Even in moments when she herself felt empty and drained, completely unstirred by the close presence of a man, there were few of her suitors who would not have stopped before a door marked "Danger—Enter at Your Peril," pressed a button, and walked into a room as chill and depressing as the gas chamber at San Quentin, solely for the pleasure of keeping a dinner date with her.
By whatever yardstick her friends or enemies might choose to judge her by, Helen Lathrup remained what she was—an extraordinary woman. And by the same token, extraordinary in her profession, with accomplishments which inspired admiration and respect, however grudgingly accorded.
There was another aspect of Helen Lathrup's personality which she seldom talked about and which made her unusual in a quite different way.
At times, her thoughts would take a very morbid turn; she would fall into restless brooding and seek out a kind of diversion which most people looked upon as pleasurable only when it remained completely in the realm of entertainment. To her, it was something more.
The darkly sinister and terrifying in literature and art disturbed and fascinated her. She had long been a reader of supernatural horror stories and there were a dozen writers in that chilling branch of literature to whose work she returned again and again. Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft—all supreme masters in the art of evoking terror—occupied an entire shelf in her library, along with scholarly studies of witchcraft, medieval demonology and Satanism.
Another shelf was entirely taken up with modern psychological studies of crime in its more pathological and gruesome aspects, including those often brutal departures from normalcy in the sphere of sex that appall even the most sophisticated minds.
She never missed an outstanding screen production of a terrifying nature. Mystery films which dealt with criminal violence in a somber setting never failed to excite her. The psychopathic young killer, haunted, desperate, self-tormented and guilt-ridden, had a strange fascination for her, whether in books or on the screen, and she experienced a pleasure she would not have cared to discuss as she watched the net closing in, the noose swinging nearer ... and then darkness and despair and the terrible finality of death itself.
But always there was a price which had to be paid. With the ending of the picture or the closing of the book a reaction would set in, and she would sit shivering, fearful, visualizing herself, not in the role of the furtive, tormented slayer—even when that slayer was a woman—but as the victim.
The victim of the very violence she had welcomed and embraced, with wildly beating heart, when she had thought of it as happening to someone else.
She could not have explained this aberration even to herself, and the impulse to succumb to it, to make herself agonizingly vulnerable by seeking out a certain movie or a certain book, would come upon her only at times.