The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  “Whom do I see upon first entering the Baghdad of the Main House lounge but, sensibly engaged with a pretty boy, my life’s ever-sensible companion? Salvation! He had arrived to rescue me from the Hovel! Down flaps Milady, attired in even gaudier rags, face a-glow with fresh paint, to screech introductions to my own, yet not my own MF but his virtual doppelgänger, MF2, who in fact is last year’s literary darling, Merrick Favor, and the boy, an actually not-terribly-androgynous young woman revealed to be Katherine Mannheim, whose work appeals to me. As does Katherine herself, due to her prickly unsentimental good nature, her stylish unstylishness, her caus-tic wit, and, not least, her readiness to admit dismay at our hostess and her realm. And also, alas, to the Favored one, due no doubt to all of the above save the last, Well-Favored being too polite for words, but more than these to her physical attractions. MF2 tolerates my intrusion, and we three discuss our current projects, I already in thrall to 2, he eyeing the girl. 2 at work on a novel, of course, at which KM declares herself ‘unwriting’ a novel. I ask about unwriting, and she replies, ‘Just like writing, only in reverse.’ We murmur admirations of Georgina, which 2 sweetly takes at face value. Among the others I recognize Bill Tidy from publicity photos—awkward, shy, and out of sorts, I must make common cause with him soon—and a bearded string bean who must be Austryn Fain. (At dinner I will be across from him, and yep, he is, fain would I lament he is a talentless lunkhead intent on buttering up Milady, even unto exclaiming over her tacky collection of ‘art,’ which consists of a jumbled crowd of earnest daubs all but obliterating her prize, a fine Mary Cassatt, and her only other decent piece, a moody Redon vastly preferred by me.) 2 shares lodgings with Lunk-head and pretends not to be displeased, and Lunkhead, as misguided as his roommate, shares 2’s yearnings for KM. In a corner lurks a bedraggled soul later revealed to be one Hugo Driver, of whom the better must remain less said. Invited to drink, I strike a blow for the proletariat by requesting an un-posh Wine Spo-dee-o-dee, half red wine, half gin, oft served at the paternal inn, and KM delights by putting down her bubbly and asking for a lethal Top-and-Bottom, equal parts port and gin. These are wincingly delivered.

  “Dinner likewise consists of sweet and raw in equal portions, for while KM coruscates and gorgeous 2 is resolutely amiable, our hostess utters dilations upon the Germanic Soul. I deflect attention to the paintings. Mary Cassatt receives her due, and the earnest daubers are praised to the skies, creepy Fain chiming in. I remark upon the little Redon, which displeased Milady screeches she installed only because of its name. What does Miss Mannheim think of the wondrous Lockesly portrait of yon peasant before his sheepfold? enquires Georgina, seeking to restore the proper moral tone. ‘I think,’ said KM, ‘of Aristotle Contemplating the Home of Buster.’ ‘Oh my dear,’ smirks Georgina, ‘you mean, you surely intend to say . . .’ ‘That bellwether is a Buster if I ever saw one,’ said KM, and sharply we returned to the magnificence of all things Teutonic.”

  Mark Foil looked up from the diary and gave Nora an almost apologetic glance. “Creeley fell into this tone when he was rattled or insecure, and alcohol always encouraged his showy side. He mentions only one Wine Spo-dee-o-dee, something he only drank when he wanted to offend people he thought were being pretentious, but I’m pretty sure he had at least three of them. Of course he loved the girl’s ordering a Top-and-Bottom, it proved they were two of a mind. They used to talk about their ‘outsider drinks.’ ”

  “Outsider drinks,” Nora said, jolted by another reference to Paddi Mann.

  “Creeley learned about them from the musicians who used to come to the family bar. But he also meant that the two of them were outsiders at Shorelands. The joke about Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer took care of her, and Georgina wasn’t completely obtuse, she at least sensed that Creeley thought she was absurd, so he was on the outs, too. Which meant we have this little situation here.”

  “What did Driver steal?” Nora asked.

  Two loud thumps came from the other side of the door. Andrew Martindale walked in, tapping the face of his watch with a satisfied expression on his face. “Thirty-three minutes, a world record. How are we doing?”

