The Hellfire Club

Nora did not tell Harwich what had happened until hours later, when she looked down at the blood soaking through her clothes, thought it was hers, and fainted. A grim Harwich accepted her refusal to report the incident but followed her out of the OR on a break to pass from his hands to hers a dead officer's handgun. This she kept as close as possible until her last morning in Vietnam, when she dropped it into the nurses' latrine. Even after Dan Harwich left Vietnam, vowing that he would write (he did) and that they had a future together (they didn't), she used her awareness of the gun beneath her pillow to fend off nightmares of the incident until she could almost think that she had forgotten it. And for years after Vietnam it was as if she really had forgotten all about it - until she had reached a kind of provisional, static happiness in Westerholm, Connecticut. In Westerholm, the ordinary, terrible nightmares of dead and dying soldiers had begun to be supplanted by the other, worse nightmares - about being pushed through the hole at the bottom of the world.

Long after, Nora sometimes looked back at that exalted period before the war slammed down on her and thought: Happiness comes when you are looking elsewhere, it is a byproduct, of no importance in itself.18

Every night that week, Nora and Davey delved into Blackbird Books, playing with figures and trying to work out a presentation that would convince Alden. Davey remained moody and remote but seemed grateful for Nora's help. To see what Blackbird Books were like, Nora read The Waiting Grave by Marietta Teatime and Blood Bond by Clyde Morning.

Davey sounded out agents; he and Nora drew up lists of writers who might sigh up with a revitalized Blackbird Books. They learned that Blackbird's greatest appeal was its connection to Chancel House, but that Chancel House had done even less with the line than Davey had imagined.

In 1977, its first year. Blackbird had published twelve paperback originals by writers then unknown. By 1979, half of the ten original writers had left in search of more promotion, higher advances, and better editing. In those days an assistant editor named Merle Marvell had handled the line. Marvell's secretary, shared with two other assistant editors, copyedited Blackbird novels for fifteen dollars a book. (Alden would not waste money on a professional copy editor.) Blackbird stubbornly refused to lay golden eggs, and by 1981 all of its original writers had moved on, leaving behind only Teatime and Morning, who had produced their first books. No longer an assistant editor, Merle Marvell bought one first novel that won an important prize and another that made best-seller list and thereafter had no more time for Blackbird. Since then, Blackbird's two stalwarts sent in their manuscripts and took their money. Neither had an agent. Instead of addresses, they had post office boxes -Teatime's in Norwalk, Connecticut, Morning's in midtown Manhattan! Their telephone numbers had never been divulged. They never demanded higher advances, lunches, or ad budgets. Clyde Morning had won the British Fantasy Award in 1983, and Marietta Teatime had been nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 1985. They went on producing a book a year until 1989, when each of them stopped writing.

'Chancel House has been publishing these people for more than ten years, and you don't even know their telephone numbers?'

'That's not the weird part,' Davey said. They were devouring a sausage and mushroom pizza delivered by a gnome in a space helmet who on closer inspection had become a sixteen-year-old girl wearing a motorcycle helmet. Room had been made on the table for a bottle of Robert

Mondavi Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon and two glasses by shoving papers, printouts, and sheets torn from legal pads into piles. 'The weird part is what I found on a shelf in the conference room today.'

Like the old Davey, he raised his eyebrows and smiled, teasing her. Nora thought he looked wonderful. She liked the way he ate pizza, with a knife and fork. Nora picked up a slice and chomped, pulling away long strings of mozzarella, but Davey addressed a pizza as though it were filet mignon. 'Okay,' she said, 'what did you find on this shelf?'

'Remember I told you that every new manuscript gets written down in a kind of a ledger? Now all this is on a computer. Whatever happens to the submission gets entered beside the title - rejected and returned, or accepted, with the date. I was wondering if we might have rejected books by Morning or Teatime, so I went back to '89, the first year we used computers, and there was Clyde Morning. He submitted a book called Spectre in June '89, and the manuscript never left the house. It wasn't rejected, but it was never accepted, either. He didn't even have an editor, so no one was actually responsible for the manuscript.'

'What happened to it?'

'Precisely. I went down to the production department. Of course nobody could remember. Most of the scripts they work on are kept for a year or two after publication, why I don't know, and then get returned to the editor, who sends them back to the author. I looked at all of them, but I couldn't find Spectre. A production assistant finally reminded me that they sometimes squirrel things away on the shelves in the conference room. It's like the dead letter office.' Davey was grinning.

'And you went to the conference room' - he was nodding his head and grinning even more wildly - 'and you… you found the book?'

'Right there! And not only that…'

She looked at him in astonishment. 'You read it?'

'I skimmed it, anyhow. It's kind of sloppy, but I think it's publishable. I have to see if it's still available - I suppose I have to find out if Morning is still alive - but it could be the leadoff in our new line!'

She liked the our. 'So we're almost ready.'

'I want to go in on Monday.' He did not have to be more specific. 'He's still in a pretty good mood on Monday afternoons.' This was Friday! evening. 'I got a call back from an agent this morning, sounding me out about a couple of writers I'm sure we could get without breaking the bank.'

'You devil,' she said. 'You've been sitting on this ever since you came home.'

'Just waiting for the right moment.' He finished the last of his pizza. 'Do you to play around with the presentation some more or is there something else we could do?'

'Like celebrate?'

'If you're in the mood,' Davey said.

'I definitely feel a mood coming on,' Nora said.

'Well, then.' He looked at her almost uncertainly.

'Come on, big boy,' she said. 'We'll take care of the dishes later.'

Twenty minutes later, Davey lay with his hands folded on his stomach, staring up at the ceiling. 'Sweetie,' she said, 'I didn't say it hurt, I just said it was uncomfortable. I felt dry, but I'm sure that's just temporary. I have an appointment with my doctor next week to talk about hormone replacement. Look at it this way - we probably don't have to worry about getting pregnant anymore.'

'I have condoms. You have your… thing. Of course we don't have to worry about that.'

'Davey, I'm forty-nine. My body is changing. There has to be this period of adjustment.'

'Period of adjustment.'

That's all. My doctor says everything will be fine as long as I eat right and exercise, and probably I'll have to start taking estrogen. It happens to every woman, and now it's my turn.'

He turned his head to her. 'Were you dry last time?'

'No.' She tried not to sigh. 'I wasn't'

'So why are you this time?'

'Because this is the time it happened.'

'But you're not an old woman.' He rolled over and half-buried his face in the pillow. 'I know what's wrong. I got too excited or something, and now you're turned off.'

'Davey, I'm starting to go through menopause. Of course I'm not turned off. I love you. We've always had wonderful sex.'

'You can't have wonderful sex with someone who wakes up moaning and groaning almost every night.'

'It isn't…' This was not going to be a fruitful remark. Neither would it be fruitful to remark that you couldn't have sex with a man who would not come to your bed, or who left your bed to worry about work or Hugo Driver or whatever it was Davey worried about late at night.

'Well, a lot of nights, anyhow,' he said, taking up her unspoken comment. 'Maybe you need therapy or