The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  Then she wondered what it would be like to have actually known Dick Dart. How could you reconcile your memories with the knowledge of what he had done? Shuddering, she recognized the reason for Davey’s distress. He had been given a moral shock. Someone he had seen every day for two years had been exposed as a fiend. Now sensible Matt Curlew could speak to her: Let him think about it by himself for as long as he likes, then make him a good breakfast and get him to talk.

  Nora dropped the paper on the kitchen table and went into the kitchen to toast bagels, get out the vegetable cream cheese, and crack four eggs into a glass bowl for scrambling. This was no day to fret about cholesterol. She ground French Roast beans and began boiling water in a kettle. After that she set the table and placed the newspaper beside Davey’s plate. She was setting in place the toasted bagels and the cream cheese when the music went off downstairs. The family room door opened and closed. She turned back to the stove, gave the eggs another whisk, and poured them into a pan as she heard him mount the stairs and come toward the kitchen. With a pretty good idea of what she was about to see, she forced herself to smile when she turned around. Davey glanced expressionlessly at her, then looked at the table and nodded. “I wondered if we were ever going to have breakfast.”

  “I’m scrambling some eggs, too,” she said.

  Davey entered the kitchen in a way that seemed almost reluctant. “That’s the paper?”

  “Page one,” Nora said. “There’s another long article inside.”

  He grunted and began reading while smearing cream cheese on a bagel. Nora ground some pepper into the eggs and swirled them around in the pan.

  When she set the plates on the table, Davey looked up and said, “Popsie’s real name is Ophelia?”

  “Live and learn.”

  “Just what I was thinking,” Davey said, concentrating on his plate. “You know, not that we have them that much, but you always made good scrambled eggs. Just the right consistency.”

  “Made?”

  “Whatever. The only other person who got them just the way I like them was O’Dotto.”

  She sat down. “If her name was Day, why did you call her O’Dotto?”

  “I don’t know. It was what we did.”

  “And why did you call her the Cup Bearer?”

  At last he looked at her, with the same irritated reluctance with which he had joined her in the kitchen. “Can I read this?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I know it must be upsetting for you.”

  “Lots of things are upsetting for me.”

  “Go on,” she said. “Read.”

  He placed the newspaper on his far side, so that he could glance from plate to print and back again without risking whatever he thought he would risk by looking at her. Behind Nora, the kettle began to sing, and she stood up to decant ground beans into the beaker and fill it with boiling water. Then she clamped on the top and carried the machine back to the table. Davey was leaning over the paper with a bagel in his hand. Nora put a forkful of scrambled egg in her mouth and found that she was not very hungry. She watched the liquid darken in the beaker as flecks of pulverized bean floated toward the bottom. After a while she tried the eggs again and was pleased to find that they were still warm.

  Davey grunted at something he had read in the paper. “Geez, they got a statement from that cynical old fart Saxe Coburg. He must be about a hundred years old by now. I asked him once if he had ever considered putting Night Journey in the syllabus, and he said, ‘I can trust my students to read drivel in their spare time.’ Can you believe that? Coburg wore the same tweed jacket every day, and bow ties, like Merle Marvell. He even looked a little bit like Merle Marvell.” Marvell, who had begun by editing the Blackbird Books, had been the most respected editor at Chancel House for a decade, and Nora knew that Davey’s admiration of him was undermined by jealousy. From remarks he had let drop, she also knew that he feared that Marvell thought little of his abilities. The few times they had met at publishing parties and dinners at the Poplars, she had found him invariably charming, though she had kept this opinion from Davey.

  She touched his hand, and he tolerated the contact for a second before moving the hand away from hers.

  “This must be very strange for you. A kid you knew in school committed all these murders.”

  Davey pushed his plate away and pressed his hands to his face. When he lowered them, he stared across the room and sighed. “You want to talk about what’s upsetting me? Is that what you’re trying to get at?”

  “I thought we were getting at it,” she said.

  “I could care less about Dick Dart.” He closed his eyes and screwed up his face. Then he put his hands on the edge of the table and interlaced his fingers and stared across the room again before turning back to her. The alarm in the center of her chest intensified. “Nora, if you really want to know what I find upsetting, it’s you. I don’t know if this marriage is working. I don’t even know if it can work. Something really bizarre is happening to you. I’m afraid you’re going off the rails.”

  “Going off the rails?” The thrilling of alarm within her had abruptly dropped into a coma.

  “Like before,” he said. “I can see it happening all over again, and I don’t think I can take it. I knew you had some problems when I married you, but I didn’t think you were going to go crazy.”

  “I didn’t go crazy. I saved a little boy’s life.”

  “Sure, but the way you did it was crazy. You stole the kid out of the hospital and put us all through a nightmare. You had to quit your job. Do you remember any of this? For about a month, actually more like two months before you capped things off by abducting that kid instead of going through channels, you got into fights with the doctors, you almost never slept, you cried at nothing at all, and when you weren’t crying you were in a rage. Do you remember smashing the television? Do you remember seeing ghosts? How about demons?”

