“Show me what to do,” she said.
* * *
They built a cell. One that wouldn’t be seen by anyone walking through the mansion’s halls or visiting its rooms.
Franklin worked through half the night with Jane aiding him by bringing what he needed and nailing in the cut wood once he’d told her where it ought to go. Before that, he used the sledgehammer on the room’s east wall. The plaster fell away in dusty chunks. With some handsawing, the wood framing was removed so that there was a hole big enough for an individual to enter. Once inside, there was a narrow passage between Bennie’s room and the bathroom next to it.
Standing there between the walls, Jane turned her head one way and then the other, behind to the hallway’s wall and forward to the building’s exterior bricks. Then she looked up. The passage ascended into the black of the unfinished attic. She could sense its space, though there wasn’t the light to see into it.
They nailed in some rough steps. It carried them up to a loft wider than any other chamber in the mansion, extending over the entirety of its perimeter, or seemed to, as far as their candlelight could reveal. Jane wondered what was in the corners they couldn’t see. It didn’t seem unoccupied somehow.
The ceiling beams were of a height that allowed for Franklin to stand if he stooped a little, which slowed the work but not as much as it would if he had to proceed on hands and knees.
He made two new walls with lengths of lumber. A crosshatched fence with gaps of a size a child’s hand could push through, but no more. When he was done, he’d created a new room in the northwest, uppermost corner of the open space, out of sight of ventilation grills or trapdoors. A cell the same size as the Grief Room below it. The only way in or out was by the hole in the wall Franklin had made at the bottom of the improvised stairs.
“Should we put anything in here?” Jane asked, a candle held in each of her hands.
“Do you mean furniture?”
“Something it might find familiar.”
“You’re giving it memories it doesn’t possess. Feelings it doesn’t feel.”
“You’re right.”
“My only question is how we bring it here.”
“I think I know a way,” she said. “When you’re ready, I’ll do it.”
He sat on the cold floor littered with sawdust and mouse droppings. To Jane, he appeared spent but not beaten. The fear that had clung to him after the failed ritual in the East Room had been lifted, and there was only a man now, doing what he felt he must, not bothering to paint his actions with rhetoric or ceremony. She would never tell him this, but it was the most like what she considered a president ought to be as she had ever seen him.
“Ready,” he said.
36
Jane sat on the attic floor, her back against the corner, the two candles by her feet. She wanted to think of Bennie. Her real son. She wanted to remind herself of something good before she did something bad.
What came to her was the memory of cookies. Jane was never much of a baker, but she and Bennie liked to make them together, a comical, losing battle against burning or over-egging the batter. In their failures there was never need for apology. In fact, the charred or flattened results tasted sweeter than if they’d found perfection.
“We’re outside,” Bennie had said to her once as she sat in a kitchen chair with him on her lap, the two of them speckled with crumbs, and she knew exactly what he meant. He wasn’t imagining they were out-of-doors. He saw the two of them as she did: outside the rules of time.
For the other parts of their lives the clock ticked away, nudging them toward their futures and—most unthinkable—their eventual parting. But there were still hiding places that could be found. Eating terrible cookies of their own making. Lying in bed in the early mornings after Franklin was up and Bennie slipped into his father’s spot, mother and son sharing their breaths, both pretending to be asleep. A song they sang together that looped back to the beginning every time they ran out of words.
She sang the same song now.
She’d sung it to the false Bennie too, only days ago. Humming it over the time she spent in the Grief Room, hoping for a sign of recognition from within it, for it to join her in the music.
It did. Once.
The being she knew to be a soulless replica sang along with her. No words, only the tune. The same melody Jane played on the piano in the Amherst house and that her grandmother forbade her to repeat, the music that seduced Franklin into proposing, at once lovely and off-putting, childish and perverse. Only now did Jane realize the composition was never really hers. It was Sir’s. His voice humming in her head as she transposed it to the keys.
She sang it louder now.
The tune brittle at first but building as she went, casting it past the candles and into the skeleton of the house’s structure, where it trembled to its deepest ends.
It’s how she called for it. It’s why it came.
She felt its footfalls in the room below, following her voice with the patient approach of a hunter. It found the hole in the wall and stepped through—she heard this too. It was coming for her, but it was important not to betray her terror, so she sang louder still, the music echoing the length of the dark attic and coming back at her, slightly altered, as it might in a cave.
It stumbled on one of the steps coming up and paused.
Jane sang on.
The light from the candles barely reached the place in the floor where the steps led up to, so that when the thing’s head rose through, she saw it as something dead pushing its way up from its grave. The lace-collared neck, suspendered shoulders, followed by the arms. Her son’s Sunday-best leather shoes.
It stood there watching her. She watched it back.
She noticed it held something in its hand. A chisel. One it picked up from the pile of tools outside the Grief Room. She realized it hadn’t been drawn by the pleasure the song gave, or some deeply buried recollection from her real boy’s past, but merely by the fact it told her where she was. It came for murder and nothing else.
“Such lovely music, Momma,” it said, and took a step closer.
Jane sang. Her voice breaking. The song pulling it apart.
The candles flickered and she wondered if it was her exhalations whirling against the flames, but it was only the thing coming closer, pushing the air ahead of it in a frigid wave.
It held the chisel against its side. The look on its face an attempt at contentment, an expression meant to soothe her by appearing soothed itself, but it was too excited by what it was about to do to manage it. In its distortion it instead appeared wide-eyed, wanton.
Where was Franklin? Surely the thing was far enough away from the hole in the floor—close enough to her—for her husband to come out from his hiding place farther back in the attic and grapple the boy, take him down as they’d planned. Jane had been frightened before. Yet her singing had kept her level, connected her to a place of imagined safety outside of the mansion. Now, as her voice pulled the boy closer, she saw that the music had entrapped her more than him.
“Keep singing,” it said.
She took a breath. Sang on.
As the boy took another step closer a second shadow materialized behind him. It moved so quietly she would never hear it, wouldn’t know what it was, if she couldn’t see the outline of its familiar shape.