As in her dream, she drifted to where she knew she must go. Except this time, she opened the bottom drawer without having to speak a word. It required only her hand to grasp the brass handle and pull.
At first, her rummaging produced disappointment. A pair of white leather baby shoes. Stray checker pieces. A silver bracelet engraved with a dedication that had been worn away. She was going to leave, but her finger became entangled in thread. When she pulled it up the pendulum came with it.
A tripod of copper legs. The thread tied to the apex. A black marble with a needle’s point fused to the bottom.
Jane set the tripod down on the desktop and freed her finger. The marble swung to one side, pinging off a copper leg and wobbling back toward her fingers, grazing her knuckle with a cold kiss.
She returned to the drawer. This time she pulled all the items out to find what might be buried beneath them. A board. Square, freckled with knots, the size of an unfolded linen napkin. She flipped it over. A circle of letters painted in an ornate style Jane associated with the illuminated Bible her father displayed on a lectern in his lecture hall.
As quickly as she could she put everything back into the drawer except the pendulum and the board. It would be madness to play with it right there, on the rug in her father’s study, though she wanted to with a nagging urgency like the need to pee. She slipped out of the room and closed the door behind her, expecting to be discovered by one of her sisters or little brothers who were constantly searching for her—Jane! What’ve ya got there?—but the hallway was empty.
She headed to the kitchen, where the door to the cellar was. It had been left open by whoever had last come up with the jar of peach preserves they’d eaten for breakfast, and now Jane stood at the top and stared down into the wavering dimness beneath the house.
Later, she’d insert a voice into her recollection of this moment. A whisper of her name coming up from the bottom of the stairs, luring her. But there was no whisper. She was compelled to venture into the darkness that smelled of axel grease by something within herself, as direct and inarguable as thirst would draw her to a stream.
Her bare feet on the wooden steps, pinching at her toes where the paint was flaking off. A discomfort that reminded her this was real. That the cold, more intense than a cellar ought to be at this time of year, was unnatural, but also real. To Jane the moment was the least like the rest of her life.
There were crates down here, tools her father never used, shelves that held the chinaware for suppers she wasn’t allowed to stay up late enough to join. She knew where the banner they tied over College Street on the first day of term was, rolled up and standing against the wall to her right, and she kept her eyes on it, waiting until she could make out the white B and O stitched onto the black cotton, before shuffling to a bare spot where she sat on the earth floor.
Jane was aware that the pendulum was a device designed to be a conduit to the spirit world, and therefore a sacrilege against God. Was this knowledge whispered to her by Mary? Was it intuition? She felt it wasn’t something she’d figured out on her own, but rather someone had told her. Not Mary, now that she considered it. Neither of her sisters, who were more interested in collecting ribbons for their hair and reciting the names of all the Bowdoin boys they had ever spoken to. And not her brothers, who were too young to be interested in offenses against God.
It was impossible, but it seemed that the pendulum and its implications would be the sort of topic her father would share. A lesson of the kind he would bestow on her before bed instead of a story. The deviations from the righteous path that led to damnation. Fatal temptations. They were warnings, often horrifying in their consequences. Yet Jane heard her father’s voice in the darkness of her room as offering her a different way, an alternative to the hair ribbons and dance invitations and smothered piety that would otherwise be the fate of an Appleton girl.
She set the tripod atop the painted side of the board and shifted it level as best she could, then poked the marble on its thread, pretending this alone—a swinging shiny ball—was the sole point of the game when she knew it wasn’t really a game at all.
For a minute she watched the marble lurch back and forth between different letters on the board. When it tired, she held it between her fingers, pulled it back, and sent it swinging again. It was calming, in an unpleasant way. Like riding in a carriage and feeling at once sleepy and ill.
Her mind noted the letters that the marble’s point swung to, putting them together into words. But they weren’t words. It’s because she wasn’t playing the game yet. To do that, she had to ask it something.
“Who am I?”
She squeezed the marble. Eased it back, keeping the thread tight. Let it go.
The ball swung as it had before. Yet this time its point touched a letter before changing direction, its former randomness now determined by an invisible influence.
J-E-A-N-N-I-E
There was no way it was an accident. The point at the bottom of the marble swung to those seven letters and only those, settling back to its resting position when it was finished. It spelled her name. Except there was only one person who called her that. Her father.
“Is there someone here?”
The marble felt warmer between her fingers this time. Softer.
Y-E-S
“What are you doing?”
In the instant before she let the marble go she felt it turning into something else.
W-A-T-C-H-I-N-G-Y-O-U
Jane looked into the grayness of the cellar’s corners. She was alone. But at the same time some part of her confirmed she was not.
“Not fair. You can see me but I can’t see you.”
She pulled the marble back and it warmed and softened even more. Still a hard ball in appearance as it swung between the letters, but against her fingertips it felt like skin.
A-S-K-M-E
“Ask you what?”
The marble wobbled between three letters, then stopped dead.
A-S-K
“All right,” Jane said, and slid her bottom over the dirt away from the pendulum. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
She was certain nothing would happen. She was certain it would.
There was no sound that drew her eyes to the farthest corner, but once they focused there it was where her attention was fixed. At times over the years that followed, she would wonder if it was this focus and attention that caused its emergence. Perhaps she was more than a witness to unspeakable things. Perhaps she was their creator in the same way that making the marble swing and asking questions of the air was the only way to make the pendulum speak.
The shadows moved.
Not something within them but the shadows themselves. It remained some distance away and yet she was enveloped by it. Embraced by layers of mud, suffocating and cold. She was terribly afraid. But her stimulation was louder than her terror, and she stayed where she was to see its becoming.
The darkness took a step out of the darkness.
It assumed the appearance of a man, but there wasn’t a moment Jane thought of it as such. Nevertheless, its presence was unquestionably masculine. Not human but, like some men she’d walked past outside of taverns or loitering in the town square, the entity blazed with an aura of threat. She recognized that she should try to escape it. She also recognized its authority. Whatever this being was, it could do things that were uncanny, magical.
“This is my house,” she said.