The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  The second grunt rolled off, the first grunt let go of her arms, and they sprinted away. She heard their footsteps and realized that now she was on the other side, with the gibbering demons; then she gathered the demons into her psychic hands and stuffed them into an inner container just large enough to hold them.

  Nora did not tell Harwich what had happened until hours later, when she looked down at the blood soaking through her clothes, thought it was hers, and fainted. A grim Harwich accepted her refusal to report the incident but followed her out of the OR on a break to pass from his hands to hers a dead officer’s hand-gun. This she kept as close as possible until her last morning in Vietnam, when she dropped it into the nurses’ latrine. Even after Dan Harwich left Vietnam, vowing that he would write (he did) and that they had a future together (they didn’t), she used her awareness of the gun beneath her pillow to fend off nightmares of the incident until she could almost think that she had forgotten it. And for years after Vietnam it was as if she really had forgotten all about it—until she had reached a kind of pro-visional, static happiness in Westerholm, Connecticut. In Westerholm, the ordinary, terrible nightmares of dead and dying soldiers had begun to be supplanted by the other, worse nightmares—about being pushed through the hole at the bottom of the world.

  Long after, Nora sometimes looked back at that exalted period before the war slammed down on her and thought: Happiness comes when you are looking elsewhere, it is a by-product, of no importance in itself.

  18

  EVERY NIGHT THAT week, Nora and Davey delved into Blackbird Books, playing with figures and trying to work out a presentation that would convince Alden. Davey remained moody and remote but seemed grateful for Nora’s help. To see what Blackbird Books were like, Nora read The Waiting Grave by Marletta Teatime and Blood Bond by Clyde Morning. Davey sounded out agents” he and Nora drew up lists of writers who might sign up with a revitalized Blackbird Books. They learned that Blackbird’s greatest appeal was its connection to Chancel House, but that Chancel House had done even less with the line than Davey had imagined.

  In 1977, its first year, Blackbird had published twelve paperback originals by writers then unknown. By 1979, half of the ten original writers had left in search of more promotion, higher advances, and better editing. In those days an assistant editor named Merle Marvell had handled the line. Marvell’s secretary, shared with two other assistant editors, copyedited Blackbird novels for fifteen dollars a book. (Alden would not waste money on a professional copy editor.) Blackbird stubbornly refused to lay golden eggs, and by 1981 all of its original writers had moved on, leaving behind only Teatime and Morning, who had produced their first books. No longer an assistant editor, Merle Marvell bought one first novel that won an important prize and another that made the best-seller list and thereafter had no more time for Blackbird. Since then, Blackbird’s two stalwarts sent in their manuscripts and took their money. Neither had an agent. Instead of addresses, they had post office boxes—Teatime’s in Norwalk, Connecticut, Morning’s in midtown Manhattan. Their telephone numbers had never been divulged. They never demanded higher advances, lunches, or ad budgets. Clyde Morning had won the British Fantasy Award in 1983, and Marletta Teatime had been nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 1985. They went on producing a book a year until 1989, when each of them stopped writing.

  “Chancel House has been publishing these people for more than ten years, and you don’t even know their telephone numbers?”

  “That’s not the weird part,” Davey said. They were devouring a sausage and mushroom pizza delivered by a gnome in a space helmet who on closer inspection had become a sixteen-year-old girl wearing a motorcycle helmet. Room had been made on the table for a bottle of Robert Mondavi Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon and two glasses by shoving papers, printouts, and sheets torn from legal pads into piles. “The weird part is what I found on a shelf in the conference room today.”

  Like the old Davey, he raised his eyebrows and smiled, teasing her. Nora thought he looked wonderful. She liked the way he ate pizza, with a knife and fork. Nora picked up a slice and chomped, pulling away long strings of mozzarella, but Davey addressed a pizza as though it were filet mignon. “Okay,” she said, “what did you find on this shelf?”

