The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  “I don’t want to pass out from your stink.”

  “My stink?” He opened his jacket and sniffed his armpits. “You’re probably having some feminine disorder.”

  “You hate women, don’t you?”

  “No, I hate my father, women I actually adore. They’re physically weaker than men, so they had to work out a million ways to manipulate them. Some of these stratagems are fantastically ornate. Guys who don’t understand that women are incapable of psychological straightforwardness don’t stand a chance. One morning they wake up beside some cash register who has a big fat diamond ring and a gold band on her finger, and she controls the pussy. If he wants any, he has to hand over the credit cards. If he complains, she makes him feel so small and selfish he makes her breakfast for a week. But is he allowed to say no? Uh uh, baby. And think about this. She can hit him, that’s fine. Brute like him deserves to be hit. But can a man hit a woman? If he does, she whips his ass in divorce court and takes all his money without even having to give him sex. He’s completely under the control of a capricious, amoral being with a tremendous capacity for making trouble. Remember the Garden of Eden? Great place until this woman came along, whispering, Come on, take a bite, the Big Guy isn’t paying any attention. Been the same way ever since. If the woman’s really good, this poor sucker with a noose around his neck, a perpetual hard-on, and someone else’s hand in his pocket is convinced that he’s running the show. He’s so tangled up he thinks his wife is this sweet little thing who isn’t very good at practical matters but sure is great, damn it, a goddamned pearl for putting up with him. Once a year she gives him a blow job, and he’s so grateful he races out to buy her a fur coat. Those fur coats in a restaurant, where women don’t want to put them in the checkroom? Every single one of those coats? A blow job, and every woman in the place knows it. And here’s something else—the older the woman, the better the coat.”

  “And you claim to adore women,” said Nora.

  “I didn’t make this stuff up. Spent the last fifteen years of my life taking my Marthas and Ednas and Agathas to the Château and listening to them talk. I hear the things they’re telling me and I also hear what they’re really saying. And sometimes, Nora, more often than you would imagine, they are the same thing. An eighty-five-year-old woman who has had three face-lifts, two husbands, at least one of them seriously rich, both currently dead, also a couple of glasses of wine with a rakish, good-looking young lawyer, is likely to let down her guard and tell you how she got through a long and pampered life without ever working a single day. Once they see that I already know how it works, they can start having a good time. These ladies are generally pissed off, they used to be fascinating, the whole male world used to stand in line to get into their pussies, and all of it went away when they turned into old ladies. Husbands are dead. Nobody on earth is interested in listening to them. Except me. I could listen to them all day long. Love those soft, elegant, smoky voices full of hidden razor blades, but even more I love their stories. They’re so corrupt. They don’t even begin to know how corrupt they are, can’t, don’t have the moral machinery for it. The only thing they regret is that the good part didn’t last another ten years, so they could have gotten their hooks into one more rich sucker who got off on hearing about his great big cock. I love the way they look—hair all stiff but made to look fluffy and soft, makeup put on so well you can hardly see their wrinkles, their hands covered with rings so you won’t notice the brown spots and the veins and lumpy knuckles. Nobody can tell me I don’t like women.”

  “Did you sleep with your old ladies?”

  “Haven’t had sex with a woman under sixty-five in at least nine or ten years. No, sixty-two, I forgot about Gladys.”

  “But you killed women,” Nora said.

  “Wasn’t personal.”

  “It was to them,” Nora said.

  “I was killing clients, understand? Every time I murdered someone, another chunk fell off the old man’s business. Along about the time I did Annabelle Austin, that book agent, he spent two days saying, Couldn’t somebody else’s clients get killed? If I could have done another ten, he’d be tearing his hair out.”

  “But you always chose women clients, and always a certain kind of woman.”

  Dart’s eyes went flat and two-dimensional.

  “Oh. You didn’t like the way they lived.”

  “Could put it that way,” Dart said. “Those people went around acting like men.”

  His tone gave her an insight. “Did they behave well around you?”

  “The times they came into the office, when I came up to them and said something flattering, they could barely bring themselves to speak to me.”

  “Unlike your old ladies.”

