The Hellfire Club

stomach told her that she was ravenous.

Into the bookstore she sailed, for the moment holding her hunger at bay. She moved along toward Night Journey and its less celebrated siblings, pulled all three paperbacks from the shelf, and carried them to the counter.

'Driver, Driver, Driver,' the man said. 'Dark, darker, darkest.'

'I gather you don't approve,' Nora said.

He rang up the total, and she gave him twenty of Sheldon Dolkis's dollars.

'I have a few doubts about Night Journey.'

'What kind of doubts?'

'Not my cup of tea,' he said, and handed her the bag.

'I want to know more about your doubts,' she said, fending off her hunger. 'People keep telling me I have to read it.'

'The Driver people are like Moonies. They're worse than authors, worse even than authors' wives.'

'I know two people who read it once a year,' Nora said.

'All kinds of people get the bug. A lot of them never read anything else. They love it so much that they want to read it all over again. Then they think they've missed something, and they read it a third time. By now they're making notes. Then they compare discoveries with other Driverites. If they're tied into computer discussion groups, that's it; they're gone. The really sick ones give up on everything else and move into those crazy houses where everybody pretends to be a different Driver character.' He sighed and looked away. 'But I don't want to spoil the book for you.'

Within the pastel interior of Dinah's Silver Slipper, an efficient young woman led Nora to a table by the window, handed her a three-foot-high menu, and announced that her waitress would be right with her.

Nora lined the books up in front of her. The later two were each several hundred pages longer than Night Journey. Nora turned them over and read the back jackets. Night Journey was the classic, world-famous, much-beloved, et cetera, et cetera. Readers everywhere had blah blah blah. The manuscripts of Twilight Journey and Journey into Light had been discovered among the author's papers many years after his death, and Chancel House and the Driver family were pleased to grant his millions of admirers the opportunity to blah blah blah.

'Hold on,' Nora said. 'Author's papers? What papers?' An alarmed female voice said, 'Excuse me?' A college- aged girl in a blue button-down shirt and! black trousers stood beside her. 'I'll have the seared tuna and iced coffee, please.'

She opened Night Journey, leafed past the title page, arrived at Part One, entitled 'Before Dawn,' and began grimly to read. The waitress placed a basket of bread sticks at the far end of the table, and Nora ate every one before her meal appeared before her. She fed herself with one: hand while propping up the book with the other. The landscapes were cardboard, the characters flat, the dialogue stilled, but this time she wanted to keep reading. Against her will she found that she was interested. The hateful book had enough narrative power to draw her in. Once she had been drawn in, the characters and the landscape of caverns and stunted trees; through which they wandered no longer seemed artificial.

She knew the reason for her anger, and it had nothing to do with Night Journey or Hugo Driver's unfortunate influence on susceptible readers. Jeffrey had told her that Davey was moving back to his parents' house. He had succumbed to Alden's gravitational pull.

More than an hour had passed while she consumed the seared tuna and nearly a third of Night Journey. Jeffrey was close to the Massachusetts border, speeding toward Holyoke to pick her up and take her somewhere.

BOOK VII

THE GOLDEN KEY

'You shall find it, Pippin,' said the old man. His beard rustled along the ground.

'I promise you that. But will you recognize it when you find it?

And do you imagine that if you succeed in claiming it, it will make you happy?'

  65

Nora went back down the sidewalk and sat facing Northampton Street on a wrought-iron bench in the shade of an awning. Shelley Dolkis's Ford stood at a parking meter on the far side of the pay telephone, some ten or fifteen feet away. A few cars drove past, none containing Jeffrey. At five-thirty on an August afternoon in Holyoke, most people had already reached the places they were going.

Nora had forgotten to put another set of quarters in the meter, which now displayed a red violation band. She had no desire to get back into that car. Then she remembered the suitcase on the backseat and darted over to it. She leaned into the airless oven of the interior, grabbed the handle of her suitcase, and tossed the keys onto the front seat.

At first she placed the carry-on bag on the bench beside her, then tucked it under the bench and gave herself a gold star for criminal cunning. Jeffrey failed to appear. Two or three minutes later, a dark blue vehicle with the sobriety of a hearse drew near. Nora straightened up and waited for it to pull to the curb behind the Ford, but at a steady fifteen miles an hour it proceeded toward the corner of Northampton and Hampden. The driver, a gaunt old party in sunglasses and a fishing hat, stared straight ahead as the car crept past her.

Now the only two cars on the street were a block away to the north, the wrong direction. Nora leaned back into the bench and closed her eyes. She counted to sixty and opened them. A muddy pickup with a Red Sox pennant dangling from the antenna chugged in from the south. She sighed, opened her bag, and took out Night Journey. Pippin was hiding in a crumbling old house where an evil crone dragged herself from room to room searching for him. The door creaked, and Pippin heard the crone's hairy feet whispering on the rotting floorboards. She looked up. The old man in the fishing hat had pulled into a parking spot in front of Dinah's Silver Slipper and was now stepping cautiously toward the restaurant's entrance. Behind him, like an ocean liner following a tug, came an old woman in a bright print dress. Nora looked the other way, and a police car with HOLYOKE P.D. on its door was swinging out around the mud-splashed truck.

Nora dove back into the book. 'Where, oh, where can my pretty be? I want to stroke my pretty boy.'

The police car drove past, and the tingling in her scalp receded. She kept her head tilted toward the book, watching the car move toward the end of the block. It veered left and made a wide U-turn in front of the pickup. She moved the book closer to her face. The police car cruised to a stop in front of the blue hearse. She peeked at the policemen. The officer in the passenger seat got out, walked across the sidewalk, and went into the Silver Slipper.

The police were looking for Nora Chancel, a woman with dark brown hair who never wore makeup. She opened her bag, found the Cover Girl Clean, and snapped it open to examine herself in the mirror. Far too much of Nora Chancel had surfaced through her disguise. She smoothed on a layer of makeup and erased the more prominent lines, applied mascara and lip gloss, tweaked and ruffled her hair into an approximation of what Dick Dart had accomplished. She risked another glance at the policemen and felt half the tension leave her body. They were leaning against the car and drinking coffee.

Far off to the south, a siren rose into the air, at first barely audible, gradually growing more insistent, finally becoming the distant explosions of red and yellow from the lights across the top of a state police car. Nora rammed the bag under her arm, stood up, and took a step forward. One of the Holyoke cops looked at her. She stretched her arms, twisted right and left, and went back to the bench. Where's the book, get the book, it's in here somewhere. She pulled a book from the jumble in the bag, opened it, and pretended to read.

The two cops gulped the last of their coffee, strolled to the corner, and dropped their cups into a wire basket. Fiddling with their shirts and ties, they moved off the sidewalk to walk down the street toward the Ford. When they passed Nora, the officer who had looked at her turned his head and made a flapping, downward gesture with his hand. Stay put.

She nudged the suitcase farther back under the bench and watched the flamboyant arrival of the state