The Hellfire Club by Peter Straub
“Oh, God,” Davey said.
“Davey, stop moaning and pay attention to me.” Alden inhaled. “Your marriage was a mistake. This creature has brought discord into our family from the moment she appeared. She has injured you in ways you can’t even begin to comprehend.” Alden, who had begun to shout again, brought himself under control. “Maybe we share a taste for erratic women.”
“I’m leaving,” Nora said, and stood up.
“You generally run away when you hear the truth, don’t you?”
“I don’t take orders from you, Alden. Davey, let’s go.”
Looking only half awake, Davey began to stand up.
“Sit down,” Alden said.
Davey sat down.
“I am going to make this very simple for you, Davey. I am presenting you with a choice. If you divorce this woman and get your life in order, you stay on at Chancel House and remain in my will. If you refuse to see reality and stay in your marriage, you’re out of both your job and my estate. You’ll have to find a way to support yourself—if you can, which I’m sorry to say I doubt.”
“That’s not a choice, it’s an ultimatum,” Nora said.
“As far as I’m concerned, you are no longer in this room. Davey, I want you to think about your decision. Think hard. Do you want to stay with the madwoman you married, or do you want the life you deserve? We would be more than delighted to have you back with us.”
“Do you really mean all this?” Davey asked.
“You have a week to think things over. I want you to do the right thing, and I think you will see that I am acting in your best interests.”
Nora said, “You’re using your money like a club. If you stick to this sadistic plan, you’ll wind up losing your son. Do you want that to happen?”
Alden stood up. “Davey, you may leave. I have to go upstairs and deal with your mother.”
Davey obediently stood up. Alden marched to the door and held it open.
“Dad,” Davey said.
“I’ll speak to you next Sunday.”
Davey moved toward the door. “Boy, are you going to be sorry,” Nora said. Pretending that he could not see or hear her, Alden patted Davey on the back as he went through the door. Nora suppressed the impulse to slap away his hand.
Clutching a white cloth in a distant corner of the living room, Maria quivered and began to move toward the entry. Alden said, “My son can let himself out of the house.” She froze in midstep.
“Good-bye, Maria,” Nora said, but Maria was too terrified to speak.
40
THEY CAME OUT of the house into abrupt night. Davey went down a step and looked back at the door. “Maybe we should go back in.”
“What for? He gave his speech.”
“I guess you’re right. He’s too angry.”
“Phooey. He’s happier than he has been in years. He thinks he’s got you right where he wants you.”
Davey shook his head and went down the rest of the stairs, fumbling in his pocket. “Would you drive? I feel kind of scrambled.”
Nora took the keys. By the time she got into the driver’s seat and moved it forward, he was leaning back with his eyes closed, his body so limp it seemed lifeless. “Come on,” she said. “He’ll never go through with it. All you have to do is call his bluff.”
“He doesn’t bluff.”
Nora started the car and drove toward the distant gate in a cocoon of darkness. After a moment she turned on the headlights. “Do you think he’s really willing to cut you out of his life forever?”
“I don’t know,” Davey moaned.
“Of course he isn’t,” Nora said. “He’s trying to bully you. This time, you can’t let him get away with it.” She turned onto Mount Avenue, accelerated, and the car shot forward like a nervous horse.
“What are you talking about?”
Usually an excellent, even a bold driver, Nora made a small adjustment to the wheel, and the Audi twitched sideways over the broken yellow line. She steered back into the proper lane and deliberately relaxed her hands. “The last thing in the world he wants is to lose you. That’s what this is all about.”
Davey moaned again, whether at his plight or her handling of his car she could not tell. “He’s going to do everything he said.”
“So what? After a couple of weeks he’ll come nosing around to see how you’re doing. If you don’t have a new job, he’ll give you your old one back. If you accept, he’ll offer you a higher salary or a better position.”
“Suppose he doesn’t. Suppose it isn’t a strategy.”
An odd sense of familiarity as strong as déjà vu took possession of Nora. Hadn’t she been reading a book in which a character presented an ultimatum much like Alden’s? What scene, what book? Then it came to her: Alden had reminded her of Archibald Poison forcing Adelbert and Clementine to provide him with a grandson.
“Don’t have an answer, do you?”
“What?”
“What happens if he really means it?”
“Every publishing house in New York would take you on. Some of them would hire you just to spite Alden. In fact . . .” She grinned sideways at Davey, who had flattened both hands on top of his head. “Screw the week. Call the people you know at other houses. Take the best offer you get, then go into your father’s office and resign. He’ll go nuts.”
“No, he won’t,” Davey said. “Why would anybody give me a job? I edit crossword puzzle books. I send out form letters on behalf of the Hugo Driver Society. Besides, you don’t know what’s going on in publishing. Nobody quits anymore. It’s not like the eighties, when people hopped around all over the place.”
“Davey, you don’t need this crap. Make some calls and see what happens.”
They drove the rest of the way home in silence.
In the dark, Nora felt her way to the light switch and realized that Davey was still in the Audi. She spoke his name. He slowly left the car. When Nora opened the back door, he began moving zombielike to the front of the garage.
