The Hellfire Club by Peter Straub
He rang up the total, and she gave him twenty of Sheldon Dolkis’s dollars.
“I have a few doubts about Night Journey.”
“What kind of doubts?”
“Not my cup of tea,” he said, and handed her the bag.
“I want to know more about your doubts,” she said, fending off her hunger. “People keep telling me I have to read it.”
“The Driver people are like Moonies. They’re worse than authors, worse even than authors’ wives.”
“I know two people who read it once a year,” Nora said.
“All kinds of people get the bug. A lot of them never read anything else. They love it so much that they want to read it all over again. Then they think they’ve missed something, and they read it a third time. By now they’re making notes. Then they compare discoveries with other Driverites. If they’re tied into computer discussion groups, that’s it” they’re gone. The really sick ones give up on everything else and move into those crazy houses where everybody pretends to be a different Driver character.” He sighed and looked away. “But I don’t want to spoil the book for you.”
Within the pastel interior of Dinah’s Silver Slipper, an efficient young woman led Nora to a table by the window, handed her a three-foot-high menu, and announced that her waitress would be right with her.
Nora lined the books up in front of her. The later two were each several hundred pages longer than Night Journey. Nora turned them over and read the back jackets. Night Journey was the classic, world-famous, much-beloved, et cetera, et cetera. Readers everywhere had blah blah blah. The manuscripts of Twilight Journey and Journey into Light had been discovered among the author’s papers many years after his death, and Chancel House and the Driver family were pleased to grant his millions of admirers the opportunity to blah blah blah.
“Hold on,” Nora said. “Author’s papers? What papers?”
An alarmed female voice said, “Excuse me?”
A college-aged girl in a blue button-down shirt and black trousers stood beside her. “I’ll have the seared tuna and iced coffee, please.”
She opened Night Journey, leafed past the title page, arrived at Part One, entitled “Before Dawn,” and began grimly to read. The waitress placed a basket of bread sticks at the far end of the table, and Nora ate every one before her meal appeared before her. She fed herself with one hand while propping up the book with the other. The landscapes were cardboard, the characters flat, the dialogue stilted, but this time she wanted to keep reading. Against her will she found that she was interested. The hateful book had enough narrative power to draw her in. Once she had been drawn in, the characters and the landscape of caverns and stunted trees through which they wandered no longer seemed artificial.
She knew the reason for her anger, and it had nothing to do with Night Journey or Hugo Driver’s unfortunate influence on susceptible readers. Jeffrey had told her that Davey was moving back to his parents’ house. He had succumbed to Alden’s gravitational pull.
More than an hour had passed while she consumed the seared tuna and nearly a third of Night Journey. Jeffrey was close to the Massachusetts border, speeding toward Holyoke to pick her up and take her somewhere.
BOOK VII
THE GOLDEN KEY
“YOU SHALL FIND IT, PIPPIN,” SAID THE OLD MAN. HIS BEARD RUSTLED ALONG THE GROUND. “I PROMISE YOU THAT. BUT WILL YOU RECOGNIZE IT WHEN YOU FIND IT? AND DO YOU IMAGINE THAT IF YOU SUCCEED IN CLAIMING IT, IT WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY?”
65
NORA WENT BACK down the sidewalk and sat facing Northamp-ton Street on a wrought-iron bench in the shade of an awning. Shelley Dolkis’s Ford stood at a parking meter on the far side of the pay telephone, some ten or fifteen feet away. A few cars drove past, none containing Jeffrey. At five-thirty on an August afternoon in Holyoke, most people had already reached the places they were going.
Nora had forgotten to put another set of quarters in the meter, which now displayed a red violation band. She had no desire to get back into that car. Then she remembered the suitcase on the backseat and darted over to it. She leaned into the airless oven of the interior, grabbed the handle of her suitcase, and tossed the keys onto the front seat.
At first she placed the carry-on bag on the bench beside her, then tucked it under the bench and gave herself a gold star for criminal cunning. Jeffrey failed to appear. Two or three minutes later, a dark blue vehicle with the sobriety of a hearse drew near. Nora straightened up and waited for it to pull to the curb behind the Ford, but at a steady fifteen miles an hour it proceeded toward the corner of Northampton and Hampden. The driver, a gaunt old party in sunglasses and a fishing hat, stared straight ahead as the car crept past her.
Now the only two cars on the street were a block away to the north, the wrong direction. Nora leaned back into the bench and closed her eyes. She counted to sixty and opened them. A muddy pickup with a Red Sox pennant dangling from the antenna chugged in from the south. She sighed, opened her bag, and took out Night Journey. Pippin was hiding in a crumbling old house where an evil crone dragged herself from room to room searching for him. The door creaked, and Pippin heard the crone’s hairy feet whispering on the rotting floorboards. She looked up. The old man in the fishing hat had pulled into a parking spot in front of Dinah’s Silver Slipper and was now stepping cautiously toward the restaurant’s entrance. Behind him, like an ocean liner following a tug, came an old woman in a bright print dress. Nora looked the other way, and a police car with HOLYOKE P.D. on its door was swinging out around the mud-splashed truck.
