Starling House by Alix E. Harrow EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Author:Alix E. Harrow
- Language: English
- Genre: Magical Realism
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 10.3 MB
- Price: Free
I dream sometimes about a house I’ve never seen.
I mean, pretty much nobody has. Logan Caldwell claims he ding-dongditched the place last summer break, but he’s an even bigger liar than me.
The truth is you can’t really see the house from the road. Just the iron teeth
of the front gate and the long red lick of the drive, maybe a glimpse of
limestone walls crosshatched by honeysuckle and greenbriers. Even the
historical plaque out front is half-swallowed by ivy, the letters so slurred
with moss and neglect that only the title is still legible:
STARLING HOUSE
But sometimes in the early dark of winter you can see a single lit
window shining through the sycamores.
It’s a funny kind of light: a rich amber that shudders with the wind,
nothing like the drone of a streetlight or the sickly blue of a fluorescent.1 I
figure that window is the only light I’ve ever seen that doesn’t come from
the coal plant on the riverbank.
In my dream, the light is for me.
I follow it through the gates, up the drive, across the threshold. I should
be scared—there are stories about Starling House, the kind people only tell
at night, half-whispered under the hum of the porch light—but in the dream
I don’t hesitate.
In the dream, I’m home.
Apparently that’s too far-fetched even for my subconscious, because
that’s usually when I wake up. I surface in the half-dark of the motel room
with a hungry, empty ache in my chest that I think must be homesickness,
although I guess I wouldn’t know.
I stare at the ceiling until the parking lot lights flick off at dawn.
I used to think they meant something, those dreams. They started abruptly
when I was twelve or thirteen, just when all the characters in my books
started manifesting magic powers or receiving coded messages or whatever;
of course I was obsessed with them.
I asked everybody in town about the Starling place, but received only
narrow, slantwise looks and sucked teeth. People in this town had never
liked me much—their eyes slide right off me like I’m a street-corner
panhandler or a piece of roadkill, a problem they would be obliged to
address if they looked straight at it—but they liked the Starlings even less.
They’re considered eccentrics and misanthropes, a family of dubious
origin that has refused for generations to participate in the most basic
elements of Eden’s civil society (church, public school, bake sales for the
volunteer fire department), choosing instead to stay holed up in that grand
house that nobody except the coroner has ever seen in person.
They have
money—which generally excuses everything short of homicide—but it
doesn’t come from either coal or tobacco, and nobody seems able to marry
into it. The Starling family tree is a maddening sprawl of grafted limbs and
new shoots, full of out-of-towners and strangers who turned up at the front
gates and claimed the Starling name without ever setting foot in Eden itself.
It’s generally hoped that both they and their house will fall into a
sinkhole and rot at the bottom, neither mourned nor remembered, and—
perhaps—release the town from its century-long curse.
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