The Hellfire Club by Peter Straub
Nora pointed at a driveway a little way ahead of them on the other side of the street. “Pull in there.”
He stared at her. “What?”
“I want to see them leave.”
“You want—oh, I get it.” He pulled up slightly ahead of the driveway between two wings of a stone wall, and backed in. “See? You think I don’t know what this is about, but I do.”
“Good,” Nora said.
“You want to make sure they get away safely.”
“I’m glad you don’t mind.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t mind. I’m just a very agreeable person.”
“So tell me why Creeley Monk killed himself.”
“It’s obvious. This guy reached the end of his rope. First of all, he was a working-class kid who pretended to be high society. From the second he got into that school, his whole life was an act. On top of that, he couldn’t sustain his initial success. Shorelands was supposed to raise him to a new level, but no one wanted to publish his next book. One flutter of interest sends him into ecstasies, and when it doesn’t pan out, he’s devastated. He takes the shotgun out of his closet and ends it all. Simple.”
This clever, rapid-fire dissection, as of a corpse under a scalpel, irritated Nora unreasonably” Harwich had reduced Mark Foil’s account to the empty diagram of a case history.
“Anyhow, you did a good job in there,” Harwich told her. “But there is this little issue about that editor who turns out to be part of the Homintern. Did you get that? We’ve met him a couple of times? Pretty soon Mark is going to know this book is just a smoke screen, and then he’s going to have a lot of questions for me.”
“It’s no big deal. I said I had a book contract, and it turns out I don’t. I’m writing the book before I take it to a publisher.”
“I’m still in a tricky position. Anyhow, there they are, safe and sound.” He nodded toward a long, graceful-looking gray car moving down Oak Street in front of them. “Not a care in the world, as usual.”
“You don’t like them, do you?”
“What’s to like?” he burst out. “These two guys live in a world where everything’s taken care of for them. They’re so smug, so lovey-dovey, so pleased with themselves, tooling off to Cape Cod in Martindale’s new Jaguar while his patients climb the walls.”
“I thought he was retired.”
“Mark’s retired, except from all the important stuff, the state boards and the national committees. Andrew has about six jobs, as far as I can make out. Head of psychiatry here, professor of psychiatry there, chief of this and that, a great private practice full of famous painters and writers, plus his books. The Borderland of the Borderline Patient. The Text of Psychoanalysis. William James, Religious Experience, and Freud. I forget the others.” He pulled out of the drive, enjoying her amazement.
“I thought . . .” Nora did not want to admit what she had thought. “How can he take a month off? Oh, I forgot. It’s August, when all the shrinks go to Cape Cod.”
“That’s right, but Andrew spends his month off running a clinic in Falmouth. And writing. He’s a busy lad.” He gave her a sidelong, appraising look. “Hey, why don’t you take some time off yourself? You shouldn’t run around on your own while your madman is on the loose. And there’s no point in trying to find this Tidy character.”
“What do you think happened to Katherine Mannheim?”
“Easy. Everybody thought either she ran away or died in the woods, so they couldn’t see that both things were true. She’s carrying her suitcase through the woods at night, the weight is too much for her, an owl scares her, blooey. A couple of nitwit cops pretend to search the woods, and surprise, surprise, they don’t find her. I’ve never been inside Shorelands, but I’ve seen it, and even now we’re talking about two square miles of wilderness. An army couldn’t have found her.”
“You’re probably right,” she said, idly watching suburban houses grow closer together as the lots shrank and sprouted the swing sets, wading pools, and bicycles in the driveway she had seen while Dick Dart drove them into Fairfield in Ernest Forrest Ernest’s car. “Oh, my God.”
Harwich gave her a look of concern.
“I know why Lincoln Chancel went to Shorelands.”
“Money, I told you.”
