Page 69 of Beneath the Poet's House

She was prepared to dash forward with only the flashlight to guide her, but there are sconces along the walls, lighting the chamber. Warm candlelight flickers against the stone like serpent tongues. She doesn’t hesitate; her bare feet are already pounding the floor when Emmit bursts through the door behind her. Grit and gravel sting her feet and panic defibrillates her heart, but she does not slow.

The chamber narrows into a tunnel, and the sconces disappear. Even with the flashlight, it’s like running through the blackest part of night with a rocky cliff looming ahead. Emmit’s footsteps smack the tunnel floor behind her, and Saoirse tries to concentrate on her breath, to ignore intrusive thoughts of hidden pits and swinging pendulums. For all she knows, she’s heading straight toward Emmit’s final trap.

Better to die running.The moment she thinks it, Saoirse’s steps become lighter. Her breath, too, comes easier, filling her lungs more completely than it had before. The tunnel is brighter, until Saoirse realizes it’s because her vantage point has changed. She is floating above herself, watching a woman in a black sweatshirt and black leggings sprint for her life, watching herself—despite a failing heart and terrifiedmind—outrun her captor in a desperate bid for freedom, eyes wide in the inky dark, panicked but determined, exhausted but persevering.

If I die down here, Emmit will write a book based on my soul, on my spirit. I will endure through his words, through his awful, stolen take on my life. I cannot let that happen. I cannot. I have more things to say, more life to write. More life to live.Sarah Helen Whitman may be known because of her connection to Poe, but she lives on through her poetry. Edition after edition of her own words, printed and bound, circulated, proliferated. Celebrated.

I’ve survived too much to give up now. To give in to someone likehim.

The floating-Saoirse beckons the running-Saoirse forward, who aims the flashlight to where the tunnel widens into another catacomb. A half circle of evenly spaced sconces lights the chamber ahead; Emmit must have come from this direction before. Saoirse bursts forward, into the chamber, where the stone walls of the tunnel are replaced with mildew-stained plywood and the haphazard zigzag of sagging boards.

The floating-Saoirse can see this is the area beyond the alcove below 135 Benefit Street, the one Emmit fell into during their felonious exploration of the Shunned House basement after defecting from the ghost tour. Someone had plans, once, for this space—it’s like an abandoned construction site—but now the chamber is a collection of perilously leaning planks and swaying scaffolds, of sliding half-finished walls and yawning chasms in false floors.

Saoirse stops running and scans her surroundings. She’s breathing hard, deciding whether she should find somewhere to hide or press forward. If she can locate the alcove, climb out of it, and make her way through the main portion of the Shunned House basement and up the stairs, she’ll be street level, that much closer to rescue. But Emmit’s right behind her. Hiding might be the only option there’s time for.

Keep running,she begs herself, at the same moment the floating-Saoirse yells,Hide!and the furious voice of Jonathan shouts,Give up! You don’t deserve to live!

Her two selves, cleaved by starvation and exhaustion, unite the moment Emmit bursts into the room. But the reintegration comes too late. He grabs a fistful of her hair with one hand, shouting incoherently, used up of all his pretty words.

With the other hand, he drops her to the ground like a fallen star.

Chapter 46

Saoirse’s body smashes into the ground. The world goes white. A second later, Emmit is on top of her, pinning her with his thighs and holding her down with his hands. His fingers dig into the flesh of her underarms, and she’s surprised to find that she can feel more pain, more torture, in this world of ceaseless tortures and myriad agonies.

Her flashlight lies on the floor where she dropped it. She and Emmit are spotlighted in its beam like actors in a play, poised to deliver their closing lines. Emmit’s face is a twisted mix of rage and relief. He’s breathing as heavily as she is. So heavily, in fact, it takes Saoirse a moment to realize his incoherent rambling has morphed into laughter.

“Every time,” Emmit says, mouth jumping in a series of manic half smiles. “Every time I think you have nothing left, you give me more. You give methis.”

Saoirse squirms beneath him, succeeding in moving her arms several inches closer to the lower half of her body. A thought occurs to her: How many hours had they spent in this position, him inside her, whispering into her ear, telling her how similar they were, how much he loved her? She wants to go back in time, take every moment of it back. She wants to make him feel her pain. She wants to kill him.

“Thank you,” Emmit says.

Saoirse stares up at him, waiting.

“This last mad dash. Your refusal to give up.Your belief that you were going to make it.This was better than my pit-and-the-pendulumscheme. Now, when I kill you—and I do have to kill you, I hope you know that—I can be certain that I took everything. Every emotion. Every dream. Though—”

He pauses and runs the back of his hand down her cheek. Saoirse recoils and tries to turn away. Her arms move, like wings on a downswing, closer to her body a few more inches.

“I’d still like to carve you up a bit,” he continues. “For my writing. For the details that will stay with me, that will inspire me, for years to come.” He releases her arms and wraps his hands around her throat. “But I can do that after you’re dead. Goodbye, Saoirse. My Helen.”

“Wait,” Saoirse says, and Emmit looks at her pityingly. “I have to know. Why me? Lucretia, Mia, they were getting into Sarah’s house regularly for their séances. You had to have noticed. You had to have seen them. Or any of the dozens of women writers you mentored at Brown. Surely one of them could have been convinced to move into 88 Benefit Street, unoccupied and available to rent as it was the last five years. So, why me, Emmit? Why did you choose me?”

A tuft of dark hair falls over one eye. Emmit blinks, considering her, considering the question. Then he smiles. A massive, full-faced smile. “It’s simple,” he says. “Because despite your beautiful mind, your uniqueness, your intelligence, you had one unalterable factor I couldn’t shy away from. Something that would soften you to me, no matter your strength. No matter what.”

“Oh?” she says, urging him to keep talking, dropping her arms to her sides slowly, ever so slowly, every cell in her body at attention, praying her movements go unnoticed. “What factor was that?”

“Death,” he says simply. “The death of your husband. It changed you. Weakened you. Made you into a different species from any other woman I’ve ever met. Ever seen. If the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic in the world, then the torture of her soul is the second. You were like a tall, thorn-choked, dew-dazzled black rose in a sea of identical pale-pink ones. I knew this the night I first saw you, and it was confirmed for me during our first conversation at the coffeehouse.”

“I see,” she says. “And I see that you have to kill me. But before you do, I’d like to tell you a story.”

Emmit scoffs but straightens slightly, his hands loosening around her throat. “A story?”

“One you’ve heard before. But only partly. You were missing the beginning. And the end. And, well, I had to change some parts in the middle too.” She cocks her head. “It’s the writer’s right, you know. Taking a little artistic liberation.”

Emmit looks at her as if she’s surprised him yet again, as if he can’t quite believe she’s daring to speak when he’s promised to silence her forever. He shrugs. “Okay. Tell me the real version of your story.”

Saoirse closes her eyes. If this doesn’t go the way she hopes, it’ll be the last story she ever tells.

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