The Hellfire Club by Peter Straub
“A lot,” Nora said.
“Whoop-de-do!” Daisy said. “Stop wasting time talking to me and surge ahead.” She hung up.
Nora went back to the couch and began the second chapter. Adelbert stood beside a tall, bony, blond woman and signed a hotel register under a false name. In their room Adelbert ordered the woman to undress. Honey, can’t we have a drink first? He said, Do what I say. The woman undressed and embraced him. Adelbert pushed her away. The woman said she thought they were friends. Adelbert took a revolver from his jacket pocket and shot her in the forehead.
Nora read the line again. Adelbert raised the revolver, squeezed the trigger, and put a bullet through her stupid forehead. This was a new side of Adelbert. Nora smiled at the idea of Daisy’s turning Alden into a murderer. She was killing off her husband’s conquests.
The telephone rang again. Groaning, Nora got up and answered it by saying, “Daisy, please, you have to give me more time.”
A male voice asked, “Who’s Daisy?”
“I’m sorry,” Nora said. “I thought you were someone else.”
“Obviously. I hope she gives you all the time you need, whoever she is.”
“Holly,” Nora said. “Chief Fenn, I mean. How embarrassing. I’m glad you called, actually. You must have some news.”
“It’s Holly, and the reason I’m calling is that we don’t have any news yet. We finally got Mrs. Weil’s doctor off the golf course, and he shot her full of sedatives and put her in Norwalk Hospital. According to him, the earliest we can get a straight story out of her is probably Monday morning. I thought I’d pass that along, so you can relax for one night, anyhow.”
She thanked him and said, “I guess if I’m going to call you Holly, you ought to start calling me Nora.”
“I already do,” he said. “I’ll be in touch Monday morning around nine, ten at the latest.”
A wave of relief loosened the muscles in Nora’s back. Holly Fenn assumed her innocent of whatever had happened to Natalie, that sow. Holly Fenn wanted to clear things up.
She returned to Daisy’s epic. Adelbert parked in front of his crumbling mansion and went inside to pull Egbert out of bed. Egbert got off the floor, crawled back into bed, and pulled the covers over his head. Adelbert went downstairs to order a cringing servant to bring a six-to-one martini to the library. By the time the servant appeared with his drink, Adelbert was deep into a volume called The History of the Poison Family in America.
A new chapter, apparently from a much older version of the novel, began. On yellowed pages, the letters rose above and sank beneath the level of the lines, every e tilting leftwards, every o a bullet hole. After a battle with the style, far more congested than that of the first two chapters, Nora saw that Adelbert was reading about the history of his father during the period immediately after the birth of Egbert. A secret Nazi sympathizer, Archibald had made millions by investing in German armament concerns and was presently diverted from his covert attempts to consolidate a group of right-wing millionaires into a Fascist movement by a maddening personal problem. After rereading several pages three times over, Nora gathered that Adelbert and Clementine had perhaps produced the grandson Archibald passionately desired. Either the child had died or they had put him up for adoption. Archibald’s tirades, lengthily represented, had not convinced them to repair the loss. When his orders and ultimatums came to nothing, Archibald informed his son that he would be cut out of his will if he did not provide an heir.
All of this lay half hidden beneath a furious explosion of exclamation points, tangled grammar, and backwards sentences. Archibald’s fantasies about American Fascism clouded whole pages with descriptions of Nazi uniforms and other regalia. Hitler appeared, confusingly. She could not be certain if the new child had been reclaimed, adopted, or even resurrected.
Nora turned to a page typed on a sheet of Ritz-Carlton stationery and skimmed through three paragraphs before the first two sentences chimed in her head. She went back and reread them and then reread the sentences again. Adelbert’s shoes were crosshatched with scuff marks. Indeed, Adelbert’s were not the shoes of a fastidious man, and such secret stains and stinks permeated his entire character.
“Oh, my God,” Nora said. “It was Daisy.”
35
SHE LOOKED UP in astonishment. Not only were Clyde Morning and Marletta Teatime the same person, but both were Daisy Chancel. After Blackbird’s initial authors had deserted Chancel House, Alden had replaced them with his wife, who had churned out piecework horror novels while she labored on her grim monstrosity. Blackbird’s two stalwarts had never been seen or heard from because they were phantoms. Spectre had been hidden on a conference room shelf because Daisy had lost interest and written it when tired, drunk, or both. Alden would never revive Blackbird. Davey had been right about that, though he did not know why.
She wondered how he would react if she presented him with her discovery, then realized that she could not. Nora knew exactly how Davey would respond, by frothing at the mouth for twenty minutes before disappearing downstairs to hide behind Puccini. A more urgent question was whether or not to tell Daisy what she had discovered. Once again, for a time two separate Noras inhabited a single body, which stood up to move into the kitchen and make a ham sandwich. Daisy’s instability made it equally possible that she would be enraged or delighted to have her pseudonyms known. Nora carried the sandwich back into the bedroom and realized that Davey had been gone for hours. At least he was not in Norwalk Hospital cooing over Natalie Weil. She decided to do precisely what she had done on the parkway, postpone any decision until it made itself. Daisy’s manner would dictate her choice.
