Chapter 41

The throbbing in her fingertips starts first, followed by a headache that blooms behind her eyes like forsythia, yellow and draping and pungent. The staccato tremors of her heart are constant, so Saoirse ignores them. She removes blocks with an intensity that would scare her had it been applied to any other endeavor prior to being held prisoner in a lightless dungeon. Time passes as both a trickle from a dying fountain and a deluge from a broken dam. She does not expend energy trying to determine the number of hours that pass, or why some blocks are liberated quickly while others will not part from their house of dust and ruin at all.

For those blocks that don’t loosen after scraping the grout twenty times, Saoirse cuts her losses and moves on. The ratio of blocks that are jarred free versus those that remain in place is about two to one. It’s easiest, of course, to liberate blocks adjacent to one another as opposed to moving to a fresh expanse of wall. Saoirse goes long, long stretches without turning on the flashlight. She grows used to working in the dark and—aside from the scrape of the pendant—the silence, a world as black and soundless as the bottom of an ocean. Everything but the muscles in her arms and the metal in her hands and the numbers in her head ceases to exist.

Finally, pushing away a powerful—but not irrational—fear that Emmit’s snuck up behind her while she worked, Saoirse switches on the flashlight. She’d lost count of the number of blocks that’d dropped to the catacomb floor, and when she sees a massive pile stretching along the wall, she can’t help but cry out in shock and joy. There are sixty blocks, intact and sturdy-looking, and one that’s cracked down the middle. Motivation renewed, she turns the flashlight off and goes back to work, this time keeping count. A few minutes later, there are six additional blocks on the ground.

She lays the flashlight on one half of the cracked block, illuminating her path across the catacomb. She picks up the first block, stacks it on a second, and runs them over to where Emmit disappeared into the ceiling, stacking them beneath the visible length of wire. Two at a time she transports the blocks, stacking them in a narrow but sturdy staircase. Her stomach twists with hunger, and once, she has to wait for a spell of lightheadedness to pass. When the last block is in place, she puts a foot on the bottom stair. She doesn’t have time to examine each level for gaps or weaknesses; Emmit could return at any moment.

Bare toes gripping the concrete, she moves with more balance and dexterity than her weak muscles should warrant. After seven blocks, she looks up. At this height, she can see that the bottom portion of the wire is a loop, about as wide as her fist. If she were taller, or didn’t need her hands to grip the blocks above her, she’d have no problem grabbing the loop and pulling the wire downward. As it stands, she needs to climb higher. Saoirse lifts her left foot and ascends another block. Her muscles are trembling now, and the concrete staircase feels less and less steady the closer she gets to the top.

You’re going to fall, Jonathan says matter-of-factly from inside her head. Or, has the voice come from outside it? Saoirse glances left and then right, her jackrabbiting heart somehow increasing in speed. Is Emmit here? Did he come in through another entrance? But no, it was—without a doubt—the voice of her dead husband.

“Jonathan?” she calls softly. The word is as shaky as her muscles.

For a moment, there is only silence. Then, Jonathan’s voice, in conjunction with a flash of movement in the shadows, comes from the left of the catacomb, clear and loud and full of bravado: “Yes, dear wife?”

Saoirse gasps, and her hands peel away from the block she clutches. For one infinite moment, she flails, and it seems as if she’ll be able to return her hands to the makeshift staircase. Then the block beneath her left foot shifts, and she’s falling, falling, down, a bird pitched from the sky with wings that were clipped one too many times and never grew back.

Saoirse lies on the ground, oblivious to everything but pain and the pulse of her heart in her ears. After several agonizing moments, she tests her bruised and throbbing body. Mercifully, nothing seems broken. When she’s able to get to her feet, she limps across the catacomb for the flashlight. Tracking the beam around the perimeter tells her she’s alone. No Emmit. No Jonathan.

She half expects a smart remark from her trickster husband, but nothing comes. She considers whether hallucinations—auditory or otherwise—are a symptom of rapid withdrawal from antidepressants, but it’s been too long since she first went on them to remember the details of tapering off. She shines the flashlight at the loop of wire and feels something drip down her arm and over her hand.

