Chapter 40

He is there when she wakes, watching as she rolls to her side, the filthy dress hanging in tatters at her elbows. She looks up and into the eyes of a man she thought, once, she knew. Her own eyes fill with tears.

“Please,” she says. “Please, if you’re going to do this, at least give me my medication.” She puts a hand to her chest. “I won’t survive another ...” She trails off, shaking her head.

Emmit shakes his head, too, in disagreement. “I can’t do that,” he says. “Don’t you see? How you responded to being buried alive? I waited, in the graveyard. I watched you break the surface; I saw your determination, your desperation. There aren’t many who can say they’ve witnessed something so primal, so raw.”

“Go to hell,” she whispers.

“It was like I could hear your thoughts,” he says quietly. “As you crouched there, weighing your options, considering your chances. It was ... beautiful. Like watching someone in the window of a burning building deciding whether they should jump.”

She cannot look at him, this person who does unspeakable things in service of his self-perceived genius. “You’re sick,” she whispers. “Maybe if you got some help, you could get better, continue writing. But if you commit to this, what you’re doing to me, eventually you’ll get caught.”

A charming smile animates one half of his face. “I told you I only need you alive while I compile enough work to sustain my career. If you keep giving me gold like back in the cemetery, that won’t be long.”

Saoirse pulls away from him and covers her face. She is weeping, yes, but more than that, something’s occurred to her, the last thing she noticed before Emmit stepped out from behind the tree, derailing her escape. She doesn’t want him watching her as she considers what he’s said: If you keep giving me gold like back in the cemetery. And that’s it. That was what she saw. Gold. Glinting like an out-of-place orb in the distance.

She’d thought she was dizzy from lack of oxygen, but that wasn’t it. The gold was the gilded bronze statue—Rhode Island’s Independent Man, meant to embody the spirit of freedom—atop the statehouse. The statue just past Saint John’s Cathedral. The statue she’s seen every day off her balcony since moving to Benefit Street. Which means Emmit is keeping her beneath Benefit Street!

Saoirse’s heart swells at the realization. She hasn’t been driven to another state or dragged to some remote site in the woods. If she can get to the right chamber, find the right tunnel, she might be close enough to a street or dwelling where someone could hear her pounding. Her screaming. She just has to bide her time ... and keep her newfound knowledge from Emmit.

Saoirse composes herself, hardening the protracted sobs into a bitter laugh.

“Something funny?” Emmit asks.

“Just your logic. If you think you can withhold my medications and I won’t keel over in the middle of one of your fear experiments, you’re wrong. The joke will be on you.”

“You don’t give yourself enough credit,” he says. “The woman I fell in love with is too strong to give up. Too strong and far too stubborn.”

Some macabre part of her hopes she goes into cardiac arrest right then. But the bigger part of her is ready to fight, to ensure Emmit never adds another manuscript to his literary canon. “Are we through here?” she asks. “I’m ready to be chloroformed so you can leave and I can go to sleep.” The sarcasm is meant to be a shield, but there’s a waver in her voice she can’t disguise. Emmit might think she’s bluffing in her entreaty to be given her meds, but she doesn’t believe her heart has too many more instances of being chloroformed left in its bank.

Emmit opens his mouth, then closes it. He gives her the half smile and a little shrug. “I suppose it is that time. I need to write while the details of tonight are still fresh. Not to mention finish planning the next test of your endurance.”

He digs the rag and bottle out of his pocket and leans toward her. Under the guise of a dramatic recoil, Saoirse sucks in a massive intake of air and holds her breath. Emmit presses the rag to her nose and mouth. Her heart pounds, and her lungs burn, but Saoirse moves her chest up and down, as if she’s breathing in the chemical. Emmit must sense something is amiss, because he presses the rag to her face even harder. She lets out several puffs of air opposite the feigned inhalations. When every bit of air in her lungs has been expelled, Saoirse lets her body go limp.

Emmit continues to hold the rag over her face, and Saoirse starts to panic. He knows I’m faking; he’s not going to stop. He’s going to hold this rag over my face until I have to breathe again! She resigns herself to another stint of drug-induced blackness and prepares her body for the shock of the chemical stink in her nostrils, but the rag is removed. Emmit takes her by the shoulders and lowers her to the ground. Saoirse senses more than hears him turn away.

Her brain is screaming for her to suck in oxygen like a sprinter at the end of a race, but she manages a series of slow, shallow breaths in time with Emmit’s footsteps. When she feels he’s a safe enough distance away, she opens her eyes. Everything depends on seeing how he gets out of the catacomb.

