The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  Nora said, “Welcome back.”

  “Did the police call?”

  “Natalie’s under sedation.”

  He was still collapsed into the chair as if thrown into it, and his eyes were closed.

  “It might be nice if you said something.”

  Davey opened his eyes and leaned forward, catching her eyes yet again and then quickly looking down. “When I heard you leave, I bounced around the house like a Ping-Pong ball. Finally I went for a drive, got on the expressway and headed north. No idea where I was going. I had to think. That’s what I’ve been doing all this time, driving and thinking. When I got to New Haven, I got off the highway, went to the campus, and walked around for about an hour.”

  “Eli, Eli,” Nora said. She wondered if Davey had ever associated with Dick Dart in New Haven.

  “Don’t be sarcastic, all right? Nora, I was thinking about you. This morning everything seemed so clear. About ten minutes after you left, I began to wonder. Did that sound like you? You can do some rash things, but I thought you’d draw the line a long way short of kidnapping and torture.”

  “What do you know?” Nora said.

  “I thought about what you said—that I was putting my guilt on you. But all the pieces fit together so perfectly, the whole pattern was so convincing, that it seemed like it had to be the truth. It was like one of those crossword puzzles Frank Neary and Frank Tidball do! The only part that didn’t fit was you.”

  “You debated with yourself.”

  He nodded. “The more I thought, the idea that you kidnapped Natalie got more and more ridiculous. I got back in my car and drove around New Haven. New Haven is a crummy town, once you get away from Yale.” Here he looked up at Nora, as if the irrelevance of the sentence had released him.

  “I got completely lost, if you can believe that. I spent four years in New Haven, and it isn’t that big. You know what happened? I got scared. I thought I’d never find my way out. I kept driving past the same little diner and the same little bar, and it was like I was under a curse. I almost had a breakdown.” He wiped his forehead. “After about an hour I finally drove past this pizza joint I used to go to, and I knew where I was. No kidding, I almost cried from relief. I got back on I-95. My hands were still shaking. It felt like my whole life was up in the air.”

  “Good thinking,” Nora said.

  He nodded. “I was so tired and so hungry. When I got to Cousin Lenny’s, I drove in. I grabbed a booth and ordered meat loaf and mashed potatoes. When it came, I dumped ketchup all over the meat loaf like a little kid, and when I was eating, this idea opened up in my head like a giant scroll: If I could get so lost in New Haven, you could be telling the truth. Who says all the pieces have to fit, anyway? One thing I knew for sure. Even if you did find out about me and Natalie, you could never kidnap her. That’s not you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You really didn’t, did you?”

  “I said that three or four times this morning.”

  “I was just so convinced. I ...” He shook his head and looked down again, then back up. Complicated feelings, all painful, filled his eyes. “Will it do any good if I apologize?”

  “Try it and see.”

  “I apologize for everything I said. I wish with all my heart for you to forgive me. I’m sorry that I let myself get into that thing with Natalie Weil.”

  “That thing is commonly called a bed,” Nora said.

  “You’re mad at me, you must despise me and detest Natalie.”

  “That’s about right.”

  “This morning, didn’t you say that we could eventually work things out? I want to do that, Nora. I hope you’ll forgive me. Will you take me back?”

  “Did you leave?”

  “God bless you,” said Davey, uncomfortably reminding Nora of his mother. He pushed himself out of the chair and came forward. Nora wondered if he intended to kneel in front of her. Instead, he kissed her hand. “Tomorrow we start over again.” He placed her hand on her lap and began caressing her leg. “What did you do all day?”

  “I almost drove to New York.” She moved her thigh away from his hand. “I was thinking about not coming back. Then I turned around and came back.”

  “I would have gone crazy if you hadn’t been here when I got back.”

  “Here I am.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “I have to lie down and get some sleep. I can barely stand up. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not.”

  He went toward the hallway, turned to give her a grateful look and a sketchy wave, and was gone.

