Chapter 36

There’s a scream in her throat, but it’s strangled by the realization that, despite awakening, the rough fingers of the specter still dig into her arms. Saoirse struggles, but the fingers dig in harder. Not fingers. Ropes.

She is tied to a chair.

Sleep paralysis , she thinks. That’s why I can’t move. I’m in my bed, and this is some weird extension of the dream. But if she is in her bed, where’s the diffuse glow from the streetlamp outside the balcony door? Where is the silvery light of the moon, bisected by the point of Saint John’s Cathedral? She blinks, straining her eyes against the darkness, which sets off the pain in her head. A low moan escapes her, but it’s interrupted by the striking of a match.

Every ounce of blood in her body turns to ice.

Fiery light materializes at the center of her vision, small at first, then growing as the match is held to the kerosene wick of a lantern. Hulking shoulders grow around the lantern like wings.

“Aidan?” Her voice is a croak. But the figure is too broad, too muscular, to be Aidan Vesper. Saoirse raises her gaze to the face above the shoulders, lit not just with the glow of the candlelight, but with an expression she knows as well as she knows anything in Providence. A tuft of dark hair across the forehead. Warm brown eyes. A jumpy half smile.

“Emmit. What is this? What’s going on?”

The left half of his mouth jumps up again. Her conversation with him before she fell asleep, before the dream, returns to her. She’d ended things with him. Is he trying to teach her a lesson? Her head hurts too much to settle on any one explanation.

She looks around at the room in which she’s trapped, and her skin rises in gooseflesh. A subterranean lair. Walls of stone, a floor of dirt and dust, a ceiling hanging with cobwebs, and the air thick with the stench of black mold and wet cement. I’m in my dream. But this is real. Emmit is real. The rope digging into her flesh is real . The astringent, chemical taste is there in her throat as well. Chloroform.

She’s not in her dream; her dream was reality.

“You drugged me,” she says. She looks around. There’s the lantern hanging from a ceiling of dirt and root. Not beneath a house but beneath the earth. Saoirse manages to turn just enough to see the stone stairs thick with dust. Just like her dream, the top of the stairs has been boarded up with concrete.

And before her, between where she’s restrained and where Emmit stands, is an alcove.

Panic wells within her, so intense it feels like she’s sinking into a pool of water and will drown. Conscious thought is eclipsed by animalistic terror, and she pulls against the ropes, but no matter how she twists against them, they do not shift or give even a fraction.

Emmit shakes his head. “It won’t do you any good to struggle.”

She hears the words, but they have no meaning. She cannot fight through the wild landscape of her mind, the way her heart knocks in her chest like a specimen trapped beneath a bell jar.

“I’m hoping that, once you hear what I want,” Emmit continues, “you’ll realize struggling will only make things worse.”

This time, something connects. Worse. He said worse. You cannot make this worse, Saoirse. Still, she’s not ready to hear the horrific thing Emmit wants. “Where are we?” she asks instead. Despite the adrenaline coursing through her, her tongue is sluggish.

“I’m not going to answer that.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want you to panic.”

Too late, she thinks and pulls harder against the ropes, but her muscles already burn with exhaustion. Likely the aftereffects of the drug. “How long are you going to keep me here?” she asks.

“I’m not sure. I guess that depends on you.”

Her heartbeat hurts within her chest, and she thinks, I had to put off getting a new cardiologist, didn’t I? The thought is so mundane, and yet so ironic, Saoirse wants to laugh. She takes a deep, shaky breath. “What do you want from me?”

“To continue being my other half,” he says. “I don’t think you understand how special what we have is, Saoirse.” He pauses. “Have you heard of residual hauntings?”

Now, she does laugh. She can’t help it. “The Stone Tape theory, right?” she says, a note of hysteria in her voice. “That ghosts are tape recordings, and that mental impressions during events can be projected as energy and ‘recorded’ onto certain objects?” She’s not sure why she’s answering him. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism, her brain forcing her body to react as if she is having a normal conversation with a normal person, so that her heart doesn’t up and quit on her that very second.

“I’m impressed,” Emmit says. “Though, not surprised. You are special, Saoirse. Not just intelligent, but intuitive. Feeling. You see things differently. You’re ahead of your time. Sarah Whitman was ahead of her time. As was Poe, of course. And I’m ahead of mine. It’s remarkable enough when one person emerges from an era with a view and a talent that can change the world. But for two people to come out of that same time period? And then to find each other? That relationship must be cultivated. It cannot be ignored.”

She wants to cry. She wants to scream. She wants to spit in the dirt at his feet. But what she does is nod, feigning a calmness she does not feel. She’s not sure her heart can take it otherwise, and it helps that she is utterly exhausted.

“Case in point,” Emmit continues, “over the time you and I have been together, I’ve written two-thirds of what is destined to become not just the next great American novel, but the next evolution in literature. The way Poe pushed the envelope on what was considered groundbreaking work in the 1800s. But I cannot go on without you. Something clicked when you and I found each other. We’ve fulfilled a void that was lingering in this city, haunting Benefit Street. And now that it’s been fulfilled, it cannot be undone.”

