The Hellfire Club Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  SHORELANDS, JULY 1938

  I: BEFORE DAWN

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  II: PADDY’S TAIL

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  III: AT THE DEEP OF NIGHT

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  IV: GENTLE FRIEND

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  V: LORD NIGHT

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  VI: FAMILIAR MONSTERS

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  VII: THE GOLDEN KEY

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  VIII: THE CUP BEARER

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  IX: MOUNTAIN GLADE

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  ONE DAY AT THE END OF AUGUST

  PRAISE FOR THE HELLFIRE CLUB

  ALSO BY PETER STRAUB

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  FOR

  Benjamin and Emma

  Hallucinations are also facts.

  LOUIS ALTHUSSER, The Future Lasts Forever

  SHORELANDS, JULY 1938

  AN UNCERTAIN AGNES Brotherhood brought her mop, bucket, and carpet sweeper to the door of Gingerbread at nine-thirty in the morning, by which hour its only resident, the poet Katherine Mannheim, should have been dispatching a breakfast of dry toast and strong tea in the ground-floor kitchen. Agnes selected a key from the thick bunch looped to her waist, pushed it into the door, and the unlocked door swung open by itself. More uncertain than ever, Agnes bit her tongue and braved the interior.

  She put her hands on her hips and bawled out the poet’s name. No response came from anywhere in the cottage. Agnes went into the kitchen and was dismayed to find on the floor an enormous coffee stain which had dried during the night to a tough brown skin. She attacked the stain with mop and bucket. When she had worked her way upstairs, she aired out the unused bedrooms and changed the linen on the poet’s rumpled but unoccupied bed.

  On her way to Rapunzel and its two terrible occupants, onea penniless ferret, the other a pitted bull toad with wandering hands, Agnes ignored a Shorelands commandment and left Gingerbread’s door unlocked.

  An hour after lunch, the novelist Mr. Austryn Fain carried a chilled bottle of Shorelands’ best Puligny Montrachet to the same door, knocked, tried the knob, slipped in, and peered into every room before taking the bottle back home to Pepper Pot. There he swigged half of the wine and hid the remainder in his closet to protect it from his more successful fellow novelist Mr. Merrick Favor, Pepper Pot’s other inhabitant.

  After dinner the following night, the Shorelands hostess, Georgina Weatherall, led a deputation of anxious guests across the lawn from Main House and up the path to Gingerbread. Georgina trained her flashlight on the keyhole and declared the door unlocked. Directly behind her, Mr. Fain wondered how she could tell this from a merely visual inspection. Georgina banged the door open, stamped into Gingerbread, and threw on all the lights.

  The search party found some of Miss Mannheim’s clothes in her closet, her toothbrush and other intimate things in the bathroom on the landing, a photograph of two small girls, pens, nibs, and ink bottle on the bedroom table, a few books stacked beside the bed Agnes had made up the previous morning. Over the cover-let lay a slate-gray silk robe, ripped about the arms. Georgina lifted the robe with two fingers, pursed her mouth, and let it drift back down onto the bed. “I am sorry to say,” she announced, not at all sorry, “that Miss Mannheim appears to have jumped the wall.”

  No manuscript complete or incomplete was ever found, nor were any notes. Agnes Brotherhood never spoke of her misgivings until the early 1990s, when a murderer and a kidnapped woman were escorted into her invalid’s room on the second floor of Main House.

  BOOK I

  BEFORE DAWN

  IN A TIME JUST BEFORE THIS TIME, A LOST BOY NAMED PIPPIN LITTLE AWOKE TO DEEP NIGHT.

  1

  AT THREE O’CLOCK in the morning, a woman named Nora Chancel, soon to be lost, woke up from the usual nightmares with the usual shudder and began for the thousandth time to check her perimeter. Darkness” an unknown room in which she dimly made out two objects which could have been chairs, a long table mounted with a mirror, invisible pictures in frames, a spindly, inexplicable machine out of Rube Goldberg, and a low couch covered in striped fabric. Not only was none of this familiar, all of it was wrong. Wherever she was, she was not safe.

  Nora propped herself up on an elbow and groped for an illicit handgun on permanent loan from a neurosurgeon named Harwich, who had rotated back to a world neither one of them could actually remember. She missed Dan Harwich, but of that one did not think. (Good old Dan Harwich had once said, A bullet in the brain is better than a bullet in the belly.) Nora’s fingers slid across the sheet and rifled beneath pillow after pillow until bumping against the mattress seam at the other end of the bed. She rolled over and sat up, having just heard the sound of distant music.

  Music?

