Dean Koontz - The Door To December

'There was this young girl, a student—'

'Ah.'

'Much worse than you think,' Marge said. 'It wasn't just moral turpitude. He wasn't the first professor to sleep with a student. Half the men on the faculty would be dismissed, and maybe as much as a fifth of the women, if that rule was well enforced. He was having sex with her, yes, but he also beat her up and put her in hospital. Their relationship was… Kinky, is a kind word for it. One night, it got out of hand.'

'Are you talking about bondage games or something?' Dan asked.

'Yes. Hoffritz was a sadist.'

'And the girl cooperated? She was a masochist?'

'Yes. But she got more than she bargained for. One night Hoffritz lost control, broke her nose, three fingers, her left arm. I went to hospital, saw her. Both eyes blackened, split lip, badly bruised.'

* * *

Laura and Earl stood at the window, watching Flash and the tall man move down the walk in the deepening twilight. The telephone-company van was only a lumpish shape, all details obscured, as the oncoming night knitted together with the shadows under the curbside jacarandas.

She said, 'FBI, huh? They won't go away?'

'No.'

'Even though I'm aware of them now.'

'Well, they're not convinced you were conspiring with your husband. In fact, that would be one of the less likely possibilities in their eyes. They still figure someone — whoever was financing Dylan's research — will come after Melanie, and they want to be here when it happens.'

'But I still need you,' she said. 'In case the FBI itself takes my daughter.'

'Yes. If that's what comes down, you'll need a witness in order to go after them in the courts.'

She went to the couch and sat on the edge, shoulders hunched, head bowed, arms propped on her thighs. 'I feel as if I'm losing my mind.'

'Everything'll work out if—'

He was interrupted by Melanie's scream.

* * *

Dan winced at Marge's description of the battered student. 'But Hoffritz has no arrest record.'

'The girl wouldn't press charges.'

'He did that to her, and she let him get away with it? Why?'

Marge got up, went to the window, and stared down at the campus. The orange light of sunset had given way to the grays and blues of twilight. A few clouds had sailed in from the sea. At last, the psychologist said, 'When we put Willy Hoffritz on suspension and started looking into his previous relationships with students, we found this girl wasn't the first. There were at least four others over the years, four that we know of all undergraduates, sexually involved with Hoffritz, all playing masochist to his sadist, although none of them had been seriously injured. Until this girl, it was always more of a nasty game than anything. Those first four were willing to talk about it when we insisted, and because of our interviews with them, we uncovered some interesting, appalling… and frightening information.'

Dan didn't press her to continue. He suspected that it was painful and humiliating for her to admit that a colleague — even one she didn't like — was capable of these things and that the academic community was no more noble than the human race at large. But she was a realist who could face up to unpleasant truths, a rare creature both in and out of academia, and she would tell him everything. She just needed to do it at her own pace.

Still facing the twilight, she said, 'None of those first four girls was promiscuous, Dan. Good kids from good families, here to obtain an education, not to escape parental authority and get some kicks. In fact, two of the four were virgins before they fell under Hoffritz's spell. And none was ever involved in sado-masochistic relationships before Hoffritz, and certainly not after. They were repulsed by the memories of what they had let him do to them.'

She fell silent again.

He decided that she wanted him to ask a question now, and he said, 'Well, if they didn't like it, why did they do it?'

'The answer to that is a bit complex.'

'I can handle it. I'm a bit complex myself.'

She turned from the window and smiled, but only briefly. What she had to tell him obviated amusement. 'We discovered that each of those four girls had been voluntarily involved in undisclosed behavior-modification experiments with Hoffritz. Those experiments included posthypnotic suggestion and a variety of ego-suppressing drugs.'

'Why would they want to get involved with something like that?'

'To please a professor, to get a good grade. Or maybe because it actually interested them. Students are sometimes interested in the things they study, even these days, even the low-caliber students we've been getting lately. And Hoffritz did have a certain charm, which was more effective with some people than others.'

'Not with you.'

'When he turned on the charm, I found him even more slimy than usual. Anyway, he was teaching these girls, and he charmed them, and you mustn't forget that he was well published and well known in his field. He had earned a certain respect.'

'And it was after these experiments started that each girl found herself sexually involved with him.'

'Yes.'

'So you think he used hypnosis, drugs, subconscious programming, to… well, to convert them?'

'To program their psychological matrices to include promiscuity and masochism. Yes. That's exactly what I think.'

* * *

Melanie's shrill scream filled the house.

Shouting her daughter's name, Laura hurried behind Earl Benton, down the hall. Revolver in hand, the bodyguard entered the child's room ahead of Laura and snapped on the light.

Melanie was alone. The menace that had elicited her screams was one that only she could see.

Dressed in white socks and the pair of white cotton underpants that she had been wearing during her nap, the child was crouched in a corner, hands held in front of her to ward off an invisible enemy, shrieking so fiercely that she must have been hurting her throat. She looked so fragile, so pitifully vulnerable.

Laura was briefly overwhelmed with loathing for Dylan. She almost sagged, almost went limp, almost crumpled under the weight of her anger.

Earl holstered his gun. He reached out to Melanie, but she struck his hands and scrambled away from him, along the baseboard.

'Melanie, honey, stop! It's all right,' Laura said.

The girl didn't heed her mother. She reached the next corner, sat down, drew her legs up, fisted her small hands, and held them up defensively. She was no longer screaming, but she made a strange, rhythmic, panicky sound: 'Uh… uh… uh… uh… uh…'

Crouching in front of her, Earl said, 'It's okay, kid.'

'Uh… uh… uh… uh…'

'It's okay now. It really is. It's okay, Melanie. I'll take care of you.'

'The d-d-door,' Melanie said. 'The door. Don't let it open!'

'It's shut,' Laura said, hurrying to her, kneeling by her. 'The door is shut and locked, honey.'

'Keep it shut!'

'Don't you remember, baby? There's a big, new, heavy lock on the door,' Laura said. 'Don't you remember?'

Earl glanced at Laura, obviously puzzled.

'The door is shut,' Laura continued. 'Locked. Sealed. Nailed shut. Nobody can open it, honey. Nobody.'

Fat tears welled in the child's eyes, spilled down her cheeks.

'I'll take care of you,' Earl said soothingly.

'Baby, you're safe here. No one can hurt you.'

Melanie sighed, and the fear ebbed out of her face.

'You're safe. Perfectly safe now.'

The girl put one pale hand to her head and began to twist a strand of hair in that absentminded way that any ordinary girl might twist her hair when preoccupied with thoughts of boys or horses or pajama parties or any of the other things that preoccupied kids her age. Indeed, after the bizarre behavior that she had displayed thus far, after alternating between extremes of hysteria and motionless catatonia, it was both moving and encouraging to see her playing with her hair, because that was such a normal act — a small thing, simple, hardly a breakthrough, not a crack in her hard autistic shield, but normal.