The Hellfire Club (2 page)

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 proposal, 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?

“I wondered where you were,” she said.

“Well, now you know.” He tapped his pencil against the notebook and managed to smile. Faced with a choice, he chose kindness. “You could watch this with me.”

She sat beside him on the sofa. Davey patted her knee and focused on the movie.

“What is this?”

“
Night Journey.
You were making so much noise I got out of bed, and when I looked at the paper, I saw it was on. I have to see the thing anyhow, so I might as well do it now.”

“You have to take notes on
Night Journey
?”

“We’re having some trouble with the Driver estate.” He pointed the remote at the screen and raised the volume. Distant in the hazy swamp, wolves howled. More peeved than she wished to be, Nora watched the boy make his way beneath the monstrous trees. “It’ll be okay,” Davey said. For an instant he took her hand. She squeezed it and tucked up her legs and rested her head on his shoulder. Davey twitched, signaling that she was not to lean on him.

Nora slid away and propped her head on the back of the sofa. “What kind of trouble?”

“Shh.” He leaned forward and picked up the pencil.

So she was not to speak. So she was a distraction. For some reason Davey had to get out of bed in the middle of the night to take notes on the film version of
Night Journey
, Hugo Driver’s wildly successful first novel and the cornerstone of Chancel House, founded by Lincoln Chancel, Davey’s grandfather and Hugo Driver’s friend. Davey, who took enormous pride in the association, had read
Night Journey
at least once a year since he was fifteen years old. Anyone less charitable than Nora might have said that he was obsessed with the book.

4

MANY WERE OBSESSED
with Hugo Driver’s first novel. One of Davey’s occupations at Chancel House was answering the requests for photographs, assistance with term papers and theses, and other mail concerning the writer that flowed into the offices. These missives came from high school students, stockbrokers, truck drivers, social workers, secretaries, hairdressers, short-order cooks, ambulance drivers, people who signed their letters with the names of characters in the novel, also famous crazies and sociopaths. Leonard Gimmell, who had murdered the fourteen children in his second-grade class during an outing to the Smoky Mountains, wrote once a week from a state prison in Tennessee, and Teddy Brunhoven, who had appeared in front of a recording studio on West Fifty-fifth Street and assassinated the lead singer of a prominent rock and roll band, communicated almost daily from a cell in upper New York State. Both men continued to justify their crimes with complex, laborious references to the novel. Davey enjoyed responding to Hugo Driver’s fan mail much more than the other duties, matters like crossword puzzles and paper plates, wished on him by his father.

Twice Nora had begun
Night Journey
, but she never made it past the chapter in which the boy hero succumbed to an illness and awakened to a landscape meant to represent death. Bored by fantasy novels, she could smell the approach of trolls and talking trees.

Davey also revered
Twilight Journey
and
Journey into Light
, the less successful sequels, but had opposed the decision to sell the film rights to
Night Journey.
On the movie’s release a year ago, he had refused to see it. Any movie of the novel would be a failure, a betrayal. You could make good movies of second-rate books” movies based on great books left an embarrassing stink. Whether or not this rule was generally true, it had applied to
Night Journey.
Despite forty million dollars’ worth of special effects and a cast of famous actors, the movie had been greeted by hostile reviews and empty theaters. It disappeared after two weeks, leaving behind the stink Davey had predicted.

5

FORBIDDEN TO SPEAK,
Nora slumped back and watched the di-saster unfurl. All that money had bought unconvincing trees, tattered clothes, and a great deal of fog. The boy came through the last of the trees and found himself on a desolate plain. Here and there, plaster boulders floated up out of silver mist. Distant wolves howled.

Bent over his notebook, Davey frowned like an earnest student taking notes in a class he didn’t like. Seriousness and concentration increased the accidental likeness between them. At forty, he still had the large, clear eyes and almost translucent skin that had both attracted and repelled her when they had first met. Her first coherent thought about him, after she had adjusted to the unexpected resemblance between them, had been that his version of her face was
too
pretty. Any man who looked like that had to be impossibly vain. A lifetime of being indulged, petted, and admired would have made him selfish and shallow. Added to these insurmountable failings was his age. Men about ten years younger than herself were still blind, ambitious babies with everything to learn. Most damning of all, an envelope of ease and carelessness surrounded Davey Chancel. Her father, a foundry worker and lifelong union man, had known that such people were the enemy, and nothing she had seen or experienced had taught her otherwise.

Eventually Nora had learned that only the last of her first impressions had been correct. It was true that he had been born into a wealthy family, but Davey was too insecure to be vain. He had been mercilessly criticized, not coddled, all his life. Oddly vulnerable, he was thoughtful” his ambitions had to do with pleasing others and publishing good books. He had one quality that might have been considered a flaw, even a serious flaw, but Nora had decided that this was a
trait
rather than a serious problem. He was imaginative, and imagination, every-one agreed, was an exceedingly Good Thing. And he needed her. It had been seductive, being needed.

