Page 68 of Beneath the Poet's House

“Here.” He tosses something at her. A tote bag, one of her own, from the closet of her bedroom. It hits her in the chest, and what little air she has whooshes from her lungs. “The help that you asked for. Clothes, water, some food. To lift your spirits—and your strength—while I finish crafting the climax of your story. I’ll be back, my Helen.” One hand goes into a pocket and comes out with a bottle and rag. “My soul, this night, shall come to you in dreams and speak to you those fervid thanks which my pen is powerless to utter.”

“Please.” Saoirse chokes the word out, not recognizing the voice as her own. It’s a voice buried too long, a voice that doesn’t know it has died. It’s too late to hold her breath, to trick him as she did before. She’s so weak. Emmit lowers the rag over her face like an eclipse.

Saoirse welcomes the black-winged annihilation. It’s a painless burial. An eternal silence, everlasting blindness, without the desperation of searching, in the dark, for the moonglow beam of a solitary flashlight.

Chapter 44

Darkness, indeed. And it goes on forever.

She swims up from the depths, arriving at the surface of consciousness with the same necessity for air she’d had after being buried alive. Every muscle, every tendon, every cell in her body thrums with pain, screams—desperately, hollowly—to be allowed to rest. Despite this marrow-deep exhaustion, she’s returned, delivered back to the crypt of her body. Back to the catacombs, with no knowledge of how to escape, no inkling as to which passage, which ceilinged archway, Emmit manipulated to take leave of her once more. She’s left with nothing. Hopeless. Helpless.

No, not left with nothing: there’s the tote Emmit threw at her before he left. She gropes until she finds the canvas straps. Inside is her flashlight, the same heavy metal one she’s had all along. Might Emmit have replaced the batteries? There’s no way to tell, but when she pushes the button, the beam comes to life. Ignoring the pain in her chest, she aims the flashlight into the tote.

At first, she sees only the water. Two bottles of it, the first of which she makes short work. She guzzles, but her stomach protests, the muscles cramping violently. She vomits, furious with herself for wasting such a precious commodity. She opens the second bottle, dizzy with the effort, and sips it slowly, one sip for every handful of minutes that pass. When her lightheadedness—if not her chest pain—lessens some, she returns to the tote.

The idea of food nauseates her.Not a heart attack, huh?she thinks bitterly.Just a little bout of anxiety that’s making me not want to eat, though I’ve had nothing for who knows how many days?If she had to guess, she’d say it’s been three days. But less time could have passed ... or more.

Despite the intellectual knowledge of it, the certainty that she has, in fact, suffered a heart attack, she struggles to come to terms with it, this calamity she’s worked to avoid the entirety of her adult life coming to pass. She tries to recall whether her cardiologist ever dispensed any advice should she think she was experiencing a heart attack, but, of course, it was only everGet yourself to the nearest emergency room immediately.She wonders how long she has. Wonders if antidepressant withdrawal is exacerbating her weakened condition.

She forces herself to eat a handful of soda crackers—chewing slowly and methodically—and is surprised to discover she feels a bit better. Enough to continue riffling through the tote, slipping her hand into every crevice. Emmit clearly took pains to make sure there wasn’t so much as a wayward pen left inside. There are the clothes, however; and they arehers—no more ridiculous, flowing white Victorian-era garb.

She peels the filthy garment over her head and dresses in the underwear, bra, soft black leggings, and black sweatshirt. By the time she’s done, she is panting, sweat dampening her hair and neck. The walls of the catacomb swim before her, and she reaches out, but there’s nothing to grab on to. She drops to her hands and knees, sucking in breath as if she’s just cleared the finish line of a marathon.

A minute passes. Then another. Finally, Saoirse feels she can climb to her feet. She keeps her muscles taut despite the effort, afraid her legs will buckle and send her careening back to the ground.

As she stands, arms by her sides, spine rigid, the fingers of her right hand discern a small lump in the fabric of her leggings, near the midway point of her thigh. Her soft black leggings. Her favorite pair. They have a pocket meant to conceal a credit card or a house key on a jog.Pleasebe something I can use.The object is long, like the pen she’d wished had been in her tote.

Saoirse slips her hand into the pocket and pulls out what’s inside. She stares at the object, sure it’s a joke. A mirage. What she holds is a syringe. A syringe of Pluto’s insulin. A medication equally deadly to feline or human, when administered to someone without diabetes.

Saoirse drops to her knees again, keeping the syringe upright as she does. She’d been wearing these leggings when she’d last tested Pluto’s blood sugar, after the breakup with Emmit and before she’d turned in for the night. Emmit had missed the thin cylinder when he’d scooped the leggings up from the floor and thrown them into the bag.