She struggles to smooth her shallow breathing, not wanting Emmit to see the starkness of her lingering terror. “You need me,” she says. “So let me go. We’ll keep doing what we were doing.”

Some mix of sadness and disappointment touches Emmit’s features, amplified by the flickering glow of the lantern. He shakes his head and clucks his tongue.

The cornered-animal panic returns with the intensity of a seizure. He took me from my bed. He carried me somewhere in —she looks down to discover she wears a thin white dress like the one from her dream ... this, along with the metal coffin pendant around her neck— and brought me to the basement of some abandoned house . Saoirse’s eyes rove over the stone and wood and brick, the dirt and dust and decay. Is she in the Shunned House? Somewhere beyond the passages they traveled the night they broke in?

A burst of hope, like a dandelion from scorched earth, blooms in her center. If she is beneath the Shunned House, the Providence Ghost Tour will go by. Pedestrians will line the street. She’ll scream. They’ll have to hear her.

You don’t know whether it’s night or day, Jonathan taunts. You have no way of knowing when anyone will be out there, if you’re even beneath Benefit Street. Plus, if you scream now, you’ll only piss him off. Best to keep him talking.

Saoirse forces her lips into some grotesque facsimile of a smile. Emmit is clearly crazy, so she should pacify him, right? Or does pacifying crazy men make things worse? “Of course we’ll go back to what we were doing before,” she ventures. “I wasn’t breaking up with you. I just thought we needed a little break. I thought you needed a break. So you could focus on your writing. I didn’t realize that you—”

“Don’t do that.”

“Don’t do what?” So, crazy, but sharp enough to resent pacification. She should have known; Emmit’s crazy and obsessive, but he’s also preternaturally insightful and observant.

No, she insists. There’s nothing preternatural about him. He’s a man. Don’t build him up in your mind to anything more than that . Despite this pep talk, Saoirse’s crying now, silent tears streaming down her cheeks, heart ratcheting up to resume its previous wild beating. “My medicine, Emmit,” she whispers. “I’ll die down here without it.”

“You won’t.” His tone is so emotionless and matter-of-fact, so final , Saoirse thinks she might faint. “You must understand that I can’t take the chance of trusting you, of trying to move on with you, only to have you run away. Or worse.”

Saoirse’s breath hitches in her chest. “So, what then? You keep me ... wherever I am, and come down here to ... rape me? Play house? How on earth does that help you write the next evolution of literature?”

Saoirse’s stomach turns as Emmit’s mouth jumps into a half smile of excitement. “That’s what’s so amazing about having you ,” he says. “That you fulfill the other half of this partnership. Like Sarah and Edgar. Doing anything with you is enough to inspire me. So, yes, I’ll come here to continue our relationship, but if you refuse me, there are other ways to get from you what I need.

“I learned this in the Shunned House, when the raccoons ran out of that closet. And again, downstairs in the basement. Your fear is pure. You’ve seen death. You have death beating inside your body. An ex-husband who is nothing but bones. A faulty heart. Your fear itself is inspiration.”

Saoirse’s tears devolve into sobs. She’s getting an unobstructed view into Emmit’s psyche, and what she’s finding there, in the dark, is far worse than any airless, lightless space below the earth. “Please, just let me go. I’ll keep being your Sarah. I’ll do whatever you want. I just can’t be down here. I can’t breathe down here.” She looks around, the reality of her situation causing her thoughts to short-circuit. Where will she sleep? Go to the bathroom? What will she eat?

No. It’s the voice that usually retaliates against Jonathan in her head. The only thing you need to determine is how to get out of here. And you will figure that out. You just need him to leave, to give you some time alone. She tries yet again to control her breathing.

“There’s an energy in this city,” Emmit says. “A residual haunting in the truest sense of the phrase. The city requires it of you. I require it of you. For my work. What would the world have been without Poe, without the legacy he left behind? He came from nothing—from fucking nothing !—and catapulted himself to greatness.”

She wants to shout at him, tell him one stupid novel does not catapult him to Poe-like status. That he cannot stand on Poe’s back—or hers—to create a legacy. But now he’s walking toward her. Saoirse bucks against the ropes and tries to slide the chair away from him, but it’s bolted to the floor.

“Get away from me. Get away!”

“Don’t make this harder than it needs to be,” he says, and his expression is that sad, disappointed one again. He removes a bottle from his back pocket and a rag from a front one. He soaks the rag in the chloroform. “I’m sorry, but I have to move you.”

Before she can ask what that means, the rag covers her face. She tries not to breathe. Tries not to think of what a chemical like chloroform might be doing to her already taxed heart. Then she thinks, Maybe it’s best to die now ...

... and takes a long, deep, shuddering inhale.