Page 61 of Beneath the Poet's House

“Hi there,” he says, laying a blanket by her feet and a bottle of water beside it. Saoirse grabs the water, unscrews the top, and takes long, desperate sips. When she’s drunk two-thirds of the bottle, it occurs to her to save the rest.But who knows if he’ll leave it when he goes?She finishes it and tosses the empty bottle on the floor.

“You can keep this,” he says, gesturing at the blanket, “so long as you behave. Like I told you, this can be like it was”—he nods vaguely toward the surface—“up there. Or, should you refuse to keep up your end of our relationship, it will be a very, very different experience for you. You’ve proven unequally valuable to my craft; I won’t hesitate to subject you to experiences like those you had beneath the Shunned House if it keeps me writing. Do you understand?”

She nods. Her stomach cramps with the water she’s just poured into it.

“Come here.”

She freezes. Now? He means, now? Keep up her end of the relationship this minute?What did you think?Jonathan asks.He was going to wait until you’d acclimated?

“I—” Saoirse says.

Emmit shoots her a look. “Are we going to have a problem?”

She shakes her head. She remembers this feeling, this unadulterated rage she must conquer so it appears she’s no more bothered thana woman being asked to repeat herself rather than one about to be assaulted.

Emmit lays the blanket on the floor as if preparing for a picnic. He sits and pats the fabric beside him. Saoirse swallows her volcanic anger and crawls forward to sit beside him.

She keeps her eyes very wide, afraid if she blinks, the tears will come. Emmit strokes her face. “I’ve missed you,” he says.

Saoirse thought that, despite her fear and horror, she might feel the ghost of their previous connection. Some glimmer of familiarity. But there’s only fear and horror. And hatred.

That sounds familiar,Jonathan says.

It should,she thinks back.The trio of emotions that dominated our marriage.

“Come closer,” Emmit whispers, and pulls her down onto the blanket. She feels the ground beneath her head, the blanket a mere wisp of protection against its firmness. Emmit stares into her eyes. “Didn’t I tell you?” he says. She smells the faint hint of chai obscured by toothpaste and the lingering remnants of aftershave. “That you’re my momentous, soul-crushingly significant thing?”

He kisses her.

Though she hears them buzzing all around her, feels their legs walking over her skin in the same oppressive way Emmit’s tongue explores her mouth, Saoirse does not open her eyes to the flies that swarm the cave like a plague.

Chapter 38

Saoirse lies on her back in the darkness and counts the beats of her heart, mercifully alone. Once again, she has no idea how Emmit took leave of the chamber. When he’d finished, he incapacitated her with another chloroform-soaked rag. Saoirse thinks back over her many hours and conversations with him, wondering at what point she should have known he was a monster. At what point she should have run. She shouldn’t have gone with him to the coffee shop. She’d been right about him manipulating her to believe he’d thought she was stalking him. He’d had her in his sights all along. Maybe if she hadn’t gone to the career fair, it wouldn’t have been so easy for him. As it stands, she’s a fly who’s thrown herself onto his web.

Saoirse struggles to her feet and walks across the vast tunnel, turning the flashlight on every twenty steps to orient herself. She stops where the walls change from stone to concrete, then again when they shift to dirt. She examines the ground beneath the casket; the dirt she forced out of the wall is imperceptible. She looks back across the expanse of the catacomb, aiming the flashlight at the blanket Emmit left. That blanket is not quite the farthest point from where the catacomb meets the cemetery, but it’s close. If she did claw a hole through the dirt, it would take Emmit a while to notice. He might never notice. Until she escaped like Andy Dufresne beneath Shawshank Prison. She, too, could be gone like a fart in the wind. Saoirse swallows a manic laugh.

She turns the metal body over in her hand. What would be worse? To chip away the dirt with the flashlight and risk breaking it, or not dig at all? Even if she doesn’t use the flashlight as a battering ram, it will die eventually. She’ll dig, then. It’s decided.

You’re screwed no matter what,Jonathan whispers, like a worm in her ear.You dig, you won’t hear him coming. Even if he doesn’t catch you in the act, he’ll see you’re filthy. On the other hand, you don’t dig, you die down here anyway.

“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?” Saoirse asks. She puts a hand to her chest, then pushes away the thought that the work will raise her heart rate as inevitably as Jonathan’s voice.

She falls into a monotonous routine: a hundred whacks with the flashlight’s head, a whispered prayer that she hasn’t knocked the filament loose or dented the battery compartment, then a press of its dirt-smeared rubber button. While light streams from its lens, she examines her progress, then kills the flashlight and starts the process over. After an unknown number of one-hundred-whack sets, she increases the number to five hundred, not wanting to wear out the battery.

The work is worse than she anticipated: endless motion with no immediate gain, shot through with the knowledge that her survival depended on digging upward through ten feet—or maybe more ... please, God, not more—of 150-year-old grave dirt, then—eventually, somehow—crawling up onto the flimsy casket and digging some more.

She sweats and curses. She screams and cries. She pauses to rest her heart and quell the stuttering of a brain that, more and more, feels the absence of its beta blockers and Paxil. She tears strips from the hem of her dress and wraps them around her hands, then tears another strip and wraps it around the handle of the flashlight. She rests with her back against the dirt wall.I will not doze off. I will not doze off. I will not doze—

She’s ripped from sleep by a scream that erupts through the catacomb, echoing around her like a surround sound. Saoirse fumbles for the flashlight as the scream comes again. She recognizes it. It’s the soundfrom her basement, the sound that interrupted her tarot reading. It’s an unearthly, tortured sound, poetry ripped straight from hell, and it mirrors the scream Saoirse’s heard in her own head since she woke up in this nightmare.

“Sarah?” Saoirse calls out, feeling less foolish than on the other times she called out to the former mistress of 88 Benefit Street. “Is that you?” Down here, where the idolatry of men’s genius is held above a woman’s right to live, the poet’s ghost may just appear. The beam of Saoirse’s flashlight roves over the walls, but the source of the scream does not appear. The next time the scream comes, it is far off, as if the screamer has moved to another chamber, dragging its pain. Its chains. Its secrets.

Saoirse forces her tired body across the catacomb, cleans herself as best she can with the underside of the blanket, then lays the blanket flat. She instructs her mind to allow her to sleep lightly, begs her brain to attune itself to the slightest of sounds. Then, she sleeps.

A thump. Light. Another thump, this one with a scrape of gravel at the end of it, as if someone has jumped off a curb and landed on asphalt sprinkled with a thin layer of gravel. Saoirse stirs. Her hands smart from the torn calluses she suffered while wielding the flashlight as a shovel, and the muscles in her arms and neck creak like rusty hinges. She sits up fast and finds Emmit staring at her from several feet away. She prays his lantern won’t illuminate the dirt on her arms or stains on the fabric of the thin white dress.

Emmit holds up a silver bucket, then walks it to the opposite wall. Saoirse’s cheeks burn with indignation despite how badly she needs to relieve her bladder. Emmit walks toward her again, but passes her on the blanket, and heads toward what Saoirse thinks of as the northern tip of the catacomb, despite having no way of knowing north fromsouth in this underground prison. “I’ll give you some privacy,” he says, and Saoirse hates herself for the gratitude she feels as she hurries to the bucket. When she’s done, she returns to the blanket. Emmit meets her there.

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