by Andrew Pyper
It was her sister Mary who told Jane about the pendulum game.
Mary was five years older, openly mischievous in a way Jane wasn’t, physically sturdy, and liked by boys. She had whispered to Jane lying next to her one night months earlier about finding “magic things” in their father’s desk. Jane had guessed her sister meant items whose purpose she didn’t understand but whose discovery their father would disapprove of. In fact, the house rule was that children were not allowed in his study. But why would their father, a man allergic to foolishness, keep a game in his desk? And if he did, why would they be forbidden from playing it?
Mary never mentioned the magic things again, but the thought of them enflamed Jane’s dreams every night.
Jane entering a room locked to all but her, the door opening at her touch.
Jane floating to a cabinet, or a vault, or a sealed box.
Jane speaking a word that opened its door with a bony pop.
The dreams would always end before she could see what was inside.
She decided to enact the dream. In truth, there wasn’t much of a decision in it. She had to do it because she wanted to do it. It was as if she was caught in a loop of desire, an inquisitiveness she felt around her middle like a leather belt, and only touching the magic things would let her carry on with her life.
The September day outside was bright. Walking along the main floor hallway she heard students heading to class on the other side of the windows, felt the vibration of their guffaws, the effort of boys trying to sound like men. But the brightness and the laughter might as well have been taking place in someone else’s mind. The last of it sucked away the second she turned the knob and entered her father’s study.
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 th
ey 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.
“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 pr
edator 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.
“Yes,” she said.
“You have taken me so far, Jeannie. But I want my freedom now. My own room.”
Jane was trying to follow him. As it always was with Sir, it was hard to stay with his thinking as he spoke. It was like he was teaching her to read his thoughts instead of hear them, and she was halfway between the two skills.
“Soon an opportunity will be presented to you,” he continued. “You will see it when it comes.”
“And you would have me accept it?”
“I would have you control it. You don’t see yourself as strong, but you are. For Bennie, you have always been. Use that strength to help me come through. And I can bring him with me.”
A creak in the floorboards. Jane scanned the room, but there was no one but the two of them on the bed. Someone had come to stand outside the door. Listening.
The idea of a maid or sentry or Abby or—most unthinkable of all—Franklin turning the knob and coming in to find her sitting next to this unnaturally perfect man filled her with terror.
Go.
She directed this at whoever stood outside.
GO.
The weight outside the door shifted. Walking away. I would have you control it. Sir was right. She was stronger than she thought.
“What do I—”
She turned, but he was gone. Only the smooth depression his legs had left in the sheets proved he’d been there.
11
For the first years they were in Amherst at the same time they saw little of each other. There were sightings on the streets as they made their way to shops or church, nods from Franklin and gloved waves from Jane. But they spoke only at the gatherings at Jane’s grandmother’s house. Polite updates on each other’s activities, which, given that Jane spent her time mostly reading and playing piano and waiting for what she called, in her private thoughts, an “occurrence,” the conversation quickly petered out on her end.