The Residence Page 22

  “Stay here,” Franklin said as he bundled the toy in the sheet and lifted it to his chest, slipping out of the room before she could ask where he was going.

  Jane waited in her feeding chair, the hammer in her lap, listening for the approach of little feet, whether flesh or steel. The house was quiet in a way that pulled her deeper into it, numbing her in its silence.

  Motherhood, she remembered, was full of silences like these. Protecting infants from having their sleep interrupted. Readying herself for the next task—the next feeding, changing, bathing—by gathering the strength to carry on through it. Labors she would do anything to have back, the quiet hours through which she thought of nothing but how best to satisfy her babies’ demands.

  Which made her think of Bennie.

  Her mind had strayed from him for a longer stretch than she usually allowed and she chastised herself for slipping. She felt this was her failure as a mother: she had not constantly held her son’s name in her mind, every second, waking or asleep.

  This was how she let him sit behind her and not next to her on the train. How she let Franklin reach his body before she did.

  No, Jeannie, he’d told her. It’s not for you.

  Not for her? It was all for her. The horror of losing her last child most of all. It was what she dreaded more than any torture, more than the end of the world. It was the moment she’d been waiting for.

  All the boys will die. And all the women broken.

  When Franklin finally appeared again, there were black smudges of soot on his forehead, the arms of his coat. The bundled sheet was gone.

  “Is it—”

  “The furnace,” he said.

  “Was it… alive when you put it in?”

  Franklin gave a single shake of his head. She couldn’t tell whether it was in negative response to her query, or his refusal to speak of any of it.

  “It won’t come back,” he said.

  Jane was less than sure of that, but she held to Franklin’s assurance and did her best to mold it into certainty.

  “Is there anyone downstairs?” she said.

  “I told the sentry to leave us be. We have until dawn, I’d guess. After that even I can’t hold back the country from demanding our attendance.”

  “How long?”

  “Four hours. Five. Enough if we start now.”

  She got up from the chair and took up the hammer in both hands.

  “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.

  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 b
one. 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.

  When she was finished Franklin gestured for her to get up, and then he did the same. He stooped next to her, watching the thing.

  “I can’t,” Jane said.

  “Nor can I,” Franklin said.

  They decided not to kill it without announcing so directly, the two of them wrestling down the stubborn memory of their lost child that the creature returned to their minds. A memory all the more vivid now for the crack in its skull the same as Bennie’s when they found him on the train car ceiling.