The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  “Harmless fun and games.” He moved aside, and she walked out into the hall.

  “Harmless?”

  Nora turned toward the bedroom, thinking that maybe the Chancels had a point after all, and secrets should stay secret. Murder stripped you bare, exposed you to pitiless judgment. What you thought you shared with one other person was . . . She stopped walking.

  “Think of something?”

  She turned around. “A man took those pictures.”

  “Kind of a waste if her sister took them.”

  “But there aren’t any pictures of him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you think there ever were?”

  “You mean, do I think that at some point he was on the bed and she was holding the camera? I think something like that probably happened, sure. I took your picture, now you take mine. What happened to the pictures of the man?”

  “Oh,” she said, remembering the wide gaps on that section of the board.

  “Ah. I love these little moments of enlightenment.”

  This little moment of enlightenment made her feel sick to her stomach.

  “I’m kind of curious to hear what you know about her boy-friends.”

  “I wish I did know something.”

  “Guess you didn’t notice the pictures, last time you were here.”

  “I didn’t go into the kitchen.”

  “How about the time before that?”

  “I don’t remember if I went into the kitchen. If I did, I certainly didn’t see those pictures.”

  “Now comes the time when I have to ask about this,” Fenn said. “Did you and your husband ever join in your friend’s games? If you say yes, I won’t tell Slim and Slam in there. Got any pictures at home with Mrs. Weil in them?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Your husband’s a good-looking guy. Little younger than you, isn’t he?”

  “Actually,” she said, “we were born on the same day. Just in different decades.”

  He grinned. “You probably know where the bedroom is.”

  15

  THROUGH THE OPEN door Nora saw a rising arc of brown spots sprayed across an ivory wall. Beneath the spray, the visible corner of the bed looked as if rust-colored paint had been poured over the sheets.

  Fenn spoke behind her. “You don’t have to go in there if you don’t feel like it. But you might want to reconsider the idea that she isn’t dead.”

  “Maybe it isn’t her blood,” she said, and fumed at Davey for having made her say such a thing.

  “Oh?”

  She made herself walk into the room. Dried blood lay across the bed, and stripes and splashes of blood blotted the carpet beside it. The sheets and pillows had been slashed. Stiff flaps of cotton folded back over clumps of rigid foam that looked like the entrails of small animals. It all looked sordid and sad. The sadness was not a surprise, but the sense of wretchedness gripped her heart.

  Slumped in the far corner beside Officer LeDonne, Davey glanced up at her and shook his head.

  She turned to Fenn, who raised his eyebrows. “Did you find a camera? Did Natalie have a camera?”

  “We didn’t find one, but Slim and Slam say all the pictures in there were taken with the same camera. One of those little Ph.D. jobs.”

  “Ph.D.?”

  “Push here, dummy. An auto-focus. Like a little Olympus or a Canon. With a zoom feature.”

  In other words, Natalie’s camera was exactly like theirs, not to mention most of the other cameras in Westerholm. The bedroom felt airless, hot, despairing. A lunatic who liked to dress women up like sex toys had finally taken his fantasies to their logical conclusion and used Natalie Weil’s bed as an operating table. Nora wondered if he had been seeing all five women at the same time.

  She was glad she wasn’t a cop. There was too much to think about, and half of what you had to think about made no sense. But the worst part of standing here was standing here.

  She had to say something. What came out of her mouth was “Were there pictures in the other houses? Like the ones in the kitchen?” She barely heard the detective’s negative answer” she had barely heard her own question. Somehow she had walked across several yards of unspattered tan carpet to stand in front of four long bookshelves. Two feet away, Davey gave her the look of an animal in a cage. Nora fled into the safety of book titles, but she found no safety. In the living room Fenn had said something about Natalie’s affection for horror novels, and here was the proof, in alphabetical order by author’s name. These books had titles like The Rats and Vampire Junction and The Silver Skull. Here were They Thirst, Hell House, The Books of Blood, and The Brains of Rats. Natalie had owned more Dean Koontz novels than Nora had known existed, she had every Stephen King novel from Carrie to Dolores Claiborne, all of Anne Rice and Clive Barker and Whitley Strieber.

