The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

Davey had gone home and changed into jeans, a black sweater, and a black leather jacket before walking to Second Avenue. The Hellfire Club was between Eighth and Ninth, on the East Side. He reached the corner of Ninth and Second only a minute or two past seven-thirty and walked down the east side of the avenue, passing a fast-food restaurant, a Mexican restaurant, and saw a bar farther down the block. He picked up his pace and went past a window that showed a few men huddled over a long, dark bar, put his hand on the door, and just below his hand saw the name MORLEY’S.

  He had managed to miss the club. He went back up the east side of the avenue, checking the names on buildings, and missed it again.

  A rank of three telephones stood only a few feet away. The first had a severed cord instead of a receiver, the second did not provide a dial tone, and the third permitted six-sevenths of Davey’s quarter into its slot and then froze.

  Disgusted, Davey stepped away from the telephones and went to the corner to wait for the light to change. He glanced down the block and this time noticed a narrow stone staircase with wrought-iron handrails between Morley’s bar and a lighting-goods shop. The stairs led to a dark wooden door, which looked too elegant for its surroundings. Centered in the door’s top panel was a brass plate slightly larger than an index card.

  The light changed, but instead of crossing the street, Davey walked to the foot of the stairs and looked up at a five-story brownstone wedged between two apartment buildings. On either side of the door were two curtained windows. The lettering on the plaque was not quite legible from the bottom of the stairs. He climbed two steps and saw that the plate read HELLFIRE CLUB and, beneath that, MEMBERS ONLY. He went up the stairs and opened the door. Across a tiny entry stood another door, glossy black. Three commands had been painted on a white wooden plaque fixed just beneath the level of his eyes:

  DO NOT QUESTION.

  DO NOT JUDGE.

  DO NOT HESITATE.

  Davey opened the black door. Before him was a hallway with a floral carpet which continued up a flight of stairs. To his left an elderly woman stood behind a checkroom counter beside the opening into a dim barroom. Past the bar, a wide leather armchair stood beside an ambitious potted fern. A white-haired concierge at a glossy black desk turned to him with a diplomatic half smile. To eliminate the preliminaries, Davey peered into the barroom and saw only prosperous-looking men in suits seated around tables or standing in clusters of three or four. He noticed a few women in the room, none of them Paddi. In the instant before the man at the desk spoke to him, he saw—thought he saw—a naked man covered to wrists and neck with elaborate tattoos beside a naked woman, her back to Davey, who had shaved her head and powdered or otherwise colored her body a flat, dead white.

  “May I assist you, sir?”

  Startled, Davey looked at the concierge. He cleared his throat. “Thank you. I’m here to meet a woman named Paddi Mann.” He glanced back into the bar and had the sense that the other people in the room had shifted their positions to conceal the surreal couple.

  “Sir.”

  Davey looked back at the concierge.

  “That was Miss Mann?”

  When Davey said yes, the concierge told him to be seated, please, and watched him proceed to the leather chair, which provided a view of nothing more provocative than the wide mahogany doors and a row of hunting prints on the opposite wall. The concierge opened a drawer and drew out a ribbon microphone at least fifty years old, positioned it squarely in front of him, and said, “Guest for Miss Mann.” The words reverberated from the barroom, from rooms upstairs, and from behind the mahogany doors.

  One of the mahogany doors opened, and a Paddi Mann who looked less raffish and more sophisticated than her office persona stepped smiling into the hallway. The dark suit into which she had changed looked more expensive than most of Davey’s own suits. Her shining hair fell softly over her forehead and ears.

  She asked why he was dressed that way.

  He explained that he thought he was going to meet her at a bar.

  Bars were disgusting. Why did he think she had invited him to her club?

  He hadn’t understood, he said. If she liked, he could go home and put on a suit.

  She told him not to bother and suggested they swap jackets.

  He took off his leather jacket and held it out. Paddi slipped off her suit jacket and twirled herself into his jacket so smoothly that he barely had time to notice that she was wearing suspenders.

  “Your turn,” she said.

