The Hellfire Club
Peter Straub
Language: English
Pages: 0
ISBN: B001IMUPB8
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Living with her weakling husband in a Connecticut town that has been the scene of four recent serial murders, housewife Nora Chancel is kidnapped by the accused killer and becomes his hostage on a perilous odyssey through New England, with the police in h
Title: The Hellfire Club
Author: Straub, Peter
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: 1997/08/01
Number of Pages:
Binding Type: PAPERBACK
Library of Congress:
couldn’t hear the bell. I rang it a few more times. When I still didn’t hear him coming down the stairs, I took out my key and let myself in, just like a hundred times before. “As soon as I got in, I heard his radio going full blast. ‘Let’s Dance,’ Benny Goodman’s theme song. It was one of the remote broadcasts they used to do in those days. I went up the stairs calling out his name. Lady was going crazy. Before I got to the top of the stairs, I started smelling something. I should have
stiff, glossy sheet that Davey recognized as the reverse side of a jacket rendering. “An idea of mine,” Paddi said, turning the sheet over to display a drawing it took Davey a moment to understand” when he did, he wondered why the idea had never occurred to him. Paddi had drawn the jacket for an annotated scholarly edition of Night Journey. (Her design was based on the famous “GI edition” of the novel.) Every one of the hundred thousand Driver fanatics in America would have to buy it. Scholars
sentence. Paddi came through the mahogany door. She had her “Hellfire Club look,” even though she seemed to be wearing exactly what she had worn to work. They ordered the same drinks from the same waiter. Davey described his searches, and Paddi told him it was important, crucial, to find the manuscript. Wasn’t there a record somewhere of everything that came in and went out? “Yes,” Davey said, “but it didn’t start until a month or two after the founding of the house. Before that, things were
she saw you.” “Something happened to her. That’s why she acted like that.” “Something happened to her, all right. And where it happened was in the same nursery where you took that kid when you decided to play God. Do you want me to believe that’s a coincidence?” “You think I took her there?” The sheer unreasonableness of this idea made her momentarily forget to breathe. “There’s no other way to explain things. You locked her up in that empty building and kept her there until she managed to
Nora had never been ten years old. You were sitting on that stump in the backyard, the one from the oak that fell down during that hellacious storm. Then she did remember: the smooth white surface of the stump, her tomboy self fooling with a length of rope she had unearthed in the garage, her father wandering up to ask if she wanted to learn some fancy knots. Then the pleasure of discovering how a random-seeming series of loops magically resolved into a pattern. She had badgered him for weeks,