In the evening she left her room and kept to her side of the hallway. She made a point of not looking at Bennie’s door in case she could see the shadow of his feet on the other side, or if it was ajar, or if her looking triggered his voice to call out. There was no one else in the second floor’s central hall. While her intention was to find Franklin in his office or in the room where he slept close by, when she came to the top of the main staircase she abruptly turned and started down.
She knew there were other people currently in the White House with her. During the day there were sentries, maids, stewards, the women who cooked and baked, the men who tended the furnace, along with the workers on the first floor inching forward on the structural renovations. But the political business and carpenters’ work was over now, dinner served and cleared, so many would have left. In fact, the White House at night was a mostly empty place. How many remained? Six, seven? Ten? Whatever the number, they would most likely be on the ground floor. So long as she didn’t go down that far she could feel as if she was the only living soul in the mansion.
On the first floor the gaslights had been lowered so that Jane had to pause at the bottom of the stairs to orient herself. Perhaps it was because the ceiling was higher here than on the residential floor, but it felt to her that she had descended into a much larger building, or perhaps not a building at all. A living thing in the midst of transforming from a house to what now stretched out before her as an endless tunnel.
It made her dizzy. To find her balance, she walked.
Past the closed doors of the state dining room on one side and the pantry on the other. In her peripheral view she could see that the entry to the private dining room was open wide, but she refused to look inside. She was certain that if she did, she would find something awful there. A being—a smudge was how she thought of it—that watched her as she passed on and shuffled to the Crimson Parlor, where she appeared about to carry on before abruptly slipping inside, eluding the emptiness that pursued her.
The room was brighter than the hallway. Had the staff forgotten to shut off the gas? It seemed unlikely. Which made her being alone unlikely too.
“It’s Mrs. Pierce,” she announced, introducing herself to the unoccupied chairs and settees. “Is anyone here?”
No one replied. But something moved.
She didn’t hear it exactly, nor see it. There was the room as it was, and then the room that followed her query, the two atmospheres distinct in the way of the sun slipping behind a cloud in the time you blinked.
She hadn’t noticed the piano when she first entered. Could that have been the difference? A baby grand piano appearing between one second and the next? In any case, it was here for her. Certainly she had never heard it played. Perhaps music was what was missing from this place. It would be her holy water, or burnt sage, or whatever talisman she’d read that witches or priests used in the cleansing of befouled homes.
The bench squeaked when she sat on it. Once the quiet was restored, she lifted the polished lid. The keys shone like animal teeth. She set her fingers down to begin, then raised them. She did the same thing again without pressing a note. Her mind was clear of the sheet music she’d studied at Fiske’s Boarding School, and she was unable to remember any of the Mozart or hymns she once knew by heart.
The only thing she could play was an improvisation. Once begun it came to her easily. More than easily—it was like she wasn’t playing at all. The tune started out buoyantly, like a march. As it went along, it fell apart. The major chords interrupted by minor-key digressions, bass thuds breaking the melody into fragments. To Jane’s ear, it was like the failure of music more than music itself, the revelation that it was only ever hammers striking wires.
You are the instrument, Jeannie.
Sir whispered this so close it was as if he was sharing the bench with her. She lurched to the side, but the broken tune continued. Her fingers kept playing even when she tried to pull them away.
She pushed against the pedal struts with her feet, threw her head back, any part of her that responded to the command to break free. For a moment her arms were stretched so far from the keyboard she felt a pop in her shoulders, first left then right, following by a searing pain in both. If she pushed any harder she could imagine her arms ripping away. But she couldn’t listen anymore. There was madness in the music. That, and terrible pain, a wordless history of it.
She knew she was free when she opened her eyes and found herself on the floor. The bench tipped onto its side. The piano’s lid shut.
No one had come to investigate either the music or the sound of her fall. Jane knew that the staff did their best to avoid her. If they attributed the piano playing to her it was probable they would have stayed away no matter what other sounds came out of the room.
She rose, rubbing her shoulders, and made her way to the hallway without looking back into the parlor. There was a worry that something would be there if she did. The same smudge she sensed in the private dining room, or maybe a different one. A whole number of the dead showing themselves, finding a way to be seen through her.
She paused in the hallway and thought of returning to her room. But she was no more protected there than anywhere else. And if she went back upstairs now she would be compelled to check on Bennie, something she could avoid so long as she remained shuffling along down here.
At the Cross Hall’s end the oversize doors to the East Room stood closed. Jane remembered looking inside when she first arrived and being astonished by the size of it. A ballroom that could accommodate hundreds. She wondered, as she pulled one of the double doors open, if they would come spilling out, trampling her in their rush to escape.
The room was empty except for the woman.
Standing across the forty feet of floor, wearing a mourning dress, starved and with eyes yellow as custard. Jane waited for the witch to come at her. The woman matched her stillness, studying her, working out where she’d seen her before.
The otherness.
Her father’s deathbed phrase came to her, and with it the recognition that the witch was Jane herself. A reflection standing at the threshold in the great gilt-framed mirror on the opposite wall.
She stepped inside. Her eyes moved to her feet, as if she was crossing a flood-rushed river while balancing atop a fallen tree. The darkness around her widening into pools. Bottomless, but not unpeopled.
In what she guessed was the middle of the ballroom she stopped. Looked up into the mirror.
The dead lay around her in piles. Not in neat stacks like firewood, but a chaos of limbs and heads that came up high as her knees. Unlike the smudges she had glimpsed earlier, these were exclusively the casualties of war. Those that had already occurred, as well as those to come.
The more Jane watched through the mirror, the more she could make out the individual men lying around her. Not all of them were still. Some shuddered, or writhed about, or raised a hand for help—all dead but for these final reflexes.
There were soldiers of the Revolutionary War wearing red waistcoats over their chests, their white pants soiled by blood or dirt or human filth. There were also bodies dressed as soldiers but wearing colors and garb she’d never seen before. Hats of smaller size, gray and blue, some shaped like boxes on their heads. These men made up the greatest number by far. Jane had the idea that they were those lost in a conflict yet to take place. Their torn bodies entwined with the dead that came decades or centuries before in an indistinguishable mass.