  He was afraid he’d rip the shoulder seams, but the jacket met his back and shoulders with only a suggestion of tightness.

  “You’re lucky I like big jackets.”

  Paddi opened the mahogany door to a lounge in which groups of chairs and couches were arranged before a window. He saw the backs of several male heads, a white gesticulating arm, newspapers and magazines on a long wooden rack. A waiter with a black bow tie, a black vest, and a shaven head held an empty tray and an order pad.

  Paddi directed him to a pair of library chairs before a wall of books at the right of the room. Between the chairs stood a round table on top of which lay a portfolio-sized envelope with the Chancel House logo. The waiter materialized beside Paddi. She asked for the usual, and Davey ordered a double martini on the rocks.

  He asked what the usual was, and she said, “A Top-and-Bottom: half port and half gin.” It was an outsider drink, she told him.

  While he pondered this category, Davey took in that the owner of the naked arm he had glimpsed from the hallway was a middle-aged man seated in a leather chair near the center of the room. The arms of the chair cut his midsection from view, but there were no clothes on his flabby upper body, and none on the thick white legs crossed ankle to knee in front of the chair. A leather strap circled his neck. From the front of the strap, a chain, an actual chain, said Davey to Nora, like you’d use on a dog if the dog weighed two hundred pounds and liked to munch babies, hung between him and the bearded guy in a three-piece suit holding the other end. The man wearing the chain swiveled his head to give Davey a do-you-mind? glare. Davey looked away and saw that while most of the people in the room were dressed conventionally, one man reading a newspaper wore black leather trousers, motorcycle boots, and an open black leather vest that revealed an intricate pattern of scars on his chest.

  He wondered how Paddi could have objected to his clothing when at least one person in the club wore no clothing at all.

  “In here,” she said, “people wear whatever is right for them. What’s right for you is a suit.”

  “Some of these people must have a lot of trouble when they leave the club,” he said.

  “Some of these people never leave the club,” she said.

  “Is this stuff real?” Nora asked. “Or are you making it all up?”

  “As real as what happened to Natalie,” Davey said.

  Paddi worked at Chancel House because it had published Night Journey. Her job gave her a unique connection to the book she loved above all others. And since she was on the subject, she drew out of the big Chancel House envelope a stiff, glossy sheet that Davey recognized as the reverse side of a jacket rendering.

  “An idea of mine,” Paddi said, turning the sheet over to display a drawing it took Davey a moment to understand” when he did, he wondered why the idea had never occurred to him. Paddi had drawn the jacket for an annotated scholarly edition of Night Journey. (Her design was based on the famous “GI edition” of the novel.) Every one of the hundred thousand Driver fanatics in America would have to buy it. Scholars would be able to trace the growth of the book over successive variations and discuss the meanings of the changes in the text. It was a great idea.

  “But there was one problem,” Davey told Nora. “In order to do it right, we needed the manuscript.”

  “What’s the problem with that?” asked Nora.

  The problem, Paddi said, was that the manuscript seemed to have disappeared. Hugo Driver had died in 1950, his wife in 1952, and their only c
hild, a retired high school English teacher, had said in an interview on the twentieth anniversary of the book’s publication that he had never seen any manuscripts of his father’s books. As far as he knew, they had never come back from Chancel House.

  Davey said he would try to find out what had happened to the manuscript. Lincoln Chancel had probably installed it in a bank vault somewhere. It certainly couldn’t be lost. Nothing so important could have slipped through the cracks—it was the manuscript of the first Chancel House book, for heaven’s sake!

  “That would be unfortunate in light of the rumors,” Paddi said.

  “What rumors?”

  “That Hugo Driver didn’t really write the book,” Paddi said.

  Where did this stuff come from? She knew what it was, didn’t she? It was what happened whenever somebody great appeared, a bunch of weasels started trying to shoot holes in him. Davey ranted on in this fashion until he ran out of breath, at which point he inhaled hugely and declared that after all it all made perfect sense” Night Journey was such a brilliant book that the weasels couldn’t cope with it. It happened all the time. Somewhere, someone was saying that Zelda Fitzgerald was the real author of Tender Is the Night.

