This came from his mouth so that all of them could hear. He wasn’t shouting. He didn’t need to.
“We cite from no Bible, hold no holy water,” Kate said. “It is the power of our union that enables us.”
“Then you have nothing.”
He spun, righting himself, so that he stood on the table. Or not quite stood—his feet, now in leather shoes so polished Jane could see the reflection of her stretch-faced self, hovered an inch over the wood. She had the idea that if she ventured a hand into the space between the table and shoes she would never be able to pull her fingers away.
Jane turned to the Fox girl. “Kate?”
She was there, but gone. Her eyes wide, staring up at Splitfoot in a kind of panicked awe. It took only a single assessment of what she’d brought against him—you have nothing—to leave her in silent agreement.
Jane tried to think of something she could say to prevent their failure, or stop something worse from happening. But it was another voice that spoke first.
“Be gone from this place!”
Franklin’s eyes were open. Held to Sir’s.
“I live here now,” it said.
“It is the people’s house! And it is the people’s will that casts you from it!”
Sir laughed emptily. It carried on beyond the exhaustion of humor, so that it was just a tormenting noise. “Tell me,” the floating man said finally. “Is it arrogance or ignorance that makes you believe such things?”
“It is the truth.”
“The truth?”
Sir drifted around the candelabra on the table, the flames licking his pant legs without burning them. He lowered to stand on the floor behind Kate. She was shivering. He lingered there, relishing her dread. It allowed Jane to note how he wore a suit of fine cloth, dark navy, the shirt white. She had never seen attire like it, yet it struck her as a uniform of a kind, however free of medals or ribbons.
“None know the true inclinations of humankind better than I.”
He started to walk in a circle behind their backs. Close enough to grasp them by the shoulder but far enough to easily step away if any of them attempted to spin around and grapple with him.
“There is little that unites you,” he said. “Each of you pursues your own fortunes, pleasures, the highest walls against the strangers on the opposite side. When the walls couldn’t be made long enough, tall enough, you invented borders. Nations. Which required ever more fictions. Rights. Votes.”
The entity placed its hands on Franklin’s shoulders. Jane saw the way it made him shudder at first and then, as Sir spoke, her husband fought the pain the hands were transferring into him. The whole time Franklin kept his eyes on her, anchoring himself.
“Since my brothers were cast out of God’s house we search for new homes, new ways to make you open the door. Just as you did for me,” Sir said, with a look Jane’s way. “Which makes this place my home as much as yours.”
“You must go,” Franklin said, his voice thin as crumpled paper.
“I will not be cast out, not by witch nor priest nor people’s will. Not by you.”
One of the candles went out.
“I—”
The second flame snuffed dead.
“—will never—”
The third.
“—GO!”
All of them disappeared into darkness.
Someone screamed. Jane thought it was Kate Fox, followed by Hany a second later. And then, as far as she could tell, the six of them were screaming.
But she was the first to stop.
There was something around her feet, pulling her down. She looked under the table to find nothing there. It wasn’t just the absence of hands or an animal that might have wrapped itself around her ankles, but the absence of carpet, of floor, of the foundation beneath it. There was nothing. Her feet hanging in space.
As the others noticed it, one by one, their voices quieted like turned taps.
Sir remained standing behind Franklin, hands on his shoulders. Jane saw that, judging from his expression, it wasn’t physical suffering the entity was inflicting, but the agony that came with being made to see things you did not want to see.
“Look at what you’ve done—what you’re doing now—in the name of union,” Splitfoot said.
There was nothing to see but the oily black of the wall-less room, the curtained windows drifting away like unmanned ships. The table was moving too, along with the chairs they sat on. Everything afloat, bobbing slower than if it were water beneath them, a series of sickening tosses and corrections.
“Look,” Sir said.
Something reached up from out of the ocean of oil. Thin as a stick, with bulbed branches at the top. Another came up next to it. More of them closer, and more so far off they were bundled together like crosses stuck in the ground of a battlefield.
The one closest to Jane bumped against her leg. She looked down to see it wasn’t a stick at all but a human arm.
Heads came up now too. The bodies of the nations here before. Shawnee, Apache, Cheyenne, Sioux. Men, women, and children. Some with painted faces, some naked. All of them grasping up at the nothingness.
“The people’s will,” the demon said.
The dead people made no sound. Yet their mouths were shaped into cries for help or calling for lost ones. Torments that had already happened, tied to the past, voiceless.
The bodies rose higher and higher, exposing their wounds, the holes and slits and sores where the bullets and bayonets and plagues had entered. Soon they would pull themselves from the oil and then—what would they do? Jane guessed they would descend upon the six of them at the table, still holding hands, and pull them down.
She tried to get Franklin to look at her. His line of sight was held on the dead closest to him, but in a frozen way that suggested he was seeing something other than their bodies or faces. Jane felt sure of it. Sir was letting him hear them.
“Franklin?”
He attempted to speak, acknowledge her with a nod. But once he’d managed the latter, he continued nodding—yes, yes, yes, yes—until he was trapped in a seizure from the neck up. Behind him, Sir lifted the weight of his hands away but did not release him completely. Ten filed nails remained resting atop Franklin’s wool coat, now steaming with sweat.
From a great distance away, at the edge of the East Room’s ocean, one of the window curtains pulled open.
Jane couldn’t make out what moved them, or what came out before they slid together again. But it was coming toward them. A glint of silver-blue, long and narrowed to a tip, cast its own dull light as it swung about in the darkness. It made her think of the pendulum game, the silver ball lurching between the letters. It made her fight not to be sick.
Abby had resumed screaming. Jane could see that her cousin was looking away from the table toward the swinging silver-blue and she wondered what it was Abby could see that she couldn’t.
“Not me! Not me! Not me!”
Jane read Abby’s lips repeating the same thing. What did it mean? Her thoughts were as muffled as the sounds around her. Yet she could still see clearly, if whatever was there to be seen was close enough. As the boy now was.
He held a sword. Franklin recognized it. The one he’d been given on his return from the Mexican War.
Franklin had no experience as a soldier. And yet he was made colonel by President Polk and assigned leadership of the New Hampshire brigade. Every level of government endorsed Franklin’s appointment, setting him up with a uniform that bore a row of medals before issuing him his rifle.