“It’s like they set out to trash the book. Every single thing is wrong.” He gave her an exasperated glance. “Whenever they come to a big moment, they squash it flat. Pay attention, you’ll see what I mean.”

Nora watched the boy trudge through the fog.

“The pace is all wrong, so is the
tone.
This should seem almost
exalted.
Everything should be filled with a kind of
radiance.
Instead of experiencing profound emotions, the kid looks like he’s going out for a sandwich. I bet it’s five minutes before we see Lord Night.”

Nora had no idea who Lord Night was and in fact thought that Davey had said Lord Knight.

“He’s going to plod along forever, and in the meantime, the Stones of Toon look totally fake.” He made another note. “You saw Gentle Friend, didn’t you? When you first came in?”

Nora supposed that the old man in rags must have been Gentle Friend. “I think so.”

“That proves my point.
Driver’s
Gentle Friend is a heroic aristocrat who has renounced the world, and this one’s a dirty hermit. When he tells Pippin to be brave, you don’t have the feeling that he knows any more about bravery than anyone else. But in the book . . . well, you know.”

“Sure.” Without ever telling an actual lie, Nora had allowed Davey to imagine that on her second attempt she had read the novel and seen that it was a masterpiece.

“Gentle Friend is passing on the central message of his life—that bravery has to be re-created daily. Because he knows it, Pippin can know it, too. In this travesty, the scene is pure cardboard. Okay, here comes Lord Night, completely wrong, of course.”

A big, brindled animal that could have been either a dog or a wolf leaped onto the boulder in front of the boy. In pairs, dogs or wolves appeared on the other boulders. The boy looked up at the animals with an absence of expression which might have been intended to represent determination.

“Duh, and who, I wonder, might you be? See, you don’t have any idea that
this
is why Pippin had to really
get it
about bravery. He has to prove himself to Lord Night, and he’s scared out of his wits. Would that mutt scare you?”

“Probably,” Nora said.

“Lord Night is scary, his teeth are like razors, he’s magic. He’s the reason for all the emotion that should have been, but
wasn’t
, present at the start of this scene. We know we’re supposed to meet this dangerous creature, and who shows up instead? Rin Tin Tin.”

To Nora, the animal staring down from the rock looked exactly like a wolf. It had been fed before the scene, but just in case, its trainer had been standing immediately off camera with a tranquilizer gun. The wolf was the best thing in the movie. Utterly real, it was a lot more impressive than what it was supposed to be impersonating. The boy had so little expression on his face because he was too scared to act. He was a sensible boy.

Then Nora saw that Davey was right” the movie wolf was only a dog. She had turned him into the Wolf of Westerholm, the unknown man who had stolen away the corpse of funny, desperate, appealing Natalie Weil and murdered four other women. And the boy playing Pippin Little wasn’t scared or sensible, he was just a lousy actor. Looking at him, she had seen her own fear.

“Of course they screw up the dialogue,” Davey said. “Lord Night doesn’t say, ‘How are you called, child?’ He
knows
his name. What he
says
is ‘Pippin Little, do you travel with us tonight?’ ”

Some renegade part of Nora had overlooked the savagery of the unknown man to remark on his reality. The unknown man strolled here and there on Westerholm’s pretty, tree-lined streets, delivering reminders. He was like war.

The animal in the movie opened his long mouth and said, “Will you come with us tonight, Pippin Little?”

Davey slapped his forehead. “I suppose they think that’s an improvement.”

Nora supposed that when she caught herself finding valuable moral lessons in murder it was time to get out. Year after year, Westerholm proved that Natalie Weil had been charitable about its pretensions. Leo Morris, their lawyer by virtue of being Alden and Daisy’s lawyer, had chartered the
QE2,
all of it, for his daughter’s sweet-sixteen party. One of their neighbors had installed a bathtub made of gold in the bathroom off the master bedroom and regularly invited his guests to step in and check it out.

For at least a year, an idea had been growing within Nora, retreating in the face of all the objections to be made against it, also in the face of Davey’s certain rejection, and now this idea returned as a conviction. They had no business living here. They should sell the house and leave Westerholm. Alden and Daisy would bluster and rant, but Davey made enough money to buy an apartment in New York.

Yes, Nora said to herself, it is time to wake up. It was simple, it was true, it was overwhelming. The move would be difficult, a risk, a test, but if she could retain this sense of necessity, in the end their lives would improve.

She glanced over at Davey, almost fearful that he had heard her thoughts. Davey was giving her a look of shocked disbelief. “Isn’t that incredible?”

“What’s incredible?”

He stared. “You have to read the book again. They cut all of Paddy’s tale and went straight to the Field of Steam. Which means that the first whole set of questions and answers is out, and so are the rats. It’s crazy.”

“Imagine it without the rats.”

“It’s like
The Wizard of Oz
without the flying monkeys. It’s like
The Lord of the Rings
without Sauron.”

“Like
Huckleberry Finn
without Pap.”

“Exactly,” Davey said. “You can’t change these things, you can’t do it.”

We’ll see about that, Nora said to herself.