Franklin stretched out his arms, ready to clutch around the boy and fall upon him. Jane sang louder to cover any creak of the floor that might reveal his approach. Yet even as this thought occurred to her the boy froze.
“Daddy,” it said.
Without looking, the thing-that-wasn’t-Bennie swung the chisel behind its back. Farther than its arm ought to extend and faster than a blink. The chisel met directly with Franklin’s bad knee. Jane knew it because she heard the liquid pop of the skin splitting where it was stretched taut from swelling, followed by the screech of steel against bone.
Franklin howled. Shuddering and low. An utterance of a kind she had never heard from him. He crumpled to the floorboards, shrinking like a roll of parchment when the flames melt it to ash.
Once more without turning around, the boy took a step back and thrust the chisel down into Franklin’s body.
“Oh! Oh, oh—”
His voice was cut off so finally she knew he had either fainted or died. She believed the latter but fought against the certainty of it.
The boy started closer again.
“Don’t stop,” it said. “I like the music.”
It bent slightly as it went, drew back a hand to pick up one of the candle holders. When it stood over Jane it put the candle down so that it illuminated both her face and its own in partial, wavering light. She wondered why it bothered and realized in the same instant that it wanted to see her terror in full view when it did whatever it was about to do.
The boy stood straight, stiffening from the inside out, the chisel drifting out from its side.
“He made the song for you, Momma.”
The chisel rose. Stilled at the top of its arc.
“Wasn’t that nice of him to—”
The thing came at her. At the same time she kicked her foot up at it. Not aiming, not trying to stop it, a reflex and nothing more. It found the boy’s wrist. The chisel knocked free, clattering into the darkness behind it.
She expected the boy to retrieve the weapon but he continued down at her instead. Its hands so fast she wasn’t able to deflect them, nor find them with her own. The fingers on her chest, forcing the air out of her lungs, before gripping around her throat. How had it grown so strong? She couldn’t fight it but she fought just the same, the sides of her hands glancing off its cheeks. It didn’t seem to feel it. It didn’t blink.
She looked into its eyes. Not hoping to find pity, because she knew it had no understanding of that. She followed its soulless stare down her neck to what it was fixed on.
The locket. The silver charm that contained her boys’ hair.
It’s going to take it, she thought.
She found the locket with her own fingers and pulled it hard enough to break the chain.
“No,” the boy said, and Jane realized she was opening the locket now, taking out the hair and closing her fingers around it tight. Protecting it.
“No, Momma. Don’t.”
The boy dared not let go of her throat to reach for her hand, but it lessened its pressure slightly in its indecision and she took a bite of air.
It wants the hair.
But she had it now and would not let go of it.
Jane reached as far as she could to her side. When she felt the heat of the candle she held her hand over the flame. A second later, what air she could pull in through her nose bore the reek of burning flesh and hair.
The boy screamed.
ME! ME! ME!
Jane tried to hear it as Bennie’s voice. The very last of her son—an overlooked shred of his soul—crying out to his mother. Yet she knew, at the same time, that this wasn’t true. Bennie was dead. Gone from the world in every sense, even in spirit. This hurt Jane more than the burning. It reminded her that what she was hearing—ME!—was only the wish of the foul vessel leaning down on her. Its yearning to be real. To have lived as a boy, died as a boy, to have hair grow upon its head, to have had the strands plucked before they put him in the pine box.
But she would not let go. Not give her child’s cuttings to the monster crushing her windpipe. Not yield. Because she saw, through a twinkling of lights that came with the denial of oxygen, that the thing’s wish for her to die was made all the more urgent by the hair burning down. As if its desire to see itself in the curling strands was beyond its reach, would always be so, and now the hair and the creature were revealed to be the ghastly souvenirs they’d always been.
ME!
For Bennie, she would not let go. She would not pull her hand away.
As the pain in her hand intensified to a silent shrieking through her marrow, she also felt herself giving way, emptying out. Dying.
I am in agony. I am nothing.
She heard the contradiction in her thoughts but couldn’t deny the truth of either. A moment on and all she was aware of was a gust of realizations that sounded above all else.
This is death.
I will not let go.
I have loved. I loved. I love.
The boy goggled down at her and appeared confused that she was still alive. It pushed all of its weight forward with its legs. Brought it down on her neck.
She felt herself cross a line. All of her filled with cold, hard and flowing like creek water under a crust of ice.
The last thing was the boy’s screaming.
Its body crumpled forward. Head over chest, chest over hips, hips over knees. Folding on top of her.
She could tell she was breathing again because she could smell it. The boy’s skin that bore a trace of soil after a rain. The hair sweetened with smoke from a fire of the kind built high to dispose of the dead.
The boy was rising again. There was blood falling from its jaw now, half-congealed wads of it building along the line of its chin before slapping to the floorboards. The eyes rolling about in its head until they found her.
“Momma?”
Jane squinted and found Franklin just behind the boy, crawling closer. He held something in his hand, dragging it along next to him. A hammer. The one she’d used to help nail up the enclosure of the cell, the steps to get up here, and left against the attic wall. The one he swings, for the second time, into the side of the boy’s head.
A sharp crack of bone. Followed by a new veil of blood, thick as tar, falling on her chest.
The boy stared at her, baffled. But already a new rage boiled up behind its puzzlement, widening its pupils and thinning its lips.
Jane threw her unburned hand against its shoulder and it fell to the side like a toppled statue.
“It hurts, Momma,” it said, but did not rise.
Franklin pulled himself next to her.
“Are you all right?”
“I believe so,” she said, smoothing a hand down her front, though there was so much blood there she couldn’t tell whether it was hers or the boy’s. “What about you? Your knee? And where did the blade—”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, pressing the palm of his hand to his stomach.
Franklin found the chisel and tossed it through the cell’s bars behind him before climbing over her and yanking the boy’s arms straight back. She watched as he wrapped a length of jute rope around its wrists. It didn’t fight for release. It just watched her, its cheek against the floor, not attempting to shape its face into anything but a vacancy she saw as hatred.
“Do the ankles,” Franklin said.
Jane thought it would try to kick her but she crawled forward and wound the rope around the bottom of its legs as it lay still, breathing and wanting her to hear its breathing.