  Davey continued to evoke certain excesses committed during her period of radioactivity. She reminded him that she had gone into therapy, and they had both agreed it had worked.

  “You saw Dr. Julian twice a week for two months. That’s sixteen times altogether. Maybe you should have kept going longer. All I know is, you’re even worse now, and it’s getting to be too much for me.”

  Nora looked for signs that he was exaggerating or joking or doing anything at all but speaking what he imagined was the truth. No such signs revealed themselves. Davey was leaning forward with his hands on the table, his jaw set, his eyes determined and unafraid. He had finally come to the point of saying aloud everything he had been saying to himself while listening to Chopin in the family room.

  “I wish you’d never been in Vietnam,” he said. “Or that you could just have put all that behind you.”

  “Swell. Now I’m talking to Alden Chancel. I thought you understood more than that. It’s so dumb, the whole idea of putting things behind you.”

  “Going nuts isn’t too smart, either,” he said. “Are you ready to listen to the truth?”

  “I guess I can hardly wait,” she said.

  31

  “LET’S START WITH the small stuff,” he said. “Are you aware of what you’re like in the middle of the night?”

  “How would you know what I’m like in the middle of the night? You’re always downstairs drinking kümmel.”

  “Did you ever try to sleep next to someone who jerks around so much the whole bed moves? Sometimes you sweat so much the sheets get soaked.”

  “You’re talking about a couple of nights last week.”

  “This is what I mean,” he said. “You don’t have any idea of what you really do.”

  She nodded. “So I’ve been having more bad nights than I thought, and that’s been disturbing for you. Okay, I get that, but I’ll sleep better now that Dick Dart is behind bars.”

  He bit his lower lip and leaned back in his chair. “When you’re having one of these bad nights, do you sometimes look around under the pillows fo
r a gun?”

  For a moment Nora was too startled to speak. “Well, yes. Sometimes, after a really bad nightmare, I guess I do that.”

  “You used to sleep with a gun under your pillow.”

  “At the Evac Hospital. How did you ever figure out what I was looking for?”

  “It came to me one night while you were sweating like crazy and rummaging under every pillow on the bed. You were hardly looking for a teddy bear. I’m just wondering, what would you do with a gun if you found one?”

  “How should I know?” He was waiting for the rest of it. Go on, she told herself, give him the rest of it. “One night two guys raped me, and a surgeon gave me a gun so I’d feel more protected.”

  “You were raped and you never told me?”

  “It was a long time ago. You never wanted to hear any more than about a tenth of what used to go on. Nobody does.” Feeling that she had explained either too little or too much, Nora assessed Davey’s response and saw equal quantities of injury and shock.

  “You didn’t think that this was something I ought to know about?”

  “For God’s sake, I wasn’t deliberately keeping a big, dark secret from you. You weren’t exactly in a hurry to tell me all about Paddi Mann and the Hellfire Club either, were you?”

  “That’s different,” he said. “Don’t look at me that way, Nora, it just is different.” His eyes narrowed. “I suppose some of these nightmares of yours are about the rape?”

  “The bad ones.”

  He shook his head, baffled. “I can’t believe you never told me.”

  “Really, Davey, apart from not wanting to think about it all that much, I guess I didn’t want to upset you.”

  He looked up at the ceiling again, drew in a huge breath, and pushed it out of his lungs. “Let’s get to the next point. This Blackbird Books stuff is just a delusion. You had me going for a while, I’ll grant you that, but the whole thing is ridiculous.”

  It was as if he had slapped her. “How can you say that? You can finally—”

  “Stop right there. There’s no way in the world my father would agree to it. If I went in there the way we planned, he’d bust me down to the mailroom. The whole thing was just a hysterical daydream. What got into me?” For a time he rubbed his forehead, eyes clamped shut. “Next point. You are not—I repeat, not— under any circumstances, to badger my mother into giving you her so-called manuscript. That is out.”

  “I already told you I wasn’t,” she said. “Why don’t you move on to the next point, if there is one.”

  “Oh, there are several. And we’re still dealing with the little stuff, remember.”

  She leaned back and looked at him, inwardly reeling from the irony of the situation. When he finally displayed the confidence she had been trying to encourage in him, he used it to complain about her.

  “I want you to show my father the respect he deserves. I’m sick and tired of this constant rudeness.”

  “You want me to keep quiet when he insults me.”

  “If that’s how you hear what I just said, yes. Now, about moving out of Westerholm. That’s crazy. All you want to do is run away from your problems, and on top of that you want to destroy my relationship with my parents, which I won’t let happen.”

  “Davey, Westerholm doesn’t suit us at all. New York is a lot more interesting, it’s more diverse, more exciting, more—”

  “More dangerous, more expensive. We hardly need any more excitement in our lives. I go to New York every day, remember? You want to deal with homeless people lying all over the streets and muggers around every corner? You’d go crazier than you already are.”

  “You actually think I’m crazy?”

