THE HELLFIRE CLUB Barrie Darke

 

Early it might have been, but late enough that no one should have been knocking.

I happened to be standing nearest the door, and so they looked to me. I am a plain and honest man, so I can say I unlocked with no inward stirrings, no sprinkling of golden presentiment through my tripes. And I can further say the truth of it was comical: I opened the door, peered out at nothing, and was ready to shut it when I lowered my gaze to see.

It was a young girl, blonde and rosy cheeked, smiling up at me. I was surprised; it was ten o’clock at night, past that. She was nine years old, as we were to discover. That smile was her all, and it had nothing designing in it, was full of excitement and a great impatience. We were also to discover later that this impatience of hers was to commence work.

But then, I thought she must have come to collect one of our number, was here to drag a wastrel home for a tirade from his woman. I was familiar with the family arrangements of each, however, and this child was new to me.

‘Who or what are you after, young lady?’ I asked. I was gone enough in beer to be accommodating and good humoured.

‘I want to come in,’ she replied.

I laughed. ‘You have presented yourself at the wrong door,’ I told her. ‘Very much at the wrong door. Where is it you think you are, or wish to be?’

‘No, this is the right door and I want to be here,’ she said. She leant to the side, stealing a look at what little she could see around me.

‘I say again—you are mistaken. This is no place for a child.’

‘I know what place this is,’ she insisted. ‘That’s why I want to come in.’

I laughed at her again. To this day, she remembers that I did so. She tweaks my nose about it when the mood strikes.

I told her to go home and closed the door. I was still chuckling and shaking my head when I turned back into the room. No one there took much interest, and I soon had her erased from my mind.

She remained that way until the next week. We were gathered again, and the knock came at the door again. It was later in the evening, so correspondingly later in the proceedings. Theo Bliss was at his game with a dark haired nun and had her over the table, her teats flattened, his fingers sinking into her hips; Roger Wear watched them with his judicious air. Thomas Mallet had sketched an image of the Virgin Mary on a scrap of paper, and Mark Sparrow had fastened it to a wall by way of a knife through her forehead.

I was on board with enough booze to leave me unsteady on my feet, though my mind was swift. The knocking brought the image of the young girl to my mind for the first time since she had been turned away. Not believing for a second it could be, I nonetheless thought, is it her trying once more? When I opened the door, I looked down.

Her smile was as broad as last week’s, as if that disappointment had never happened and certainly wouldn’t happen again.

‘What is it you think goes on here?’ I asked without preliminaries. I closed the door against me, to forestall her peering. ‘What is it you think we do here?’

‘You commit outrages,’ she said brightly.

That, I hadn’t been anticipating. It cut through me, no matter my inebriation.

‘If that is really what you think, then you should know there are no children allowed here,’ I said, recovering. ‘Go home to bed. Who lets you run wild at midnight?’

‘I want to see the magic side of it,’ she said.

That gave me further pause. It made the most sense. Children were enamoured by the magical, and that feeling was greater in those children old enough to suspect it wasn’t real.

‘I’m sorry, no,’ I said, closing the door on her again. I don’t know why I saw fit to apologise, and I don’t know what I would have done had she put a foot forward to stop the door, or if she had barged her way through.

I spoke to our club’s leader, Bernard Southwold, not that there was a great deal to say. We laughed at her mention of the ‘magic side of it’, though not without a pang on my behalf. Truth be told, we had long overlooked magic in favour of swallowing ale and licking the cunts of the nuns—though we had all the necessary books on a shelf somewhere.

On the occasion of her third visit, which came the following week, my expression was warm and friendly. Her smile was different at the sight, or her eyes were, as if she knew a chink had now opened.

‘Young madam, you may knock on this door till the end of time, but you have to prove yourself worthy of entry,’ I said.

This had been in my mind all week. It was nothing I had agreed with Bernard, nothing I had put to the others, and certainly nothing I had mentioned to my favourite nun while we cooled in our juices afterwards. It had pressed itself on me all week, ready to leap out.

She nodded and walked away. I watched her go for a while before closing the door.

 

I could have stayed silent about what I had said, but after another drink, I decided it was best to tell Bernard Southwold. He wasn’t unduly concerned and predicted nothing profound would come of it. All the same, he instructed me to find out what I could about her, before her inevitable return the following week.

