The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  “I suppose I do,” she said.

  “What would you like to do?”

  “Go to bed,” she said. “After that, maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life chopping celery for your mother. I’d have to change my name, but that’s all right, everybody else already has. After a couple of years maybe I’d get to be as perceptive as your mother thinks I am.”

  Jeffrey gave her one of his sidelong looks. “I thought you seemed unhappy back there. Disappointed, I guess.”

  “Well, you’re already perceptive enough for both of us. Yes. I guess I was expecting too much. I thought that even if everything was falling apart around me, at least I could help prove that your aunt was the real writer of Night Journey. Instead, all I managed to find out was that Hugo Driver was a nasty little creep who stole things. But if he didn’t steal Night Journey, then everything we thought we knew was all wrong. What did your aunts see in those pages, anyhow? What excited them so much?”

  “Phrases. Descriptions of landscapes, fields and fog and mountains. Most of them were sort of like Driver, but not close enough to justify calling a lawyer. There was something about death and childhood—how a child could see death as a journey.”

  “That makes a lot of sense for Katherine Mannheim, but it hardly proves anything about the book.”

  “Two other phrases got them excited, mainly. One was about a black wolf.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “The other was ‘the Cup Bearer.’ They did get excited about that.” The front of the hotel floated past them. A guitarist played bossa nova music on the terrace.

  “I don’t get it. That’s what Davey used to call your mother.”

  “You saw that picture of the two of them as little girls, where my mother is holding a cup. After that, Katherine started calling her the Cup Bearer.” He rolled the MG down into the lot. His smile flashed. “I forgot, you never read Night Journey.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “Book Eight of Night Journey is called ‘The Cup Bearer.’ That’s what really got Grace and Effie going, that and the wolf.” He pulled into an empty spot and switched off the engine.

  “But Davey was calling your mother the Cup Bearer before he could even read. How did he ever hear about it?”

  “He must have seen the photograph in her room,” Jeffrey said. “He went there looking for her sometimes, when Alden and Daisy left him alone. If he’d asked her about it, she would have told him about the nickname. That would have been another reason why the book meant so much to him later on. It reminded him of my mother.”

  Now she knew why Davey had been irritated with her when she had asked him about the origin of the nickname. Jeffrey was waiting patiently for her to finish asking questions so that they could leave the car. “Is the Cup Bearer in the book anything like your mother?”

  “Well, let’s see.” He propped his chin in his hand. “She makes this foul-smelling brew. She had no children of her own, but she raised someone else’s child. On the whole, she’s pretty fearsome. I’d have to say she’s a lot like my mother.”

  “Hugo Driver never saw that picture. Where did he get the phrase from?”

  “You got me.”

  In the warm evening air they moved toward the concrete steps, washed shining white by the lights, leading to the hotel’s back door. Half his face in shadow, the Eton cap tilted over his forehead, Jeffrey more than ever resembled a jewel thief from twenties novels. “Maybe this is none of my business,” he said. “But if she leans on you to call Davey, think hard before you do it. And if you do decide to call him, don’t tell him where you are.”

  He turned away and led her up the gleaming steps.

  76

  WITHIN A SMALL, wary portion of her mind, Nora had been awaiting the news that the hotel had only a single unoccupied room, but Jeffrey had not turned into Dan Harwich. He had returned from the desk with two keys, hers for the fifth-floor room overlooking the terrace and the top of King Street where she had taken a long bath and now, wrapped in a white robe, occupied a grandmotherly easy chair, the radio playing Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody and the air conditioner humming, reading her husband’s favorite novel as an escape from thinking about what to do next.

  Pippin Little wandered from character to character, hearing stories. Some of these characters were human and some were monsters, but they were fine storytellers one and all. Their tales were colorful and involved, full of danger, heroism, and betrayal. Some told the truth and others lied. Some wanted to help Pippin Little, but even they were not always truthful. Some of the others wanted to cut him up into pieces and turn him into tasty meat loaf, but these characters did not always lie. The truth Pippin required was a mosaic to be assembled over time and at great risk. Nearly everybody in Night Journey was related to everybody else” they made up a single enormous, contentious family, and as in any family, its members had varying memories and interpretations of crucial events. There were factions, secrets, hatreds. Pippin had to risk entering the Field of Steam to learn its lessons, or he had to avoid its contagion” if he stood among the Stones of Toon, he would acquire a golden key vital to his search, or he would be set upon by the fiends who pretended to possess a golden key.

  It was just past nine-thirty, half an hour before she had been invited to call Helen Day. Did she want to call Helen Day? Not if Jeffrey’s mother was going to do no more than try to make her feel sorry for Davey. She already felt sorry for Davey. Then she remembered that Helen Day had spoken of having to think about some matter before she could discuss it. Probably the old woman was considering telling her something she had already guessed, that the Chancels had never wanted their son.

