A terse silence of several hours, then: Please find out if there is a basement or a crawl space in the house.
I let her stew for a while before writing back, I’m really scared of spiders sorry. I add an emoji shedding a single tear, because if she’s going to blackmail me into selling out a man who quietly doubles all his recipes for me, I’m going to make her regret it.
Baine replies with a string of annoyed texts, which I ignore. She mentions karst topography and ground-penetrating radar and includes several blurry aerial maps of Starling land.19 I turn my ringer off.
The next time I check my phone there’s a picture of the Muhlenberg County High School. It’s an odd angle, taken behind the football field, where the bleachers back up onto a sea of feed corn. It wouldn’t be remarkable at all, except that I know it’s where Jasper eats his lunch every day—and so does she.
I stare at the picture for a long time, feeling that cold place in the middle of me.
The next day I roll back the rug in the downstairs pantry and send her a picture of the trapdoor. She’s thrilled. Exactly where is it located? Is it locked? Do you know where the key is? And then, inevitably: Could you find it?
I’m not surprised by the request—you don’t drug a person and threaten their only family member if all you want from them is a nice conversation and a couple of email attachments—but I’m a little surprised how much I don’t want to do it. I delay as long as I can, backtracking and seesawing, sending back obnoxiously long lists of all the places I’ve looked for the key without finding it. She urges me to try harder and I send even longer lists in response, with footnotes. She suggests that perhaps I could pick the lock, making delicate mention of my school disciplinary reports; I reply that I was a shitty teen who knew how to open cheap doors with a credit card, not an old-timey bank robber.
In the end I receive a text that directs me very simply to open the cellar door by Friday. There are no threats or dire warnings, but I scroll back up to look at that picture of the high school until the chill spreads from my chest across my back, as if it’s pressed against a stone wall.
The next day I wait until I hear Arthur’s footsteps on the stairs. The sullen scrape of the coffeepot, the squeal of hinges, the squelch of boots on wet ground. Then I put down my paintbrush, thump the lid back on the can with the butt end of a screwdriver, and go up to the attic room.
It seems to take a very long time to get there: the staircase stretches endlessly upward, doubling back on itself more times than is strictly logical, and I make a dozen false turns on the third floor. The fifth time I end up standing in the library I sigh very hard and say, to no one in particular, “You are being a real dick about this.”
When I turn around, the narrow staircase is behind me. I brush my fingers along the wallpaper in silent thanks.
Arthur’s room isn’t messy after all. It’s bright and clean and hot, floorboards baking in the lavish light of May. There’s a desk beneath the window and a bed under the eaves, quilt tucked neatly around the mattress because of course he makes his bed every morning. I consider rumpling his sheets just to be a pill, but the thought makes me feel suddenly sweaty and restless, and anyway the hellcat is curled in the middle of his bed giving me a one-eyed glare. I stick my tongue out at her and look elsewhere.
On the wall at the head of the bed, hanging in a heavy bracket, there’s a sword. It doesn’t look like a toy or a Ren faire prop. The blade is rust-mottled, chipped and scored, but the edge is sharpened to invisibility, like the point of a snake’s tooth. There are symbols running from hilt to point, inlaid in soft silver, and I know with chilled certainty that Elizabeth Baine would have a seizure if I sent her a picture of it. I turn to the desk instead.
The surface is painfully tidy, all the pens nib-down in a coffee cup, all the books stacked and sticky-noted. The top drawer contains an array of overlong needles and pots of ink, a few paper towels stained a watery red. It should have occurred to me before now that the nearest tattoo place is in E-town. That he must sit up here with his sleeves rolled high and his hair hanging in his eyes, pressing the needle into his skin again and again.
I shut the drawer too hard, feeling irritable, overwarm.
The next drawer is full of pencil shavings and little stubs of charcoal. The third drawer is empty except for a ring of keys. There are only two keys on the ring, both old and ornate.
Just as my fingers brush the iron, there’s a muffled thud behind me. I flinch—but it’s just a freckled black bird at the window. It flaps querulously at the glass, as if offended to find an entire house this high in the air, then vanishes. It leaves me with my heart ping-ponging against my ribs and my eyes very wide.
Every inch of the wall around the window is obscured by paper and thumbtacks, as if an entire art museum had been crammed onto an attic wall. At first I think they must be early drafts of the illustrations for Underland and my stomach does a nauseous somersault—but no. Eleanor Starling worked in brutal black-and-white, her lines biting like teeth across the page, and these drawings are all gentle grays and soft shadow. There are Beasts stalking across the pages, but they’re subtly changed. Arthur’s Beasts have an eerie elegance, a terrible beauty that Eleanor’s never did. They step gently through quiet woods and empty fields, obscured sometimes by graphite knots of briar and honeysuckle.
They’re good drawings—so good I can almost hear the rattle of the wind through the branches, feel the give of the loam under my shoes—but the perspective is odd, tilted down instead of straight-on. It takes me a minute to realize this is how the world looks seen from the windows of Starling House.
I remember myself suddenly as I was: walking alone down the county road in my red Tractor Supply apron, looking up at this amber-lit window and hungering for the home I never had. Now I know Arthur was sitting on the other side of the glass, just as alone, dreaming of the world outside.
My throat tightens. I tell myself it’s the dust.
There’s a small sketch pinned just beneath the window, rougher and quicker than the others. It shows the woods in winter, the pale bellies of the sycamores, the doubled ruts of the drive. There’s a figure emerging from the trees, her coat oversized, her face upturned. All the other pictures on the wall are strictly pencil and charcoal, but this one contains a tiny shock of oily color, the only bright thing in a sea of gray: a smear of rich, arterial red. For her hair.
Something small and delicate goes ping in my chest. I snatch the keys and run.
I clatter down the stairs and back into the hall, not thinking about the keys in my hand or the fancy phone in my pocket or the way his face might’ve looked as he drew me: half annoyed, half something else, dangerously intent.
On the first floor I get turned around and find myself in the chilly mudroom behind the kitchen, tripping over cracked rubber boots, and the next door I open takes me out into the humid light of spring.
The sky is hazy blue and the air is spangled gold, as if the sun is shining from everywhere at once. I peel off my tennis shoes—I would peel off my skin if I could—and step away from the shadow of the house, headed nowhere, anywhere.
I walk, following a faint trail worn in the grass, studying the mad pattern of vines up the stone walls. There are leaves on the vines now, still translucent and damp-looking, and fat clusters of flower buds. The honeysuckle by the motel is already a ferocious, man-eating green, so this must be something else.