Franklin grunted, one hand against the boy’s shoulder, holding off his biting lunges, the other hand grasping for the sword. Bennie made no sound other than the snapping click of his teeth.
The boy’s foot slipped in the blood. Only a brief loss of leverage, but it allowed Franklin to spin him onto his back. The impact released the sword from his grip and it clattered to the side. Franklin reached for it. This gave the boy the time to bring up his knee and thrust it into Franklin’s stomach, throwing him off.
Franklin landed hard but kept scrabbling to the sword, grabbing the handle. Without hesitation he swung the weapon wide behind him, hoping to find the boy. But Bennie was already off. Sprinting away from the open door, past Jane, and into the Blue Room on the opposite side of the Cross Hall.
“Franklin!”
Her shout didn’t slow him. He was up by the time she turned back to see if he was still alive. Her husband in pursuit of the boy, barreling across the hall with the sword tapping against his leg like a riding crop, urging himself on.
Jane went to Abby. The wound in her hand was shallow, though in need of sutures.
“My poor cousin,” Jane said.
“Is it gone?”
“Yes.”
“Not Bennie. The other.”
“It remains. But not here. Not right now.”
Abby rose to her feet and noticed her hand as if for the first time. “I should stay,” she said, looking at Jane. “But this—”
“It requires a doctor’s attention. Mr. Webster?” Jane said, and at the voicing of his name the president’s secretary reentered the house with the reluctance of a cat being pulled into the rain. “Would you take Abby to have this tended to?”
“Of course, ma’am.”
“I’m sure you know what Franklin would ask if he were here.”
“Discretion,” Webster said, offering Abby his arm to lean on. “You can be assured of it.”
He started away with Abby a half step behind. Once outside they both accelerated their pace, so that by the time Jane lost sight of them in the night they were on the verge of breaking into a run.
Hany came inside from her place at the threshold and took Jane’s hands in hers.
“What can I do?” she asked.
“I’m sorry you’ve done what you have already. It was wrong of me to ask it.”
Jane embraced her. Neither of them saw it coming. The two women held on to each other like friends from their lives before, from childhood, if not earlier than that.
“You should go,” Jane said when she pulled away.
“It’s not right it’s just the two of you here.”
“It must be the two of us.”
“President Pierce. He—”
“Go now. Please.”
Hany nodded. She went to the door. When she closed it behind her Jane felt the house hold its breath.
Jane took in some of the cold air for herself. It steadied her. In fact, she found that she had no particular complaint of the body, no cough or headache or leaping in the stomach. Even in the eye of madness, she felt the most sane she’d been in weeks, perhaps years.
One more breath filled her with solid steel.
35
Jane entered the Blue Room prepared to witness some new and unthinkable scene, but the room was empty. Everything in its place except for a rectangular piece of the wall pushed in. The secret door Franklin had mentioned to her.
She went straight in.
A passage, narrow and dark. Ahead of her there was what she sensed to be another door that was shut. She felt her way along, sliding her back over the wall to her right. At what she figured to be halfway her hand fell into a gap. When she righted herself she waited for her eyes to find the dimensions of the new space she’d found in the darkness, and within seconds she was able to make out what was there. Another passage. Even narrower than the one she stood in.
The curvature of the Blue Room resulted in a space between its interior walls. A gap that, from the secret door’s location, grew out wider than the spaces between the other walls in the mansion. This was the passage she had found. A space within what would normally never have been seen, let alone entered.
To go inside required her to advance sideways, squeezed front and behind.
Less than a body’s length along her ankle bumped against something hard. She squinted. A set of uneven stairs rose up higher, curving along the Blue Room’s wall where it widened until it disappeared in shadow.
She assembled what she saw and what it told her:
The stairs were made of irregular cuts of lumber and were constructed by the workers who’d been hammering and sawing throughout the residence so they could gain access to the vents and support beams from the inside. The entire White House had been built this way, with passages between the walls and crawl spaces between the floors to provide for maintenance to the latest systems of plumbing and heating.
There were probably other passages, other stairs like it elsewhere.
This was how the thing moved around. Where it lived.
The last conclusion she arrived at was that she must climb higher to find where the thing went. And she was about to when something shuffled down toward her from above.
Jane braced to meet it. She would not turn back. To get past her would mean going through her.
Whatever it was, it was bigger than she was. Descending from the wider space above to the bottleneck where she stood. Scratching over the wood frame on either side of it without slowing.
“Step back, Jeannie,” it said.
She reversed to let Franklin descend. She could smell his sweat in the close quarters and recognized its sharp odor, the kind that came not from labor but violence, or sex, or panic.
“Gone,” he said once they’d returned to the openness of the Blue Room.
“Where?”
“Between the floors and ceilings. I tried to follow, pulling myself along flat—I couldn’t find him.”
“We mustn’t let him go.”
“I know.”
“He means to hurt us, not just—
“I know it.”
She stepped closer to him. “He tried to kill Abby because he thought she was me.”
He showed her his hands, the blood that was there. “I figured that. And I’ve seen what he can do.”
“We must end it,” she said. “Do you understand my meaning?”
“I understand. But I can’t do it.”
“He’ll kill me if he has the chance. Or one of the staff. Or you.”
“I can’t, Jeannie,” he said, and met her eyes for the first time since he emerged from the passage. “Could you?”
She hadn’t realized the full implications of what she was asking him beyond ridding the house of its trouble. Now she heard it too, and thought on it. Could she put down something she knew to be a danger to the innocent? Kill it by her own hand?
It would be done in the name of necessity. It would right, at least in part, what she had done wrong. And it wouldn’t be murder, not in God’s eyes, as she and he both knew it wasn’t human. The thing was Sir’s child. Not Franklin’s. Not hers.
These were facts. And they blew away like leaves when put against the idea of destroying anything that looked like Bennie, spoke like him, reminded her of him.