The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  He tugged a wallet from the dead man’s jacket. “Check out these business cards. Playtime Enterprises, Boston. Gumbo’s Goodies, Boston. Satisfaction Guaranteed, Waltham. What are these places? Hot Stuff, Providence. The Adults Only Parlor.” Dart started laughing. “Jumbo sells sex toys! What a gem! Let’s find out his name.”

  He held up a license displaying a photograph of a pudgy face with distended cheeks and close-set eyes. “We have the pleasure of being in the company of Mr. Sheldon Dolkis. Mr. Dolkis is, let’s see, forty-four years of age, weight two hundred twenty-five pounds, height five feet, eight inches. He claims to have hazel eyes, and he has declined to be an organ donor. We shall see about that, I believe.” Dart grasped the corpse’s right hand. “A treat to make your acquaintance, Shelley. We’ll paint the town red.”

  He drove into the southbound lanes of the highway. “We want a Mom and Pop motel redolent of the two quintessential Normans, Rockwell and Bates. A shabby little office and a string of depressing cabins.”

  “Why is that what we want?”

  “Can’t leave our new friend in the car, now, can we? Shelley is part of our family.”

  “You’re going to keep him?”

  “I’m going to do a lot more than that,” Dart said.

  54

  “DELIGHTFUL PLACE, SPRINGFIELD,” Dart said. “Pay attention now, Shelley. Even a lowlife like you must have heard of the Springfield rifle, but did your education cover the Garand? Wonderful weapon for its time. For two hundred years, both of these rifles were manufactured in Springfield. It may be the only city in America with a weapons museum. Now, there’s a museum worth visiting. Of course it also has that Basketball Hall of Fame, if you can believe that. Have to throw the yokels a crumb now and then.

  “Basketball was okay when white people still played it, but look what happened. Overgrown glandular cases took over, and now it’s all exhibitionism. Sportsmanship? Forget it, there’s no sportsmanship in the ghetto, and basketball is only the ghetto with big paychecks. All part of the decline in public morality. My father—you think he cares who really wrote Night Journey? His idea of good literature is a copy of American Lawyer with his picture on the cover. You should see what goes on at Dart, Morris—the bill padding, the Concorde flights we charge to the client. What gets me, they don’t see the humor in this stuff, they chug down two bottles of Dom Pérignon and stuff themselves with caviar at what they call a conference, bill the client five hundred bucks for the dinner, and don’t even think it’s funny! No wonder people hate lawyers. Compared to the other guys, I’m a paragon. I take care of my old ladies. If I bill them for lunch, it’s because during that lunch, we talked about business. It isn’t all Danielle Steel and Emily Dickinson, you know.”

  They had been driving aimlessly through the outskirts of Springfield, Dart scanning both sides of the streets for a motel as he talked.

  “Take Shelley Dolkis here. Delivered dildos and inflatable dolls to guys too feeble to have sex with other people. Even the sex industry has a hierarchy, and Shelley was on the bottom end—the jerk-off end. But if he could talk, he’d tell you he provided a necessary service. If people didn’t have access to his products, why, they’d go out and commit rape!”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Nora said.

  “Whole thing comes down to having the balls to be completely straight about being crooked. The guy who runs for the Senate and says he wants the job so he can screw the aides, stuff his pockets with payoff money, take a lot of drugs, and swim naked with a couple of strippers, that’s the guy who gets my vote. This country founded on fairness? A bunch of other guys owned it, and we took it. Wasn’t there a little thing called the Boston Tea Party? Suppose you came to Connecticut in 1750 and happened to see a nice plot of land on the Sound with half a dozen Pequot Indians living on it. Did you say, too bad, guess I’ll move inland? You killed the Indians and got your land. You lived in Westerholm a couple of years. Ever see any Pequots? The same things happen over and over. History books lie about it, teachers lie about it, and for sure politicians lie about it. Last thing they want is an educated public.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is a happy time for me. I’m a lot more sensitive than most people think I am, and you’re beginning to see that side of me.”

  “That’s true,” Nora said.

  “And here’s a place that will suit our little family just fine.”

  A shabby row of cabins stood at the top of a rise. Numbered doors lined a platform walkway. A neon sign at the entrance to the parking lot said HILLSIDE MOTEL.

