The Hellfire Club by Peter Straub
“But there’s a branch in New York, isn’t there? And you’re a member.”
“It isn’t like that. You keep making it sound like a real club, when it’s just these guys who get together to mess around. They do hire a good chef now and then, or they used to, and they did have a concierge and a coat-check woman. There was a bar, and you could take girls to the rooms upstairs. I only went a couple of times after Amy and I broke up.”
“Who was the girl you took to the Hellfire Club in New Haven?”
“The same little menace who turned up in the art department. At Yale she called herself Lena Ware. Every time I saw her, she was reading Night Journey. I think she came to New Haven looking for me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you’d met her twice?”
“It would have sounded so strange. And I didn’t want to tell you about . . . you know . . . about what Dart probably told you.”
“About hitting her with the car.”
“I didn’t hit her. Well, I thought I did, but I didn’t. When I met her at Chancel House a couple of years later, and she was calling herself Paddi Mann, she said she was so mad at me that she wanted to scare me. Nora, she was nuts. I love Hugo Driver, but she never thought about anything else. You should have seen her friends! There are Driver houses, did you know that? I went to one with her. It was in a tenement over a restaurant on Elizabeth Street. It was really bizarre. Everybody was high all the time, and they had cave rooms, and people who dressed up like wolves, and all this stuff.”
“That was what you described to me, wasn’t it?”
“Uh huh. Anyhow, she kept trying to get me to go to Shorelands because she had this screwball theory that Shorelands was in Night Journey.”
“How?”
“She said she thought you couldn’t understand the book unless you went to Shorelands, because Shorelands was in it. Something about the places, but that’s all she said. The whole idea was goofy. I got a book about Shorelands by a guy with a funny name, and it didn’t say anything new about Night Journey.”
“Just out of curiosity, what really happened the last time you went to her place?”
“I found the book under her bed, and I really did think that something bad had happened to her, because she just disappeared. Her room was completely empty. The other Driver people who lived there didn’t know where she had gone, and they didn’t care. She wasn’t a girl to them, she was Paddi Mann, the real one, the one in the book. When I left, I felt so depressed that I couldn’t stand the thought of going home, so I did check into a hotel for a couple of nights. When we moved into our house, the book turned up in a carton I took out of the Poplars.”
“It was in our house?”
“I remember opening it up and seeing her name. For a second, Nora, I almost fainted. Every time that girl turned up, my life went haywire. I put it in the Chancel House bookcase in the hallway. The day I met Natalie in the Main Street Delicatessen, she mentioned that she’d never read Night Journey. She liked horror novels, but Driver always seemed too much like fantasy to her, so she’d never tried him. The next day I pulled one of the Night Journeys out of the bookcase and gave it to her, and it turned out to be that one.”
“Oh, Davey,” she said. He took another swallow of his drink. “So you wanted to get it before the cops saw it.”
“I told you that. It had my name in it, too.”
“So to cover up your affair, you told me this story instead of saying, ‘Well, Nora, after we bought the house I gave this book to Natalie.’ ”
“I know.” He groaned. “I was afraid you’d figure out that I was seeing her. Anyhow, why are you asking me all this stuff? You don’t care about Hugo Driver.”
“I bought all three of his books today.”
“No kidding. After you finish the first one, you have to read Twilight Journey. It’s really great. God, it would be wonderful to talk to you about it. Want to know what it’s about?”
“I have the feeling you want to tell me,” Nora said.
As ever, Davey instantly became more confident when given the opportunity to talk about Hugo Driver. “Like in the first book, he has to go around talking to all these people and piece together what really happened out of their stories. He learns that his father killed a bunch of people, and almost killed him because he was afraid he’d find out. Anyhow, early in the book he hears that his parents aren’t his real parents, they just found him in the forest one day, which in some ways is a tremendous relief, so off he goes in search of his real parents, and a Nellad, which is a monster that owns a gold mine and looks like a man but isn’t, slices him with its claws, and the old woman who dresses his wounds tells him that his mother really is his mother. His parents left him in the forest when he was a baby, but she went out that same night and brought him back. He says, ‘My mother is my mother.’ ”
79
FOR THE SECOND time that night, an enormous recognition seemed to gather in the air around Nora’s body, cloudy, opaque, awaiting the moment to reveal itself. “Incredible,” she said.
“It’s a fantasy novel—what do you want, realism?” The ice cubes rang in the glass, and music rustled in the background. “It’s so strange. You’ve been through all this terrible shit, and we’re talking about Hugo Driver. I’m pathetic. I’m a joke.”
“No, what you’re saying is interesting. Tell me what happens in the third one.”
“Journey into Light? Pippin learns that the real reason they’re living way out in the forest at the foot of the mountains is that his grandfather was even worse than his father. He tried to betray his country, but the plot failed, and they escaped into the woods before their part in it was discovered. The Nellads are some other descendants of his grandfather’s, and they have all his evil traits. They’re so bad they turned into monsters. Pippin’s grandfather killed a whole lot of people to gain control of a gold mine, but that was a secret, too. The gold mine has to be taken back from the Nellads, and Pippin has to reveal the truth, and then everything is all right.”