Though the lantern light has diminished along with Emmit’s shadowy form, Saoirse sees him pull something from the waistband of his jeans. With a flick of his wrist, the object extends, then extends even further as he pulls each segment out of the previous one with a coinciding click. In a matter of seconds, he’s holding a two-foot pole that, with a final click, boasts a rubber knob on one end. Saoirse inhales a bit too loudly, and Emmit whips around.

She snaps her eyes shut and freezes. No, no, no, don’t look over here, don’t bring the chloroform back, please, god, no, I am begging you, keep doing what you’re doing ...

Three, five, seven seconds pass, and she hears the scrape of metal against stone. Saoirse opens her eyes in time to see Emmit fish a length of wire down from the arched stone ceiling, wrap his hand in his shirt sleeve, and yank the wire down to reveal an ancient-looking wood-and-rope ladder that unfurls in a series of jerky thumps. The final step stops a few inches from the ground. She closes her eyes again, worried he’s going to take one last look at her before going up the stairs. When she opens them, Emmit’s left foot is disappearing into the ceiling. He reaches down and pulls the ladder up, each step making a muffled thump as he stacks the layers on top of one another.

Saoirse is plunged into darkness. She takes several deep, replenishing breaths, hardly daring to believe she’s avoided another chloroform-induced blackout. It’s not the victory she hoped for, however; not now that she’s seen the way out might as well be on the moon. There’s no way to reach the wire; she’s not even sure she’d be able to discern which stone the wire is tucked behind. She fears Emmit’s left her without a flashlight, but after a moment of panicked groping, her fingers find the metal cylinder.

Turning the flashlight on, Saoirse walks to the spot from where Emmit ascended the hidden ladder. She shines the beam along each stone in the archway, once, twice, three times. Finally, on the fourth swoop, she sees it: a half-inch piece of wire barely visible at the top of a particularly cracked stone.

That wire is the way out. But without the expandable baton Emmit took with him, how can she reach it? She moves the flashlight back and forth, examining this new prison more closely. Stone. Dust. More stone. Concrete blocks. The tattered dress on her back. The flashlight in her hands. She turns, reilluminating the place where stone becomes concrete, then jogs over to stand beside it. She inspects the concrete. The grout that was used to bind the blocks together must be as old as the catacomb itself. She scrapes it with a fingernail, watching it turn to dust that disappears as it falls to the floor. She wraps a finger in the fabric of her dress and scrapes at the grout harder.

A few larger chunks break away, but even buffered by fabric, her nail aches with the effort. Saoirse turns the flashlight off and bangs at the space between the blocks of concrete with its handle.

When she turns the flashlight back on, she can’t believe her eyes. Almost all the grout connecting the two blocks has been knocked free. But she can’t use the flashlight as a sledgehammer. If it breaks, knocking out enough blocks to reach the wire won’t matter. She won’t be able to see anything in the blackness without a flashlight. Saoirse looks around for something with which to scratch out the gravel. Desperately, she runs her hands over her body, across the flimsy fabric of the dress, as if a hidden pocket might reveal itself.

“Goddamn you, Emmit,” she says. “A flashlight and a stupid dress? That’s all I get?” Her hands reach the neckline of the fabric, and she grips it, enraged by her helplessness. And that’s when her fingers bump against the pendant at her throat.

The pendant. Sarah’s coffin pendant. Sarah’s metal coffin pendant. Small, but shaped like a tiny spade. She unclasps the necklace and positions the pendant along the top portion of the block to the left. With five long, scraping motions, the grout disintegrates. She moves the pendant to the left line of grout, and counts five more, then does the same at the bottom. The grout here is thicker, but she’s still able to scrape it out.

Holding the flashlight under her arm, she grabs the concrete block with two hands and wiggles it. It moves, and not just a few millimeters, but several inches. She places the flashlight on the ground and shakes the block back and forth with manic, frenzied movements. A moment later, the block jumps from its place in the wall like something alive.

Saoirse stares at the block by her feet, so pleased with this small victory, she lets out a quiet, incredulous laugh. She picks up the flashlight, shines it at the ceiling, then back at the block, gauging how many she will need. It’s about ten feet to the ceiling, and the blocks are—she measures with her finger—about nine inches wide. She’ll need eleven to reach the top, then one less for each stack beside it, descending to one, if she wants to make a staircase, which, stability-wise, is really her only option. So, sixty-six blocks in all.

She stares at the concrete wall, her mind brimming with defiance and determination despite the job before her.

“All right, you concrete bitch,” she whispers. “Time to fall.”