'It wasn't torture!' Boothe protested. 'It was ... education. Guidance. Scientifically encouraged evolution!'
'We were showing her The Way,' Uhlander said.
* * *
Melanie murmured.
Laura barely heard the girl above the music and screeching of car tires in the movie. She leaned closer to her daughter. 'What is it, honey?'
'The door...' Melanie whispered.
In the pulsating light from the film, Laura saw that the girl's eyes were going shut again.
'The door...'
* * *
Beyond the French windows, night had come to Bel Air.
Boothe had gone to the bar for more bourbon.
Uhlander had gotten up too. He was standing behind the desk, staring down into the panoply of colors that composed the Tiffany lampshade.
Dan said, 'What is this "door to December," this door that opens onto a different season of the year than any other door or window in the house? I read a little about it in your book. You said it was a paradoxical image used as a key to the psyche, but I didn't have a chance to finish the chapter, and I wasn't entirely sure I grasped the concept, anyway.'
Uhlander spoke without looking up from the lamp. 'As part of the attempt to get Melanie to view anything as possible, to open her to fantastic concepts like astral projection, she was given specially designed concepts on which to concentrate during long sessions in the sensory-deprivation chamber. Each concept was an impossible situation ... a carefully designed paradox. Like that door to December about which you read. It was my theory ... it still is my theory that these mind-stretching exercises are useful for people who want to develop their psychic potential. It's a way of training yourself to explore the unthinkable, a way to readjust your worldview to include what you formerly thought impossible.'
From the bar, Boothe said, 'Albert is brilliant, a genius. He's spent years developing a synthesis of science and the occult. He's found places where both those disciplines intersect. He has so much to teach us, so much to contribute. He mustn't die. That's why you mustn't let that little bitch kill us, Lieutenant. We both have so much to give the world.'
Uhlander continued to stare into the jewel-rich colors of the lamp. 'By visualizing impossibilities, by working hard to make each of these strange concepts seem possible and real and familiar, you can eventually liberate your psychic powers from the mental box in which you've sealed them with your socially acquired, culturally imposed disbelief. Preferably, the visualization would take place during deep meditation or after being hypnotized in order to fully concentrate the mind. This theory has never been proved. Because scientists are barred from subjecting human subjects to the lengthy and somewhat painful steps necessary to reshape the psyche.'
'Too bad you weren't around in Germany when the Nazis were in power,' Dan said bitterly. 'I'm sure they would have provided hundreds of human subjects for such an interesting experiment, and they wouldn't have given a damn what you had to do to reshape their psyches.'
As if he hadn't heard the insult, Uhlander said, 'But then, with Melanie, subjected as she was to years of drug-induced states of prolonged and intense concentration, then those longer sessions floating in the sensory-deprivation chamber ... well, it was an ideal approach, and the breakthrough was at last achieved.'
There had been other mind-stretching concepts besides the door to December, the occultist explained. Sometimes Melanie had been instructed to concentrate on a staircase that went only sideways. Uhlander said, 'Imagine you are on an enormous, eternal Victorian staircase with an elaborately carved handrail. Suddenly you become aware that you're neither climbing higher nor descending. Instead, you're on a stairway that leads only sideways, which has no beginning or end. Other concepts included the cat that ate itself, beginning with its tail, the story that Melanie recounted while hypnotically regressed in the motel room that morning, and there was one about a window to yesterday. 'You are standing at a window in your bedroom, looking out on the lawn. You don't see the lawn as it is today, but as it was yesterday, when you were out there, sunbathing. You see yourself out there, lying on a beach towel. This isn't the same scene you can see through the other windows in the room. This isn't an ordinary window. It's a window looking out on yesterday. And if you went through that window, would you be back there in yesterday, standing beside yourself as you were sunbathing?'
Boothe left the bar, glided through shadows, and stopped in the penumbra at the edge of the lamp's rainbow glow. 'Once the subject is able to believe in the paradox, then he must not only believe in it but actually enter it. For instance, if the stairway to nowhere had worked best for Melanie, there would have come a point at which she would've been told to step off the end of those stairs, even though there was no end. And the instant she'd done that, she would have left her body as well and begun her first out-of-body experience. Or if the window to yesterday had worked for her, she would have stepped into yesterday, and the dislocation involved in becoming part of the impossible would have triggered an astral projection. That was the theory, anyway.'
