The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  “Cute,” Dart said. “Pull the trigger, show our studio audience the show must go on.”

  Nora pulled the trigger. The hammer came down with a flat, metallic click. Dart gave out a breathy chuckle and clamped a hand around her wrist. “On we go.” He pulled down her hand, and she squeezed her index finger again. The revolver rode upward on the force of the explosion, and the last bullet burned a hole through Dart’s laughing eye, sped into his brain, and tore off the back of his skull. A red-gray mist flew up and out and spattered the wall far behind him. A bullet in the brain is better than a bullet in the belly. Even Dan Harwich was right sometimes. Dart’s fingers trembled on her wrist. Faintly, as from a distant room, Nora heard Marian Cullinan screaming.

  102

  HALF AN HOUR later the larger world invaded Nora’s life, at first in the form of the many policemen who supplied her with coffee, bombarded her with questions, and wrote down everything she said, thereafter as represented by the far more numerous and invasive press and television reporters who for a brief but intensely uncomfortable period pursued her wherever she went, publishing their various inventions as fact, broadcasting simplifications, distortions, and straightforward untruths, a process which led, as always, to more of the same. If she had agreed, Nora could have appeared on a dozen television programs of the talk-show or tabloid kind, sold the rights to her story to a television production company, and seen her photograph on the covers of the many magazines devoted to trivializing what is already trivial. She did none of these things, considering them no more seriously than she considered accepting any of the sixteen marriage proposals which came to her in the mail. When the public world embraced her, its exaggerations and reductions of her tale made her so unrecognizable to herself that even the photographs in the newspapers seemed to be of someone else. Jeffrey Deodato, who endured a lesser version of Nora’s temporary celebrity, also declined to assist in the public falsification of his life.

  Once Nora had satisfied her laborious obligations to the law enforcement officers of several cities, what she wanted was enough space and time to reorder her life. She also wanted to do three specific things, and these she did, each one.

  But this long, instructive process did not begin until forty minutes after she put Dick Dart to death, when the world rushed in and snatched her up. In the interim, Nora freed the other two women and let Margaret Nolan comfort Lily Melville while she held Jeffrey’s hand and tried to assess his injury. Clearly in pain but bleeding less severely than she had feared, Jeffrey said, “I’ll live, unless I die of embarrassment.” Marian Cullinan retreated to her room, but sensible Margaret volunteered to drive Jeffrey to the hospital and used the imposing force of her personality to dissuade Nora from coming along. She would try to call the Lenox police from the hospital” if the telephones did not work, she would go to the police station after leaving the hospital. She ran to the lot and returned with her car. Staggering, supported by Margaret and Nora, Jeffrey was capable of getting to the door and down the walk. While easing him into the car, Nora remembered to ask Margaret what had happened to Agnes Brotherhood.

  “Oh, my Lord,” Margaret said. “Agnes is locked in her room. She must be frantic.” She told Nora where in her office to find the key and suggested that she might want to clean herself up and put on some clothes before the police came.

  Nora had forgotten that she’d been naked ever since she had taken off Marian’s coat beneath the terrace.

  Margaret raced off toward Lenox, and Nora walked back toward Main House and Agnes, who had escaped the attentions of Dick Dart because he had been unable to get into her room.

  She walked past the lounge without looking at Dart’s body. The keys, each with a label, were in the top left-hand drawer of the desk, just as Margaret had said. Nora pulled on Margaret’s big blue raincoat and went down the hall to Agnes’s room.

  The thin figure in the bed was sleeping, Nora thought, but as she took two steps into the room, Agnes said, “Marian, why did you take so long? I don’t like being locked in, and I don’t like you, either.”

  “It’s not Marian,” Nora said. “I’m the woman who saw you this afternoon. Do you remember? We talked about Katherine Mannheim.”

  A rustle of excited movement came from the bedclothes, and Nora could make out a dim figure pushing itself upright. “They let you come back! Or did you sneak in? Was that you who tried to get in before?”

