“Are you okay?” Jasper’s voice has a wobble to it that makes me want to crawl into his bed and sleep spine-to-spine, the way we used to back when there were still three of us and only two beds. And later, after the dreams started.
I shrug at the ceiling instead. “I’m always okay.”
The polyester sighs as he rolls to face the wall. “You’re a pretty good liar”—I’m a fantastic liar—“but that’s for everybody else. Not family.”
The innocence of it makes me want to laugh, or maybe cry. The biggest lies are always for the ones you love the most. I’ll take care of you. It’ll be fine. Everything’s okay.
I swallow hard. “Everything’s okay.” His disbelief is palpable, a chill emanating from the other side of the room. “Anyway, it’s over.” I don’t know if he believes it, but I do.
Until the dream.
It isn’t like the others. The others had a soft, sepia light to them, like old home movies or fond memories you’ve half forgotten. This one is like diving into cold water on a hot day, crossing from one world to another.
I’m back at the gates of Starling House, but this time the padlock falls open and the gates swing wide before me. I walk down the dark throat of the drive, thorns tugging at my sleeves, trees tangling their fingers in my hair. Starling House emerges from the dark like a vast animal from its den: a gabled spine, wings of pale stone, a tower with a single amber eye. Steep steps curl like a tail around its feet.
The front door is unlocked, too. I sweep across the threshold into a maze of mirrors and windows, halls that branch and split and switchback, staircases that end in empty walls or closed doors. I walk faster and faster, shoving through each door and rushing to the next as if there is something I want desperately to find.
The air grows colder and wetter as I go deeper. A pale mist seeps up from the floorboards, coiling around my ankles. At some point, I realize I am running.
I stumble through a trapdoor, down the stone stairs, down and down. Roots crawl like veins across the floor, and I have the confused thought that they must belong to the house itself, as if dead lumber and nails could come alive given enough time.
I shouldn’t be able to see anything in the darkness, but I see the stairs end abruptly in a door. A crude stone door crisscrossed with silver chains. Another padlock dangles from the chains. The lock is open. The door is cracked.
Cold fog pours through the gap and I know with the strange fatalism of dreams that I am too late, that something terrible has already happened.
I reach for the door, choked with a grief I don’t understand, shouting a name I don’t know—
And then I’m awake, and my mouth tastes like tears. I must have clenched my fists in my sleep, because blood has soaked through the bandaging and pooled around my left hand.
It’s still dark, but I pull on yesterday’s jeans—the cuffs still wet with slush, the pockets full of stolen cash—and slip outside with a spare sleeping bag draped over my shoulders. I sit with my back against the concrete block and let the hellcat climb into my lap, alternately purring and growling, while I wait for the sun to rise and the dream to fade like the others.
Except it doesn’t. It lingers like a bad cold, settling deep in my chest. All that day I feel the press of invisible walls against my shoulders, the weight of rafters overhead. The scattered leaves make wallpaper patterns against the pavement, and the scuffed linoleum of Tractor Supply seems to creak beneath my feet, like old wood.
That night I stay up too late reading a Regency romance by the parking lot lights, trying to drive the house out of my head, or at least get rid of that aching, senseless grief. But the dream takes me as soon as I close my eyes, pulling me through the same tangled halls and twisting stairs, ending with the same unlocked door.
Six and a half days after I ran away from it, I return to Starling House. Look: I didn’t plan on it. I was going to walk the extra half mile to and from work for the rest of my natural life specifically so that I never had to come within a hundred yards of Starling land again. I was going to bum rides from Lacey, or maybe steal a bike. I’m no coward, but Jasper’s made me watch enough horror movies to recognize a red flag when it holds my hand and tells me to run.
But after six nights of wrecked sleep—followed by six and a half days of dodging worried looks from Jasper and taking the long way to work, of mistaking the bathroom mirrors for rows of windows and looking over my shoulder for doorways that don’t exist—I fold. I’m tired, and I’m moderately freaked out, and I’m running out of old sheets to rip up into bandages because the cut on my hand won’t seem to close.
So here I am, using my Monday lunch break to glare at the gates of Starling House.
The gates glare back at me, the beastly shapes nothing but iron by the cold light of day. I run my tongue over my lips, half scared and half something else. “Open sesame. Or whatever.”
Nothing happens, because of course nothing happens, because I’m not in one of my silly childhood stories and there’s no such thing as magic words or haunted houses, and even if there were they wouldn’t have anything to do with someone like me.
I look down at my left hand, fresh-wrapped this morning, then up and down the road, the way a person does when they’re about to do something ridiculous and don’t want to be seen.
A pickup chugs past me. I give it a cheery, nothing-to-see-here wave and catch a pair of averted eyes in the rearview mirror. This town is good at looking away.
The truck disappears around the bend and I unwind the white cotton bandaging—the cut is still exactly as wide and tattered as it was six days before, still oozing watery blood—and press my palm to the front gates. I feel a thrill of recognition, like when you spot a face you know in a crowded room, and the gates swing open.
My heart does a double-thud. “Okay.” I’m not sure if I’m talking to myself or the gates. “Okay. Sure.”
It’s probably just motion sensors or cameras or rigged pulleys or some other totally rational explanation. But it doesn’t feel totally rational. It feels like the beginning of a mystery novel, when you’re screaming at the plucky protagonist to run but sort of hoping she doesn’t, because you want the story to start.
I take a little breath and step through the gates onto Starling land.
The driveway doesn’t look like it’s ever been paved, or even graveled. It’s just a pair of tire ruts dug into red clay, divided by a scraggled line of dead grass. Pools of rainwater gather in the low places, reflecting the winter-white sky like the scattered shards of a broken mirror. Trees crowd close overhead, as if they’re trying to catch glimpses of themselves. Birds’ eyes glitter at me from the woods, black and wet.
In my dreams the drive is dark and twisting, but in reality I turn a single curve and there it is.5
Starling House.
The windows are filmy eyes above rotten sills. Empty nests sag from the eaves. The foundation is cracked and slanted, as if the entire thing is sliding into the open mouth of the earth. The stone walls are covered with the bare, twisting tendons of some creeping vine—honeysuckle, I figure, which is only ever a show tune away from gaining sentience and demanding to be fed. The only sign that anyone lives inside is the slow bleed of woodsmoke from a leaning chimney.
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.