The Hellfire Club

Yes, Nora said to herself, it is time to wake up. It was simple, it was true, it was overwhelming. The move would be difficult, a risk, a test, but if she could retain this sense of necessity, in the end their lives would improve.

She glanced over at Davey, almost fearful that he had heard her thoughts. Davey was giving her a look of shocked disbelief. 'Isn't that incredible?'

'What's incredible?'

He stared. 'You have to read the book again. They cut all of Paddy's tale and went straight to the Field of Steam. Which means that the; first whole set of questions and answers is out, and so are the rats. It's crazy.'

'Imagine it without the rats.'

'It's like The Wizard of Oz without the flying monkeys. It's like The Lord of the Rings without Sauron.'

'Like Huckleberry Finn without Pap.'

'Exactly,' Davey said. 'You can't change these things, you can't do it.'

We'll see about that, Nora said to herself.6

Sometime later she came groggily awake with her head in Davey's lap. A wide-shouldered man with crinkly eyes and a heroic beard was carrying the boy through an enormous wooden door. The soundtrack, all shining violins and hallooing trombones, applauded. This stage of events was coming to an end. Nora remembered a sense of resolve, but could not remember what she had resolved to do. With the memory of her own determination came the return of renewed strength. She had resolved to act. Time to wake up. She and Davey would turn their backs on Westerholm and move the forty crucial miles into New York City. It was time to be a nurse again.

Or if not that, she immediately thought, something else. Nora's last experiences of nursing were a radioactive substance too hot to touch. Until the final month, the radioactivity had expressed itself privately, in nightmares, stomach problems, sudden explosions of temper, depressions. The gleeful demons had put in occasional appearances. Neither Nora nor Davey had connected this stream of disorder to her work at Norwalk Hospital until her last month, when Nora herself had become radioactive. An improperly considered but nonetheless necessary action had for a time brought her into the orbit of the police. Of course she had not committed a crime. She had behaved morally, not immorally, but recklessly. After she had agreed, naturally to the regret of all, to 'take a sabbatical,' she had signed half a dozen papers and left the hospital too unhappy to pick up her final paycheck.

Nora's reckless but moral action had at first resembled kidnapping. The year-old son of a prominent man had been brought in with a broken leg and bruising around the chest. A fall downstairs, the mother said. She had not seen it, but her husband had. Sure did, said the husband, a sleek item in a Wall Street suit. His skin had an oily shine, and his smile was amazingly white. Took my eye off the kid for a second, and when I looked back, bam, almost had a heart attack. Half an hour after the child was admitted, both parents left. Three hours later, stuffed bunny under his pin-striped arm, back came smiling Dad. Into the private room he went, came out fifteen minutes later, even oilier, smiling hard. Nora checked on the child and found him all but unconscious.

When she reported what she had seen, she was told that the father could not be responsible for any injuries to the child. The father was a wizard, a financial genius, too noble to beat his own child. The next day Mom and Dad came in at eight. Dad left after half an hour, Mom went home at noon. At six, just as Nora was leaving, Dad returned alone. When Nora checked in on the child the next day, she learned that he had suffered a mysterious 'failure' the previous evening but was now recovering. Once again she reported her suspicions to her superiors, once again she was rebuked. By this time, two or three other nurses silently agreed with her. The parents had been in again at eight, and these nurses had observed that the wizard seemed to be merely acting the role of a worried parent.

When the father returned that evening, Nora, after an hour railing in vain at Administrators, planted herself in the child's room until Dad asked to be left alone with his baby, at which point she left long enough to make three telephone calls - one to an acquaintance who ran the Jack and Jill Nursery School on the South Post Road in Westerholm, another to the chief of pediatrics, the third to Leo Morris, her lawyer. She said, I am saving this child's life. Then she reported back to the room. The irritated wizard said that he was going to file a complaint and bustled out. Nora wrapped up the child and walked out of the hospital. She drove to the Jack and Jill Nursery, delivered the child into her friend's care, and returned to face the storm she had created. Four months after the turmoil had subsided, the wizard's wife issued a statement to the press saying that she was seeking a divorce on the grounds that her husband regularly beat both herself and their son.

'At least they got one thing right,' Davey said. 'The Green Knight really does look like a grown-up Pippin. But you can't tell that Pippin realizes it.'

On the screen, electronic manipulation was transforming the bearded man's face, stripping away years by smoothing wrinkles, shortening his hair, drawing in the planes of his cheeks, leaving the beard as only a penumbra around a face almost identical to the boy's.

'You need the words. His own salvation lay within himself. Pippin had come to the great truth behind his journey through vast darkness. Life and death stirred beneath his own hands, and his hands commanded them.' Davey recited the words unemotionally but without hesitation.

'Oh, of course,' Nora said. 'Absolutely.'

For less than a second, the boy's face shone out from within the shadow of the man's, and then the wild hair, frothing beard, and hard planes of the forehead and cheekbones locked back into place. The man carried the boy down a grassy slope. Sunlight gilded his hair and the tops of his arms. On the hill behind the man and the boy stood a huge door in a dark frame, like a mirage. Before them in the fold of a valley at the bottom of the hillside, oaks the size of matches half-hid a white farmhouse.

She turned her head to Davey and found him looking not at the screen but down at her with a suggestion of concern in his eyes.

'Kind of pretty,' she said.

'So it's completely wrong.' His eyes darkened. 'That's not Mountain Glade. Does it look like there's a secret in that place? Mountain Glade isn't pretty, but it contains the great secret.'

'Oh, sure.'

'It's the whole point,' Davey said. His eyes had moved backward into his head.

'I better go back to bed.' Nora pushed herself upright without any assistance from Davey. 'Isn't it almost over, anyhow?'

'If it is over,' he said.

Onscreen, the bearded man faded toward transparency. When she stood up and took an undecided step away from the sofa, he vanished altogether. The boy sprinted toward the farmhouse, and then the cast list obliterated his image.

Nora took another step toward the door, and Davey gave her a quick, unreadable glance. 'I'll be there in a little while,' he said.

Nora climbed the stairs, again reflexively checking that the front door was locked and the security system armed. She slid back into bed, felt the night sweat soak through her nightgown, and realized that she had to convince Davey that her desire to leave Westerholm had nothing to do with Natalie Weil or the human wolf.

Half an hour later, he entered the bedroom and felt his way along the wall until he found the bathroom. Without really being aware that she had fallen asleep, Nora opened her eyes from a dream in which Dan Harwich had been looking at her with colossal, undimmed tenderness. She rolled over and pushed her head deep into the pillow. For a long time Davey brushed his teeth while the water ran. He washed his face and yanked a towel off the rack. He spoke a few reproachful words she could not make out. Like his mother, when alone or unobserved he often conducted one-sided conversations with some person not present, a habit which Nora thought could not technically be described as talking to yourself, the bathroom light clicked off, and the door opened. Davey groped toward the bed, found the bottom of the mattress in the dark, and felt his way up his side to pull back the duvet. He got in and stretched out along his edge of the bed, as far from her as he could get without falling off. She asked if he was all right.

'Don't forget about lunch tomorrow,' he answered.

Once during her period of radioactivity, Nora had forgotten that they were due at the Poplars for a meal. Usually, Davey's reminders of this distant error struck her as unnecessarily provocative. Tonight, however, his remark suggested a way to put her resolution into effect.