  “Remember I told you that every new manuscript gets written down in a kind of a ledger? Now all this is on a computer. Whatever happens to the submission gets entered beside the title—rejected and returned, or accepted, with the date. I was wondering if we might have rejected books by Morning or Teatime, so I went back to ’89, the first year we used computers, and there was Clyde Morning. He submitted a book called Spectre in June ’89, and the manuscript never left the house. It wasn’t rejected, but it was never accepted, either. He didn’t even have an editor, so no one was actually responsible for the manuscript.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Precisely. I went down to the production department. Of course nobody could remember. Most of the scripts they work on are kept for a year or two after publication, why I don’t know, and then get returned to the editor, who sends them back to the author. I looked at all of them, but I couldn’t find Spectre. A production assistant finally reminded me that they sometimes squirrel things away on the shelves in the conference room. It’s like the dead letter office.” Davey was grinning.

  “And you went to the conference room”—he was nodding his head and grinning even more wildly—“and you . . . you found the book?”

  “Right there! And not only that . . .”

  She looked at him in astonishment. “You read it?”

  “I skimmed it, anyhow. It’s kind of sloppy, but I think it’s publishable. I have to see if it’s still available—I suppose I have to find out if Morning is still alive—but it could be the leadoff in our new line.”

  She liked the our. “So we’re almost ready.”

  “I want to go in on Monday.” He did not have to be more specific. “He’s still in a pretty good mood on Monday afternoons.” This was Friday evening. “I got a call back from an agent this morning, sounding me out about a couple of writers I’m sure we could get without breaking the bank.”

  “You devil,” she said. “You’ve been sitting on this ever since you came home.”

  “Just waiting for the right moment.” He finished the last of his pizza. “Do you want to play around with the presentation some more, or is there something else we could do?”

  “Like celebrate?”

  “If you’re in the mood,” Davey said.

  “I definitely feel a mood coming on,” Nora said.

  “Well, then.” He looked at her almost uncertainly.

  “Come on, big boy,” she said. “We’ll take care of the dishes later.”

  Twenty minutes later, Davey lay with his hands folded on his stomach, staring up at the ceiling. “Sweetie,” she said, “I didn’t say it hurt, I just said it was uncomfortable. I felt dry, but I’m sure that’s just temporary. I have an appointment with my doctor next week to talk about hormone replacement. Look at it this way—we probably don’t have to worry about getting pregnant anymore.”

  “I have condoms. You have your . . . thing. Of course we don’t have to worry about that.”

  “Davey, I’m forty-nine. My body is changing. There has to be this period of adjustment.”

  “Period of adjustment.”

  “That’s all. My doctor says everything will be fine as long as I eat right and exercise, and probably I’ll have to start taking estrogen. It happens to every woman, and now it’s my turn.”

  He turned his head to her. “Were you dry last time?”

  “No.” She tried not to sigh. “I wasn’t.”

  “So why are you this time?”

  “Because this is the time it happened.”

  “But you’re not an old woman.” He rolled over and half-buried his face in the pillow. “I know what’s wrong. I got too excited or something, and now you’re turned off.”

  “Davey,
I’m starting to go through menopause. Of course I’m not turned off. I love you. We’ve always had wonderful sex.”

  “You can’t have wonderful sex with someone who wakes up moaning and groaning almost every night.”

  “It isn’t . . .” This was not going to be a fruitful remark. Neither would it be fruitful to remark that you couldn’t have sex with a man who would not come to your bed, or who left your bed to worry about work or Hugo Driver or whatever it was Davey worried about late at night.

  “Well, a lot of nights, anyhow,” he said, taking up her unspoken comment. “Maybe you need therapy or something. You’re too young for menopause. When my mother went through it, she had a lot of white hair, she was over fifty, and she turned into a total bitch. She was impossible, she was like in a rage for at least a year.”

  “People have different reactions. It’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “People in menopause don’t have periods. You had one a little while ago.”