“Not for the reason you think. He was trying to recruit Georgina Weatherall for his Fascist cause, the Americanism Movement. Lincoln Chancel secretly supported the Nazis. He got together a bunch of sympathetic millionaires, but they had to keep quiet during the war. In the fifties, Joe McCarthy roped them into anti-Communism, I guess, and they had to go along.”
He looked at her suspiciously. “I have to say, you do liven things up. Let me take you out for dinner tonight, I know a great French place out near Amherst—a little bit of a drive, but it’s worth it. Amazing food, candlelight, the best wines. Nobody’ll see us, and we’ll be able to have a good long talk.”
“Are you worried about somebody seeing us?”
“We have to keep you under wraps. In the meantime, I’ll order a pizza. There’s not much food in the house. You can get a nap, and I’ll go to the hospital. Don’t answer the phones or open the door for anyone, okay? We’ll keep the world at arm’s length for a while and get reacquainted all over again.”
Nora leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes. Instantly, she was standing in a forest clearing ringed by tall standing stones. Counting money into neat stacks at a carved mahogany desk placed between two upright stones, Lincoln Chancel glanced up and glared at her. Misery and sorrow overflowed from this scene, and Nora stirred and awakened without at first recognizing that she had fallen asleep. Longfellow Lane rolled past the windows like a painted screen.
“Right now you need to be taken care of,” Harwich said.
He pressed a button clipped to his visor to swing up the garage door and drove inside to park beside Sheldon Dolkis’s green Ford. As soon as he got out of the car, he moved to the wall and flipped a switch to bring the heavy door rattling down. A bare overhead light automatically turned off, and the door clanked against the concrete. Nora felt almost too tired to move. Harwich’s dim form moved past the front of the car toward the right side of the garage. “You okay?” he said, and opened an interior door. A panel of gray light erased the front of his body and turned his hair to silver fuzz.
“Guess I didn’t know how tired I was.” She dragged herself out of the remarkably comfortable seat and noticed that a small figure like a white sparrow had perched atop the car’s hood. No, not a bird, a winged woman, poised for flight. This had a meaning, but what meaning? Oh yes, what do you know, Dan Harwich numbered among his possessions a Rolls-Royce. How odd” the deeper into the world she descended, the further up she went. The car door closed with a bank vault’s serious thunk, and Nora went past the waiting Harwich into the house.
“Everything caught up with you,” he said from behind her. He put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder and squeezed past in the narrow space of the rear entry, lightly kissed her, and took her with him through the kitchen to the living room, where she stood embarrassed in the midst of a yawn while he darted forward and drew down on a cord which advanced dark curtains across the bow window. “Let’s get you settled,” he said, and ushered her gently up the stairs, past the linen closet, and into the guest room, where he conducted her toward the bed and removed her shoes once she had stretched out. She yawned again, hugely.
“You fell asleep in the car for about ten minutes.”
“I did not.” The protest sounded childish.
“You did,” Harwich said in an amused echo of her tone. “Not very peacefully, though. You made a lot of unhappy noises.” He began massaging the sole of her right foot.
“That feels wonderful.”
“Why don’t you take off that T-shirt and unbutton your jeans? I’ll help you slide them off.”
“No.” She shook her head back and forth on the pillow.
“You’ll be more comfortable. Then you c
Obediently she sat up and yanked off the white V-necked shirt, turning it inside out in the process, and flipped it toward him.
“Cute bra,” he said. “Do the top of those jeans.”
Protesting, she flattened out and undid the button, pulled down the zip, and wiggled the jeans over her hips. Harwich yanked them down, and in one quick movement they whispered over her thighs, knees, feet. “Matching panties! You’re a fashion plate.” He raised the sheet and the cover so that she could wriggle under and then lowered them over her, not without a little tucking and patting. “There you are, sweetie.”
“What a guy,” she heard herself say, and roused herself to add, “Give me about an hour, okay?” The words sounded distant in her ears, and soft, slow-moving bands of color began to spill from the few objects visible through the slits of her eyes, one of them being Dan Harwich as he drifted toward the door.
