The Hellfire Club

'Blot up as much water as you can. Ram it into the bottom corners.'

Nora pushed the towel around the inside of the bag, and Dart bent over the tub to rinse the towel she had used on the floor under hot water, rub soap into it, and begin washing the cleaver.

'You memorize everything you read, and you never forget it?'

He sighed and leaned against the tub. 'I told you. I don't memorize anything. Once I read a page, it stays in there all by itself. If I want to see it, I just look at it, like a photograph. All those books I had to read for my old ladies, I could recite backwards if I wanted to. Let me feel that.'

He swiped his fingers on her towel and ran them across the lining of the bag. 'Wad toilet paper down in there. Would you like to hear the complete backwards Pride and Prejudice? Austen Jane by? Almost as bad as the forward version.'

Nora stuffed toilet paper into the corners of the bag and began ripping pages out of Night Journey.

Dart ran the cleaver under hot water and soaped it again. 'How do you think I got through law school? Name a case, I could quote the whole damn thing. If that was all you had to do, I'd have made straight A's.'

'That's amazing.' She plastered the first pages against the sodden silk lining.

'You'll never know how relieved I was when I got assigned someone like Marjorie West. Seventy-two years old, rich as the queen of England, never read a book in her life. Four dead husbands and never happier than when talking about sex. Ideal woman.'

Nora had met Marjorie West, whose Mount Avenue house was even grander than the Poplars. She was herself a structure on the grand scale, though much reconstructed, especially about the face. Nora found that she did not wish to think about Marjorie West's relationship with Dick Dart. These days, Marjorie West probably did not want to think too much about it, either. Nora tore another twenty pages out of Night Journey. 'So you could quote from this book, too.'

'You heard me quote from that book.' He placed the cleaver on the rug and addressed the carving knife.

'Tell me about that massy vault, the one that's bigger on the inside than on the outside.'

'You have the book right in front of you.'

'I can't read in this light. What does the vault look like?'

Dart grimaced at the amount of mud still clinging to the knife. 'What does it look like on the outside? I'll have to give you the whole sentence so you get the atmosphere. 'With many a fearsome and ferocious glance, many a painful jab about the ribs, many an adjustment of her enormous hat, Madame Lyno-Wyno Ware led Pippin through the corridors of her spider-haunted mansion to a portal bearing the words MOST PRIVATE, thence into a chamber of gloomy aspect and to another such door marked MOST MOST PRIVATE, into a far gloomier chamber and a door marked MOST MOST MOST PRIVATELY PRIVATE, which creaked open upon the gloomiest of all the chambers, and therein extended her gaudy arm to signify, concealed beneath a tattered sofa, a homely leaden strongbox no more than a foot high.' That's all, 'homely leaden strongbox no more than a foot high.' From there on, it's about Pippin's disappointment, that little thing can't be the famous massy vault, but the boy bites the bullet and forges ahead, says the right words, and it all turns out all right, kind of.'

He rinsed the carving knife, brought it near his eyes for inspection, and rubbed the soapy cloth into the crevices around the hilt.

'The golden key brings him to Madame Lyno-Wyno Ware?'

'Lie? No. Why, nowhere.' Dart picked up his glass with a dripping hand and finished the vodka. 'The truth is all-important, can't lie to Mrs Lyno-Wyno Ware, nope.' Twitching with impatience, he watched her stuff paper into the bag. 'That'll do. Scamper into the: kitchen and get me a refill.'

When she returned. Dart took a mouthful, set down the glass, and meticulously dried the knives. A hard red flush darkened his cheek-bones. 'Clean the mess out of the tub. Work fast, I have a lot to do, must prepare for the arrival of sweet Marian.'

Nora knelt in front of the bathtub. A few dimes and quarters glinted in the slow-moving brown liquid. The thunder of rainfall on the roof suddenly doubled. The window over the tub bulged inward for a second, and the entire cottage quivered.

