It’s full of people. Some I know well and some I don’t, all as familiar as the sound of the river or the shine of the streetlights. The mailman. The cook at the Mexican place. Bev and Charlotte. The girl who ratted me out to the teacher in sixth grade. Don Gravely, Mr. Cole, Constable Mayhew, Ashley Caldwell, Arthur. Jasper.
None of them are moving. None of them are speaking. They’re watching me with damp, incurious eyes. I’m choking on smoke, coughing out words like please and help. Surely someone will call 911 or find a hose or at least reach their hand out to me and tell me it’s alright, even though it isn’t.
I should have known better. This is a town that turns away from anything troubling or unpleasant, anything that threatens their belief in themselves as decent, upstanding folk: off-season hunting and illegal dumping, hungry dogs and children with five-fingered bruises, even their own poisonous history. Why did I think I would be an exception?
The people in the parking lot turn their backs to me in eerie unison and walk away. Even Jasper.
I feel my attention snag. I stop coughing. Jasper might sulk or swear at me—he might steal the last pack of good ramen or ignore my texts or apply to jobs behind my back—but he would never turn his back and leave me like this.
This is just a bad dream. I have better ones. I close my eyes and reach for something else, a memory so polished and golden it’s become a fantasy. When I open my eyes, the parking lot is gone.
I’m standing on the banks of the Mud River. The sun is dipping low, striking bright sparks off the water. It’s dark enough that the swallows are out, and the fireflies are gleaming in the low places beneath the trees. It feels like the very end of June or the beginning of July, when you’ve lost track of time and it doesn’t matter because you have nowhere in particular to be, when summer stretches so luxuriantly on either side of you that you begin to doubt the existence of other seasons.
Eleanor is standing beside me. Her feet are small and bare in the mud. She’s not glaring at me anymore, but looking out at the river with a helpless, aggrieved kind of love, as if she would carve the love out of her chest if she knew how. She slips her hand into mine and I hold it reflexively, because it’s small and cold, because it reminds me of waiting with Jasper for the bus. I rub my thumb along her knuckles.
Eleanor makes a small noise of disgust, as if she cannot believe anyone would be that stupid, before she pulls me into the river.
The water should be warm as spit this time of year, but it isn’t. It’s a stinging, sapping cold, the kind that cramps muscles and stops hearts. I wrench at our joined hands but Eleanor is unnaturally strong. Her fingernails dig blue crescents into my wrist, pulling me deeper, deeper, until I’m drowning again except this time I want to let go and can’t. This time there’s no one to pull me back to the surface and curl his body around mine.
I catch the edge of that image and hold on to it. Arthur, warm and alive. Arthur holding me while the word “home” ricochets through the cavity of my chest like a stray bullet.
I am not drowning anymore. I open my eyes and I am standing in the cozy sitting room of Starling House, the one with the squashy couch and the pastel wallpaper and the portraits of the Wardens. Except it hasn’t acquired any of those things yet. The floors are shining with fresh polish and the plaster is perfectly intact. The only portrait on the wall is Eleanor herself.
“Really, Opal? Here?” The real Eleanor laughs. “This is my home.”
I face her, sick of her mean little laugh and her cold little eyes. “No, it isn’t. I mean maybe it used to be, but not anymore.” Her mouth gets very small and hard in her soft child’s face, like the seed in the center of a persimmon, so I keep going. “You left it behind and it became somebody else’s home, over and over again, and all of them loved it just as much as you did. Probably more.”
Her tiny persimmon-seed mouth moves. “No they didn’t.”
“They did. And you know what? It loved them back. It was just a house when you lived in it, a big dead thing full of other dead things, but it’s woken up over the years. Or maybe gone to sleep, I don’t know which.” I think of those long ivory roots trailing in the water, drinking deep from the river of dreams. I think of the wisteria wound around every part of the House, running under the skin of it like veins. Dead things don’t dream, but the House did, and so it was no longer dead. It spent a hundred and fifty years drinking the water and dreaming whatever houses dream—fires in hearths, dishes in sinks, lights in windows—and when it found itself empty it called another hungry, homeless person to itself, and did its best to keep them safe. Until it couldn’t.
I always thought of it like a lighthouse, but it was more like a siren: a beautiful thing perched above certain death, a sweet and deadly voice in the night.
But I swear there will be no more portraits on the wall, no more graves to tend. I swear I will end this, here and now. I will be the last Warden of Starling House.
Eleanor is backed against a wall, her arms outstretched as if she can hold her house still, unchanging. I feel sorry for her. “The House sent me dreams before I ever saw it. It needed me, and I needed it.” I remember the window shining through the trees like a lighthouse. Arthur’s face on the other side of the gates, furious and alone. Motes of dust sparking in slantwise light. My blood soaking into the floorboards.
The sitting room shifts around us, becoming the room I know in the world above. The wallpaper fades and the plaster cracks. The floor polish turns dull and scratched and stains bloom on the bare wood. The narrow Victorian furniture is replaced by a sagging couch, and the walls are crowded with mismatched portraits. The atmosphere shifts, accumulating years of long sunsets and deep winter evenings, rainy afternoons and bitter midnights, decades of striving and hungering and fucking and letting the coffee go cold because your book just got good. Whole generations of living, leading down to Arthur, and then to me.
“Starling House might have been yours in the beginning, Eleanor, but it’s mine now.” I say it as gently as I can, but Eleanor flinches as from a hard slap.
But she bares her small, sharp teeth at me, and says, “Take it, then. I don’t care.” Her eyes shine with an awful light. “You already lost everything else.”
Then she runs from me, disappearing into the House, and I follow.
I don’t have to hurry. I can hear Eleanor’s small feet slapping the stairs, doors slamming behind her, but this is my House now. It will take me wherever I want to be, and no lock will hold against me.
I find her back in the attic room, perched back on her bed with her Beast beside her. The Beast is small and fragile now, like an underfed stray, and it watches me from beneath the safety of Eleanor’s elbow.
“What did you mean?” I ask her, and I am calm, so calm.
That mad gleam still shines in her eyes, triumphal, terrible. “I mean it’s over. I mean that black lake—the ash pond, you called it?—was never built the way it should have been. So many little cracks and fissures, so many places it could break, with just a little bad luck.”
How many times has Bev ranted along the same lines? All anybody has to do is say “coal keeps the lights on” in her hearing and she’s off, showing them pictures of Martin County on her phone. The dirt turned to gray sludge, the houses stained with arsenic and mercury, the ghostly white bellies of the fish floating for miles down the Big Sandy.
The House shakes around me. I breathe carefully. “Eleanor, listen to me. If that stuff hits the river—”
“Then they’ll get what they deserve.”
“Who will, for fuck’s sake?” I’m not breathing carefully anymore. The pipes are whining in the walls, the curtains billowing. “Not Gravely Power, that’s for damn sure. They’ll pay a fine and reopen in two weeks.”