by Andrew Pyper
“A new administration.”
“A new family. There’s always a child to steal, or some other crack in the spirit he can find a way in through.”
Franklin raised his head high enough to look out at the mansion through the glass. He found the two windows of Bennie’s room. The curtains of one were closed, the other half-open, but nobody was there.
“So there’s nothing to be done,” he said, crouching low again.
“Nothing on this side of heaven.”
She pulled her hands from the soil. He watched the black crumbs fall from her fingers, exposing the skin beneath like roots.
“What do you mean?”
“We need to meet him not where we live,” she said, “but where he lives.”
“And where’s that?”
“My father called it the otherness. Our world is on this side, his on the other. But now he’s come to move between the two.”
She placed her hands to the sides of his head. He smelled the perfume of her bath powder, combined with the lush rot of the potting soil. Our world. His on the other. When she removed her hands he brought his own fingers to his face, smearing the dirt she’d left on his skin. As he spoke, he looked down at the black lines of his palm as if the map of a land he’d never seen before.
“Look at us,” he said with a laugh, loud and short as a sneeze. “Cowering in a hothouse, whispering about ghosts.”
“He’s not a ghost.”
“No?” He considered it a moment. “No.”
“But that may be to our advantage,” she said. “I have a thought.”
There was a creak somewhere ahead of them. They rose to find the gardener had returned. Franklin was about to ask him to leave again, but Jane started out before he could, thanking the gardener for the respite. The Pierces exited the way they’d come in, hands held this time.
“Keep your eyes down,” Jane said as they made their way toward the mansion. Franklin realized she was trying to prevent him from looking up at the Grief Room’s windows at the same time he looked up at them.
In one of the windows stood Franky. His child. The one at whose bedside Franklin had sat, had prayed to go instead of Bennie before having his prayer answered by Sir.
There was a boy in the other window as well. Younger than the other, just tall enough to peek his head over the sill. This one Franklin didn’t recognize. But Jane did.
As her husband had paused to look up, she had too. It was John. The little brother she’d sat vigil by, witnessed the moment of his passing and in it, the possibility of bringing back the dead.
“Don’t look at him,” Jane said, seeing her husband’s stare fixed on their lost son. “He’s not real. Our boy is with God.”
“He knew,” Franklin said.
“It doesn’t matter anymore. Come inside. Come—”
Franklin grabbed her arm. It wasn’t meant to hurt her, but the grip made her wince.
“I wasn’t a good enough father,” he said, a gasp between each of his words.
“Nor I a mother.”
“I have thought terrible things, Jeannie. Wished terrible things.”
“And I have done them. But we must go inside now.”
She led him toward the east door, his fingers still dug into her arm. Don’t look, don’t look, she said, over and over. Franklin kept his eyes lowered, whether from her beseeching or to hide his tears she couldn’t tell.
Just before the second-floor windows of the Grief Room were angled out of view, Jane disobeyed her own command. She looked up and saw that someone stood there still. Neither Franky nor John this time. Her father. She had to squint to make out his face. Once she did, she saw that he was angry. A rage she’d never seen him show in life now directed down at her.
What broke her was the uncertainty whether he was real. While Jane could believe that her little brother and son were out of reach of demons, she wasn’t sure the same was true for Jesse Appleton, given his transgressions.
Which would mean she would never know, after her own passing, if she would find the protections of God or not.
PART THREE THE GRIEF ROOM
32
That night, Jane told him what she thought they must do. How they could pull Sir back into the darkness by visiting the darkness themselves.
She would write a letter to Kate Fox. Ask her to return to the mansion and conduct—what might it be called? Not one of her knock readings, nor a séance. Not an exorcism, certainly. Perhaps this: a cleansing. An opening of themselves of the same kind that had brought the false Bennie into the house, and also let Sir become fully realized. Open the door for me. And I can open the door for you. If Jane had been the necessary accomplice to opening the door to Splitfoot, then by the same means, she might bring him out and close it.
“But I will need help,” she whispered.
She was keeping her voice low because they were lying together in bed. And though neither of them said it aloud, they were both aware they may be under surveillance by something in the dark of the room, or inside the walls, or hovering inches over them in the gloom.
“You mean the Fox girl,” Franklin said.
“She has a gift for detecting these ways of passage. It may take some pleading—along with a healthy payment, I expect—but if she agrees, she will be our conduit.”
“There is your ‘we’ again.”
“It will require a circle. That’s how she explained it to me on her first visit. The more people who open themselves to the one they wish to reach, the greater chance of connection.”
“You have me in mind.”
“You’re the one he sought to influence from the beginning. I don’t see the point of attempting it without you.”
He kissed her.
