Chapter 9

Saoirse awakens, disoriented, though it takes only a moment to identify the hunter-green velvet of the living room settee. Someone has lit the three tall candles in the chandelier as well as the ones on the mantel. The shadows cast by the flames ripple along the walls, and Saoirse shudders, recalling the jumping, shifting aura in the basement. Nausea roils in her stomach as she remembers what the aura became. The rise and fall of the waves. The writhing mouths. The word that both extinguished all noise and sounded only in her mind.

Already, however, the memory is fading. The acuteness of the terror she felt is blunted, seems almost secondhand, as if someone else experienced it. As if it were nothing more than a nightmare.

“Saoirse,” Lucretia says, worry clouding her eyes behind the black-framed glasses. She had been perched on the edge of the coffee table but now she stands, hovering over Saoirse like a fretful mother. “Are you okay?”

“Don’t bombard her with questions.” Mia’s voice comes from deep within the living room. Saoirse struggles to sit up. “At least, not with meaningless ones.” Mia steps forward, out of the shadows, until she is at the other end of the settee. Lucretia moves toward the fireplace where Roberto leans, looking uncomfortable. “The question we should be asking her”—Mia’s voice is thick, as if she’s an actor about to deliver a monologue that will reveal an important Shakespearean truth—“is not ‘Are you okay?’ but ‘What did you see?’”

Irritation with Mia’s perpetually nonchalant attitude reunites Saoirse with her strength. She’s about to lay into her when she remembers the conclusion she reached while talking to Diane. She’d decided to keep Mia, Lucretia, and Roberto’s existence to herself; whatever happens going forward is on her. Still, how to explain the visions in the basement? Had Mia put something in the steaming cup of strange tea? But everyone had drunk from the same pot; if Mia had drugged her, she’d drugged all of them. Saoirse swings her legs to the front of the settee and pushes herself to a stand.

She’s still shaky, but she feels a little better. In fact, every minute that passes sees her coming closer and closer to feeling good. Maybe, inexplicably, great. Saoirse scrunches her eyes closed and shakes her head. When she opens them, she catches sight of the shelf on the opposite wall, of the tiny animal bones, and a line of poetry springs into her mind as plainly as if she were looking at it on a computer screen:

My bones were never as happy in my body as they are on my lover’s shelf.

Saoirse freezes. Twenty minutes ago, she was terrified, certain she was going to be pulled into another dimension by a shape-shifting ghost. Now, after almost a year of grief-induced writer’s block—not to mention the time preceding Jonathan’s death during which her creativity was stymied by other traumas—her brain is spitting out first lines with equal parts promise and intrigue, albeit ones that are far darker than she ever produced in the past. What is happening to me?

“Saoirse?” It’s Roberto who says it, forcing Saoirse back to the room, to the accusation she was about to make. Her fear during the séance has retreated further still, and she’s finding it harder and harder to remember what she was upset with Mia about.

“I ... I’m fine. I must have just gotten wrapped up in”—she pauses—“the performative ritual of it all.”

Roberto flushes, embarrassed at having his own words thrown back at him.

“You’re not going to tell us what you saw?”

Saoirse studies Lucretia. “What makes you so sure I saw something?”

Now it’s Lucretia’s turn to flush, the rising color far more noticeable in her fair cheeks than in Roberto’s olive ones. “I just thought ...”

“Enough,” Mia chastises. “If Saoirse doesn’t want to tell us what Sarah showed her, we shouldn’t push her.”

Saoirse turns to Mia. She feels positively spritely, as if she could leap over the coffee table and up to the chandelier, hang there while the three diminishing candles drip wax down her wrists and onto her hair. “What did Sarah show you ?” she asks instead.

Mia smiles shrewdly. “I’ve been struggling with a new poem. It’s meant to be part of an anthology of Rhode Island–inspired pieces, one of a series of five I’m preparing for submission to the editor. I asked Sarah if she could throw a few fireflies my way, maybe a will-o’-the-wisp or two. Something to light my path through the darkened thicket.”

“A poignant metaphor,” Saoirse says. “Perhaps the Divine Poet has already delivered.”

Mia’s smile grows, but Lucretia fidgets and stamps her foot. “I don’t believe either one of you. I think you both saw something. Something amazing. Maybe even dangerous.”

Saoirse continues holding Mia’s gaze, but at Lucretia’s declaration, Mia looks away and shrugs. “Sorry to disappoint you, Lu,” she says.

Roberto’s pursing his lips beside the fireplace, and Saoirse knows that, like Lucretia, he isn’t fooled by her and Mia’s playacting. She feels bad about keeping them in the dark, but more than anything, she wants the three of them out of her house as acutely as she did last week so she can hurry to the cozy antique desk in the upstairs office and expand on the line of poetry that appeared—like a bird to a feeder after a blizzard—in her head. Was it placed there by Sarah? Or—and this is far more unsettling to consider—by the flickering shape-shifter, the figure with the face of Jonathan, Poe, and the stranger from the Athen?um? Crazier still is that, right now, she doesn’t care.

She just wants to write.

And write.

And write.

Saoirse does manage to take leave of the trio, declining—with exaggerated regret—Roberto’s offer to move the party to his house to watch a new horror film he’s been waiting to see.

“Mind if we take the cupcakes with us?” Lucretia asks. “You know, for the movie?”

Saoirse retrieves the platter from the kitchen. Roberto gives her a quick hug before stepping out onto the sidewalk. Lucretia smiles a little sheepishly, as if sorry she’d been so pushy about whatever she thought Saoirse had seen. Saoirse gives the pair a little wave, then watches as Mia makes her way down the steps and joins them on the street.

Mia nods in the direction of Roberto’s apartment, and Lucretia and Roberto start walking. She goes only a few steps before she stops, turns back toward the house, and gives Saoirse a knowing smile.

“Happy return to writing,” she says. “Keep Sarah’s gift close. Only share it when you’re ready for whatever might be summoned in response. For the power that might be unleashed.”

Before Saoirse can respond, Mia turns and strides away. Saoirse shuts the door and starts toward the stairs, still planning on holing up in the third-floor office for the rest of the evening. But something pulls her down the hallway, to the walkout, through the trapdoor, and into the basement. She crosses the room to the scene of the séance, where she surveys the unlit candles, the silent mantel clock, the now-opaque crystal ball. She picks up the antique phone. No battery pack, after all. Had she really heard it ring? The daguerreotype lies face down beside the quill pen and bottle of ink. She reaches for it, careful to grasp its edges to avoid slicing her finger on the cracked glass. She turns the daguerreotype over.

The image of the Divine Poet is clear beneath the smooth, unbroken glass.