Free The Hellfire Club by Peter Straub

projections, give him graphs. Have lists of writers you want to sign 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 row of titles by Clyde Morning and Marletta 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 or worse than other horror novels. Maybe what was crucial about them was that they were published by Blackbird—Chancel House.
    “I was thinking once that we could do a series of classics, 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’ll have to pay attention.”
    “Davey . . .” A sense of 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 you the truth, I think about getting out of this hole just about every day. But look, I know how much living here means to you.”
    Her laughter amazed him.

BOOK II
PADDY’S TAIL
    T HE FIRST THING P IPPIN 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. T HE 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 debride-ment 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 at 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 Nora 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, easing and steadying. She had won a focused concentration out of the chaos around her, and every operation became a drama in which she