underland at its heart, and high stone walls all around. I couldn’t tell you whether I was more terrified that someone would find their way down there, or that something would come crawling out. All I know is that I dreamed of the Beasts every night, their teeth stained with my uncle’s blood, and that I was often woken by the noises I made in my sleep. I could never tell if I’d been laughing or screaming.
I thought I would be happy there. I had a name and a home of my own, and enough money to keep both for as long as I lived. But instead I was a ghost haunting my own house. I wondered sometimes if I’d drowned that night, and just didn’t know it.
It was the loneliness, I think. The townsfolk hated me and kept hating me, with an intensity that comes from shame. The only company I had was my starlings, who bred and multiplied until they rose sometimes from the sycamores in great black clouds. I used to watch them from the attic window, the flock lifting and falling, writhing like a dark ribbon in the sky, and think of my poor Beasts trapped under the earth.
I was too frightened to go back into Underland and find them, but I loved them too well to leave. So I studied them. I had the twin privileges of time and money, and I poured them all into Underland. I ordered books on history and geography, mythology and monsters, folklore and fable. I taught myself Latin and puzzled through the Cherokee syllabary. I made charms and wards, forged four keys and a sword guided only by myth and mysticism. There was nothing in my library that precisely resembled Underland or the Beasts, but I saw their shadows in every tale of demons or monsters, every story about teeth waiting in the night.