The Whisperers (44 page)

Despite her dislike of dark spaces, and her concern at how Joel might react if he found that she had trespassed in his basement – for she knew that was how he would view it if he discovered that she had entered it without him – she wanted to see what was down there. She was aware that he was storing something new there for she had seen him moving the last of the boxes from his truck when she had returned from work the previous day. She experienced a frisson of excitement at the thought of such an incursion, spiced by a degree of apprehension, even fear.

She began to search for the key to the basement. While Joel kept one on a chain with his other keys, she guessed that there had to be a spare nearby. Already she knew her way around all of the shared areas in the house. One of the kitchen drawers contained a jumble of old junk, including stray keys, combination locks, and screws. She went through it all, but could find no key that looked like it would fit the basement lock. After that, she searched in the pockets of Joel’s coats that hung in the hall, but discovered only dust, a couple of coins, and an old receipt for gas.

Finally, aware that she was about to cross a line, she went through Joel’s personal closet. Her fingers probed in suit pockets and shoes, beneath piles of t-shirts and through stacks of socks and underwear. Everything was clean and neatly folded, a hangover from Joel’s time in the military. Halfway through, she began to forget about the key and started enjoying the intimate nature of her search, and what it revealed about the man she loved. She discovered photographs from his time in the military, and letters from a former lover, only a few of which she read, finding herself distressed by the possibility that someone could have thought that she loved Joel as much as she, Karen, did, and irritated by the fact that he had kept these letters. She flipped through them until she found the one that she sought, a simple ‘Dear John’ letter advising Joel that their continued enforced separation because of his military service was too difficult for her to bear, and she wished to end their relationship. The letter was dated March 2007. Karen wondered if the woman, whose name was Faye, had found someone else before she wrote that letter. Some sixth sense told her that she had.

In a steel case on the floor of the closet was a Ruger pistol and a number of bladed weapons, including a bayonet. The sight of the knives made her shiver, the dreadful intimacy of their penetrative capacity, the potential for a brutal connection between victim and killer, separate entities briefly joined by a shard of metal.

Beside the knives lay what looked like a key to the basement door.

She carried it downstairs and placed it in the lock. She twisted the key with her left hand, the little Lady Smith held in her right. The key moved easily, and the door unlocked. She opened it, and was suddenly aware of the silence in the house.

The whispering had stopped.

Before her, the basement stairs stretched down into darkness, only the first three illuminated by the light from the hall. Her fingers found the pull cord that dangled from the ceiling. She yanked it, and the overhead light came on, so that now she could see as far as the bottom of the stairs. Down there was another pull cord that lit the rest of the basement.

She took the steps slowly and carefully. She didn’t want to trip, not here. She wasn’t sure which possibility was worse: that Joel might come in and find her on the floor, her leg broken, or that Joel might not come back, and she would be left there, waiting for the voices to resume their whispering, alone in their presence.

She brushed the thought from her mind. It wasn’t going to help her nerves any. At the second to last step, she stretched up on her toes, holding on tightly to the rail, and tugged the second cord. Nothing happened. She tried again, pulling once, then twice. There was still only darkness before her, and darkness behind and to her left where the basement stretched to most of the width of the house.

Hell, she thought, then remembered that Joel, always practical, kept a flashlight on the shelf immediately beyond the last step in case of just such an eventuality. She had seen it when he had first shown the basement to her, the day she had moved in with him. She trailed her fingers along a steel joist, surprised at how cold the metal felt, then allowed her hand slowly to run horizontally along the shelf, worried about dislodging the flashlight and knocking it to the ground. Eventually, her grip closed upon it. She twisted the head, and a beam shone on the ceiling, catching cobwebs and sending a spider scuttling into a corner. The beam was weak, though. The batteries needed to be replaced, but she would not be down here for long, just for long enough.

She spotted the new additions almost immediately. Joel had stacked the wooden crates and cardboard boxes in the far corner. She padded over to them in her slippered feet, shivering at the cold of the basement. All of the boxes were open and filled with packing material: straw in most cases, foam chips in the rest. She reached into the nearest and felt a small, cylindrical object, protected by bubble wrap. She withdrew it from the box and unwrapped it in the flashlight’s beam. It shone on the two gemstones inlaid into the gold disks at either end, and the unfamiliar signs carved into what she was certain was ivory.

She searched in the box again, and found another of the tubes, and a third. Each was slightly different from the last, but all had gold and gemstones in common. There were more of the cylinders down there, two dozen or more, and at least as many old gold coins in individual plastic sheaths. She rewrapped the cylinders that she had removed, and restored them to their place, then moved on to the next box. This one was heavier. She cleared away some of the straw packing to reveal a beautifully decorated vase. Beside it, in a crate previously used to transport wine, was the gold head of a woman with lapis lazuli for eyes. She ran her fingers across its face, so lifelike, so perfect in appearance. Although she was not someone who generally troubled museums with visits, here, in this musty basement, she began to understand the appeal of such artifacts, the beauty of something that had survived for so long, a link to civilizations now long vanished.

It made her think again of her earrings. Where Joel had got them from, she had no idea, but she knew now that this was the big score about which he had spoken, and in these items lay his hopes for both of their futures. She felt angry at him, yet also strangely relieved. If it had been drugs that she had found, or counterfeit money, or expensive watches and gems stolen from a jewelry store, she would have been disappointed in him. But these objects of beauty were so unusual, so unexpected, that she was forced to reconsider her opinion of him. He didn’t even have pictures hanging on his walls until she came to live with him, yet this was what he stored in his basement? She wanted to laugh. It bubbled up from deep inside her, and she covered her mouth to stop it, and in doing so she was reminded of the sight of Joel seated cross-legged by the basement door, speaking intently to someone on the other side of it, and in that moment she recalled the reason she had come down here. The smile disappeared from her face. She was about to move on to the other crates when a shape on the shelf to her left caught her eye. It was clearly a box, loosely covered in bubble wrap, and it stood incongruously amid paint cans and jars of nails and screws. Yet even disguised as it was, and in such undistinguished surroundings, she was drawn to it. As she touched it, she felt it vibrate against her fingers. It reminded her of a cat purring.