  “Hillside, like the strangler,” Dart said. He pulled up in front of the last unit and patted the corpse’s cheek. “Relax for a moment, Shelley, while Nora and I secure our accommodations.”

  An ancient Sikh accepted twenty-five dollars and shoved a key across the counter without leaving his chair or taking his eyes off the Indian musical blaring from the television set on his desk.

  “Nora, Nora,” Dart said as they walked on creaking boards back toward their car and Sheldon Dolkis. “As they say in beer commercials, does it get any better than this?”

  “How could it?” Nora said.

  “You and me and a big fat dead man.” He slid the key into the door of the last room. “Let’s have a look at our bower.”

  An overhead light in a rice-paper bubble feebly illuminated a bed covered with a yellow blanket, a battered wooden dresser, and two green plastic chairs at a card table. Worn matting covered the floor. “Nora, if this room could talk, what tales it would tell.”

  “Suicides and adulteries,” Nora said, and felt a dim flicker of terror. This was not the kind of thing the person inside the bubble was supposed to say.

  But she had not displeased Dick Dart. “You get more interesting with every word you say. When you were in Vietnam, were you raped?”

  She collapsed against the wall. Davey couldn’t figure it out in two years of marriage, and Dick Dart saw it in about twenty-four hours.

  He glanced outside. “After we escort Shelley into this lovely room, I have a story to tell you.”

  Back outside, Dart opened the passenger door and put his hand on Dolkis’s shoulder. The dead man was regarding the roof of his car as if it were showing a porn movie. “Shelley, old boy, time for a short stroll. Nora-sweetie, what I am going to do is pull him toward me, and I want you to get up behind him and catch him under the other arm.”

  Dart leaned into the car and pulled the dead man’s head and shoulders into the sunlight. “Get set, don’t want to drop him.” Nora wedged herself next to the car and bent down. The dead man’s suit was the oily green of a Greek olive and stank of cigarette smoke. “Here we go,” Dart said. The suit jerked sideways. She lifted the arm and edged in close to the body. “Good hard pull,” said Dart. The body lifted off the car seat, and its feet snagged. A soft noise came from the open mouth. “Don’t complain, Shelley,” Dart said. He reared back, and Dolkis’s feet slid over the flange. One of his shoes came off. “Walky walky,” Dart said.

  They dragged him inside. At the far end of the bed, Dart lowered his side of the body and let go. The weight on Nora’s back slipped away, and the body’s forehead smacked against the rattan carpet. Dart rolled the corpse over and patted the bulging gut. “Good boy.” He untied the twisted necktie and threw it aside, then unbuttoned the shirt and pulled it out of the trousers. A thin line of dark hair ran up the mound beneath the sternum and down into the dimple of the navel. Dart unbuckled the belt and undid the trouser button.

  “What are you doing?” Nora asked.

  “Undressing him.” He yanked down the zipper, moved to the lower end of the body, pulled off the remaining shoe, and peeled the socks off the plump feet. He yanked at the trouser cuffs. The body slid a couple of inches toward him before the trousers came away, exposing white shorts with old stains on the crotch. Dart reached into the left front trouser pocket and extracted a crumpled handkerchief and a key ring, both of which he threw under the table
. From the right pocket he withdrew a brass money clip and a small brown vial with a plastic spoon attached to the top.

  “Shelley took coke! Do you suppose he actually tried to get a heart attack?” He unscrewed the cap and peered into the bottle. “Selfish bastard used it all up.” The bottle hit the floor and rolled beneath Nora’s chair. “I have to get some things out of the car.”

  Dart strode out into the dazzling light. Grateful to be powerless, to feel nothing, Nora heard the trunk of the car open, the rustle of bags, a lengthy silence. A blue jay screamed. The trunk slammed down. A dignified, doctorly man carried a lot of bags into the room and became Dick Dart.

  He hitched up his trousers, knelt beside the body, and arranged the bags in a row beside him. From the first he dumped out his knives. From the second he removed a pair of scissors. He took the half-empty vodka bottle from the third, removed the cap, winked at Nora, and took a long pull, which he swished around in his mouth before swallowing. He shuddered, took a second drink, and replaced the cap. “Anesthesia. Want some?”

  She shook her head.

  Dart walked up the body and levered the trunk upright. “Give me a hand.”

