Arthur frowns repressively at the end table. I make a grab for the notepad but Arthur beats me to it. He clutches it close to his chest, looking thoroughly harassed. “Alright! Fine.”
“Is that, ‘Alright, fine, I’ll tell you everything’？”
His eyes don’t meet mine. He flips fastidiously through the pages instead. He wets his lips once, and then he tells me everything.
This is the history of Starling House.
On May 11, 1869, a young woman named Eleanor Starling was married to a local businessman named John Peabody Gravely. The morning after their wedding, John Gravely was found dead. The coroner listed the cause of death as heart failure, but noted that he was a healthy man of no more than forty-five. From this, and from the subject of Eleanor Starling’s later obsessions, we can surmise two things: that his death was not a natural one, and that Eleanor knew it.
Historical evidence cannot tell us whether the young widow mourned her husband, but grief would explain several of her subsequent actions. She chose to remain in Eden, despite having no blood relations or family ties in the area. She never remarried, despite her youth. And she built Starling House on her husband’s property, in close proximity to the mines, and directly above the source of his death.
Construction began by the summer of ’68. The original blueprints were either burned or never made in the first place; several later Starlings have attempted to map the House, but none of their drawings are in agreement, and several of them appear to have changed over time. Eleanor Starling left no record of why she built such a vast and strange house, but the oldest and best-loved book in her collection was a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It has been suggested by subsequent Starlings that she was not building a house but a labyrinth, for much the same reason the King of Crete once did: to protect the world from the thing that lived inside it.
When the house was complete, in February of 1870, Eleanor Starling took up residence and stayed there until her death in 1886. There is substantial evidence that she devoted the remaining years of her life to the study of the place she later called “Underland.” She believed, according to the notes and journals found by her successors, that there was another world beneath, or maybe beside, our own—a terrible, vicious world, populated by monstrous beings. She believed that there were cracks between that world and our own, places where things might leak through, and that one of these rifts lay underneath Eden, Kentucky.
It was not the only such place, by her reckoning. She was convinced that these holes in reality were the source of every ghost story and monster tale, every legend about creatures that crawl out of the dark. She filled her library with folklore and fables, rhymes and songs. She studied them not as fictions, but as records, hints, the faded footprints scattered across time and space.
From her studies she learned that Beasts might be fought. Every culture seemed to have its own defenses against them: silver bullets, crosses, holy words, hamsas, circles of salt, cold iron, blessed water, wards and runes and rituals, a hundred ways of driving back the dark.
In 1877, she was confident enough in her research to commission the making of a sword. It was forged from pure silver by a blacksmith who claimed to have once served the King of Benin. She had it stamped with a dozen different symbols and quenched in water from St. George’s Well and the Ganges. In her papers there was a letter from a convent in France suggesting it had been blessed by a living saint.
From the existence of the sword we can surmise that she planned a great battle. From her sudden disappearance in 1886, we can surmise that she lost. While it’s possible that she ran away, it seems likelier that she was finally taken by the very Beasts she had studied for so long, leaving Starling House empty behind her.
But Starling House was no longer just a house. What had begun as stone and mortar had become something more, with ribs for rafters and stone for skin. It has no heart, but it feels; it has no brain, but it dreams.
In the census of 1880, Eleanor Starling listed her occupation as “Warden of Starling House.” When she died, the House chose a new Warden for itself.
Less than a year after her death, a young gentleman named Alabaster Clay arrived at Starling House. In his letters to his sister he recounted the bad dreams that plagued him, full of hallways and staircases and black birds with black eyes. He said he woke every morning full of yearning for a house he’d never seen.
Eventually, he followed those dreams to Eden. The gates opened for him, and so did the doors. Inside he found a deed in his name, a ring of three iron keys, and a sword. All his subsequent letters to his sister were signed Alabaster Starling.