John Verdon - Let the Devil Sleep

He searched for something to say-something pedestrian, maybe a distracting question-to calm her down. “The electrical service box… does it have one main circuit breaker in addition to the breakers for all the individual circuits?”

“What?”

“Just wondering what kind of box it is that I’ll be dealing with.”

“What kind? I have no idea. Is that a problem?”

“No, not at all. If I need a screwdriver, I’ll call up to you, okay?” He knew that all this was irrelevant, no doubt confusing to her, but confusion was better at this point than a panic attack.

He descended the stairs carefully, sweeping the light back and forth.

Everything seemed perfectly still.

Then, just as the thought came to mind that a banister would be a wise addition to the rickety staircase structure-just as he was placing his weight on the third stair tread from the bottom-there was a sharp crack, the tread collapsed, and Gurney pitched forward.

It all happened in less than a second.

His right foot descended along with the broken tread into empty space as his body pivoted forward and downward, his arms rising instinctively to protect his face and head.

He crashed onto the concrete floor at the base of the stairs. The lens of the flashlight shattered, the light went out. A sharp pain shot like an electrical shock through the bone of his right forearm.

Kim was screaming. Hysterical. Asking if was he all right. Footsteps retreating, running, stumbling.

Gurney was stunned but conscious.

He was about to try some tentative movements, assess the physical damage.

But before his muscles could respond, he heard a sound that raised the hairs on his neck. It was a whisper, very close to his ear. A whisper harsh and sibilant. A whisper that hissed like the hiss of a furious cat:

“Let the devil sleep.”

When Gurney awoke the next morning at home, he was anxious and exhausted, with a deeply burning sensation in his right forearm and a painful stiffness through his whole body. The bedroom windows were open, and there was a damp chill in the air.

Madeleine was already up, as usual. She liked getting up with the birds. There seemed to be a secret ingredient in the first light of dawn that energized her.

His feet were cold and sweaty. The world outside the windows was gray. It was a long time since he’d had a hangover, but he felt like he had one now. He’d had a miserably restless night. Recollections of the events in Kim’s basement, the discoveries he’d made after his fall, and the hypotheses they suggested kept racing around in his head without coherence or conclusion, twisted and derailed by his multiple aches. He’d finally fallen asleep just before dawn. Now, two hours later, he was awake again. His level of mental agitation told him that further sleep would be impossible.

The urgent imperative was to organize and understand what had happened. He went over it all one more time, reaching into his memory for as much detail as possible.

He recalled stepping cautiously down the stairs, using his flashlight to illuminate not only the staircase but the basement areas to the right and left of it. No hint of any sound or movement. When he was still several steps from the bottom, he’d swept the beam in a wide arc around the walls to locate the electrical panel. It was a gray metal box, mounted on a wall not far from the ominous chest where the bloodstains had led him two days earlier. The darkened stains were still clearly visible on the wooden steps and on the concrete floor.

He remembered stepping down onto the next stair tread, then hearing and feeling the startling snap of it giving way under his foot. The beam of his flashlight had swung in a wild arc as his hands flew out reflexively in front of his face. He knew he was falling, knew he couldn’t stop it, knew it would be bad. Half a second later, his arms, right shoulder, chest, and the side of his head collided brutally with the basement floor.

There was a scream from the top of the stairs. First a pure scream, then two screamed questions: “Are you all right? What happened?”

For a moment he was dazed, unable to answer. Then, somewhere, he couldn’t tell in what direction, he heard what sounded like the scramble of feet running, maybe bumping into a wall, maybe tripping, running again.

He had tried to move. But the whisper, so close by, had stopped him.

It was a feverish sound, more animal than human, the words hissing out under pressure, like steam escaping through clenched teeth.

He’d reached for his ankle holster, pulled out the Beretta, lay there in the silent darkness, listening. The situation was so deeply unnerving that he had little recollection of the time interval that elapsed-thirty seconds, a minute, two minutes or more-before Kim returned with her Mini Maglite, the beam much brighter than it had been when they’d used it to examine the chest at the end of the bloodstain trail.

She’d started down the stairs just as he was getting shakily to his feet, hot pain shooting from his wrist to his elbow, legs unsteady. He told her not to come any further, simply shine the light on the stairs. Then he climbed up to her as quickly as he was able to, almost losing his balance twice from dizziness. He took the flashlight from her, turned around, and covered as much of the basement floor as he could see from that position.

He’d moved down two more steps, gun in one hand, flashlight in the other, and repeated the back-and-forth searching movement with the narrow beam. Another two steps… and then he was able to sweep the beam around the entire basement space-floors, walls, steel support columns, ceiling beams. Still no sign of the whisperer. Nothing was upset, nothing in disarray, no movement other than the eerie shadows of the support columns moving across the cinder-block walls as he angled the little Maglite.

When he reached the basement floor, steadily sweeping the beam around him, he’d concluded-with as much bafflement as relief-that there were no nooks, no hiding places, no dark corners where a man could hide from the light. With the possible exception of the chest, the basement offered no apparent opportunities for concealment.

He’d asked Kim, hovering in nervous silence at the top of the stairs, if she’d heard anything after he fell.

“Like what?”

“A voice… a whisper… anything like that?”

“No. No, what do you mean?” she’d asked with rising alarm.

“Nothing, I just…” He shook his head. “I was probably just hearing my own breathing.” Then he asked if the running footsteps had been hers.

She said yes, probably yes, she probably ran, at least she thought she had, maybe sort of stumbled, walked fast, maybe-couldn’t actually remember, being in a panic-feeling her way to the bedroom, where she kept her flashlight on her night table. “Why do you ask?”

“Just checking my impressions,” he said vaguely.

He didn’t want to speculate aloud on the alternate possibility that the intruder had bounded up the staircase out of the basement as Kim was on her way to her bedroom, had made use of the dark to conceal himself, was perhaps at some point within inches of her, and when she came back had slipped past her out of the house.

But wherever he’d gone, however he’d gotten out-assuming he had gotten out and wasn’t crouching in the chest-what sense did it make? Why was he in the basement to begin with? Could it conceivably have been Robby Meese? Logistically, it was possible. But what was the purpose?