The Hellfire Club

Start, she commanded herself. Now.

'Davey,' she said, 'what would you like to be doing at Chancel House?'

Again, he seemed to force himself to think. 'Editorial work.'

'Then that's what you should be doing.'

'Well, yeah, but you know, Dad…' He gave her a resigned look.

'You're not like that disgusting guy who takes did ladies to lunch, you're not Dick Dart. What job do you want most?'

He bit the lining of his cheek before deciding to declare what she already suspected. 'I'd like to edit Blackbird Books. I think I could build Blackbird into something good, but Dad is canceling the line.'

'Not if you make him keep it.'

'How do I do that?'

'I don't know, exactly.But for sure you have to come at him with a plan.' She thought for a moment. 'Get all the figures on the Blackbird Books. Give him projections, give him graphs. Have lists of writers you want to sing up. Print up a presentation. Tell him you'll do it on top of your other work.'

He turned his head to gape at her.

'I'll help. We'll put something together that he won't be able to refuse.'

He looked away, looked back, and filled his lungs with air. 'Well, okay. Let's give it a try.'

'Blackbird Books, here we come,' she said, and remembered seeing the JDW of titles by Clyde Morning and Marietta Teatime in Natalie's bedroom. Unlike Natalie's other books, these had not been filed alphabetically, but separated, at the end of the bottom shelf.

'You know, it might work,' Davey said.

Nora wondered if putting the books together meant they were significantly better. Maybe what was crude or worse than other horror novels about them was that they were published by Blackbird - Chancel House.

'I was thinking once we could do a line of classic books in the public domain.'

'Good idea,' Nora said. Looking back, she thought that the Blackbird Books on Natalie's shelf seemed uniformly new and unmarked, as if they had been bought at the same time and never read.

'If we can put together a serious presentation he will have to pay attention.'

'Davey…' A sense hope and expectancy filled Nora ,and the question escaped her before she could call it back. 'Do you ever think of moving out of Westerholm?'

He lifted his chin. To tell the truth I think about getting out of this hole just about every day. But I know how much living here means to you.'

Her laughter amazed him.

BOOK IIPADDY'S TAIL

The first thing Pippin saw was the tip of a little tail, no wider than four horsehairs bound together, but in search of the rest of the animal, he followed the tail around rocks, through tall weeds, in great circles, up and down great loops on the grass, and when at last he reached the end of the long, long tail, he found attached to it a tiny mouse. The mouse appeared to be dead. 17

Although Davey seemed moody and distracted, the following five days were nearly as happy as any Nora could remember. One other period - several weeks in Vietnam, in memory the happiest of her life - had come at a time when she had been too busy to think of anything but work. Looking back, she had said to herself, So that was happiness.

Her first month in the Evacuation Hospital had jolted her so thoroughly that by its end she was no longer certain what she would need to get her through. Pot, okay. Alcohol, you bet. Emotional calluses, even better. At the rate of twenty to thirty surgical cases a day, she had learned about debridement and irrigation - clearing away dead skin and cleaning the wound against infection - worms in the chest cavity, amputations, crispy critters, and pseudomonas. She particularly hated pseudomonas, a bacterial infection that coated burn patients with green slime. During that month, she had junked most of what she had been taught in nursing school and learned to assist in high-speed operations, clamping blood vessels and cutting where the neurosurgeon told her to cut. At night her boots left bloody trails across the floor. She was in a flesh factory, not a hospital. The old, idealistic Nora Curlew was being unceremoniously peeled away like a layer of outgrown clothes, and what she saw of the new was a spiritless automaton.

Then a temporary miracle occurred. As many patients died during or after operations, the wounded continued to scream from their cots, and Norma was always exhausted, but not as exhausted, and the patients separated into individuals.

To these people she did rapid, precise, necessary things that often permitted them to live. At times, she cradled the head of a dying young man and felt that particles of her own being passed into him, casing and steadying. She had won a focused concentration out of the chaos around her, and every operation became a drama in which she and the surgeon performed necessary, inventive actions which banished or at least contained disorder. Some of these actions were elegant; sometimes the entire drama took on a rigorous, shattering elegance. She learned the differences between the surgeons, some of them fullbacks, some concert pianists, and she treasured the compliments they gave her. At nights, too alert with exhaustion to sleep, she smoked Montagnard grass with the others and played whatever they were playing that day - cards, volleyball, or insults.

At the end of her fifth week in Vietnam, a neurosurgeon named Chris Cross had been reassigned and a new surgeon, Daniel Harwich, had rotated in. Cross, a cheerful blond mesomorph with thousands of awful jokes and a bottomless appetite for beer, had been a fullback surgeon, but a great fullback. He worked athletically, with flashes of astounding grace, and Nora had decided that, all in all, she would probably never see a better surgeon. Their entire unit mourned his going, and when his replacement turned out to be a stringy, lint-haired geek with Coke- bottle glasses and no visible traces of humor, they circled their wagon around Captain Cross's memory and politely froze out the intruder. A tough little nurse named Rita Glow said she'd work with the clown, what the hell, it was all slice 'n' dice anyhow, and while Nora continued her education in the miraculous under the unit's other two surgeons, one a bang-smash fullback, one a pianist who had learned some bang-smash tendencies from Chris Cross, she noticed that not only did geeky Dan Harwich put in his twelve-hour days with the rest of them but he got through more patients with fewer complaints and less drama.

One day Rita Glow said she had to see this guy work, he was righteous, he was a fucking tap dancer in there, and the next morning she swapped assignments to put Nora across the table from Harwich. Between them was a paralyzed young soldier whose back looked like raw meat. Harwich told her she was going to have to help him while he cut shell fragments from the boy's vertebrae. He was both a fullback and a pianist, and his hands were astonishingly fast and sure. After three hours, he closed the boy's back with the quickest, neatest stitches she had ever seen, looked over at Nora, and said, 'Now that I'm warmed up, let's do something hard, okay?'

Within three weeks she was sleeping with Harwich, and within four she was in love. Then the skies opened. Tortured, mangled bodies packed the OR, and they worked seventy-eight hours straight through. She and Harwich crawled into bed covered with the blood of other people, made love, slept for a second, and got up and did the whole thing all over again. They were shelled in the middle of operations and in the middle of the night, sometimes the same thing, and as the clarity of the earlier period shredded, details of individual soldiers burned themselves into her mind. No longer quite sane, she thrust the terror and panic into a locked inner closet.

After three weeks she was raped by three dumbell grunts who caught her as she came outside for a break.One of them hit her in the side of the head, pushed her down, and fell on her. The other kneeled on her arms. At first she thought they had mistaken her for a Vietcong, but almost instantly she realized that what they had mistaken her for was a living woman.'

The rape was a flurry of thumps and blows and enormous, reeking hands over her mouth; it was having the breath mashed out of her while grunting animals dug at her privates. While it went on, Nora was punched through the bottom of the world. This was entirely literal.The column of the world went from bottom to top, and now she had been smashed through the bottom of the column along with the rest of the shit. Demons leaned chattering out of the darkness.

The second grunt rolled off, the first grunt let go of her arms, and they sprinted away. She heard their footsteps and realized that now she was on the other side, with the gibbering demons; then she gathered the demons into her psychic hands and stuffed them into an inner container just large enough to hold them.