Dark Room Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Frozen Charlotte extract

  Sleepless extract

  Flesh and Blood extract

  Bad Bones extract

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Saffron Hills, South Carolina – 1995

  Walter West was placing the final picture into his new photograph album when he heard the delicate chime of the doorbell. Frowning at the interruption, he checked that the photograph was aligned perfectly before closing the album. He walked up the steps out of his basement studio, blinking in the light as he emerged into a grand hallway lined with large windows. Opening the front door, Walter saw a girl standing on the step outside.

  “Hi,” she said. “We’re in biology class together, I’m—”

  “I know who you are,” he said with a grin. “Please, come in.”

  The girl flashed a quick, uncertain smile before creeping through the doorway. She was pretty: dark eyes and high cheekbones, her face framed with shoulder-length brown hair. Reaching into her schoolbag, she pulled out a sheaf of papers and handed them over to him.

  “Um, I think our assignments got mixed up,” she said, pointing to the handwritten name at the top of the page. “Unless my parents changed my name to Walter and didn’t tell me about it.”

  “Hey, thanks for dropping this over. I’m going to need all the time I can get.” Walter looked up from the assignment, checking the drive through the doorway. No sign of a car. “Did you walk all the way up here?”

  “On my own two feet,” the girl replied brightly.

  “Wow.”

  It was a long walk from school to Walter’s house, and an even longer walk down from the hills to the creek, where he knew the girl lived. None of his friends would dream of trying it, but then all of his friends had a car. There was an invisible line running through the heart of Saffron Hills separating the rich from the poor, and folks on either side didn’t tend to cross it unless they had to.

  He closed the door behind the girl. “I’ll see if I’ve got your assignment,” he told her. “I can give you a ride home after, if you want.”

  She followed him along the hallway, openly admiring the oil paintings on the walls and the crystal chandelier hanging down from the ceiling.

  “You have a beautiful home,” she told him.

  “Yeah, it’s not so bad,” Walter said easily. “Just be grateful my dad isn’t here, otherwise you’d get the full Tall Pines tour. I swear he knows the exact date when every single piece of furniture in this house was made, and he’s not afraid of telling people.”

  “It’s so quiet… Are you on your own?”

  Walter nodded.

  “Where is everyone?”

  “Let me see…” He ticked off his fingers. “Mom’s visiting our aunt Gracie in Tennessee, Dad’s in Malaysia working on some big skyscraper project, and my sister is out riding and won’t be back for hours.”

  “What about the maids and the butler?” she teased.

  He laughed. “Believe it or not, we clean our own rooms here.”

  “Doesn’t it get a bit creepy, being in this big old place all on your own?”

  “You get used to it,” Walter replied. “There used to be stories about a ghost that floated around here in the middle of the night – apparently some lady suffocated her kids in their beds a hundred years ago. But then my dad got a priest to come over and perform an exorcism, and after that everything was OK.”

  The girl stared at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please don’t do that. I was this close to peeing myself.”

  Walter laughed again. Something about her openness was refreshing. Girls usually liked Walter. He was smart and good-looking and polite, and his family was the most influential in Saffron Hills. But sometimes he suspected that the girls liked the idea of going out with ‘Walter West’ more than they actually liked him. They didn’t really know him – what he liked and disliked, what he wanted to do with his life. His male friends didn’t care either, they were too busy making lame jokes and insulting one another. His family were hardly ever in the same room at the same time. When Walter thought about it, no one really knew him at all.

  They shared a polite, awkward silence as they walked through Tall Pines, the girl’s sandals slapping against the hardwood floor.

  “Don’t think me rude, but I can’t stay long,” she said. “My mom doesn’t want me out on my own after dark. Everyone’s kinda jumpy at the moment. Ever since Crystal went missing, you know?”

  He did. It had been a week now since the local beauty queen, the newly crowned Miss Saffron, had vanished on her way home from school. Walter had joined the volunteers combing the local woods, a solemn line picking its way carefully through the undergrowth. He hadn’t seen Crystal, though. Nobody had.

  The girl tugged at a loose thread on her schoolbag. “Do you think she’s dead?”

  Walter shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, I hope not, but it’s been a week and no one’s seen her. And that family of hers…”

  He didn’t say any more. He didn’t have to. Everyone in Saffron Hills knew that Crystal’s family were bad news. Trailer trash, they were called at the country club and at dinner parties in the hills – and other, even less pleasant, names.

  The girl shook her head. “It’s so sad,” she murmured. “Crystal was a sweet girl.”

  “You were friends?”

  “Kinda – when her creepy brother wasn’t hanging around. We’d stop and say ‘hi’, you know.”

  Walter led her into the dining room – more of a hall than a room, really – dominated by a vast mirror that stretched the length of the wall and a mahogany dining table.

  “Look at this thing!” the girl giggled, running her hand across the polished wood. “You could get twenty people around here.”

  “Closer to thirty, actually,” corrected Walter. “It doesn’t make Mom’s dinner parties any more fun, though.”