I was far from anyone’s idea of a natural spy, but I agreed. In fact, I would have asked a few questions about her regardless, by that stage. She had captured my interest.

Her name was Annie Finneran. She had been living in the village for almost three months, lodging with her maternal grandmother, old Mrs Wode. Her mother had died of yellow fever. Despite a lack of siblings, and the generally quiet and obedient nature of Annie, her father considered himself to be overwhelmed by this responsibility, so deposited her here and left on the same day.

Old Mrs Wode was not well known to me—I avoided the aged when I could, finding them tiresome—but by all accounts was a warm and kindly soul. It is difficult to say if she was fit to carry the burdens of a parent once again, but her charge knocking at our door long past any reasonable bedtime spoke eloquently on the subject.

I spent much of my time that week observing her with other children, hard to watch though it was, and equally hard to interpret. The children here were insular and forbidding, as village children tended to be. They did not throw open their arms for newcomers, and this was doubled for those with qualities such as Annie displayed.

Granted, she did not strike me as the exemplar of a child who wanted to ingratiate herself—not with other children, at least. As we came to know, she was ferociously intelligent and self-possessed, and it was foolhardy to think the company of other nine year olds would suit her temperament.

I saw her on the edges of it with a gaggle of runny nosed squealers, smiling distantly, as one in a daydream, knowing that her satisfactions lay in other directions. She was untroubled by any loneliness, I thought. By then, that was what I wanted to think.

She caught me looking at her that day. She turned slowly, as though she had been aware of me for some time and now was the moment to let me know it. There is a subtle difference between a smile and a grin, but we all know it when we see it. And this was a deep, knowledgeable, and prophetic grin if ever I saw one.
 


The original Hellfire Club had been established by the revered Sir Francis Dashwood some years before. Others of its nature rapidly sprang up, some with his blessing, some without; he rarely visited either kind, and as far as we knew hadn’t come within five miles of ours in the decade of our existence. That was a melancholy fact, but he was a man in the prime of life and there was yet time.

Bernard Southwold and I had been a part of it from the first night. We had been equal in our enthusiasm, and all that separated us to appoint him leader was his greater wealth and his firmer sense of organisation. I accepted that; the weight of leadership may have blunted my appreciation of the night, in any case. I freely say, if it wasn’t apparent by now, that I dearly loved the club. And it doesn’t need to be said that I enjoyed myself there without fail. I often thought the few worthwhile hours of my life had been spent within those walls.

Quickly a fixture in the life of the village, we were tolerated by some and reviled by others. Comparatively few dared to make an effort to join, fewer yet to drive us out. That would have been beyond their powers, for our membership typically included a number of characters who held the reins in the village, from squires to magistrates to those groaning with mercantile success: Roger Wear, for instance, currently employed more men in the village than anyone else, and Theo Bliss’s father had been widely beloved, nobody believing that a son of his could be involved in too nefarious pursuits, even at midnight. I held no position of influence myself, but when I walked the roads or stepped into the alehouses, I rarely saw a hostile look.

Yet I sometimes dreamt of the club on fire, torched by miscreants with blackened faces, and such dreams were enough to leave me agitated for days afterwards.

At the start, as a younger, more reckless man, I was interested in the esoteric books. We heard tales of success in this area from the other Hellfire Clubs, historical figures summoned, or red skinned imps that would carry out one’s bidding for a day and a night. Rumour told of sudden riches and grand advancements. There were more intoxicants than alcohol and more sexual practises than even our most debauched nuns knew of.

Naturally, we tried to draw from the books. Bernard didn’t delve too deeply, but a handful of the members joined me in thumbing through the pages and daring a few hushed utterances as the witching hour crept by. Nothing concrete came of it: perhaps we had unsettled dreams, deceased relatives appearing to warn us off, and perhaps we noticed curiously thickened shadows on our walks home in the black hours, but that was all.
A few instances of blasphemy were sufficient to feed the more madcap appetites amongst us. The best ale in the locale and a strumpet taking your issue into her mouth were enough for most. The sense that it was a pity never left me, however.

That night, we met without any sense that our times would change. No one so much as mentioned Annie, and Bernard neglected to ask me what I had learned about her. It was to be a commonplace night for them, no more than that.

I can say I may have allowed myself a sliver of hope without recognising it as such. I didn’t drink voluminously, to keep my wits preserved, and I had no intention of loosening myself with a nun until the very last gasp of the night, when hope was extinguished. I would be the last to leave, I would turn the key in the lock and walk home in the chill before dawn, if that was what it took.