She laid the flashlight on the shelf, and began to undo the wrapping. She had to lift the box to do so, and something inside seemed to shift slightly. Any concern she had that Joel might discover she had been down there was gone: she felt a burning desire to view the box, to open it, understanding the moment she touched it that this was what she was seeking, that this was linked to the voices in her nightmare, to the sensations of confinement and imprisonment, to Joel’s nocturnal conversations. When the bubble wrap stuck she tore at it with her fingers, hearing it pop as she shredded it, until at last the box was fully revealed to her. She stroked it, caressed it, marveling at the detail of its carvings. She lifted it, and was surprised by its weight. She couldn’t begin to imagine how much the gold that went into its construction might be worth alone, regardless of the age of the box itself. With the tip of a finger she examined the intricate series of locks, shaped like spiders, that held the lid fixed to the base. There were no keyholes that she could see, merely clasps that would not move. She grew increasingly frustrated, picking with her fingernails at the metal, all sense of reason and patience gone. Then one of her fingernails broke, and the pain of it brought her back. She dropped the box as though it had suddenly grown hot in her hands. She was overcome by a profound sense of evil, a feeling that she was close to an intelligence that wished her only harm, that resented her touch. She wanted to run, but she was no longer alone in the basement, for there was movement in the corner to her left, directly across from the stairs.

‘Joel?’ she said. Her voice trembled. He would be so angry at her. She could already see the confrontation playing out: his fury at her trespass, hers at his hoarding of stolen artifacts in the basement of their home. They were both in the wrong, but her transgression was minor compared to his, except she knew that he would not see it that way. She did not want him to hit her again. Sense began to return to her: this was a serious criminal enterprise in which Joel was engaged, and that was bad enough. But the box . . . The box was another matter entirely. The box was foul. She had to get away from it. They both did. If Joel would not come with her, she would leave alone.

If he lets me leave, she thought. If it stops at just hitting when he finds out what I’ve been up to. Her mind went back to the weapons in his closet, and the bayonet in particular. Joel had shown it to her once before when she found him slumped in the corner of the room, his eyes red from weeping for his lost comrade, Brett Harlan. It was an M9 bayonet, just like the one Harlan had used on his wife before cutting his own throat.

Because the box made him do it
.

She shuddered at the imaginative leap that she had just made, even as she strained to peer into the darkness before remembering the flashlight. She grasped it and pointed its beam at the corner. Shadows moved: the outline of garden tools and stacked bottles, the frames of the shelves, and one other, a figure that danced away from the light, melting into the blackness beneath the stairs; a deformed shape, distorted by the action of the beam but also, she knew, unnatural in its essence, contorted in its physicality. She could almost smell it: musty and aged with an acrid edge, like old cloth burning.

This was not Joel: this was not even human.

She tried to follow its progress with the flashlight. Her hands were shaking, so she gripped the Maglite with both hands, holding it close to her body. She shone it under the stairs, and the shape danced away again, a shadow without a form to cast it, like smoke rising from an unseen flame. Now there was movement to her right as well. She swung the beam, and briefly a figure was framed against the wall, its body hunched, its arms and legs too long for its torso, the crown of its skull misshapen by outgrowths of bone. It was both real and unreal, the shadow seeming to stretch from the box itself, as though the essence of whatever was contained within it were seeping out like a bad smell.

And the whispering had started again: the voices were speaking about her. They were disturbed, angry. She should not have touched the box. They did not want her desecrating it with her fingers, with her woman’s hands. Filthy. Unclean.

Blood
.

She was having her period. It had started that morning.

Blood
.

Tainted.

Blood
.

They knew. They smelled it on her. She retreated, trying to get to the stairs, aware now of three figures circling her like wolves, moving to stay out of the reach of her light even as they closed upon her. She waved the flashlight like a flaming torch, using it to probe at the darkness, to keep them at bay, her back to the shelves, then the wall, until at last she was facing the basement and her foot was on the first step. Slowly she ascended, not wanting to turn her back. Halfway up, the bulb above her head flickered and went dark, and then her flashlight too gave up the ghost.

They’re doing it. They like the darkness
.

Now she turned, stumbling up the final steps, and as she reached the door and slammed it closed she caught a final glimpse of them ascending toward her: shapes without substance, bad dreams conjured from old bones. She turned the key and pulled it from the lock, tripping as she did so and falling painfully on her coccyx. She watched the handle of the door, expecting it to turn like it did in those old horror movies, but it did not. There was only the sound of her breathing, and the beating of her heart, and the rustle of her robe against her skin as she pushed herself along the floor and came to rest against an armchair.

The doorbell rang. The shock of it made her squeal. She saw the figure of a man outlined against it by the night light. She looked at the clock on the wall. It was after three. Where had the hours gone? Rubbing the base of her spine where she had landed so awkwardly, she walked to the door and pulled the drape to one side so that she could see who was there. A man in his sixties stood in profile on the step. He wore a black hat, which he raised politely, revealing a bald cone misted by wisps of gray hair. She opened the door, relieved at the presence of another human being, even a stranger, but she still kept the security chain on.

‘Hello,’ said the man. ‘We’re looking for Karen Emory.’ He still had not turned toward her, so she could see only one side of his face.

‘She’s not here,’ said Karen, the words emerging before she even realized that she had spoken them. ‘I don’t know when she’ll be back. It’s late, so she probably won’t be home until morning.’