Read Online The Hellfire Club by Peter Straub - Free Book Online Page A

looked sordid and sad. The sadness was not a surprise, but the sense of wretchedness gripped her heart.
    Slumped in the far corner beside Officer LeDonne, Davey glanced up at her and shook his head.
    She turned to Fenn, who raised his eyebrows. “Did you find a camera? Did Natalie have a camera?”
    “We didn’t find one, but Slim and Slam say all the pictures in there were taken with the same camera. One of those little Ph.D. jobs.”
    “Ph.D.?”
    “Push here, dummy. An auto-focus. Like a little Olympus or a Canon. With a zoom feature.”
    In other words, Natalie’s camera was exactly like theirs, not to mention most of the other cameras in Westerholm. The bedroom felt airless, hot, despairing. A lunatic who liked to dress women up like sex toys had finally taken his fantasies to their logical conclusion and used Natalie Weil’s bed as an operating table. Nora wondered if he had been seeing all five women at the same time.
    She was glad she wasn’t a cop. There was too much to think about, and half of what you had to think about made no sense. But the worst part of standing here was standing
here.
    She had to say something. What came out of her mouth was “Were there pictures in the other houses? Like the ones in the kitchen?” She barely heard the detective’s negative answer” she had barely heard her own question. Somehow she had walked across several yards of unspattered tan carpet to stand in front of four long bookshelves. Two feet away, Davey gave her the look of an animal in a cage. Nora fled into the safety of book titles, but she found no safety. In the living room Fenn had said something about Natalie’s affection for horror novels, and here was the proof, in alphabetical order by author’s name. These books had titles like
The Rats
and
Vampire Junction
and
The Silver Skull.
Here were
They Thirst, Hell House, The Books of Blood,
and
The Brains of Rats.
Natalie had owned more Dean Koontz novels than Nora had known existed, she had every Stephen King novel from
Carrie
to
Dolores Claiborne
, all of Anne Rice and Clive Barker and Whitley Strieber.
    Nora moved along the shelves as if in a trance. Here was a Natalie Weil who entertained herself with stories of vampires, dismemberment, monsters with tentacles and bad breath, cannibalism, psychotic killers, degrading random death. This person wanted fear, but creepy, safe fear. She had been like a roller coaster aficionado for whom tame county fair roller coasters were as good as the ones that spun you upside down and dropped you so fast your eyes turned red. It was all just a ride.
    At the end of the bottom shelf her eyes met the names Marletta Teatime and Clyde Morning above a sullen-looking crow, the familiar logo of Blackbird Books, Chancel House’s small, soon-to-be-discontinued horror line. Alden had expected steady, automatic profits from these writers, but they had failed him. Gaudy with severed heads and mutilated dolls, the covers of their books came back from the distributors within days of publication. Davey had argued to keep the line, which managed to make a small amount of money every season, in part because Teatime and Morning never got more than two thousand dollars per book. (Davey sometimes frivolously suggested that they were actually the same person.) Alden dismissed Davey’s argument that he had condemned the books by refusing to promote or publicize them” the beauty of horror was that it sold itself. Davey said that his father treated the books like orphaned children, and Alden said damn right, like orphaned children, they had to pull their own weight.
    “Mrs. Chancel?” said Holly Fenn.
    Another title shouted at her from the bottom shelf.
Night Journey
protruded at a hasty, awkward angle from between two Stephen King encyclopedias as if Natalie had crammed it in anywhere before running to the door.
    “Mr. Chancel?”
    She looked at the
D
’s, but Natalie had owned no other Driver novels.
    “Sorry I wasn’t more helpful.”