The Residence Read online

  “He’s come home! He’s come—”

  Jane was cut off so abruptly it was as if she’d been struck. In fact, her head spun to the side, though nothing visible had touched her.

  Each of them watched the thing come out of the corner as if there were a door there without a hinge or handle, and each of them, for their own reasons, saw that they had been wrong.

  “Splitfoot,” Kate whispered.

  It was different now. Jane felt it.

  In his previous visits, even the ones when he had been most physically detailed, most manlike, he had given the impression of something wearing a costume. But this was what it really was. And while it was more faint in its particulars it showed itself in how it warped its environment. The density of it was so great it bent the floorboards under its weight. It stole the air from the room and left them gasping. The revulsion it brought was as sudden as taking a turn on the trail and coming upon a fly-buzzed corpse while on a walk in the woods.

  All of it made clear that it was not a complex, self-contradicting thing as a human being was, but elemental. Malice. Hate. Violence. It was the thing such words are meant to refer to but can’t dig deep enough to reach the thing itself.

  Boom.

  A clap of thunder. Except it came from below, not above.

  BOOM. Boom… BOOM-BOOM.

  It rattled the windows and shook dust from the ceiling plaster. It wasn’t a sound in their heads but the vibrations of something—multiple things—smashing against a part of the building’s wall. To Jane, the increasing desperation of the knocks spoke of people not trying to get in but trying to get out.

  People. She was sure of it.

  Coming from somewhere on one of the lower floors. The furnace room. People bringing their knees and feet and fists against its oval walls. Its door.

  Boom-boom… BOOM!

  The thing in the room liked the sound of it. The panic, the terror. Jane could feel that too.

  “Oh Jesus Christ!” Maggie shouted. It sounded like nonsense. “Holy Jesus help us!”

  The presence wasn’t repelled by Maggie’s words. If anything it savored the helplessness with which she spoke them and lingered a moment to witness the evaporation of the smugness she displayed mere minutes ago. Then it moved. Pulled away to the interior wall and passed through it to the hallway on the other side.

  Once it was gone the three of them returned to themselves.

  Maggie started sobbing. Kate was saying the same thing to herself, over and over, too quiet for any of them to hear. Jane was listening for where the thing had gone. Because it hadn’t left the residence. It wouldn’t leave, not now.

  Jane rushed out into the hall. To the right, at the far end by Franklin’s offices, members of the staff were collecting, asking what the noise could have been. When they saw Jane none of them called to her or came to her aid. They were as frightened of her as of whatever had been smashing around in the basement.

  The door to Bennie’s room was ajar.

  Jane crossed the hall to it. It seemed to take an hour or more. The incalculable length of a dream.

  Behind her, she heard Maggie and Kate run past, both of them wailing. The hallway’s width and height a perfect magnifier of their distress, sending their voices backward and forward and reaching down the stairwell as they made the turn.

  When Jane got to the bedroom door she was exhausted. Her arm was too heavy to raise to the knob, so she just kept walking into the wood, nudging it wider with the toes of her shoes.

  Everything was as she had left it when she last came in. Yet something had just been there. Something still was.

  There were the tin soldiers lined up against the baseboards. The paint-chipped crib. Her boy’s little bed with the marigold headboard, the lace-fringed pillow, the sheets so tightly tucked in she could see the mattress’s lumps of stuffing push against the cotton.

  “Bennie?”

  She hoped he would come running to her from out of the walls, out of the air, the same as Sir had appeared. The boy would hear his mother’s voice, the depths of her love, the lengths she had gone to and the risks taken to provide him a way, and he would complete the last part of the crossing himself.

  Nothing stirred. The thunderous knockings from below had stopped. Even the presence that had manifested in her bedroom—the thing that had made Kate Fox whisper Splitfoot—wasn’t there anymore, if it had been the same force to open the door.

  “I’m here,” Jane said.

  She stood there long enough that she discovered she was not trying to hear anything but detect the source of an almost imperceptible change in the room’s temperature. A new warmth. One that she remembered from other rooms in her life, spaces that were similarly chilled and, when she entered, would push against the cold through her own breathing and the beating of her heart.

  The crib.

  There was a reshaping of the blankets behind the narrow wooden bars she hadn’t noticed when she first entered. She wondered if an animal could have done it. A mouse or rat. But vermin don’t change the smell of a room like this by their breaths alone. Only a child does that. Only a baby.

  She went to the crib and bent over it, drawing back the quilt with gentle tugs of her fingernails.

  A boy. Maybe two months old. A baby she didn’t recognize, though it was like her own boys in many respects: square-featured, blue-eyed, a general resemblance to their father, which was to say good-looking without any particular beauty marks or aberrancies or exoticism.

  “Who are you?” she said, already slipping her hands under its back and lifting it up to her face. “Do you have a name?”

  As Jane looked into its eyes the baby’s eyes looked into her. A communion that altered the infant’s appearance in minuscule ways. The baby transformed into Bennie in the moments she held it as if drawing from her memories, the motherly times of being in the nursery, cold and tired but happy, seeing the child in her arms as forever hers.

