by Andrew Pyper
They lingered in the dining room long after the bowls and loaf had been cleared. Jane spoke softly about their marriage. While the turning points of the story were familiar to Franklin, some of the details were new. The heat she felt the length of her spine the first time she saw him in the Amherst house. How sorry she was that he stayed with her over their intermittent courtship, particularly given there was likely a spell of some kind that led him to her.
“That was no spell,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Falling in love feels the same to all who succumb to it. It’s a choice where there is no choice.”
“My goodness, Frank. I believe that is the most frightening, most wonderful thing you’ve ever said.”
“And you are the most frightening, wonderful thing to happen to me.”
They looked at each other across the polished teak, the candlelight flickering their faces between old and young, dead and alive.
Jane laughed.
Outside, in the kitchen, the cook and the steward heard it and wondered what the gloomy president’s wife could possibly have found so funny.
33
When they assembled at the East Room’s double doors Kate Fox was already inside, standing behind the table within the candelabra’s circle of yellow. Because its five candles were the only source of light in the enormous space, she looked like she was stranded on an island in an ocean of tar.
“You may have questions,” she announced before anyone else could speak. “But I ask that you keep them to yourselves. I will explain all that need be known. My voice alone.”
She gestured for them to come in. None of them moved at first. Some, like Abby, hesitated because of the apprehension at what was about to happen. Others, like Franklin, because the girl had a touch of the holy about her—a light that seemed not to reflect her but come from her—and he had always been bashful when entering a church.
Jane threaded through them and stepped into the black sea. It was only when she arrived on the shore of the island of candlelight and looked back at the others that they ventured after her, one by one.
Franklin was the last to enter, glancing back down the Cross Hall to ensure it was empty before closing the doors. He kept his eyes on Kate Fox. He was wrong, perhaps, in his initial detection of an angelic aura. She may have only been pretty. But even in this respect there wasn’t a distracting abundance: narrow-faced to the point of malnourishment, teeth in need of brushing, eyes rimmed with the red of fever. She was appealing to him because he saw how alone she was in her suffering, and while he might never know its precise nature, he wished to stand with her against it. She reminded him of Jane.
“What we will do together is new to me,” Kate Fox said as she motioned to where each of them ought to sit, Jane to her left, Hany to her right, Franklin, Webster, and Abby across from her. “But I’m confident that it’s a simple matter: we join our wills to first summon, then cast out the being that besieges this house. We will take it back in the name of the president, his people.”
Jane was only half listening. She fingered the locket at her throat, the one that contained clippings of her sons’ hair, hoping to find strength from it, or protection. An odd dreaminess descended on her. She cast her eyes about the room, peering into the forty feet between herself and the windows, which felt ten times that. All was still, yet full of motion. It gave her the idea that something had shifted the instant she moved her head away. The curtains were pulled closed but the silk trim glinted back at her, as if pushed by a breeze from the other side.
“Jane?”
Franklin’s voice brought her back.
“Join us,” Kate Fox said.
Jane saw that all their hands were on the table’s top except for hers. It required some effort to release her grip from the locket and link fingers with the Fox girl and Webster.
“Close your eyes,” Kate said.
They did so in unison. The room so quiet Jane imagined she could hear their eyelids come together in a delicate click. After that there was only the contact of the hands that anchored her to the circle—Kate’s worryingly hot, Webster’s jellied and froggish.
“Push away the pictures in your mind,” the Fox girl told them. “Each time you do, they will try to come back. And each time, return to the emptiness. Not darkness. Merely nothing. Push away, return. Push away. Return. Push—”
She cut herself off. All six of them held their breath.
It was as if they’d heard something, but the silence was the same. The dreaminess that first visited Jane had descended over all of them. It slowed them from realizing it wasn’t an interruption of noise they strained to hear, but a change in the air.
The cold. A weight draped over their circle. And when they could hold their breath no longer it reached down their throats, cutting and hard as stone.
“What is—” Webster said, abandoning his query at the realization he had no word to finish it.
From above came a sound that Franklin thought he’d heard before, long ago. Something from his youth of hiking through the forests of New Hampshire and Maine. Rain. Falling through the canopy of leaves with such force it was like a thousand galloping hooves.
Jane heard it as the clinking of glass against glass. She opened her eyes and looked up. Saw that she was right.
The two chandeliers that hung from the ceiling—one to the right of where she was sitting, the other to the left—were shaking. She could see the crystal cut in the shape of tears firing shards of reflected candlelight into the corners, polka-dotting the walls.
“Keep your eyes closed!” Kate Fox shouted.
Jane looked around the circle. All of their eyes were open except for Kate’s and Franklin’s. But only the girl knew what was causing the cold and the glass to shake without having to look.
The ceiling between the chandeliers, twenty feet directly over their heads, bulged outward. Not breaking. Bending. As if there was an overflowing tub on the second floor that was flooding through the boards, pressing down, so that only a skin of paint held the water in. Yet they felt no drips fall through. And the ceiling only distended wider and lower. The plaster shaping itself round and tight as a pregnant belly.
