Dean Koontz - The Door To December

The last word faded into a low moan of pure black despair. Her anguish was terrible, bleak.

Eventually her breathing grew less agitated, less ragged, and finally normal. The weeping subsided.

She lay in silence, perfectly still, as if in a deep sleep. But in the darkness under the bed, her eyes were still open wide, staring in shock and terror.

When she got home, shortly before dawn, Laura made a pot of strong coffee. She carried a mug into the guest bedroom and sipped at the steaming brew while she dusted the furniture, put sheets on the bed, and prepared for Melanie's homecoming.

Her four-year-old calico cat, Pepper, kept getting in the way, rubbing against her legs, insisting upon being petted and scratched behind the ears. The cat seemed to sense that it was soon to be deposed from its favored position in the household.

For four years, Pepper had been something of a surrogate child. In a way, the house also had been a surrogate child, an outlet for the child-rearing energies that Laura could not direct toward her own little girl.

Six years ago, after Dylan had run off, cleaning out their bank accounts and leaving her with no ready cash, Laura had been forced to scramble, scrape, and scheme to keep the house. It wasn't a mansion, but a spacious four-bedroom, Spanish two-story in Sherman Oaks, on the 'right' side of Ventura Boulevard, on a curving street where some homes had swimming pools and even more had hot tubs, where children were frequently sent to private schools, and where the family dogs were not mongrels but full-bred German shepherds, spaniels, golden retrievers, Airedales, dalmatians, and poodles registered with the American Kennel Club. It stood on a large lot, half hidden by coral trees, benjaminas, bushy red and purple hibiscus, red azaleas, and a fence shrouded in bougainvillea, with thick borders of impatiens in every hue along the serpentine, mission-tile walk that led to the front door.

Laura was proud of her home. Three years ago, when she had finally stopped paying private investigators to search for Dylan and Melanie, she had begun to put her spare money into small renovation projects: darkly stained oak base molding, crown molding, and door frames; new, rich dark-blue tile in the master bathroom, with white Sherle Wagner shell sinks and gold fixtures. She'd torn out Dylan's Oriental garden in the back lawn because it was a reminder of him, and had replaced it with twenty different species of roses.

In a sense, the house took the place of the daughter who had been stolen from her: she worried and fussed about it, pampered it, guided it toward maturity. Her concern for keeping the house in good repair was akin to a mother's concern for the health of her child.

Now she could stop sublimating all those maternal urges. Her daughter was finally coming home.

Pepper meowed.

Snatching the cat off the floor and holding it with its legs dangling, face-to-face, Laura said, 'There'll still be plenty of love for one pitiful cat. Don't worry about that, you old mouse-chaser.'

The phone rang.

She put the cat down, crossed the hall to the master bedroom, and plucked the handset off the cradle. 'Hello?'

No answer. The caller hesitated a moment, then hung up.

She stared at the phone, uneasy. Maybe it had been a wrong number. But in the dead hour before dawn, on this extraordinary night, a ringing phone and an uncommunicative caller had sinister implications.

She double-checked the locks on the doors. That seemed to be an inadequate response, but she could think of nothing more to do.

Still uneasy, she tried to shrug off the call, and at last she went into the empty room that had once been the nursery. Two years ago, she had disposed of Melanie's baby furniture when she had finally admitted to herself that her missing daughter would have by that time outgrown everything. Laura had not refurnished, ostensibly because when Melanie returned, the girl would be old enough to have a say in the choice of decor. Actually, Laura had left the room empty because — though she couldn't face her own fears — deep in her heart she'd felt that Melanie would never be coming back, that the child had vanished forever.

She had saved a few of her daughter's toys, however. Now she took the box of old playthings out of the closet and rummaged through it. Three-year-olds and nine-year-olds didn't have much in common, but Laura found two items that might still be appealing to Melanie: a big Raggedy Ann doll, slightly soiled, and a smaller teddy bear with floppy ears.

She took the bear and the doll into the guest bedroom and set them on the pillows, with their backs against the headboard. Melanie would see them the moment she came into the room.

Pepper jumped onto the bed, approached the doll and the bear with curiosity and trepidation. She sniffed the doll, nuzzled the bear, then curled up beside them, apparently having decided that they were friendly.

The first beams of daylight were streaming through the French windows. By the manner in which the early light fluctuated from gray to gold to gray again, Laura could tell, without looking at the sky, that the rain had stopped and that the clouds were breaking up.

Although she'd had only three hours of sleep the previous night, and though her daughter wouldn't be leaving the hospital for six or eight hours, Laura didn't feel like returning to bed. She was awake, energetic. From the stoop outside the front door, she retrieved the plastic-wrapped morning newspaper. In the kitchen, she squeezed two large oranges to make a glass of fresh juice, put a pan of water on the stove to boil, took a box of raisin oatmeal from a cupboard, and popped two slices of bread in the toaster. She was actually humming a tune — Elton John's 'Daniel'—when she sat at the table.

Her daughter was coming home.

The front-page stories in the paper — the turmoil in the Middle East, the fighting in Central America, the scheming of politicians, the muggings and robberies and senseless killings — did not discourage or concern her as they usually did. The murders of Dylan, Hoffritz, and the unknown man were not reported: That story had broken too late to make the early edition. If she had seen that slaughter recounted in the Times, maybe she wouldn't have felt so lighthearted. But she saw not a word about those murders, and Melanie would be released from the hospital this afternoon, and all things considered, she had known worse mornings.

Her daughter was coming home.

When she finished her breakfast, she pushed aside the newspaper and sat looking out the window at the damp rose garden. The sodden blooms seemed impossibly bright in the slanting sun, as unnaturally colorful as flowers in a vivid dream.

She lost track of time, might have been sitting there two minutes or ten, when she was snapped out of her reverie by a thump and clatter somewhere in the house. She sat straight up, rigid, tense, scared, her mind filled with images of blood-spattered walls and cold dead forms in opaque plastic bags.

Then Pepper broke the ominous spell by dashing out of the dining room, into the kitchen, claws clicking on the tile. She scampered into a corner, stood there, the hair raised along her back, ears flattened, staring at the doorway through which she had come. Then with a sudden self-consciousness that was comical, the cat pretended nonchalance, curled up in a furry puddle on the floor, yawned, and turned sleepy eyes on Laura, as if to say, 'Who, me? Lose my feline dignity? Even for a moment? Never! Scared? Ridiculous!'

'What'd you do, puss? Knock something over, spook yourself?'

The calico yawned again.

'It better not have been anything breakable,' Laura said, 'or I might finally get those cat-skin earmuffs I've been wanting.'