“It’s going to be all right,” she said, struggling to maintain her optimism. She closed the door behind them and saw him glance at the family room. “Come on upstairs,” she said.
He dragged himself toward the stairs. Nora followed him into the kitchen, turning on lights as Davey advanced before her. “Let me make something for you,” she said.
“Who can eat?”
Nora watched him take the bottle of kümmel from the shelf, select a lowball glass, and fill it to within an inch of the rim. He sat down opposite her and began revolving the glass on the table. At last he looked up at her.
“You’re letting this get to you too much.”
“There’s one big difference between us, Nora. He’s not your father.”
“Thank God,” Nora said, perhaps unwisely. “My father would never have treated you like that.”
“I forgot, the great Matt Curlew was perfect. According to you, my father is the scum of the earth.”
“I never said that,” Nora protested. “I hate the way he treats you, and this ultimatum is the perfect example. He’s using Daisy’s tantrum to drive us apart.”
“Gee, thanks. In case I don’t understand what my father is doing, you have to explain it three or four times.” He took a gulp of his drink, and a delicate shade of pink rose into his cheeks.
“Oh, Davey, maybe I’ve been talking too much, but he made me incredibly angry. And you were so silent.”
“You keep forgetting he’s my father. This guy you say has mistreated me all my life sent me to the best schools in America—something the sacred Matt Curlew never did for you—he gave me a job and pays me a lot more money than I deserve, he runs an important company—another thing Matt Curlew didn’t do—and in case you forgot, see this table? He paid for it. He paid for everything in this house, including the light-bulbs and the toilet paper. I think he deserves some gratitude, not to mention respect.”
“In other words, he owns you.”
?
“I don’t want you to hate him,” Nora lied. “But I love you, too, and I’d like you to get out from under his thumb.” Davey lifted his glass and drank. “In a way he was right. You have to decide which one you want more, him or me. But if you choose him, you lose me for good, and if you choose me, you’ll get him back in about a second.”
“I’m married to you, not my father,” he said.
“Thank God, I was beginning to get worried.”
“But I don’t want to lose either one of you. I think you’re nuts to imagine that he’ll change his mind.”
“He won’t change his mind, he’ll just wait for another chance.”
“How can you be so sure? If he cans me and I can’t find another job, we’re going to run out of money in about three months. Then what? Welfare? A cardboard box?”
“He’d never let that happen. You know he’d—”
“If I do get a job with another publisher, do you know what my salary would be? About a third of what I’m making now. We move out of here, okay, but all we could afford would be some dinky rathole of an apartment.”
“Who says you have to work in publishing? The world is full of jobs.”
“Don’t you read the newspapers? Okay, maybe I could get a job as a clerk, but then we’d get half of a rathole.”
“I can get a job,” Nora said. “That way we get the whole rathole.”
“God, it’s like being married to Pollyanna.”
“But you will make the calls, won’t you?”
Davey pursed his lips and gave the refrigerator a considering glance. “Actually, there might be another way.”
“What other way?”
“I could tell him that I’ll move back into the house if he lets you stay here as long as you want. I think he’d go for it.”
“We’d have lawyers all over us before you stopped talking. Good old Dart, Morris would build a wall between us six feet thick. How does that help us?”
“Once I’m there, I can talk to him, and if I can talk to him, I can soften him up. Sooner or later, he’ll listen to reason.”
“Davey, the Trojan horse.”
“That’s right.”
Nora leaned back in her chair and looked at him steadily for what seemed a long time.
“I knew you wouldn’t like it,” he said. “But he has to calm down sooner or later.”
“Davey, your father is doing his damnedest to turn you back into a child, and you want to give him a helping hand. Once he has you locked up in there, he’s going to keep hammering away. By the time he’s finished, you’ll be wearing diapers and eating pureed carrots, and we’ll be divorced.”
“What a high opinion you have of me.” His face had turned a brighter shade of pink.
“I know what happens when you’re around your father. You turn mute, and you do everything he says.”
“Not this time.” He frowned at his glass, then looked back up at Nora in a way that seemed almost challenging. “Where did you find that garbage about my mother writing the Morning and Teatime books, in the astrology column?”
“It’s true,” Nora said. Davey grimaced. “I was reading along, and there they were, the crosshatch scuff marks and a sentence starting with ‘Indeed.’ I was flabbergasted.”
“Not as flabbergasted as my mother. She’s never even read novels like that. You heard my dad. Why would she do it in the first place?”
“Because Alden talked her into it. He thought he could make a lot of quick money out of horror novels.”
He put on a disgusted expression and gazed at his drink. “Nora, even if this crazy idea came to you, why did you decide to tell her about it? Didn’t you realize what would happen? I don’t get how . . .” He threw up his hands.
“She was already ranting at me about spitting on her masterpiece, and I tried to rescue myself by telling her that it was so much better than those books. I guess I thought she’d be flattered.”
“Smart,” he said. “You throw a bomb into the living room and expect her to take it as a compliment.”