  Her own dark shape stared back from the mirror, and the present returned in a series of almost instantaneous recognitions. At home with her chairs, pictures, striped couch, and her husband’s unused NordicTrack, Nora Chancel had again murdered the demons of the past by scrambling out of sleep in her bedroom on Crooked Mile Road in Westerholm, Connecticut, a fine little community, according to itself a completely da
ndy community, thank you, except for one particular present demon who had murdered a number of women. Someday, she hoped someday soon, this would end. Her husband had spent hours reassuring her that it would end. As soon as the FBI and the Westerholm police did their job, life would go back to normal, whatever that was. The demon would turn out to be an ordinary-looking man who sold bug zappers at the hardware store, who trimmed hedges and skimmed pools on Mount Avenue, who came to your house on Christmas morning and waved away a tip after fixing your gas burner. He lived with his mother and worked on his car in his spare time. At block parties, he was swell behind the grill. As far as Nora was concerned, half a dozen oversized policemen were welcome to take turns jumping up and down on his ribs until he drowned in his own blood. A woman with a wide, necessarily secret knowledge of demons, she had no illusions about how they should be treated.

  The music downstairs sounded like a string quartet.

  Davey was up, trying to fix things by making endless notes on a yellow pad. He would not or could not take the single action which would fix those things that could be fixed: he refused to confront his father. Or maybe he was lying down on the family room sofa, listening to Beethoven and drinking kümmel, his favorite author’s favorite drink. Kümmel smelled like caraway seeds, and Hugo Driver must have reeked of cara-way, a fact unmentioned in the biographies.

  Davey often reeked of caraway on the nights when he climbed late into bed. Last night, it had been two when he made it upstairs” the night before, three-thirty. Nora knew the hours because both nights the familiar nightmares had sent her galloping out of sleep in search of an automatic pistol she had dropped into a latrine one blazing June day twenty-three years before.

  The pistol lay rusting at the bottom of what was by now probably a Vietnamese field. Dan Harwich had divorced and remarried, events for which Nora considered herself partially responsible, without ever having stirred from Springfield, Massachusetts. He might as well have been rusting beneath a field, too. You couldn’t fall in love that way twice” you couldn’t do anything the same way twice, except in dreams. Dreams never gave up. Like tigers, they simply lay in wait until fresh meat came along.

  2

  DAVEY HAD KNOWN Natalie Weil, too. Half of Westerholm had known Natalie Weil. Two years ago, when she had sold them the three-bedroom raised ranch with downstairs “family room” on Crooked Mile Road, Natalie Weil had been a small, athletic-looking blonde perhaps ten years younger than Nora, a woman with a wide white smile, nice crinkles at the corners of her eyes, and a former husband named Norm. She smoked too much and drew spirals in the air with her hands when she talked. During the time when Nora and Davey were living in the guest wing of the Poplars on Mount Avenue with Alden and Daisy, the older Chancels, Natalie Weil had intuited the emotional atmosphere within the big house and invited her grateful charges for dinner at her own raised ranch house on Redcoat Road. There Nora and Davey had eaten chili and guacamole, drunk Mexican beer, and half-attended to wrestling matches on cable while Natalie anatomized, to their delight, the town where Nora’s new husband had grown up. “See, you’re from Mount Avenue, Davey, you see this town the way it was about fifty years ago, when everybody dressed for dinner and everybody stayed married forever and nobody knew any Jews. Forget it! These days they’re all divorced or getting divorced, they move in and out of town when their company tells them to, they don’t think about anything except money—oh my God, there’s Ric Flair, one day I am going to humiliate myself and write him a really lurid fan letter. And we have three synagogues, all booming. Ric sweetie, could you be true to me?”

  After selling them the house on Crooked Mile Road—a house paid for by Alden and Daisy Chancel—Natalie took them for lunch at the General Sherman Inn, advised them to fill the family room with babies as soon as possible, and disappeared from their lives. From time to time, Nora had seen her spiraling one hand in the air as she steered two new prospects up the Post Road in her boatlike red Lincoln. Six months ago, she had come across Natalie dumping frozen pizzas into a shopping cart already piled with six-packs of Mexican beer and Diet Coke, and for ten minutes they caught up with each other. Natalie had said yes, she was seeing someone, but, no, it wouldn’t amount to anything, the guy was a prune. She would call Nora, you bet, it would be great to get away from the Prune.

  Two nights before, Natalie Weil had disappeared from a blood-soaked bedroom. Her body had not been left behind, like those of the other four women, but Natalie was almost certainly as dead as they. Like Natalie, they were divorced businesswomen of one kind or another, and they lived alone. Sophie Brewer was an independent broker, Annabelle Austin a literary agent, Taylor Humphrey the owner of a driver-service company, Sally Michael-man the owner-operator of a lighting-supplies company. All these women were in their mid- to late forties. The younger Chancels had installed a security system soon after they moved into their new house, and after the first two deaths, on nights Davey came home late Nora punched in the code that turned it on before she went to bed. She kept all the doors locked when she was in the house. After Taylor Humphrey’s murder, she began hitting the buttons as soon as it got dark.

