Chapter 47

Saoirse hears the word echoing out into the future, across months and places, from the writhing mouths of specters and the lying mouths of lovers, blaring in her mind like a siren. It hasn’t lost its volume. It hasn’t lost its power. Emmit is staring at her, his face twisted in an expression of horror.

“He pleaded with me,” Saoirse says. “‘My phone,’ he said. ‘It’s right there. Please, call an ambulance.’ I remember the way his breath caught in his throat, the continuous heaving of his chest. But I didn’t know where his phone was. I never looked for it. I never took my eyes off him. The man who held me prisoner in my own home. My own mind. Who would have traded my life for that of the baby he wanted on mere principle.

“He made one final attempt as he leaned, half-crumpled, against the side of his desk, his eyes pleading. The way mine had pleaded with him night after night after night for years. ‘Call,’ he whispered. ‘Please, Saoirse. Please.’ But I didn’t. And do you know why, Emmit?”

Emmit flinches at being addressed. He shakes his head. As he does, Saoirse pulls the syringe from her pocket and flicks off the cap.

“Because this was my momentous, soul-crushingly significant thing,” she says.

Emmit’s eyes widen, and he pulls back as if he’s been slapped.

Saoirse continues, “I watched him die, and I didn’t call for help. Had I known he’d sent a text to Aidan—that’s the man you kicked out of my house the night you kidnapped me—telling him I’d come home early, I would have deleted it.” Saoirse stops. “I still can’t figure why Aidan hasn’t gone to the police.” She shrugs one shoulder, using the movement to further move her arm into position.

“Anyway, after Jonathan died, I stayed in the house for three whole days while his body rotted.” She tilts her head. “Most people think that flies don’t appear on a corpse until a few days into decomposition, when the body starts to bloat. But did you know that blowflies and flesh flies often arrive on the scene within minutes after a person has died? They swarmed the office, the house, in droves, and I endured them, so that I could say he was dead when I found him.” Slowly, she lifts the hand with the syringe. “He was dead when I found him,” she adds thoughtfully. Her thumb thrums against the plunger. “Or, at least, he might as well have been. Twelve years earlier on a moonlight night in Providence ... he was already dead to me.”

Saoirse drives the syringe into the front of Emmit’s thigh and slams the plunger down, dispensing every milliliter of its contents. Emmit howls and propels himself off Saoirse, rolling back onto a low stack of concrete slabs. Saoirse scrabbles backward, careful to steer clear of the holes in the floorboards. On a wide, somewhat sturdy-looking beam, she jumps to her feet.

Emmit clutches his thigh and struggles to stand. Already, his eyes are glassy. His muscles contract in a series of shudders. He tries to maneuver off the slab, but he can’t figure the best way forward. He’s surrounded by joists and noggings, no baseboard. To jump from his current position to an opposite joist would take dexterity and balance, and Emmit no longer has either.

He clambers to the farthest side of slab, where a frayed rope hangs out of reach. Before Saoirse can consider why this jump might seem like a better option to a man whose vision is blurring and whose hands are starting to tremor, Emmit leaps for it. He misses, falling toward a vertical alcove against the chamber’s back wall. Through sheer luck, he lands on a thin piece of wood that juts across the space, keeping him from plunging to some subterranean level below. With slow, labored movements, Emmit pushes himself to a sitting position, blinking across the yawning expanse of empty space, the crisscrossed beams and haphazard piles of building material, the chaotic loops of rope and open walls.

Saoirse scans the area before the vertical alcove that culminates in a free fall. A thick sheet of wood siding leans against the already-nailed-in portion of the wall. She jumps over a beam to an actual floorboard, the one where her trusty flashlight still provides them the only light in the chamber. Careful not to kick the flashlight, she positions herself on the board and looks over to the slab.

“I was the one haunting you,” Emmit says, the words slurring together.

Saoirse jerks at the sound of his voice, almost slipping off the floorboard. “What?”

“The preshents— presence in your house you thought was Sarah. I was the one watching while you wrote your stupid poetry. While you pretended to have something worthwhile to say. I read your words while you slept. They were amateurish. Cliché. That’s why this didn’t work. Why the residual haunting fell apart. I was a worthy successor to Poe, but your derivativeness couldn’t hold a candle to Whitman.”

His mouth tries to jump into its half smile, but the muscles spasm. He huffs out a little laugh, as if she only needs to wait and she’ll get what’s coming to her. “Your so-called poetry was garbage.”

Saoirse moves to the sheet of wood, lifts it from the wall, and fits its edge into a groove along the ground. She slides it toward the opposite sheet, six feet across, stopping before she completely closes off the space. Emmit sees it then. What he hadn’t seen before. That she can board him up in the wall of this chamber. That, with a few quick motions, he’ll be trapped inside the bowels of the Shunned House with no one to hear him scream. If the fast-acting insulin coursing through his veins will even allow him to issue anything approaching a scream.

“And you made a grave misjudgment in the way you believed Jonathan’s death changed me,” Saoirse says. “I’m not different because of what Jonathan’s death did to me.” She makes sure Emmit’s eyes are focused, makes sure he’s seeing her when she says, “I’m different because of what I did to cause Jonathan’s death .”

She slides the board farther into place while Emmit gasps. She hears his nails scrape along the wall as he searches for something to grip, something to pull or throw open.

“Pleash, Seerrshh-ahh, don’t do this. I’m shorry. I’m shor—sorry for all of it.”

Listen to him, Jonathan screams. Do you want to end up with another voice clamoring at you from inside your head? Do not do this.

Saoirse drops her hands from the wall. Her heart gallops. “You know,” she says, and there’s something in her voice that causes Emmit to quiet, “I think the most poetical topic of all has got to be when the sociopathic, narcissistic, pompous man’s plan to cause the death of a woman—beautiful or otherwise—is thwarted, when his plan against that woman becomes his very undoing.”

She raises her hands, clasps the wood panel, and slides it another two inches to the right. Before she fits it firmly in place, she peers through the three-inch gap one final time. A wave of lightheadedness assails her, but not before she swears she sees Jonathan in the corner beside Emmit. Jonathan the way he looked the last time she saw him alive, crumpled against his desk. Emmit’s skin is just as pale, and in addition to the trembling of his lips—no more self-aware, charming half smile—there’s a look of bewilderment on his face. Sarah Whitman’s accomplishments were never supposed to outshine—or outlast—Poe’s.

“One more thing,” Saoirse says. “Go fuck yourself. Both of you.”

Emmit’s panicked keening starts as Saoirse slides the board into place. She listens until the keening stops. She listens until his breathing slows. When several minutes pass without a sound, she picks up the flashlight and aims it at the tunnel that will take her to the main basement of the Shunned House. She follows the beam of light without looking back.

Without regret.