“Why have you done this?”
“I am always looking for a path,” Splitfoot said using her father’s mouth.
“Where?”
“To your thoughts, your choices. To be the loudest voice in your head. And through that voice, to guide you to your ends.”
Jane wished, hopelessly, that the man standing in front of her actually was her father. She didn’t know how much she missed him. He would understand everything that had happened to her. They would have so much to talk about. But the man with her could provide no comfort. The very notion of his touch made her shudder.
Sir read her mind and encaged her in his arms.
“The thinking of a thing gives it a reality. Every cruelty, every murder, every lie. Even the greatest atrocities begin with a harmless musing,” Sir whispered against her cheek. “Thinking a thing makes it want to be a thing.”
“You want the world to end.”
“I want it broken.”
“You can’t do that from here.”
“It is the best place to do it.”
“No. We won’t—”
“From here I can break the world by breaking the mind of the man with power over it. How is that done? You break his heart.”
He pulled her closer. He would never let her go.
Behind her, from the other side of the door, she heard someone running down the hall. The steps light and quick. A child.
27
The president rushed upstairs toward his dead son’s voice.
He wasn’t thinking. Not in the way he normally did, arranging his considerations by pros and cons and priorities. Franklin’s mind was alive but in a different way, and he realized this place had been pulling him there since he entered it, opening him to senses and visions he didn’t welcome but, once revealed, were impossible to dispel. It was the dead who did it. The house was full of them.
Including the man outside the furnace room.
It’s cold on either side, Mr. President, depending on your situation.
It was also the way Franklin felt around these presences that confirmed they weren’t living. The gut twists, dizziness, the fattened tongue. Speaking with the furnace keeper made Franklin ill. He had the idea that it was not inflicted on purpose but was necessary for the presence to make itself visible, and in the case of the furnace man, converse. Maybe all the dead were like that. To get from there, they had to ride on the shoulders of someone here.
If he was right, it would go some way to explaining why he hadn’t felt properly himself since coming to live in the mansion. Then again, he wasn’t himself in coming here. He wasn’t Franklin Pierce anymore, a husband, a suffering father of lost children. Here he was president. Greater than a man, though one not permitted to be human.
He heard the door to the library close at the same time he came to the top of the stairs. It wasn’t where the voice was coming from, which removed any curiosity he might have had as to who was in there. He started to the right. The second floor hall was empty in the way a space is following an act of violence. It was how his father’s tavern felt after being cleared of a brawl.
He knew the door to the room across from Jane’s would be open. It let him slip inside without touching it.
There was the neatly made bed, the crib, the dresser, the chair. He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. But he felt it all the same.
“I was calling for you, Papa.”
The boy was standing in front of the window with his back to him. Heavy curtains were lined against his sides so that Franklin had mistaken him for a high-backed chair fixed to let the moonlight in.
“Are you all right?” Franklin asked.
It was the wrong question. It wasn’t what he really wanted to know. And it let the boy win the first point: he was here, being treated as a human being would. They were both acting now. Which was the initial step on the way to doing away with the difference between acting a part and being who you really are.
“I’m fine,” the boy said. “I was just lonely.”
He turned. The room was dark so that the only light came from whatever dusting of moon and lamp found its way through the window, along with the shaft of yellow cast along the floor from the hallway. But it was sufficient to illuminate two things. One was that the boy’s turning wasn’t the only movement, as there was something else, something to the right, that rose and seemed to unfold itself—cle-clank—at the same time. The other was that the boy’s face was that of his son. His Bennie.
Fixing his attention on the boy alone was another mistake. It prevented him from getting a good look at the rising, unfolding thing that came at him.
Fif-fif-fif-fif-fif…
A dwarf. It’s back and neck and shoulders so stiff it advanced in arthritic lurches. Low and fast as a startled rat. And like a rat, its very nature was repulsive.
The thing passed so close he felt some part of it graze his pant leg. Franklin moved deeper into the room to be farther from it in case it leapt on him from behind. But as he spun around to meet the attack, he caught sight of it. The general. Bennie’s toy soldier banging its arm against the door, swinging it shut. The shaft of light from the hall skinnying to nothing.
“Don’t be afraid,” Bennie said.
Franklin didn’t reply, didn’t move. Another point won by the boy. He didn’t mean to calm his father, just hold him there. That wasn’t his only victory. By not denying the boy’s claim that he was afraid only proved that he was.
The floor squeaked. It was the boy stepping closer. Franklin turned from the dwarfish shadow standing guard at the door. Now that the boy was away from the window it let more of the scant light in, silty and brown as a disturbed creek bed.
“Do you know who I am?” the boy asked.
“I know who you were.”
“Were?”
“None of this is real.”
“How best to show that you’re wrong?”
The boy seemed to ponder his own question. And then Franklin saw it wasn’t a question meant for a response from either of them. They both already knew the answer.
“Do you know who I am?” the boy asked again, precisely the same as before, a mimicry that smuggled a threat inside it the second time.
“Yes.”
“Will you say it?”
“You are Benjamin Pierce,” Franklin said, his throat on fire. “My son.”
He was expecting it. The figure at the window he’d seen from the orangery. The cries that had traveled down through the vents. The calls for him that sounded so much like the ones that awakened him when he still had living sons, the shouts for their father to come and push away the bad dreams that invaded their sleep. And he had responded with the same reflex to help. To shield.
But what was it?
It was Bennie in the sense that its resemblance to his son made him remember his son. Jane carried the locket with the boy’s hair for the same reason. Yet for all that, looking at the boy who kept his distance as if hiding the flaws that would give him away if he came too close, Franklin saw even less than a clipping of hair. He saw a betrayal. It was an agent sent here to build a bridge between where it came from and where Franklin existed using his love as building material. From what he could tell, it was almost all the way there.
“May I go, Papa?”