Nora dove back into the book. “Where, oh, where can my pretty be? I want to stroke my pretty boy.”
The police car drove past, and the tingling in her scalp receded. She kept her head tilted toward the book, watching the car move toward the end of the block. It veered left and made a wide U-turn in front of the pickup. She moved the book closer to her face. The police car cruised to a stop in front of the blue hearse. She peeked at the policemen. The officer in the passenger seat got out, walked across the sidewalk, and went into the Silver Slipper.
The police were looking for Nora Chancel, a woman with dark brown hair who never wore makeup. She opened her bag, found the Cover Girl Clean, and snapped it open to examine herself in the mirror. Far too much of Nora Chancel had surfaced through her disguise. She smoothed on a layer of makeup and erased the more prominent lines, applied mascara and lip gloss, tweaked and ruffled her hair into an approximation of what Dick Dart had accomplished. She risked another glance at the policemen and felt half the tension leave her body. They were leaning against the car and drinking coffee.
Far off to the south, a siren rose into the air, at first barely audible, gradually growing more insistent, finally becoming the distant explosions of red and yellow from the lights across the top of a state police car. Nora rammed the bag under her arm, stood up, and took a step forward. One of the Holyoke cops looked at her. She stretched her arms, twisted right and left, and went back to the bench. Where’s the book, get the book, it’s in here somewhere. She pulled a book from the jumble in the bag, opened it, and pretended to read.
The two cops gulped the last of their coffee, strolled to the corner, and dropped their cups into a wire basket. Fiddling with their shirts and ties, they moved off the sidewalk to walk down the street toward the Ford. When they passed Nora, the officer who had looked at her turned his head and made a flapping, downward gesture with his hand. Stay put.
She nudged the suitcase farther back under the bench and watched the flamboyant arrival of the state police.
The car wailed to the front of the Ford and turned off its lights and siren a second before another highway patrol car came screaming into Northampton Street. Two big men in flat-brim hats left their car angled in front of the Ford. One of them began questioning the two policemen while the other walked past the green car and waited for the second state vehicle. The clamor of the siren shut off in mid-whoop, but the light bar stayed on. One of the big troopers c
His partner walked back to their vehicle and rapped on a rear window. The window rolled down, and the state policeman put his hands on the sill and leaned forward to talk to two men in the backseat. The troopers who had arrived first were talking to the remaining Holyoke cop, who pointed across the street, then at the Ford, and finally at his own car. Nora bent forward and groped for the handle at the top of her suitcase.
One state policeman looked up, grinning, from the trunk. The rear doors of the second state car opened, and two men in dark suits, white shirts, and dark ties, one of them taller and fairer than the other, got out. The taller man wore heavy black sunglasses. Nora froze, her case halfway out from under the bench. Mr. Shull and Mr. Hashim, Slim and Slam, idled up to the trunk and inspected a box proffered by the grinning trooper. Nora pushed her suitcase back under the bench and tried to vanish into the shadow of the awning.
Slim looked inside the box, and the corners of his mouth jerked down. He displayed its contents to Slam, who nodded. Slim handed the box back to the trooper, and the trooper allowed himself a final smirk before returning it to the trunk. Mr. Hashim began rooting through the Ford’s glove compartment. Mr. Shull wandered away, thrust his hands in his pockets, and regarded the surface of Northampton Street through his hipster sunglasses.
The trooper who had shown Mr. Shull the box came up beside him, attended to a few words, and then signaled to one of the big troopers from the first car. After another brief exchange, he waved at the local cop, who bounced forward and answered a few questions. He nodded, shrugged, nodded again, then turned to point at Nora.
The trooper glanced at her, asked a question, got another nod in return, and planted his hands on his hips as the policeman began walking toward Nora. Mr. Shull lifted his head and looked at Nora, then at the cop, then back at Nora. He drifted to the passenger door and said something to Mr. Hashim. Mr. Hashim leaned forward and gave her a skeptical glance through the windshield of the Ford.
The policeman coming toward her had concerned brown eyes and a wispy mustache, and his belly was beginning to roll over his belt. Nora swallowed to loosen her throat and sat up straight. She found that she was still holding the book open somewhere in the middle, and inserted a finger to look as if she had been interrupted while reading. “Hi,” she said.
The policeman moved into the shade. He took off his hat. “Hot out there.” He wiped his forehead with a hand and wiped the hand on his trousers. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“I don’t know what I can tell you.”
“Let me ask the questions and we’ll find that out.” He put his hat back on his head and took a notebook and ballpoint from his shirt pocket. “How long have you been out here, ma’am?”
“I’m not too sure.”
The policeman put his foot on the bench and flattened the notebook on his knee. “Could you give me a rough estimate?”
“Maybe half an hour.”
He made a note. “Did you observe any activity taking place in or around the vehicle under investigation? Did you observe anyone in contact with the vehicle?”
She pretended to consider the question. “Gee, I don’t think so.”
“Would you give me your name and address, please?”
“Oh, sure. No problem. My name is . . .” Her mind refused to supply any name but Mrs. Hugo Driver. “Dinah,” she said. Shorelands? “Dinah Shore.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she felt like holding out her hands for the cuffs.
