“Really, Opal? Here?” The real Eleanor laughs. “This is my home.”
I face her, sick of her mean little laugh and her cold little eyes. “No, it isn’t. I mean maybe it used to be, but not anymore.” Her mouth gets very small and hard in her soft child’s face, like the seed in the center of a persimmon, so I keep going. “You left it behind and it became somebody else’s home, over and over again, and all of them loved it just as much as you did. Probably more.”
Her tiny persimmon-seed mouth moves. “No they didn’t.”
“They did. And you know what? It loved them back. It was just a house when you lived in it, a big dead thing full of other dead things, but it’s woken up over the years. Or maybe gone to sleep, I don’t know which.” I think of those long ivory roots trailing in the water, drinking deep from the river of dreams. I think of the wisteria wound around every part of the House, running under the skin of it like veins. Dead things don’t dream, but the House did, and so it was no longer dead. It spent a hundred and fifty years drinking the water and dreaming whatever houses dream—fires in hearths, dishes in sinks, lights in windows—and when it found itself empty it called another hungry, homeless person to itself, and did its best to keep them safe. Until it couldn’t.
I always thought of it like a lighthouse, but it was more like a siren: a beautiful thing perched above certain death, a sweet and deadly voice in the night.
But I swear there will be no more portraits on the wall, no more graves to tend. I swear I will end this, here and now. I will be the last Warden of Starling House.
Eleanor is backed against a wall, her arms outstretched as if she can hold her house still, unchanging. I feel sorry for her. “The House sent me dreams before I ever saw it. It needed me, and I needed it.” I remember the window shining through the trees like a lighthouse. Arthur’s face on the other side of the gates, furious and alone. Motes of dust sparking in slantwise light. My blood soaking into the floorboards.
The sitting room shifts around us, becoming the room I know in the world above. The wallpaper fades and the plaster cracks. The floor polish turns dull and scratched and stains bloom on the bare wood. The narrow Victorian furniture is replaced by a sagging couch, and the walls are crowded with mismatched portraits. The atmosphere shifts, accumulating years of long sunsets and deep winter evenings, rainy afternoons and bitter midnights, decades of striving and hungering and fucking and letting the coffee go cold because your book just got good. Whole generations of living, leading down to Arthur, and then to me.
“Starling House might have been yours in the beginning, Eleanor, but it’s mine now.” I say it as gently as I can, but Eleanor flinches as from a hard slap.
But she bares her small, sharp teeth at me, and says, “Take it, then. I don’t care.” Her eyes shine with an awful light. “You already lost everything else.”
Then she runs from me, disappearing into the House, and I follow.
I don’t have to hurry. I can hear Eleanor’s small feet slapping the stairs, doors slamming behind her, but this is my House now. It will take me wherever I want to be, and no lock will hold against me.
I find her back in the attic room, perched back on her bed with her Beast beside her. The Beast is small and fragile now, like an underfed stray, and it watches me from beneath the safety of Eleanor’s elbow.
“What did you mean?” I ask her, and I am calm, so calm.
That mad gleam still shines in her eyes, triumphal, terrible. “I mean it’s over. I mean that black lake—the ash pond, you called it?—was never built the way it should have been. So many little cracks and fissures, so many places it could break, with just a little bad luck.”
How many times has Bev ranted along the same lines? All anybody has to do is say “coal keeps the lights on” in her hearing and she’s off, showing them pictures of Martin County on her phone. The dirt turned to gray sludge, the houses stained with arsenic and mercury, the ghostly white bellies of the fish floating for miles down the Big Sandy.
The House shakes around me. I breathe carefully. “Eleanor, listen to me. If that stuff hits the river—”
“Then they’ll get what they deserve.”
“Who will, for fuck’s sake?” I’m not breathing carefully anymore. The pipes are whining in the walls, the curtains billowing. “Not Gravely Power, that’s for damn sure. They’ll pay a fine and reopen in two weeks.”
For the first time, Eleanor looks unsure. I sit beside her on the bed, the mattress dipping beneath me. “Why did you stay in Eden, Eleanor?”