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.
After Alabaster’s tenure ended, others came. Whenever one Warden fell, another was chosen to take up the sword. Some of them found something like happiness, at least for a while. They’ve married, raised children, watched the passage of time from the windows of Starling House: the building of the power plant across the river, the veins of telephone lines spreading across the county, the rise and fall of Big Jack. They’ve walked the wards and kept the Beasts at bay.
But the Beasts always take them, in the end.
The most recent Warden arrived in 1985, all the way from North Carolina. She and her husband met at a pork-processing plant—Lynn Lewis worked on the kill floor and Oscar was a janitor. But Oscar was let go after he hurt his back and, following some sort of violent altercation with management, so was Lynn. The two of them lingered as long as they could, until the electric company shut off the lights and the bank boarded up the windows, and then they drifted from job listing to job listing, aimless and homeless. A few months later the Warden began to dream of a big house behind high iron gates. They followed the dreams west, and when they arrived they found a ring of keys and a deed waiting for them.
The House thrived under their stewardship. The floors didn’t creak and the windows didn’t whistle in winter; the kitchen always smelled like lemons and the wisteria was always in bloom. Lynn and Oscar loved Starling House, and they fought for what they loved.
Their son was less worthy. He was a weak and selfish young man, given to fanciful drawings and silly daydreams. He denied his fate as long as he could. He thought for a while the House would find someone else, someone braver—until he saw the cost of his cowardice.
Lynn and Oscar Starling died in 2007. That very night he made his oath and became the new Warden of Starling House.
But he swore a second, private oath: that he would be the last.
SEVENTEEN
I saw this old map of the Mississippi once. The cartographer drew the river as it actually is, but he also drew all the previous routes and channels the river had taken over the last thousand years. The result was a mess of lines and labels, a tangle of rivers that no longer existed except for the faint scars they left behind. It was difficult to make out the true shape of the river beneath the weight of its own ghosts.
That’s how the history of Starling House feels to me now, like a story told so many times the truth is obscured, caught only in slantwise glimpses. Maybe that’s how every history is.
The Starlings are watching me from their portraits, unalike but all the same. Each of them drawn here by their dreams, each of them bound to a battle I still don’t understand. Each of them buried before their time.
Arthur is watching me, too. His eyes are red, sunk deep in the uneven planes of his face. Watery blood is seeping from his throat again but he keeps his chin high and his spine stiff. He looks cold and a little cruel, except for the slight tremble in his hands. His tell, Mom would call it.
“So, the last Warden. That’s you, isn’t it?” My voice is loud in the hush of the house. “What did you mean, last?”
“I meant,” Arthur says, “that there wouldn’t be another Warden after me.”
“Oh? You don’t think there’s anybody out there having strange dreams about a big empty house?” Arthur was born to this house, but maybe I was chosen for it. Maybe I don’t have to be a Gravely, after all. “You don’t think maybe somebody will come along after you—”
“The Starlings have been fighting this war for generations!” His hands are shaking worse, his tone vicious. “They’ve bled for this place, died for it, and it’s not enough. It’s getting—” Arthur bites the sentence off, looking up at the portraits with his lips pale and hard. “Someone has to end it.”
“And that’s going to be you.” As I watch, a little blood drips from his collar onto the hellcat. “And what army?”
Arthur’s lips go even paler, pressed tight. “I don’t require an army. Every Starling has found new wards and spells, weapons that work against the Beasts. I’ve taken their studies further.” He rubs his wrist as he talks, thumb digging into his tattoos hard enough to hurt. The wind moves mournfully under the eaves. “All I need is a way through that damn door.”
There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of doors in Starling House, but I know which one he means. “And you don’t have the key.”
“No.”
“And you can’t pick the lock.”
“No.”
“And you can’t, I don’t know, blow it up?”
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.”