  Nora moved along the shelves as if in a trance. Here was a Natalie Weil who entertained herself with stories of vampires, dismemberment, monsters with tentacles and bad breath, cannibalism, psychotic killers, degrading random death. This person wanted fear, but creepy, safe fear. She had been like a roller coaster aficionado for whom tame county fair roller coasters were as good as the ones that spun you upside down and dropped you so fast your eyes turned red. It was all just a ride.

  At the end of the bottom shelf her eyes met the names Marletta Teatime and Clyde Morning above a sullen-looking crow, the familiar logo of Blackbird Books, Chancel House’s small, soon-to-be-discontinued horror line. Alden had expected steady, automatic profits from these writers, but they had failed him. Gaudy with severed heads and mutilated dolls, the covers of their books came back from the distributors within days of publication. Davey had argued to keep the line, which managed to make a small amount of money every season, in part because Teatime and Morning never got more than two thousand dollars per book. (Davey sometimes frivolously suggested that they were actually the same person.) Alden dismissed Davey’s argument that he had condemned the books by refusing to promote or publicize them” the beauty of horror was that it sold itself. Davey said that his father treated the books like orphaned children, and Alden said damn right, like orphaned children, they had to pull their own weight.

  “Mrs. Chancel?” said Holly Fenn.

  Another title shouted at her from the bottom shelf. Night Journey protruded at a hasty, awkward angle from between two Stephen King encyclopedias as if Natalie had crammed it in anywhere before running to the door.

  “Mr. Chancel?”

  She looked at the D’s, but Natalie had owned no other Driver novels.

  “Sorry I wasn’t more helpful.” Davey’s voice sounded as if it came from the bottom of a well.

  “No harm in trying.” Fenn stepped out of the doorway.

  Davey shot Nora another anguished glance and moved toward the door. Nora followed, and LeDonne came along behind. The four of them moved in single file toward the living room, where Slim and Slam faced forward, automatically shedding any signs of individuality. Davey said, “Excuse me, I have to go back.”

  Fenn flattened his bulk against the wall to let Davey get by. Nora and the two policemen watched him go down the corridor and swerve into the bedroom. LeDonne quizzed Fenn with a look, and Fenn shook his head. After a couple of seconds, Davey emerged, more distressed than ever.

  “Forget something?” Fenn asked.

  “I thought I saw something—couldn’t even tell you what it was. But—” He spread his hands, shaking his head.

  “That happens,” Fenn said. “If it comes back to you, don’t be shy about giving me a call.”

  When they turned to go down the stairs, the two FBI men split apart and looked away.

  16

  “WHAT DID YOU think you saw?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You went back in the bedroom. You had something on your mind. What was it?”

  “Nothing.” He looked sideways at her, so shaken he was white. “It was a dumb idea. I should have just gone home.�
��

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I wanted to see that house.” He paused. “And I wanted you to see it.”

  “Why?”

  He waited a second before answering. “I thought if you looked at it, you might stop having nightmares.”

  “Pretty strange idea,” Nora said.

  “Okay, it was a rotten idea.” His voice grew louder. “It was the worst idea in the history of the world. In fact, every single idea I’ve ever had in my life was really terrible. Are we in agreement now? Good. Then we can forget about it.”

  “Davey.”

  “What?”

  “Do you remember when I asked if you were upset?”

  “No.” He hesitated, then sighed again, and his glance suggested the arrival of a confession. “Why would I be upset?”

  Nora gathered herself. “You must have been surprised by what your father said about Hugo Driver.”

  He looked at her as if trying to recall Alden’s words. “He said he was a great writer.”

  “You said he was a great writer.” After a second of silence she said, “What I mean is his attitude.”

  “Yeah,” Davey said. “You’re right. That was a surprise. He sort of jolted me, I guess.”

  For Nora the next few seconds filled with a hopeful tension.