So I was more alert than anyone when the knock came. It gave me a sense of déjà vu, and also a palsy in my heart. Some would say I was moving towards the door before the knock even sounded. They are no doubt correct. There was Annie Finneran, with a round cloth bundle in her hands. She gave me her grin—the grin, not the smile—and held it out.

I took it, and she followed me inside without needing to be invited. I could feel her walking behind, head swivelling, drawing in every sight. One of the nuns tittered as she pulled her torn shift into decorous place, but apart from that the place fell quiet. I thought Mark Sparrow might be about to remonstrate with me, but the sight of her quelled him.

I placed the bundle on a damp, crumb strewn table. Everyone bar Annie stared at it; Annie was looking for the spines of the books. I unwrapped the covering. Soon stood revealed the snowy white head of a warm and kindly old woman.
 


In the earliest weeks and months of our club, I had looked forward to the next meeting with a relish I had never known for anything else. Life spun on that axis. Life was nothing beyond waiting for that one glorious night in the benighted week. It never became routine, that would be wrong to say, but it couldn’t fail to have dulled in the decade between.

Now the old youthful exhilaration was back. I would claim, in fact, that it was stronger. Maturity had deepened my responses, fashioned them into something less hectic.

Mark Sparrow walked out, taking a couple of the less steely nuns with him. Roger Wear grabbed for a chair and sat in it before he fell over in a faint. Thomas Mallet wandered over to a window, as if he preferred to look at the blackness outside. Theo Bliss stared at the severed head as if it were a mathematical problem, his thumb playing over his lips. Bernard Southwold was stillness itself.

I confess my own heart came close to faltering. Old Mrs Wode’s eyes and mouth were agape, in what could be interpreted as a mix of terror and shock over this, the final vision of her life.

Annie flitted about serenely, taking no notice of what she had caused, seeing how the club’s tatty appurtenances matched up to her imagining of them. I expected to see disappointment on that score, but I could see she was happy enough. She was full of the possibilities, the potentialities, and that is always a jubilant affair in the young.

Bernard was thrown back into himself, so it fell to me to lead the conversation. ‘I believe this counts as a good application,’ I said. ‘I vote Annie Finneran can join.’

There was no laughter, only a general exhalation.

‘Sir Francis himself would approve, I’m sure,’ I said. ‘We should send word to him.’

Bernard still wasn’t clutching the situation. I called Annie over, and she came readily enough. They didn’t shy away from her, but they did look at her as though she was marked by colourings that betokened poison.

‘What is it you want, young lady, now that you’re here?’ I asked.

‘I want to explore the books,’ she said, as I’d known she would.

‘Explore in the sense of …’

‘Of making them come true,’ she said.

I turned to the others. ‘We have to concede,’ I said, ‘that this is one of the reasons Sir Francis inaugurated these clubs. Not only to indulge our senses. But I see we are doubtful at the prospect.’

I looked at Annie. She waited, as if I was the one to make the decision, not Bernard.

‘We can grant you another chance to prove yourself,’ I said. ‘You can have another week. Spend some hours with the books and then give us a display.’

I held my hands out to the others. ‘Do we agree, gentlemen?’ I asked them. ‘Do we require a vote?’ I indicated the head on the table. ‘This affair can be hidden for a week, and then I’m sure we can find a presentable explanation for it. Miscreants with their faces painted black in the night, say. What do we think?’

‘Yes,’ Bernard said. ‘One more week. Another test.’

I smiled at Annie. I couldn’t yet match her grin. ‘How does that strike you?’

She shrugged, absorbing the news as though it was everything she’d expected. ‘I accept,’ she said.
 


Unprecedentedly, and on my urging, Annie was permitted to pass hours each day in the empty club. The books deserved no less attention, no less dedication.

I opened the door for her and locked it behind her when she left. On some mornings I stayed inside, patching up joints and adding touches of varnish or paint, to make the place more of what it could have been. There were other times when I preferred to sit outside: an atmosphere could develop, whether it was inside or outside of my skull. Annie, be it said, never asked me to stay or to leave. She was wholly indifferent to my presence.