  Nora had heard about Sally Michaelman from an immaculate twenty-something two places in front of her at a checkout counter in Waldbaum’s, the supermarket where she had last come across Natalie Weil. Nora first noticed the young woman because she had put on drop-dead makeup and a loose but perfectly fitted linen outfit to visit a supermarket at ten in the morning. She might have been drifting past fluted columns in an advertisement for a perfume named something like Arsenic. In the baggy shorts and old blue shirt she had changed into after her morning run, Nora leaned over her cart to see what the twenty-something had put on the belt: thirty cans of gourmet cat food and two bottles of Swedish water, now joined by a third.

  “Her cleaning woman called my cleaning woman,” she was saying to the woman behind her, also an armored twenty-something. “Can you believe this crap? It’s that woman from Michaelman’s, and I was in there last week, looking for a, you know—”

  “That thing in your entry, that thing just inside the door.”

  “For something like you have. Her cleaning woman couldn’t get in, and with all the, you know—”

  She took in Nora, glared, and swooped into her cart to drop a bag of plums on the moving belt. “We might as well be living in the South Bronx.”

  Nora remembered that woman from Michaelman’s” she didn’t know her name, but the woman had persuaded her to go ahead and buy the halogen lamp she wanted for the family room. She had been down-to-earth and handsome and comradely, the kind of person Nora instinctively thought of as a fellow traveler. Her first impulse was to defend this terrific woman to the two self-centered idiots in front of her, but what had they done besides call her that woman from Michaelman’s? Her second impulse, almost simultaneous with the first, was to panic about whether or not she had locked the back door on her way to the car.

  Then Nora had seen the bloody corpse of the terrific woman from the lamp store. This figure instantly mutated into that of a boy soldier on a gurney, his belly blown open and his life slipping out through his astonished eyes. Her knees turned to water, and she dropped her head, breathing hard until the twenty-somethings had moved away from the register.

  The dying young man and others like him inhabited her better nightmares. The worse ones were much worse.

  3

  NORA DISMISSED THE nightmare, decidedly of the worse variety, and got out of bed. Because she wanted to look more in control of herself than Davey was likely to be, she rubbed her hands over her forehead and wiped her palms on her nightgown. Out in the hallway, the music no longer sounded like a string quartet. It had a wilder, more chaotic edge” Davey had put on one of the Mahler symphonies he had taught her to enjoy.

  Nobody who did not enjoy classical music could stay married to Davey Chancel, who fled into music when troubled. Nora, the pride of the Curlews, had decided to marry Davey during his second prop
osal, six months after they met, one year after Springfield and her never-to-be-thought-of reunion with Dan Harwich.

  Nora padded past a case filled with Chancel House books and reached the stairs to the front door. Beside it, the red light glowed reassuringly above the keypad of the security system. Nora went quietly down the stairs and checked that the door was still locked. When she started down the second set of stairs to the family room, the music came into focus. Indistinct voices sounded. She had been hearing a soundtrack. Davey, who never watched anything except the news, had turned on the television. She went down the last of the stairs, her sympathy hardening into anger. Again, Alden had again publicly humiliated his son.

  She opened the family room door and leaned in. Startled but in no obvious distress, wide-eyed Davey stared at her, wearing a lightweight robe of Thai silk over his pajamas and holding a pencil upright over an open notebook. The surprise in his face echoed her own. “Oh, honey,” he said, “did I wake you up?”

  “Are you all right?” Nora padded into the room and glanced at the screen. A ragged old man waved a staff in front of a cave. Pippin! Remember to be brave! You must be brave!

  Davey aimed the remote control at the set, and the soundtrack disappeared. “I didn’t think you’d hear, I’m sorry.” As neat as a cat in the even light of the halogen lamp, he placed the remote on top of the notebook and looked at her with what seemed like real remorse. “Today we ran into a problem, some nuisance Dad asked me to handle, and I thought I should watch this thing.”

  “It wasn’t the TV. I woke up.”

  He tilted his head. “Like last night?” The question may not have been perfectly sympathetic.

  “This business about Natalie—you know . . .” Nora cut herself off with a wave of a hand. “All the hags in Westerholm have trouble sleeping these days.” She turned back to the television. A bedraggled boy of eight or nine shouldered a sack through a dripping swamp. Twisted, monstrous trees led into gleaming haze.

  “And most of them have no more to worry about than you do.”

  Last night Davey had listed the reasons why Nora should not worry: she did not live alone or run a business” she did not open the door to strangers. If anyone suspicious turned up, she could push the panic button above the keypad. And, though this remained tactfully unstated, wasn’t she overreacting, letting the old problems get to her all over again?