Saoirse chuckles, then cackles, unconcerned with what the laughter might be doing to her heart. She thinks of the unnamed narrator of “The Black Cat,” brought to ruin by the eponymous Pluto, driven to madness as effectively as if by a beating heart beneath a floorboard. After ensuring the needle’s cap is clamped tight, she returns the syringe to her pocket.

Armed with this new secret, she sips her water and nibbles crackers.

And, like a writer mapping an upcoming scene, she plans.

Chapter 45

The grind of stone against stone wakes her. Saoirse retreats to the right-hand wall of the catacomb, as far away from the sound of Emmit’s return as she can get. She needs time to see from where he is entering, to see what he might carry in his hands. He said he would see her as the protagonist of Poe’s—and his—greatest story of all, and she imagines him walking toward her with all manner of torture devices. The muscles in her chest tighten, but she thinks of the syringe in her pocket and wills herself to be calm.

“Serrrrr-shaaah,” Emmit calls, materializing from behind a sheath of stone, scanning the chamber for her. She watches the wall behind him, the seamless way in which the stone doorway fits back into the frame. Emmit follows her gaze, then turns to her and smiles his charming half smile. “While a good magician never reveals the mechanism of a trick”—he pauses, cocks his head—“there’s no reason not to let you in on the secret now.” He slips his fingers into a groove, pulls upward, and the door swings open like a secret bookshelf in Holmes’s library.

“Sometimes,” he says, “the truth is right before us. A flyer on a foyer table. The ghost of a dead woman standing behind you as you write.” He raises an eyebrow, as if to say,Can you believe how brazen I’ve been?Saoirse keeps her gaze—and her emotions—level, refusing to rise to the bait.

Emmit regards the empty bottles of water and sleeve of mostly eaten crackers. “I see you’ve taken advantage of my generosity. I knew allyour talk about needing your medications was inflated. You’re ready to take on the final endeavor, then? Your very own pit-and-the-pendulum conundrum, as it were.”

She tries to recall the plot of “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Something about darkened catacombs that are slowly illuminated and a prisoner exploring the area in which they’re being held captive? Hasn’t she been in “The Pit and the Pendulum” all along?

Emmit walks toward her, pulling a length of rope from the waistband of his jeans. “Scholars claim the first trip Poe ever made to Rhode Island was in 1845. ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ was published in 1842. If Poe didn’t discover the room containing the pit and the pendulum within these catacombs, then I can only assume he built it himself.” He tilts his head, considering something. “It’s actually more likely he built it himself, since he didn’t base the elaborate torture scheme of the story on any parallels with the Spanish Inquisition, during which the tale is set. Conversely, the unnamed narrator must face his fate—either evisceration by the swinging, razor-edged pendulum or forced into a depthless pit by red-hot, advancing walls—separate from any historically accurate method of prisoner torture.” Emmit comes a few steps closer, and Saoirse gauges the distance.

“It’s a few chambers over,” Emmit continues. “An exact match to what’s described in the story: wooden frame facing the ceiling, a picture of Father Time above a foot-long pendulum.”

He takes three quick steps toward her in time with the words “foot-long pendulum.” Saoirse’s muscles twitch, but she stays crouched, refusing to envision pitch-black rooms or creaking pendulums swinging ever closer as they descend from ceiling to floor.

“I’ve placed a bucket of raw meat there,” Emmit says casually, as if inviting her to dinner, “though I doubt the bait will draw the rats as effectively as it did in Poe’s story. If it does, I imagine it’s even more of a long shot that the rats will chew through the leather straps, allowing you to escape. That part of the story seems mere fiction to me. I’ll give you the option, though, to fling yourself into the pitbeforeI strap you tothe board beneath the pendulum. That’s the whole point of the exercise, of course. The way your mind works, the way you chew your way out of being backed into every corner ... that’s where my obsession lies. You remain my Muse even after refusing to serve my art the way Sarah served Edgar’s.”

Lunging from her crouch against the wall, Saoirse lobs the tote containing the remaining food at Emmit’s head with one hand, gripping the flashlight with the other. Emmit cries out and ducks, and Saoirse darts past him, but he recovers quickly. He grabs for her, just missing her sweatshirt. Saoirse sprints for the stone frame, letting fear and adrenaline pump her arms and lift her feet. She reaches the door, slips her fingers into the horizontal groove the way she’d seen Emmit do, and pushes up and outward. The door swings forward, and Saoirse slips through, then pushes it shut behind her.

---