As she stood there, scanning between these possibilities, an observation arrived: the boy wasn’t there. Not lying, waiting, in the big-boy bed. Not standing by the window. If he was hiding, there were few places he could do so. Behind the curtains? There were no telltale feet beneath them. Beneath the covers? The bed was neatly made. Under a piece of furniture? She bent to look under the crib and bed frame, but there were only gray shadows there.
Jane rose. The toy soldier shuddered in her arms. A doubling of its smell blown cold against her face.
She rushed over to the crib and half placed, half dropped the general on the floor. It tottered for a second. A motion of its own making, or simply the weight of it rolling, unbalanced, on its elbows and knees. She didn’t speak until it settled.
“Benjamin?”
The silence mocked her.
He was gone. She didn’t want to think of the possibility of his having escaped, so she focused on him simply returning to some netherworld. He did what other spirits were said to do—he appeared, then disappeared. There was nothing left behind but the experience of it, the doubt of its ever having occurred, and the collision of the two shaping themselves into a story.
She was talking herself into his never having existed even as she watched the hand slide out from under the crib.
It couldn’t be happening, but it was. She had looked into the darkness there and seen nothing. Maybe that’s what Bennie was, just as Splitfoot was, what every murderous idea was. The mind’s sculpture of darkness.
The hand slid out over the floor longer than she thought his arm could stretch. When it stopped, the other hand came after it, extending an inch farther than the first. When they were side by side the fingers bent at the knuckles, gripped hard. The arms bending as they pulled the rest of him out.
Play…
The voice wasn’t pretending to be her son’s anymore. It wasn’t Sir’s becalmed tone either. She had never heard a voice like it, but it came to her as something she had always known.
Play with me.
A crash. Something heavy clattering to the floor. Jane looked up, expecting to see the place where a chandelier had detached from the ceiling, but there was no chandelier in this bedroom. She looked down. The general. Its knotted limbs still twisted around its head, but now lying on its back. Fallen over. That, or its first attempt to get up.
Don’t go, Momma.
She backed away. Her eyes on the boy as he slid free and, without pause, pulled himself erect with the smoothness of a snake rising from the grass.
The general was moving too. Rocking back and forth.
Play!
Jane turned and rushed out to the hallway. She meant to head straight to her room but veered to the left, half running, keeping herself an equal distance from both walls as if the portraits of dead senators and Speakers of the House might reach out to her as Bennie’s hands just had.
She was halfway along when she saw what had drawn her there.
On her left was the staircase, on the right the oval-shaped library that sat above the Blue Room below and, another floor down from that, the furnace. That’s where she found him.
He stood alone in a roomful of books. His expression kindly, patient, suffering. The same surroundings and state of mind she had seen him occupy all his life.
“Daddy?”
He gestured for her to come closer. She remembered him doing that too, and in just that way: less a wave than a rounded clenching of his fingers, as if grasping an invisible cane. When he wanted to speak with her it was always a matter of significance. And because he didn’t want to raise his voice—because so much of what he said had the aura of a secret about it—he needed her to be close.
Jane went to him.
She was almost near enough for him to reach out to her, touch her if he chose to, when she remembered she’d left the door to Bennie’s room open.
26
He heard the banging from upstairs but felt it from below.
It’s why Franklin headed down to the ground floor upon leaving the Blue Room. He wanted to fix the problem. He wanted to give someone a piece of his goddamn mind. The house was coming at him, an attack composed of the distortion of everyday things that he guessed was the way insanity presented itself. He wouldn’t let himself entertain the possibility. So he decided: it was the house that was against him. And if it was the house, he would restore his place as its master.
There were a half dozen staff members in the ground floor’s hall when he appeared. Maids, a brass-buttoned steward, an aproned cook. All but one of them scuttled into the kitchen or cellar or laundry when they saw him. The one who remained stood outside the furnace room. The same man who’d warned him against entering when he’d come down on his first day to complain of the house’s cold.
“What’s going on in there?” Franklin demanded, striding up to him.
“Sir?”
“All the noise. Likes fists against the walls. Didn’t you hear it?”
“I’ve heard some things, but not that.”
Franklin couldn’t tell if the man was mocking him. If he had to guess, he’d say the fellow was protecting someone.
“Step aside.”
“Sir?”
“If you won’t stop this nonsense, I will.”
“I wouldn’t call it nonsense.”
The man said this with a seriousness that even Franklin’s stare failed to dissolve. At first it seemed he wouldn’t move. And then, with a shake of the head of the kind one gives to someone who insists on drinking another glass of whiskey despite being unable to stand, he moved back.
Franklin considered the door, listened for movement or voices on the other side. When he could detect nothing he gripped his hand around the brass knob and turned to ask the furnace keeper another question. The hall was empty. Was it possible that the man had retreated so quickly as that? Franklin would have called out his name if he’d known what it was. He would shout an order now—Come back!—if he didn’t want to hear the uselessness of it.
A person only sees things like that when they’re ready to.
He was ready now.
Franklin pushed the door open and stepped into the wall of dry heat.
The first thing he noticed was the boiler itself: smaller than he would have imagined, a fat steel barrel with a dozen ducts stretching out of it like tentacles punching up through the floorboards. It looked to him like a crab on its back. He remembered peekytoes he found overturned by the tide on the beach at Boothbay, where he visited during breaks at college. Some were dead. Some only looked that way until you tried to pick them up and the claws would clamp on to your skin.
The second thing he noticed was that the room was unoccupied.
The man at the furnace room door was a believer. In what? Other worlds. Franklin hadn’t been brought up that way, the world of his father—money, politics, war—decidedly the present one. And then, when Franklin was older, he’d been chosen. Picked out from the crowd to speak for the crowd. There was no room for other worlds in his.
He drew closer to the boiler. The mansion was big, but the heat blasting out at him was of a volume he was sure could heat all of Washington if the windows were opened. It would melt the ice on the Potomac. Tell the crocuses it was time to rise. Yet he knew that only a floor above the rooms were chilled as those of houses laid to waste by plague.