  “I would never have murdered my old sweethearts . . . unless they were the only clients left.”

  “What about me?”

  He smiled, slowly. “Do you mean, am I going to kill you?”

  Nora said nothing.

  “Dear Nora-pie. We’ll know more after our reality lesson.”

  “Reality lesson?”

  He patted her knee. “Lots of motels in Massachusetts. We want one with a nice big parking lot.”

  46

  ON THE FAR side of Springfield, Dart pointed at a three-story, sand-colored building with white balconies outside the windows. “Bingo!” It stood at the far end of a half-filled parking lot the size of a football field. A vast blue-and-yellow sign stretching across the roof said CHICOPEE INN. A Swiss ski lodge called Home Cooking faced the lot from the left. “Get over, we don’t want to miss the exit.”

  Nora crossed two lanes and left the highway. “Forgot I was talking to Emerson Fittipaldi,” Dart said.

  She drove a short distance down the street and turned into the lot.

  “Darling, we’ll always have Chicopee. And home cooking, too! Don’t you love home cooking? Mom’s famous razor blade soup, that sort of thing?”

  “Should I park in any particular place?” Nora was weary with dread.

  “Right in the goddamned middle. Do you have some favorite alias, my dear?”

  “Some what?” She drew the Lincoln into an empty space approximately in the center of the lot.

  “Need new names. Have any suggestions, or shall I choose?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Hugo Driver.” She closed her eyes and slumped back against the seat. “The Drivers.”

  “Love the concept, tremendously appropriate, but using the names of well-known people is usually an error.” He turned sideways and tried to reach the bags on the backseat. “Hell.” Dart knelt on his seat and leaned over, almost touching the top of the car with his buttocks. Nora opened her eyes and saw the pocket containing the gun hanging a foot away from her face. She considered the energy and speed necessary to snatch it out of his pocket. She wondered if she knew how to fire a revolver. Dan Harwich had instructed her in the operation of the safety on the pistol he had given her, but did revolvers have safeties, and if so, where were they? By the time this baffling question had occurred to her, Dart was pulling himself and two brown paper bags back over the top of the seat. He pushed the bag containing the bottles into her lap. “You carry this one and the one in the trunk. One more thing: please refrain from giving people these bone-chilling looks of anguish, okay? World loves a happy face. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile, and I smile at you all the time.”

  “You’re having a better time than I am.”

  “Smile, Nora. Brighten up my day.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “Rehearsal for the wonderful smile you’re going to give the moron behind the desk.”

  Nora faced Dart, pulled back her lips, and exposed her teeth.

  He gave her a long, considering look. “Call on some of the old fire, Nora-pie. Let’s see the blazing figure who beat the shit out of Natalie Weil.”

  “Too scared to come out.”

  He gave an exasperated sigh. “This is a project.” He made the
sign of the cross over his heart.

  “A project?”

  “Inside.” He took the keys and got out. She waited for him to pull her across the seat, but instead he walked to the front of the car and looked back at her, eyebrows raised. Nora left the car and looked around at a vibrant blur. She blotted her eyes on her sleeve and moved toward Dart.

  A young man with shoulder-length blond hair lowered a half-liter Evian bottle to an invisible shelf in front of him, smiled across the desk as they came into the chill of the lobby, and stood up. His lightweight blue blazer was several sizes too large for him, and the bottoms of the sleeves were rolled. A silver tag on his lapel said that his name was Clark. “Welcome to the Chicopee Inn. Can I help you?”

  “Need a room for the night,” Dart said. “Sure hope you got one for us. Been driving two days straight.”

  “Should be no problem.” His eyes moved to the bags they were carrying, then from Dart to Nora and back again. His smile vanished. He sat down in his chair again, pulled a keyboard toward him, and depressed random-seeming keys. “One night? Let me set you up, and then we’ll take some information.” He brushed his hair back with one hand, exposing a circular gold ring in his ear. Keys clicked. “Three twenty-six, third floor, double bed. Is that okay?” Dart agreed. Nora slumped against the counter and regarded the bright, unreal green of the carpet. “Name and address, please?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. John Donne, Five eighty-six Flamingo Drive, Orlando, Florida.”

