Page 58 of Beneath the Poet's House

As Saoirse places a foot on the first stair, a noise comes from outside. A glass bottle, exploding against the pavement. She stands another moment, foot poised, temples throbbing. Listening. When no othersound comes, she continues up the stairs. Aidan is gone. Emmit is gone. There are lots of people on the streets at night. Lots of noise. Soon, these sounds will fade beneath a cloak of sleep. Her mind will be wiped clean as thoroughly as a stretch of pavement dotted with dogwood blossoms after a summer rain.

She will not think of Emmit Powell as she lies, restless, in bed. She will not think of Aidan Vesper. Of Poe. Or Jonathan.

She will not think of Emmit Powell as she dreams.

Chapter 35

She is on the floor of a cavernous house, a thin white dress clinging to her skin like a sheet of mist. She knows she is dreaming, but this does nothing to alleviate her nauseating fear. Something is coming for her. No—something already has her. She looks up to where the cathedral ceiling extends into a dizzying dissolution of shadows. A tap-tap-tap comes from one of the windows, but each time she turns to find the source, the tapping changes location. No matter where she looks, no matter how she turns, there are more windows behind her.

She spins, desperate to find her way out. The floor drips like candle wax down the walls. Like the world’s most disorienting elevator, the entire giant room lowers. The floor stops, but the ceiling continues its downward trajectory. Eventually, the ceiling stops, too, until the grand, creepy hall has melted into a subterranean lair. The walls are stone. The floor is dirt. The smoky-prismed chandelier hanging from the ceiling has morphed into a thick, draping mass of cobwebs.

The setting of her dream is not the basement of the Shunned House, but it’s notnotthat basement either. It certainly smells the same. Strange, she can smell the house in a dream. The air is so thick she can barely breathe, and not just with the stench of black mold and wet cement. There’s something harsher there, too, more astringent. Something chemical that she tastes so palpably, it makes her eyes water. She imagines the smooth muscle of her esophagus burning.

The lair is lit by a single lantern that swings from a ceiling of dirt and root. She’s no longer beneath a house, then, but fully underground. Behind her is a set of stone stairs so thick with ash, she’d leave footprints if she were to walk up them. Though, there will be no opportunity to test this theory; whatever egress used to exist at the top of the stairs has been boarded up with concrete.

Ahead, however, is an alcove. The only potential chance of escape. As she creeps toward it, she recalls how Emmit fell into a shallow pit beneath the Shunned House, the fear she felt when he grabbed her ankle. Would she find him here, too, in this menacing, underground dreamscape?

One hand on the crumbling wall, Saoirse peers into the blackness. When nothing emerges from the depths, she drops to her knees and reaches forward with one hand. While the floor does indeed drop off, she feels something about a foot down from where she’s kneeling. There is neither flashlight nor candle with which to illuminate the darkness, but as she stares, the space brightens enough for her to see what’s before her, in that strange bending of reality that so many dreams take.

The object in the alcove is a coffin, gleaming and polished and wholly at odds with the dust and grime of the lair. She wants to look away. She wants to run away, but she can only trail her fingers over the coolness of the wood. She knows—with the same certainty with which she knows her name—that, should she open it, she’ll find her own pale corpse, wearing the same white cotton dress she wears now, lying on maroon velvet, her waxy fingers intertwined and resting on her stomach.

It’s a realization so cliché, she wants to shout at her subconscious,This is the best you can come up with?But despite her belief that she knows the way this dream ends, she is powerless to stop herself from following the script.

She leans forward onto the coffin, testing its ability to hold her weight. When it does not go crashing to the ground, she flattens her body against the lid and feels around with her feet for the floor.She finds it about three feet down, so that when she slides to a stand beside the coffin, the lid is just below her chest. She hooks her fingers under the latch, steels her muscles for the wood’s weight, and throws open the lid. Time flickers, and for an instant, she is not in this alcove. For an instant, she is somewhere else. Then, the coffin is open, and she is staring at the body inside it.

It is not her. She was wrong. The faces flicker so fast, there’s no opportunity to identify the corpse as any one individual: It’s Jonathan. It’s Poe. It’s Emmit. Now Jonathan again. The supine form is the same obscene, flickering vision of madness from the first séance. The mouth opens, but the image continues to stutter, and Saoirse sees the horrible, writhing insect mouth again. The flickering increases to the point where the movement smooths out, and three different mouths speak the same word:

“Miiiiiiinnnnnnne.”

Saoirse is so paralyzed, staring into that gaping mouth, considering the implications of that word, she reacts too slowly to the raising arms. The specter, no,specters—the writer who haunts her, the dead husband who almost ruined her, and the man who has manipulated her affections—reach up, grab Saoirse around the torso, and pull her down.

Down, down, down into the madness.

Chapter 36

There’s a scream in her throat, but it’s strangled by the realization that, despite awakening, the rough fingers of the specter still dig into her arms. Saoirse struggles, but the fingers dig in harder. Not fingers. Ropes.

She is tied to a chair.

Sleep paralysis, she thinks.That’s why I can’t move. I’m in my bed, and this is some weird extension of the dream.But if sheisin her bed, where’s the diffuse glow from the streetlamp outside the balcony door? Where is the silvery light of the moon, bisected by the point of Saint John’s Cathedral? She blinks, straining her eyes against the darkness, which sets off the pain in her head. A low moan escapes her, but it’s interrupted by the striking of a match.

Every ounce of blood in her body turns to ice.

Fiery light materializes at the center of her vision, small at first, then growing as the match is held to the kerosene wick of a lantern. Hulking shoulders grow around the lantern like wings.

“Aidan?” Her voice is a croak. But the figure is too broad, too muscular, to be Aidan Vesper. Saoirse raises her gaze to the face above the shoulders, lit not just with the glow of the candlelight, but with an expression she knows as well as she knows anything in Providence. A tuft of dark hair across the forehead. Warm brown eyes. A jumpy half smile.

“Emmit. What is this? What’s going on?”

The left half of his mouth jumps up again. Her conversation with him before she fell asleep, before the dream, returns to her. She’d ended things with him. Is he trying to teach her a lesson? Her head hurts too much to settle on any one explanation.

She looks around at the room in which she’s trapped, and her skin rises in gooseflesh. A subterranean lair. Walls of stone, a floor of dirt and dust, a ceiling hanging with cobwebs, and the air thick with the stench of black mold and wet cement.I’m in my dream.But this is real. Emmit is real. The rope digging into her fleshis real. The astringent, chemical taste is there in her throat as well.Chloroform.

She’s not in her dream; her dream was reality.

“You drugged me,” she says. She looks around. There’s the lantern hanging from a ceiling of dirt and root. Not beneath a house but beneath the earth. Saoirse manages to turn just enough to see the stone stairs thick with dust. Just like her dream, the top of the stairs has been boarded up with concrete.

And before her, between where she’s restrained and where Emmit stands, is an alcove.

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