The Hellfire Club by Peter Straub

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 want 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