  The baby’s face soured. It didn’t change its features the way babies normally did—there was a mechanical aspect to it, an expert fakery, as if an enchanted doll—and Jane saw it. She didn’t mind. She told herself precisely: Don’t pay any mind to that. The baby may not be fully Bennie, not yet. But she was on a journey and this was the beginning. In any case, wasn’t she a mother? Wasn’t a moment like this when she felt the most secure, strong on her feet, her sicknesses held at bay? Didn’t she always see the nursery as the place where the doubts and hauntings of the everyday couldn’t touch her?

  The baby cried.

  Its eyes remained placid. The cheeks uncolored. Its body still in her hands. It sounded like a hungry infant. But in every other respect, it was the same doll-like surrogate to an actual blotchy-faced, blinking baby that it was a moment ago.

  “There now,” Jane said, and it hushed by a degree.

  She carried it over to the feeding chair. It took only a minute to pull down her dress with the infant waiting on her lap and then lift it to her breast. Its mouth found her nipple easily and suckled in even draws.

  “There, there,” she whispered, and felt herself emptying.

  13

  “Jeannie?”

  Franklin’s hand was on her shoulder, gently rocking her awake.

  “I fell asleep,” she said, and discovered she was still in the feeding chair.

  “Are you all right?”

  She remembered the Fox girls. The younger one urging her to open a door within her. The true presence that Sir’s skin had always hidden coming into the house. The baby in her arms.

  “Is he here?”

  “Is who here, my love?”

  Jane looked around the room. The infant was neither on her nor in its crib, though the blankets remained tousled just as they were after she lifted it. Her dress had been pulled up. Had Franklin done that when he found her and was choosing to discreetly not mention it? If not him, she stiffened to think of Sir being the one to slip the buttons into their eyelets at the back of her neck.

>   “Oh, Franklin,” she said, answering nothing.

  “You weren’t in your room. I looked up and down. And found you here.”

  “You don’t like this place.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” he lied. “I just don’t know what it is.”

  “These are Bennie’s things.”

  “I can see that.”

  “This is Bennie’s room.”

  Franklin had expressed varying degrees of worry over her for as long as they had been married. But Jane saw a different type of concern on his face now. It was as if she were dying. Or worse. As if she were dead and had come back a different creature altogether.

  “It’s late,” he said. “Can I help you to bed?”

  “Perhaps you can help me to yours?”

  There was no promise in it. It was a request for assistance and nothing else.

  Franklin offered his arm, and she held fast to it.

  They closed the door to Bennie’s room behind them and started down the long hall to Franklin’s quarters. She tried to find the anger she’d held for her husband, but whether it was the disorienting events of the evening or a new resolution of her own making, she couldn’t find any.

  As they walked, he tried to turn the moment toward the normal by talking about his dinner and its tedious guests, the husbandly sharing of the day pouring out of him after so long on his own, and Jane half listened to him. The other half heard the creak of a handle turning behind her and Bennie’s door pulling open an inch.

  Franklin didn’t hear it. Just as he didn’t notice her touch a finger to the top of her chest where she felt a dampness.

  She drew the finger away. Sticky and wet. The yellowish white of milk.

  14

  When they were first courting, Franklin fantasized about saving enough money to buy Jane a piano of her own. She loved to play, and could read sheet music but preferred her own compositions. Melodies that sounded at first like one heard before, a hymn or nursery song that lay just beyond memory, before shifting into a murkier key. Some called them “original,” while others said they gave them goosepimples, or brought on bad dreams.

  In the end her uncle Amos, whom Jane adored and Franklin loathed (his contempt of his suit all too obvious) beat him to it. A polished Pirrson was delivered to the Amherst house addressed to “My Most Talented Niece,” and Jane wept as the men heaved it up the steps. Everyone gathered to hear her play Mozart allegros and Für Elise. She followed this with an improvised piece, childish and light, that Jane dedicated to her deceased brother John. This brought on sustained applause from all including the delivery men, though Jane’s grandmother later took her aside and asked her to never play the tune in her house again.

  Her grandmother was not at home when, a few months later, Jane played it for Franklin.

  They weren’t alone in the sitting room—Jane’s sisters came and went—but the music, once started, blotted out everything but the two of them. The melody was sweet but almost gratingly so, like an infant’s burbling that prevented one from sleep. Nevertheless, Franklin was undone. The sensation he had was of deep recognition, a glimpse of himself in a mirror that was truer than others precisely because of its blemishes and distortions.

  When she was finished he was astonished to touch his face and find his fingers glistening with tears. It was as if they belonged to a future version of himself, a phantom looking back at this moment and mourning it for reasons he couldn’t possibly know.

  He crossed the room to place his hand over hers, still hovering over the keys.

  “Marry me.”

  “I thought we already were,” she said. “Shall I play it again?”

  She didn’t have to. He would remember it always. There was the sense that, for better or ill, her composition was their love song, a theme to be repeated over time. He couldn’t say that he liked Jane’s music. But it was theirs.

  “Please,” he said, and stepped away without moving his eyes from her back. “If you would do me the kindness, Jeannie. Yes, please.”

