But Joel was not here. Before he had departed, he had put a small box on the pillow beside her.
‘I was going to keep them for your birthday,’ he said. ‘Then I thought, why wait?’
It was an apology, she supposed, an apology for striking her, and hurting her. She had opened the box. The earrings were dull gold, but intricately carved, and so delicate that they seemed more like lace than metal. She knew before she touched them that they were old; old, and valuable.
‘Where did you get them?’ she asked, and as soon as the words were out of her mouth she knew that she had reacted wrongly, that her tone was doubtful and not filled with the wonder and gratitude Joel had anticipated. She thought that he might snatch the box away from her, or explode into another fit of rage, but instead he just looked hurt.
‘They’re a gift,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d like them.’
‘I do,’ she said, her voice trembling. She reached out and lifted them from the box. They were heavier than she had anticipated. ‘They’re beautiful.’ She smiled, trying to rescue the situation. ‘They’re really beautiful. Thank you.’
He nodded. ‘Well, okay then,’ he said.
He watched as she put them on, but his response as she turned her head to let them catch the sunlight filtering through the drapes was distracted. She had disappointed him. Worse, she felt that, by her actions, she had confirmed a suspicion he had of her. When she was sure that he was gone, she took off the earrings and put them back in the box, then pulled the sheet over her head and prayed for sleep to come. She so wanted to rest, and not to dream. Eventually, she took half an Ambien, and sleep came, and with it the voices.
It was late afternoon when she woke. Her head felt fuzzy, and she was disoriented. She was about to call out for Joel, and as she recalled his absence she wished, even amid their troubles, that she was not alone, and that he was near. He said that he would be gone overnight, perhaps even for two nights. He had promised to let her know. A big deal was about to come good for him, he said, and they could look for a better place. They might even head off somewhere for a while, somewhere pretty and quiet. She told him that she’d like to go away with him, but she was happy too just to stay where they were. She’d be happy anywhere, she said, as long as he was beside her, and as long as he was content. Tobias said that that was one of the reasons why he liked her so much, because she didn’t go asking for expensive things, because she had simple tastes. But that wasn’t what she had meant at all, and it annoyed her that he’d misunderstood her. He had patronized her, and she hated being patronized, just as she hated the stupid secrets he now kept in his basement, and the fact that he wasn’t telling her everything about the trips he took in his truck, and the goods that he delivered.
And then there were the earrings. She rolled over on the bed and opened the box. They were beautiful. Antique, too. No, older even than that. Antiques were like furniture or jewelry from the 1800s, or so she had always thought. These earrings, though, were ancient. She could almost feel their age when she had first touched them.
She got up and ran a bath. The day was as good as gone, and she decided that she wasn’t going to bother getting dressed. She would spend the evening in her robe, watch some TV, and order a pizza. With Joel absent, she rolled a joint from the little stash of pot that she kept hidden in her personal drawer and smoked it in the tub. Joel didn’t approve of drugs, and although he had never tried to forbid her from smoking joints he had made it clear that he didn’t want to know about it if she did. For that reason, she only tended to smoke when he wasn’t around, or when she was with friends.
After the bath and the joint, she felt better than she had in a long time. She looked at the earrings again, and decided to try them on. She piled her hair up on her head, wrapped herself in a clean white sheet, then stood in front of the mirror just to get a sense of how she might have looked in another time. She’d felt kind of silly doing it, but she had to admit that she appeared elegant, the earrings gleaming in the lamp-light, fragments of yellow light falling like dust motes upon her face.
There was no way that Joel could afford a gift like those earrings, she knew, not unless he really was lying even more than she suspected about how much he was earning as a truck driver. The only conclusion to be drawn was that he was involved in something illegal, and the earrings were part of it: an exchange, perhaps, or a purchase with some of the proceeds. It took away some from the beauty of them. Karen had never stolen anything in her life, not even a piece of candy or some cheap cosmetics, the standard targets for the petty thieves among her high school friends when she was growing up. At the diner, she never took more than was permitted her under her food allowance. It was more than generous anyway, and she saw no reason to be greedy, even though there were one or two other waitresses who used the allowance as an excuse to take food home and gorge themselves, their boyfriends, and probably anyone else who happened to be dropping by their place too.
But the earrings were so beautiful. She had never been given anything so lovely, so old, so valuable. Now that they were on, she did not want to take them off. If he could convince her that he had come by them honestly, she would keep them, but equally she would know if he was lying. If he did decide to lie to her about them, their relationship would be under real threat. She had already decided to forgive him for striking her again because she loved him, but it was time for him to be honest with her, and maybe with himself too.
She sat on the bed and turned on the TV. What the hell, she thought, and rolled a second joint. She watched a movie, some dumb comedy she’d seen before but that seemed far funnier now that she was a little high. Another movie followed, an action one this time, but she was starting to drowse. Her eyes closed. She heard herself snoring, and it woke her up. She lay down and rested her head on the pillow. The voices came again, but this time she had the peculiar sensation that this dream, and her nightmares about Clarence Buttle, had become conflated, because in the dream she sensed a presence nearby.
No, not in the dream.
In the house.
Her eyes opened.
‘Joel?’ she called, thinking that he might have come back earlier than expected. ‘Is that you?’
There was no reply, but she sensed that her words had caused a reaction elsewhere in the house: stillness where there had formerly been movement, silence where there had been sound.
She sat up. Her nostrils twitched. There was an unfamiliar smell: musty, but also faintly perfumed, like an old church vestment still suffused with the scent of incense. She found her gown and slipped it on, covering her nakedness, and was about to walk to the bedroom door when she reconsidered. She returned to her own bedside table and opened the drawer. Inside was a Lady Smith 60 in a .38 special. Joel had insisted that she keep a gun in the house, and he had taught her how to shoot out in the woods. She didn’t like the gun, and had largely agreed to have it just to placate him, but now she was glad that, with Joel absent, she was not entirely defenseless.
She waited at the top of the stairs but heard nothing, not at first. Then, slowly, she became aware of it.
The whispering had started again, and this time she was not asleep.
34
Karen stood at the basement door, and listened. She felt like a sleepwalker, for her mind was still fuzzy from the sleeping pill, and the pot, and the aftereffects of napping through the day. Everything was slightly off kilter. When she turned her head, it seemed to take a split second for her eyes to follow the movement, and the consequence was a dizzying blurring of her vision. Now, tentatively, she placed the palm of her hand against the basement door, then knelt until her ear was close to the keyhole. Strangely, it made no difference to the volume of the voices she was hearing, even though she was certain that the whispering originated from behind the door. The voices were at once inside her and beyond her, resulting in an alteration in perception that she visualized in almost mathematical terms: an equilateral triangle, with her at one apex, the source of
the voices at another, and the transmitted sound of them at a third. She was overhearing a conversation either carried on with no awareness of her presence or, more correctly, with an awareness of its inconsequentiality. It reminded her of when she was a very young girl, and her father and his friends would gather on a sunny day and sit around the table in the garden, drinking beers, while she sat in the shade of a tree, watching them and picking up on certain words and phrases, but unable to follow or fully understand the substance of their discussions.
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 th
e 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.
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