  The girl smiled. “You should come round to our place some time,” she said. “Have mac and cheese in front of the TV.”

  “I’d like that.”

  She shot him a defensive look, unsure whether he was making fun of her or not. Something about the way the girl was looking around the house made Walter feel unexpectedly embarrassed. All of a sudden, his home felt over-the-top and ostentatious. He felt like he should apologize – though for what, he wasn’t sure. The girl stopped by a large framed photograph. It was a family portrait, taken a couple of years earlier: Mom and Dad sitting together on a couch, their hands clasped, whilst Walter and his sister stood dutiful guard either side of them.

  “The West family, in all their glory,” he said dryly. “Terrible, isn’t it?”

  “It’s sweet!” she replied. “Don’t you like pho
tographs?”

  “Actually, I do – when I’m not in them.” Walter paused. “In fact I have my own studio here in the house. Would you like to see it?”

  “Sure,” she said politely.

  He led her out of the dining room and along a corridor, moving quickly now. Stopping at a door beneath the main staircase, he pushed it open to reveal a set of narrow steps leading down into the basement. When he gestured eagerly at the girl to go down them, she hesitated.

  “No light?”

  “The bulb on the stairs needs changing,” he said apologetically. “Keep hold of the handrail and you’ll be fine.”

  A little reluctantly, she started down the stairs. Walter closed the door behind him, plunging them into darkness. Sensing the girl’s nervousness as she edged towards the basement, he began to chatter in what he hoped was a reassuring way.

  “It kinda sucks that I have to come down here,” he said. “I told Mom and Dad that I needed a better room but they told me this was the only space they had. I said, OK, let’s move my sister down here and I can use her bedroom, but I got outvoted.”

  The girl didn’t laugh, too busy concentrating on navigating the steps through the gloom. When they reached the basement floor Walter slipped past her, feeling his way over to the wall.

  “Wait, let me get the light.”

  His fingers closed upon the switch, and he flicked it on. Bright, safe light poured into the basement. The girl found herself staring into a dusty, full-length mirror leaning against the wall – she jumped, startled by her own reflection.

  “You OK?” asked Walter.

  She laughed nervously. “Sorry. I scared myself there.”

  The girl looked around. The basement had been converted into a makeshift studio, centered around a modelling space surrounded by flashlights on stands and a white screen backdrop. Expensive cameras perched on tripods, lenses glinting in the light. Framed photographs covered the walls.

  “Phew!” she said, placing a hand over her heart. “For a minute there I was expecting some kind of dungeon.”

  “I clean up the bloodied corpses before the guests come round,” Walter replied, deadpan. “Mom insists.”

  The girl smiled, starting to relax a little. She went over to the far wall to examine the photographs. They were a series of landscape shots of the woods around Saffron Hills. Dawn sunlight shimmered through the pine trees.

  “These are beautiful,” she said.

  “Thank you,” said Walter. “The hard part is getting up early enough to catch the light.”

  “You should become a professional. People would pay good money for these.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know how many more tasteful landscapes the world needs.”

  As the girl peered closer at the photographs, an idea occurred to Walter. Quietly he picked up a camera and focused it on her. He waited until he had framed her face – unguarded, absorbed, biting on her lip in a slightly pensive way – and then he took her picture.

  “Hey, quit it!” she laughed.

  “Come on, just a couple of photos for my portfolio!” He fired off another before the girl could protest. “You look great!”

  She laughed – flattered, but trying not to show it. Walter meant what he said. She really was very pretty, in a naive and utterly natural way. Like a startled deer in the woods.

  “I’ve just finished my latest album,” he told her, his heart beginning to beat a little faster as he trained the camera on her face. “Take a look, I think you’ll like them.”

  “This one, you mean?” she replied, going over to the desk and pointing at the embossed album.

  Walter waited until he had the shot. “Perfect,” he said quietly.

  The girl opened the album.

  Crystal’s ruined face stared back at her. The beauty queen’s blue eyes had been dulled, her long blond hair matted with blood and the top of her skull crushed almost beyond recognition.

  The girl screamed.

  As she reeled away from the photo album, her hands over her face, Walter’s finger clicked rapidly on the shutter button, firing away like it was the trigger of a gun. His pulse was racing, his heart thundering in his chest. He was so excited he could barely breathe. Sternly he forced himself to concentrate, to focus on capturing the screaming girl.

  “What have you done?” she gasped.

  “I told you I was bored of landscapes,” Walter said.

  She stared at him in disbelief. “Y-you killed her?”

  He hadn’t planned to – Walter hadn’t killed anyone before, hadn’t even realized what he was capable of. He had invited Crystal round on a whim, figuring that some shots of Miss Saffron might look good in his portfolio. She had been so eager – so pathetically pleased just to be in his house. She couldn’t stop talking and giggling and flirting, messing up the shots he was trying to take of her. As he had trained his camera upon Crystal’s beautiful face, Walter had felt overwhelmed by sudden anger. The first blow, with the lighting stand, had taken him almost by surprise. But later on, in the dazed aftermath, it seemed to make perfect sense.