A long gash from wrist to forearm glistens, the strip of skin alongside it ragged. Blood pools in the wound, and she tears at the hem of her dress, planning to wrap her arm with it, but stops. She looks back up at the wire. She looks down at her arm again. She looks at the flashlight, and her plan comes together.

In a flash, she pulls the tattered dress over her head and stands, naked and shivering. She ties the wrist of one sleeve closed and drops the flashlight into the armhole. The light in the catacomb is muted now, filtered through sheer muslin fabric. Saoirse can see just enough to make her way to the staircase.

She ties the sleeves around her neck to keep her hands free and places a foot on the first block, planning to follow the same path up. Before she can do so, the scream comes. Not far off, but here. In this chamber. Hands shaking, Saoirse aims the filtered beam around the catacomb. Nothing ... nothing. Had she imagined the scream the way she’d imagined her husband’s voice? But then there’s movement in the outermost ring of the flashlight beam. Heart in her throat, Saoirse repositions the light, illuminating the ghost that haunts her.

The creature opens its mouth, and out of it pours a scream of primal rage. Despite the low light, Saoirse sees the animal’s large pointed ears and its matted rust-red fur. She sees the cut of its ribs, like another set of teeth, as if the fox’s body itself has become a mouth, desperate to devour. To take what it can. And despite her fear, Saoirse feels overcome with sadness. It was Emmit’s opening of these catacombs that caused the fox to become trapped. She knows it like she knows her own name.

They lock eyes for several moments before the fox raises its delicately boned face to the ceiling and screams again. With tears in her eyes, Saoirse says, “I’m so sorry. I’m going to get out of here, and then they’ll exhume these tunnels. There’ll be a chance for you to get out.” She forces herself to break eye contact but whispers, “A chance to be free.” These final words are more to herself than the trapped animal. Saoirse starts back up the steps.

At the top, she unties the sleeves from around her neck and takes the portion of fabric containing the flashlight into her right hand. She’ll have one chance to throw it through the loop in the wire and catch some part of the weighted sleeve on its way back down. She can’t lose her footing. She can’t miss the loop. She can’t drop the flashlight.

You were never much of an ath —Jonathan starts to say from her head, but she doesn’t wait for him to finish. The flashlight is already leaving her hands, time slowing as she watches it sail toward the loop, a bull’s-eye of just four, maybe five, inches across. She might be inclined to think herself lucky when the glowing sleeve arcs perfectly through the wire, but to be lucky would be to have never found herself in these catacombs at all.

The rest of the dress trails spectrally behind the flashlight, a dutiful ghost to be delivered into Saoirse’s waiting hands. She catches the heaviest portion of her moving target, one hand clamping down over the wire before it can liberate itself from the fabric and spring back up and out of her reach.

Saoirse stands there momentarily, hardly daring to move, to breathe. Then, she ties the fabric around her neck, yanks the wire down, and the wood-and-rope ladder unfurls itself in the same series of jerky thumps it had when Emmit accessed it. She realizes it’s going to upset the bottom portion of her staircase in time to grab the rope and swing herself onto the middle step. The last two steps knock the concrete foundation askew and, like a too-tall Jenga tower, the tower falls, crashing in on itself into a pile of upended blocks and dust.

The rope ladder sways, and Saoirse clings to it. She half expects to see the fox in the muted, bobbing beam of the flashlight, but the creature is gone. She starts for the top, her promise to find help echoing in her head, her excitement at escaping this chamber tempered only by her apprehension of what she’ll find above.

As she pulls herself through the hole and onto a dirt floor, the knot around her neck comes loose. Saoirse grasps the hem of the fabric just before it slides back through the hole. With shaking fingers, she yanks the flashlight from the sleeve, pulls the dress back on, and shines the beam into the yawning chamber before her, Alice coming out of the rabbit hole into a garden of dust and stone.

Saoirse’s heart plummets. She’s exchanged one impenetrable catacomb for another. But then she sees that this chamber extends into an actual tunnel. Aware of how much time has passed since Emmit last chloroformed her, sick with dread that she’ll run into him as soon as she steps into the tunnel, Saoirse throws a final glance at the hole from which she’s emerged, pats the flashlight reverentially, and starts forward.

Into the unknown.