Nora bit into her sandwich and began skipping through the pages, trying to learn where this story was going.
After another hour, she decided that if this story was going anywhere, it was in some Daisyish direction unknown to the normal world. Scenes concluded, and then, as if an earlier draft had not been removed, repeated themselves with slight variations. The tone swung from dry to hysterical and back. At times Daisy had broken up a straightforward scene to interpolate handwritten passages of disjointed words and phrases. Some scenes broke off unfinished in midsentence, as if Daisy had intended but forgotten to return to them later. There was nothing faintly like a conventional plot. One chapter read in its entirety: The author wants to have another drink and go to bed. You idiots should do the same.
After following these confusions through a maze of arrows and crossings-out, Nora began to feel sick to her stomach. She decided to see what happened at the end and dug the last thirty pages out of the pile. Cleanly typed on fresh white bond, they were free from alterations, insertions, or marks of any kind. Nora leaned back, resumed reading, and soon found herself once more entangled in barbed wire.
The ending of Daisy’s book described an argument between Clementine and Adelbert ranging over the whole of their marriage. At various moments, they were in their twenties, their forties, fifties, and sixties. The site of the argument shifted from different rooms in their house to train compartments, hotel dining rooms, and terraces in European cities. They lounged on the grass in a London park and propped up the bar of a Third Avenue gin mill at two in the morning. The ending was a compilation of the occasions of their dispute. What Nora did not understand was the nature of the dispute itself.
Clementine spewed accusations, and Adelbert responded with irrelevancies, most of them about music. I have kept your business going, you bastard, but instead of thanking me you kicked me in the teeth. (Adelbert: I never liked Hank Williams all that much.) Your entire existence is based on a lie, and so is our son’s. (Adelbert: Cheap music sounds good on car radios.) You’re not merely a fraud, but a fraud soaked in blood. (Adelbert: Most people would rather go to a ball game than a symphony, and they’re correct.) Bile soaked the paragraphs, a bitterness evoked by a subject as familiar to Clementine and Adelbert as it was opaque to Nora.
The last paragraph drew away from the protagonists t
“Fraud,” Clementine said, and the moron sun, having no choice, shone down upon the Poisoned world.
Nora placed the last page atop the others and heard the sound she had most been dreading, the ringing of the telephone.
36
“THANKS BE TO God, I did not hear the most hateful phrase on the face of the earth, ‘Wrong number.’ Haven’t I been good? Haven’t I been the most restrained little thing on the face of the earth? I am proud of myself, unto the utmost utmost. I have been circling this phone, picking it up and putting it down, I have several times dialed the first three numerals of your phone number only to put the blasted thing down again, I promised you hours of peace and quiet untroubled by little me, and by my count three hours and what’s more twenty-two minutes have passed, and so what did you think? Tell me, speak, discourse, dearest Nora, please say something.”
“Hello, Daisy,” Nora said.
“I know, I’m too nervous to shut up and let you speak, listen to me babble! How far are you? What do you think? You like it, don’t you?”
“It’s really something,” Nora said.
“Isn’t it ever! Go on.”
“I’ve never read anything like it.”
“You got through the whole thing? You couldn’t have, you must have skimmed.”
“No, I didn’t,” Nora said. “It isn’t the kind of book you can skim, is it.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“For one thing, it’s so intense.” Daisy uttered a satisfied grunt, and Nora went on. “You have to pay attention when you’re reading.”
“I should hope so. Go on, Nora, talk to me.”
“It’s a real experience.”
“What kind of experience? Be more specific.”
Confusing? Irritating? “An intense experience.”
“Ah. I think you already said that, though. What kind of intense experience?”
Nora groped. “Well, intellectual.”
“Intellectual?”
“You have to think when you’re reading it.”
“Okay. But you keep saying the same things over and over. A little while ago, when you were talking about how it wasn’t the kind of book you could skim, you said, ‘for one thing,’ so you must have another reason in mind, too. What was it?”
Nora struggled to remember. “I guess I meant the condition of the manuscript.”
An ominous silence greeted these words.
“You know what I mean, all those changes and deletions.”
“For God’s sake, the whole thing has to be retyped, but you asked to see it, remember, so I gave it to you as is, this is so obvious, but anybody can read a book after it’s published, that’s hardly the point, I want to hear what you have to say, and you’re talking about something completely irrelevant.”
“I’m sorry. All I meant was that you have to read it more slowly this way.”
“Yes, you have been abundantly clear on the subject, trivial though it is, and now that we have that out of the way I wish to sit back and soak up your observations.”
Nora could hear Daisy’s impatience compounding itself several times over. “Some of it is very funny,” she said.
“Goody goody. I meant for parts to be ecstatically funny. Not all of it, though.”
“Of course not. There’s a lot of anger in it.”
“You bet. Anger upon anger. Grrr.”
“And you took a lot of chances.”
“You wonderful girl, you saw that? Blessings on your head. Tell me more.”
“So it seemed very experimental to me.”
“Experimental? What could possibly seem experimental to you?”
“The way you repeat certain scenes? Or how you end some sections before they’re finished?”