  He shook his head and held up his hands. “Forget about it. We’re getting into the serious stuff now. Let’s consider the way Natalie Weil reacted to you in the police station. She went nuts. And it wasn’t because of me. It wasn’t because of that cop. It was because 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 get out. Now I’m wondering whether or not you remember doing all this. Because you really did seem startled when Natalie started screaming, and I don’t think you’re that good an actress, Nora. I think you must have had some kind of psychotic break.”

  “I kept her locked up in an empty building. I guess I must have thrown all that blood around her bedroom, too. What else did I do? Torture her? Did I let her starve?”

  “You tell me,” Davey said. “But from the way she acted—the way she looked—I’d say both.”

  “You astound me.”

  “The feeling is mutual.”

  Nora regarded him during the silence which followed this exchange, thinking that he had somehow managed to become a person she did not at all know. “Would you mind telling me why I would do all this to Natalie Weil, whom I like? And whom I haven’t seen, in spite of what you told Holly Fenn, for almost two years?”

  For the first time during this confrontation, Davey began to look uncomfortable. He turned some thought over in his mind, and the discomfort moved visibly into anger. “Dear me, what in the world could it be? Wow, I wonder.”

  “Well, I do,” Nora said. “Apparently it’s staring me in the face, but I can’t see it.”

  “Is this really necessary? At this point, I mean?”

  “You bastard,” she said. “You want me to guess?”

  “You don’t have to guess, Nora. You just want me to say it.”

  “So say it.”

  He rolled his head back and looked at her as if she had just asked him to eat a handful of dirt. “You know about me and Natalie. Satisfied now?”

  “You and Natalie Weil?”

  Wearily, he nodded.

  “You were having an affair with Natalie Weil?”

  “Our sex life was hardly wonderful, was it? When we did have sex, you were turned off, Nora. The reason for that is, you started going into the Twilight Zone. I don’t know where you went, but wherever it was, there wasn’t much room in there for me.”

  “No,” she said, battling to contain the waves of rage, nausea, and disbelief rolling through her. “You cut me out. You were anxious about work, or so I thought, you had all this anxiety, and it began to affect you when we went to bed, and then you started getting even more anxious because of that, which affected you even more.”

  “It was all my fault.”

  “It was nobody’s fault!” Nora shouted. “You’re blaming me because you were sleeping with Natalie, damn her, and you know what that is? Babyish. I didn’t tell you to stick your dick into her. You thought that one up all by yourself.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “You’re not responsible. You hardly know what reality is anymore.”

  “I’m beginning to find out. When did this start? Did you drive up to her house one day and say, Gee, Natalie, old Nora and I aren’t getting it on very well anymore, how about a tumble?”

  “If you want to know how it started, I met her in the Main Street Delicatessen one day, and we started talking, and I invited her to lunch. It just sort of took off from there.”

  “How long ago was this wonderful lunch?”

  “About two months ago. I’m just wondering how you found out about it, and when you started to hatch your crazy plan.”

  “I found out about two seconds ago!” she yelled.

  “It’s going to be interesting to hear what Natalie says when she’s able to talk. Because from what I saw, you scare the shit out of her.”

  “I should,” Nora said. “But because of what she did t
o me, not the other way around.”

  At an impasse, they stared at each other for a moment. Then a recognition came to Nora. “This is why you wanted to go to her house that day. You wanted to see if you left anything behind. All that stuff you told me last night was just another Davey Chancel fairy tale.”

  “Okay, I was afraid I might have left something at her house. If I saw something, I could say I left it behind the last time we visited her.”

  “And tell me some lie about how it got there.”

  He shrugged.

  “How did Paddi Mann’s book get into Natalie’s house?”

  He smiled. “Dick Dart didn’t give it to her, that’s for sure.”

  Nora felt like throwing every dish in the kitchen at the wall. Then, in a shivering bolt of clarity, she remembered Alden’s talking to Davey on the terrace about Dick Dart, saying something like I wonder what Leland’s wife thinks about her son romancing the same women her husband seduced forty years ago. Alden had said, It’d be a strange boy who did that, wouldn’t you think? Alden had been the man Natalie called “the Prune.” Alden had probably taken the photographs in Natalie’s kitchen. No longer smiling, Davey gave her an uncertain, guilty glance, and she knew she was right. “Natalie had an affair with your father, didn’t she?”

  Davey blinked and looked guiltier than ever. “Ah. Well. She did.” He bit his lower lip and considered her. “Funny you should know about that.”

  “I didn’t know. It just sort of hit me.”

  “I suppose she could have told you when it was going on. Didn’t you meet Natalie in the supermarket a while ago?”

  “Alden gave her those Blackbird Books,” she said, having come to another recognition. “I wondered why they were separate like that on the shelf. They were a gift from a lover, and she kept them together.”

  “She never got around to them,” Davey said.

  “No wonder, given her active life. Did she cut him off when you turned up? Was it like a trade-in deal, a newer model, like that?”