The broad circle of grass within the tall stones looked like a stage. Nora moved forward as Lincoln Chancel wrapped bands around the stacks of bills before him and one by one placed them in a satchel as carefully as if they were raw eggs. He gave Nora a sharp, disgruntled look and returned to his task. “You don’t belong here,” he said, seeming to address the satchel.
His ugliness outdid the famous photograph, in which it had seemed a by-product of rage. It was an entire ugliness, domineering in its force.
“No sand in your craw. A few setbacks and you’re on your knees, whimpering Daddy, help me, I can’t do it on my own. Pathetic. When people talk to you, all you hear is what you already know.”
“I understood why you went to Shorelands,” she said, doing her best to mask the fear and impotence she felt.
“Consider yourself fired.” He sent her a cold, ferocious glance of triumph and pulled a thick cigar from his top pocket, bit off the end, and lit it with a match which had appeared between his fingers. “Go home. It’s not a job for a little girl.”
“Screw you,” Nora said.
“Gladly.” He grinned at her like a dragon through a flag of smoke. “Even though you’re too scrawny for my taste. In my day we liked our women ample—womanly, we used to say. Tits like bolsters, buttocks you could sink your hands into. Women to make your pole stand up and beg for it. One other kind I liked, too—small ones. Every big man wants to roger a little thing. Get on top, you feel like you’ll either snap their bones or split ’em in half. But you’re not that type, either.”
“The Katherine Mannheim type.”
He drew on the cigar and blew out a quivering ring of smoke that smelled like rotting leaves. “The runaway.” Instead of losing its shape and drifting upward, the trembling smoke ring widened and began shuddering toward Nora. “Little bitch didn’t have the manners of a whore.”
The smoke ring floated into the middle of the grassy circle, paused, and twisted into nothingness. Pretending that she had already followed orders and left, Chancel snapped the lock of the satchel over the last wad of bills, and her question spoke itself in her head. What did she say . . .
“What did she say to you while the photograph was being taken?”
He looked over at her and mouthed the cigar. “Who?”
“Katherine Mannheim.”
“I graciously invited her to sit on my lap, and she said, ‘I’ve already seen your warts, I don’t have to feel one, too.’ Tidy and that blockhead Favor both laughed. Even the pansy smiled, and so did that poser with the funny name. Austryn Fain. What kind of a handle is Austryn Fain?” He aimed the astonishing nose at her like a gun. “You don’t know anything. You don’t even read the right books. Get out of here. Lose yourself in the woods.”
She cried out and found Harwich’s shadowy, reassuring face inclining toward her. “Ow, that hurt,” he said, maintaining his smile. “You walloped me!”
“Sorry. Bad dream.” A long leg brushed hers, and she squinted at his face.
“Do you always make so much noise in your sleep?”
“Get out of this bed. What are you doing here?”
“I’m trying to calm you down. Come on. There’s nobody here but me.”
Nora dropped her head back on the pillow.
“Nobody’s going to hurt you. Dr. Dan is right here to make sure of that.” He slid closer to her and inserted an arm between her head and the pillow. A smooth cotton shirt encased the arm. “In my medical opinion, you need a hug.”
“Yeah.” She was grateful for this simple kindness.
“Close your eyes. I’ll get out of here when you fall asleep again.”
She turned into his arms and tugged a corner of the pillow between her head and his shoulder. He caressed the side of her head and began stroking her bare arm. “Your operation,” she murmured.
“Long way off.”
“I never sleep during the day,” Nora said, and in seconds proved herself a liar.
When she opened her eyes again, Harwich passed a warm hand up her arm and tugged the sheet over her shoulder. Various, not entirely subjective internal dials and gauges informed her that she had spent a significant time asleep. What time was it? Then she wondered if Dick Dart had been arrested since they had left Mark Foil’s house. Harwich circled her waist with an arm.
“Don’t you have an operation pretty soon?” she asked.
“Took less time than I thought it would.”