  Agnes had no idea of what had gone on downstairs. “No, that was someone else.”

  “Well, you’re here now, and I know you’re right. I want you to know. I want to tell you.”

  “Tell me,” Nora said. She bumped into a chair and sat down.

  “He raped her,” Agnes said. “That terrible, ugly man raped her, and she died of a heart attack.”

  “Lincoln Chancel raped Katherine Mannheim.” Nora did not say that she already understood at least that much.

  “You don’t believe me,” Agnes said.

  “I believe you absolutely.” Nora closed her eyes and sagged against the back of the chair.

  “He raped her and she died. He went to get the other one, the other horrible man. That was what I saw.”

  “Yes,” Nora said. Her voice seemed to come from a great distance. “And then you told the mistress, and she went to Gingerbread and saw them with her body. But you didn’t know what she did after that for a long time.”

  “I couldn’t have stayed here if I knew. She only told me when she was sick and taking that medicine that didn’t do anything but make her sicker.”

  “Did you ask her about it? You finally wanted to know the truth, didn’t you?”

  Agnes started to cry with muffled sniffs. “I did, I wanted to know. She liked telling me. She still hated Miss Mannheim.”

  “The mistress got money from Mr. Chancel. A lot of money.”

  “He gave her whatever she wanted. He had to. She could have sent them both to jail. She had proof.”

  Nora let her head roll back on her shoulders and breathed out the question she had to ask. “What kind of proof did she have, Agnes?”

  “The note, the letter, whatever you call it. The one she made Mr. Driver write.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “It was in Gingerbread. The mistress made Mr. Driver write down everything they did and what they were going to do. Mr. Chancel didn’t want him to do it, but the mistress said that if he didn’t, she would go back to the house and get the police on them. She knew he wouldn’t kill her, even though he probably wanted to, because she put herself in with them. Mr. Chancel still wouldn’t do it, but Mr. Driver did. One was as good as two, she said. She told them where to bury that poor girl, and she put that in the note herself, in her own writing. That was how she put herself in with them.”

  She managed to say what she knew. “And she put the note in her safe, the one under her bed, didn’t she?”

  “It’s still there,” Agnes said. “I used to want to look at it sometimes, but if I did I’d know where they buried her, and I didn’t want to know that.”

  “You can open her safe?”

  “I opened it a thousand times when I was taking care of her. She kept her jewelry in there. I got things out for her when she wanted to wear them. Do you want to see it?”

  “Yes, I do,” Nora said, opening her eyes and straightening up. “Can you walk that far, Agnes?”

  “I can walk from here to the moon if you give me enough time.” Agnes reached out and closed her hand around Nora’s wrist. “Why is your skin so rough?”

  “I’m pretty muddy,” Nora said.

  “Ought to clean yourself up, young thing like you.”

  Agnes levered herself out of the bed and shuffled toward the door, gripping Nora’s wrist. When they moved into the light, she took in Nora’s condition with shocked disapproval. “What happened to you? You look like a savage.”

  “I fell down,” Nora said.

  “Why are you wearing Margaret’s raincoat?”

&nbs
p; “It’s a long story.”

  “Never saw the like,” Agnes said, and shuffled out into the hallway.

  In Georgina Weatherall’s bedroom, the old woman switched on the lights and asked Nora to put a chair in front of the bed. She twirled the dial. “I’ll remember this combination after I forget my own name.” She opened the safe door, reached in, extracted a long, once creamy envelope yellow with age, and held it out to Nora. “Take that with you. Get it out of this house. I have to go to the bathroom now. Will you please help me?”