  “As usual, I’ve been talking too much,” said Foil. He pulled up his sleeve to glance at his own wristwatch. “We still have plenty of time if we don’t dawdle on the way.”

  Martindale went to a wing chair on the far side of the room, where he crossed his legs and composed himself.

  “Where were we?” Foil asked.

  “Stealing,” Nora said.

  “We were stealing something?” said Martindale.

  “Hugo Driver was stealing something.” Foil opened the red diary and turned pages. “This was a few days before Lincoln Chancel’s arrival, and all sorts of trunks and boxes, even furniture, had been delivered to Rapunzel and set up in the tower. Chancel insisted on his own bed, so it came on a truck and was carried up into the tower, and the old one went into the Main House basement. He had a ticker tape machine put in, so he could keep up with the stock market. A big carton of cigars arrived from Dunhill. A catering company installed a mahogany bar in one room and stocked it with bottles.”

  Foil examined a page. “Here we are, the day before Chancel’s arrival. Like good outsiders, Creeley and Katherine Mannheim had been indulging in Top-and-Bottoms, and in the middle of dinner he had to leave the table to visit the bathroom. Who should he spot acting fishy in the lounge but good old D&D, Hugo Driver, who had left the dining room without anyone’s noticing.

  “I did not even see him at first, and I might not have seen him at all if he hadn’t sucked in enough air to fill a balloon and followed that by kicking one of the legs of the sofa. When I looked toward the source of these noises, I observed KM’s embroidered bag sliding down the back of the sofa and coming to rest on the seat with a distinct rattle. D&D, whom I had thought wrapped in his usual nervous gloom back at the table, emerged around the side of the sofa and slid something into the right pocket of his shabby houndstooth jacket. He twitched the flap over the pocket and tried to face me down. What a pathetic creature it is. I stopped moving and smiled at it and in a very quiet voice asked it what it was doing. I believe it all but fainted. I said that if it replaced the stolen object at once, I would keep silent. The nasty sneak bared its teeth and informed me that Miss Mannheim had requested that it bring her a pillbox from an inner compartment of the bag, and that had I not been fixated on Rick Favor, I would have overheard the exchange. I had observed KM whispering to D&D, and its dank desperate glee at having been so favored, but that had been all. It produced the proof of its innocence, a small silver pillbox. Soon after my return from the bathroom, another laborious dinner and its hymns to Nietzsche and Wagner happily in the past, I inserted myself into the scented region between ‘Rick’ (!!) and KM and described what I had seen and said. KM brandished the pillbox, and 2 unsubtly implied I had imagined the theft. I implored her to look through the bag, and when she complied I saw, though 2 did not, an amused expression cross her features. ‘Who steals my purse steals trash,’ she said. Excited now, dear 2 prepared himself to assault D&D, but was stayed by KM’s saying that no, nothing was missing, certainly nothing of value, and he had after all produced the invaluable box, from which she then extracted a minute ivory pill and lodged it like a sweet beneath her pointed tongue.

  “But two weeks later,” Foil said, “while everyone else paid court to Lincoln Chancel, Driver slipped a pair of Georgina’s silver sugar tongs into his pocket, and Creeley saw him do it. The first person he told was Merrick Favor, and Favor called him a degenerate and said that if he didn’t stop slandering Hugo Driver, he’d punch him in the face.”

  “Speaking of degenerates,” Andrew Martindale said from his distant chair, “the lunatic who escaped from jail in Connecticut is on the loose in Springfield, what about that? Dick Dirt?”

  “Dart,” Nora croaked, and cleared her throat. “Dick Dart.”

  “He was in a motel on the other side of town. Whe
n the police got there, all they found was a corpse cut to pieces in one of the rooms. No sign of Dart. The reporter said the body looked like an anatomy lesson.”

  Nora’s face felt hot.

  Foil was watching her. “Are you all right, Ms. Eliot?”

  “You have to drive to Provincetown, and we’re keeping you.”

