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.
The hair on my arms stands up. I keep my voice very reasonable. “What would help?”
“I don’t know.” From the sour shape of his mouth I get the impression he dislikes not knowing things. “Perhaps if you gave it time . . .”
I check my phone, a lock of hair sliding out from under my hood. “Well, I have to be back in twenty minutes and I have a double shift tomorrow.”
He blinks at me as if he’s not sure what a shift is or why one would double it. Then his eyes move somewhere to the left of mine and land on that wayward curl of hair.
The rims of his nostrils go white. Suddenly he’s made of still water instead of stone, and I can see a series of emotions rippling across his surface: terrible suspicion, shock, grief, abyssal guilt.
I have the feeling he’s about to scream or hiss or tear his hair in a fit of madness, and I don’t know whether to run toward him or away—but he merely swallows hard and closes his eyes.
When he opens them his face is perfectly opaque once more. “Or perhaps, Miss . . . ?”
Mom picked her last name according to her mood (Jewell Star, Jewell Calamity, Jewell Lucky). I generally stick with unremarkable Scots-Irish names (McCoy, Boyd, Campbell), to match my hair, but for some reason I say, “Just Opal.”
He doesn’t seem to like that much. His mouth ripples, reaches a compromise: “Miss Opal.” He pauses here for a very long sigh, as if me and my Tractor Supply apron are a burden of unfathomable proportions. “Perhaps I could offer you a job.”
FOUR
Arthur regrets the words as soon as they leave his lips. He bites down on his tongue, very hard, to prevent himself from saying anything worse.
“A job?” The girl’s—Opal’s—voice is bright, but her eyes on him are cold silver. “Doing what?”
“Ah.” Arthur considers and rejects several terrible ideas before saying, coolly, “. . . Housekeeping.” He wonders briefly about the etymology of the word—has there ever been a house that required such rigorous keeping as this one?—and shivers. “Cleaning, I mean.” He makes a disdainful gesture at the floor, nearly invisible beneath geological layers of grit and dust.
The filth doesn’t particularly bother him—it’s one of his many weapons in the long and petty war between himself and the House—but removing it might serve several purposes: the House might be soothed by the attention, lulled by the false promise of a more satisfactory Warden;
the girl might be driven away by the drudgery; and he might pay some small part of the hideous debt he has incurred against her.
Arthur hadn’t recognized her the night before, with her hair tucked under the hood of her sweatshirt, but now he remembers that hair straggling down her neck, clinging to her pale cheeks, soaking the front of his shirt. He couldn’t tell the color of it until the first ambulance rounded the corner. In the sudden glare of the headlights her hair became a bed of coals in his arms, or a field of poppies blooming out of season.
It occurs to him that her presence on his doorstep this morning might be part of some long and involved revenge plot, that inviting her into his home might have been a grave miscalculation, but her expression is still cool, mistrustful. “That’s nice,” she says carefully, “but I already have a job?”
Arthur flicks his fingers at her. “I’ll pay you, of course.”
A cold flash in her eyes, like light on a fresh-minted dime. “How much?”