Chapter 25

Pulse thudding like the entirety of Brown’s marching band resides within her rib cage, Saoirse covers her head with her elbows and tries—with her last ounce of rational thought—to keep her bladder from releasing. She is going to die in this ridiculous house, this shunned house, this two-bit tourist attraction, die like Jonathan from a mixture of hubris and a stupid, failed heart! With her ears covered by her arms as they are, sounds are muffled. Saoirse could be convinced she’s underwater. Still—muffled sound aside—after a moment, she thinks the shrieking has stopped. Saoirse moves her elbows half an inch away from her head; Emmit is—calmly, almost robotically—calling her name. Slowly, she lifts her head and stares up at him, still standing in the doorway.

For a moment, Emmit does nothing but stare back at her, dark eyes wide, the hair that falls over one side of his forehead more disheveled than normal. Then, one side of his mouth pulls up in a crooked smile, and he is chuckling. Saoirse continues to stare, and Emmit laughs harder. In a few more seconds, he’s bending over and placing his hands on his knees. He tries to speak, but he’s laughing too hard to form the words.

“Wha—” she tries, but her tongue won’t move properly. Her body feels heavy from the downswing of adrenaline. “What is so funny?” she finally manages. “Where’d they go? The creatures—” She throws a quick, terrified glance over her shoulder. “Where were they? What were they?”

“They were raccoons!” Emmit shouts, then drops to the ground himself. He crawls toward her, tears streaming from his eyes as he laughs, so hard he can barely catch his breath. A frisson of siren-red anger shoots up from Saoirse’s stomach, but it explodes into a dozen lighter-colored streaks that unfurl within her body like falling stars. Mostly, she feels relief. Raccoons? Were they really just raccoons? And she starts to laugh too. The capsule she swallowed not forty-five minutes before has not worn off, and as she laughs, she feels those pastel streaks of relief mix with waves of euphoria and lingering terror. It’s a veritable roller coaster, one with no room to be purely angry, purely relieved, purely anything.

When Emmit reaches her, he grabs her shoulder and pulls her into him, and the two of them are rolling on the grime-coated floor, howling like hyenas. She’s still laughing when he kisses her. His tongue against hers makes her giddy with longing, convinces her that breaking into this house was the best idea they could have had. She rolls on top of him and kisses him hard, rips his jacket off and then hers.

They lay the jackets on the floor, strip the rest of their clothes off, and the shunned house falls away. Once, for the briefest of moments, Saoirse wonders if those abstract, waddling creatures really were raccoons, or something more sinister, less of this world. But in the next moment, the thought is lost, to bliss, to lust, to the joy of being alive, diseased heart or not. Alive and—against all odds, after what she went through with Jonathan—spending time with this electrifying, offbeat, alluring man. A man who seems, more and more, to be bringing out a more exhilarating—and terrifying—side of herself.

They are dressed and back downstairs, heading toward the back door and the cool autumn night, when Emmit ducks out of the main hallway and into another.

“What are you doing?” Saoirse asks in a loud whisper. “I thought we were getting out of here.” Their tryst upstairs went a long way toward eliminating the unease she feels in this house, but the effects of the brandy and capsule have worn off enough for her to feel hungry and a little on edge. And who’s to say the raccoons won’t return, lumber-waddling back to what is undoubtedly the site of their nest. But Emmit neither answers nor reappears.

“Hey,” she says again, then sighs and steps into the lightless hallway. Like the three shallow steps at the back of 88 Benefit, this hallway is the passage to the walkout basement. As she enters the space and scans the floor, she sees the Shunned House shares another architectural design with 88 Benefit: there’s a trapdoor at the center of the room. Emmit’s nowhere to be seen, and the trapdoor is a huge mouth that’s hanging open.

“Emmit!” she calls, more exasperated this time. Still no response. Irritated, Saoirse creeps toward the door. She peers into the gloom, but it’s too dark to see what’s at the bottom of the stairs. She holds her breath and listens, but not a sound comes from the yawning expanse below.

“Emmit?”

From a long, long way off, she hears Emmit’s voice call back, “Saoirse, you have to see this!”

“No, thank you,” she starts to respond, but then there’s a crash, like timber and stones falling from a great height, from where Emmit’s voice had seemed to come. The subsequent silence sends chills—like the legs of myriad insects—skittering across Saoirse’s shoulders. A fly buzzes up from the alcove, and she follows its haphazard progression with her eyes, intent on determining if it materialized from the dark labyrinth of the basement or the darker recesses of her mind. She’s not sure which would be worse.

“Emmit?” she tries one more time, pushing the fly from her thoughts. Silence. She curses, reaches for her phone in her jacket pocket, and engages its flashlight. Blinking away the remnants of booze and drugs and swallowing her rising dread— this is not like when I found Jonathan, this is not like when I found Jonathan —Saoirse makes her way down the stairs.

The steps creak as if she’s disturbing the dreams of whatever sleeps beneath them. At the bottom, she aims the flashlight to the left and is met with a crumbling, dust-whitened brick wall. The air is humid and dank, and there’s a strange, heavy odor, like leaf-rot after a storm.

