Chapter 42

She walks through the spiderwebs and the silence until she comes to a three-way fork. Choosing the middle passage, she walks some more.

Interesting choice, Jonathan comments. He’s been inclined to remain between the walls of her skull since her fall. It’s not like you have any way of knowing where you’re going.

“ You were always the indecisive one,” Saoirse responds aloud. “ I’m the one who made a choice and stuck with it, no matter the consequences.” She’s almost annoyed he refrains from breaking free from her, wishes she could face him head-on when she says this, even if what appeared before her was a specter horrifying to behold. She wants him to remember how she didn’t back down despite the traumatizing pressure, that she didn’t give him what he wanted just because he wanted it.

The flashlight dims, and Saoirse stops. She presses the button, plunging the cave into darkness, and closes her eyes. “Please,” she says, every heartbeat driving force into this single word. When she turns the flashlight on and opens her eyes, the beam is strong again. “Thank you. Just a little longer.”

A few strides later, Saoirse wonders if the flashlight dimmed at all. How many days have passed since her last dose of medication? Enough to produce corporeal dead husbands? Flickering lights? “Keep it together,” she mutters. “You can do this.”

You know, Jonathan says, and Saoirse groans. Maybe when you fell off that ladder of blocks, you hit your head. Maybe you’re lying on the ground, bleeding out. Or maybe you never made it out of that grave Emmit dug for you. It seems far more likely you suffocated on all that grave dirt than that you dug yourself to freedom. This whole thing—me, your escape from the lower catacomb—could be nothing more than a hallucination produced by your dying brain as you return to the stars.

Saoirse considers this for a moment. “Did you see things?” she asks. “When you were dying?”

The voice in her head is quiet for a long time. Then, finally, very, very softly, it says, You know what I saw. After that, Jonathan is quiet.

Saoirse comes to another split, the tunnel separating into two narrower passages. She pauses, cocks her head. Down the passage to the left ... is that a sound? She listens, but nothing more comes. The presence of sound might mean Emmit, but Saoirse remembers the conclusion she came to after her premature burial. The golden glint of the statehouse statue, her likely proximity to Benefit Street, her own house. The presence of sound might mean Emmit ... but it might mean other people. It might mean help. Saoirse starts down the left-hand passage.

After several minutes of walking in the dark with only her labored breathing to accompany her, she hears it again. Something like a chant, accompanied by distant drumming. She quickens her pace, but the sounds stops as quickly as it started. Twenty strides farther and she hears it again. As she hurries forward, the sound grows in volume. Saoirse runs, forcing herself to hold in her cry for help until she can be sure it isn’t Emmit. Up ahead is a wall, and though she’s out of breath, Saoirse sprints for it. She presses her hands to the stone, then holds her ear against the wall. The drumming continues. Saoirse’s about to call out when a muffled—but familiar—voice rises from behind the stone.

“Whitman House, we reach back through time to your one true inhabitant. We ask for your help. Our friend took up residence within you and sought to uncover the truth through words. Now, she is missing. We need your ability to see . We need you to call the Divine Poet. What has Emmit Powell done with Saoirse White?” Mia speaks a line from one of Sarah’s poems, and the voices of Roberto and Lucretia join in.

“I’m here!” Saoirse shouts. “Right here! In the wall! Mia, Roberto, Lucretia, help! I’m in the catacomb. He’s trapped me in here! He ... he buried me!”

There is the briefest of silences, and then a squeal. Saoirse would know that squeal anywhere.

“Saoirse, oh my god.” Lucretia’s words are a shrill, incredulous crescendo. “Is that really you? How do we get to you? How do we get you out of there?”

“I don’t know!” Saoirse yells, wanting to cry from an overwhelming mix of happiness and frustration. Her friends are holding a séance to find her. People are looking for her. People care. She tries to think, too stressed and dehydrated, her mind tripping over bad ideas and false starts, having no idea how to instruct them to find her. “The Shunned House!” she cries suddenly. “The basement of the Shunned House! There’s an alcove in the floor. That’s where he took—”

The hand clamps over her mouth with such force, Saoirse bites a chunk out of her tongue. She tries to scream, to make some sort of noise, but Emmit holds her too tightly. Saoirse thrusts her thigh back between his legs, and Emmit grunts in pain.

“Saoirse!” It’s Lucretia again. “What’s happening?”

Roberto’s voice comes next. “My god, he’s in there with her. He’s got her. Saoirse, we’re coming! We’re going to get you out of there!”

The muffled sounds of chairs moving and people running reach her ears, followed by bumps and knocks on the other side of the stone. “Maybe it’s a trick wall,” she hears Roberto say. Already, however, her friends’ voices are farther away. Emmit hauls her back toward the catacomb, her bare feet dragging on the ground, and she considers Jonathan’s words again: This whole thing could be nothing more than a hallucination produced by your dying brain as you return to the stars.

At this point, you should be so lucky, Jonathan quips.

Saoirse keens with hopelessness. Her heart rate rises, falls, then rises again, the thuds against her rib cage growing increasingly erratic. She squirms and clutches for her chest, but Emmit’s arms around her torso are in her way. Finally, he stops dragging her, releases her arms, and stands her upright before him, as if he’s about to scold an uncooperative child.

“You could have ruined everything!” Emmit gasps. “What were you—” He stops when he sees she’s trying to speak. He sighs dramatically, Goth English major to the last. “What is it, Saoirse?” His tone is impatient, almost sarcastic. “What do you want to say?”

Saoirse drops to her knees, rolls onto her side, and writhes, gasping and clutching her chest. Her hands flutter. The movement within her rib cage is unceasing and unprecedented: white-hot lava that bubbles up from the glassy-iced cauldron of her rib cage. “Heart attack,” she croaks. “Heart ... attack.”

Emmit’s expression is confused, then skeptical. Finally, when he sees what she can only imagine is all the color drain from her face, his eyes—those eyes she stared into as they made love, walked the graveyard and the streets of Providence, as they talked of writing and death and living and love—open wide, not in concern but in anger and disbelief.

“Are you—” he starts, but it’s too late. The grays and blacks and browns of the catacomb drop away until the world is an overexposed photograph, inverted, more white than dark. Everything is hot and bright and so, so white.

“I—” she says but can’t continue and rolls onto her back, head lolling against the ground. Gravel digs into her neck, the backs of her arms, and the pain blooms outward like little explosions of wildflowers that cover her brain, bathing her thoughts in fragrance, soft petals, velvety leaves. The sensations converge, and a stanza unfurls in her mind:

The poet sleeps, and pansies bloom

Beside her far, provident tomb;

The turf is heaped above her bed;

The stone is moldering at her head;

But each fair creature of her dream,

Transferred to daylight’s common beam,

Lives the charmed life that waneth never,

A Beauty and a Joy forever.

She’s not sure if it’s hers or a memory of some distant verse. Sarah’s, perhaps, dropped into her head by the ghostly poet whom she feels standing over her even now. Saoirse smiles through the pain and closes her eyes. Tears patter the ground like heartbeats.

Whether hers or Sarah’s, the words are beautiful. She will miss beautiful words. She hadn’t realized they could exist down here. In the catacombs.

And if they can exist here, then they will exist wherever she’s on her way to now, falling from the sky like raindrops to jewel her hair, droplets that contain multitudes ... entire worlds.