'Madness,' Dan said again.
'Not madness at all.' Uhlander finally looked up from the lamp. 'It worked, you see. It was the door to December that the girl was most able to visualize, and as soon as she stepped through it, she was in touch with her psychic abilities. She learned how to control them.'
Contrary to what Dan and Laura had thought, the girl was not afraid of what would come through the door from some supernatural dimension. Instead, she had been afraid, once she opened the door, that she would go through it and kill again. She had been torn between two opposing and powerful desires: the urge to kill every last one of her tormentors, and the desperate need to stop killing.
Jesus.
Boothe stepped to the desk and put his hand on some of the tightly banded hundred-dollar bills that filled the open suitcase. He looked hard at Dan. 'Well?'
Instead of answering him, Dan said to Uhlander, 'When she enters this psychic state, uses these powers, is there a change in the air around her that people would notice?'
A new intensity entered Uhlander's bird-bright eyes. 'What sort of change?'
'A sudden, inexplicable chill.'
'Could be,' Uhlander said. 'Perhaps an indication of a rapid accumulation of occult energies. Such a phenomenon is associated with the poltergeist, for instance. You've been present when this has happened?'
'Yes I think it happens each time she leaves her body—or returns to it,' Dan said.
* * *
Suddenly the air in the theater turned cold.
Laura had just looked away from Melanie, no more than two or three seconds ago, and the girl's eyes had been open wide. Now they were closed, and already It was coming. It must have been waiting, watching, ready to take advantage of the girl's first moment of vulnerability.
Laura grabbed Melanie and shook her, but her eyes did not open. 'Melanie? Melanie, wake up!'
The air grew colder.
'Melanie!'
Colder.
In the grip of panic, Laura pinched her daughter's face. 'Wake up, wake up!'
Two rows back in the theater, someone said, 'Hey ... quiet over there.'
Colder.
* * *
Boothe's hand was on the money, caressing it. 'You know where she is. You've got to kill her. It's the right thing to do.'
Dan shook his head. 'She's only a child.'
'She's killed eight men already,' Boothe said.
'Men?' Dan laughed humorlessly. 'Could men have done to her what you people did? Tortured her with electric shock? Where did you put the electrodes? On her neck? On her arms? On her little backside? On her gen**als? Yes, I'll bet you did. On the gen**als. Maximum effect. That's what torturers always go for. Maximum effect. Men? Eight men, you say? There's a certain level of amorality, a bottom line of ruthlessness below which you can't call yourself a man anymore.'
'Eight men.' Boothe refused to acknowledge what Dan had said. 'The girl's a monster, a psychopathic monster.'
'She's deeply disturbed. She can't be held accountable for her actions.' Dan had never imagined that he could enjoy seeing another human being squirm as much as he was enjoying the growing horror and desperation on these bastards' faces as they realized that their last hope of survival had been a false hope.
'You're an officer of the law,' Boothe said angrily. 'You have a duty to prevent violence wherever you can.'
'Shooting a nine-year-old girl is the commission of violence, not the prevention.'
'But if you don't kill her, she'll kill us,' Boothe said. 'Two deaths instead of one. Kill her, and the net effect is that you save one life.'
'A net balance of one life to my credit, huh? Gee, what an interesting way to think of it. You know, Mr. Boothe, when you get down there in Hell, I'll bet the devil makes you an accountant of souls.'
A sudden all-consuming fury pulled the white-haired publisher's face into a grotesque mask of hatred and impotent rage. He threw his whiskey glass at Dan's head.
Dan ducked, and the fine crystal struck the floor far behind him, shattering on impact.
'You stupid fu**ing son of a bitch,' Boothe said.
'My, my. Mustn't ever let your friends at the Rotary Club hear you talking like that. Why, they'd be shocked.'
Boothe turned away from him, stood facing the darkness where the books waited silently on their shelves. He was shaking with rage, but he did not speak.
Dan had learned everything he needed to know. He was ready to leave.