“Don’t be afraid,” the Fox girl said. She sounded afraid.
Jane tried to close her eyes. She wished to add the force of her will to whatever defense they were expected to summon. That, and she didn’t want to witness whatever was to be born from the ceiling overhead.
“Jesus help us,” Hany said, her voice just audible over Webster’s whimpering.
Now all but Franklin held their heads back, looking up. Their hands were still linked, they could feel it, not only from the pressure of those who sat next to them, but the tremor that ran through their fused arms. There was no way of knowing where their own body stopped and the others began.
The bulge in the ceiling split open.
Jane readied herself to be soaked—in what? Latrine water. Or afterbirth. Or blood. But nothing showered down. It allowed her to watch what came out without blinking.
A black oil swam out over the plaster like liquid shadow, clinging to the ceiling. Thick and glistening, aswirl in different shades of night, dusk purple, midnight slate, the crimson scar that precedes dawn. It felt to Jane like looking down on a pond after having poured ink into it.
She wanted to leave. Yet she knew, even if she tried, no part of her could move.
The oil contracted, reshaping itself. Definition and particulars added as if from the touches of a draughtsman’s pen. Appendages grew out of it of roughly equal length, four of them, their ends twitching.
Legs, arms. Feet, hands.
A body.
Jane looked across the table at Franklin. His eyes remained closed, but his face was wrinkled tight from the effort of keeping them that way. Jane felt it the same as he did: the body on the ceiling wanted to be seen. By all of them. By Franklin most of all.
“You are not welcome here!”
K
ate Fox declared this with such volume it startled the other five, their hands leaping from the table and thudding back but not unclasping. Jane struggled to understand the words. She knew what they meant, one by one, yet their collective meaning lay just beyond her grasp. It was the same sensation that came with being in the presence of Sir.
The body on the ceiling pushed out a new growth. A tube sprouting a ball at its end. Smooth skin, straight nose, eyes. A mouth that made Jane, even now, think lovely. A head.
Katie…
Once he was fully formed, Sir floated with his back to the ceiling, blinking down at them. The oil retreated into the hole it ushered from. Once it was gone, the hole was gone too, leaving the plaster dry. The long-limbed man gently undulating as if resting on waves.
Jane clenched her legs tight to the end of her seat to prevent herself from tumbling upward. The way that Bennie tumbled away from her when the train car flipped and the laws of gravity, of who should die first, were suspended.
After all I’ve done for you. Katie. Jeannie. Frank.
Sir was speaking without moving his lips. The voice came from every part of the room that expanded farther and farther until there were no walls, only the faint outline of the curtains, the sheet-covered mirrors.
“We stand for the people of this nation,” Kate said.
Sir snickered. His body drifted down. Spiraling slow.
“We summon the power of millions,” she said. “Black and white, man and woman!”
“Be silent, priestess.”
This came from his mouth so that all of them could hear. He wasn’t shouting. He didn’t need to.
“We cite from no Bible, hold no holy water,” Kate said. “It is the power of our union that enables us.”
“Then you have nothing.”
He spun, righting himself, so that he stood on the table. Or not quite stood—his feet, now in leather shoes so polished Jane could see the reflection of her stretch-faced self, hovered an inch over the wood. She had the idea that if she ventured a hand into the space between the table and shoes she would never be able to pull her fingers away.
Jane turned to the Fox girl. “Kate?”
She was there, but gone. Her eyes wide, staring up at Splitfoot in a kind of panicked awe. It took only a single assessment of what she’d brought against him—you have nothing—to leave her in silent agreement.
Jane tried to think of something she could say to prevent their failure, or stop something worse from happening. But it was another voice that spoke first.
“Be gone from this place!”
Franklin’s eyes were open. Held to Sir’s.
“I live here now,” it said.
“It is the people’s house! And it is the people’s will that casts you from it!”
Sir laughed emptily. It carried on beyond the exhaustion of humor, so that it was just a tormenting noise. “Tell me,” the floating man said finally. “Is it arrogance or ignorance that makes you believe such things?”
“It is the truth.”
“The truth?”
Sir drifted around the candelabra on the table, the flames licking his pant legs without burning them. He lowered to stand on the floor behind Kate. She was shivering. He lingered there, relishing her dread. It allowed Jane to note how he wore a suit of fine cloth, dark navy, the shirt white. She had never seen attire like it, yet it struck her as a uniform of a kind, however free of medals or ribbons.
“None know the true inclinations of humankind better than I.”
He started to walk in a circle behind their backs. Close enough to grasp them by the shoulder but far enough to easily step away if any of them attempted to spin around and grapple with him.
“There is little that unites you,” he said. “Each of you pursues your own fortunes, pleasures, the highest walls against the strangers on the opposite side. When the walls couldn’t be made long enough, tall enough, you invented borders. Nations. Which required ever more fictions. Rights. Votes.”
The entity placed its hands on Franklin’s shoulders. Jane saw the way it made him shudder at first and then, as Sir spoke, her husband fought the pain the hands were transferring into him. The whole time Franklin kept his eyes on her, anchoring himself.
