Page 42 of Beneath the Poet's House

“I have an idea,” he whispers. He pushes something smooth and oval-shaped into her hand. She looks down. It’s a capsule, clear and flimsy; she can press the sides of it together with her fingers, see thelight-brown powder shifting beneath the pressure. Quickly, she hands the capsule back to him.

“What is it?” she asks over the noise of Jonathan in her brain, cackling something about how wildly she’s misjudged this man. Emmit regards her hungrily, and despite her fear and incredulity, her face grows warm under his gaze, the way it had that morning when he kissed her on her stoop.

“Nothing crazy,” Emmit says. “And one hundred percent safe. Just something to liven up this tour a bit. To liven up our”—he grabs her and pulls her close—“feelings for one another too. I only ever get them from the same person, and I trust him like my own brother.”

Saoirse glances around at their little group. A middle-aged woman with a Lizzie Borden House tote slung over one arm. A twentysomething man pleading with Stacy to admit whether she’s seen a Revolutionary War–era ghost herself. A college-aged couple snapping photos in front of a set of stairs leading up to the large brick hall. Saoirse turns back to Emmit.

“Why?” she asks, genuinely puzzled. Why do they need something to liven the experience up? The tour was his idea, and it’s more interesting than Saoirse anticipated. Is Emmit so bored that he needs a synthetic mood boost, or is something else going on?

Something ... like ... addiction?Jonathan asks.Something like what you accused me of at the end but never offered to help me with?

Shut up,Saoirse thinks back.Shut up and let me think.

“Why what?” Emmit asks.

“Whydrugs?”

Emmit looks around, but everyone’s listening to Stacy, who’s launched into another story about ghosts on Brown’s campus. He turns back to her, and before Saoirse knows what is happening, he is slipping his hands beneath her jacket and under her sweater, then running his palms up her sides and sliding his fingers under her bra. He kneads her flesh, and Saoirse struggles to remain standing, the muscles in her legs turning to jelly.

He turns her body away from where Stacy is standing so that anyone regarding them would think they’re engaged in an innocent embrace. When he pulls away, his mouth jumps up in that maddening half smile, and Saoirse realizes it’s as much a nervous tic as it is an endearing expression. He dips her back over the sidewalk and kisses her again, parting her lips with his tongue, one hand still on her breasts while the other holds her up. She grows dizzy. Thoughts fly out of her head.

After he rights her, he lifts a hand, a pair of brown-powder capsules between his fingers. He takes one, places the other on her tongue, removes the flask from his pocket, and swigs from it, then presses that to her mouth too.

“You want to know why?” he asks. “Because I want to do everything with you. I want to experience everything with you. I ...” He stops and puffs out a little breath, as if even he can’t believe the things his desire for her has him doing and saying. A tuft of hair hangs over his forehead. He looks at Saoirse from under it, eyes wet with emotion, with lust. “I am in awe of you. Being with you is like being bathed in an electric light. If we were to part right now, never to see each other again, I’d be a better person for having met you. For having lain with you. For having heard one single line of your poetry.”

Saoirse struggles to retain the last breath of air in her lungs. The capsule still sits on her tongue.Do not swallow this. Do not fall under his spell.Anyone can say words that are pretty.

But not everyonecansay words that are so pretty, so captivating, and that’s a major part of Emmit’s appeal. Though ... speaking of pretty words, why do the ones he’s just uttered sound so familiar? Did she read them somewhere? In the book she took out from the Athenæum of Poe’s letters to Whitman? So ... a second instance of Emmit serenading her with another man’s poetry. Still, the warning in her head—whether Jonathan’s or her own—doesn’t matter. She feels the exact moment in which she fails to heed the warning. Feels the exact moment in which she falls.

Saoirse closes her mouth, wraps her fingers around the flask, and washes the capsule down with the acrid brandy. She takes Emmit’s face in her cold hands and kisses him. Whatever he’s given her will be an experience, and it will be an experience they can share together. The contents of the capsule can’t be much more dangerous than the antidepressants she already mixes with her heart medication every day.