The policeman looked up from his notebook. “That’s your name, Dinah Shore?”
“I got teased about it all the time in school. For a long time I had to listen to all these Burt Reynolds jokes, but that stopped a couple years ago. Thank God.” She forced herself to stop babbling.
“I can imagine,” said the policeman. “Address?”
Where did Dinah Shore live? “Boston.” She groped for a Boston street name. “Commonwealth Avenue. Four hundred Commonwealth Avenue. I just moved there about a week ago. Half my stuff is still in storage.”
“I see.” Another note. “What brings you to Holyoke, Dinah?”
“I’m waiting for a friend. He’s picking me up.”
“You don’t have a car, Dinah?”
Of course she had a car. Every American had a car. “I have a Volvo station wagon, but it’s in the garage.” The policeman stared down at her, waiting for Dinah Shore, a resident of Boston, to explain her presence on a bench in Holyoke. “A friend gave me a ride this far, and my other friend is coming along to pick me up. He should be here soon.”
“And you’ve been here how long, Dinah?”
What had she said earlier? “I’m not too sure. Maybe forty-five minutes?”
“You bought your book in the Unicorn?”
How did he know that? The policeman nodded down at the brown paper bag printed with a picture of a unicorn and the name of the bookstore beside her bag. “Oh, yes. I knew I’d have to wait for a while. So I went into the bookstore, and then I had something to eat at that restaurant next to it.”
“Dinah’s?”
“Is it called Dinah’s? What a coincidence.”
He stared at her for a moment. “So you went into the Unicorn, you looked around, you bought a book—”
“Three books,” she said. She looked away from the police-man’s troubled gaze. A red MG convertible driven by a man in a blue Eton cap was cruising past the patrol cars and officers taking up most of the southbound lanes in the region of Sheldon Dolkis’s Ford. Another Holyoke squad car had joined them, and two burly men in sports jackets were talking to the troopers. A tow truck turned the corner of Hampden Street and came to a halt. The man in the Eton cap pulled to the curb across the street from Nora. Her heart gave a thump of alarm” the face under the blunt visor of the cap was Jeffrey’s. He looked back at the crowd of policemen and their vehicles. One of the highway patrol cars was moving out of the way, and the tow truck was making beeping sounds as it backed up toward the Ford.
“You bought three books, and you went into Dinah’s. You had something to eat. You did all that in forty-five minutes?”
“It was probably more like an hour. My friend just showed up.”
The policeman twisted his body to look across the street. “That’s him in the MG?”
She raised her arm and waved. Jeffrey was looking at the corner where she had said she would meet him. “Jeffrey!” He snapped his head in her direction and took in the spectacle of an unknown blond woman waving at him from a bench while a policeman glanced back and forth between them. It was dawning on him that the unknown blond woman had called him Jeffrey. He bent over the top of the door and peered at her. Nora prayed he would not utter her name.
The cop said, “That guy doesn’t look like he knows you.”
“Jeffrey’s a little nearsighted.” She spread her arms and shrugged, miming her good-humored inability to leave the bench.
“Oh, there you are,” Jeffrey said. He opened the door and put one leg out of the car, but she waved him back.
The policeman faced her again and hitched himself back into position. “Where did your friend from Boston drop you off?”
“On the corner. Where all the people are.”
“Did you happen to notice if the vehicle was parked there at the time?”
“Yes. I saw it parked right there.”
“How long were you in the bookstore?”
“Maybe five minutes.”
“And then you go into Dinah’s. They give you a table, you
“About another five, ten minutes.”
“So we have forty to forty-five minutes in Dinah’s. And in that time, you ate lunch and managed to read half of that book?”
“Oh.” Nora held up the book. Her finger was still inserted between the pages.
“Dinah, we have a big problem here.” He adjusted his cap. He put his hands on his hips. Nora prepared herself for imminent arrest. The cop sighed. “Do you have any idea at all of what time it was when your friend dropped you off on the corner?”
She looked up at his cynical young face. “Around four-thirty,” she said.
“So you’ve been in this vicinity for more like two hours, isn’t that about right, Dinah?”
“I guess it must be.”
“We don’t have much of a sense of time, do we?”
“Apparently not.”
“Apparently not. But that’s how long you have been wandering around this part of Holyoke. In all that time, did you happen to see a woman who would be, say, about ten years older than you are, about your height and weight, with chestnut-brown hair down to just below her ears?”
“Are you looking for her?”
“She might have been wearing a long-sleeved, dark blue silk blouse and blue jeans. Five six. A hundred and ten pounds. Brown eyes. She probably came here in that car that was towed away.”
“What did she do?” Nora asked.
“Let me try one more time. Have you seen the woman I described to you?”
“No. I haven’t seen anyone like that.”
He took his foot off the bench and flipped the notebook shut. “Thank you for your cooperation, Dinah. You can go.”
She stood up. “Thank you.” She went across the curb, and Jeffrey got out of the MG. When she stepped down into the street, the policeman said, “One more thing, Dinah.”
She turned around, half-expecting him to handcuff her. He shook his head, then bent down to pull her case from beneath the bench. “Good luck in all your endeavors, Dinah.”