Chapter 23

Emmit stops at his Mercedes before they leave, riffling through the glove compartment. The walk to the park at Prospect Terrace on Congdon Street takes a little over five minutes. They arrive in time for introductions and directives from their tour guide, Stacy.

After checking her phone to make sure everyone’s arrived, Stacy turns in the opposite direction from which Saoirse and Emmit have come. “All right, everyone. Our tour has officially started. Onward, to what we in the biz still refer to as the Biltmore Hotel.”

Saoirse and Emmit match their strides to the half dozen or so other participants on the ghost walk. Saoirse wishes she’d thought to bring a pair of gloves. It’s much colder than when she had initially planned to be out with Emmit, nine hours earlier.

“Are you excited?” Emmit asks.

“Sure,” Saoirse replies. “This is cool.”

“Are you scared?” He grins.

Saoirse feels her mouth lift into a half smile that mirrors the one Emmit so often wears. “It takes an awful lot to scare me these days.”

“Fair enough,” Emmit says, “though, just in case, I packed us a little liquid courage.” He’s staring at her, gauging her reaction. When she raises an eyebrow, Emmit slips a hand into his jacket pocket and pulls out a flask. Saoirse feels a little drop in her stomach. Emmit unscrews the top and drinks, then holds it out to her, the cleft in his chin deepening.

The drop in her stomach rollercoasters into a rise of anger, but she derails it. She can’t be upset; Emmit doesn’t know about her heart condition. He doesn’t know because she hasn’t told him. She meant what she said the other night at the restaurant: she was a “sort of” drinker in that she’d never had a problem with it. Not like Jonathan had. And because she’d had a conservative approach toward drinking before her diagnosis, not overdrinking with her heart condition hadn’t required much of a transition.

Emmit is still holding the flask in her direction, and she takes it from his hand. She’s always so careful with her health; a few sips of whatever is in the flask isn’t going to kill her. She sips, wincing at the burn in her throat, and sputters as she hands it back.

“What is that? Gasoline?”

“Brandy.” He takes another sip. “It is a little strong. Next time, I’ll mix it with eggnog.”

“Next time?” Saoirse scrunches her face. “Do ghost tours whip you into a partying frenzy or something?”

“Eggnog is criminally underrated,” Emmit says. “We’re embracing Providence’s past tonight, aren’t we? Eggnog was the drink of gentlemen and women throughout the nineteenth century.”

Saoirse forces a little laugh, but already her heart rate is increasing, and she feels the alcohol traveling through her, heating up her muscles, her skin, her veins. Emmit returns the flask to his pocket and grabs her hand, and she relaxes slightly and smiles. With his fingers entwined in hers, she can forget about eggnog and brandy.

Their first stop is the Graduate Hotel, built in 1922 and formerly known as the Biltmore. Saoirse listens to Stacy’s anecdotes about the hotel’s famous guests and unexplained deaths, a flood in 1954, a plague of lawsuits, unpaid debt, and an eleventh-hour rescue from demolition. Stacy is delving into how these events resulted in the hotel’s various unquiet spirits, when Emmit slips the flask out of his pocket again.

Jonathan speaks up instantly: So much for Emmit not being a big drinker. Looks like you picked another winner, huh?

Before Saoirse can decline the flask, Emmit thrusts it into her hand. Her heart rate ratchets up another notch, though whether from the brandy she’s already consumed or her rising unease, she can’t be certain. Emmit is staring at her expectantly, and a dozen excuses, explanations, and retorts spring to her mind. Rather than utter any one of them, she takes another swig, the large letters— B . I . L . T . M . O . R . E .—atop the eighteen-story hotel glowing red in her periphery.

He takes the flask back and glances at the other tour patrons. Stacy is explaining to a young woman how the hotel’s famous glass elevator is now—according to a plaque on its brass door—for time travel only. Emmit flashes her a grin, but his eyes look a little clouded. Saoirse feels her own eyes drooping a little, and the traveling warmth of the alcohol moves to her stomach. There’s a fuzziness around the edges of her vision and a looseness to her shoulders. She shakes her head, trying to clear her thoughts, and they follow Stacy and the rest of the tour-goers down the sidewalk.

