Book of Horrors (Nightmare Hall) (2 page)

Reed strode to the podium to finish her reading. Read
fast,
she told herself, and get this meeting over with. You have important business to attend to!

As they all sat back down, Link told Lilith teasingly, “What Reed was reading sounded mildly interesting.”

If Reed hadn’t been so grateful to him for his monumental news, she’d have been insulted.
Mildly
interesting? McCoy’s work? That was like calling Mount Everest a
hill.

Well, what could she expect from someone who had once tried to read
The Adventures of Superman
and never made it past the first page because, he said, he couldn’t “sit still that long.”

“Whew,” Debrah declared when Reed had raced through the rest of the chapter, “that’s too much! Poison?” She shivered and looked to Link for confirmation that the story had been horrifying.

He laughed and shrugged.

“She was desperate,” Reed said stiffly. “Her siblings treated her like dirt.” Then she felt foolish for defending a character in a book and added, “This book sold in the millions. It’s considered one of McCoy’s best.” It was also a personal favorite of Reed’s.

“Seems to me,” Link said, “that if you’re all so fascinated with this McCoy, you shouldn’t have waited until second semester to start your fan club. People have already joined other stuff. You’re too late.”

“We didn’t have time first semester,” Reed said. “And I already told you, Link, when I got to Salem, I figured there already
was
a fan club. By the time I found out that there wasn’t, I was swamped with classwork …
why
am I explaining all of this to you? I’ve got to get going. Meeting dismissed.”

She closed the book briskly, then glanced down at the back cover of the book in her hands. An attractive woman with dark hair waving softly around her face smiled up at Reed from the back cover. She looked perfectly healthy. Hard to believe, looking at the photo, that McCoy had been sick and was just now recovering. But then, the book was not a new one.

Link had gotten up to walk over to the podium. He took the book from Reed’s hands, leafing casually through the pages. “I still say,” he mused, “that you don’t look like the kind of person who would be hung up on all this blood and guts stuff.”

They’d had this discussion before. And she was too excited about his news to take offense this time. “I’m not hung up on it,” she said as she took the book back, thrusting it into her backpack. “McCoy is a great writer, that’s all. You’d know that if you ever tried any of her stuff.”

But Link wasn’t really exaggerating. She
was
pretty hung up on McCoy’s work. Had been for years. She loved it. All of it.

“Don’t have much time for reading.”

“Oh, that’s right, you’re too busy
fishing.”

He wasn’t offended. “Right. And you shouldn’t curl your upper lip in a sneer like that. Ruins that gorgeous face.”

Oh, brother. She almost laughed. Aloud, she said, “Gotta go. Walk me out?”

“In
Cat’s Play,”
Debrah was still arguing with Jude about the book as they all walked to the door of the small room, “the killer, Caroline, shouldn’t have hidden the bodies in the basement. That’s such a cliché. Why couldn’t she have done something more original, like maybe stashing them in the hayloft of the barn?”

Jude groaned. “Oh, man, talk about a cliché! That’s been done a zillion times. I think she should have put them in the woodshed beside the garage. It was summer. No one would have been going out there to get wood.”

“You can’t store dead bodies outside in the summertime,” Reed pointed out. “The heat.”

Ray and Tom nodded.

“She should have put them in that freezer on the back porch,” Ray said. “That would be a lot colder than the basement.”

Link suddenly laughed aloud. When everyone looked at him, he apologized. “I’m sorry, but listening to all of you talk about dead bodies … I mean, you all look so
normal,
but. …”

“Are you saying we’re not normal?” Reed snapped. “Because we like well-written horror books? Lots of people do. And may I just point out that you sat through the reading of that last chapter? You didn’t look very bored to me.”

“Personally,” Jude said calmly before Link could answer, “normal is one thing I’ve never had any desire to be. Boring! Besides, if I were normal, I wouldn’t stand a chance of ever being as famous a horror writer as McCoy is, and that
is
my goal.”

