Chapter 39

When Saoirse was a child, her mother—worried she wouldn’t experience all the whims and fancies of a happy childhood without a sibling—spent every Saturday morning from May to October with Saoirse in the woods surrounding their backyard, a canvas bag of gardening tools and mason jars with holes poked through the tops at the ready, a song on her lips and joy on her face. It was these outings that were the foundation of Saoirse believing her mother was the best, most reliable person she knew.

They’d dig for worms in the rich garden soil by the property line, then venture into the pine trees, the summer sun filtered through endless, crisscrossing boughs and massive squirrel nests, their footsteps muffled by last year’s needle-fall and by their excitement for the unknown.

Saoirse’s favorite game was to find the biggest rock her ten-year-old arms could manage. She’d curl her fingers under its edges, reveling in the way the soil slid beneath her nails, feeling like she knew, even then, the way the words to describe the sensation curled into rhymes and stanzas in her head. Her mother would count backward from ten, and when she reached one, Saoirse would lift the rock, squealing with anticipation, while her mother scooped creepy-crawly, many-legged things into the open mouths of their jars.

Later, running through the woods with her mother, Saoirse would catch the pad of her finger in the thorn of a nearby rosebush or a net of interwoven briars. Forgetting about the dirt beneath her nails, she’d place a finger in her mouth to suck the wound. Blood and dirt would mingle into something bitter and heady but not entirely unpleasant. It was the taste of long, lazy days with her mother, just the two of them, and all the secrets of nature and the words and images and stories that intermingled in Saoirse’s mind.

The taste in her mouth now is like that, but without any of the happy associations. Saoirse reaches for her face, but the trajectory of her hands is blocked by something, her knuckles whapping against the hard, flat barrier, and when she reaches up, she feels the wood, unyielding and expansive, six inches from her face. She attempts to push up on her elbows, but her forehead smashes into the wood, and she falls back, little white lights exploding across her vision. Those stars are the only light there is; she’s in utter blackness, utter silence, the dirt not only on her tongue but in the back of her throat, crunching between her molars, the smell of it in her nostrils, and she tries to spit it out, but there’s nowhere to turn, no reprieve from the taste and the darkness, and she feels as if she’s drowning.

He buried me, she thinks wildly, incredulously, and she waits for Jonathan to say something smart, something cutting, but no such remark comes. She’s alone with her terrified thoughts and her quivering, useless muscles, and she’s in a goddamn coffin. How did Emmit even go about orchestrating such a thing? Surely he couldn’t have had an open grave freshly dug and waiting for her.

Saoirse freezes. Surely he couldn’t have had a grave freshly dug and waiting. Who did she lay with in this coffin? No. No. That would be too much, even for Emmit, even after hearing the things she’s heard. She must be in some cardboard box, in some makeshift hole Emmit dug a few feet below the surface. It’s not an actual grave. It can’t be. If she can manage to push the lid open, she’ll find a few inches of loose dirt are all that separate her from freedom. All that hold her in this claustrophobic nightmare.

But as she presses her hands to the wood above her a second time, she becomes cognizant of the surface on which she lies. She’d thought it was flat. It is flat. But there’s something on top of the bottom board, beneath her supine body. Against her brain’s desperate directives, her fingers walk themselves over the surface. Jonathan’s voice finally sounds in her skull: You won’t survive this. Not the being-buried part, but the stress and fear, the horrific discovery you’re about to make. Your heart won’t be able to take it.

Reflexively, she agrees with him: Don’t make this worse, she instructs herself. Concentrate on the board above you, on busting that open. For the love of sunlight and of living and of the breathing, beautiful world, do not explore what’s below. But it’s like her fingers have a mind of their own.

She feels the dry, desiccated fabric first, the crinkly texture of what might be centuries-old lace. Below that is something hard and knobby. Like twigs. Like bones. She counts. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Then backtracks, to the fourth digit. Feels the circular object there, bisected by ridged metal teeth clamping down on the cold, hard centerpiece. It’s impossible to tell whether the ring features a diamond or a small stone.

The hyperventilating starts then. In a matter of seconds, she feels as if her lungs have shrunk to the size of quarters. She pulls her hands back into fists and pummels the wood above her. Her panic is good for something; her thrusts are manic, fueled by the instinct to survive, to breathe. The wood splinters, chips and dust falling into her eyes, into her mouth, as she screams.

And she is screaming. She hadn’t realized it before, but she is screaming, and her heart is pounding in her temples, her throat, her chest, her stomach, in her fists as she pounds and pounds the wood. She’s pummeling Emmit, pummeling Jonathan, and Aidan, punching herself for her stupidity and gullibility, screeching as she rails against her weak heart and her weaker mind, her desire to have tried again for love, for a life. She screams, and she jams her fists at the casket, and the debris hitting her face and neck becomes less slivers of wood and more chunks of dirt and tiny pebbles and dried bits of branches and other detritus from the earth.