  Nora waited outside the bathroom until Agnes had finished, then conducted her back to her room. As she helped her get back into bed, she told her that there had been some trouble downstairs. The police were going to come, but everything was all right. Marian and Lily and Margaret were all fine, and the police would want to talk to her, but all she had to do was tell them that she had been locked in her room, and they would go away. “I’d rather you didn’t say anything about the letter you gave me,” she said, “but of course that’s up to you.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that note,” Agnes said. “Especially not to any policeman. You better wash yourself off and get into some real clothes, unless you want a lot of men staring at you. Not to mention tracking mud all over the house.”

  Nora showered as quickly as she could, dried herself off, and trotted, envelope in hand, to Margaret’s room. A few minutes later, wearing a loose black garment which concealed a long envelope in one of its side pockets, she went downstairs. Seated at the dining room table, Marian jumped up when Nora came in. She had changed clothes and put on fresh lipstick. “I know I have to thank you,” Marian said. “You and that man saved my life. What happened to everybody? What happened to him? Are the police on the way?”

  “Leave me alone,” Nora said. She went to a chair at the far end of the table and sat down, not looking at Marian. A current of emotion too complicated to be identified as relief, shock, anger, grief, or sorrow surged through her, and she began to cry.

  “You shouldn’t be crying,” Marian said, “you were great.”

  “Marian,” Nora said, “you don’t know anything at all.”

  From the front of the building came the sounds of sirens and police cars swinging into the gravel court, bringing with them the loud attentions of the world outside.

  ONE DAY AT THE END OF AUGUST

  One day at the end of August, a formerly lost woman who asked the people she knew to call her Nora Curlew instead of Nora Chancel drove unannounced through the gates on Mount Avenue and continued up the curving drive to the front of the Poplars. After having been ordered out of the house by his father, Davey had been implored to come back, as Nora had known he would, and was living again in Jeffrey Deodato’s former apartment above the garage. Alone in the house on Crooked Mile Road, Nora had spent the past week dealing with endless telephone calls and the frequent arrivals of cameras, sound trucks, and reporters wishing to speak to the woman who had killed Dick Dart. She had also contended with the inevitable upheavals in her private life. Even after she told him that she wanted a divorce, Davey had offered to move back in with her, but Nora had refused. She had also refused his invitation to share the apartment above the garage, where Davey had instantly felt comfortable. You told the FBI where I was, she had said, to which Davey replied, I was trying to help you. She had told him, We’re finished. I don’t need your kind of help. Not long after this conversation, she had called Jeffrey, who was out of the hospital and convalescing at his mother’s house, to tell him that she would see him soon.

  Alden Chancel, whose attitude toward Nora had undergone a great change, had tried to encourage a reconciliation by proposing to build a separate house, a mini-Poplars, on the grounds, and she had turned down this offer, too. She had already packed most of the surprisingly few things she wanted to keep, and she wished to go someplace where few people knew who she was or what she had done. Nora was already impatient with her public role” another explosion of reporters and cameramen would soon erupt, and she wanted to be far away when it did. In the meantime, she had three errands to accomplish. Seeing Alden was the first of these.

  Maria burst into a smile and said, “Miss Nora! Mr. Davey is in his apartment.”

  A few days after being suspended, Maria had been rehired. The lawsuit against Chancel House had been withdrawn, and Alden no longer feared revelations connected to Katherine Mannheim.

  “I’m not here to see Davey, Maria, so please don’t tell him I’m here. I want to talk to Mr. Chancel. Is he in?”

  Maria nodded. “Come in. He’ll like to see you. I will get him.” She went to the staircase, and Nora walked into the living room and sat down on one of the long sofas.

  In a few minutes, radiating pleasure, affability, and charm, Alden came striding in. He was wearing one of his Admiral of the Yacht Club ensembles: white trousers, a double-breasted blue blazer, a white shirt, and a snappy ascot. She stood up and smiled at him.

  “Nora! I was delighted when Maria told me you were here. I trust this means that we can finally put our difficulties behind us and start pulling together. Davey and I need a woman around this place, and you’re the only one who would possibly do.” He kissed her cheek.