  Nora leaned back against the sofa. If she had any feelings, they were like the little, black, shriveled husks left behind by a fire. She supposed that someday they would turn back into feelings.

  38

  HUNGER EVENTUALLY FORCED Nora off the sofa. Her watch said it was ten minutes to eight. Davey slept on. Nora thought he would probably wake up around midnight, fumble his way out of his clothes, and climb right back into bed to finish digesting his meat loaf and mashed potatoes, another example of Davey’s habit, when under stress, of regressing to the age of training wheels. A search of the kitchen shelves yielded a can of mushroom soup, hot diggity. She plopped the congealed gray-brown cylinder into a pot, turned on the heat, and waited for it to melt while she toasted two slices of whole-wheat bread.

  As soon as she began to spoon soup into her mouth an inner rheostat dialed itself upward, and a sense of well-being came to life within her. She’d return Daisy’s book, and that would be that. She could get over Natalie Weil, though she would never trust her again. Nora didn’t have to trust her; she never had to see or speak to the platinum cockroach again. If they met over the dairy counter at Waldbaum’s, in a nanosecond Natalie’s frisky little cockroach heels would skitter her away behind a mountain of toilet paper until Nora was in the parking lot. Pleased by this image, Nora took the last spoonful of soup, crunched the final inch of toast, and stood up to rinse the dishes.

  The telephone went off. Nora abandoned the dishes and hastened to pick it up before it awakened Davey. She said “Hello?” What followed froze her stomach before it reached her mind. A man ice cold with rage said something about an unimaginable breach of trust, something about an unspeakable intrusion, something else about devastation. At last she recognized the ranting voice as Alden Chancel’s.

  “And what I will never understand,” he was saying now, “besides the unbelievable pretension of imagining that you could offer advice about writing, is your persistence in following a course you knew to be dangerous. Didn’t it ever occur to you that your recklessness might have consequences?”

  “Alden, stop yelling at me,” Nora said.

  “You refuse to listen to people who know better than you, you pick up an axe and start swinging. You burrow in like a termite and eat away at other people’s lives. You are an outrage.”

  “Alden, I know you’re upset, but—”

  “I am not upset! I am furious! The person who is going to be upset is you!”

  “Alden, Daisy wanted me to read her manuscript. She insisted on bringing it here, she wouldn’t have let me say no.”

  “She has been laboring over this god-awful thing for decades, but until you came sidling up to her, did it ever occur to her to show it to anyone else? Daisy doesn’t solicit comments on unfinished work. You weaseled into her like you weaseled into this family, and you planted a virus inside her. You might as well have killed her outright.”

  “Alden, I was trying to help her.”

  “Help? You picked up a knife and stuck it in her heart.”

  “Alden!” Nora shouted. “None of that is true. When Daisy called me to see how I was getting on with her book, I said it was a wonderful book. She kept twisting everything I said into an insult.”

  “This surprised you? You must be feebleminded. Daisy knows her book is a chaotic mess. It can’t be anything else.”

  “I don’t know if it’s a chaotic mess or not, and neither
do you, Alden.”

  “You’re a destructive jackass, and you should be horsewhipped.”

  “Alden!” she shouted again. “Unless you calm down and try to understand what really happened, you’re going to—”

  Hair flattened on one side, clothes crisscrossed with wrinkles, Davey came into the kitchen and stared at her openmouthed.

  “That’s Dad? You’re talking to my father?”

  Nora held the telephone away from her ear. “I have to explain this to you,” she said to Davey. “Your mother misunderstood something, and now your father’s going crazy.”

  “Misunderstood what?”

  Alden’s voice bellowed from the receiver.

  “You have to stick with me on this,” Nora said. “They’re both flipping out.”

  Alden tinnily bawled Nora’s name.

  She put the receiver to her ear again. “Alden, I’m going to say one thing, and then I’m going to hang up.”

  “Let me talk to him,” Davey said.

  “No!” Nora told him. “Alden, I want you to calm down and think about what I said to you. I would never deliberately hurt Daisy. Let things quiet down, please. I’m not going to talk to you until you’re willing to listen to my side of the story.”

