Free The Hellfire Club by Peter Straub Page B

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.
    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 hand-gun. 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 pro-visional, 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 by-product, 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 Marletta Teatime and
Blood Bond
by Clyde Morning. Davey sounded out agents” he and Nora drew up lists of writers who might sign 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 the 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 Marletta 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,