Franklin was the last to enter, glancing back down the Cross Hall to ensure it was empty before closing the doors. He kept his eyes on Kate Fox. He was wrong, perhaps, in his initial detection of an angelic aura. She may have only been pretty. But even in this respect there wasn’t a distracting abundance: narrow-faced to the point of malnourishment, teeth in need of brushing, eyes rimmed with the red of fever. She was appealing to him because he saw how alone she was in her suffering, and while he might never know its precise nature, he wished to stand with her against it. She reminded him of Jane.
“What we will do together is new to me,” Kate Fox said as she motioned to where each of them ought to sit, Jane to her left, Hany to her right, Franklin, Webster, and Abby across from her. “But I’m confident that it’s a simple matter: we join our wills to first summon, then cast out the being that besieges this house. We will take it back in the name of the president, his people.”
Jane was only half listening. She fingered the locket at her throat, the one that contained clippings of her sons’ hair, hoping to find strength from it, or protection. An odd dreaminess descended on her. She cast her eyes about the room, peering into the forty feet between herself and the windows, which felt ten times that. All was still, yet full of motion. It gave her the idea that something had shifted the instant she moved her head away. The curtains were pulled closed but the silk trim glinted back at her, as if pushed by a breeze from the other side.
“Jane?”
Franklin’s voice brought her back.
“Join us,” Kate Fox said.
Jane saw that all their hands were on the table’s top except for hers. It required some effort to release her grip from the locket and link fingers with the Fox girl and Webster.
“Close your eyes,” Kate said.
They did so in unison. The room so quiet Jane imagined she could hear their eyelids come together in a delicate click. After that there was only the contact of the hands that anchored her to the circle—Kate’s worryingly hot, Webster’s jellied and froggish.
“Push away the pictures in your mind,” the Fox girl told them. “Each time you do, they will try to come back. And each time, return to the emptiness. Not darkness. Merely nothing. Push away, return. Push away. Return. Push—”
She cut herself off. All six of them held their breath.
It was as if they’d heard something, but the silence was the same. The dreaminess that first visited Jane had descended over all of them. It slowed them from realizing it wasn’t an interruption of noise they strained to hear, but a change in the air.
The cold. A weight draped over their circle. And when they could hold their breath no longer it reached down their throats, cutting and hard as stone.
“What is—” Webster said, abandoning his query at the realization he had no word to finish it.
From above came a sound that Franklin thought he’d heard before, long ago. Something from his youth of hiking through the forests of New Hampshire and Maine. Rain. Falling through the canopy of leaves with such force it was like a thousand galloping hooves.
Jane heard it as the clinking of glass against glass. She opened her eyes and looked up. Saw that she was right.
The two chandeliers that hung from the ceiling—one to the right of where she was sitting, the other to the left—were shaking. She could see the crystal cut in the shape of tears firing shards of reflected candlelight into the corners, polka-dotting the walls.
“Keep your eyes closed!” Kate Fox shouted.
Jane looked around the circle. All of their eyes were open except for Kate’s and Franklin’s. But only the girl knew what was causing the cold and the glass to shake without having to look.
The ceiling between the chandeliers, twenty feet directly over their heads, bulged outward. Not breaking. Bending. As if there was an overflowing tub on the second floor that was flooding through the boards, pressing down, so that only a skin of paint held the water in. Yet they felt no drips fall through. And the ceiling only distended wider and lower. The plaster shaping itself round and tight as a pregnant belly.
“Don’t be afraid,” the Fox girl said. She sounded afraid.
Jane tried to close her eyes. She wished to add the force of her will to whatever defense they were expected to summon. That, and she didn’t want to witness whatever was to be born from the ceiling overhead.
“Jesus help us,” Hany said, her voice just audible over Webster’s whimpering.
Now all but Franklin held their heads back, looking up. Their hands were still linked, they could feel it, not only from the pressure of those who sat next to them, but the tremor that ran through their fused arms. There was no way of knowing where their own body stopped and the others began.
The bulge in the ceiling split open.
Jane readied herself to be soaked—in what? Latrine water. Or afterbirth. Or blood. But nothing showered down. It allowed her to watch what came out without blinking.
A black oil swam out over the plaster like liquid shadow, clinging to the ceiling. Thick and glistening, aswirl in different shades of night, dusk purple, midnight slate, the crimson scar that precedes dawn. It felt to Jane like looking down on a pond after having poured ink into it.
She wanted to leave. Yet she knew, even if she tried, no part of her could move.
The oil contracted, reshaping itself. Definition and particulars added as if from the touches of a draughtsman’s pen. Appendages grew out of it of roughly equal length, four of them, their ends twitching.
Legs, arms. Feet, hands.
A body.
Jane looked across the table at Franklin. His eyes remained closed, but his face was wrinkled tight from the effort of keeping them that way. Jane felt it the same as he did: the body on the ceiling wanted to be seen. By all of them. By Franklin most of all.
“You are not welcome here!”
Kate Fox declared this with such volume it startled the other five, their hands leaping from the table and thudding back but not unclasping. Jane struggled to understand the words. She knew what they meant, one by one, yet their collective meaning lay just beyond her grasp. It was the same sensation that came with being in the presence of Sir.
The body on the ceiling pushed out a new growth. A tube sprouting a ball at its end. Smooth skin, straight nose, eyes. A mouth that made Jane, even now, think lovely. A head.
Katie…
Once he was fully formed, Sir floated with his back to the ceiling, blinking down at them. The oil retreated into the hole it ushered from. Once it was gone, the hole was gone too, leaving the plaster dry. The long-limbed man gently undulating as if resting on waves.
Jane clenched her legs tight to the end of her seat to prevent herself from tumbling upward. The way that Bennie tumbled away from her when the train car flipped and the laws of gravity, of who should die first, were suspended.
After all I’ve done for you. Katie. Jeannie. Frank.
Sir was speaking without moving his lips. The voice came from every part of the room that expanded farther and farther until there were no walls, only the faint outline of the curtains, the sheet-covered mirrors.
“We stand for the people of this nation,” Kate said.
Sir snickered. His body drifted down. Spiraling slow.
“We summon the power of millions,” she said. “Black and white, man and woman!”
“Be silent, priestess.”