by Andrew Pyper
“Momma!” the boy said to Abby. Wanting her to turn. To see him up close.
Franklin leaped from his chair. He’d stopped shaking, but hadn’t stopped moving. He lunged to the side, his hands grabbing at Abby’s arms as if pleading with her.
Their circle of hands was broken. It made things clearer, louder. It also made them go fast.
The boy brought the sword down at the same time Franklin heaved Abby against him, pulling them both away and tumbling into the chair where he’d sat.
The sword exploded into the table. Chips of oak flying up like sparks.
There was a confusion of new movement—Kate Fox running in the direction of the double doors, followed by Webster, then Hany—but Jane stayed focused on the boy, now working to wrench the sword from where it had bit deep into the wood.
She fought to catch up with what happened. It came to her just before Bennie pulled the sword free.
He’d been aiming for Abby, intending to cleave the blade into the side of her head. He’d chosen her, gone straight for her from where he’d been hiding behind the curtains from before they’d gathered at the East Room’s single table, because he’d mistaken Abby for Jane.
Momma!
The boy raised the sword up over his head.
Franklin pushed Abby toward the doors. The others had already made it there, heaving them open. The gaslight from the Cross Hall tumbled into the room. It barely reached the table where Jane alone still sat. The light broke apart into airborne sand that settled over the dead people coming up through the floor, conjoining their thousands of bodies into one.
Jane expected Sir to be angered by the interruption. Instead, he stepped away from Franklin—his posture erect without being stiff, the physical eloquence of a dancer—and bent to whisper in Bennie’s ear.
The boy lowered the sword level with his waist. He cast a vacant gaze over first Jane, then Franklin, before running after the others.
Franklin and Jane didn’t move. They couldn’t.
She watched the walls pull back into place, the floor drawn clear of the dead. It took only a moment, but when she tried to find Sir he wasn’t where he’d been standing. There was only Franklin, hunched over, his breathing an irregular series of catches and sighs and snaps.
The screams came from outside the room. Echoing and amplifying as they traveled from their source at the far end of the Cross Hall. Abby.
It sounded to Jane like her own voice. The screeching panic that called herself out of a nightmare only to find she’d moved from a sleeping to a waking one.
34
He knew all of it was real.
What Franklin had seen when the man in the one-colored suit had descended from out of the ceiling and placed his hands on him—it wasn’t a vision. It was more real than where he found himself now. The horror he would carry with him to his death was the certainty that what the demon showed him was a deeper reality than anything he would experience again in his life.
What had he seen? He would never attempt to describe it. The scale of it prevented him. And it was because he and almost everyone he’d ever known were complicit in it. Anguish. Theft. Atrocities. He saw how the human world, his nation, was born out of blood.
He was grateful to discover that it was too much to hold on to. It would return to his mind repeatedly to the last of his days, but never the whole of it, and with gaps of forgetting in between. Even now, as he looked across the table in the East Room at his wife, it had retreated from his mind in the way that a horn blown too close to the head can leave it empty but for the ringing.
“Who is that?”
He was asking about the screaming coming from the far end of the hall.
“It’s after her,” Jane said.
“The boy?”
“You saved her, Franklin. But it’s after her now.”
He saw the crevice in the tabletop from where the sword had come down and he understood.
“Stay with me,” he said, but he needn’t have. It was Jane who came around the table to help him from his chair. It was his First Lady guiding him as fast as they could move to the open doors.
* * *
There was nothing to be seen for the length of the Cross Hall except for a trail of blood spots, curving and random as rose petals dropped before a bride down the church aisle. It started outside the Green Room and carried on past the glowering portraits of dead presidents before turning right toward the Entrance Hall.
Someone was struck, Jane thought. Someone is dying. Even as she ran alongside Franklin, following the stains and, once, almost slipping when her bootheel found one, she hoped it wasn’t Hany.
They came around the corner to be met by a scene requiring interpretation.
The front door of the White House was open. Webster stood a few feet outside under the portico, the top half of him leaning as if he intended to come back inside to lend aid, but his hips and legs were facing Pennsylvania Avenue, ready to sprint. Hany was at the threshold, her back against the frame and her arms held out straight, ensuring the door didn’t close. And in the center of the Entrance Hall, lying on the marble tiles, was Abby. Her hand was cut. Not deep, from what Jane could tell, a three-inch slice across her knuckles where she likely tried to defend herself from a swing of Bennie’s sword.
The boy stood over her, but had turned to face Franklin and Jane. The sword held absently over Abby’s chest as if a weather vane, nudged by the wind.
“Watch me, Papa,” he said.
Jane could see what was about to happen yet was fixed in place by the thing’s command. Watch me. She could do nothing but what it asked. As she did, she saw something remarkable: Franklin rushing forward. His arms rolling in a headlong charge. He had found his battle, and no fall from a stallion or swollen knee or black magic spell would stop him.
The boy observed Franklin’s approach as if awaiting instructions. By the time he swung around and brought the sword’s tip even with his chest the two of them were already entangled, falling to the floor.