“Since my brothers were cast out of God’s house we search for new homes, new ways to make you open the door. Just as you did for me,” Sir said, with a look Jane’s way. “Which makes this place my home as much as yours.”
“You must go,” Franklin said, his voice thin as crumpled paper.
“I will not be cast out, not by witch nor priest nor people’s will. Not by you.”
One of the candles went out.
“I—”
The second flame snuffed dead.
“—will never—”
The third.
“—GO!”
All of them disappeared into darkness.
Someone screamed. Jane thought it was Kate Fox, followed by Hany a second later. And then, as far as she could tell, the six of them were screaming.
But she was the first to stop.
There was something around her feet, pulling her down. She looked under the table to find nothing there. It wasn’t just the absence of hands or an animal that might have wrapped itself around her ankles, but the absence of carpet, of floor, of the foundation beneath it. There was nothing. Her feet hanging in space.
As the others noticed it, one by one, their voices quieted like turned taps.
Sir remained standing behind Franklin, hands on his shoulders. Jane saw that, judging from his expression, it wasn’t physical suffering the entity was inflicting, but the agony that came with being made to see things you did not want to see.
“Look at what you’ve done—what you’re doing now—in the name of union,” Splitfoot said.
There was nothing to see but the oily black of the wall-less room, the curtained windows drifting away like unmanned ships. The table was moving too, along with the chairs they sat on. Everything afloat, bobbing slower than if it were water beneath them, a series of sickening tosses and corrections.
“Look,” Sir said.
Something reached up from out of the ocean of oil. Thin as a stick, with bulbed branches at the top. Another came up next to it. More of them closer, and more so far off they were bundled together like crosses stuck in the ground of a battlefield.
The one closest to Jane bumped against her leg. She looked down to see it wasn’t a stick at all but a human arm.
Heads came up now too. The bodies of the nations here before. Shawnee, Apache, Cheyenne, Sioux. Men, women, and children. Some with painted faces, some naked. All of them grasping up at the nothingness.
“The people’s will,” the demon said.
The dead people made no sound. Yet their mouths were shaped into cries for help or calling for lost ones. Torments that had already happened, tied to the past, voiceless.
The bodies rose higher and higher, exposing their wounds, the holes and slits and sores where the bullets and bayonets and plagues had entered. Soon they would pull themselves from the oil and then—what would they do? Jane guessed they would descend upon the six of them at the table, still holding hands, and pull them down.
She tried to get Franklin to look at her. His line of sight was held on the dead closest to him, but in a frozen way that suggested he was seeing something other than their bodies or faces. Jane felt sure of it. Sir was letting him hear them.
“Franklin?”
He attempted to speak, acknowledge her with a nod. But once he’d managed the latter, he continued nodding—yes, yes, yes, yes—until he was trapped in a seizure from the neck up. Behind him, Sir lifted the weight of his hands away but did not release him completely. Ten filed nails remained resting atop Franklin’s wool coat, now steaming with sweat.
From a great distance away, at the edge of the East Room’s ocean, one of the window curtains pulled open.
Jane couldn’t make out what moved them, or what came out before they sli
d together again. But it was coming toward them. A glint of silver-blue, long and narrowed to a tip, cast its own dull light as it swung about in the darkness. It made her think of the pendulum game, the silver ball lurching between the letters. It made her fight not to be sick.
Abby had resumed screaming. Jane could see that her cousin was looking away from the table toward the swinging silver-blue and she wondered what it was Abby could see that she couldn’t.
“Not me! Not me! Not me!”
Jane read Abby’s lips repeating the same thing. What did it mean? Her thoughts were as muffled as the sounds around her. Yet she could still see clearly, if whatever was there to be seen was close enough. As the boy now was.
He held a sword. Franklin recognized it. The one he’d been given on his return from the Mexican War.
Franklin had no experience as a soldier. And yet he was made colonel by President Polk and assigned leadership of the New Hampshire brigade. Every level of government endorsed Franklin’s appointment, setting him up with a uniform that bore a row of medals before issuing him his rifle.
They’d reached the borders of a distant battle near Vera Cruz when the booms of artillery fire started up. The noise startled his horse. Franklin slammed into the saddle, fainted, fell. He was blinking himself back into consciousness when the horse brought its back hoof down on his knee.
He came home to be named a general and given an honorary sword.
The dead boy held it now.
It swung at Bennie’s side as he walked on the surface of oil through the grasping dead. His eyes held on Abby’s.
“Don’t!”
Jane didn’t know what she was asking the boy not to do, but felt it was about to happen, and that it would be something new, something it hadn’t done—or hadn’t been able to do—before this.
The boy brought the sword up high.
Franklin’s spasming had spread to the rest of him, his chest jolting, arms flying bonelessly around him. He looked to Jane and she could see that this struggle was Franklin’s own this time. An effort to free himself. To do something.
Bennie stood behind Abby. He was smiling in a way that had nothing to do with play, or happiness, or anything a smile can stand for.