  When the body was naked except for underpants, Dart rummaged through the suit pockets: a ballpoint pen, a pocket comb gray with scum, a black address book. He threw these toward the wastebasket, then noticed the money clip on the floor beside him. “My God, I forgot to count the money.” He pulled out the bills. “Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, ninety, a hundred, a hundred and ten, four singles. Why don’t you take it?”

  “Me?”

  “A woman’s incomplete without money.” He folded the bills into the clip, scooped coins from the floor, and dropped it all into her palm. “Nora-pie, would you be so kind as to go into the bathroom and tear down the shower curtain?”

  She went into the bathroom and groped for the switch. Glaring light bounced from the walls, white floor, and mirror. A translucent curtain hung down over the side of the white porcelain tub. Nora reached up and tore at the curtain. One by one, plastic rings popped off the rail.

  When she carried the sheet into the bedroom, the light from the bathroom fell across the floor. “Perfect.” Dart cut away the dead man’s underpants and spread the shower curtain next to the body. A flap of underwear lay across Sheldon Dolkis’s groin. “Let’s see how our boy was hung.” He ripped away the cloth. “Had to jerk off with tweezers.”

  Dart draped his suit jacket over the back of a chair. He rolled his sleeves halfway up his biceps and tucked his necktie in between the third and fourth buttons of his shirt. Kneeling beside the body, he slid his arms under the back, grunted, and rolled it onto the shower curtain. He moved up and rolled it over again, so that the body faced upward. He fussed with it, centering it on the plastic sheet. “All righty.” He rubbed his hands together and looked fondly down at the corpse. “Do you know what I wanted to be when I grew up?”

  “A doctor,” Nora said.

  “A surgeon. Loved cutting things up. Loved it. What did the great Leland Dart say? ‘I’m not wasting my money on some medical school that’ll flunk you out in a year.’ Thanks a bunch, Dad. Lucky me, I found a way to be a surgeon despite him.”

  He lowered himself to his knees and picked up the stag-handled knife. “You’ve seen a million operations, right? Watch this. Tell me if I’m any good.” She watched him slide the knife beneath the breastbone and draw it down the mound of the belly, bisecting the line of hair. Yellow fat oozed from the wound. “I don’t suppose, when reminiscing about his dear old Yale days, your husband ever mentioned an organization called the Hellfire Club?”

  55

  SHE GAVE A start of surprise and said, “You did that very well.”

  “Of course,” he said, annoyed. “I’m a born surgeon. What’s the essential quality of a born surgeon? A passion for cutting people up. Used to practice on animals when I was a kid, but I didn’t want to be a vet, for God’s sake.” He cut away wide semicircles of flesh on either side of the incision, then carved off soft yellow fat and dropped it onto the shower curtain. In a few seconds, he had exposed the lower part of the rib cage and the peritoneum. “Want to take a look at Shelley’s liver—a real beauty, I bet—and his pancreas, check him for gallstones and anything else that might turn up, but I have to get this huge, ugly membrane, the greater omentum, out of the way. Look at that fat. This guy could keep a soap factory running for a month.”

  “You’ve been doing your homework.”

  “Medical books are much more enjoyable than the nonsense I read for my old darlings.” He sliced through the thick, fatty membrane and peeled it back, then began probing the abdominal cavity.

  “The Hellfire Club?” Nora asked.

  “You know about the secret societies at Yale, don’t you? The secret secret societies are a lot more interesting. The Hellfire Club is one of the oldest. Used to be you could only get in through heredity, but during the forties they started taking in outsiders. Lincoln Chancel was buddy-buddy with some old sharks who were members, and they bent the rules to get Alden in, so Davey was eligible, and he joined. I came in when I was a sophomore, so we were there together for a year. Jesus Christ, look at this.”

  He sliced the peritoneal attachments and pulled the liver out of the body. “Right lobe is about half the size it’s supposed to be. See all this discoloration? A decent liver is red. Here, around the vena cava, this big vessel, it’s turning black. The texture is all wrong. I don’t know what the hell old Shelley had, but his bad habits were killing him.” Dart placed the severed liver on the plastic sheet and cut it in half. “What a mess. Hepatic artery looks like a toothpick. . . . I don’t know why Davey stayed in the club. Probably his old man thought it would toughen him up. He was all wrong for the place. It was about cutting loose, getting down and dirty. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.”