  A week ago, announcing that she had finally had enough of his abuse, fraudulence, and adulteries, Daisy had left the Poplars to move into a suite at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, from which she refused to be budged. She would not see or speak to Alden. She had emerged from her breakdown and subsequent immersion in soap operas with the resolve to escape her imprisonment and revise her book. During one of his pleading telephone calls, Davey said that his mother wanted “to be alive again” and had told him that he had “set her free” by learning the truth about his birth. He was baffled by his mother’s revolt, but Nora was not.

  “That’s nice of you, Alden,” she said.

  “Should we get Davey in on this talk? Or just hash things out by ourselves for a while? I think that would be useful, though any time you want to bring Davey in, just say the word.”

  Alden had been impressed by the commercial potential of what she had done at Shorelands, and Nora knew from comments passed along by Davey that he was willing to provide a substantial advance for a first-person account of her travels with Dick Dart, the actual writer to be supplied later. The notion of her “true crime nonfiction novel” made his heart go trip trap, trip trap, exactly as Daisy had described. But the most compelling motive for Alden’s new congeniality was what Nora had learned during her night in Northampton. He did not want her to make public the circumstances of the births of either Hugo Driver’s posthumous novels or his son.

  “Why don’t we keep this to ourselves for now?” she said.

  “I love dealing with a good negotiator, love it. Believe me, Nora, we’re going to come up with an arrangement you are going to find very satisfactory. You and I have had our difficulties, but that’s all over. From now on, we know where we stand.”

  “I agree completely.”

  Alden brushed a hand down her arm. “I hope you know that I’ve always considered you a tremendously interesting woman. I’d like to get to know you better, and I want you to understand more about me. We have a lot in common. Would you care for a drink?”

  “Not now.”

  “Let’s go into the library and get down to the nitty-gritty. I have to tell you, Nora, I’ve been looking forward to this.”

  “Have you?”

  He linked his arm into hers. “This is family, Nora, and we’re all going to take care of each other.” In the library, he gestured to the leather couch on which she and Davey had listened to his ultimatum. He leaned back in the chair he had used that night and folded his hands in his lap. “I like the way you’ve been handling the press so far. You’re building up interest, but this is about when we should do a full-court press. You and I don’t need to deal with agents, do we?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I know some of the best architects in the New York
area. We’ll put together a place so gorgeous it’ll make that house on Crooked Mile Road look like a shack. But that’s a long-range project. We can have fun with it later. You’ve been thinking about the advance for the book, haven’t you? Give me a number. I might surprise you.”

  “I’m not going to write a book, Alden, and I don’t want a house.”

  He crossed his legs, put his hand to his chin, and tried to stay civil while he figured out how much money she wanted. “Davey and I both want this situation to work out satisfactorily for all three of us.”

  “Alden, I didn’t come here to negotiate.”

  He smiled at her. “Why don’t you tell me what you want, and let me take it from there?”

  “All I want is one thing.”

  He spread his hands. “As long as it’s within my powers, it’s yours.”

  “I want to see the manuscript of Night Journey.”

  Alden stared at her for about three seconds too long. “Davey asked me about that, hell, ten years ago, and the thing’s lost. I wish I did have it.”

  “You’re lying to me,” Nora said. “Your father never threw anything away. Just look at the attic of this house and the storeroom at the office. Even if he had, he would have kept that manuscript. It was the basis of his greatest success. All I want to do is take a look at it.”

  “I’m sorry you think I’m not telling you the truth. But if that’s what you came here for, I suppose this conversation is over.” He stood up.

  “If you don’t show it to me, I’m going to say things that you don’t want people to hear.”

  He gave her an exasperated look and sat down again. “I don’t understand what you think you can get out of this. Even if I did have it, it couldn’t do you a bit of good. What’s the point?”

  “I want to know the truth.”

  “That’s what you came here for? The truth about Night Journey? Hugo Driver wrote it. Everybody knows it, and everybody’s right.”