  “Let me worry about getting us to Cape Cod in time. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes. It’s just . . .” She tried to invent a reasonable-sounding explanation for her distress. “I live in Connecticut, in Westerholm, actually, and I knew some of Dick Dart’s victims.”

  Andrew Martindale looked sympathetic, Mark Foil concerned. “How terrible for you. Did you ever meet this Dart person?”

  “Briefly,” she said, and tried to smile.

  “Would you like to break for a couple of minutes?”

  “No, thank you. I’d like to hear the rest.”

  Foil looked down again at the book open in his hands. “Let’s see if I can boil this down. Lincoln Chancel arrived on schedule and almost immediately turned Hugo Driver into a kind of servant, sending him on errands, generally exploiting him in every way. Driver seems to have gloried in the role, as if he expected to keep the job when the month was over. Poor Creeley was left out in the cold. I gather that Merrick Favor mentioned his accusations to one or two people, and after that both he and Katherine Mannheim were out of favor with their hostess. She more than Creeley, actually, because she quickly became absorbed with her ‘unwriting,’ whatever that meant, and even skipped a few dinners to work on it. This put her in such disfavor that everybody began to feel that it was only a matter of time before Georgina booted her out, as she’d been known to do when a guest seriously disappointed her.

  “One night they all took part in a ceremony called ‘the Ultimate,’ which took place in an area called Monty’s Glen. I don’t know any more about it, except that it was boring. All Creeley said in his diary was ’the Ultimate, yawn, glad that’s over.’ But the next day all the excitement began. After lunch, Creeley was out walking through the gardens. Merrick Favor came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder, and Creeley all but passed out. For a second, he thought Favor had boiled over and wanted to hit him, but instead he apologized to Creeley. Hugo Driver really was a thief, or so he strongly suspected. Then he explained himself.

  “Favor had been trailing after Katherine Mannheim through the gardens, hoping to have a word alone with her, but every time she sat down for a moment, one of the other men popped through an opening in a hedge and sat down beside her. The last one had been Driver, and Favor had watched them say a few words to each other until Miss Mannheim got up and walked away through a gap in the hedges. Favor had started to go toward her when he saw Driver notice that she had left her bag lying half open on the bench, and he stopped to watch what would happen. Driver glanced around”—Foil imitated the quick movements of a man who wishes not to be observed—“and moved closer to the bag. From where he was standing, Favor couldn’t see Driver dip into the bag, and Driver was clever enough not to look at his hands. Favor was pretty sure what was going on, anyhow, and he was almost certain that he did see Driver slide some kind of object into his jacket pocket, so he came out of hiding and confronted the little weasel. Driver denied everything. He even said he’d had enough of these accusations and intended to complain to Georgina. Off he went. Favor took the bag to Miss Mannheim and told her what he’d seen. When she looked in the bag, she laughed and said, ‘Who steals my trash steals trash.’ That night she disappeared.”

  “After Favor thought he saw Driver stealing something from her bag,” Nora said.

  “Right. She didn’t show up for dinner. Georgina was irritated and foul to everyone, even Lincoln Chancel. Late at night, Creeley went out for a walk and came across Chancel and Driver near Bill Tidy’s cottage, and Chancel was extraordinarily rude to him. He told him to stop sneaking around. The next night, again no Katherine Mannheim, and after dinner, Georgina led the entire party to Gingerbread on the pretext of seeing whether Miss Mannheim was ill. Everybody could sense that unless they found Katherine Mannheim in a high fever and too weak to get out of bed, Georgina was going to throw her out on the spot. Instead, she was gone. She’d taken off sometime between the previous afternoon and that night. Georgina didn’t even seem surprised, Creeley wrote. She behaved as though she expected to find an unlocked door and empty cottage. ‘I am sorry to say,’ she said, ‘that Miss Mannheim appears to have jumped the wall.’ And that was that. She had a number for one of Miss Mannheim’s sisters and called her to ask her to remove the few things left behind in the bungalow, and the next day the sister arrived. She had no idea where Miss Mannheim could have gone. She wasn’t in her apartment in New York, and she hadn’t spoken to anyone in her family. She was unpredictable, and she’d previously disappeared from places where she’d felt uncomfortable. But her sister did have one huge worry.”