“You’re talking about the times when the same things happen all over again after they happened the first time, but differently, so the real meaning comes out. And the other thing you’re talking about is when anyone with half a brain can see what’s going to happen, so there’s no point in writing it all down. My God, it’s a novel, not journalism.”
“No, you’re right. It’s a wonderful novel, Daisy.”
“Then tell me why it’s wonderful.”
Nora groped for the safest comment that could be made about the book. “It’s bold. It’s daring.”
“But why do you think so?” Daisy shouted.
“Well, a lot of books start in one place and tell you a story, and that’s that. I guess what I mean is, you’re willing not to be linear.”
“It’s as linear as a clothesline. If you don’t see that, you don’t see anything at all.”
“Daisy, please don’t be so defensive. I’m telling you what I like about your book.”
“But you’re making me be defensive! You’re saying these stupid things! I spent most of my life laboring over this book, and you sashay up to me and tell me it doesn’t even have a story.”
“Daisy,” Nora said, “I’m trying to tell you that it’s much richer than the books that only tell you a story.”
Slightly mollified, Daisy asked, “What’s your favorite part so far?”
Nora tried to remember something she had liked. “I have lots of favorite parts. Adelbert killing the women. The way you present Egbert. Your descriptions of Adelbert’s clothes.”
Daisy chuckled. “How far are you? What’s happening now?”
Nora tried to remember what had been going on at the point she had skipped ahead. “I’m at the part where Archibald is carrying on about Nazi uniforms and talking to Hitler while he’s making Clementine and his son give him a grandson.”
“The fantasia? You’re only as far as the fantasia? Then you can’t possibly see the pattern, you’re not entitled to speak about it at all. I trusted you with my soul and you’re walking all over it with your big dirty feet, I give you a masterpiece and you spit on it.”
Nora, who had been uttering Daisy’s name at intervals during this tirade, made a desperate effort to placate her. “Daisy, you can’t twist everything around this way, I am not lying to you, I understand what you have put into your book, and I know how special it is because I know you wrote those Clyde Morning and Marletta Teatime novels, and this is so much more adventurous and complex.”
During the long silence which followed she thought that she might have reversed the trend of this conversation, but Daisy had been gathering herself to scream. “Traitor! Judas!”
The line went dead.
Nora dropped the receiver in its cradle and blindly circled the bedroom, hugging herself. When she reached the telephone again, she sat on the bed and dialed the Poplars’ number. She heard the phone ring three times, four times, five. At the tenth ring, she hung up, fell back on the bed, and groaned. Then she sat up and dialed the Poplars’ number again.
After the second ring, Maria picked up and spoke a cautious “Hello?”
“Maria, this is Nora,” she said. “I know Mrs. Chancel doesn’t want to talk to me, but could you please tell her I have important things to say to her?”
“Mrs. Chancel doesn’t want,” Maria said.
“Say whatever you have to, but get her to talk to me.”
Nora heard the telephone clunk down, then a few nearly inaudible words from Maria followed by a series of howls.
“Mrs. Chancel say you not family, her son family, not you. No good. Not talk.” She hung up.
Nora fell back onto the bed and contemplated the ceiling. After an indeterminate time, one small consolation offered itself. Daisy would never speak to Alden of what had occurred. From this certainty grew a larger consolation. Because Daisy would not trouble Alden, Alden would not trouble Dav
She got off the bed to reassemble the manuscript and stuff it back into the suitcase.
37
STILL ANXIOUS, NORA wandered into the kitchen and wiped down the counter. The problem was that if something could go wrong, it usually did. For Daisy, the manuscript was in enemy territory as long as it remained with Nora. She thought about dragging the suitcase from under the bed and driving it to Mount Avenue, but this prospect immediately induced exhaustion and despair.
Without considering what she was doing, Nora went to the sink, turned on the hot water, squirted soap into the palm of her hand, and began washing her hands. Then she washed her face. When she was done, she washed her face and hands again. The fourth time she scrubbed soap into her cheekbones and the flanges of her nose, Nora became conscious of these actions. Hot water stung her skin. She turned on the cold tap, rinsed herself, and reached for a dry dish towel. Her face stung as if she had sandpapered it. Blotting herself dry, Nora realized that she still felt appallingly dirty— no, not still, but rather as though someday very soon she would be appallingly dirty. Fighting the urge to turn the water back on and scrub herself all over again, she drifted into the living room, lay down on the sofa, and closed her eyes until the sound of Davey’s car turning into the driveway awakened her. She wondered where he had been for the previous nine or ten hours and decided she didn’t care. The Audi pulled into the garage.
Here was an interesting problem: would he slip into the family room and pretend she was not there, or would he come upstairs to confront her? Davey opened and closed the back door. His footsteps brought him toward the stairs. However slowly, he was moving in her direction.
Davey reached the top of the stairs and glanced into the kitchen before turning to the living room. He was looking for her, definitely a good sign. Was this what was called grasping at straws? Go on, she thought, grasp away. He came into the living room. His eyes locked with hers and slid away. He dropped into the chair most distant from Nora, leaned back, let his arms fall, and closed his eyes.