Book of Horrors (Nightmare Hall)

by Diane Hoh

  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.

  Chapter 2

  REED 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.

  She followed Rain up the path to the front door, where a woman stood waiting.

  When they were inside, he said, “Reed Monroe, Victoria McCoy.” To Reed, he said, “You can call her McCoy. I do.”

  The woman who closed the door and faced Reed bore no resemblance to the smiling photograph on the back cover of Victoria McCoy’s novels. That woman was young, pretty, well-groomed. The woman introduced as Rain’s mother had a pale, wide face with faint lines around the mouth, and deeply shadowed, sunken eyes. A wild mass of unkempt salt-and-pepper hair hung loose around her shoulders. She was dressed completely in black, in a long, full skirt and a long-sleeved, high-necked shirt, over which she was wearing a sleeveless black crocheted vest and a heavy, handmade necklace of orange and black beads. Matching heavy earrings tugged at her earlobes.

  Instead of being shocked by the difference, Reed felt pleased. That woman on the book jackets looked so ordinary. A lot like her own mother. This woman looked like she wrote horror novels.

  Perfect.

  “She’s here about the job,” McCoy’s son said. He said it in a monotone, completely devoid of emotion. Reed wondered if she’d interrupted something.

  “Oh, how wonderful!” the author cried. “You heard that I needed someone and you came? Now I won’t have to go through the administration to find a replacement.”

  “McCoy …” Rain began, but his mother shushed him with a wave of her hand.

  “Hush, dear, this is so perfect!”

  My words exactly, Reed thought happily, sensing that the job was hers.

  “I can’t tell you how much time you’re saving me,” Victoria McCoy said. “The bureaucracy, you know. All that red tape. Such a nuisance. So many questions. Come into the living room, take your things off. My son made a fire in the fireplace to take the chill out of this drafty old house. Tell me how you heard about the job.”

  “I’ll get coffee,” Rain said, and disappeared.

  Reed followed the author into the room to the left of the entry hall. It was long, narrow, and dark, the walls painted metal gray, the wood floors bare, the heavy draperies dark forest green, the furniture heavy and ugly, upholstered in a dark green print. The only warmth and light in the room came from the fireplace, where the promised fire blazed.

  The room was cluttered almost to the point of chaos. Three of the walls were lined floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves that tilted slightly, from which books of all shapes and sizes spilled. A huge wooden desk at the rear of this room was piled high with papers and books and magazines. There was no computer anywhere in sight, not even a typewriter.

  “I don’t work in here,” the writer said before Reed could ask. “I have a study, my own private little hideaway,” she waved a hand toward the hall, “behind the kitchen. You, however, will work in here.”

  Reed’s joy at a statement that certainly sounded as if she already had the job collided with her disappointment that she wouldn’t be working side-by-side with the author. How was she going to learn anything if they were in separate rooms?

  “They didn’t want to let me live here, you know,” the author said as she directed Reed to a seat on the ugly sofa. “They wanted me smack in the middle of campus, where I would be … what was the word the dean used … visible? Yes, visible. I suppose there isn’t any point in having a successful writer-in-residence if the residence that writer chooses is out of the public eye. But she finally gave in, your dean. I made it clear that solitude was essential if I were to continue my work.”

  “I guess that’s why we haven’t seen much of you on campus,” Reed said.

  “Last year, I did the campus thing quite a bit. I taught two classes and conducted seminars and held an autograph session in your little village of Twin Falls nearby. But then I fell ill.”

  The illness must be why she had changed so much in appearance since the photo. Reed knew illness could do that. Her own grandmother had aged ten years after a bout with pneumonia.

  Suddenly, an odd, falsetto voice from the dimmest corner of the room shrieked, “Get out, get out, get out!”

  Reed jumped, startled.

  Victoria McCoy laughed. “That’s just Poe. He’s a mynah, but he and I both pretend he’s a raven. You’re familiar with the piece?”

  Reed nodded. She had read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in high school. She had loved it, although “The Pit and The Pendulum” was her favorite piece.

  So that was why Rain had such an old-fashioned name. Edgar Allan, for the writer. He must hate it. He didn’t look the least bit old-fashioned. Which was probably why he made everyone call him “Rain.”

  “Poe goes everywhere with me, even on my rare excursions to town with my son. People stare at me, walking around with a bird on my wrist, but I don’t care. I’m past that now. Poe and I have long, lovely conversations together. Don’t you think he’s pretty?”