She frowned and sighed and turned the pages steadily, muttering to herself. I also heard her gasp rapturously, saw her run around the room, almost turning somersaults. I never asked how she was progressing, knowing I would be rebuffed.

There was the afternoon when I stepped inside from a walk and found her with a boy her age. They sprang apart, Annie giggling, the boy looking as though he was not sorry at the interruption. I turned and walked out again.

None of us in the club liked to speculate on what had happened to the body of her grandmother. Escorting her to the house one evening, I asked her how she was coping with cooking and cleaning and all the other dull jobs required. She said she knew how to do it all herself, had had to learn quickly with her parents. I asked, you might say foolishly, if she was scared at night on her own. She stopped walking, threw back her head, and laughed.

All in all, I dare say she was eating and sleeping better than I was. And I expect I was eating and sleeping better than the other club members. Roger Wear came to see me one night halfway through the week. He sat wordlessly for quarter of an hour, then shook his head and left.

The day before we were due to witness the results of her study, Annie wanted to be in the club from early morning till late at night. I played card games with myself while she rifled through the pages, and won them all. I hung off the beams, lifting myself up till my arms ached. I didn’t go out on any walks that day, but I sat by the entrance now and then, greeting passersby who had scrutiny for the place. Knowledge of what was happening had spread—who could say how? I hoped none of it came from the members, but the nuns couldn’t be trusted to keep their mouths shut.

The day passed quickly for me, but I hoped it wasn’t that way for Annie. I hoped she knew she had every particle of time she needed, and was relaxed and content with it.

When it was time to leave, decreed by her, her face was strong. She didn’t look like a child now. Do many, when it’s close to midnight? She told me to convene them the next night, not at the club, but at a ruined abbey on the edge of the village. She sounded like she foresaw no difficulties with this, like she knew there would be no refusals, and when I said goodnight at her gate, she didn’t reply or look back.
 


I awoke early the next morning, after only a few hours sleeping. I had been visited in my dreams by no years dead relatives, and felt fortunate in that. This day was beyond their reach, of course: this day would take the Virgin Mary herself to bring to a halt, and she was elsewhere.

I breakfasted at the nearest alehouse, as was my habit. The landlord there was a pious man, increasingly so as he aged, and I thought his belaboured charity towards me would come to an end that morning. When he served me my oats, I wondered if he had spat in the bowl. He was welcome to, as I ate little of them.

Mark Sparrow had been scrupulously avoiding us since he left on that epochal night, but he joined me now as I sat stirring my food. He looked harrowed and ill. Before I could inform him we were to meet at the abbey, he said he was glad he had found me: he would be leaving the village imminently on business for a few days. He had never before been forced to do this that I could recall, his working life being indistinguishable from leisure, but I remained polite.

‘It will be a matter of great regret to miss it,’ I told him.

‘And I am sorry for it,’ he said, ‘but it is unavoidable.’

‘I will pass on your best regards to Annie,’ I said.
 
This made his face blanch all the more, and his eyes pleaded with me to put no further pressure on him. I weighed a moment of cruelty when I could have toyed with him … but instead looked at my dish and waited for him to depart. He made another apology, and then muttered a goodbye that was unworthy of him.

I lobbed a curt word at the landlord when I left, and he flinched, scared suddenly, as he should have been.

I sent notice of the abbey decision to everyone, and while no objections came back, I wondered how many would attend. I walked the village paths, being seen. I passed people whose minds were straining, who sought reassurance from me. Once I might have given it, but the day had its effect on me too, and spider legs of malice brushed my heart. I walked on, my lips pursed.

It could have been a mistake, I knew, but I stopped at the house—Annie’s house, as it now was. By then it was late afternoon and she looked as though she had only then risen from her bed. The house, I must report with all delicacy, did not reek.

She sauntered about, yawning and blinking, stretching like a cat. I wondered if her dreams had been inky and empty also, but hadn’t the courage to enquire. She ate a crust of bread, which woke her up. I asked her if she wanted a final hour or two in the club with the books, and she looked at me sceptically. I took this as an invitation to leave her be.

I resumed walking. I wasn’t difficult to find, and soon I was accompanied by Bernard Southwold.

‘Have you seen her today?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I thought it best to leave her be.’

I surprised myself by saying this. It felt appropriate to lie, that was the top and bottom of it. Not necessarily about seeing Annie, but a lie for any reason at all.

