Down a Dark Hall (18 page)

“The Rosenblums? But how—?”

The letter,
she thought.
Of course! I had written the Rosenblums’ phone number in the letter
. Natalie must have read it and realized what the number meant and called them.

She believed him as she had always believed him, and she felt his hand guide hers to the knob of the kitchen door.

She did not remember, later, stepping through it. She knew only that suddenly she was outside, running down the driveway,
with the silly towel still upon her head and the rain in her face and the wind whipping cold against her shoulders. Ahead
of her lay the iron fence and beyond that the black arms of trees waving wild against the sky. She could not see them for
the darkness, but she knew they were there.

Halfway down the drive she stopped and turned to look back at the house. There it stood, as it would stand forever in her
nightmares, the great peaked roof outlined in flashes against the lightning-ruptured clouds. It had been from almost exactly
this point that she had first glimpsed Blackwood, gray stone upon gray stone like a child’s jigsaw puzzle, the windows ablaze
in the late afternoon sun as though the interior were alive with flames.

“Can’t you feel it?” she had said then to her mother. “There’s something about the place—something—”

She knew the answer now.

Kit did not wait to watch the building fall. She turned and began to run again into the clean, cold strength of the wind.

 “Here I am!” she cried. “Here I am!” as headlights came round the curve in the road ahead and drew to a stop against the
gate.

Young adult author Jenny Han sat down with Lois Duncan to ask her all about

Jenny:
In my opinion,
DOWN A DARK HALL
is your scariest book. I think the isolation and claustrophobia play a big part, and also the horrible adults — Madame, the Professor, even Dan, the selfish stepdad — but it’s the ghosts that frighten me the most. Lois, do you believe in ghosts?

Lois:
I don’t believe in the type of ghosts that are associated with Halloween, dressed in white sheets and shouting, “Boo!” But I do believe that the energy of human consciousness can survive the death of the physical body. I don’t find it impossible to speculate that that energy might be transmitted to others by those souls who are highly motivated and whose mind force is strong enough. But, of course, that’s not something that any of us can be sure of one way or the other as long as we’re anchored to this earth plane.

Jenny:
How did you pick the artists whom the girls channel?

Lois:
I chose brilliant artists, writers and musicians who died young and might be expected to be frustrated because they had so much to offer and weren’t given enough time to fully express it.

Jenny:
And I’m dying to know — what was that French poem Sandy wrote all about, and did you have an actual painter in mind for the grotesques that Kit and Jules find so horrible?

Lois:
Sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t know myself what was in them. I didn’t want to start visualizing the contents, because I didn’t want them in my own mind. (I can’t even stand to watch a horror movie on television.) I thought I’d cop out and let my readers imagine them for themselves.

Jenny:
It seems you did a little research on how to forge a painting. How did you become interested in that? Have you ever done any painting?

Lois:
I don’t know a thing about painting. But I’m fortunate enough to be a longtime friend of the famous artist Betty Sabo. When I wanted information about aging those forged paintings, I went to Betty. She described the entire procedure and then reviewed the manuscript to make sure I got it right. You’ll notice the book is dedicated to Betty and her husband, Dan Sabo.

Jenny:
Did any particular place inspire Blackwood Hall? Or the story of the family who once lived there?

Lois:
Pure imagination. This was my one experience in writing a Gothic mystery, so I went all out to make it as atmospheric as possible.

Jenny:
What research did you do to study ESP?

Lois:
After the murder of my teenage daughter, Kaitlyn Arquette, I began having startling psychic experiences of my own, and I contacted Dr. William Roll, project director for the Psychical Research Foundation, to see if he could help me understand what was happening to me. He was as fascinated by those experiences as I was and asked me to write a paper about them for a conference he was chairing. We communicated a lot by phone (no e-mail back then), and got to be friends.

Bill, then, came up with the idea of our collaborating on a nonfiction book for young adults based on laboratory research and documented case histories of psychic phenomena. He had connections with the top parapsychologists in the nation and was intimately involved in the research himself, and I had a history of writing for teenagers, so we thought we’d be the perfect team to create such a book.
PSYCHIC CONNECTIONS: A JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERIOUS WORLD OF PSI
was published, and it was a good book.

The problem was that school librarians were reluctant to stock it for fear of its being challenged by irate parents who didn’t want their children exposed to the subject unless it was treated as fantasy. So, to Bill’s and my great disappointment, it went out of print pretty quickly. However, I learned a lot by writing that book with someone so knowledgeable to guide me. It was like taking a crash course in parapsychology.

Jenny:
Had you heard of anyone going insane from channeling, or was that just suspense writer’s license?

Lois:
Writer’s license. Through writing
PSYCHIC CONNECTIONS
, I came to know many practicing psychics — some working with police departments — and I’ve never heard of any of them being harmed by that experience. They just take it for granted. Like having a knack for drawing or writing or playing the piano.

Jenny:
PSYCHIC CONNECTIONS
sounds fascinating! I wish it were still in print. What’s the most interesting or surprising thing you learned while working on it?

Lois:
That all these subjects that many people consider unbelievable — things like clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy, and astral projection — are being taken seriously by scientists. They’re being studied in laboratory settings, often with positive results.

Jenny:
What was particularly challenging about updating each book?