Everyone in the group already knew that Jude Noble had aspirations of one day following in Victoria McCoy’s footsteps. To that end, he wore his blond hair almost to his shoulders, sometimes affected an English accent, and marched around campus wearing a long black raincoat because, he said, he hadn’t been able to find a long, black cape, which was what he’d really wanted. He actually looked terrific in the raincoat, Reed had decided, probably because he was large enough to carry off the long garment. A shorter person would have been lost in its flowing folds.

“Think they make any money, these writers?” Link asked Jude, his voice friendly.

“If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t be planning on entering the field. I’m not real keen on starving. That business about living in a garret in New York City, eating tomato soup made from ketchup, never seemed romantic to me. The way McCoy’s books have sold, she must have pots of money. I plan to do the same.”

When everyone was out in the hall, Reed switched off the lights and closed the door. But her mind had already left the fan club, the meeting, the library. It was focusing instead on what her first move should be. She knew, of course, where McCoy lived.

But should she go there? Now? If she waited until morning, someone else could beat her to the punch. Disaster.

The rumor was that the writer was a very private person. Interrupting her quiet evening at home might be a tactical error. Making the author angry could cost her the job. Also disaster.

“Well, I don’t blame Caroline,” Debrah was saying. “Her sister and brother had it coming to them. After all she’d done for them, and they were so ungrateful!”

“And you think a hefty dose of poison is fair treatment for refusing to help their sister with the housework?” Link said, his amusement still apparent.

“Look,” Reed said, “I have
got
to get going. We’ll finish this discussion next week, okay? Link? Walk me back to the dorm?”

She
had
to get that job. Jude, Debrah, and Lilith would hate her, of course, for not sharing Link’s news. But they’d get over it.

“Funny about Carl,” Link said as they trudged across old, frozen snow toward Lester, Reed’s dorm. “He never struck me as the type who would just up and leave college. The guy never had a B in his life. Straight A’s, all the way. And when he got that job working for McCoy, he acted like he’d won a Pulitzer Prize. You wouldn’t think he’d just throw all that away and take a hike.”

“Everybody says Victoria McCoy is very demanding,” Reed pointed out. “That’s probably how she got where she is today. Carl couldn’t hack it, that’s all.”

But
I
can, she told herself, her jaw clenching with determination. I can do it. I can get this job. And then Victoria McCoy will have to
kill
me to get rid of me.

R
EED DECIDED IT WOULD
be a serious mistake to interrupt a writer at home in the evening. Talk about getting off on the wrong foot! Although her nerves sang with the awful possibility that someone else in the fan club might learn about Carl’s abdication and get to McCoy before she did, she decided to risk it.

First thing in the morning. That would be the smartest approach.

Too excited to sleep, she was forced to count backward from one hundred to relax, telling herself that she didn’t want to show up at McCoy’s house looking like yesterday’s trash. First impressions were important.

The relaxation trick worked, as it always did. When Reed opened her eyes, it was morning.

Her roommate, Tisha Blackwell, was still sleeping, the pillow half-covering her head. Reed dressed quietly to avoid awakening her.

It was still early as she made her way to the McCoy house. The sun edged its way slowly upward in the sky, erasing the mist that rose from the Salem River behind campus. The big, white, two-storied houses on Faculty Row were quiet under the bare-limbed trees lining the wide street. Cars were still parked in the driveways, waiting for professors and instructors to come dashing out onto their porches, briefcases in hand, heading off to another day of classes, lectures, and seminars.

Victoria McCoy didn’t live on Faculty Row. Her house was beyond the end of the street, hidden behind a grove of pine trees. Reed had gone looking for it shortly after she’d arrived on campus, and hadn’t found it right away. It wasn’t visible from the street.

Maybe it was too early to awaken McCoy. Some writers worked far into the night, didn’t they? What if the author liked to sleep late?

Reed couldn’t wait another second. Every passing moment increased the risk that someone else would get to McCoy first. If Debrah, for instance, had heard about this opening, she’d probably slept all night on McCoy’s porch.

But no one was sleeping on McCoy’s porch, because there
was
no porch. No porch swing as on the other houses, no big, fat flowerpots, empty now in the cold of winter, no bicycles leaning against a porch railing.