  At the boy’s request, he spelled out Donne. Then Dart spelled Orlando for him. He supplied a zip code and a telephone number.

  “Orlando’s where they have Disney World, right?”

  “No need to leave America, you want to see exotic places.”

  “Uh, right. Method of payment?”

  “Cash.”

  Clark paused with his hands on the keyboard and looked up. He flicked back his hair again. “Sir, our policy in that case is to request payment in advance. The rate for your room is sixty-seven dollars, forty-five cents, tax included. Is that all right?”

  “Policy is policy,” Dart said.

  Clark returned to the keyboard. The tip of his tongue slipped between his lips. A young woman in a blazer identical to his came through a door behind him to his right and gave Dart a double take as she walked past the desk to another door in the wall to his left.

  “I’ll get your keys and take the payment.” He opened a drawer to remove two round-headed metal keys. He put them into a small brown folder and wrote 326 in a white space at the top of the folder. The boy stood up and slid the folder across the desk. Dart placed a hundred-dollar bill beside it. “You can swing your car right up in front here to bring in your bags,” the boy said, his eyes on the bill.

  “Everything we need in the world is right here.”

  The boy picked up the bill and said, “One minute, sir.” He went through the door from which the young woman had emerged.

  Dart began humming “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby.”

  A few seconds later, the boy reappeared, smiled nervously at Dart, unlocked a cash drawer, and counted out change.

  “Good business demands vigilance,” said Dart, shoving the bills and coins into a trouser pocket.

  “Yeah. I should explain, we don’t have a restaurant or room service, but we serve a complimentary continental breakfast from seven to ten in the Chicopee Lounge just down to your right, and Home Cooking—right outside in our lot—they give you good food there. And checkout is at twelve noon.”

  “Point me toward the elevators,” Dart said. “You behold a pair of weary travelers.”

  “Past the lounge, on your left. Enjoy your stay.”

  Nora jerked herself upright, and Dart took a step back from the desk, opening a path to the elevators. She plodded past him, trying not to hear the cajoling voices in her head. The bottles took on weight with every step. She barely noticed the small, open room outfitted with couches, chairs, and tables into which Dart slipped to extract a folded newspaper from a rack. He placed a hand in the small of her back and urged her toward the elevators, where he punched a button. “Every little bird must find its branch.”

  Upstairs in a hazy corridor, Dart fit one of the keys into the lock of room 326. “Nora, look.” It took her a moment to notice the three round holes, puttied in and clumsily retouched with paint, in the brown door. “Bullet holes,” Dart said.

  Nora walked in. Every little bird must find its branch. You didn’t have to leave America to see exotic places. As she moved past the bathroom and the sliding panel of a closet, she heard Dart close the door and slide a lock into place. A window leading onto a narrow white balcony overlooked the parking lot. She put her bags on the table. Dart brushed past her, clicked the lock on the window, and moved a metal rod to draw a filmy curtain. He shrugged off his jacket, hung it over the back of a chair, and took his knives from their bag. “Lookee, lookee.” He was pointing at discolored blotches on the lampshade. “Bloodstains. Our kind of place.”

  Nora glanced at the queen-sized bed jutting out into the room.

  Dart unpacked the purchases from the hardware store and arrayed them in a straight line on the table. He moved the coils of rope from first place to second, after the roll of duct tape, and made sure everything was straight, bottom ends lined up. “Forgot scissors,” he said. “We’ll survive.” He laid the two larger knives at the end of the row, then fussed with the alignment. “Shall we begin?”

  She said nothing.

  He picked up a vodka bottle, untwisted the cap, and swished vodka around in his mouth before swallowing, then recapped the bottle and set it gently on the table. “Take your clothes off, Nora-pie.”

  “I don’t feel like doing that.”

  “If you can’t do it yourself, I’ll have to cut them off.”

  “Please,” she said. “Don’t do this.”

  “Don’t do what, Nora-pie?”

  “Don’t rape me.” Soundlessly she began to cry.