* * *
Laura couldn't wake Melanie. She was causing an ever greater disturbance in the theater, angering other patrons, but she couldn't make the child respond with even a murmur or a flutter of her eyes.
Earl had stood up and put his hand on the gun inside his coat.
Laura looked around wildly, waiting for the first sign of the apparition, the explosion of occult force.
But the chill abruptly went away, and the air grew warm again without any supernatural violence.
Whatever had been there a moment ago had now gone.
* * *
Uhlander's gaze had drifted back to the mosaic of stained glass through which the room's only light rose in colorful beams. Though he stared at the scene depicted on the shade, he did not seem to see it; the unfocused nature of his stare was reminiscent of Melanie's haunting detachment. The author was probably seeing his future in that light, although his future was only darkness. In a thin and tremulous voice, he said, 'Lieutenant, listen, please ... you don't have to like us ... to take pity on us.'
'Pity? You think it would be an appropriate expression of pity for me to blow the brains out of a nine-year-old girl?'
Trembling, Palmer Boothe swung back to him. 'It won't just be our lives you'll be saving. For God's sake, don't you see? She's running amok. She has a taste for blood, and it's not very damned likely that she'll stop with us. She's crazy. You said so yourself. You said we drove her crazy and she's not responsible for what she's done. All right! She's not responsible, but she's out of control, and she's probably getting more powerful all the time, learning more about her psychic abilities every hour, and maybe if somebody doesn't stop her soon, maybe nobody will ever be able to stop her. It's not just Albert and me. How many others may die?'
'No others,' Dan said.
'What?'
'She'll kill the two of you, the last of the conspirators from the gray room, and then ... then she'll kill herself.'
When he put it in words, it hit him hard. A sudden, heavy ache bloomed in his chest at the prospect of Melanie taking her own life in despair over what she had done.
'Kill herself?' Boothe said.
'Where'd you get an idea like that?' Uhlander asked.
Succinctly, he told them about Laura's hypnotic-therapy sessions and about the strange things that Melanie had said regarding her own vulnerability. 'When she said It would come after her once it had killed everyone else, we had no idea what the creature might be. Spirit, demon—it seemed impossible that such a thing could exist, but we saw evidence that something strange was loose in the world. Now we know it wasn't a spirit or a demon, and we know that ... well, once she's eliminated the two of you, she plans to take her own life, turn her psychic powers upon herself. So you see, the only lives hanging in the balance are yours and hers, and I'm afraid hers is the only one I have any chance of saving.'
Boothe, whose morality was about as admirable as that of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin, who had hired torturers and murderers with a clear conscience, who would clearly have committed any number of murders with his own bare hands if that were the only way he could save his own damned skin, this thoroughly corrupted and corrupting snake was aghast that Dan, an officer of the law, was not only going to let them die but seemed to welcome the idea that they would soon be removed from this world. 'But ... but ... if she kills us, and you could have stopped her and didn't ... then you're just as guilty of our murder as she is.'
Dan stared at him, then nodded. 'Yes. But that doesn't shock me. I've always known I'm like everyone else in that regard. I've always known, given the right circumstances, I have the capacity for cold-blooded murder.'
He turned his back on them.
He walked away from them, toward the library door.
When Dan was halfway to the door, Uhlander said, 'How long do you think we have?'
Dan paused, looked back at them. 'After reading part of your book this morning, I thought I understood at least some of what was going on. So when I left them, I warned Laura to keep Melanie awake and to keep her from slipping into a deeper catatonic state. I didn't want her to come for you until we had a chance to talk. But tonight I don't intend to keep Melanie from going to bed. And when she goes to bed and finally sleeps ...'
They were all silent.
The only sound was the faraway gurgle and sizzle of rain.
'So we have a few hours,' Boothe said at last, and he sounded like a different man from the one who had welcomed Dan into the library a short while ago, a much weaker and less impressive man. 'Just a few hours ...'
But they didn't even have that much time. As Palmer Boothe's voice faded into a silence composed of terror and self-pity, the air temperature in the library dropped twenty degrees from one second to the next.
Laura hadn't been able to keep Melanie alert.