  “Nora, I want to talk to him.”

  “I hear my son’s voice,” Alden said. “Put him on.”

  Davey put his hand on the receiver, and Nora reluctantly surrendered it.

  “He called me a termite. He called me a jackass.”

  Davey waved for silence. “What?” He clutched his hair and fell against the counter. His fingers burrowed farther into his hair, and he gave Nora an agonized look of disbelief. “I know that, how couldn’t I know that?” He closed his eyes. Though he had clamped the receiver to his ear, Nora could still hear the clamor of Alden’s voice. “Well, she says she wanted to help Mom...I know, I know... Well, sure, but... Yeah. Okay, fifteen minutes.” He hung up the receiver. “Oh, God.”

  He looked around the kitchen as if to reassure himself that the cabinets, refrigerator, and sink were all still in place. “We’re going over there. I have to wash my face and brush my teeth. I can’t show up like I am now.”

  “Call him back and tell him we’ll come tomorrow night. We can’t go over there now.”

  “If we don’t show up in fifteen minutes, he’ll come over here.”

  “That’d be better,” Nora said.

  “If you want to piss him off even more.” Davey came across the kitchen and glowered at her. “Where is that blasted manu script, anyhow?”

  “Under the bed.”

  “Oh, God.” Davey hurried into the hallway.

  39

  BY THE TIME they reached the Post Road, Nora had described the conversations she had had with Daisy before and during her reading of the book, and by the time the barred iron fence in front of the Poplars came into view, she had finished telling him about the telephone call which had led to the present difficulty. What she had not described was the book itself. She also left out one other detail. Emitting noxious fumes, the suitcase sat in the trunk.

  “She forced it on you,” Davey said.

  “If I hadn’t agreed, she would have started screaming at me then.”

  “It doesn’t sound like she gave you any way to say no.”

  “She didn’t.”

  Davey turned into his parents’ drive. Looking at the gray stone facade of the house, Nora experienced even more tension than the sight of the Poplars usually aroused in her.

  “We ought to be able to make Dad understand that,” Davey said.

  “You’re going to have to do most of the talking.”

  When they got out of the car, Davey looked up at the house and rubbed his hands on his trousers. For a couple of seconds, neither of them moved.

  “Was the book any good, anyhow?”

  “I have no idea,” Nora said. “It’s mostly a furious attack on Alden. His name in the book is Adelbert Poison.”

  Davey closed his eyes. “What’s her name in the book?”

  “Clementine.”

  “Clementine Poison? Am I in there, too?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “What’s my name?”

  “Egbert. You almost never get out of bed.”

  “I want to get this over with and go home.” He went to the back of the car and, grunting, lifted out the suitcase. “It must be one elephant of a manuscript.”

  “You have no idea,” Nora said. “Davey, I was serious about what I said before. You’re going to have to speak up, because if I say anything, Alden is going to yell at me.”

  “He’ll yell at me, too.” Davey closed the trunk and lugged the case toward the steps. “No matter what you think you want, Nora, you can’t stay out here.”

  She and Davey slowly ascended the steps. He pushed the brass-mounted button beside the huge walnut door.

  Maria opened the door before Davey’s hand left the button. Evidently she had been posted at the entry. “Mr. Davey, Mrs. Nora, Mr. Chancel say you go to library.” She gave the suitcase an uneasy glance.

  “Is my mother in there, too?”

  “Oh no, oh no, your poor mother she can’t leave her room.” Maria stepped back and held the door.

  “When I was a little kid, he always chewed me out in the library.” In the living room, a water stain twice the size of the suitcase darkened the carpet at the foot of an empty pedestal intended for a Venetian vase. A second large stain dripped down the wall beside the fireplace.

  At the far end of the living room, the door to the library was closed. “Here goes nothing,” Davey said, and opened it.

