“You would have me leave?”
This reply came at once. It startled Jane more than the fact it was here, as its voice proved it was no longer—if it ever was—a product of her imagination. And there was the nature of the voice. Low, unhurried. A thickness to the way its tongue curled around its words as if slightly drunk. She’d heard men speak this way at receptions her father held, occasions when beer and tumblers of whiskey were served. The men looking at her sisters and Jane in a way she didn’t like but was shamed to be also stirred by.
“You shouldn’t be in my father’s house.”
“But you said it was yours.”
“It’s—”
“You asked me here. Which makes me a guest. Would you cast out someone who has only just arrived? And at your invitation?”
It spoke plainly and deliberately. Yet the words spun in Jane’s head, turning simple phrases into riddles.
“I didn’t invite you.”
“That,” it said, and without it gesturing Jane knew it meant the pendulum. “That’s like a knock at the door. Yours and mine. And both of us answered.”
The thing was an outline of darkness, the merest sketch of a man. It reminded Jane of the time she’d stood on the banks of a bog at the corner of her grandparents’ property in Amherst and saw something moving just beneath the surface, thick as tar. She never saw what it was. It slithered through the water and caused it to bulge upward, suggesting the form of a turtle or snake without revealing any actual part of it.
“What are you?”
“There is no answer to that.”
“You could come forward. Show yourself.”
It paused for the first time. Jane thought it revealed a limitation. How the thing was still bound by rules of some kind, though it was already manipulating the space it occupied to make those rules disappear.
“That would only frighten you more than you are.”
“I’m not frightened,” she said.
It made a swallowing sound. A single, wet gurgle, as if a morsel of food—she thought of her mother’s boiled whitefish—was sliding into its stomach. It looked at her with eyes she could now make out from what she guessed was its face. Eyes she felt draw the fear from within her, pulling it up her throat like the campus doctor had supposedly done for a college boy who’d had a tapeworm removed by way of his mouth, baited by a bowl of milk.
It made the swallowing sound again. This time, Jane heard it as laughter.
“I can do things,” it said.
It was wrong to want to know what it meant. That’s what the particular darkness of the cellar was. Wrongness.
“Show me,” she said.
“We need to be friends first.”
“I don’t have any friends.” Jane was surprised by the honesty the thing brought out from her even as she detected the shade of a lie in its every word.
“You will never need another,” it said.
She reeled back at this, or wished to. But she felt like she was sinking into the earth, so all she was capable of was leaning a few more inches away, her body stretched so that made her feel vulnerable, as if she would soon be lying flat on her back.
“Are you a magician?”
“No,” it said. “But I can make people see things.”
“An oracle?”
“No. But I do have a vision of the future. And you’re in it, Jeannie. We are there together.”
It wasn’t a haunted house. Jane was sure of it now. There was nothing foul buried beneath its wood-frame walls, no profane spirit that had been lying in wait. In a way she could never explain, she knew the haunted spirit was herself. And the foul thing came to her because she had called for it.
Could she be blamed for that? She was a child. The last girl before the prayed-for boys of their big family were born, stranded on an island between her strapping sisters and toddler brothers. Bookish, solitary, with an inclination for the morbid. She’d only wanted a companion, an end to her loneliness. But this too was a lie she’d thread into her memory later. The truth is that Jane Appleton summoned a living shape out of the cellar’s shadows because she wished to bring back the dead.
“What’s your name?”
“Name,” it repeated, and seemed to ponder the nature of her query.
“What do I call you?”
“You,” it repeated again. “You may call me Sir.”
It was a trick. Sir wasn’t a name. It was how she’d been taught to refer to the professors at the college or a gentleman stranger she might sit next to at church. But not laborers or those she could detect by their clothes or place of residence were below her station. The thing in the cellar was not a gentleman. And yet, by calling itself Sir it wished to fool her into lending it a superior position in their relationship. For that’s what it was now. There was a bond between them even if she wished there wasn’t. A friendship. One that was the opposite of what the term meant in all respects except its intimacy.
“I am the one you asked for. Aren’t I, Jeannie?”
“Yes, Sir,” she said.
10
Four days before Franklin and Abby departed for New York, Sir had come to Jane in the Grief Room.
Upon his return, when Franklin told her that he’d been standing outside the door, she was privately relieved. She’d always known Sir was real. But if his voice could be heard by someone else, it meant it wasn’t just in her head anymore. Which meant something else too. He was stronger now—stronger here—than he’d ever been before.
She was careful not to lie to her husband. She said it wasn’t a man who was speaking. This was how she thought of Sir: something he was not. To think of what he might actually be made her light-headed. It was like imagining the darkness past the end of stars.
When Sir came to her four days ago he didn’t emerge out of nothing as he had in the past. She was sitting on the edge of Bennie’s tiny bed and then he was there, next to her. His leg touching hers.
“Jeannie,” he said.
His eyes were dark, but the second she glanced away she couldn’t recall their color. She looked again, noted it, looked away, and once more their particular hue was lost. His details could change even as she watched him, as if he was the embodiment of a false memory.
He had a dimpled chin. His chin was flat.
The tops of his ears poked out through his hair. He had no ears.
His lips were pink as if from kissing. His lips were white as if from tasting ash.
The one aspect that didn’t alter was the complexion of his skin. Unfreckled, pale as cake.
Considered as a man, she found him handsome without feeling the faintest attraction to him. Still, she experienced an unpleasant thrill in being near him. The closest sensation she could think of was the time as a child in Maine when she’d watched a hawk come down on a hare. The predator tore its prey apart with its talons, the hare twitching its legs at the same time it was dismembered and eaten. It was awful. It was impossible to turn away from.
“You’ve been very good,” he said. “You’ve been faithful.”
“Not to you.”
“To your son. But also to me.”
She wouldn’t call it faithfulness. Sir was a parasite she had asked for. And she was convinced that, as he had said in the Bowdoin house’s cellar, he could do things. But she had no loyalty to him, which was remarkable, because she felt a trace of at least some empathy for everyone, strangers included.