  “I had a period that lasted more than two weeks. Then I didn’t have one for about six weeks.”

  “I don’t have to hear all the gory details.”

  “The gory details are my department, right. But everything’s going to be all right. This is temporary.”

  “God, I hope so.”

  What did Davey hope was temporary? Menopause? Aging? She moved across the sheet and put an arm over his shoulder. He turned his face away. Nora kissed the back of his head and slid her other arm beneath him. When he did not attempt to shrug her off or push her away, she pulled him into her. He resisted only a second or two before turning his head to her and slipping his arms around her. His cheek felt wet against hers. “Oh, honey,” she said, and moved her head back to see the tears leaking from his eyes. Davey wiped his face, then held her close.

  “This is no good.”

  “It’ll get better.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Try talking about it,” Nora said, swallowing the words for a change.

  “I sort of think I have to.”

  “Good.”

  Now he had a grudging, almost furtive look. “You know how I’ve been kind of worried lately? It’s because of this thing that happened about ten years before I met you.” He looked up at the ceiling, and she braced herself, with a familiar despair, for a story which would owe as much to Hugo Driver as to Davey’s real history. “I was having a rough time because Amy Randolph finally broke up with me.”

  Nora had heard all about Amy Randolph, a beautiful and destructive poet-photographer-screenwriter-painter whom Davey had met in college. He had lost his virginity to her, and she had lost hers to her father. (Unless this was another colorful embellishment.) After graduation they had traveled through North Africa. Amy had flirted with every attractive man she met and threw tyrannical fits when the men responded. Finally the two of them had been deported from Algeria and shared an apartment in the Village. Amy went in and out of hospitals, twice for suicide attempts. She photographed corpses and drug addicts. She had no interest in sex. Davey once said to Nora that Amy was so brilliant he hadn’t been able to leave her for fear of missing her conversation. In the end, she had deprived him of her conversation by moving in with an older woman, a Romanian émigrée who edited an intellectual journal. He had never explained to Nora how he had felt about losing Amy, or spoken of what he had done between the breakup and their own meeting.

  “Well,” Nora said, “whatever this is, it couldn’t have been much stranger than life with Amy.”

  “That’s what you think,” Davey said.

  19

  “IT WAS ABOUT a month after Amy left. You know, I think I was actually kind of happy for her. Some people acted like they thought I should be disturbed by what she did, but I didn’t know why. Amy never liked sex anyhow, so it was more like getting worked up about who she wasn’t doing it with than who she was, and that’s ridiculous. Anyhow, after about a month, I repainted my apartment and put new posters on the walls, and then I got a really good stereo system and a lot of new records. Whenever I found anything that reminded me of her, I threw it out. A couple of times when she called up, I hung up on her. Because it was all over, right?”

  “You were pretty angry,” Nora said.

  Davey shook his head. “I don’t remember being angry. I just didn’t see the point of talking to her.”

  “Okay.” Nora reached over the side of the bed and picked her bra and blouse off the floor. She tossed the bra into the clothing bin and put on the blouse.

  “I wasn’t angry with Amy,” he said. “Everybody kept telling me that I had to be, but I wasn’t. You can’t get angry at crazy people.”

  Nora gave up and nodded.

  “Anyhow, I was in a funny mood. After my apartment was all redone, I reread Hugo Driver—all three books—after I came home from work. Then I read Night Journey all over again. I felt like Pippin.”

  In other words, Nora thought, he felt as though Amy had killed him.

  “I couldn’t stand being in the apartment by myself, but I hardly had any friends because Amy, you know, made that difficult. I didn’t want to spend time with my parents because they hated Amy, and they loved telling me how lucky I was. I went through this weird period. Sometimes I’d spend the whole night staring at the tube. I’d listen to one piece of music over and over, all weekend.”

  “I guess you got into drugs,” Nora said.