It was not merely incredible” it was stupefying: Hugo Driver had structured his last two novels around the best-kept secrets of his publisher’s family. No wonder they were published post-humously, Nora thought, and then wondered why they had been published at all. She marveled at the grandeur of Alden Chancel’s cynicism” certain that no one but himself and his wife would understand the code, he had cashed in on Driver’s popularity. Probably his audacity had amused him.
“Your father published these books,” she said, as much to herself as to Davey.
“They don’t sound like his kind of thing, do they? But you know how proud he is of never reading the books he publishes. He always says he wouldn’t be able to publish them half as well if he actually had to read them.”
Davey was right. Alden took an ostentatious pride in never reading Chancel House books. He had not known the contents of Hugo Driver’s posthumous novels.
“Why are we talking about this?” Davey asked. “Nora, come home. Please. Come here, and we’ll settle everything.” With these words, he had produced his own golden key. He wanted her back” he would not abandon her during the ordeal of Slim and Slam. “I’ll drive up there and bring you back. You could stay the night in the house, and I’d come over in the morning to take you to the station. Everybody’s going to be pissed as hell at me, but I don’t care.”
He wanted her to stay in the house while he returned to the Poplars. He wanted her back, but only so that he wouldn’t have to worry about her. “You can’t drive, Davey,” she said. “You’ve been drinking.”
“Not that much. Two drinks, maybe.”
“Four, maybe.”
“I can drive.”
“No, don’t do it. I don’t want to come back until I know I’m not going to be arrested.”
“What about not getting killed? Isn’t that a little more important?”
“Davey, I’ll be fine.” Nora promised herself to leave Northamp-ton early the next morning. “Lis
“Where else do you find manuscripts?”
“Hugo Driver’s haven’t exactly been easy to find, have they? Hugo Driver is about the only writer in history who didn’t leave any papers behind when he died.”
“Well, they didn’t just drop down out of the sky.”
The recognition hovering about Nora streamed into her in a series of images: a baby left in a forest, then reclaimed by his mother” an old man, the baby’s grandfather, wearing a Nazi uniform” Daisy Chancel exhaling smoke as she fondled a copy of Driver’s last book. You’re not one of those people who think Journey into Light is a terrible falling off, are you?
The last two Driver novels had not fallen from the sky” they had flowed from the busy typewriter just off the landing of the Poplars’ front staircase. Twenty years before he had turned to Daisy to produce the Blackbird Books, Alden had cajoled her into giving him two imitation Hugo Driver novels. He had needed money, and sly Daisy, knowing he would never read the books, had vented her outrage while she saved his company. Alden—Adelbert—was a fraud in more than one way. This was the real reason for her hysteria and his rage at Nora’s discovery that Daisy had written the Blackbird books.
“What’s going on?” Davey asked. “I don’t like this. I know you, you have something up your sleeve. You could have come home this afternoon, and instead you get Jeffrey to drive you around the Berkshires so you can meet the Cup Bearer and ask a lot of questions about Hugo Driver. Are you trying to help these Mannheim people destroy my father?”
“No, Davey—”
“Jeffrey is like a spy, he came here to burrow around for proof his aunt wrote Night Journey, Helen Day was probably doing the same thing, they both wanted the money, only my father figured out what the Cup Bearer was up to and he fired her, but he’s such a good guy he hired half her family anyhow.”
“That’s wrong. Neither one of them wants anything from you. Helen Day is convinced that her sister didn’t write Night Journey.”
“They’re using you. Can’t you see that? God, this is horrible. I used to love the Cup Bearer, and she lied to my parents, she lied to me, and she lied to you. Her whole goddamned life is a lie, and so is Jeffrey’s. I’m coming up there tonight and taking you away from these people.”
“No, you’re not,” she said. “Helen Day is not a liar, and you’re not coming up here just to drive me back to the police.”
“Hold on, I’ll be right back.” The clunk of the telephone against the desk, the opening of the refrigerator. The rattle of ice cubes, the gurgle of vodka. “Okay. Now. Helen Day, damn her to hell. Can’t you see that if she was Katherine Mannheim’s sister, she’s also the sister of these two old bats who are suing us?”
“She never even liked her other sisters. She won’t have anything to do with them.”
“Sure, that’s what she told you, and you’re so naive you believed her. What’s this ‘Day’ business, anyhow? That can’t be her name. She came here under an alias. I suppose that isn’t suspicious.”
Nora explained how and why his grandfather had shortened her name.
“But she’s still a liar.”
“Helen Day isn’t the liar in this story, Davey.” She immediately regretted having been provoked into making this statement.
“Oh, it’s me, isn’t it? Thank you so much, Nora.”
“I didn’t mean you, Davey.”
“Who’s left? I was right the first time, you have something up your sleeve. Oh God, what else? You hate my father and you’d like to ruin him, just like these Mannheims or Deodatos or whatever their real names are. I should hang up and tell the cops where you are.”
“Don’t, Davey, please.” She drew in a large breath. “You’re right. There is something I’m not saying, but it doesn’t have anything to do with Night Journey.”