Despite the strangeness of the conversation and the foreboding that had taken on a weight in the air of the house over the last hours, there was no denying they were together. Their bodies, their voices. He was grateful to have her close again. She felt it even more than he did. Jane was not only comforted by her husband’s hand stroking her side, an up and down that made a whisper of its own—I’m here, I’m here—but she was unburdened. For the first time since the day she went down the cellar steps in the Bowdoin house, there was someone she’d shared the entirety of her secret with.
Her lips met his. Her mouth, arms. Opening—
Scrrrritch.
They didn’t move. Something was crawling above them in the gap between the ceiling and the attic floor.
Momma? Papa?
The boy. The tone forlorn and wounded in a way the real Bennie never had cause to be.
“Don’t be afraid,” Franklin whispered. “He wants us to be afraid.”
“He wants us to be alone.”
I seeee you.…
Franklin slid away from Jane. Even under the bedcovers a cold air filled the space between them.
“Liar!”
He threw back the blankets and stood at the center of the room, shouting up into the chandelier that glinted wetly back at him.
“You are not our child! You are nothing!”
They both listened for the scratches but the air was still. It lent the sensation of being outside of time. Characters in someone else’s dream.
The Fox girl—
THUMP
… the Fox girl—
THUMP…
Bennie half sang this in the way of a tune repeated by a child jumping skip rope. Where feet would meet the ground the boy thumped his fist down on the ceiling instead.
… the Fox girl—THUMP… the Fox girl—THUMP…
It would go on like this. They knew it without speaking it aloud. There would be this creature calling out to them from the boards and bricks, preventing them from rest, from clear thoughts. It would isolate them from each other as much as they had already been isolated from the country that lay outside the residence’s walls.
“Come back,” Jane said to her husband, not bothering to whisper anymore.
Franklin
got under the covers, lying board-straight on his back. He listened to the undead laughter from above for what seemed like half the night before he wondered if she had meant for him to return to their bed, or for someone else who had left her to return from where they had gone.
* * *
It took almost a week of correspondence from Jane, the promise of three hundred dollars upon completion of the “cleansing,” and a suite at the Willard, to convince Kate Fox to return to the White House. Franklin spent the time listening to counsel from his aides and congressmen on what to do about the Western problem, working long hours he experienced as a fight to stay awake while asking for more coffee from the steward. Because his cabinet insisted the meetings take place at the Capitol and not the White House (a demand the president was happy to accede to), Franklin was able to sneak away for naps in his office.
Once Jane had convinced the Fox girl to come, the two of them set to making arrangements that would have the best chance of success. Kate thought a big space more appropriate than a bedroom or salon, so that they could bring Splitfoot out into the open, deny him the corners and furnishings he could use to hide. It was also hoped that the vastness would simulate not a house but the country at large. Kate wanted to show how the mansion was special, too great a thing for any one imp to claim.
There was no chamber bigger than the East Room. Jane had the staff remove the few chairs and benches already there. She also asked for the mirrors to be covered in bedsheets, remembering the terrible visions they showed her when she entered the ballroom days before.
The other element Kate considered crucial was to make the circle as large as discretion would allow. Representative of the nation, as she put it in her final letter. And, though he may be reluctant, the attendance of the president will be required.
She was right to anticipate Franklin’s hesitation. But it didn’t arise from the weirdness of the proceedings, rather his worry that his participation become public knowledge. The balancing of confidentiality and the circle’s size led to a guest list of those who could be trusted most: Webster, Hany, Kate Fox, Abby, Franklin, and Jane.
Kate Fox arrived on the afternoon of the day the ritual was proposed to take place. She made no mention of Maggie’s absence, and Jane didn’t ask, sensing a rift between the sisters. In any case, Jane was glad the elder Fox girl wasn’t here. It was impossible to imagine Maggie bringing an equal intensity to the task. Kate spent her time in the East Room centering the round table she’d asked for, smoothing her hand over its top and repeatedly touching the six chairbacks as if engaged in some silent discourse between herself and the wood.
Jane was the only one to speak with her.
“I don’t mean to disturb you,” she said, halfway between the East Room’s doors and where the girl stood, as if coming any closer might risk sharing a contagion. “I just wanted to declare my appreciation in person.”
“I tried to pretend there was a choice in it. But I had to come.”
“You felt obliged to the president.”
“No. I felt obliged to you.”
Kate smiled in a way that showed she was unused to smiling, and Jane saw in it how twisted the girl’s life had been. A person more talked about than allowed to speak. A mystery, a story, a name. It was precisely the same way Kate Fox saw Jane.
“All the same, my thanks for—”
“I see us as friends, Mrs. Pierce,” Kate announced. “As sisters. Real sisters. Though I doubt I will see you again after tonight.”
Jane’s instinct to provide comfort pulled at her to say something polite. Of course we shall meet again, my dear. But the girl deserved better than an empty lie.
“I see us as sisters too,” Jane said before leaving. She’d meant to say friends but the truth came out instead.
