He sat down in his favorite chair and closed his eyes. When his heartbeat had slowed a little he went to the hearth, removed the loose stone, and removed his LEDGER. It soothed him. A ledger was where you kept track of debts owed, bills outstanding, accumulating interest. It was where you finally put paid to all accounts.
He sat back down, flipped to the place where he had stopped, hesitated, then wrote: "August 14, 1990." He wrote for nearly an hour and a half, his pen dashing back and forth line after line, page after page. His face as he wrote was by turns savagely amused and dully righteous, terrified and joyous, hurt and grinning. When he was finished, he read what he had written ("These are my letters to the world / which never wrote to me... ") while he absently massaged his aching right hand.
He replaced the ledger and the covering stone. He was calm; he had written it all out of him; he had translated his terror and his fury to the page and his resolve remained strong. That was good. Sometimes the act of writing things down made him feel more jittery, and those were the times he knew he had written falsely, or without the effort required to hone the dull edge of truth to an edge where it would cut - where it would bring blood. But tonight he could put the book back with a calm and serene mind. The rage and fear and frustration had been safely transferred into the book, with a rock to hold it down while he slept.
Harold ran up one of his shades and looked out into the silent street. Looking up at the Flatirons he thought calmly about how close he had come to just going ahead anyway, just hauling out the .38 and trying to mow down all four of them. That would have fixed their reeking sanctimonious ad hoc committee. When he had finished with them they wouldn't even have had a f**king quorum left.
But at the last moment some fraying cord of sanity had held instead of giving way. He had been able to let go of the gun and shake the betraying cracker's hand. How, he would never know, but thank God he had. The mark of genius is its ability to bide - and so he would.
He was sleepy now; it had been a long and eventful day.
Unbuttoning his shirt, Harold turned out two of the three gaslamps, and picked up the last to take into his bedroom. As he went through into the kitchen he stopped, frozen.
The door to the basement was standing open.
He went to it, holding the lamp aloft, and went down the first three steps. Fear came into his heart, driving the calmness out.
"Who's here?" he called. No answer. He could see the air-hockey table. The posters. In the far corner, a set of gaily striped croquet mallets sat in their rack.
He went down another three steps. "Is someone here?"
No; he felt there was not. But that did not allay his fear.
He went the rest of the way down and held the lamp high above his head; across the room a monstrous shadow-Harold, as huge and black as the ape in the Rue Morgue, did likewise.
Was there something on the floor over there? Yes. There was.
He crossed behind the slotcar track to beneath the window where Fran had entered. On the floor was a spill of light brown grit. Harold set the light down beside the spill. In the center of it, as clear as a fingerprint, was the track of a sneaker or tennis shoe... not a waffle or zigzag pattern, but groups of circles and lines. He stared at it, burning it into his mind, and then kicked the dust into a light cloud, destroying the mark. His face was the face of a living waxwork in the light of the Coleman lamp.
"You'll pay!" Harold cried softly. "Whichever one of you it was, you'll pay! Yes you will! Yes you will!"
He climbed the stairs again and went through his house from end to end, looking for any other signs of defilation. He found none. He ended in the living room, not sleepy at all now. He was just concluding that someone - a kid, maybe - had broken in out of curiosity, when the thought of his LEDGER exploded in his mind like a flare in a midnight sky. The break-in motive was so clear, so awful, that he had nearly overlooked it completely.
He ran to the hearth, pulled up the stone, and ripped the LEDGER from its place. For the first time it came completely home to him how dangerous the book was. If someone found it, everything was over. He of all people should know that; hadn't all of this begun because of Fran's diary?
The LEDGER. The footprint. Did the latter mean the former had been discovered? Of course not. But how to be sure? There was no way, that was the pure and hellish truth of the matter.