The Hellfire Club Read Online Free Page A

come to the great truth behind his journey through vast darkness. Life and death stirred beneath his own hands, and his hands commanded them.
” Davey recited the words unemotionally but without hesitation.
    “Oh, of course,” Nora said. “Absolutely.”
    For less than a second, the boy’s face shone out from within the shadow of the man’s, and then the wild hair, frothing beard, and hard planes of the forehead and cheekbones locked back into place. The man carried the boy down a grassy slope. Sunlight gilded his hair and the tops of his arms. On the hill behind the man and the boy stood a huge door in a dark frame, like a mirage. Before them in the fold of a valley at the bottom of the hillside, oaks the size of matches half-hid a white farmhouse.
    She turned her head to Davey and found him looking not at the screen but down at her with a suggestion of concern in his eyes.
    “Kind of pretty,” she said.
    “So it’s completely wrong.” His eyes darkened. “That’s not Mountain Glade. Does it look like there’s a secret in that place? Mountain Glade isn’t pretty, but it contains the great secret.”
    “Oh, sure.”
    “It’s the whole point,” Davey said. His eyes had moved backward into his head.
    “I better go back to bed.” Nora pushed herself upright without any assistance from Davey. “Isn’t it almost over, anyhow?”
    “If it
is
over,” he said.
    Onscreen, the bearded man faded toward transparency. When she stood up and took an undecided step away from the sofa, he vanished altogether. The boy sprinted toward the farmhouse, and then the cast list obliterated his image.
    Nora took another step toward the door, and Davey gave her a quick, unreadable glance. “I’ll be there in a little while,” he said.
    Nora climbed the stairs, again reflexively checking that the front door was locked and the security system armed. She slid back into bed, felt the night sweat soak through her nightgown, and realized that she had to convince Davey that her desire to leave Westerholm had nothing to do with Natalie Weil or the human wolf.
    Half an hour later, he entered the bedroom and felt his way along the wall until he found the bathroom. Without really being aware that she had fallen asleep, Nora opened her eyes from a dream in which Dan Harwich had been looking at her with colossal, undimmed tenderness. She rolled over and pushed her head deep into the pillow. For a long time Davey brushed his teeth while the water ran. He washed his face and yanked a towel off the rack. He spoke a few reproachful words she could not make out. Like his mother, when alone or unobserved he often conducted one-sided conversations with some person not present, a habit which Nora thought could not technically be described as talking to yourself. The bathroom light clicked off, and the door opened. Davey groped toward the bed, found the bottom of the mattress in the dark, and felt his way up his side to pull back the duvet. He got in and stretched out along his edge of the bed, as far from her as he could get without falling off. She asked if he was all right.
    “Don’t forget about lunch tomorrow,” he answered.
    Once during her period of radioactivity, Nora had forgotten that they were due at the Poplars for a meal. Usually, Davey’s reminders of this distant error struck her as unnecessarily provocative. Tonight, however, his remark suggested a way to put her resolution into effect.
    “I won’t,” Nora said.
    She could help them by drawing nearer to Daisy Chancel” she could soften the blow before it fell.

7
    A FEW MINUTES after they had wandered out onto the Poplars’ terrace early the next afternoon, Nora left Davey and Alden holding Bloody Marys as they looked out at the sun-dazzled Sound. The announcement that she was going upstairs to see Daisy had met only a token resistance, although Davey had seemed disgruntled to be left alone with his father so soon after their arrival. Davey’s father had seemed pleased