We walked to the abbey, a distance of over a mile, most of it spent in silence. Many’s the time I knew he was on the verge of saying this should be stopped, she should be stopped, sent back to her father no matter how much of a brute or a failure he was. Even then, before anything had been proven, he couldn’t risk saying those words to me.

I let that threat build, but then broke it by reminiscing about the early, jaunty days of the club. Bernard smiled along, but it wasn’t a full smile. He was foreseeing those memories becoming jaundiced. I knew they wouldn’t for me, whatever took place that night, be it a disappointment or—to use one of Annie’s words—an outrage.

We were the first there, soon joined by Theo, Thomas, Roger, and the majority of the others. Only a small number looked happy to be there. I hoped I did. There was no last minute appearance from Mark Sparrow, and none of us remarked on his absence. The best of the nuns came arm in arm, which moved me enormously.

We waited outside, buffeted by a range of weathers, from stiffening winds to a silvery sun shower. The sky darkened, and I thought these dimming colours over the landscape, the shadows thrown by the last light, sloping and deformed, presented a puzzle to be solved.

When it was full dark, Annie wandered over a hill and down to us. She wore a new dress of a deep crimson. I thought her hair had been cut shorter. Her face was blank, but resolute with it.

She walked through us and led us inside the abbey. It was far colder than the outside air. We took our seats on the cobwebbed, nature blasted pews like we were practised at it. She stood where the altar had once been and turned to face us. Now she could show her famous grin.

She whispered for a while, though whispers carried in that place. Words from the books, words that felt familiar to me, though I had no memory of them from those times years ago when I looked into the pages. Words buried so deep in our ancient history we didn’t have to know them for them to have a grip on us. When she shouted, when she screamed, the windows would have shattered, had the abbey still been in possession of them. We didn’t like to think what the moonlight was watching out there.

She crouched like an animal. She took to her knees in a parody of the devout that was more than the devout could manage. Her red dress and yellow hair became harder to look at. She sculpted the air, and whatever filled the air, with her hands. There were periods when she held herself tight, sitting on the floor, knees brought to her chest, staring intently.

When it ended—there was no sign from her, but we knew it had—I heard weeping from Bernard beside me. I glanced at him, not wanting to look away from Annie for longer than a second, and it wasn’t fear I saw in him, it was pride. I almost cried myself.

Annie got to her feet and led us out. A devil stood there, taller than the roof, taller than the hills. His features were crude and lumpen, as though he had been summoned unfinished, as perhaps he had; this was her first effort, after all. He looked down at us, the most callous stare I had ever seen.

She told us to hail him, and we did. We stared at him, to see how the moonlight played on his wings. He laughed at us. And, while Annie urged us to say her name, say it again and again, he pissed on our heads.
 


Now many years have passed, and I am sad to say they have left me a reduced figure. I am old beyond my time, sickly with fevers, horribly weakened. I cannot move from my bed. There are days, more and more of them, when I cannot lift my head to see who comes in at the door.

I have been given, on Annie’s say so, a room above the club. It is a fitting place, and it is a great kindness, though I am aware it is a steely end to a life such as mine: a goad to the afterlife, to the angels to deliver me from here. You will not find a soul to say I deserve better. Here I am; I will go no further.

You may ask, with due satisfaction, am I fearful? There are moments when I would say yes. I would not be human otherwise, and despite what some may think, I remain human. Those tremulous moments are not only reserved for the pools of night. Often the sun, particularly in a declining winter, can seem to me a pitiless ogre. But there are moments of pleasure, too.

There is more that could be told of our club, or her club, as it inevitably became. The night the she devils came up and cavorted in the streets, while all but Annie and I cowered inside. The brave but futile sacrifice of Bernard Southwold is worth five pages itself, the treachery of Roger Wear somewhat fewer. The wave of children born that awful way and what became of them. The marriage of Annie at the age of twelve and the fortune she amassed at the age of fifteen; the reappearance of her father, and the part I played in his speedy despatch. I regret most that I have no time left to speak about the visit of Sir Francis Dashwood himself—other than to say he was suitably wonder struck.

Others can regale the world with these tales, if the world wishes to hear them. The world might: Annie’s legend grows every day, and she will become a historic figure, of that I am convinced. Other journal keepers may find themselves more dispassionate about her than I could ever be.

I listen out for her step, and hope she will be here soon. I hope she will ease me towards the end, and into what will come after.