Nora pushed herself away from the table. “I have to go to bed. Will you come, too?”
“I’m going to stay up. I won’t be able to get to sleep for hours.”
“But you will make those calls?”
“I don’t need another bully in my life.”
“I’m sorry, I won’t say any more about it, I promise.” Nora backed toward the door. “I’ll see you later, then.”
“I suppose.”
She forced herself to smile as she left the room.
41
ABOUT HALF AN hour after Davey had left for work on Monday morning, Nora cried out aloud and woke herself up. Sweat covered her body and dampened the sheets. A small, trembling pool lay between her breasts. She groaned and wiped her face with her hands, then grabbed a dry portion of the top sheet on Davey’s side of the bed and blotted her chest. “Holy cow,” she said, an expression inherited from Matt Curlew. As soon as she wiped away the moisture, more of it rolled from her pores. Her body radiated heat. “Oh, hell,” she said. “A hot flash.” She had not known that you could get a hot flash while sleeping. An insect of some kind began crawling up her right thigh, and she raised her head to look at it. Nothing was on her thigh, but the sensation continued. Nora tried to rub it away. The invisible bug moved another two inches up her leg and ceased to be. She lay back on the damp sheets, wondering if phantom insects were common occurrences during hot flashes, or if this were some little treat all her own. A few seconds later the moisture on her body turned cold, and it was over.
After she had showered and out of habit put on a dark blue T-shirt, white shorts, and her Nikes, Nora realized that she had dressed for a run. She padded into the kitchen for a glass of orange juice and realized that she knew at least one person sufficiently down-to-earth not to mind being asked what some would consider an intrusive question. She pulled the telephone directory toward her and looked up Beth Landrigan’s number. Only when she heard the telephone ringing did she wonder if she might be calling too early.
Beth’s untroubled greeting dispatched this worry. “Nora, how nice, I was just thinking about you. Our lunch last week was so much fun that we should do it again. Just us, no noisy husbands. Let’s cut loose and go to the Château.”
“Great,” Nora said. “I love the Château, and Davey never wants to go there.”
“Arturo practically lives at the Château, but he never goes there for lunch, so we’d be safe. Wednesday?”
“You’re on. Twelve-thirty?”
“Could you wait until one? I have a Japanese lesson at eleven-thirty on Wednesdays, and it lasts an hour.”
“Sure,” Nora said. “Wow, Japanese lessons. I’m impressed.”
“So am I. I’m getting to speak it like a native...of Germany, unfortunately. Anyhow, you didn’t call me to talk about my language difficulties. What’s on your mind?”
“I wanted to ask you a question, and I hope it won’t offend you.”
“Fire away.”
“It has to do with menopause.”
“Offended, are you kidding? Everybody I know is menopausal, including me. It’s all the rage. What’s the question?”
“I had my first hot flash this morning.”
“Welcome aboard.”
“This strange thing happened. In the middle of it, I felt a bug crawling up my leg, but there wasn’t any bug. I could really feel it. Did that ever happen to you?”
Beth was laughing. “Oh God, the first time that happened I almost jumped out of my skin. They tell you about the flashes, they tell you about night sweats and lots of other unpleasant things, but they never get around to telling you about the bug.”
“I’m glad it’s not just me.”
“There’s even a name for it. I can’t remember the word, but it’s something like masturbation. Maybe I’ll ask my tuto
“Probably knows a lot more about masturbation,” Nora said, and the two women laughed and talked another few minutes before saying good-bye.
Cheered by this conversation and delighted by the promise of a friendship with funny, smart, levelheaded Beth Landrigan, Nora settled her long-billed blue cap on what she hoped was her own level head and left the house.
Forty-five minutes later, Nora heard the telephone ringing as she opened her front door, and she rushed up the stairs to answer it. Sweat darkened the blue T-shirt and shone on her legs. She snatched up the receiver and said, “Hello.”
“Nora, this is Holly. I’d like you to get down to the station right away. Can you do that?”
“Did Natalie say something?”
“We have a lot of things to talk about, and that’s one of them. If you don’t have a car, I can send a man for you.”
“I came in from my run just this second, and I’m dripping. Let me take a quick shower and change clothes, and I’ll be right in.”
He hesitated. “Okay, but some folks here are going to get nervous if you don’t show up soon, so make it as quick as you can.”
“Holly, you sound so... kind of abrupt. Should I be worried about anything? My life has gone so haywire lately, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“It isn’t quite that simple,” he said. “Do what you have to do and get here as fast as you can.”
“I’ll see you in twenty, twenty-five minutes.”
“Come around to the back. This place is a zoo.”
Nora said, “Okay, good-bye,” and Fenn hung up without speaking.
42
NORA PARKED IN the slot Davey had taken behind Fenn’s office, and saw through his window the back of his head and shoulders as he talked to Barbara Widdoes, who was wandering back and forth in front of his desk. Several other people, dark shapes in the back of the room, also seemed to be present. Through the humid air, Nora rushed past the row of police cars. She had put on a blue chambray shirt, jeans, and brown loafers. Wet hair clung to her ears. Her heart pounded.