  “Did I say something about rape? What I said was, take off your clothes.”

  She hesitated, and through her tears saw him pick up the larger of the two knives, the one Matt Curlew would have called an Arkansas pigsticker. He stepped toward her, and she began unbuttoning her shirt. A small, separate part of her mind marveled at the quantity of tears spurting from her eyes. She placed the blue shirt uncertainly on the chair and glanced at the blurry figure of Dick Dart. The blurry figure nodded. Nora undid her belt, unbuttoned her jeans, pulled down the zip, and stepped out of the brown loafers. Hatred and disgust penetrated the cloud wrapped around her emotions. She made a small, high-pitched noise of outrage, pushed down her jeans, and, one leg after the other, stepped out of them. She draped the jeans over the arm of the chair and waited.

  “Not really into underwear, are you? Dear me, look at that bra. Your basic no-frills Maidenform Sweet Nothings, isn’t it? A thirty-four B? You should try one of those new uplift bras, not just an underwire, but the new kind, do wonders for you, give you a nice contour on top. Well? Let’s unhitch Nora’s pretty mammaries, shall we?”

  Nora closed her eyes and reached up to unhook the bra, which was, as Dart had said, a Maidenform Sweet Nothings, size 34 B. She let the straps slip backwards over her shoulders, exposing her breasts, pulled it away from her body, and dropped it onto the chair.

  “Don’t really hang up our clothes at home, do we? You’ve got, ummm, you’ve got an overstuffed chair with layers of T-shirts and blouses draped over the back and jeans folded on the seat. No, I take it back. For you I see a nice long couch, hardly visible under all those clothes. What you do is grub around in these clothes, wear them a few times, and then dump them into the hamper and start all over again.”

  This was, in fact, exactly what Nora did, except that she did it less consistently than Dart had suggested.

  “Oh my, look at that. Hanes Her Way undies—purple, what’s more, to go with your tired white Maidenform. Nora, you shouldn’t buy your dainties at
the drugstore. At the very least, your bra and undies should match. With your body, you’d look good in Gitano. They make pretty matching bras and underpants, and they’re cheap. You want to spend more money, try Bamboo or Betty Wear. Myself, I’m crazy about Betty Wear, it’s nice stuff. Listen, do yourself a favor and stop throwing out those Victoria’s Secret catalogs. I know you think they’re cheesy, but if you’d just look at them at least as thoroughly as Davey undoubtedly does, you’d see that they’re very useful. Above all, you owe it to yourself to look at Vogue now and then. Great magazine, I never miss an issue. I bet you’ve never even bought one.”

  “I bought one once.”

  “When? In 1975?”

  “Around then,” she said, her arms folded over her chest and her hands on her shoulders.

  “Written all over you, especially those Hanes Her Way spanky-pants. Should take better care of yourself. Take the dumb things off.”

  She pushed down the waistband on her underpants, shoved them to her knees, and stepped out.

  “Nora’s got a great big bush! God, Nora, you’ve got this clump, get out the Weedwacker!”

  She had gradually been convincing herself that no man who spoke in this way to a woman would rape her—a rapist would never advise the purchase of Betty Wear, much less be able to identify a Maidenform Sweet Nothings bra and Hanes Her Way underpants—but his next words undermined her shaky hope that Dart wished to do no more than inspect her body.

  “Sit on the bed,” he said.

  She walked to the end of the bed as if over broken glass and sat down with her hands on her shoulders and her legs clamped together. A sudden mental flash of Barbara Widdoes’s plump knees and fat calves above her heavy shoes brought with it the surprising thought that Barbara Widdoes was probably a lesbian.

  “Have to restrain you for a while,” Dart said, and picked up one of the coils of rope to slice off two sections, each about four feet long. These he carried toward Nora, along with the knife and the roll of duct tape. “Might be a little uncomfortable, but it won’t actually hurt.” He knelt in front of her, looked up into her eyes, winked, and wound one of the sections of rope around her ankles. “You have a nice body,” he said. “Maybe just the teeniest bit stringy, and your skin could use a moisturizer.” The rope bit into her skin, and she said, “Ouch.”