Lois:
The biggest challenge in updating these stories and bringing them into the present day was the dramatic change in technology since the time they were written. Remember, some of these books were written in the 1970s. And a very strong plot element in many of my novels was the fact that the endangered heroines were unable to cry out for help. But today, most teenagers have cell phones. They can call — they can text— they have laptops and iPads — nobody is isolated. I had to find ways of getting rid of those communicative devices in book after book. And I couldn’t use the same method more than once, because people might read these new editions back-to-back, so they’d notice if I repeated myself.

Jenny:
Many of your books have paranormal elements — did you go through a period when you were especially interested in these types of subjects?

Lois:
I have always been interested in the paranormal. (That interest took on a new dimension in 1989, when Kait was murdered and psychic detectives gave us more information than the police did.) But back when I wrote these particular books, I had not yet been personally exposed to the study of parapsychology. I considered it fantasy — yet wasn’t quite sure it was fantasy. I used it primarily because it made for good story material.

Jenny:
Can you tell us a little about your writing process?

Lois:
People often ask me, “Do you plot your books before you start, or do you let your muse be your guide and just go where you’re taken?” When you write in a genre, as I do, you have to lay out your plot ahead of time. There’s a basic three-part structure for all genre novels: (1) Someone the reader relates to (2) reaches an important goal (3) by overcoming increasingly difficult obstacles. That means that, in order for the reader of a young adult novel to relate to the protagonist, that protagonist must be a teenager. In regard to Step Two, the more important the goal, the stronger the story. The most important goal for anyone is survival, which is why mystery and adventure novels are so popular. The next most important goal is love and acceptance, which is why romance novels are popular, especially with girls. And, for teenage protagonists, there’s a third and very important goal— and that is to grow up. The protagonist must mature during the course of the book and therefore be wiser and stronger at the end of the story than in the beginning. Once you develop your characters and set the goals for the protagonist (in my case, I usually set all three goals, and therefore have a main plot plus two subplots all going at once), you set obstacles in the way of the protagonist so he or she has to overcome them to reach those goals. That movement to hurtle obstacles in order to reach the goals is called “pacing.” So there’s a lot of planning that goes into my novels before I ever sit down and actually start writing.

Jenny:
I’ve read all of your books many, many times, so I decided I would read the updated versions and see if I could spot the changes. Of course I noticed the cell phones and texting and e-mails, but I also noticed subtler differences, like name changes — Mother to Mom, Rheardon to Rolland. I think I know why but I’d love to hear it from you.

Lois:
There were different reasons. Mostly it was to modernize the novels. When my children were growing up, most young people called their mothers “Mother.” Today they usually call them “Mom.” But when I went back and re-read those novels, I also realized that, for some unknown reason, I had tended to favor certain names. Perhaps I’d known people with those names and therefore was comfortable with them, so I tended to overuse them. I hadn’t realized I was doing that, because some of those novels were written ten or fifteen years apart. But now, reading them one right after another and seeing a last name like “Rheardon” pop up twice, I became very conscious of what I’d done, so I made the necessary changes.

Jenny:
Can we dare hope to read an all-new novel from Lois Duncan in the near future?

Lois:
I honestly don’t know what I’m going to write next. I’m in between projects, recharging my batteries.

Jenny Han is the author of several books for teens, including
The Summer I Turned Pretty
,
It’s Not Summer Without You
, and
Shug
, as well as
Clara Lee and the Apple Pie Dream
, the first book in the middle grade series featuring Clara Lee. She is currently at work on the final book in her summer trilogy,
We’ll Always Have Summer
.

Lois Duncan is the author of over fifty books, ranging from children’s picture books to poetry to adult non-fiction, but is best known for her young adult suspense novels, which have received Young Readers Awards in sixteen states and three foreign countries. In 1992, Lois was presented the Margaret A. Edwards Award by the
School Library Journal
and the ALA Young Adult Library Services Association for “a distinguished body of adolescent literature.” In 2009, she received the St. Katharine Drexel Award, given by the Catholic Library Association “to recognize an outstanding contribution by an individual to the growth of high school and young adult librarianship and literature.”

Lois was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Sarasota, Florida. She knew from early childhood that she wanted to be a writer. She submitted her first story to a magazine at age ten and became published at thirteen. Throughout her high school years she wrote regularly for young people’s publications, particularly Seventeen.

As an adult, Lois moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she taught magazine writing for the Journalism Department at the University of New Mexico and continued to write for magazines. Over three hundred of her articles and stories appeared in such publications as
Ladies’ Home Journal
,
Redbook
,
McCall’s
,
Good Housekeeping
, and
Reader’s Digest
, and for many years she was a contributing editor for
Woman’s Day
.

Six of her novels—
SUMMER OF FEAR
,
KILLING MR. GRIFFIN
,
GALLOWS HILL
,
RANSOM
,
DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU
and
STRANGER WITH MY FACE
—were made-for-TV movies.
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER
and
HOTEL FOR DOGS
were box office hits.

Although young people are most familiar with Lois Duncan’s fictional suspense novels, adults may know her best as the author of
WHO KILLED MY DAUGHTER
?, the true story of the murder of Kaitlyn Arquette, the youngest of Lois’s children. Kait’s heartbreaking story has been featured on such TV shows as
Unsolved Mysteries
,
Good Morning America
,
Larry King Live
,
Sally Jessy Raphael
and
Inside Edition
. A full account of the family’s ongoing personal investigation of this still unsolved homicide can be found on the Internet at
http://kaitarquette.arquettes.com
.

Lois and her husband, Don Arquette, currently live in Sarasota, Florida. They are the parents of five children.

You can visit Lois at
http://loisduncan.arquettes.com
.