  “Zelda was the real author of Tender Is the Night,” Paddi said. “Sorry. Just kidding.”

  Davey asked her if she believed this crap.

  “No, not at all,” she said. “I agree with you. Hugo Driver should be on stamps. I think his picture should be on money. One of the reasons I like this club is that it seems such a Hugo Driver–ish sort of place, doesn’t it?”

  Davey guessed that it did.

  Would he like to see more of it?

  “I wondered when we were going to get to this part,” Nora said.

  21

  AT THE LANDING above the curved staircase, Paddi did not take him down the dark corridor but led him up another flight of stairs. An even narrower version of the staircase continued upward, but Paddi took him into a corridor identical to the one below. Davey felt as if he were following Paddi through a forest at night.

  Then she vanished, and he realized that she had slipped through an open door. The shade had been pulled down, and the room was darker than the corridor. After they undressed she led him to a futon. Davey stretched out against her, his body as hot as an oven-warmed brick, hers as cool as a stone drawn from a river. He hugged her close, and her cool hands ran up and down his back. When his orgasm came, he yelled with pleasure. They lay quiet for a time, then talked, and when they had established that neither of them was seeing anyone else, Davey fell asleep.

  He woke up an hour later, hungry, light-headed, uncertain of his surroundings. He remembered that he was lying on a floor in the East Village. He was suddenly, shamefully certain that Paddi had stolen his money. He sat upright, and his hand touched a girlish shoulder. He looked down and made out the shape of her head on the pillow. Pillow? He did not remember a pillow. A sheet covered both of them.

  “We should get something to eat,” he said.

  “I’ll take care of that. Isn’t there something else you’d like to do first?”

  He stretched out beside her and once more felt that he was as hot as a potbellied stove and she as cool as a substance just extracted from a river. Davey surrendered to sensation.

  Unimaginably later, they lay side by side, staring up. Davey had forgotten where he was. A slight, high-pitched buzzing sounded in his ears. The woman beside him seemed completely beautiful. Paddi rolled over, picked up an instrument like the mouthpiece of an old-fashioned telephone, and ordered oysters and caviar and other things he didn’t quite catch and what sounded like a lot of wine.

  Soon two young women entered the room carrying circular trays, from which they distributed around the futon a number of covered dishes. Two open bottles and four glasses appeared beside Davey’s left shoulder. The women smiled at Paddi, who was sprawled on top of the sheet, but did not look at Davey. When they had put in place the last dish, they stood and turned to the door, where one of them said, “Shall I?”

  “Yes,” Paddi said. A low, rosy light spread through the room, and the women backed smiling through the door.

  Plovers’ eggs, dumplings, steaming sautéed mushrooms, eel, whitebait, rich finger-sized segments of duck, similar sections of roast pork, little steaming things like pizzas covered with fresh basil and glistening shreds of tomato, in a crisp transparent seal, round, pungent objects that must have been meatballs and tasted like single malt scotch, grapes, clementines” an excellent white burgundy and a better red bordeaux. Taking almost nothing herself, Paddi brought plate after plate before him. Davey sampled everything, and together they emptied half of each bottle. Paddi kept him amused with tales of the art department and gossip about people who worked at Chancel House” she quoted Hugo Driver and wondered at the friendship between the author and Lincoln Chancel. Did Davey know where this unlikely pair had met?

  “Sure, at Shorelands,” Davey said, “this estate in Massachusetts. They were put up in the same cottage.” He thought that the owner of the place, Georgina Weatherall, who knew that Davey’s grandfather was on the verge of starting a publishing company, had put them together in the hope that Lincoln Chancel would help Driver in some way. And exactly that had happened. Driver must have shown Chancel the manuscript of Night Journey, and Chancel had used it to make Driver’s fortune and increase his own.

  * * *

  “Is that really how they met?” Nora asked Davey. “In a sort of literary colony?”