  She might as well get as far as she could with Night Journey. If she skipped here and there, she could just about finish the hundred pages remaining. Or she could go straight to the last twenty-five pages and see if Pippin ever made it to Mountain Glade. On the night her life had started to go wrong, she had come awake in time to see Pippin racing downhill toward a white farmhouse, which she had made the mistake of calling “pretty.” Pretty, so what if it’s pretty, Davey had said, or something close” it’s all wrong, Mountain Glade isn’t supposed to be pretty. Does that place look like it contains the great secret?

  So what did this all-important place look like? Lord Night said it was “an unhallowed haunt of baleful spirits revealed by the Stones of Toon” the Cup Bearer described it as “a soul-thieving devastation you must never see"” even less satisfactorily, Gentle Friend called it “the locked prison cell wherein you have interred your greatest fear.” Nora turned over most of the pages remaining before the end of the book and skimmed down the lines before finding this paragraph:

  The great door yielded to the golden key and revealed what he had most feared, yet most desired to see, the true face of Mountain Glade. Far down the stony, snow-encrusted mountain, he beheld a misshapen cottage, a bleak habitation of lives as comfortless as itself.

  Pippin had come back home.

  A few minutes before the appointed time, Nora found the North-ampton telephone directory in a drawer and sat on the bed to use the telephone.

  “Heavenly,” said a female voice.

  Nora asked for Helen Day, and the phone rapped down on a counter. She heard a buzz of cheerful female voices.

  “Hello, this is Helen Day.”

  Nora gave her name and added, “Sounds like you’re having a party over there.”

  “Some of the elves got home early from the Asia Society. I have to change phones.” Nora held the dead receiver while time ticked on. She moved the telephone closer to the side of the bed, stretched out, yawning, and closed her eyes.

  “Are you there? Nora? Are you all right?”

  The ceiling of a strange room hung above her head. She lay on an unfamiliar bed slightly too soft for her taste.

  “Nora?”

  The strangeness around her again became the room at the top of the Northampton Hotel. “I think I fell asleep for a s
econd.”

  “I have at least half an hour before anybody’s going to need me again. Can you talk for a bit, or do you want to forget about it and go back to sleep?”

  “I’m fine.” She yawned as quietly as possible.

  “I often think about Davey. He was such a darling little fellow. I want to hear whatever you can tell me about him. What is he like now? How would you describe him?”

  “He’s still a darling little fellow,” Nora said.

  “Is that good?”

  Nora did not know how honest she should be, nor how harsh an honest description of Davey would be. “I have to admit that being a darling little fellow at the age of forty has its drawbacks.”

  “Is he kind? Is he good to people?”

  Now Nora understood what Helen Day was asking. “He isn’t anything like his father, I have to say that. The problem is, he’s insecure, and he worries a lot, and he’s frustrated all the time.”

  “I suppose he’s working for his father.”

  “Alden keeps him under his thumb,” Nora said. “He pays Davey a lot of money to do these menial jobs, so Davey is convinced he can’t do anything else. As soon as his father raises his voice, Davey gives up and rolls over like a puppy.”

  Helen Day said nothing for a moment. “Do you and Davey go to the Poplars often?”

  “At least once a week. Usually on Sundays.”

  “How are relations between Alden and you?”

  “Strained? Rocky? He put up a good front for about six months, but then he started to show how he really felt.”

  “Is he civil, at least?”

  “Not anymore. He despises me. I did this stupid thing and Daisy went out of her mind, so Alden called Davey on the carpet and said that unless he left me, he’d fire him from Chancel House and cut him out of his will.”

  Helen Day was silent. “I had the feeling that you had something else in mind when you asked me to call,” Nora said.

  “Alden is blackmailing Davey into leaving you.”

  “That’s the general idea. I tried to convince him that we didn’t need Alden’s money, but I don’t think I did a very good job.”

  “What was this thing that gave Alden his excuse?”

  “Daisy talked me into reading her book. When she called me up to talk about it, she went on a kind of rampage. Alden blamed me.”

  “He’s a terrible bully. I respect the man no end, but that’s what he is.”

  “I don’t respect him. He never wanted Davey, but he can’t let him go. All Davey’s life he’s suffered from the feeling that he’s not the real Davey Chancel, so he’ll never be good enough.”

  “I was afraid of this,” Helen Day said. “Alden’s making him pay.”

  “Lincoln did the same thing, didn’t he? He forced Alden and Daisy to adopt a grandson, and they went along for the sake of the money. Isn’t that what you were thinking about telling me? You didn’t want to say it in front of Jeffrey.”

  Again Helen Day waited a long time to speak. “I wish I could discuss that subject, but I can’t.”

  “I already know. There was something just like it in Daisy’s book.”

  “Daisy was furious with both of them.”

  “She didn’t want him, either. I’m surprised they ever had a child in the first place.”

  Helen Day said, “I suppose they were surprised, too.”

  “You were at the Poplars when the first one was born. You saw them go through all that.”

  “I did.”

  “ ‘The uproar,’ you called it.”

  “That’s exactly the right word. Noise day and night, shouting and yelling.”

  “And you think Davey ought to know why his parents have always treated him the way they do. That he was only a way for Alden to stay in his father’s will.”

  Silence.

