The rational half of my brain recognizes that this place is a wreck and an eyesore that should be condemned by the health department and shoved into the nearest sinkhole; the less rational part of me thinks about every haunted house movie I’ve ever seen, every pulpy book cover with a hot white woman running away from a silhouetted mansion.
An even less rational part of me is curious.
I don’t know why—maybe the shape of it reminds me of an E. Starling illustration, all strange angles and deep shadows, like a poorly kept secret. Maybe I just have a soft spot for the neglected and abandoned.
The front steps are slick with matted black leaves. The door is an imperious arch that might once have been red or brown but is now the nothing-color of afternoon rain. The surface is scarred and stained; it’s only up close that I see there are tiny shapes carved roughly into the wood. Hundreds of them—horseshoes and crooked crosses and open eyes, spirals and circles and malformed hands that run in long rows like hieroglyphs, or lines of code. Some of them I almost recognize from Mom’s tarot decks and astrology charts, but most of them are unfamiliar, like letters from an alphabet I don’t know. There’s a derangement to them, a desperation that tells me I should leave before I wind up ritually beheaded or sacrificed on a stone altar in the basement.
I step closer instead.
I lift my hand and knock three times at the door to Starling House. I give him a couple of minutes—I figure it’ll take a second to finish up his brooding or lurking or whatever it is he does in there—before knocking again. I shuffle through the dead leaves, wondering if he’s gone out for a drive, and then if he even has a license. I try and fail to picture him practicing his parallel parking with Mr. Cole in the passenger seat.
I’m about to knock a third time when the door whips open in a rush of heat, and there he is.
The heir to Starling House is even uglier by daylight: his brows flat and heavy over a twisted nose, his eyes like a pair of mine shafts burrowed into a chalk cliff. The eyes widen.
I wait for him to say something normal, like Hello? or Can I help you?,but he merely stares down at me in mute horror, like a human gargoyle.
I go for a breezy smile. “Morning! Or afternoon, I guess. We met the other night, but I thought I’d come introduce myself properly. My name’s Opal.”
He blinks several times at my outstretched hand. He crosses his arms without shaking it. “I believe,” he grates, “I advised you to run.”
I smile a little harder. “I did.”
“I thought ‘and never come back’ was implied.”
His voice is so dry, so thoroughly harassed, that my smile goes briefly crooked. I iron it straight. “Well, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m here because”—your goddamn house is haunting me—“because I’m taking an architecture class online, and I was hoping to take some pictures for my project?” I don’t even know if the community college offers online classes in architecture, but I figure it’s a good excuse to go poking around, driving the dream-house out of my head and replacing it with the dull facts of dirty wallpaper and creaking stairs.
“You want to take . . . pictures. For your”—his scowl deepens by several degrees—“architecture class.”
“Yep. Can we talk inside?”
“No.”
I give the slightly theatrical shiver that generally compels men to drape their sweaters around my shoulders. “It’s pretty chilly out here.” It’s freezing, actually, one of those mean February days when the sun never quite rises and the wind has white teeth.
“Then,” he says, biting into each word, “you should have worn a coat.”
It’s an effort to keep my voice sweet and stupid. “Look, I just need a couple of pictures. Please?” I gesture at the house, the hall vanishing into cobwebs and shadows behind the line of his shoulders. His eyes follow the arc of my hand and linger on the fresh gleam of blood. I tuck it beneath my apron.
His gaze returns to my face. “No,” he says again, but this time his tone is almost apologetic.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” I threaten. “And the day after, and the day after that, until you let me in.”
The heir to Starling House gives me another long, ugly stare, as if he thinks I’ll go scampering back down the drive if he’s sufficiently unpleasant, as if eight years of retail hasn’t given me a spine of sugar and steel.
I count slowly to ten. A loose shutter slaps above us.
He appears to struggle with himself, lips twisting before he says carefully, “It wouldn’t . . . help.” I wonder if he somehow knows about the dreams, about the way I wake in the night with tears sliding down my temples and someone else’s name on my lips. I wonder if this has happened before, to other people.