After a minute or so, she opened her eyes and began in a shaky voice. “The story … was actually pretty short and simple, but when I was little, it seemed so … big. So scary. A world I got pulled into. Like a nightmare. My father called it a fairy tale. But he told it like it was real.” She swallowed. “There was a king, and he made a law that once a year all the bad children in the kingdom had to be brought to his castle—all the children who’d gotten in trouble, who’d lied or been disobedient. Children who were so bad that their parents didn’t want them anymore. The king kept them in the castle for a whole year. They had good food and clothes and comfortable beds, and they were free to do whatever they wanted to do. With one exception. There was a room in the deepest, darkest part of the castle basement that they were warned to stay away from. It was a small, cold room, and there was only one thing in it. A long, moldy wooden chest. The chest was actually an old, rotting coffin. The king told the children that it held a sleeping devil—the most evil devil in all the world. Each night after the children got into their beds, the king would walk from bed to bed, whispering in the ear of each child: ‘Never go down to the darkest room. Stay far away from the rotting coffin. If you want to live through the night, let the devil sleep.’ But not all the children were wise enough to obey the king. Some of them suspected he made up the story about the devil in the chest because the chest was where he hid his jewels, and once in a while a child would get up in the night and sneak down into that dark room and open the rotting chest that looked like a coffin. Then a piercing shriek would rise through the castle, like the scream of an animal caught in the jaws of a wolf. And the child would never be seen again.”

There was a stunned silence around the table.

Kyle was the first to speak. “Holy shit! That was the bedtime story your father told you when you were a little kid?”

“He didn’t tell it that often, but every time he did, it terrified me.” She looked at Gurney. “When you said ‘Let the devil sleep’ just now, that cold feeling came rushing back to me. But … I don’t understand how someone could have been waiting for you in the basement. Or why whoever it was would have whispered that in your ear. What sense does it make?”

Madeleine plainly had a question that was troubling her as well. But before she could ask it, there was a firm knock at the side door.