“Emmit,” she calls, forcing herself to keep walking. Would he dare to tease her after the terror she experienced in the upstairs bedroom? Tell me something, Saoirse, Jonathan says from her head, and she groans. “I don’t need input from you at present,” she whispers, but he will not be ignored.

How well do you know this man? Jonathan’s tone is arrogant. Better than you knew me after years of being married? Of course not. And yet, look at what you say I did. Look at what our relationship disintegrated into. And we had history together. If there’s something evil in this basement, do you think you are safe? Do you think he’ll save you? A pause, and then, Are you sure the evil thing down here isn’t him?

“Shut up,” she warns, running the flashlight’s beam along the brick wall as it extends out before her.

You could disappear down here, Jonathan adds, and no one would ever find you.

No, the her-part of her brain retorts. That won’t happen. I do know Emmit. We bared our souls to one another. He didn’t go back to Baltimore this week so he could stay with me. He’s not playing me. He’s not after anything. Then, the thing she’s been unwilling to admit even to herself unfurls like a rose under a midnight moon: I think he’s falling in love with me.

The room she traverses is far, far longer than the floor plan of the house should allow. The concrete floor has changed to dirt and a strange, heavy dust, the particles of which mix with the wet air, making it difficult to breathe. The room narrows considerably until, the next time she looks away from the flashlight beam, she finds herself in less of a room than a corridor. The ceiling is no longer the same wide expanse it was when she descended the stairs, but has dropped down at either side to form something of an archway.

“No way,” she whispers and starts to turn around. She will not be the idiot in a horror movie, walking foolishly to her own demise. But then Emmit’s voice rings out, bouncing disorientingly off the walls:

“Saoirse!”

“Emmit!” she yells back. “Where are you?”

“Down here,” he calls. “You have to see this!”

She speeds up, though every cell in her body is screaming at her to turn around. “Are you okay? I heard something crash.”

As if to solidify her point, a second crash comes. A cloud of dust plumes up ahead in the beam of her flashlight. She starts to jog toward it, but when she reaches the scene, she still can’t see Emmit anywhere in the settling debris.

And that’s when a hand grabs her ankle. She shrieks and tries to jump back, but the hand holds her in place. “Get off me, get off me!” She kicks her leg and gasps for breath, but there’s a second level of fear vibrating beneath her panic, beneath the terror of being grabbed, like her fear has its own subterranean lair beneath a walkout basement. She drops into that secondary fear as abruptly as plunging through an unseen opening in the floorboards: This stress on top of alcohol and drugs cannot be good for my heart.

“Let go!” she shrieks, squinting into the black hole from which the hand extends. A head appears beside the arm, and Emmit is there, struggling to climb out of the hole.

“Saoirse,” he croaks, “it’s me. Stop kicking, and help me out of here.”

For the second time that night, Saoirse, too weak to stand, drops to her knees on the ground. Emmit looks at her strangely, eyes glinting, a smirk at one corner of his mouth, as if he knows a delicious, terrible secret. “Jesus Christ, Emmit,” she exclaims, catching her breath. “Was that the crash I heard? Did you fall down there? Are you okay?”

“I ... I think so,” he replies, and the smirk disappears. Likely, she’d imagined it in the first place. “There are boxes or something down here. I fell onto one of them. It blocked my fall, but I shouldn’t stand on it too much longer. It’s pretty unsteady.”

Saoirse grips his hands, and Emmit worms his way up. “Why the hell did you come down here in the first place?” she asks.

“I had to see where Lovecraft’s story was set,” he says and brushes dust and chips of wood from the collar of his jacket. “Where it was actually set. Dumb, I know. But once I was down here”—he pauses and gestures around them—“I had to see how far it goes. I’m not high anymore. Well, not that high. But it’s not my imagination, right? This basement, it goes way beyond the foundation of the house.”

As Emmit continues talking about the inexplicable construction, Saoirse leads him back in the direction of the basement stairs. “It’s not your imagination. The rooms do extend too far to make sense within the framework of the house. But I don’t need any more raccoons, and I don’t need you falling into any more holes in the floor. If you want to investigate, why don’t you contact that friend of yours with the historical society? Find out about the Shunned House from the safety of street level?”

They’ve reached the bottom of the stairs, and Saoirse brushes more dust from Emmit’s jacket. Emmit blinks and flexes his fingers, as if returning to himself.

“For now,” Saoirse continues, “how about we get out of here? Maybe get some dinner?”

“That’s a great idea,” he says. “And, Saoirse? I’m sorry for dragging you down here. It’s just, once I started walking into the, well, abyss, for lack of a better word, I couldn’t help myself. We were there! In the very place that inspired Lovecraft! I started thinking”—he stops and smiles at Saoirse a little sheepishly—“that it might inspire me too.” He moves closer to her, his expression earnest. Then, in a tone of reverent disbelief, he says, “I think it did inspire me.”

Saoirse takes his hand. “That’s great,” she says, leading him up the stairs. At the top, she closes the trapdoor, then shepherds him across the walkout basement and into the hallway. She’s desperate to be outside, away from the heavy stench of mold that makes it hard to breathe, that makes her heart thud painfully in her chest. She’s desperate to suck in lungfuls of fresh, cold air. “And I want to hear all about it. Just as soon as we walk out the back door, prop that big rock in front of it to keep it closed, and get the hell out of this creepy old house.”