“There is your ‘we’ again.”
“It will require a circle. That’s how she explained it to me on her first visit. The more people who open themselves to the one they wish to reach, the greater chance of connection.”
“You have me in mind.”
“You’re the one he sought to influence from the beginning. I don’t see the point of attempting it without you.”
He kissed her.
Despite the strangeness of the conversation and the foreboding that had taken on a weight in the air of the house over the last hours, there was no denying they were together. Their bodies, their voices. He was grateful to have her close again. She felt it even more than he did. Jane was not only comforted by her husband’s hand stroking her side, an up and down that made a whisper of its own—I’m here, I’m here—but she was unburdened. For the first time since the day she went down the cellar steps in the Bowdoin house, there was someone she’d shared the entirety of her secret with.
Her lips met his. Her mouth, arms. Opening—
Scrrrritch.
They didn’t move. Something was crawling above them in the gap between the ceiling and the attic floor.
Momma? Papa?
The boy. The tone forlorn and wounded in a way the real Bennie never had cause to be.
“Don’t be afraid,” Franklin whispered. “He wants us to be afraid.”
“He wants us to be alone.”
I seeee you.…
Franklin slid away from Jane. Even under the bedcovers a cold air filled the space between them.
“Liar!”
He threw back the blankets and stood at the center of the room, shouting up into the chandelier that glinted wetly back at him.
“You are not our child! You are nothing!”
They both listened for the scratches but the air was still. It lent the sensation of being outside of time. Characters in someone else’s dream.
The Fox girl—
THUMP
… the Fox girl—
THUMP…
Bennie half sang this in the way of a tune repeated by a child jumping skip rope. Where feet would meet the ground the boy thumped his fist down on the ceiling instead.
… the Fox girl—THUMP… the Fox girl—THUMP…
It would go on like this. They knew it without speaking it aloud. There would be this creature calling out to them from the boards and bricks, preventing them from rest, from clear thoughts. It would isolate them from each other as much as they had already been isolated from the country that lay outside the residence’s walls.
“Come back,” Jane said to her husband, not bothering to whisper anymore.
Franklin got under the covers, lying board-straight on his back. He listened to the undead laughter from above for what seemed like half the night before he wondered if she had meant for him to return to their bed, or for someone else who had left her to return from where they had gone.
* * *
It took almost a week of correspondence from Jane, the promise of three hundred dollars upon completion of the “cleansing,” and a suite at the Willard, to convince Kate Fox to return to the White House. Franklin spent the time listening to counsel from his aides and congressmen on what to do about the Western problem, working long hours he experienced as a fight to stay awake while asking for more coffee from the steward. Because his cabinet insisted the meetings take place at the Capitol and not the White House (a demand the president was happy to accede to), Franklin was able to sneak away for naps in his office.
Once Jane had convinced the Fox girl to come, the two of them set to making arrangements that would have the best chance of success. Kate thought a big space more appropriate than a bedroom or salon, so that they could bring Splitfoot out into the open, deny him the corners and furnishings he could use to hide. It was also hoped that the vastness would simulate not a house but the country at large. Kate wanted to show how the mansion was special, too great a thing for any one imp to claim.
There was no chamber bigger than the East Room. Jane had the staff remove the few chairs and benches already there. She also asked for the mirrors to be covered in bedsheets, remembering the terrible visions they showed her when she entered the ballroom days before.
The other element Kate considered crucial was to make the circle as large as discretion would allow. Representative of the nation, as she put it in her final letter. And, though he may be reluctant, the attendance of the president will be required.
She was right to anticipate Franklin’s hesitation. But it didn’t arise from the weirdness of the proceedings, rather his worry that his participation become public knowledge. The balancing of confidentiality and the circle’s size led to a guest list of those who could be trusted most: Webster, Hany, Kate Fox, Abby, Franklin, and Jane.
Kate Fox arrived on the afternoon of the day the ritual was proposed to take place. She made no mention of Maggie’s absence, and Jane didn’t ask, sensing a rift between the sisters. In any case, Jane was glad the elder Fox girl wasn’t here. It was impossible to imagine Maggie bringing an equal intensity to the task. Kate spent her time in the East Room centering the round table she’d asked for, smoothing her hand over its top and repeatedly touching the six chairbacks as if engaged in some silent discourse between herself and the wood.
Jane was the only one to speak with her.
“I don’t mean to disturb you,” she said, halfway between the East Room’s doors and where the girl stood, as if coming any closer might risk sharing a contagion. “I just wanted to declare my appreciation in person.”
“I tried to pretend there was a choice in it. But I had to come.”
“You felt obliged to the president.”
“No. I felt obliged to you.”
Kate smiled in a way that showed she was unused to smiling, and Jane saw in it how twisted the girl’s life had been. A person more talked about than allowed to speak. A mystery, a story, a name. It was precisely the same way Kate Fox saw Jane.
“All the same, my thanks for—”
“I see us as friends, Mrs. Pierce,” Kate announced. “As sisters. Real sisters. Though I doubt I will see you again after tonight.”
Jane’s instinct to provide comfort pulled at her to say something polite. Of course we shall meet again, my dear. But the girl deserved better than an empty lie.
“I see us as sisters too,” Jane said before leaving. She’d meant to say friends but the truth came out instead.
* * *
The invitations that Franklin and Jane put to Webster, Hany, and Abby were combinations of apology and revelation. As it turned out, in all three cases, neither were required. This was because Webster, Hany, and Abby were devoted to the Pierces, perhaps the only ones in Washington who truly were. And because the three of them already had some idea of the White House’s afflictions.
“I’ve been a witness to that which I haven’t felt able to repeat to anyone, not even my wife,” Webster said when the president asked him to stay late that evening to attend “a ceremony of a kind.” “It can only be much worse for you. As you and Mrs. Pierce seem to be at the center of it.”
“She is,” Franklin said. “We are.”
Webster turned quiet. The president thought it was his secretary considering his next words in the name of discretion, but once he began to speak it was clear his reluctance was the result of dread for himself. “Can you say what it is we’re meant to combat, sir?”