  * * *

  Their wedding was held in the Amherst house. Green bunting hung over the door as Franklin approached with his father, the only other guest on the Pierce side. The old man was dressed in his military finery, medals polished, mustache so heavily waxed its tips drooped like tubers feeling their way into his mouth. He was also slightly drunk (“Resolved,” as he put it) from the sips taken from a flask allegedly handed down by Washington himself. In the carriage, his father had offered a drink to Franklin, who declined with a shake of his head, though in truth he wished for the resolve of whiskey to burn in his own belly.

  Inside, the Appletons and people of local importance greeted the Pierces with relief. Franklin was shuffled into the parlor, given instructions by the minister, and handed a crystal glass of cider all so swiftly he had the impression there may be another wedding after this and they were running behind schedule. Then he heard the real cause of everyone’s haste: Jane was crying upstairs. Deep-throated sobs that everyone in the house wanted to be free of as soon as they were able.

  Franklin stood listening to the impressive anguish of his wife-to-be with the rest of the guests. He was grateful for the cider, the sipping of which gave him something to do. In time, Jane’s cries were joined by the calming voice of her mother. What was happening now would prove a pattern for his wife: the dread of a forthcoming event, the summoning of will, and finally the steely execution, the sharp Appleton chin raised in a show that others referred to as brave. Franklin regarded her as such too. And yet sometimes—on this day, his wedding day—he couldn’t entirely prevent a bitterness at the wailing upstairs. Why was her struggle with everything, even with happiness, a sign of courage, and his reaching for that same happiness a proof of selfishness?

  It was so quiet when Jane stifled herself they could hear the creaking of the stairs as the bride made her way down. Because Jane was the musician of the family there was no one to play the piano for her entrance, so that they listened to the gritty scrape of her heels on the boards as if they signaled the approach of a midnight specter.

  The brave chin came first, followed by puffy eyes and mouth alighting at the sight of her groom. Franklin felt the need to take her away to somewhere safe. He would never have guessed Jane was having the same thought about him.

  The secret she held as she stood next to Franklin and spoke her vows was that her tears in the dressing room upstairs weren’t caused by anxiety over the marital bed, nor bidding farewell to being an Appleton girl and becoming the wife of a congressman. She had grieved about those things on other occasions. Today, before her mother demanded entry, she wept out of fear as she listened to the things Sir told her.

  He appeared in fully realized human form, though Jane was unable to look directly at him. Like the reflex that turned one’s gaze from the sun she could only take in the details of his appearance in glimpses. His face refined, but unnaturally so: lips too thin, nose too pointed, all too white. She would say he wore powder on his skin except the powder was his skin, crumbly and bleached. His tongue didn’t fit his mouth so that as he spoke it reached out with a predatory intelligence, stealing tastes of air.

  She had been looking at herself in the standing mirror when she noticed a movement behind her, quick as a sparrow flying past the window. When she turned he was there. Already speaking. Already making his way to the bed where he sat straight-backed on the edge and looked at her knowing she couldn’t match its stare.

  “Jeannie,” it said.

  She couldn’t answer. The thing’s indifference to her horror compounded her horror. As it calmly formed its words she cried louder and louder. The words reached her nonetheless.

  “I thought it was a proper occasion for me to be clearly heard,” the voice explained. “You have done so well. And I have come to celebrate with you. Our day of union.”

  He wasn’t naked, but his clothing lacked the wrinkles or dye of any fabric she’d seen before, so that it was a part of his being, a
way of matching his surroundings as certain lizards can alter their color. Black jacket and trousers, starched shirt buttoned to the top. No belt, no tie. She took note of these details to avoid looking into its eyes.

  “I am your friend, am I not?”

  She didn’t think this was so in any way.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “This man—Franklin. I chose him. And I was right to choose him.”

  “Why?”

  “He will deliver us.”

  In the cellar of the Bowdoin house Sir had been a line of darkness. In subsequent visits it had been notions in her head. Now it was a man, but at once more distinct and less real than any man. In its progression it was like a dream moving from the night into the day.

  “You are special,” it went on. “Ready to see and feel and learn.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Let him love you. Love him in return if you wish.”

  “I wish—”

  “It will be difficult. But I promise there will be rewards.”

  “For Franklin too?”

  The thing cocked its head an inch too far.

  “He will have his own campaigns,” Sir said.

  Jane’s mother knocked at the door. Before the echo of it silenced, the being was gone, leaving behind a wordless message like perfume on a pillow. It would never leave her. Her husband was intended for a seat at a table set for gods. She would be witness to remarkable things.

  It struck her as she creaked her way down the stairs and saw Franklin, bloodless and lost, that the happiest presence at her wedding was Sir.

  * * *

  A half hour after the service Jane and Franklin boarded the coach waiting to take them to Washington.

  “You’ve made me a beautiful promise today,” she whispered to him, so near he could taste her words. “Would you make me one more?”

  “I can only know the answer if you ask me.”

  “Will you promise to abstain?”

  He blanched, and Jane interpreted him as understanding her to be speaking of sex.