Chapter 37

When she comes to, Saoirse remembers every detail of her kidnapping and imprisonment in an instant, with none of those precious moments of forgetting that sometimes occur when waking after a trauma. It’s dark to the point of blindness again, but the pressure of the ropes around her arms is gone. She tests the air, tests her muscles, and feels solid ground beneath her.

She’s on the ground. Unrestrained. Saoirse pushes herself onto her elbows and feels around her, yelping when her hand hits something hard. Tentatively, she reaches out, finds what feels like cool metal, something long and cylindrical. There’s a button. She presses it, and the world erupts with light.

The flashlight illuminates a space terrifying in its vastness; Saoirse has the sense that she’s in a labyrinth the size of a football field. The smell is no better than the first prison, only different: earth and the wriggling bodies of worms rather than dampness and mold. Even with the brightness of the flashlight’s bulb, the beam is swallowed by the yawning darkness, like a pebble dropped off a cliff. Something scuttles over her hand, and Saoirse suppresses a shriek.

She shakes the spider away and scrabbles to her feet, batting at roots that hang above her. The walls and ceiling are composed of stacked stone, with stone pillars that crisscross and arch over her head, but the earth has pushed through the cracks and crevices of these materials so persistently, they are almost completely overgrown. The effect is dizzying, like an autostereogram, an artificial tunnel that becomes a lair of subterranean fauna when viewed with the correct vergence. Saoirse shivers, and sweeps the flashlight over the walls, following the progression of the stone arches and taking small steps forward, unsure if she’s ready to see just how far her prison extends.

She’s gone about twenty paces when she finds a giant stone slab that looks to be set into the larger frame of the stone wall, not a part of it. Though the labyrinth feels impenetrable, she knows it can’t be. Emmit got her in here. There must be a way out. Could this stone slab be it? She props the flashlight against the wall and stands with her feet spread wide, then places her hands on the stone.

A wave of lightheadedness assails her. She is weak with hunger and feeling the effects of the chloroform, lethargic and disoriented. Or perhaps it’s something worse ... something to do with her heart, the lack of beta blocker medication and her antidepressant. How long until she really feels the effects of being off her medication?

Twenty-four hours, most likely, Jonathan says. Forty-eight at the most.

“I will not be down here that long,” she says aloud. No sense replying to Jonathan in her head. She presses her hands more firmly against the stone, but the slab is too heavy to be mobile. There’s no way this is how Emmit got her in here. She retrieves the flashlight and continues feeling her way along the stone until the wall turns to dirt. Saoirse digs her fingers into the loam, but it’s more compact than she expected.

She continues trailing her hand along the wall until the corner of something sharp snags against her palm. She aims her flashlight at the spot but doesn’t see anything. She feels around again, trying to find the edge she felt a moment ago. When she does locate it, she finds the dirt is packed so thickly she has to chop at the sediment with her flashlight.

Enough filth falls away so that Saoirse can make out the shape of the object in the soil. Her mind stutters at what—horrifyingly, unbelievably—she thinks she’s seeing. Her heart thuds in her chest like a gong, and she lurches back, but this only makes things worse. Seeing the wall of dirt from several feet back allows her brain to make sense of the big picture, to parse what she’s discovered in the soil. It makes sense. As much sense as this nightmare can possibly make.

The hard edge in the soil is the corner of a casket. Buried so long, it’s as much a part of the dirt in which it lies as the rocks and worms. The room she is in is not an extended basement. It’s not a subterranean chamber. It’s not a dungeon or a lair.

It’s a catacomb.

A catacomb that must exist directly adjacent to a cemetery.

Nausea roils in Saoirse’s stomach, and she drops the flashlight to put her hands on her knees, breathing hard, more terrified of fainting—and falling unconscious again—than of facing this horrifying reality. The bastard . He left her in a catacomb. She’s as good as buried alive down here.

No. Again, the adamant refusal. If she submits to her fear, to her fate, she might as well fashion a noose out of a hanging root or throw herself into the slab of stone now. She will not die down here. He told her he’d be back. He wants her to go on as if she’s in love with him. Wants her to be the Sarah to his Edgar. The muse to his enigmatic, tortured, artistic genius. If it means her life will be extended long enough to figure out how to get out of here, she’ll do it.

Saoirse sinks to the ground against the root-choked wall. Trapped underground by her once-lover, a Pulitzer Prize–winning, nationally beloved author. A strangled laugh escapes her. How could she have been so stupid?

You really didn’t learn your lesson, did you? Jonathan asks.

“Shut up,” she says. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

She’s without her medication. Without a weapon. Without food or water or even a blanket. Without people who will be looking for her, and—here, she becomes overwhelmed with sadness—the ability to take care of Pluto. Without a single thing but this gossamer-thin dress and her own wits.

But this isn’t true. Not completely. She has one more thing. Something she’s kept from Emmit, for all their long talks over dinners and in her bedroom. For all their commitment to baring their souls and knowing one another on a molecular level. She has what is perhaps the greatest weapon of all.

She has a secret. A secret that reminds her of what she’s capable of when her back’s against the wall.

Emmit rouses her from a sleep she hadn’t expected to be granted with a single “Saoirse?” rather than a shriek of stone against stone or the groan of a trapdoor lifting out of the ceiling.

“Hi there,” he says, laying a blanket by her feet and a bottle of water beside it. Saoirse grabs the water, unscrews the top, and takes long, desperate sips. When she’s drunk two-thirds of the bottle, it occurs to her to save the rest. But who knows if he’ll leave it when he goes? She finishes it and tosses the empty bottle on the floor.

“You can keep this,” he says, gesturing at the blanket, “so long as you behave. Like I told you, this can be like it was”—he nods vaguely toward the surface—“up there. Or, should you refuse to keep up your end of our relationship, it will be a very, very different experience for you. You’ve proven unequally valuable to my craft; I won’t hesitate to subject you to experiences like those you had beneath the Shunned House if it keeps me writing. Do you understand?”

She nods. Her stomach cramps with the water she’s just poured into it.

“Come here.”

She freezes. Now? He means, now? Keep up her end of the relationship this minute? What did you think? Jonathan asks. He was going to wait until you’d acclimated?

“I—” Saoirse says.

Emmit shoots her a look. “Are we going to have a problem?”

She shakes her head. She remembers this feeling, this unadulterated rage she must conquer so it appears she’s no more bothered than a woman being asked to repeat herself rather than one about to be assaulted.

Emmit lays the blanket on the floor as if preparing for a picnic. He sits and pats the fabric beside him. Saoirse swallows her volcanic anger and crawls forward to sit beside him.

She keeps her eyes very wide, afraid if she blinks, the tears will come. Emmit strokes her face. “I’ve missed you,” he says.

Saoirse thought that, despite her fear and horror, she might feel the ghost of their previous connection. Some glimmer of familiarity. But there’s only fear and horror. And hatred.

That sounds familiar, Jonathan says.

It should, she thinks back. The trio of emotions that dominated our marriage.

“Come closer,” Emmit whispers, and pulls her down onto the blanket. She feels the ground beneath her head, the blanket a mere wisp of protection against its firmness. Emmit stares into her eyes. “Didn’t I tell you?” he says. She smells the faint hint of chai obscured by toothpaste and the lingering remnants of aftershave. “That you’re my momentous, soul-crushingly significant thing?”

He kisses her.

Though she hears them buzzing all around her, feels their legs walking over her skin in the same oppressive way Emmit’s tongue explores her mouth, Saoirse does not open her eyes to the flies that swarm the cave like a plague.