“Uh huh.”
“I found out something about you tonight, but I’m not sure I should tell you now because you won’t believe me.”
“Swell. Good-bye, Nora.”
“I’m telling you the truth. Helen Day knows this thing, this fact about you. She kept it secret all her life, but now she thinks you ought to know it.”
Davey abused and insulted Helen Day for the space of several sentences, and then asked, “If this information is so important, why didn’t she tell it to me?”
“She promised not to.”
“Then why did she tell you? I hear the faint sound of tap dancing, Nora.”
“She didn’t tell me. She made me guess until I got it right.”
He gave a weary chuckle.
“Why do you think Helen Day left the Poplars?”
After another couple of abusive sentences, he said, “At the time, what my parents told me was that she decided to go away and open her own business. Which I guess is what she did, right?”
“On her savings? Do you think she could have saved up that much money?”
“I see. The story is that my father paid her to keep quiet, right? This secret must be right up there with the key to the Rosetta stone.”
“For you it is the Rosetta stone,” Nora said.
“I know, I’m the real author of Night Journey. No, too bad, it was published before I was born. Nora, unless you spit out this so-called secret right now, I’m going to hang up on you.”
“Fine,” she said. “I just have to work out a way to say it.” She thought for a moment. “Do you remember what your mother did all during your childhood?”
“I do believe we’re about to go to Miami by way of Seattle here. Fine. I’ll play along. Yes, I remember. She sat up there in her office and she drank.”
“No, when you were a child, she wrote all day long. Your mother got a lot of work done in those days, and not all of it was put into the book she asked me to read.”
“Okay, she wrote the Morning and Teatime books. You’re right about that. I went through four or five of them, and all those things you mentioned were there. It’s kind of funny, because I also found some expressions I must have heard her say a thousand times. They just never registered before. Like ‘sadder than a tabby in a downpour’—stuff like that. ‘We wore out a lot of shoe leather.’ That’s one reason the old man came down on you so hard. He overreacted, but he doesn’t want anybody to know. I can see why. It wouldn’t make him look very good.”
“Thank you.”
“But she wrote those books in the eighties, and we’re talking about the sixties.”
“Do you have copies of the last two Driver novels with you?”
“No way, you hear me? If you’re trying to tell me my mother wrote the later Drivers, you belong in a loony bin.”
“Of course I’m not,” she lied. “The whole point is in the difference between the two styles.”
“I am really not following you.”
“I’m going to Miami by way of Seattle, remember? Unless I do it this way, you’ll never believe me. So humor me and get the books.”
“This is nuts,” Davey said, but he put down the receiver and came back in a few seconds. “Boy, I haven’t read these in probably fifteen years. Okay, now what?”
Nora had pulled the two books from her bag, and now she opened Twilight Journey, looking for she knew not what, with no assurance of finding it. She turned over some thirty pages and scanned down the paragraphs without finding anything useful.
“What do you want to show me?”
Some lines on page 42 rose up to meet her eye. “Too true,” said the wrinkled creature squatting on the branch. “Too true, indeed, dear boy.” She had to get Davey to notice these Daisyish sentences without seeming to point them out. “Turn to page forty-two,” she said. “About ten lines down from the top. See that?”
“See what? ’He looked up and scratched his head.’ There?”
&nb
Davey read, “ ’Pippin turned slowly in a circle, wishing that the path were not so dark, nor the woods so deep.’ That?” This was the sentence immediately below those with Daisy’s trademarks.
“Read that paragraph out loud, and then read the whole page to yourself.”
“Fine by me.” He began reading, and Nora frantically searched through random pages.
“Now I should read the page to myself?”
“Yes.” She scanned another page and saw a second indeed.
“All right, what about it?”
“That didn’t sound a lot like your mother’s writing, did it?”
“No, not really,” Davey said, sounding uneasy. “Of course not. How could it? What’s your point, Nora?”
“Look on page eighty-four, right below the middle of the page.”
“Huh,” Davey said. “That long paragraph, beginning with ‘All the trees seemed to have moved’?”
She told him to read it aloud, then read the whole of the page to himself, as before.
“I’m getting a funny feeling about this.”
“Please, just do it.”
He began reading, and Nora turned to the back of the book and found, just above the final paragraph, the proof she needed. “With a shock, Pippin remembered that only a day before he had felt as bereft as a long-haired cat in a rainstorm.” She waited for Davey to finish reading page 84.
“Are you being cute or something?” he asked. “You told me you weren’t trying to tell me that my mother wrote this. A few piddly coincidences don’t prove anything. I’m starting to get highly ticked off all over again.”
“What coincidences? Did you see something in those paragraphs you didn’t mention?”
“I’m getting fed up with your games, Nora.”
Time to raise the ante: she had to give him part of the truth. “I don’t think Hugo Driver wrote this book,” she said. “It really did appear out of nowhere, didn’t it? There were no papers. You would have seen them long ago, if they existed.”
“Are you ever on thin ice. What’s next? Hugo Driver was my mother in male drag?”