She turns her head and spits great mouthfuls of dirt over her shoulder, then sucks in what she hopes will be clear air, but dirt still floods in—more dirt, and more dirt, and then she’s broken free from the casket, pushing the remaining jagged edges of wood out of her face, but the dirt floods over her in rivulets now, and she can no longer scream at all, her mouth too full of the earth, of sorrow and regret.

Like a flash of lightning, the epitaph from the Athen?um’s fountain explodes in her mind: C OME H ITHER E VERY ONE T HAT T HIRSTETH . She drank from the fountain. She will never leave Providence. She will be buried in this city.

She almost stops struggling then, but with a final burst of strength, she makes a wide, sweeping motion with her arms, a drowning swimmer desperate to break the surface. She gets her legs beneath her, despite the endless avalanche of dirt, but her feet catch in the rags of the corpse who’s been so unceremoniously disturbed, the corpse whose grave—if Emmit gets his way—would be one shared for all eternity.

And she would have shared a grave with this quiet skeleton, interred forever in Providence, had the dirt above the coffin not been so recently tilled by Emmit by virtue of needing to deposit Saoirse within it. Saoirse’s route of ingress has become her saving egress, the dirt unpacked and uneven enough to allow her to flail her way to freedom. She feels the cool, open air with her left hand first, grabs for it like a rope, finds harder ground beside the gravesite, and scrambles upward on what’s left of the dilapidated coffin. Her starving lungs burn and consciousness dips. She cannot pass out now. Just three more seconds.

She forces her left knee up through cascading dirt in conjunction with the opposite arm. Her fingers close around something—a still-intact side of the casket, perhaps, or a root; it doesn’t matter which, it only matters that its existence allows her to make one final push for the surface. Her nose and mouth come clear of the earth, and she gasps in air. Saoirse stays like this, face partially unburied, simply breathing, content with this small gift, unbothered that the rest of her body is still encased in dirt. She doesn’t even open her eyes, just breathes, feeling the oxygen relieve her muscles of their near-fatal burden, calm the thrashing of her overtaxed heart.

When her lungs have ceased their volcanic burning, she wriggles up farther, blinks the dirt from her eyes, and looks around as much as she can without being able to turn her neck. It’s a surreal sensation, being eye level with the base of so many tombstones, like she’s at the center of a city, staring up at blocks of skyscrapers the same steel-gray, the inscriptions like darkened windows or recessed moldings.

She’s about to laugh—or cry—with relief when it occurs to her that Emmit must be watching. Did he expect her to break free? Would he have pulled her out himself if she hadn’t? Either way, he’s not going to let her get away now. She wriggles from the grave, pulling herself onto her forearms, then her stomach, ending in a wobbly-legged crouch. Do I scream and hope someone hears me? she asks herself, or maybe Jonathan. Or make a run for it now?

A branch snaps behind her, and she lurches forward, blinking wildly in the dark. She spins, trying to determine where the graveyard’s exit is, but there are too many trees, their branches like hands waiting to pluck her from the ground like a flower, blocking her line of vision. She darts from one line of tombstones to the next, panic rising, dread rising, a scream rising, and she wants to cry that, after years of taking care of herself, of taking her medication even when things with Jonathan were at their worst, this is how it’s going to happen, this is how her heart will stop beating for good. Somehow, she pushes past the terror, past the despair, and runs, gaining speed despite her steadily increasing pulse, and even when her foot catches the base of a thick square headstone, and she falls to her knees, she is back on her feet and running again in an instant. Up ahead is a long stone wall, and beyond that is a street. A streetlight shines a circle of orange onto the pavement like a halo. Beyond that, something gold—like a reflective ghost—glints in the distance.

“Help,” she calls out, but her voice is a croak, her throat too scratchy from the dirt she swallowed. She sucks in a breath. “Hel—”

The word, the world, all the air is cut off when something hits her in the chest. Saoirse’s feet fly out from under her, and she hits the ground on her back with the force of a brick wall stopping a semi. Along with the air from her lungs, every hope of freedom she’d harbored whooshes from her body as Emmit steps out from behind a tree trunk, rubbing his arm where he’d used it to end her desperate sprint.

She tries to scream, but his hand is over her mouth, and then it’s the chloroform and the blackness, and she’s gone, into the sulfurous current, into the dim lake of Auber, her heart beating to ash, her memories treacherous, her path no longer even a nebulous luster but merely a dust plume in the night, in the misty mid-region of some Poe-penned place.

And she disappears. Into the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.