The Hellfire Club

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 began 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 disaster 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, everyone 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 Weir.

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 cf gold in the bathroom off the mister 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 Dayey'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.