  “I’ve got something on my mind, I guess I was worked up. . . . I don’t want to fight, Nora.”

  “So you’re not mad at me anymore.”

  “I wasn’t mad at you. I just feel confused.”

  Two hours with his parents had turned him back into Pippin Little. If he needed a Green Knight, she volunteered on the spot. She had asked for a job, and here one was sitting next to her. She could help Davey become his successful adult self. She would help him get the position he deserved at Chancel House. Her other plans, befriending Daisy and moving to New York, were merely elements of this larger, truer occupation. Start, she commanded herself. Now.

  “Davey,” she said, “what would you like to be doing at Chancel House?”

  Again, he seemed to force himself to think. “Editorial work.”

  “Then that’s what you should be doing.”

  “Well, yeah, but you know, Dad . . .” He gave her a resigned look.

  “You’re not like that disgusting guy who takes old ladies to lunch, you’re not Dick Dart. What job do you want most?”

  He bit the lining of his cheek before deciding to declare what she already suspected. “I’d like to edit Blackbird Books. I think I could build Blackbird into something good, but Dad is canceling the line.”

  “Not if you make him keep it.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. But for sure you have to come at him with a plan.” She thought for a moment. “Get all the figures on the Blackbird Books. Give him projections, give him graphs. Have lists of writers you want to sign up. Print up a presentation. Tell him you’ll do it on top of your other work.”

  He turned his head to gape at her.

  “I’ll help. We’ll put something together that he won’t be able to refuse.”

  He looked away, looked back, and filled his lungs with air. “Well, okay. Let’s give it a try.”

  “Blackbird Books, here we come,” she said, and remembered seeing the row of titles by Clyde Morning and Marletta Teatime in Natalie’s bedroom. Unlike Natalie’s other books, these had not been filed alphabetically, but separated, at the end of the bottom shelf.

  “You know, it might work,” Davey said.

  Nora wondered if putting the books together meant they were significantly better or worse than other horror novels. Maybe what was crucial about them was that they were published by Blackbird—Chancel House.

  “I was thinking once that we could do a series of classics, books in the public domain.”

  “Good idea,” Nora said. Looking back, she thought that the Blackbird Books on Natalie’s shelf seemed uniformly new and unmarked, as if they had been bought at the same time and never read.

  “If we can put together a serious presentation, he’ll have to pay attention.”

  “Davey . . .” A sense of hope and expectancy filled Nora, and the question escaped her before she could call it back. “Do you ever think of moving out of Westerholm?”

  He lifted his chin. “To tell you the truth, I think about getting out of this hole just about every day. But look, I know how much living here means to you.”

  Her laughter amazed him.

  BOOK II

  PADDY’S TAIL

  THE FIRST THING PIPPIN SAW WAS THE TIP OF A LITTLE TAIL, NO WIDER THAN FOUR HORSEHAIRS BOUND TOGETHER, BUT IN SEARCH OF THE REST OF THE ANIMAL, HE FOLLOWED THE TAIL AROUND ROCKS, THROUGH TALL WEEDS, IN GREAT CIRCLES, UP AND DOWN GREAT LOOPS ON THE GRASS, AND WHEN AT LAST HE REACHED THE END OF THE LONG, LONG TAIL, HE FOUND ATTACHED TO IT A TINY MOUSE. THE MOUSE APPEARED TO

  BE DEAD.

  17

  ALTHOUGH DAVEY SEEMED moody and distracted, the following five days were nearly as happy as any Nora could remember. One other period—several weeks in Vietnam, in memory the happiest of her life—had come at a time when she had been too busy to think of anything but work. Looking back, she had said to herself, So that was happiness.