Nora came out of the bathroom. Dart was staring at the ceiling. 'Thought the whole thing was going to come down. Put the bag on the table and bring me the rope. Hardly need the tape, wouldn't you agree?'

She placed the bag on the table. 'Coat.' Dart removed his tie and draped it over a shoulder of the suit. Nora unsnapped the slicker, put it on the hook, and, her heart beating in time to the drumfire on the roof, carried the rope toward him. 'Slight possibility I may have overdone the vodka, but all is well.' He concentrated on arranging his shirt on a hanger.

Aligned with Dart's usual care, the knives had been placed beneath the pillow on the left side of the bed. 'Rope.' She came close enough to hand him the coil of clothesline. He yanked off his boxer shorts. 'Sit.'

Dart drew the carving knife from beneath the pillow, cut off two four-foot lengths of rope, and stumbled around to the side of the bed. 'Hands.' Eventually he succeeded in lashing her hands and feet. 'Little sleep. Party isn't over yet.'

Nora worked herself up the bed and watched Dart fussing to align the knife under his pillow. He stretched out on the bed and closed his eyes. Then he rolled his head sideways on the pillow and seemed to consider some troubling point. The rope bit into her ankles and wrists. 'What the fuck you care about the massy vault, anyhow?' Wind and rain thrashed against the kitchen windows.

'I like hearing you quote,' Nora said.

'Right. Worry not, I'll wake up in time.' He was asleep in seconds.97

Candlelight fell to the floor in a shifting, liquid pool. On the other side of the table, paler light filtered through the bathroom door. All else was formless darkness. Dick Dart began sending up soft, fluffy snores barely audible under the drumming on the roof. Her hands were falling asleep. Drunk and hurried, Dart had made the knots tighter than before, and the rope was cutting off her circulation. She made fists, flexed her fingers, slid her wrists up and down. A dangerous tingling began in her feet. With her eyes on the pool of light wavering across the smooth floor, Nora explored the knot with her fingers.

Dart's failure to include what her dream-father called 'the choke' meant that Nora could fight the rope without immobilizing her hands. If she could locate the end of the rope, slide it under the nearest strand, unwind it once around, and pass it beneath the next strand, the entire mechanism would collapse. But every time her fingers traced a strand, it disappeared back into the web. The first time she had escaped this knot, Dart had tied a single hand in front of her; with both hands tied behind her back, she would have to find the end of the rope with her fingers.

The shoulder beneath her ached, and her wrists were already complaining. Her feet continued their painful descent into oblivion. She rolled her eyes upward in concentration and found the darkness obliterated by the yellow afterimage of the candlelight. If she wanted to see anything at all, she would have to look away from the light.

Groaning, she swung up her knees and flipped onto her back. A flaring red circle blotted out the ceiling. Another shift of her body rolled her over to face Dart. His breath caught in his throat before erupting in a thunderous snore. Nora tried to force her wrists apart, and increased the pain. Again she closed her hands into fists, extended and stretched her fingers, slid her wrists from side to side. There was some give, after all. The tingling in her hands began to subside.

How much time did she have? Not even Maid Marian was desperate enough to run through a deluge to sleep with Norman Desmond, but Dart's vanity ignored storms. He expected eager Marian in something like twenty minutes. Even drunk, he was probably capable of waking up in time.

Nora folded her hands, rubbed the tips of her fingers over the web of rope, and felt only interlocking strands. She maneuvered herself back onto her other side and shifted toward the end of the bed. She swung her legs out and lowered her feet to the floor. They registered only a profound, painful tingling. Her fingers probed the knot without success. She had to increase the amount of rope she could reach, and the only way to do that was by sliding the whole structure closer to her hands.

If she could put it between her wrists and pull her hands up, the door-knob might work. She stamped her feet on the floor, and a red track burned all the way from her soles to her knees.

Time's running out, girl.

The first two fingers of her right hand plucked at a thread. The thread moved. Her heart surged, and her