  Wearing a blue pin-striped suit he had put on for the occasion, Alden stood up from a red leather chair at the far end of an Oriental rug bursting with violent blues and reds. “I think the first order of business is the surrender of the manuscript.”

  Davey walked toward his father as a man armed with a Swiss Army knife approaches a hungry tiger. Alden accepted the suitcase and put it down. He pointed at a tufted leather couch behind a leather-topped coffee table. “Sit.”

  “Dad—”

  “Sit.”

  They moved around the table and sat. Alden placed himself on the chair and moved his foot to press a raised button set into the floor amid the fringes of the rug.

  “Dad, none of this is—”

  “Not now.”

  The door opened to admit Jeffrey.

  “The object is now returned,” Alden said. “Take it upstairs to Mrs. Chancel and place it in her hands.”

  Jeffrey bent to pick up the suitcase and turned around to carry it off as if he were disposing of a dead animal. On his way out, he gave Nora a dark, unreadable glance. The door closed behind him.

  “You have nothing to say in this matter,” Alden told his son. “Unless, that is, you encouraged either your wife or your mother in their actions.”

  “Of course I didn’t,” Davey protested. “I told Nora to stay away from Mom’s work. I knew something terrible would happen.”

  “As it did. Now we must deal with the fallout. Your mother is in great emotional extremity. When I came home this evening, I found her weeping and hoarse from screaming. The living room was littered with broken glass. Maria was too frightened to cope, and Jeffrey, who must have understood that his role in this unhappy matter would rebound on him, was cowering in his apartment.”

  “Jeffrey?” Davey said. “What role did Jeffrey have?”

  Alden ignored him. “Of course Jeffrey was responding to a request on the part of his employer. I have spoken to him, and we can all be sure that Jeffrey will never again be involved in any transaction of this kind. But nothing like this is ever going to happen again.”

  “What did he do?” Davey asked.

  “He drove her,” Nora said.

  “Yes. He drove Daisy to the house you share with this viper.”

  “Please, Dad, don’t call her names. I want you to understand what really happened. Mom called Nora
and insisted that she read the book. She didn’t give her a chance to say no.”

  “Really.” Radiating contempt, Alden turned to Nora. “You have no free will? You don’t have the excuse of being on our payroll, except indirectly, and you cannot be said to be a friend of Daisy’s. Daisy doesn’t have friends. Were you being a dutiful little daughter-in-law?”

  “In a way, that’s right,” Nora said. “I did think I might be able to help her in some way.”

  “So you suggested that you read what she had written in order to offer editorial advice.”

  “No, just to give her someone to talk with about her book. Give her support.”

  “We see how well that worked. But you don’t deny that this evil suggestion came from you?”

  “I wanted to be helpful.”

  “I repeat. The suggestion was yours?”

  “Yes, but Davey and I talked about it, and I agreed not to pursue it. Today Daisy called me and said it was crucial that I read her book and she was coming over right away.”

  “At which point you could have told her that you were too busy, or any one of a hundred other things.”

  “She wouldn’t have accepted any excuses. If I had tried to back out, she would have been terribly insulted.”

  “You encouraged her mania instead of dampening it. But that wickedness is nothing beside the unspeakable obscenity of claiming that my wife is the author of Clyde Morning’s and Marletta Teatime’s novels.”

  “What?” Davey whirled to stare at Nora.

  “She is,” Nora told him. “In her book, there are those crosshatched scuff marks and sentences starting with ‘Indeed.’”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before this?”

  “I forgot,” she said, which was the truth. “There was so much else, it just slipped my mind.”

  Alden said, “Are you starting to see the kind of woman you married? Is a bit of light beginning to dawn?”

  “He doesn’t want you to know,” Nora said. “He doesn’t want anyone to know.”

  “Shut your vile mouth,” Alden shouted, pointing at Nora. “Not only does this lie insult my wife, who considers herself an artist and has never even read one of our horror novels, it throws mud at my firm and myself. You are endangering our reputation and mine. It’s scandalous, and I won’t stand for it.”