Page 60 of Beneath the Poet's House

No.It’s the voice that usually retaliates against Jonathan in her head.The only thing you need to determine is how to get out of here. And you will figure that out. You just need him to leave, to give you some time alone.She tries yet again to control her breathing.

“There’s an energy in this city,” Emmit says. “A residual haunting in the truest sense of the phrase. The city requires it of you. I require it of you. For my work. What would the world have been without Poe, without the legacy he left behind? He came from nothing—from fuckingnothing!—and catapulted himself to greatness.”

She wants to shout at him, tell him one stupid novel does not catapult him to Poe-like status. That he cannot stand on Poe’s back—or hers—to create a legacy. But now he’s walking toward her. Saoirse bucks against the ropes and tries to slide the chair away from him, but it’s bolted to the floor.

“Get away from me. Get away!”

“Don’t make this harder than it needs to be,” he says, and his expression is that sad, disappointed one again. He removes a bottle from his back pocket and a rag from a front one. He soaks the rag in the chloroform. “I’m sorry, but I have to move you.”

Before she can ask what that means, the rag covers her face. She tries not to breathe. Tries not to think of what a chemical like chloroform might be doing to her already taxed heart. Then she thinks,Maybe it’s best to die now ...

... and takes a long, deep, shuddering inhale.

Chapter 37

When she comes to, Saoirse remembers every detail of her kidnapping and imprisonment in an instant, with none of those precious moments of forgetting that sometimes occur when waking after a trauma. It’s dark to the point of blindness again, but the pressure of the ropes around her arms is gone. She tests the air, tests her muscles, and feels solid ground beneath her.

She’sonthe ground. Unrestrained. Saoirse pushes herself onto her elbows and feels around her, yelping when her hand hits something hard. Tentatively, she reaches out, finds what feels like cool metal, something long and cylindrical. There’s a button. She presses it, and the world erupts with light.

The flashlight illuminates a space terrifying in its vastness; Saoirse has the sense that she’s in a labyrinth the size of a football field. The smell is no better than the first prison, only different: earth and the wriggling bodies of worms rather than dampness and mold. Even with the brightness of the flashlight’s bulb, the beam is swallowed by the yawning darkness, like a pebble dropped off a cliff. Something scuttles over her hand, and Saoirse suppresses a shriek.

She shakes the spider away and scrabbles to her feet, batting at roots that hang above her. The walls and ceiling are composed of stacked stone, with stone pillars that crisscross and arch over her head, but the earth has pushed through the cracks and crevices of these materials so persistently, they are almost completely overgrown. The effect isdizzying, like an autostereogram, an artificial tunnel that becomes a lair of subterranean fauna when viewed with the correct vergence. Saoirse shivers, and sweeps the flashlight over the walls, following the progression of the stone arches and taking small steps forward, unsure if she’s ready to see just how far her prison extends.

She’s gone about twenty paces when she finds a giant stone slab that looks to be set into the larger frame of the stone wall, not a part of it. Though the labyrinth feels impenetrable, she knows it can’t be. Emmit got her in here. There must be a way out. Could this stone slab be it? She props the flashlight against the wall and stands with her feet spread wide, then places her hands on the stone.

A wave of lightheadedness assails her. She is weak with hunger and feeling the effects of the chloroform, lethargic and disoriented. Or perhaps it’s something worse ... something to do with her heart, the lack of beta blocker medication and her antidepressant. How long until she really feels the effects of being off her medication?

Twenty-four hours, most likely,Jonathan says.Forty-eight at the most.

“I willnotbe down here that long,” she says aloud. No sense replying to Jonathan in her head. She presses her hands more firmly against the stone, but the slab is too heavy to be mobile. There’s no way this is how Emmit got her in here. She retrieves the flashlight and continues feeling her way along the stone until the wall turns to dirt. Saoirse digs her fingers into the loam, but it’s more compact than she expected.

She continues trailing her hand along the wall until the corner of something sharp snags against her palm. She aims her flashlight at the spot but doesn’t see anything. She feels around again, trying to find the edge she felt a moment ago. When she does locate it, she finds the dirt is packed so thickly she has to chop at the sediment with her flashlight.

Enough filth falls away so that Saoirse can make out the shape of the object in the soil. Her mind stutters at what—horrifyingly, unbelievably—she thinks she’s seeing. Her heart thuds in her chest like a gong, and she lurches back, but this only makes things worse. Seeing the wall of dirt from several feet back allows her brain to make sense of the big picture, toparse what she’s discovered in the soil. It makes sense. As much sense as this nightmare can possibly make.

The hard edge in the soil is the corner of a casket. Buried so long, it’s as much a part of the dirt in which it lies as the rocks and worms. The room she is in is not an extended basement. It’s not a subterranean chamber. It’s not a dungeon or a lair.

It’s a catacomb.

A catacomb that must exist directly adjacent to a cemetery.

Nausea roils in Saoirse’s stomach, and she drops the flashlight to put her hands on her knees, breathing hard, more terrified of fainting—and falling unconscious again—than of facing this horrifying reality. Thebastard. He left her in a catacomb. She’s as good as buried alive down here.

No.Again, the adamant refusal. If she submits to her fear, to her fate, she might as well fashion a noose out of a hanging root or throw herself into the slab of stone now. She will not die down here. He told her he’d be back. He wants her to go on as if she’s in love with him. Wants her to be the Sarah to his Edgar. The muse to his enigmatic, tortured, artistic genius. If it means her life will be extended long enough to figure out how to get out of here, she’ll do it.

Saoirse sinks to the ground against the root-choked wall. Trapped underground by her once-lover, a Pulitzer Prize–winning, nationally beloved author. A strangled laugh escapes her. How could she have been so stupid?

You really didn’t learn your lesson, did you?Jonathan asks.

“Shut up,” she says. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

She’s without her medication. Without a weapon. Without food or water or even a blanket. Without people who will be looking for her, and—here, she becomes overwhelmed with sadness—the ability to take care of Pluto. Without a single thing but this gossamer-thin dress and her own wits.

But this isn’t true. Not completely. She has one more thing. Something she’s kept from Emmit, for all their long talks over dinnersand in her bedroom. For all their commitment to baring their souls and knowing one another on a molecular level. She has what is perhaps the greatest weapon of all.

She has a secret. A secret that reminds her of what she’s capable of when her back’s against the wall.

Emmit rouses her from a sleep she hadn’t expected to be granted with a single “Saoirse?” rather than a shriek of stone against stone or the groan of a trapdoor lifting out of the ceiling.

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