  Reed swiveled on the couch to glance over her shoulder at the cage. All she could see were dark, glossy wings and a pair of beady, glittering eyes. “Leave her alone, leave her alone, leave her alone!” the bird shrieked.

  “Poe, mind your manners,” his owner scolded. Then, as she turned back to Reed, her eyes suddenly went completely blank. She fell silent and began staring straight ahead, as if Reed weren’t there.

  When the odd silence became uncomfortable, Reed said hesitantly, “Ms. McCoy? Is anything wrong?”

  There was no answer until the mynah shrieked, “Alert, alert, alert!” Then the writer snapped back to reality as suddenly as she’d left it. She smiled at Reed. “You were saying?”

  “I … I wasn’t saying anything.” Disconcerted, Reed wished Rain would come back. Where had he gone for that coffee, Twin Falls? The room was so dim, and she could feel a dampness now, smell a faint mildewy odor. A house this ugly and isolated, so unlike the other faculty housing, had probably stood empty. Maybe for a long time before Victoria McCoy and her son … and bird … had moved in.

  Reed let her eyes roam around the room. A large, bronze object sitting at the very top of the bookshelves caught her gaze and held it. Another bird, looking almost as real as Poe. Its wings were spread, its head bent, its small, glittering eyes staring down upon them.

  Reed shivered. It was beautiful, very realistic-looking, but there was something about it that made her skin crawl.

  Rain appeared in the doorway. “McCoy, don’t we have any coffee? I’ve been looking all over for it. I thought you got some last week, in town. It was on the list.”

  Later, Reed would go over and over in her head every word uttered by the writer then. But when it happened, she could only sit and listen in shock.

  Victoria McCoy leaned forward, fixing her dark, deeply shadowed eyes on Reed’s. “People take things, you know,” she whispered. “My son doesn’t believe me, but it’s true. He gets very angry when I say things like that, but those people who worked for me, they were always stealing things. When I confronted them, as anyone would, they left. It’s so hard to trust anyone now.”

  While Reed was trying desperately to digest what had been said to her, Victoria McCoy lifted her head, smiled brightly, and said, “Oh, I must have forgotten to get it, dear. I’m sorry. We’ll have tea instead.”

  They had tea. While they sipped and talked about the job, Reed pushed the author’s strange, whispered words into a tiny, remote corner of her mind and left them there. She would take them out later and examine them. Maybe she’d heard them wrong.

  Or maybe she hadn’t.

  “How many hours would you need me?” she asked the woman sitting opposite her.

  “Oh, as many as you can give me. I know how busy you young people are. I’m heavily into my new book an
d I desperately need someone to answer the telephone and my fan mail. I do get quite a lot of it. You are going to take the job, aren’t you?” Victoria McCoy added anxiously.

  “I’d be honored,” Reed said emphatically. If the mildewy smell got to her, she’d cover her nose with a tissue, and if the bird drove her nuts, she’d cover his cage or tape his beak shut. But she was not going to pass up this opportunity. Jude certainly wouldn’t have, or Debrah or Lilith. No one in the fan club would. “And I know you need your privacy to work, so I promise I won’t get in your hair.” She got up to leave.

  Victoria McCoy raised one hand to her hair. “My hair? Oh, yes, I’ve been meaning to have it cut. Rain sometimes hacks away at it for me, but he’s been so busy …”

  “I’ll do it later,” Rain said, as if the remarks had made sense. He began pulling on a ski jacket, red like Reed’s. “Right now, I’m going to walk your new employee back to her dorm.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Reed protested, although she liked the idea. “I have a class at ten. It’s almost that now. I’m going straight there.”

  “I have a ten o’clock, too. We’ll go together.”

  Before they left, Rain turned to his mother. “You’ll be okay here, right? Not going into town, are you? If you need something, it can wait until I get back home.”

  The woman’s mouth tightened and her eyes narrowed. “Please don’t speak to me as if I were a child,” she snapped. “I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself. You’re embarrassing me in front of this young woman.”

  “Sorry,” Rain muttered. And Reed sensed that he was.

  As they left the house, a flood of relief washed over her, taking her by surprise. She’d been so pleased earlier about the house being perfect for McCoy. Now, she couldn’t wait to get away from it.

  What was that all about?

  The house didn’t matter. She was going to be working for Victoria McCoy.

  She couldn’t wait to take the news to the fan club.