But she came back, and he’s still alive. He’s certain he won’t be for much longer. “You have to go,” he says urgently. “This place is dangerous, evil—”
“It’s not.” That must be a lie, but as she says the words Arthur feels them becoming a little more true. The air is warmer than it was, and the Beasts are a little smaller, a little less awful. Birdsong is rising from the trees, as if dawn is coming.
Opal runs her thumb over his knuckles, warming him. “we make this place what it is. It’s just our dreams, reflected back at us.”
Arthur stands quietly for a moment, considering. Then he laughs, harshly and not entirely sanely. “You should still run, then, while you can.” He pulls his hand away, and she lets him. “All my dreams are nightmares.”
Opal’s smile turns wry and fond. “No, they aren’t.” She points, inexplicably, at his feet.
Arthur doesn’t want to look down. But Opal is watching him with that wry, warm expression still on her face, and he discovers there is very little he wouldn’t do to keep it there. He looks down.
There are no bodies or gravestones. Where there had been nothing but frozen grass, dead and tangled, there is now a small, anxious patch of green. The jagged leaf of a dandelion is caught beneath his shoe, and even as he watches a violet lifts its bent neck above the lawn. There are flowers blooming in Underland.
“I don’t—I’m not—” Arthur isn’t sure what he doesn’t or isn’t, but Opal steps closer before he can work it out.
She reaches for his sword hand this time and unpeels his fingers from the hilt. Her touch is gentle, patient. “You spent a long time alone, fighting a war that wasn’t even yours. It got given to you, and you did your best not to give it to anyone else. You did so well, you really did.” Another lie, of course, but Arthur permits himself to imagine how good it would feel to believe it. “But it’s over now. Eleanor’s gone. The war’s over. It’s time to dream your own dreams.”
Arthur’s hands feel weightless and empty without the sword. He isn’t sure how a person usually stands, what they do with their arms. “I don’t know how,” he says, honestly.
Opal steps even closer, so that their chests nearly touch. She goes up on tiptoe to lay her jaw along his and says, “It’s alright. I’ve got you, Arthur.”
She kneels on the grass—there’s more of it now, a green wave cresting like spring over the earth—and pulls him down beside her. She sets the sword between them, scarred and ugly, and lies down beside it, curled on her side. Arthur lies down with her. Their bodies are a pair of parentheses around the silver exclamation of the sword, their faces close enough to kiss.
Arthur looks into her eyes—that dangerous gray, sharp and bright as a sickle moon—and she looks into his, and their breathing falls into an easy rhythm. She doesn’t say anything, but Arthur finds she doesn’t have to. He’s already spinning wild stories in his head, an extravagance of dreams: Starling House in bloom, the gates thrown wide; the sword forgotten in the attic, the blade rusted and idle; the two of them like this, curled together in an endless dusk, with nothing to die for and everything to keep living for.
The grass grows high around them. Flowers bloom all out of season, tiger lilies knocking gently against cornflowers, scarlet knots of clover wrapped around bursts of tickseed. They bend gracefully in the breeze, brushing over Opal’s shoulders, her hair, the hard line of her jaw. Arthur thinks there are things moving around them—Beasts, maybe, except their bodies are sleek and lovely, and they leave flowers where they step, instead of rot—but he can’t seem to care.
He watches Opal’s eyes drift slowly closed. He remembers how very tired he is, how long it’s been since he wasn’t tired.
Arthur Starling sleeps, and dreams good dreams.
EPILOGUE
This is the story of Starling House.
There are lots of stories about that house, of course. You’ve heard most of them. The one about the mad widow and her poor husband. The one about the miners who broke into Hell and the monsters at the center of a maze. You’ve even heard the one about the three bad men and the little girl who gave them their comeuppance, although nobody tells that one, not yet. (They will, I swear they will. I’ve broken a lot of promises, but not this one.)
This story is my favorite, because it’s the only one with a happy ending.
It usually starts when somebody mentions the power plant, or the fire last summer. Remember that night back in June, they say. First the motel burns, then the dam breaks.
Somebody else might mention the wreck by the old railroad bridge, or the string of out-of-towners that wound up in the hospital with strange injuries, or the way their dogs stared into the mist with their hackles high, not quite daring to bark.
Bad luck, I guess, someone says, and everybody nods, just like always.
Except it seemed like Eden’s bad luck was all used up in that single night. There was a bad spell right after, of course, and everybody worried about jobs. The ash pond flooded the power plant and took out the lights all the way to Nashville. They said you could see it from the International Space Station, a black stripe cut right out of the country.
But FEMA showed up quick enough, and power got diverted from someplace else. For a week or two the whole county was covered in government officials wearing plasticky suits, collecting groundwater samples, but when the tests came back they said it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. They said most of the spill flowed downhill and settled in a low spot. Big Jack, still hard at work, people said.
The out-of-towners got discharged from the county hospital and climbed into their sleek cars. They drove north, their expressions haunted but strangely vacant, as if they didn’t know what they were driving away from but didn’t dare slow down.
The mist rose once or twice more that summer, but it didn’t linger as long, and it didn’t leave new patches of rot and tragedy behind it. People said it smelled sweet, like wisteria, and left flowers blooming behind it. A woman on Riverside Road said she opened her kitchen door and found a luna moth stuck to the screen. She took a picture and showed anyone who asked and several who didn’t. Everyone leaned over her screen and admired it dutifully, the size of it, the pale green of the wings, like fox fire on a dark night.
Don Gravely gave a big interview to The Courier-Journal in July, assuring everyone that the expansion plans were still underway, that they would rebuild stronger and bigger than ever. Except in that very same issue there was an article about a lawsuit being brought against Gravely Power and a newly discovered will. That librarian woman from the eastern side of the state found it tucked in a Bible, Luke 15:32, in Leon Gravely’s own handwriting. Turned out Old Leon hadn’t willed the company and family fortune to his brother, after all, but to that no-good daughter of his. She was long gone, drowned on another one of those bad-luck nights, but her children were still living.
Except nobody could find them. The boy—what was his name? Jason? Jackson?—was rumored to be up in Louisville now, but his sister couldn’t be found. The woman who used to run the Garden of Eden Motel went around the whole town, banging on doors and having herself a good yell at anybody that held still long enough, but nobody’d seen Opal since that night. The constable told the former owner of the Garden of Eden Motel, as kindly as he could, that girls like that never came to good ends, and the former owner of the Garden of Eden invited him to say that again, louder. The constable declined.