“Remarkable,” Jane said.
Kate, who’d been silent to this point outside of their initial introductions, sat forward in her chair and regarded her with open pity. She saw that Jane wasn’t fooled. She also saw how this disillusionment hurt her more than the waste of an hour and a hundred dollars.
“Sometimes it helps if we join hands,” Kate said.
Maggie shot her sister a look. It was hard to be sure, but Jane interpreted it as a warning. As if Kate was venturing somewhere that had proven dangerous. As if the girl was proposing to make the game real.
“Like this?” Jane asked, picking up Kate’s hand in hers before Maggie had a chance of preventing her.
“Yes,” Kate said. “Maggie? You too.”
Maggie wrinkled her nose. Jane read it as an attempt to appear indifferent to what was happening now, but it didn’t entirely mask something else that changed in the elder sister’s expression. A stiffening of her back, the formerly slouched shoulders now high as if she’d been told to sit properly by a teacher. But it wasn’t a response to authority. It was a response to fear.
“Hands,” Kate said.
Maggie took Jane’s and Kate’s free hands in hers.
“Mrs. Pierce?”
“Yes?”
“Forgive me, but I’m going to ask you to do something that may be a trial.”
“Ask it.”
“Think of Benjamin.”
“That’s not a trial. I think of—”
“Don’t remember him. Bring him.”
“How?”
“See him.”
“I always see him!”
“Not from the past. Here. Now.”
She felt foolish playing along with such an obvious ruse, but Jane found it hard to deny the younger Fox girl. Partly because she was a child. Partly because there was something more convincing—some buried intensity even the girl herself was uncertain how to contain—that made Jane curious to see what might be revealed if she went all the way to the edge.
She focused. Brought up Bennie’s face, let her mind conjure the tiny wrinkles and dimples of him as a newborn. And then those same markings as they deepened or shrank over time. A microscopic scan of her son’s face.
“I see him.”
“Now bring him to us,” Kate said.
“I don’t know how.”
“Ask him. Pull him. Order him.”
“How do—”
“Make him.”
Jane exhaled for so long that, when she breathed in, it was like she had broken the surface of a lake after nearly drowning.
“Come to me, Bennie,” she said.
“Clear as light so he can follow it to you.”
“Come to me!”
“Good. Now open yourself to the other side.”
As vague a command this was, Jane knew exactly what the girl was asking. She had been waiting to be given permission to let herself try since her children’s passing. And before that too. In some way Jane had been waiting to yield herself to the realm of death all her life. If Franklin’s fate was the shouldering of power, hers was this: to be a bridge between the underworld and the living world she only half-inhabited ever since she took her father’s pendulum game from his desk drawer.
“Please, my sweet boy!” she cried. “I am here!”
“You are the door. Open it.”
“Come to your mother, Bennie!”
“Open the door inside of you,” Kate said, her voice rising. “Open it wide to your lost child. To all who wish to enter!”
“Bennie!”
“Open it now!”
Jane pulled her hands away from Maggie’s and Kate’s to swing her arms out to her sides. It expanded her. As if the smallness of her body had sprouted new appendages, a metamorphosis from woman to spider. When she spoke her voice was altered. Even Jane heard it, and would have screamed if she wasn’t so far away, so open.
It was Sir’s voice.
Come… through…
The temperature dropped with the abruptness of stepping into the ocean. It wasn’t a mere sensation either. Jane exhaled, shuddering, and her breath reached out to Maggie and Kate in gray billows.
“He’s here,” Jane said.
There was a shape advancing from out of the shadows in the corner of the room. Clear, material, unmistakable. She was used to seeing things that others didn’t, so when she looked to Kate and Maggie she expected the blank, trancelike expressions they wore as part of their theatrics. But they saw it too. Maggie’s mouth hanging open so wide her spittle made the inside of her lower lip shine. Kate’s neck stretched so long it was as if she was about to float up from her chair.
What Jane also noted was the sisters’ differences of expression. Maggie’s was astonishment. Kate’s was recognition.
“He’s come home! He’s come—”
Jane was cut off so abruptly it was as if she’d been struck. In fact, her head spun to the side, though nothing visible had touched her.
Each of them watched the thing come out of the corner as if there were a door there without a hinge or handle, and each of them, for their own reasons, saw that they had been wrong.
“Splitfoot,” Kate whispered.
It was different now. Jane felt it.
In his previous visits, even the ones when he had been most physically detailed, most manlike, he had given the impression of something wearing a costume. But this was what it really was. And while it was more faint in its particulars it showed itself in how it warped its environment. The density of it was so great it bent the floorboards under its weight. It stole the air from the room and left them gasping. The revulsion it brought was as sudden as taking a turn on the trail and coming upon a fly-buzzed corpse while on a walk in the woods.
All of it made clear that it was not a complex, self-contradicting thing as a human being was, but elemental. Malice. Hate. Violence. It was the thing such words are meant to refer to but can’t dig deep enough to reach the thing itself.
Boom.
A clap of thunder. Except it came from below, not above.
BOOM. Boom… BOOM-BOOM.
It rattled the windows and shook dust from the ceiling plaster. It wasn’t a sound in their heads but the vibrations of something—multiple things—smashing against a part of the building’s wall. To Jane, the increasing desperation of the knocks spoke of people not trying to get in but trying to get out.
People. She was sure of it.
Coming from somewhere on one of the lower floors. The furnace room. People bringing their knees and feet and fists against its oval walls. Its door.
Boom-boom… BOOM!
The thing in the room liked the sound of it. The panic, the terror. Jane could feel that too.
“Oh Jesus Christ!” Maggie shouted. It sounded like nonsense. “Holy Jesus help us!”
The presence wasn’t repelled by Maggie’s words. If anything it savored the helplessness with which she spoke them and lingered a moment to witness the evaporation of the smugness she displayed mere minutes ago. Then it moved. Pulled away to the interior wall and passed through it to the hallway on the other side.
Once it was gone the three of them returned to themselves.
Maggie started sobbing. Kate was saying the same thing to herself, over and over, too quiet for any of them to hear. Jane was listening for where the thing had gone. Because it hadn’t left the residence. It wouldn’t leave, not now.