A half mile later, they’re on Brown’s campus, with Stacy introducing the building before them as University Hall. The tour guide gestures animatedly as she says, “It’s haunted by the ghosts of the American soldiers treated here when the building was used as a hospital during the Revolutionary War.”

“I remember this,” Saoirse says to Emmit, trying to get their date back on track. “We used to scare each other with stories of ghostly soldiers roaming the halls.”

Stacy is fielding questions from the group when Emmit jams his hand in his pocket yet again. Saoirse’s stomach sinks at the same moment her heart rate rises. But this time, Emmit doesn’t come out with the flask. He’s clutching something obscured by his closed fist. He leans in close, breath hot against her ear.

“I have an idea,” he whispers. He pushes something smooth and oval-shaped into her hand. She looks down. It’s a capsule, clear and flimsy; she can press the sides of it together with her fingers, see the light-brown powder shifting beneath the pressure. Quickly, she hands the capsule back to him.

“What is it?” she asks over the noise of Jonathan in her brain, cackling something about how wildly she’s misjudged this man. Emmit regards her hungrily, and despite her fear and incredulity, her face grows warm under his gaze, the way it had that morning when he kissed her on her stoop.

“Nothing crazy,” Emmit says. “And one hundred percent safe. Just something to liven up this tour a bit. To liven up our”—he grabs her and pulls her close—“feelings for one another too. I only ever get them from the same person, and I trust him like my own brother.”

Saoirse glances around at their little group. A middle-aged woman with a Lizzie Borden House tote slung over one arm. A twentysomething man pleading with Stacy to admit whether she’s seen a Revolutionary War–era ghost herself. A college-aged couple snapping photos in front of a set of stairs leading up to the large brick hall. Saoirse turns back to Emmit.

“Why?” she asks, genuinely puzzled. Why do they need something to liven the experience up? The tour was his idea, and it’s more interesting than Saoirse anticipated. Is Emmit so bored that he needs a synthetic mood boost, or is something else going on?

Something ... like ... addiction? Jonathan asks. Something like what you accused me of at the end but never offered to help me with?

Shut up, Saoirse thinks back. Shut up and let me think.

“Why what?” Emmit asks.

“Why drugs ?”

Emmit looks around, but everyone’s listening to Stacy, who’s launched into another story about ghosts on Brown’s campus. He turns back to her, and before Saoirse knows what is happening, he is slipping his hands beneath her jacket and under her sweater, then running his palms up her sides and sliding his fingers under her bra. He kneads her flesh, and Saoirse struggles to remain standing, the muscles in her legs turning to jelly.

He turns her body away from where Stacy is standing so that anyone regarding them would think they’re engaged in an innocent embrace. When he pulls away, his mouth jumps up in that maddening half smile, and Saoirse realizes it’s as much a nervous tic as it is an endearing expression. He dips her back over the sidewalk and kisses her again, parting her lips with his tongue, one hand still on her breasts while the other holds her up. She grows dizzy. Thoughts fly out of her head.

After he rights her, he lifts a hand, a pair of brown-powder capsules between his fingers. He takes one, places the other on her tongue, removes the flask from his pocket, and swigs from it, then presses that to her mouth too.

“You want to know why?” he asks. “Because I want to do everything with you. I want to experience everything with you. I ...” He stops and puffs out a little breath, as if even he can’t believe the things his desire for her has him doing and saying. A tuft of hair hangs over his forehead. He looks at Saoirse from under it, eyes wet with emotion, with lust. “I am in awe of you. Being with you is like being bathed in an electric light. If we were to part right now, never to see each other again, I’d be a better person for having met you. For having lain with you. For having heard one single line of your poetry.”

Saoirse struggles to retain the last breath of air in her lungs. The capsule still sits on her tongue. Do not swallow this. Do not fall under his spell. Anyone can say words that are pretty.

But not everyone can say words that are so pretty, so captivating, and that’s a major part of Emmit’s appeal. Though ... speaking of pretty words, why do the ones he’s just uttered sound so familiar? Did she read them somewhere? In the book she took out from the Athen?um of Poe’s letters to Whitman? So ... a second instance of Emmit serenading her with another man’s poetry. Still, the warning in her head—whether Jonathan’s or her own—doesn’t matter. She feels the exact moment in which she fails to heed the warning. Feels the exact moment in which she falls.