When Reed had found the house the first time, she’d been too awed to approach it. Had stood in the pine trees staring at it, hoping for a glimpse of the writer. Had left disappointed, seeing no one.

Now, she circled around the grove, found the slightly worn path through it, and followed the path to the clearing. She stood there for a moment, staring again at the home of Victoria McCoy, world-famous author.

It was perfect.

Perfect.

No pretty, white-pillared, two-story Beaver Cleaver house here. The house she was staring at was not white, it was gray. Dark, gloomy gray. Perfect. Black shutters and front door. Also perfect. The house itself was tall and narrow, with small, heavily curtained windows facing the front, top, and bottom. Had to be dark inside, with such small windows and the thick grove of tall trees blocking out the sun. Reed smiled. Perfect. A bright, sunny house was no place to write horror novels.

“Must
you read only that kind of thing?” her mother had cried one day when Reed had arrived home from the library with a fresh load of reading material. “Honestly, Reed, sometimes I worry about you. I don’t understand why horror books appeal to you.”

It wasn’t as if Reed herself hadn’t wondered the same thing. She had finally decided that it had something to do with the rest of her life being so …
ordinary.
Her parents didn’t scream at each other and throw things, they certainly didn’t mistreat
her,
her friends were fun and nice, and their community was peaceful and quiet. All of that was great, and she wasn’t complaining.

But she was smart enough to know that there was a darker side of life, and she was curious about it. It intrigued her. What was it that brought that darker side out into the open? Did everyone have a dark side? How did you avoid letting it loose?
Could
you? Could you keep it hidden forever?

She had found some of the answers in McCoy’s novels. But not all. They couldn’t tell her everything she wanted to know.

But working side-by-side with the author of those works could give her the rest of the answers.

And this house, so isolated in its private little grove, so grimly dressed in its funeral gray and black, looked like the perfect place to learn.

Two cars were parked alongside the house. Identical compact cars, a pair of shiny metal twins. Both were black. Very appropriate. But why two? The author, Reed knew, was a widow.

Her heart pounding with anticipation, Reed picked her way along the frozen, rutted path to the front door. She was almost there when she slipped and toppled sideways, crying out in alarm as she fell to the ground.

A moment later, the front door to the house flew open and footsteps crunched down the stairs to her side. A deep, resonant voice said, “What the devil … ?”

Reed raised herself on her elbows. “I … I slipped,” she said.

Whoever she was looking at, it definitely wasn’t Victoria McCoy. But there
was
a faint resemblance to the cover photograph in the angled face and dark, black-browed eyes staring down at her. The hair, as black as the brows, was wavy, and worn almost to the shoulders. The face, well, the face was almost perfect, everything properly proportioned, the jaw wide and strong, the lips full and about to curve into an amused smile, Reed guessed.

He looks like a poet, Reed thought as she scrambled to her feet, brushing old snow from her jeans and red ski jacket. I’ll bet
he
reads.

He hurried to her side. “Are you okay?” he asked, taking her elbow and looking into her eyes. “Didn’t hit your head, did you? That ground’s hard as a rock.”

“No. I just bumped my pride,” she said. “Not the first time.” She forced a smile, although she had never been more embarrassed in her life. “It heals fast.”

He returned the smile. “Good!” Then, abruptly, as a second figure appeared in the doorway of the house, “Who are you? And what are you doing here?”

“Oh. I’m Reed Monroe. Freshman. At Salem,” she added lamely, and immediately felt unbelievably stupid because where
else
would she be a freshman? It wasn’t as if there were more than one university in the area. “I … I heard that Victoria McCoy might be looking for an assistant and I’m here to apply for the job. You didn’t already get it, did you?”

He threw his head back and laughed. “No way!” he said when the laughter had died. “I don’t mind being her son, but I wouldn’t want to work for her.” He thrust out a hand. “Edgar Allan Raintree here. McCoy is my mother’s maiden name, also her professional name. My friends just call me Rain. You’d better come inside before you freeze.”

Relief replaced Reed’s embarrassment. The job wasn’t taken. She still had a chance. Probably a small one, though, if she didn’t pull herself together and start acting like a competent, responsible human being.