  “Alden made you promise, didn’t he? He made you promise never to tell Davey about this.” Another recognition came to her. “He made you leave, and he gave you enough money to start up your own business.”

  “He gave me the chance I needed.”

  “You’ve been grateful ever since, but you’ve never felt right about it.”

  After a pause, the old woman said, “He shouldn’t be playing the same dirty trick on his son that his father played on him. That makes me very unhappy.”

  “Did they even want the first child? They must have had it because of Lincoln.”

  “If you guess, I’m not telling you. Do you understand? Keep guessing. You’re doing an excellent job so far.”

  “So they didn’t. How did the first one die?”

  “I thought you said that Daisy wrote about this in her book.”

  “She did, but she changed everything.” An amazing thought flared in Nora’s mind. “Did Daisy kill the baby? It’s a terrible thing to say, but she’s almost crazy enough to have done it, and Lincoln and Alden wouldn’t have had any trouble hushing it up.”

  “The only thing Daisy Chancel ever killed was a bottle,” said Helen Day. “What would you do with an unwanted baby?”

  “You gave yours to your relatives.”

  “But what would most people do?”

  “Give it up for adoption,” Nora said.

  “That’s right.”

  “But then why make up a story about it dying? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Keep guessing.”

  “You give up one child and then adopt another one? I don’t even know if that’s possible. No agency would give a child to a couple that had given their own away.”

  “Sounds right to me,” said Helen Day.

  “So the first one died. It must have been a crib death. Unless Alden murdered it.”

  “What did Daisy put in her book?”

  “It was all mixed up. There was a child, and then it was gone. The Lincoln character rages around, but half the time he’s in a Nazi uniform. Lincoln Chancel didn’t wear Nazi uniforms, did he?”

  “Mr. Chancel collected Nazi flags, uniforms, sashes, armbands, things like that. After he died, Alden asked me to burn them. You have to guess, Nora. Do you guess the baby died?”

  “I guess it didn’t die,” Nora said. “I guess it was adopted.”

  “That’s a good guess.”

  “But . . .” A moment from Daisy’s book played itself out in her mind: Adelbert Poison squabbling with Clementine on his rotting terrace. Nora tried to remember what he had said about Egbert—some word Daisy had written. What had actually happened to Davey, the only sequence of actions which made sense out of these uproars, came to her an instant before she recalled the word, which was reclaim. It felt as though a bomb had gone off in her chest.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “They couldn’t have.”

  After she said what was in her mind, she had no doubt that she was right. “They had Davey adopted, and then Lincoln made them take him back. There was no first Davey. Davey was the first Davey.”

  “Sounds like a pretty good guess to me,” said Helen Day. “The Chancels have grand imaginations. Everyday truth doesn’t stand a chance.”

  Nora let her idea of their crime speak for itself. “Neither one of them ever wanted him. They had to take him back for the sake of the money. They would have been happier if he had died.”

  “And Alden’s been making him pay ever since.”

  “He’s been making him pay ever since,” Nora echoed.

  “I was right about you. You do see more than most other people.”

  “They lied to him all through his life. How old was he when they got him back?”

  “About six months. The other family didn’t want to lose him, but Lincoln made Alden and Daisy go up to New Hampshire, and they said all the right things and got him back.”

  “Everybody believed that their child had died. The only person who knew what had happened was you. When Davey got older, they were afraid you’d tell him the truth, so they made you leave.”

  Helen Day sighed. “One of the hardest things I ever did in my life. I
could see Jeffrey whenever I wanted, and I knew he was with people who loved him. But Davey was all alone. When Mr. Chancel died, they just ignored him. They’re fine people, but they didn’t want to be parents.”

  Nora was still reeling. “How can you say they’re fine people when you know what they did?”

  “It isn’t so easy to judge people when you understand them. Alden has a cold heart and he’s a bully, but I know why. His father. That’s the pure and simple truth.”

  “I bet that’s right,” said Nora.

  “You never knew Lincoln Chancel. Mr. Chancel had more energy, brains, and drive than any other six men put together. He was a fighter. Some of the things he fought for were wrong and bad, and he didn’t give a hoot about the law unless it happened to be on his side, but he didn’t pussyfoot through life—he roared. There were times when I was angrier at him than I’ve ever been at anyone, but there was something magnificent about him. I always thought Mr. Chancel was a lot like my sister, with everything turned inside out. Neither one of them was very nice, but if they’d been nice people they wouldn’t have been so impressive.”

  “But he was a monster.”

  “You have to have a saint inside you to be a monster. Mr. Chancel caused a lot of damage, but his heart wasn’t cold, not at all. When I went to Shorelands, who do you suppose tried hardest to find my sister? Who talked Georgina into letting me stay four days? Mr. Chancel. Who went out into the woods with me and the policemen? He had his businesses to run, he had his ticker tape and his telephone calls, but he did more to help find Katherine than any of those writers.”

  “I see,” said Nora.

  “I hope you do. And he saw what kind of shape I was in, with my husband dead and my son gone and my heart broken over poor Katherine, and he offered me a job at twice what I was getting, plus room and board.”

  “You feel strongly about him.”