Someone was cut—Franklin—but Jane couldn’t see exactly where. There was a fresh dappling of blood next to where the two of them fought. The spots were light, but she couldn’t be sure if it was only the first spritz before the unstoppable letting.
Franklin grunted, one hand against the boy’s shoulder, holding off his biting lunges, the other hand grasping for the sword. Bennie made no sound other than the snapping click of his teeth.
The boy’s foot slipped in the blood. Only a brief loss of leverage, but it allowed Franklin to spin him onto his back. The impact released the sword from his grip and it clattered to the side. Franklin reached for it. This gave the boy the time to bring up his knee and thrust it into Franklin’s stomach, throwing him off.
Franklin landed hard but kept scrabbling to the sword, grabbing the handle. Without hesitation he swung the weapon wide behind him, hoping to find the boy. But Bennie was already off. Sprinting away from the open door, past Jane, and into the Blue Room on the opposite side of the Cross Hall.
“Franklin!”
Her shout didn’t slow him. He was up by the time she turned back to see if he was still alive. Her husband in pursuit of the boy, barreling across the hall with the sword tapping against his leg like a riding crop, urging himself on.
Jane went to Abby. The wound in her hand was shallow, though in need of sutures.
“My poor cousin,” Jane said.
“Is it gone?”
“Yes.”
“Not Bennie. The other.”
“It remains. But not here. Not right now.”
Abby rose to her feet and noticed her hand as if for the first time. “I should stay,” she said, looking at Jane. “But this—”
“It requires a doctor’s attention. Mr. Webster?” Jane said, and at the voicing of his name the president’s secretary reentered the house with the reluctance of a cat being pulled into the rain. “Would you take Abby to have this tended to?”
“Of course, ma’am.�
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“I’m sure you know what Franklin would ask if he were here.”
“Discretion,” Webster said, offering Abby his arm to lean on. “You can be assured of it.”
He started away with Abby a half step behind. Once outside they both accelerated their pace, so that by the time Jane lost sight of them in the night they were on the verge of breaking into a run.
Hany came inside from her place at the threshold and took Jane’s hands in hers.
“What can I do?” she asked.
“I’m sorry you’ve done what you have already. It was wrong of me to ask it.”
Jane embraced her. Neither of them saw it coming. The two women held on to each other like friends from their lives before, from childhood, if not earlier than that.
“You should go,” Jane said when she pulled away.
“It’s not right it’s just the two of you here.”
“It must be the two of us.”
“President Pierce. He—”
“Go now. Please.”
Hany nodded. She went to the door. When she closed it behind her Jane felt the house hold its breath.
Jane took in some of the cold air for herself. It steadied her. In fact, she found that she had no particular complaint of the body, no cough or headache or leaping in the stomach. Even in the eye of madness, she felt the most sane she’d been in weeks, perhaps years.
One more breath filled her with solid steel.
35
Jane entered the Blue Room prepared to witness some new and unthinkable scene, but the room was empty. Everything in its place except for a rectangular piece of the wall pushed in. The secret door Franklin had mentioned to her.
She went straight in.
A passage, narrow and dark. Ahead of her there was what she sensed to be another door that was shut. She felt her way along, sliding her back over the wall to her right. At what she figured to be halfway her hand fell into a gap. When she righted herself she waited for her eyes to find the dimensions of the new space she’d found in the darkness, and within seconds she was able to make out what was there. Another passage. Even narrower than the one she stood in.
The curvature of the Blue Room resulted in a space between its interior walls. A gap that, from the secret door’s location, grew out wider than the spaces between the other walls in the mansion. This was the passage she had found. A space within what would normally never have been seen, let alone entered.
To go inside required her to advance sideways, squeezed front and behind.
Less than a body’s length along her ankle bumped against something hard. She squinted. A set of uneven stairs rose up higher, curving along the Blue Room’s wall where it widened until it disappeared in shadow.
She assembled what she saw and what it told her:
The stairs were made of irregular cuts of lumber and were constructed by the workers who’d been hammering and sawing throughout the residence so they could gain access to the vents and support beams from the inside. The entire White House had been built this way, with passages between the walls and crawl spaces between the floors to provide for maintenance to the latest systems of plumbing and heating.
There were probably other passages, other stairs like it elsewhere.
This was how the thing moved around. Where it lived.
The last conclusion she arrived at was that she must climb higher to find where the thing went. And she was about to when something shuffled down toward her from above.
Jane braced to meet it. She would not turn back. To get past her would mean going through her.
Whatever it was, it was bigger than she was. Descending from the wider space above to the bottleneck where she stood. Scratching over the wood frame on either side of it without slowing.
“Step back, Jeannie,” it said.
She reversed to let Franklin descend. She could smell his sweat in the close quarters and recognized its sharp odor, the kind that came not from labor but violence, or sex, or panic.
“Gone,” he said once they’d returned to the openness of the Blue Room.
“Where?”
“Between the floors and ceilings. I tried to follow, pulling myself along flat—I couldn’t find him.”
“We mustn’t let him go.”
“I know.”