“It went all right?”
“Except for the demise of the patient.”
She whirled around to face him and found him propping his head on one hand, smiling down. “Joke. Barney Hodge will live to tear another thousand divots from the country club greens.”
“How long have I been asleep?”
“Most of the day. It’s about five-thirty.”
“Five-thirty?”
“When I got back, I checked on you, and there you were, out cold, even quiet. I was getting the feeling that you refought the war every time you fell asleep.”
“I just about do, according to Davey.”
“Not in my house.” He leaned forward and brushed his lips against her forehead. “My house is good for you.”
“So are you,” she said.
“I like to think so.” He raised her chin with his hand and kissed her gently on the lips.
“The perfect host.”
“The perfect guest.” He kissed her again, for a longer time and far more seriously.
“I’d better get out of bed before we do something foolish,” she said, relieved that he was in his clothes, and then noticed his bare shoulder visible above the sheet. “You took your shirt off.”
“More comfortable. Fewer wrinkles. Besides, a shirt seemed so unfriendly.” He circled her waist and pulled her toward him to whisper, “Pants did, too.” She stiffened, and he said, “We’re alone here. We don’t have to answer the phone or open the door. Why don’t we spend a little time together? I want us to be nice to each other. You’re this spectacular person, and we really care for each other.”
“Whoa, hold on,” she said. “What are you doing?”
He smiled at her. “Nora, one of the best things about this lovely relationship of ours is that we always wind up in bed. You go out and raise hell all over the place while I stay here in my hole, marrying the wrong people out of boredom, I guess, but sooner or later you always explode back into my life and we charge our batteries all over again. Isn’t that right?”
“Jesus,” Nora said.
“It’s always the same, and this time you show up more gorgeous than ever! You’re out of your mind with worry . . .”
“Hardly just worry.”
“. . . and come right here because you knew you belonged with me. We’re in this little bubble of time made just for us. Inside that bubble we help each other, we heal each other. When we’re healed, we go on and tackle all the other crappy parts of life.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Nora said. “Hold it, I have to tackle the bathroom b
“All the decisions were made a long time ago,” Harwich said. “This is the follow-through.”
Some fierce emotion she could not begin to identify gripped her, lifted her out of bed, and carried her toward the bathroom. Harwich said, “I’ll be here when you get back,” but she hardly heard him. She locked the door and sat on the toilet, her face blazing. The enormous feeling within her refused to speak its name even as it sent tears brimming in her eyes. He wanted to take care of her, she needed his care. This had seemed to be true. “But I don’t need to get laid,” she whispered to herself. “I don’t need him to fuck me.” She flushed the toilet and looked around at the objects on the bathroom shelves, the dangling shower cap, the lush hotel bathrobe, the shampoo and conditioner, the perfume. “Oh, my God,” she said to herself, “I’m an idiot.”
She stood up, washed her hands, and wrapped the thick robe around herself, all the while watching her feelings align themselves into new positions. The largest of these feelings—not humiliation, chagrin, regret, not even the ghost of her old attachment to Dan Harwich, but simple anger—sent her back into the bedroom to face him.
“What’s that for?” he asked, referring to the robe.
“My self-respect,” she said. “Battered as it is.”
“Uh oh. Come on, Nora, sit down and talk to me. I want to help you.”
“You did help me,” she said, moving toward the chair where he had deposited her clothes. His own jeans lay folded over the top of the chair, his shirt unfurled like a jacket across the back. “You took me in, you fed me, you let me see Mark Foil. I’m grateful, so thanks, Dan.”
“You’re not grateful, you’re upset. I understand, Nora. You went through a terrible experience, and it’s still affecting you. You don’t think you can trust anybody, and when I try to comfort you, all the bells go off. You suddenly think you can’t trust even me. Part of the fault is mine, I can see that.”
Halfway to the chair, she turned around and faced him, wrapping her arms around her chest. “What part is that, Dan?”