On Sunday I wander up to the third floor looking for a stepladder and wind up in a high-ceilinged room full of armchairs and shelves and more books than the public library.
It’s the sort of place I didn’t know existed outside of movie sets, all mullioned windows and oak paneling and leather-bound spines. I see folklore and mythology, collections of fairy tales and children’s rhymes, horror novels and history books and fat Latin dictionaries with half the pages dog-eared. My stomach twists with longing and resentment and wonder.
I snatch a book off the shelf, not even pausing to read the title.
It’s a super old edition of Ovid, written in that awful verse where everything rhymes and “over” is spelled “o’er.” The book falls open to a page titled “The House of Sleep,” followed by a long passage about a drowsing god in a cave. The word “Lethe” is underlined more times than seems strictly sane, the page so deeply indented it’s torn a little. In the margin beside it someone has written a list of Latin names: Acheron, Styx, Cocytus, Pyriphlegethon, Lethe,and then: a sixth river?
And I know without knowing how—unless it’s something in the stark shape of the lettering or the black of the ink—that E. Starling wrote this note.
A throat clears behind me. I jump so badly I drop the book.
Arthur Starling is watching me, Bond-villain-ly, from the shadows of a wingback armchair. There are dozens of books piled around him, bristling with sticky notes, and a stack of neatly labeled folders. Tsa-me-tsa and Pearl Starling, 1906–1929. Ulysses Starling, 1930–1943. Etsuko Starling, 1943–1955.9
Arthur has a thick yellow pad of paper balanced on his knee. His left pinky is silvery gray with graphite, and his sleeves are rolled to the elbow. His wrists look stronger than I would expect from someone whose main hobbies are skulking and frowning, the bones wrapped in stringy muscle and scarred flesh.
“Oh, hi!” I reshelve Ovid and give him an innocent wave. “What you got there?”
His face twists. “Nothing.”
I tilt my head to see the page better. There are notes at the top, tally marks and dates mostly, but the lower half of the page has been overtaken by crosshatching and graphite. “Looks pretty good from here. Is that the sycamore out front?”
He flips the pad over, glowering.
“Are those tattoos?” There are dark lines of ink slinking out from under the rolled cuffs of his shirt, tangling with the jagged lines of scars. I can’t make out any images, but the shapes remind me of the carvings on the front door: eyes and open palms, crosses and spirals.
Arthur rolls his sleeves back down and buttons them pointedly. “I’m paying you for a specific purpose, Miss Opal.” His voice is frigid. “Shouldn’t you be cleaning something?”
That night I leave Starling House with a pair of candlesticks and a fountain pen rolled up in my hoodie, because fuck him.
At least I don’t have to see him very often. Whole weeks pass without an exchange of words longer than “Good morning” when he unlocks the door, and “Well, I’m headed out” as I leave. Every now and then I take a wrong turn and catch a glimpse of hunched shoulders and uncombed hair, but usually the only sign that the house is occupied are the occasional thumps and murmurs from the attic above me, and the slow accretion of dishes in the sink. I might find a fresh pot of coffee or a soup pot still simmering on the stove, smelling wholesome and home-cooked in a way that’s completely foreign to me, but I don’t touch any of it, thinking vaguely of burrows and mounds and what happens to the idiots who eat the fairy king’s food.
Time already passes strangely in Starling House. Sometimes the hours slouch by, and I find myself indulging in little-girl fantasies to occupy myself （I’m Cinderella, forced to scrub the grout lines by my evil stepmother; I’m Beauty, trapped in an enchanted castle by a Beast with a face like a crow’s skull）。 Sometimes the hours skitter away into grimy corners and stained baseboards, and I look up from a gray bucket of water to find the sun hanging near the horizon, and realize the house has swallowed another day, another week.
The only reliable measurement of time is the state of the place.
By the end of February the first floor is almost livable. There’s still a thriving population of spiders and mice, and I can’t do anything about the hunks of plaster that sometimes fall from the ceilings, or the way the floors all seem to slant toward some central point, as if the whole house is collapsing in on itself, but walking down the halls no longer feels like touring a crypt. The tabletops gleam and the windowpanes wink. The rugs are red and blue and deep green, rather than gray, and the smell of bleach and tile cleaner has driven back the black smell of mildew.