I don’t have much of a temper. People like me learn to send their tempers down and inward, where they won’t get you fired or arrested or cussed out. But the haughty curl of his lip sends a white lick of fury up my spine.
I’m opening my mouth to say something I’ll regret—which begins listen here, asshole—when he sweeps past me and on down the hall. He lifts a lazy hand. “There’s a broom in the kitchen closet and supplies under the sink. I’m sure you’ll find your way around.”
His steps creak and ache into the shadows, and then I’m all alone in Starling House.
The air hangs thick and expectant around me. A mirror watches me with my own eyes, spooked gray. I wonder what color Eleanor Starling’s eyes were, and how she died, and how her husband died, and if their bones are buried now beneath the floorboards. Halfway down the hall a door opens with a Hollywood creak, and I swallow the urge to run screaming.
I raise both hands in the air. “Look, I don’t want any trouble.” I don’t believe in ghosts, demons, possessions, aliens, astrology, witchcraft, or vampires, but I know that the person who walks into the haunted house and loudly proclaims that they don’t believe in ghosts is the first one to get gruesomely murdered. “I’m just here to clean, okay?” I’m answered by a meek moan, like a stair beneath a tiptoed foot. I decide to interpret it as permission.
I spend the first hour or two just wandering. Rooms sprout from the halls at random, branching and splitting like the patternless roots of a tree: sitting rooms and parlors, cramped offices and tiled washrooms, closets beneath staircases and ballrooms beneath ribs of rafters. I’ve never been lost in my life—getting lost in Eden would be like getting lost inside my own skin—but I find myself wishing for a spool of red thread to string behind me.
The house is well past dirty and headed for derelict, the sort of filthy that blurs the line between inside and outside. Dust lies so thick on the floors that it gives beneath my shoes, like soil. Wallpaper bubbles and peels. Mold blooms like black eyes in the folds of curtains and corners of couches. Some rooms are torn apart—the furniture overturned and the rugs rucked, mirrors ripped from the walls and shattered, still surrounded by sharp skirts of glass—and some are perversely neat. On the second floor I find a dining room with the table still set for two, spoons and forks laid on napkins the color of lichen. Chicken bones smile up from the plate, thin and yellow.
I back quietly out of that room, pausing only to shove a set of tarnished silver spoons in my back pocket. I figure if you call someone a stray, you should expect a consequence or two.
Beneath all the filth there are problems no amount of housekeeping could address: cracked windowpanes, dripping pipes, floors slanted so badly I feel off-balance. In one room the plaster has fallen away like a calving glacier, so that you can see the studs and lath boards, crusted iron pipes and fat, flaky wasp nests. There are strange white cords wrapped around everything, like oversized cobwebs; it takes a moment for me to recognize them as roots. Those honeysuckle vines must have wriggled their way through the limestone.
The next room is small and bright, with pastel wallpaper and a squashy couch. There are portraits on the walls, their faces filmed with dust. If I squint it could almost be cozy, except for the dirt and mold and the drifts of cicada shells in the windowsills. The couch exhales a stale sweetness when I sit down, as if it remembers open windows and spring breezes.
I should probably be freaked out—this place is eerie and endless, a rotting labyrinth—but mostly I just feel sorry for it. Starling House makes me think of an underfed pet or a broken doll, a thing unloved by the person who promised to love it best.
I give the couch cushion an uncertain pat. “We’ll set you right. Don’t worry.” It’s probably a coincidence that a draft flutters the curtains.
The kitchen is just around the next corner: grimy tile with footprints smeared between the sink and the fridge, a rusted cookstove, a Paleolithic microwave set to the wrong time. The promised cleaning supplies consist of a half-rotten mop chewed into a mouse nest and a box of spray bottles that have melted into a single Chernobyl-like blob, so I end up tearing a curtain into rags and filling a bucket at the sink. The tap hiccups but the water runs clear. The Starlings must have a well or a spring; county water comes out brackish gray and leaves crusted chemical rings in the bathtub.
I return to the almost-cozy sitting room and run my rag over the wainscoting. In two swipes the wash water is black and silty, fly wings and pill bugs bobbing on the surface. I dump it and do it all again, and again, and again. The hours fall into a rhythm of scrubbing, wringing, dumping, filling, the hiss of the tap and the wet slap of the rag. My knees ache. My hands are scoured pink; the cut on my left palm shreds open again. The blood soaks into the floorboards before I can wipe it away.