  “Well, yeah. Amy always hated drugs, so now that I was free . . . you know? A guy in the mailroom named Bang Bang sold stuff, which Dad didn’t know about. So one day I saw this guy coming out of the mailroom on a break, and I looked at him, and he looked at me, and I followed him outside. I got some coke and some pot, and I pretty much did those for about a year. At work I stayed pretty straight, but when I got back to my apartment, boy, I poured myself a glass of Bombay gin on the rocks, did two big, fat lines, rolled a joint, and had a little party until I went to bed. Or didn’t. I was thirty, thirty-one. I didn’t need a lot of sleep. Just take a shower, shave, drop in some Murine, couple lines, fresh clothes, off to work.”

  “And one day you met this Girl Scout,” Nora said.

  “You sure you want to hear about this?”

  “Why don’t you just say, ‘Nora, once when I was fooling around with drugs I had this messed-up girlfriend, and we got crazy together’?”

  “Because it’s not that simple. You have to understand where I was mentally in order to understand what happened. Otherwise it won’t make any sense.”

  It occurred to Nora that whatever he had to say, strictly factual or not, would be instructive. Maybe Davey had been a weekend punk!

  “This isn’t just about a girl, is it?”

  “Actually it’s about Natalie Weil.” He pushed himself upright and pulled the sheets above his navel. “Look, Nora, I didn’t tell you the truth the other day. This is the real reason I wanted to get into Natalie’s house.”

  She tucked up her legs, leaned forward, and waited.

  20

  “I WAS IN a stall in the men’s room one morning, feeling lousy because I’d stayed up all night. I snorted some coke, and my nose started to bleed. I had to sit on the toilet with my head back, holding toilet paper against my nose. Finally the bleeding stopped, and I decided to try to get through the day.

  “I came out of the stall. Some little guy was going toward the sinks. I grabbed some towels and dried my hands, and this guy was messing with his hair, and I looked at his face in the mirror, and I almost had a heart attack.”

  “The little guy was a girl.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Because you almost had a heart attack.”

  “She was in the art department. She had short hair and she wore men’s clothes. That’s all I knew. I didn’t even know her last name. Her first name was Paddi.” He looked at her as if this were of enormous significance.

  “Patty?”

  “Paddi. Two d’s and an i. Okay, my nose started bleed
ing again. I grabbed another towel and held it up against my nose. Paddi was dumping two piles of coke on the sink in front of her. ‘Try this,’ she said. We’re right in the middle of the men’s room! I leaned over and snorted the stuff right off the sink, and bingo! I felt a thousand percent better. ‘Get it?’ she said. ‘Always use good stuff.’

  “ ‘What planet are you from?’ I asked her.

  “She smiled at me and said, ’I was born in a village at the foot of a great mountain. My father is a blacksmith.’

  “I almost passed out. She was quoting Night Journey. I said, ’I wander far and sometimes get lost. I own a purpose greater than myself, the saving of children from the darkness.’

  “And she chimed in, ’I conquer my own fear.’

  “We grinned at each other for a second, and I shooed her outside before someone came in. She was waiting for me across the hall. ‘I’m Paddi Mann,’ she said. ‘And you’re Davey Chancel, of the famous Chancel House Chancels. Want to buy me a drink tonight?’

  “Normally, assertive women put me off, and we’re not supposed to go out with women from the office, but she could quote Hugo Driver! I told her to meet me at six-thirty at Hannigan’s, a bar a couple of blocks away, and she said no, we should go to the Hellfire Club down on Second Avenue, great place, and let’s meet at seven-thirty so she could take care of some things she had to do. Fine, I said, and she came right up in front of me and tilted up her head and whispered, ’His own salvation lay within himself.’ ”

  Nora had heard these words before, but she could not remem-ber when.

  “You know what? I thought I could learn things from her. It was like she had secrets, and they were the secrets I needed to know.”

  “Sure,” Nora said. “You needed to know the secret of how to score coke better than Bang Bang’s.”