  “That she was dead,” Nora said.

  “You’ve heard about her weak heart. The sister was afraid that she might have wandered into the woods and suffered heart failure, so she insisted on calling in the police. Georgina was furious but gave in. For a couple of days, the Lenox police questioned the guests and staff at Shorelands. They searched the grounds and the woods. In the end, it seemed pretty clear that she had run off, and a week later, the summer was over.”

  “And then all these deaths,” Nora said.

  “Like a plague. Georgina must have felt some sort of renewal was called for, because she immediately paid for a lot of extensive renovations, but all those deaths cast a long shadow over the place.”

  “There’s going to be a long shadow over us,” Andrew Martindale said.

  “One more minute.” Foil consulted his watch and skipped over a thick wad of pages. “I want you to hear something from the end, so you’ll know as much as I do about Creeley’s death.” He looked up again. “If you learn anything at all that might shed light on this, I’d appreciate being let in on it. I know it isn’t likely, but I do want to ask.”

  “I’ll tell you about anything I find,” Nora said.

  “It’s so enigmatic. Here’s what Creeley wrote in his journal three days before he killed himself.

  “All at once, a beam of light pierces the depression I’ve been in since leaving Shorelands. It seems there is hope after all, and from a most Unexpected Quarter. Interest in high places! What a blessed turn, if all goes as it should.

  “Then this, the next day.

  “Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Done. Finished. I should have known. At least I did not babble to MF. How cruel, to be written only to be unwritten.

  “And that’s it, that’s all, that’s the last entry. I didn’t hear from him on either of those days. When I tried to call, the operator told me his phone was off the hook, and I assumed he was working. I knew he’d been unhappy for a long time, so it was good to think he was working hard. But he never let three days go by without at least talking to me, and the next day, when I still couldn’t get through to him, I drove to his apartment after my last patient.”

  Foil paused for a moment. “It was a dark, miserable day. Freezing. We’d had a terrible winter. I don’t think we’d seen sunlight for a month. I got to his building. Creeley had the top floor of a duplex, with a separate entrance to his part of the house. After I got out of the car, I climbed over a snowbank and looked up at his windows. All his lights were on. I went up the steps to the porch and rang his bell. His downstairs neighbors, the owners, were both out, and I could hear their dog barking. They had a collie named Lady—high-strung, like all collies. That’s a desolate sound, you know, a dog barking in an empty house. Creeley didn’t answer. I thought he’d turned up his radio to drown out the sound of the dog, which he had to do off and on during the day. He didn’t mind, Creeley played music all the time when he was writing, and the only problem with turning it up was that sometimes he couldn’t hear the bell. I rang it
a few more times. When I still didn’t hear him coming down the stairs, I took out my key and let myself in, just like a hundred times before.

  “As soon as I got in, I heard his radio going full blast. ‘Let’s Dance,’ Benny Goodman’s theme song. It was one of the remote broadcasts they used to do in those days. I went up the stairs calling out his name. Lady was going crazy. Before I got to the top of the stairs, I started smelling something. I should have recognized the smell right away. I opened his living room door, but he wasn’t there. I hollered his name and turned the radio down. That blasted collie got even louder. I knocked on the bathroom door and looked in the kitchen. Then I tried the bedroom.

  “Creeley was lying on his bed. Blood everywhere. Everywhere. He’d used the shotgun his father had given him for his sixteenth birthday, when he still had hopes of normal male hobbies for his son. I went into shock. I just shut down. It seemed like I stood there for a long time, but it could only have been a couple of minutes. After a little while, I called the police and waited like a robot until they came. And that was that. Try as I might—and I tried, all right—I never understood why he did it.”

  62

  “WELL, I UNDERSTAND why he did it.” Harwich turned out of the driveway onto Oak Street and rotated his shoulders several times, as if trying to shake off the atmosphere of the past thirty minutes. He leaned sideways to see himself in the rearview mirror and ruffled the tight gray curls on the side of his head. “Mark is an okay guy, but he doesn’t want to see the truth.”