Eleanor Starling came from nowhere in particular and had no particular beauty, but she wormed her way into the Gravely household anyhow. She was an odd girl, silent and waifish, prone to melancholy, but the Gravely boys doted on her. It wasn’t long after she arrived that they found the oldest Gravely facedown in the Mud River. There wasn’t a mark on him, but they say his face was stretched and racked, like a man looking upon an unspeakable horror.
At the time it was considered a tragic accident, but when the middle brother announced his engagement to little Eleanor Starling a few weeks later, people started talking, as people will. They started asking themselves just how the oldest Gravely boy wound up in the Mud River, when he was known to be a sober and careful man. They wondered if perhaps he had learned something about Miss Starling that she didn’t like, or simply resisted her wiles. But people kept their suspicions to themselves; Eden has always prided itself on its good manners, and good manners are mostly keeping your mouth shut and your mind on your own business.
John Gravely wouldn’t have listened to them, anyway; he was thoroughly taken with Eleanor, or, it was murmured behind his back, taken in. On their wedding day she stood wanly at his side, too forgettable even to achieve ugliness, but John Gravely looked at her like she was ice water in July.
The fog rose that night, thick and sudden. When it burned away they found John Gravely lying dead down at the bottom of his own mine shaft, wearing an expression just as ghastly as his poor brother’s. Eleanor Starling was nowhere to be found, but the men said they saw small bare footprints that led down into the deep dark and did not come out again.
Most people hoped she would have the good grace to disappear and let the last Gravely mourn in peace, but three days later Eleanor was seen wandering the hills and hollows of her husband’s land, still wearing her wedding gown. The farmhands that found her said her skirt slapped heavy and wet against her ankles, the hem gray with silt, as if she’d walked straight out of the river. They said, too, that she was laughing, light and joyful as a child.
The new widow told the sheriff she went for a walk on her wedding night and got lost, and had no earthly idea what happened to her poor, poor husband. No one believed her, but no judge could convict her, so the town could only watch and whisper as she used up all her husband’s money—and a hundred and sixty-six acres of his richest coal country, right across the river from the mines themselves—to build herself a house so vast it was written up in The Courier-Journal and The Lexington Daily Press.
She chose a strange site to build: a damp, low hollow so deep in the woods the house itself couldn’t be seen from the road. The townsfolk knew it existed only by the workers that came and went: surveyors and architects, carpenters and masons, roofers and painters. She hired them and fired them within days—because she didn’t want them getting too friendly with the locals, people said, or because she was mad. Why else would she hire four separate locksmiths, and order each of them to melt their molds afterward? The last person she employed was a blacksmith who came all the way from Cincinnati to hang the front gates.
Eleanor moved into the house the day after the gates were hung and was never seen again. For the following twenty years, the only sign of her continued survival was the shine of her windows at night, peering through the trees like the amber eyes of some restless animal.
The town thrived in her absence. They survived the Grant administration and the Freedmen’s Bureau; they made peace with the carpetbaggers and war with the tax collectors. The youngest Gravely boy kept the family business afloat, opening new coalfields and laying railroad tracks across the river. He married well and smiled often, and people began to believe Eleanor Starling would leave him in peace.
But then, on one of those sickly spring nights when the fog comes off the river in great white curls like wood shavings under a knife, bad luck came for the last Gravely brother.
He told his wife he would be out late on company business, and rode off on his favorite horse, a glossy thoroughbred named Stonewall who cost more than most men made in a year. Stonewall was a sure-footed creature, but that night he must have caught a hoof between the railroad ties, or turned an ankle. Or maybe he saw something moving in the mist ahead and refused to take another step. All anybody knew for sure was that Stonewall and his rider were both standing on the tracks when the midnight coal train came through.
There was no proof it was the widow’s work. But after that night, Starling House went dark.
There were several competing theories about this: maybe Eleanor had run away, her grim work finally completed; maybe the spirits of the three brothers had found some revenge of their own; maybe she hanged herself in sudden remorse, or maybe she simply fell down one of her own twisting staircases and lay at the bottom, broke-necked.
Eventually the sheriff took it upon himself to investigate—although whether he was more interested in discovering the state of Eleanor’s body or her fortune, I couldn’t tell you—but the gates were locked and the walls were high. He returned to town briar-bitten and muddy, with an expression of distant confusion, as if he’d walked into a room and couldn’t remember why.
Eden might have forgotten about the widow and her strange house, given time, and returned their minds once again to their own business, but you already know they didn’t. They couldn’t, for three very good reasons.
The first was the unpleasant discovery that Eleanor had, without anyone’s say-so or approval, become slightly famous. That book of hers—a morbid, unsettling thing that everyone did their best to ignore—made her name linger longer than anyone wanted, like an ill-mannered houseguest.
The second reason was the raggedy young man who arrived in Eden the following spring. He called himself a Starling, and maybe he was; all the town knew for sure is that the gates opened for him, and there were lights in the woods again, after that.
The third reason is rarely spoken of, and only slantwise, by suggestion and intimation. It’s something about the way the shadows fell in Eden, after Eleanor died. It’s the way everything soured: the river ran darker and the clouds hung lower; rich coal seams went dry and healthy children sickened; good luck went bad and sweet dreams spoiled. It’s the way Starling House crouches just out of sight, watching us all.
It’s the way the fog still rises, on chill and rotten nights. Some people think it’s just weather, but my granddaddy always said it was her: Eleanor Starling, whittled down to nothing but malice and mist, still thirsty for Gravely blood, haunting the town that still hates her.
SEVEN
I didn’t plan to stay up late again, but here I am: sitting with the laptop screen angled away from Jasper’s bed, typing up a story that shouldn’t matter to me at all.
I couldn’t sleep, not even after reading six chapters of a racy “Beauty and the Beast” retelling I’d had on hold for weeks. Bev’s story seemed to bleed through the pages, so that I saw a house swallowed by honeysuckle instead of a castle covered in roses. I could almost hear her voice: the rhythm of it, the slight slur of the tobacco tucked in her lip.
Eventually I gave up. I opened the file I’d saved as “document 4,” buried in a series of folders with boring names, and typed it all out. I told myself that writing down somebody else’s story wasn’t as bad as making up my own, the way repeating a lie isn’t as bad as telling one; I told myself it was probably all horseshit, anyway.
Before I had gone back to my room, I’d asked Bev if she thought any of it was true. She tilted her chin one way, then the other. “Enough, I’d say.”
“Enough to what?”
“Enough to steer clear of those people. I don’t think this town is cursed by anything but coal, and I don’t know if all the Starlings are as bad as the first one was, but I’ll tell you something: I don’t trust the boy who lives there now.”