  “Shorelands was a private estate where the hostess liked to feel that she was encouraging works of genius, but yeah, that’s more or less right. And whether Georgina Weatherall had anything in mind or not, she did put Driver together with my grandfather, and things fell into place. Neither one of them had been at Shorelands before, so they probably spent a lot of time together, like the new guys at school.”

  A millionaire businessman and a penniless writer? Nora doubted that Lincoln Chancel, a ruthless acquirer of companies, had ever felt like a new boy in school. “Who else was at Shorelands at the same time? I bet, afterward, they all wished that they’d been put together with your grandfather. Did he ever go back?”

  “God, no,” Davey said. “Haven’t you ever seen that picture?”

  Davey began to laugh.

  “What’s funny?”

  “I just remembered something. There’s a picture from when my grandfather was at Shorelands—a photograph of all these guys sitting on the lawn. Georgina Weatherall’s in it, and Hugo Driver, and all the people who were there that summer. My grandfather’s squeezed into this rickety lawn chair, and he looks like he’s about to strangle someone.”

  The rest of that night Davey lay with Paddi, sipping from a variety of drinks brought in by women he sometimes saw and sometimes did not, occasionally hearing music from the floors below, now and then catching a sob or a shout of laughter from rooms throughout the building.

  And then, immediately it seemed, he was locking the door of his apartment, having showered, shaved, and changed clothes without any memory of returning home or performing these tasks. His watch said it was eight o’clock. He felt rested, sober, clearheaded. But how had he gotten home?

  22

  HE HAD PUSHED through the front doors of the Chancel Building with two appointments in mind, one still to be made, the other already fixed. At some time before he left the building today, he had to see his father to talk about Hugo Driver’s manuscripts and doing a definitive edition of the novel, and this evening he was going back to the Hellfire Club. He was ready for both encounters. His father would welcome an idea sure to bring more prestige to the firm, and to his meeting with Paddi he could bring the good news from his father. If Alden Chancel had taken charge of the manuscript of Night Journey, Davey intended to take charge of its rebirth.

  His ordinary duties devoured the morning until eleven, when he had to go to a meeting. After the meeting, he went up two floors to his father’s office, where
the secretary told him that Alden had left for lunch and would not be free until three-thirty.

  At three twenty-five, Davey went back to see his father.

  At first impatient, Alden grew interested in the project Davey described. Yes, it might be possible to publish such an edition as a paperback intended for classroom use. Yes, let’s think about using the cover of the GI edition, we got a lot of mileage out of that. As for the manuscript, hadn’t that gone back to Driver?

  Davey said that an assistant in the art department, the person who had come to him with the idea, had already told him that Driver’s son thought it was still with Chancel House. When he named the assistant, his father said, “Paddi Mann, interesting, the meeting I just came from was about an idea of hers, using two different covers on the new paperback of Night Journey. Bright girl, this Paddi Mann.” But as for the manuscript, if the sole remaining Driver didn’t know where it was, maybe it was lost.

  For the next two hours, Davey searched the wrapped manuscripts on the conference room shelves and looked in broom closets and the windowless cubicles where copy editors toiled. He stopped only when he noticed that it was twenty minutes before he was to meet Paddi.

  A low conversational buzz came from the bar, and Davey glanced through the arched opening as automatically as he had read the admonitions on the inner door. For a moment he thought he saw Dick Dart, but the man vanished behind the crowd. Dick Dart? Could he be in the Hellfire Club? Was Leland?

  The voice of the concierge forced him to turn away from the bar. “May I assist you, sir?”

  Davey placed himself in the chair beside the fern, the concierge opened the drawer, removed the heavy microphone, positioned it with excruciating exactness, and uttered his sentence. Paddi came through the mahogany door. She had her “Hellfire Club look,” even though she seemed to be wearing exactly what she had worn to work. They ordered the same drinks from the same waiter. Davey described his searches, and Paddi told him it was important, crucial, to find the manuscript. Wasn’t there a record somewhere of everything that came in and went out?