Saoirse closes her mouth, wraps her fingers around the flask, and washes the capsule down with the acrid brandy. She takes Emmit’s face in her cold hands and kisses him. Whatever he’s given her will be an experience, and it will be an experience they can share together. The contents of the capsule can’t be much more dangerous than the antidepressants she already mixes with her heart medication every day.

Stacy leads the group toward Benefit Street, and it occurs to Saoirse that her own house may very well be their next stop. The thought is like a shimmery length of ribbon that unspools from her grasp. She no longer feels the cold of the October evening, and Emmit’s hand in hers is like a lifeline, making her feel equal parts elated and invincible.

So much for Mia’s heads-up, Jonathan says from a shadowy corner of her mind. You’re jumping into this with all the caution of a skydiver with a glitchy parachute.

This time, she does issue her dead husband a response: Did you ever think that maybe my relationship with you inoculated me from another toxic, dangerous situation? I suffered so much at your hands. The universe couldn’t possibly have delivered to me anything other than a good person, who treats me with equality and respect. Not after the monster I endured. Not after you.

There’s a chuckle from that same dark recess of her mind, and Saoirse can see Jonathan, his smug expression, his arms around his torso as if he’s wrapped himself in a hug: You and I both know that’s not how the universe works.

Saoirse’s so lost in the conversation, in her flighty, tipsy, floaty thoughts, she almost walks into the woman in front of her before Emmit pulls her back. The rest of the tour group stands on the sidewalk, peering up at a butter-yellow Colonial. There’s a steep set of steps leading up to a fence painted the same shade of yellow; the grounds beyond the fence are overgrown and weed-choked. Saoirse blinks. Are the grounds also veiled in a layer of strange, billowy mist ... or is that the by-product of her dreamlike vision?

“135 Benefit Street. The Shunned House,” Stacy says theatrically. “Built around 1763 and inhabited by Howard Phillip Lovecraft’s aunt Lillian in 1919 when she worked as a companion to a Mrs. H. C. Babbit. Lovecraft based his infamous story on a house in New Jersey, but felt the tangled ivy and unnaturally steep roof of the house before you lent itself to the idea of being ‘corpse-fed,’ and so crafted his story with the Babbit House as its basis.”

At the words corpse-fed , a sensation like the brush of insect legs travels up Saoirse’s spine.

“From our vantage point here,” Stacy continues, “the Shunned House appears to be three floors. However, if you look around the side of the house, you’ll see the first floor is a walkout basement. The plot of Lovecraft’s story revolves around the actual basement, which would mean the area under this level”—she gestures at the windows in front of them, then lowers her voice—“the area that’s completely underground. This is where the narrator and his uncle attempt to discover the source of a strange yellow vapor, or ‘corpse-light,’ but find death, decay, and an unspeakable monster for their troubles. Lovecraft wrote in a letter to a friend that the house’s image would come up throughout his life with renewed vividness. And with good reason. The latent horror of this house has captivated the city’s imagination for a century.”

There are whispered murmurings of excitement, and several hands go up.

“I’m happy to take questions,” Stacy says, “but let’s do so as we walk, because our next stop is just ahead, and I need to be mindful of the time. We don’t want to be out in this city too long after dark.” She punctuates this statement with a boom of vampiric laughter. The group follows her up the sidewalk and away from the looming yellow house.

Saoirse starts after them, feeling like she’s outside of her own body, when a yank comes on the hem of her coat so hard, she stumbles. Emmit catches her, pulls her close, and takes her chin in his hand. He kisses her, then pulls away and orients her head so that she’s looking up at the Shunned House’s wide, slanted roof.

“I’ve got another idea.” His words tickle her ear, and in an instant, she’s turned on, his proximity pushing her body to the brink, igniting her imagination, and she feels, suddenly, like she could write a poem while he’s inside her, that she could conjure the cadence of it inside his head, and he would, in turn, speak the words aloud.

“What’s your idea?” she responds, and her words run together slightly.

Emmit pulls his hips into hers and grips her jawbone tighter. “We’re going inside,” he says. “We’ll find an unlocked window or an open door, and we’re going to find out just what otherworldly phenomenon Lovecraft intuited in the basement.”