Stacy leads the group toward Benefit Street, and it occurs to Saoirse that her own house may very well be their next stop. The thought is like a shimmery length of ribbon that unspools from her grasp. She no longer feels the cold of the October evening, and Emmit’s hand in hers is like a lifeline, making her feel equal parts elated and invincible.

So much for Mia’s heads-up,Jonathan says from a shadowy corner of her mind.You’re jumping into this with all the caution of a skydiver with a glitchy parachute.

This time, she does issue her dead husband a response:Did you ever think that maybe my relationship with you inoculated me from another toxic, dangerous situation? I suffered so much at your hands. The universe couldn’t possibly have delivered to me anything other than a good person, who treats me with equality and respect. Not after the monster I endured. Not after you.

There’s a chuckle from that same dark recess of her mind, and Saoirse can see Jonathan, his smug expression, his arms around his torso as if he’s wrapped himself in a hug:You and I both know that’s not how the universe works.

Saoirse’s so lost in the conversation, in her flighty, tipsy, floaty thoughts, she almost walks into the woman in front of her before Emmit pulls her back. The rest of the tour group stands on the sidewalk, peering up at a butter-yellow Colonial. There’s a steep set of steps leading up to a fence painted the same shade of yellow; the grounds beyond the fence are overgrown and weed-choked. Saoirse blinks. Are the grounds also veiled in a layer of strange, billowy mist ... or is that the by-product of her dreamlike vision?

“135 Benefit Street. The Shunned House,” Stacy says theatrically. “Built around 1763 and inhabited by Howard Phillip Lovecraft’s aunt Lillian in 1919 when she worked as a companion to a Mrs. H. C. Babbit. Lovecraft based his infamous story on a house in New Jersey, but felt the tangled ivy and unnaturally steep roof of the house before you lent itself to the idea of being ‘corpse-fed,’ and so crafted his story with the Babbit House as its basis.”

At the wordscorpse-fed, a sensation like the brush of insect legs travels up Saoirse’s spine.

“From our vantage point here,” Stacy continues, “the Shunned House appears to be three floors. However, if you look around the side of the house, you’ll see the first floor is a walkout basement. The plot of Lovecraft’s story revolves around theactualbasement, which would mean the areaunderthis level”—she gestures at the windows in front of them, then lowers her voice—“the area that’s completely underground. This is where the narrator and his uncle attempt to discover the source of a strange yellow vapor, or ‘corpse-light,’ but find death, decay, and an unspeakable monster for their troubles. Lovecraft wrote in a letter to a friend that the house’s image would come up throughout his life with renewed vividness. And with good reason. The latent horror of this house has captivated the city’s imagination for a century.”

There are whispered murmurings of excitement, and several hands go up.

“I’m happy to take questions,” Stacy says, “but let’s do so as we walk, because our next stop is just ahead, and I need to be mindful of the time. We don’t want to be out in this city too long after dark.” She punctuates this statement with a boom of vampiric laughter. The group follows her up the sidewalk and away from the looming yellow house.

Saoirse starts after them, feeling like she’s outside of her own body, when a yank comes on the hem of her coat so hard, she stumbles. Emmit catches her, pulls her close, and takes her chin in his hand. He kisses her, then pulls away and orients her head so that she’s looking up at the Shunned House’s wide, slanted roof.

“I’ve got another idea.” His words tickle her ear, and in an instant, she’s turned on, his proximity pushing her body to the brink, igniting her imagination, and she feels, suddenly, like she could write a poem while he’s inside her, that she could conjure the cadence of it inside his head, and he would, in turn, speak the words aloud.

“What’s your idea?” she responds, and her words run together slightly.

Emmit pulls his hips into hers and grips her jawbone tighter. “We’re going inside,” he says. “We’ll find an unlocked window or an open door, and we’re going to find out just what otherworldly phenomenon Lovecraft intuited in the basement.”

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