Chapter 43

“ Shh. You’re all right. You’re all right. Did you really think I was going to let you die?”

Saoirse stirs, unsure if the voice is in her head or her ears. Her body feels like sheets of layered gauze, porous and flimsy, liable to float away in a breeze. She flexes her fingers, trying to determine if she is, in fact, alive, or if her tortures have extended into death.

“You were not having a heart attack,” Emmit says, and Saoirse opens her eyes. “Just a little bout of anxiety, by my reckoning.”

The light is strange—bluish, and not diffuse, but a bright streak that falls behind Emmit’s crouched form. He follows her gaze. “Your flashlight died, and I don’t have my phone on me. I was writing when I got one of my feelings. Something momentously significant is happening, Emmit, it said. I knew I had to check on you that very minute, not wait. On the way out the door, I grabbed this stupid blue flashlight, and, well, here we are.”

Saoirse swallows, and this simple act causes the pain in her chest to expand outward in all directions. It feels as if every rib is broken and her lungs are full of stones. “Not anxiety,” she chokes out. “Heart attack. Need a hospital.”

“Don’t be so dramatic. And besides, I can’t take you out of here now. You made sure of that when you yelled out to your friends. They’re probably at the police station this very second. I need to secure you somewhere temporary and get home before the inevitable officer arrives at my door.” He pauses. “No, I won’t go home. I’ll go to the Ath. Where I’ve been working on my novel all evening.”

Saoirse is having trouble focusing. Her friends are at the police station? What friends? Why? And Emmit’s a writer? Is that how she met him? She blinks, trying to grasp on to the edges of her thoughts, but nothing registers. Nothing but the pain and shortness of breath.

“Now that you know for sure where I’ve been keeping you,” Emmit says, “you have to admit how remarkable it is.” His expression is reverent. “Who would have ever believed the basement from Lovecraft’s Shunned House was real , uncovered by Poe during one of his visits to Rhode Island?” Emmit laughs. “I read about it on the website of a Poe-fan-turned-collector. At an auction at the Ath, he came into possession of a map of Benefit Street, published in 1846. There were notes in the margins that matched Poe’s handwriting, notes that cited the location of the basement with a single, scribbled word: portal .

“It kills me that the Athen?um staff wouldn’t have thoroughly examined anything from that time period before auctioning it off; Poe spent a good deal of time there when he was courting Sarah, and was known to have signed his poem ‘Ulalume’ in the library’s copy of the American Review .” Emmit laughs again and shakes his head, as if tickled by his own good fortune.

The unnatural glow of the flashlight’s blue glare behind Emmit turns his face into a shadow-saturated jack-o-lantern. Saoirse’s fear comes back to her, pushing the memories of the last several days out of the basement of her mind.

“It makes perfect sense when you think about it,” Emmit continues. “That Poe’s interest in the house on Benefit Street wasn’t limited to his infatuation with Sarah. That he’d uncovered a series of catacombs beneath the city and that Sarah’s home contained one of the easiest points of ingress. That ‘The Premature Burial’ and ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ took their inspiration from Poe’s real-life adventures.

“There were whispers of slave tunnels beneath College Hill over the years, but when no one could prove their existence, the rumors were attributed to drain tunnels. It’s so easy to assume all the mysteries of the world have been uncovered; it takes but a single person with a specific set of interests for a connection to be made.” He gives her a look like, Wouldn’t you agree? Saoirse does not—cannot—respond.

Emmit sighs. “I refused to abandon the theory of a network of underground tunnels,” he continues. “I located several references to a catacomb in the annals of Saint John’s Cathedral. When I considered this in conjunction with Poe’s interest in burials and graveyards—and with Lovecraft’s Shunned House, not even a quarter of a mile from the cathedral—I knew there was something to it, but the entrance to the tunnels eluded me. That is, until you moved into 88 Benefit Street. Into Sarah’s house.

“I was watching the house, as I had so many nights before, contemplating where the entrance to the catacombs could be, certain the answer lay inside, that Sarah Whitman, and Poe’s obsession with her, was the key. And then you pulled up in your dusty little Mazda, and I saw you step out onto the street, a timid little bird but possessed of a palpable strength. I fell for you as utterly as Edgar did Sarah, watching her tend her garden by the light of the moon.”

Saoirse’s lucid now. Though, while her brain stitches the details of Emmit’s confession into a macabre tapestry, her heart threatens to unravel, arteries and ventricles severed like thread against teeth.

“You were the key to unlocking the energy, the history, of the house. Your arrival in Providence initiated the residual haunting. The more I pursued you, the stronger our connection to the past became. Oh, and thanks for telling me about the trick paneling at the side of the house. That was crucial. Do you want to hear something hilarious? Your friends? The little séance circle they constructed? Their black-clothed table was directly over what I eventually discovered was the false floor. Once I found it and chiseled it free from almost two hundred years’ worth of dust and grime, I needed only to slide the table back over the now-visible outline. You four sat right over it and never knew.”

Saoirse winces.

“As for the second entrance,” Emmit continues, “I’d searched the Shunned House before, but plunging through the floor the night I was with you convinced me to return the next day and pursue what was beyond it. But something followed me, some animal that got into the walkout. Maybe one of those damn raccoons.” He shakes his head and chuckles. “So I didn’t go too far. But I had what I needed. And the more I explored the catacombs, the more my embodiment of Poe solidified.

“Under the city’s streets, I saw how his stories came to life. My ability to write grisly settings, my passion—so stymied after writing Vulture Eyes —was returning.” One side of his mouth curls in a derisive smile. “Until you derailed everything. Twice.”

“I’ll die if you don’t take me out of here,” Saoirse whispers.

“You will die, my love. The queenliest dead that ever died so young. But not before I see you as the protagonist of Poe’s—and soon to be my—greatest story of all.” He scoops up the flashlight and aims the blue beam at her face. Saoirse drops her head and shields her eyes.

“Here.” He tosses something at her. A tote bag, one of her own, from the closet of her bedroom. It hits her in the chest, and what little air she has whooshes from her lungs. “The help that you asked for. Clothes, water, some food. To lift your spirits—and your strength—while I finish crafting the climax of your story. I’ll be back, my Helen.” One hand goes into a pocket and comes out with a bottle and rag. “My soul, this night, shall come to you in dreams and speak to you those fervid thanks which my pen is powerless to utter.”

“Please.” Saoirse chokes the word out, not recognizing the voice as her own. It’s a voice buried too long, a voice that doesn’t know it has died. It’s too late to hold her breath, to trick him as she did before. She’s so weak. Emmit lowers the rag over her face like an eclipse.

Saoirse welcomes the black-winged annihilation. It’s a painless burial. An eternal silence, everlasting blindness, without the desperation of searching, in the dark, for the moonglow beam of a solitary flashlight.