  No one knew what Walter West was like, not really. They didn’t know what he liked, what he disliked. What he wanted to do with his life.

  Sobbing hysterically, the girl realized too late that she had to run: Walter had already moved across the basement to cut off the stairs. Placing his camera down on an old bureau he opened the drawer, pulling out a hunting knife he had dug out from a box of his grandfather’s possessions in the attic. It wouldn’t be missed. That was the thing about being rich: if you were smart, you could get your hands on anything you wanted.

  At the sight of the gleaming blade, the girl moaned with fear. Walter was starting to enjoy this.

  “Why me?” she sobbed. “What did I do?”

  “You came to visit me,” he said simply. “Turned up on my doorstep like a little glimpse of heaven. I like pretty things, and you’re just as pretty as Crystal was. But by the time I had finished with her she was something else – her skin had turned this delicate shade of blue, she looked like a watery angel. Wouldn’t you like to be an angel too?”

  “P-please let me go,” the girl whispered.

  “I’m afraid that’s not an option.”

  “I won’t tell anyone, I swear. Not a soul.”

  Walter sucked in through his teeth. “Right now, I think you’d say just about anything to try to escape this house alive,” he told her. “I understand why, it’s perfectly natural. But once you get home you might change your mind and start running your mouth off to people, and then there’s no telling what you might say. No, I think you need to stay here.”

  She screamed, but even if they hadn’t been underground there was no one within a square mile who could hear her. Walter had been telling the truth: the rest of his family were all out, and the maids and the kitchen staff – whom he had lied about – had the day off. It was almost as if someone was making him kill again. He would do just as he had done with Crystal, using the roll of plastic sheeting in the corner of the room to wrap up the girl’s body before photographing her. Then Walter would wait until the middle of the night and take her to the creek, where he would weigh her corpse down with chains and tyres and let the murky water claim it.

  “Don’t look so sad,” he told the girl. “You’re going to have an album all of your own, just like Crystal. My pair of beautiful angels – one light, one dark.”

  “You sick freak!”

  Her eyes flashed with anger, and she snatched up a lighting stand. There was some fight in her, after all.

  Perfect.

  She jabbed the stand at him as he advanced towards her, trying to keep him at arm’s length. He didn’t hurry. They had all day. No one was going to come and rescue her. With his free hand Walter picked up his camera from the bureau and zoomed in on her trembling face.

  “C’mon,” he said cajolingly. “Smile for the camera.”

  Chapter One

  When Darla O’Neill was a little girl her
dreams had been like fairy tales – bright cartoon fantasies of brave princes and beautiful princesses. But life had soon taught Darla that most stories didn’t have happy endings – especially not her own. By the age of seven she had stopped dreaming about golden carriages and lavish palace balls. Now, aged sixteen, she didn’t dream of anything at all.

  She was lying awake, the springs of the trailer’s foldout bed digging into her back, listening to the summer rain thud down on the roof and her daddy’s buzz-saw snores. From her bed Darla could see Hopper’s silhouette slumped across the couch, an arm trailing down on the floor by a half-empty beer bottle. He had come back from the bar late, dropping his keys as he staggered in through the door. Darla had closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep, waiting for Hopper to pass out. It hadn’t taken long. It never did.

  Even with the rain and the windows open, the trailer was hot and airless. Darla lay on top of the sheets in an oversize T-shirt, sweat glistening on her bare arms and legs. Nights were easier in the winter, even when the snows came and turned the trailers into frozen shells. Darla could burrow under the blankets and create a warm little nest for herself. But there was no escaping the late August heat in South Carolina. Somewhere above her head, she heard a mosquito whine. Water dripped sullenly through a leak in the roof, landing on the jumble of plates and dishes piled up in the sink.

  There was a loud bang on the trailer door. Darla jumped.

  “Hopper!” a man’s voice yelled. “Where are you?”

  Hopper mumbled something in his sleep and turned over. A fist banged on the door again, louder this time. Darla slid under the blankets.

  “I know you’re in there, Hopper! Get your ass outta that trailer now!”

  Hopper sat up with a groan, rubbing his face. It always took him time to come to, especially when he had been drinking. He swore as he stumbled to his feet, knocking over the beer bottle. Outside the man continued to hammer on the door. Through the net drape Darla saw lights flickering on in the neighbouring trailers.

  “OK, OK!” Hopper shouted through the door. “Gimme a minute, will you?”

  He was fully awake now, moving quickly and quietly through the shadows. Opening a cupboard, he pulled down a cookie jar and prised it open, transferring a wad of dollar bills into his jeans’ back pocket. There was always a hiding place for the money, wherever they stayed, always different each time. Hopper never told Darla where – as though she was the one who couldn’t be trusted, not him. He slipped a pair of shoes over his bare feet and put on his favourite leather jacket. Then he crept over to Darla’s bedside.