“He means to hurt us, not just—
“I know it.”
She stepped closer to him. “He tried to kill Abby because he thought she was me.”
He showed her his hands, the blood that was there. “I figured that. And I’ve seen what he can do.”
“We must end it,” she said. “Do you understand my meaning?”
“I understand. But I can’t do it.”
“He’ll kill me if he has the chance. Or one of the staff. Or you.”
“I can’t, Jeannie,” he said, and met her eyes for the first time since he emerged from the passage. “Could you?”
She hadn’t realized the full implications of what she was asking him beyond ridding the house of its trouble. Now she heard it too, and thought on it. Could she put down something she knew to be a danger to the innocent? Kill it by her own hand?
It would be done in the name of necessity. It would right, at least in part, what she had done wrong. And it wouldn’t be murder, not in God’s eyes, as she and he both knew it wasn’t human. The thing was Sir’s child. Not Franklin’s. Not hers.
These were facts. And they blew away like leaves when put against the idea of destroying anything that looked like Bennie, spoke like him, reminded her of him.
She shook her head. “Is there someone else who could—”
“Not with a task of this kind. There’s nobody to be trusted with it. And there’s nobody—nobody else—who can know.”
“We can’t let it run free.”
“So we trap it.”
“And if we manage that, we release it?”
“It will only come back. Or do harm to someone else. Or be recognized.”
“We keep it here then.”
He pressed his lips together. It was the expression he made when he was working to believe his own words. “As long as it remains hidden—as long as it can’t reach out from where it dwells,” he said, “we’ll be safe.”
“And the thing will be a secret.”
“Between us.”
“Only us.”
* * *
She couldn’t say whose idea it was. Both of them contributed to it, though there were very few spoken deliberations between them. What they did was the product of obligation, but it was carried out by way of the unspoken language of marriage.
They started in the Grief Room.
Franklin gathered some of the heavier tools and lumber left by the workmen around the state rooms and carried them up to the second floor, piling them outside in the hall. Jane helped with the things she could carry, the can of nails and crowbar and long saw. Once he judged they had all they needed she put her hand on the knob to open the door.
“Wait,” he said, handing her a hammer. “I’ll go in first. If it gets past me, use this to stop it.”
It.
She’d forgotten about the general. They hadn’t heard it marching about or knocking at the door as they had the first days they’d shut it inside Bennie’s room, and her mind had shifted to other concerns since. Whatever was inside the toy’s metal skin that had given it life may have perished by now. Or it might have been waiting for this very moment.
Franklin picked the crowbar up from the floor. Tested the weight of it.
“Good?” he said.
She brought the hammer’s head up next to her chin to show that she was.
He turned the knob and pushed the door inward.
The only illumination arrived from what fragments of moonlight found a way through the drawn curtains. It was still sufficient to flash off the soldier’s red cheeks, its sword, before it rushed at Franklin from out of the corner.
Jane tried to anticipate the noise it would make. A
shriek or chitter or wail. It didn’t bother. It just came fast on its stiff knees, tottering and thrusting its blade, stubby but sharp as a hunting knife.
Franklin leaned back, raised his left leg. He did it sure and slow like something he knew he’d have only one chance at. When the general reached the spot on the floor his eyes were fixed to, Franklin kicked.
His boot met the soldier clean in the head. The general toppled backward, landing on its side. For a second its legs kept going, running without moving, before they went still. It rolled onto its front so that it could push itself back up with its hands. Movements that gave Franklin the time to step over to where it lay and smash the heel of his boot down on its back.
The little sword spun away. Jane thought Franklin would move for it as he had for Bennie’s, but he just brought the boot down again. And again. Each time the general would push his top half up with his arms, Franklin would stomp its back, puckering the once smooth steel into blemish-scarred skin with his heel.
The soldier slowed. Franklin allowed himself a deep breath before starting at the back of its head with the crowbar. Once, twice. The impacts were sharper than his boot had been and on the first swing it cracked the steel. On the third it ruptured it.
Jane couldn’t see anything inside of it from the distance and angle where she stood, though Franklin, standing right above the hole he’d made, paused as if he had. Revulsion, then pity, twisted his face. Jane thought he might be sick. He might cry.
He swung the crowbar down again. Kept at it, the force of it doubling each time. Blows to the back of its legs, its neck. He didn’t give the soldier a chance to collect itself, though it tried. Somehow its pathetic attempts at a counterattack made it more frightening to Jane, the worry that it would never stop, relentless and immune to death.
The fatigue hit Franklin all at once, and the crowbar fell from his hand. The toy didn’t move. Jane started for the general’s sword herself, just in case, but Franklin spoke to her without turning.
“Help me with this,” he said.
He reached into Bennie’s crib and started to pull at the tightly fitted sheet. Jane did as she was asked. Together they yanked the sheet up and Franklin threw it over the soldier. He nudged it with the toe of his boot, and when the sheet remained in place, he gave it a harder kick. The tin of its body gave a squeak as it slid a few inches over the floor—or was it a voice from within?—but made no sign of returning to life.