* * *
The invitations that Franklin and Jane put to Webster, Hany, and Abby were combinations of apology and revelation. As it turned out, in all three cases, neither were required. This was because Webster, Hany, and Abby were devoted to the Pierces, perhaps the only ones in Washington who truly were. And because the three of them already had some idea of the White House’s afflictions.
“I’ve been a witness to that which I haven’t felt able to repeat to anyone, not even my wife,” Webster said when the president asked him to stay late that evening to attend “a ceremony of a kind.” “It can only be much worse for you. As you and Mrs. Pierce seem to be at the center of it.”
“She is,” Franklin said. “We are.”
Webster turned quiet. The president thought it was his secretary considering his next words in the name of discretion, but once he began to speak it was clear his reluctance was the result of dread for himself. “Can you say what it is we’re meant to combat, sir?”
“Jane and I have struggled to name it. Perhaps that’s because we lack the expertise. Perhaps because it wishes not to be named.”
“Because it’s nature is evil?”
“I couldn’t say what its nature is.”
“Then what could you say about it?”
Franklin took his time, gave his secretary the benefit of his clearest thoughts. “It seeks chaos,” he said. “It hates humankind. It is a spirit that has bodily reality. A malignancy we must remove.”
Webster took in a breath so heaving and long Franklin wondered if the man would pop. “How should I prepare for tonight?” he asked finally, exhaling.
“Bring only your strength and your faith.”
“Then I will summon all I possess of both,” Webster said. “I believe this is the opportunity we spoke of earlier, sir. And I am ready for it.”
Jane asked Hany to stay behind after bringing afternoon tea to the First Lady’s chambers. She planned on telling her dresser only as much as necessary, as she struck Jane as a practical woman who would hear only the foolishness in what was being asked of her. Yet Hany’s unreadable expression after Jane’s initial statements—“I would ask your presence at a private event this evening”—prompted her to go on, explaining not only how she blamed herself for bringing Splitfoot here, but the dark bargain that saw Bennie return as a vacant shade, the trouble it would mean for all in the residence if they were permitted to stay.
The First Lady was exhausted when she finished. Only then did Hany move. The older woman came to sit next to Jane on the bed.
“I have children too,” Hany said. “I’ve lost two of my own.”
“So you know what it is to miss them.”
“And I know what it is to blame God for taking them.”
“It was wrong of me.”
“Maybe. Or maybe God needs blaming now and again,” Hany said, patting Jane’s cheeks hard enough to waken her. “Right now we have to try to set things right, because the Lord doesn’t seem inclined to do it on his own.”
Jane put her arms around her. She hadn’t planned to, but her gratitude, her need, overwhelmed her.
“I wish we had more time to share what we know of this place,” Jane said into Hany’s shoulder. “What we know as mothers.”
“There’ll be time on the other side for that.”
“We live in different worlds, you and I. How I wish we shared only one.”
“One day,” Hany said as Jane released her. “Until then never mind the world. Let’s do our best to share the same country.”
Abby was approached last. There was no event on the president’s calendar for that evening, so when Jane sent a messenger to ask her to come to the White House, Abby rushed there from her apartment straightaway, thinking her cousin had fallen ill once more.
“A sensible assumption.” Jane grimly smiled once Abby had taken off her coat and found a chair in the Crimson Parlor where the First Lady was waiting for her. “It’s strange, but I’m feeling as well in body as I have in some time. My trouble is of a different kind.”
“The boy,” Abby said. “The thing.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“Glimpses. He always runs off, like he’s playing a g
ame. Hide-and-seek.”
Jane sighed and her entire body trembled. “I suspect we will all soon be the ones hiding from him.”
Abby got up and joined Jane on the settee. Their hands found each other in a sisterly reflex.
“He looks like Bennie,” Abby said.
“But you know he’s not?”
“Yes.”
“Do you wish to know how he came here?”
“Not now. Perhaps when we have put this behind us. Because you didn’t ask me to come so you could tell me a story, did you?”
“No.”
“You asked me because you’re in need of help.”
Jane felt the tightening of the throat that usually preceded her tears, but none came.
“Thank you, cousin,” she said.
“What is it you’d like me to do?”
Jane tried to think of a way to say it that might be simply understood. The problem was she didn’t entirely understand it herself.
“Hold my hand as you’re holding it now,” she said, squeezing hard as Abby did the same. “Hold it and don’t let go until we bring light back to this place.”
* * *
Jane and Franklin ate dinner alone. Kate Fox chose to remain in her room at the Willard. Abby, Webster, and Hany would meet them in the East Room at nine o’clock, an hour chosen to ensure the darkness of night, as well as the absence of all but the minimal overnight staff.
“It seems they already knew,” Franklin said after he and Jane had shared their conversations with Hany and Webster.
“Do you remember, as a child? When your mother or father would take you to visit some cousin or friend or colleague of theirs?” Jane said. “How some houses don’t feel right the moment you enter them?”
“Yes.”
“This is one of them. That’s how they know.”