  This was interesting, even within the comforting membrane. Most of what Davey had said to her had been a lie. “Where did you meet?”

  “Used to rent a couple of floors in the North End. When the neighbors got suspicious, we’d move into another building. Point was, once you got inside the club, you could do whatever you liked. Nobody was allowed to criticize anything another member chose to do. Don’t question, don’t hesitate, don’t judge. Naturally, we had a few ODs. No problem, dump the body in a vacant lot. People in your generation think they invented drugs. Compared to us, you were pussies. Hash, LSD, angel dust, speed, heroin, bennies, lots and lots of coke. Now, that’s one area where little Davey felt right at home. He’d go three and four nights without sleeping, shoving blow up his nose with both hands, babble about Hugo Driver until he finally passed out.”

  Nora watched his hands working inside the gaping body.

  “Hate the smell of bile. If people think shit smells bad, they ought to take a whiff of the stuff that goes through their gallbladder.” Dart brought a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom to mop up a dark brown stain spreading across the sheet. He sliced the pear-shaped sac of Dolkis’s gallbladder in half and crowed. “What did I tell you? Gallstones. At least ten of ’em. If his liver didn’t kill him first, Shelley was in line for some painful surgery.” He wrapped the mutilated gallbladder in toilet paper and set it aside, but the wet, dead stench still hung in the air.

  “I want to check out this guy’s pancreas and look at his spleen. The spleen is a gorgeous organ.”

  “Did you bring girls to the Hellfire Club?” asked Nora.

  “Any woman who walked into that place was fair game. Even Davey’s crazy girlfriend, Amy something or other, came there once. Made her even crazier than she was before. Then Davey started turning up with this chick. If Amy was strange, this babe was completely weird. Men’s clothes. Short hair.” Dart was severing connective tissue and ducts with quick, accurate movements of his knife. “You’d see this cute little thing sitting alongside Davey and think Yeah, I’ll jump her bones, and then for some reason you realized no, no way. Also, every word she said a
bout herself was a lie. Hello.”

  Dart held up a dripping, foot-long pancreas with a gray-brown growth the size of a golf ball drooping from its head. “I’ve seen tumors before, but this baby is something special. Shelley, your body should be on display in a glass case. I can’t wait to see what his heart looks like.”

  “She was a liar?”

  “Have you noticed your hubby has a tendency to expand upon the truth? This girl was even worse. I guess little Davey had a propensity for crazy ladies.” He put down the diseased pancreas and gave her a twist of a smile.

  “What was her name?”

  “Who knows? She even lied about that. As you may have noticed, I can tell when people are lying. She was about the best liar I ever met, but she was a liar, all right. According to Davey, she went to New Haven College, and came from some little town up around here, I forget which. Chester, something like that. Granville, maybe. I checked her out. She wasn’t registered at New Haven College, and no family with her last name lived in that town.”

  “Could it have been Amherst?”

  “Amherst? No. Why?”

  “Davey once told me a story about an old girlfriend of his who said she came from Amherst. I thought it might be the same girl.”

  He gave her a long, straight look. “The lad probably reeled in wacko ladies by the hundreds. He’s very pretty, after all. Anyhow, he spent almost all his free time with this one. I don’t suppose they spent the whole time talking about Hugo Driver, but whenever I saw them together she was after him to get his father to do something or other with Night Journey. She was totally focused on that book. The girl was after him to let her see the manuscript—something like that. I know he tried, but it didn’t work.”

  Dart manipulated the knife and held up a purple, fist-shaped organ. “Looks surprisingly okay, considering the company it kept.”

  “What happened to the girl?”

  He placed the spleen beside the oozing liver. “One night I happened to walk into our favorite pizza place, and who should I see in the back of the room but Davey and his friend. Your husband-to-be was polluted. I was hardly sober myself, but I wasn’t nearly as bad as Davey. He waved me over to their table, pointed at me, and said, ‘There’s your answer.’ The girl said no. It had to be the two of them, no one else. I was the answer. No, I wasn’t. The girl was stone-cold sober. Finally I figured out that until he got loaded, she’d wanted him to drive the two of them someplace, and he still wanted to do it. She kept saying they could wait until the next day. That fool you married was insisting on going that night—to Shorelands. She wanted to see the place, so tonight was the night. I could drive. All this without asking me if I had the slightest interest in driving across Massachusetts at night.