His mouth ripples. “I would think, by now, that you would know the laws of physics do not always apply in this house.”
I’m about to ask if he’s tried “open sesame” when a rhyme goes lilting through my mind: she buried the key by the sycamore tree. “Have you dug around the sycamore? That big old one out front?” I regret the question as soon as I ask it, because what if I’m right? What if I’ve just handed Arthur the key to Hell? I have a sudden, mad urge to circle my fingers around his wrists, to hold him here with me in the world above.
But Arthur makes a small, exasperated noise. “Eleanor Starling left all her drafts and sketches of that book in this house. I’ve read each version fifty times. I’ve examined the drawings under microscopes and black lights. Of course I’ve dug around the sycamore.” The exasperation subsides. In its absence he merely sounds tired. “There’s nothing there. If there ever was a key, Eleanor must have destroyed it. She wanted the way to Underland to remain closed.”
Relief moves through me in a searing wave, far too intense. I swallow and say, somewhat at random, “I don’t know. What about the dedication?”
Arthur is frowning at me. “It doesn’t have a dedication.”
“Yes it—” I close my mouth. Maybe Eleanor Starling’s drafts and manuscripts didn’t include the dedication; maybe Arthur hasn’t read the later editions. I hope, suddenly and desperately, that he hasn’t. “I still don’t understand why you’d want to go down there in the first place. I mean, look at you.” I let my eyes move over him, lingering on the oozing red furrows along his neck, the rusty patches on the couch where blood has dried and flaked from his skin. “Why are you doing any of this?”
The small muscles of his jaw clench. “It’s the duty of the Warden to wield the sword,” he says stiffly. “To keep the House and ward the walls and do your damnedest to keep the Beasts from breaching the gates.”
He makes it sound so noble, so tragic, like one of those medieval ballads that ends with a knight lying dead on the field of battle with his lady weeping over his broken body. I picture myself finding him slumped in the hall or sprawled on the driveway, his throat torn out but his sword still in hand, and a panicked, senseless fury boils up my spine. “Oh, right, you’re the Warden, of course.”
I’m aware that my tone has edged away from sarcastic and toward genuine outrage, that I’m giving away a game I shouldn’t even be playing, but I don’t care. “It’s your birthright,I forgot.” He flinches from the word, eyes white-ringed. “Did you have to swear it on the full moon? Was there a blood sacrifice? Because I’d hate to hear Lacey Matthews say she told me so—”
“Stop it.” He says it very quietly, face turned as if he’s speaking to the hellcat still curled in his lap.
“Do you want to die, is that your deal?” I’m mildly surprised to find that I’m on my feet, fingers curled into fists, ribs screaming. “Because it sure looks like it. You could have called me, you could have—I don’t know—hidden in a closet, or run away—”
“I did. I told you.” He doesn’t shout, but his voice has a rasp to it that makes me think he’d like to. His features are white and contorted, aggressively ugly. I make a distant note that this is what Arthur looks like when he’s actually angry, rather than just pretending. “My parents didn’t let me go off to school, I ran away. Because I was tired of living in a ghost story, because I wanted a nice normal life with lockers and—and stupid worksheets—and for a while I thought I’d done it. Made a clean getaway. For two years, I didn’t dream at all.”
It occurs to me that I would have been about twelve when he ran away to school. That my dreams began just when Starling House lost its heir. A whole string of what-ifs and might-have-beens unfurls in my head, an alternate life where I took up the sword instead of Arthur. I stamp on it.
“I came home because the town commissioner called me to complain. My parents had stopped picking up the groceries, see, and it was all rotting outside the gate, attracting vermin. It was a public nuisance, he said.”
I remember—in a cold, unwilling rush—what Bev said when I asked her about the Starlings. How the boy didn’t call the police for days after his parents died. How he didn’t shed a tear, but just told the coroner it was past his suppertime.
At the time, the story scared me. Now I feel nothing but terrible, familiar grief. I remember my first meal after the crash: the constable brought me a Happy Meal and I sat staring at the bright-colored box in my lap, printed with smiling, bumbling cartoons, and realized all at once that I was too old for it. That I’d spent the last minutes of my childhood dying on a riverbank in the cold light of the power plant, dreaming there were warm arms wrapped around me, and when I woke up the next morning I had outgrown such youthful fantasies.