  Her first month in the Evacuation Hospital had jolted her so thoroughly that by its end she was no longer certain what she would need to get her through. Pot, okay. Alcohol, you bet. Emotional calluses, even better. At the rate of twenty to thirty surgical cases a day, she had learned about debride-ment and irrigation—clearing away dead skin and cleaning the wound against infection—worms in the chest cavity, amputations, crispy critters, and pseudomonas. She particularly hated pseudomonas, a bacterial infection that coated burn patients with green slime. During that month, she had junked most of what she had been taught in nursing school and learned to assist at high-speed operations, clamping blood vessels and cutting where the neurosurgeon told her to cut. At night her boots left bloody trails across the floor. She was in a flesh factory, not a hospital. The old, idealistic Nora Curlew was being unceremoniously peeled away like a layer of outgrown clothes, and what she saw of the new was a spiritless automaton.

  Then a temporary miracle occurred. As many patients died during or after operations, the wounded continued to scream from their cots, and Nora was always exhausted, but not as exhausted, and the patients separated into individuals. To these people she did rapid, precise, necessary things that often permitted them to live. At times, she cradled the head of a dying young man and felt that particles of her own being passed into him, easing and steadying. She had won a focused concentration out of the chaos around her, and every operation became a drama in which she and the surgeon performed necessary, inventive actions which banished or at least contained disorder. Some of these actions were elegant” sometimes the entire drama took on a rigorous, shattering elegance. She learned the differences between the surgeons, some of them fullbacks, some concert pianists, and she treasured the compliments they gave her. At nights, too alert with exhaustion to sleep, she smoked Montagnard grass with the others and played whatever they were playing that day—cards, volleyball, or insults.

  At the end of her fifth week in Vietnam, a neurosurgeon named Chris Cross had been reassigned and a new surgeon, Daniel Harwich, had rotated in. Cross, a cheerful blond mesomorph with thousands of awful jokes and a bottomless appetite for beer, had been a fullback surgeon, but a great fullback. He worked athletically, with flashes of astounding grace, and Nora had decided that, all in all, she would probably never see a better surgeon. Their entire unit mourned his going, and when his replacement turned out to be a stringy, lint-haired geek with Coke-bottle glasses and no visible traces of humor, they circled their wagons around Captain Cross’s memory and politely froze out the intruder. A tough little nurse named Rita Glow said she’d work with the clown, what the hell, it was all slice ’n’ dice anyhow, and while Nora continued her education in the miraculous under the unit’s other two surg
eons, one a bang-smash fullback, one a pianist who had learned some bang-smash tendencies from Chris Cross, she noticed that not only did geeky Dan Harwich put in his twelve-hour days with the rest of them but he got through more patients with fewer complaints and less drama.

  One day Rita Glow said she had to see this guy work, he was righteous, he was a fucking tap dancer in there, and the next morning she swapped assignments to put Nora across the table from Harwich. Between them was a paralyzed young soldier whose back looked like raw meat. Harwich told her she was going to have to help him while he cut shell fragments from the boy’s vertebrae. He was both a fullback and a pianist, and his hands were astonishingly fast and sure. After three hours, he closed the boy’s back with the quickest, neatest stitches she had ever seen, looked over at Nora, and said, “Now that I’m warmed up, let’s do something hard, okay?”

  Within three weeks she was sleeping with Harwich, and within four she was in love. Then the skies opened. Tortured, mangled bodies packed the OR, and they worked seventy-eight hours straight through. She and Harwich crawled into bed covered with the blood of other people, made love, slept for a second, and got up and did the whole thing all over again. They were shelled in the middle of operations and in the middle of the night, sometimes the same thing, and as the clarity of the earlier period shredded, details of individual soldiers burned themselves into her mind. No longer quite sane, she thrust the terror and panic into a locked inner closet.

  After three months she was raped by two dumbbell grunts who caught her as she came outside on a break. One of them hit her in the side of the head, pushed her down, and fell on her. The other kneeled on her arms. At first she thought they had mistaken her for a Vietcong, but almost instantly she realized that what they had mistaken her for was a living woman. The rape was a flurry of thumps and blows and enormous, reeking hands over her mouth” it was having the breath mashed out of her while grunting animals dug at her privates. While it went on, Nora was punched through the bottom of the world. This was entirely literal. The column of the world went from bottom to top, and now she had been smashed through the bottom of the column along with the rest of the shit. Demons leaned chattering out of the darkness.