Most nights Arthur finds it soothing—it’s nice to imagine that he doesn’t stand alone against the Beasts, even if his only ally is a foolish old house with ambitions of sentience—but tonight the House is restless. Every nail turns fretfully in its hole and the roof tiles clack like chattering teeth. A drainpipe bangs against the wall in the anxious rhythm of a woman drumming her nails on the table. Arthur soothes it as best he can, renewing wards and double-checking charms, but the weather is mild and the doors are locked. He lies awake for a long time, listening, and falls asleep only when Baast curls on his chest.
When he wakes, Baast is standing over him with her back arched and her tail rigid. Arthur’s skin is prickling, as if a chill draft has blown through, and he is suddenly aware that the front gates have been opened. So has the front door. He looks out his round window long enough to see the ghostly creep of fog along the ground, and then he’s running barefoot down the steps with the sword aching in his bandaged hand.
There is nothing on the third floor, or the second. There’s a tugging sensation in the back of his skull, like the trembling of a spider’s web, that leads him to the kitchen, but it’s empty except for the faint phosphorescence of the microwave clock.
Something clicks, like the shutter of a camera. It comes from the pantry.
He opens the door and light glances off rusted cans and old jars, their contents gray and glutinous. The rug has been rolled back, and beneath it there is a perfect square of darkness in the floor.
The trapdoor is open.
Arthur has seen it open only once before, when he was eleven. His mother had waited until high noon on the summer solstice before she knelt on the floor and unlocked it. Then she took his hand and led him down, down into the dark.
He remembers the steps, slick and endless. He remembers trailing a hand along the walls and finding them wet, weeping cold water. He remembers crying, and his mother noticing, but not stopping.
He doesn’t understand how the door was opened again—he keeps the keys safe in his room, and these aren’t the sort of locks that can be picked—but his thoughts have become very slow, very simple. He is the Warden of Starling House, and the locks have failed.
Arthur goes down beneath Starling House for the second time in his life, his heart beating evenly, his tattoos burning into his skin.
The walls are smooth limestone, untouched by picks or chisels; it’s like the world split open and someone built stairs in the gap. It should be completely black, but the mist has its own ghostly fox-fire glow.
The sound comes again, that unnatural click. Arthur braces his sword before him and walks faster.
The stairs don’t lead to a room or a chamber; they simply end, running straight into the great slab of the first door. He sees the chains still stretched taut across the surface, and the lock still shut, but there’s a shape standing before it, pale in the mist-light.
Arthur does not hesitate. He lunges down the last few stairs and swings. It’s an ugly swing, a woodcutter’s downward chop, but it would have been enough to sunder a fresh-hatched nightmare. Except he slips on the damp stone, or the stone slides out from under his foot, and the sword goes wide. It skrees off the limestone in a spray of white sparks.
His body slams into the shape and he flinches, expecting rending teeth and gouging claws, the scuttling, scrabbling attack of a creature with too many joints and limbs—
It doesn’t come. Instead, a voice says, fervently, “Christ on abicycle.”
Arthur doesn’t move. He doesn’t breathe. He is reasonably sure that his heart does not beat.“Opal?”
The pale shape lifts its head and he sees a pointed chin, a freckled pair of cheeks, gray irises rimmed with white. “Opal.God—are you alright? Did I—” His hand spasms and the sword clatters to the ground. He runs his fingers frantically up the bare skin of her arms, over her shoulders, dreading the tacky heat of blood.
“I’m fine. It’s okay.” It’s only when she speaks, when he feels the warmth her breath on his face, that he realizes he has her pinned against the door. That his thumb is resting in the hollow between her collarbones, just over the wild rhythm of her pulse. That the expression in her eyes should be fear, but isn’t.
He steps back, too fast, and something gives an expensive-soundingcrunchbeneath his left foot. “What are you doing here?”
His tone is menacing, but she answers easily. “Cleaning. You owe me overtime, bud.”
Arthur decides the heat coursing through his limbs is anger. It makes his voice shake. “I told you never to come here at night. I told you—”
“You’re standing on my phone.”
He exhales. Bends to retrieve her phone from beneath his left foot. Looks down at the spiderwebbed screen, breathing hard.
“Give it here.”
Her photos are displayed on the screen in a neat grid. One of them appears to be the front gates of Starling House. The next one is the front door, with several close-ups of the wards. Then the library, the sitting room, the kitchen, the mudroom. “What . . . what are these?” His voice sounds muffled in his ears, as if he’s speaking under water.
“Pictures.” He can hear the sullen set of her chin.
He scrolls up. There are pictures of every oddity in the House: claw marks scored in the wallpaper, books in dead languages, charms and spells. It’s strange to see it this way, all the evidence of his family’s long, mad war captured in bright arrangements of pixels. The most recent picture is a gray stone door crisscrossed with chains. There is a ring of three iron keys dangling from the padlock. One of them is jammed awkwardly into the keyhole, although he knows the lock won’t turn. Arthur has wasted hours trying.
When his mother showed him this door, she asked him how many locks Starling House had. He counted in his head: gates, front door, cellar, and the stone door beneath it all.Four,he answered. Then his mother held up the ring of keys and asked how many keys Eleanor had made.
Three,he said. And then, daringly, he asked why.
