Dean Koontz - The Door To December

She was lovely too, even though she wasn't wearing any makeup and though her auburn hair was damp and frizzy from the rain. She was thirty-six, but she looked younger. Her green eyes were clear, direct, penetrating, and beautiful. And haunted.

The woman would be even more disturbed by what she would see in the makeshift lab, and Dan disliked having to take her in there. But that was the main reason he had called her out in the middle of the night. Although she hadn't seen her husband in six years, no one knew the man better than she knew him. Since she was a psychiatrist as well, perhaps she would recognize the nature of the experiments and research that Dylan McCaffrey had been conducting. And Dan had a hunch that he wasn't going to solve these homicides — or locate Melanie — until he could figure out what Dylan McCaffrey had been doing.

Laura followed him through the doorway.

In the gray room, he watched her face. She registered surprise, puzzlement, and uneasiness.

The two-car garage had been closed off and remodeled into a single large, windowless, relentlessly drab room. Gray ceiling. Gray walls. Gray carpet. Fluorescent ceiling lights glowed softly behind grayish plastic panels. Even the handles on the sliding gray closet doors were painted gray. Though the heating vents must have been bare gray metal in the first place, they also had been painted, apparently because, unpainted, they had been shiny. No spot of color or brightwork had been allowed. The effect was not merely cold and institutional, but funereal.

The most impressive piece of equipment in the room was a metal tank that resembled an old-fashioned iron lung, although it was considerably larger than that. It was painted the same drab gray as the room. Pipes led from it, into the floor, and an electrical cable went straight up to a junction box on the ceiling. Three movable wooden steps provided access to the tank's elevated entrance hatch, which stood open.

Laura went up the steps and peered inside.

Dan knew what she would find: a featureless black interior that was barely illuminated by the meager light that found its way through the hatch; the sound of water stirred by the vibrations transmitted through the steps and into the tank frame; a dampish odor with a hint of salt to it.

'Know what it is?' he asked.

She descended the three steps. 'Sure. A sensory-deprivation chamber.'

'What was he doing with it?'

'You mean, what are its scientific applications?'

Dan nodded.

'Well, you fill it with a few feet of water…. Actually, you use a solution of ten percent magnesium sulfate in water for maximum buoyancy. Heat it to ninety-three degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature at which a floating body is least affected by gravity. Or depending on the nature of the experiment, maybe you heat it to ninety-eight degrees to reduce the differential between body temperature and water temperature. Then the subject—'

'Which is a person — not an animal?'

She looked surprised by the question. Dan Haldane felt woefully undereducated, but Laura didn't disparage him or let any impatience creep into her tone, and he felt at ease again almost immediately.

She said, 'Yes. A person. Not an animal. Anyway, when the water's ready, the subject undresses, enters the chamber, closes the door after himself, and floats in total darkness, in total silence.

'Why?'

'To deprive himself of all sensory stimulation. No sight. No sound. Little or no taste. Minimal olfactory stimulation. No sense of weight or place or time.'

'But why would anyone want to do that?'

'Well, initially, when the first tanks were used, they did it because they wanted to find out what would happen when someone was deprived of nearly all external stimuli.'

'Yeah? And what happened?'

'Not what they expected. No claustrophobia. No paranoia. A brief moment of fear, yes, but then… a not unpleasant temporal and spatial disorientation. The sense of confinement disappeared in a minute or so. Some subjects reported being certain they were not in a small chamber but a huge one, with endless space around them. With no external stimuli to occupy it, the mind turns inward to explore a whole new world of internal stimuli.'

'Hallucinations?'

For a moment, her anxiety faded. Her professional interest in the functioning of the human mind became evident, and Dan could see that, if she had chosen a career in the classroom, she would have proven a natural-born teacher. She clearly took pleasure in explaining, illuminating.

She said, 'Yes, hallucinations, sometimes. But not frightening or threatening hallucinations, nothing like what you'd expect from a drug experience. Intense and extraordinarily vivid sexual fantasies in many cases. And virtually every subject reports a sharpening and clearing of thought processes. Some subjects have solved complex problems in algebra and calculus without even the benefit of paper and pencil, problems that would ordinarily be beyond their abilities. There's even a cult system of psychotherapy that uses deprivation chambers to encourage the patient to concentrate on guided self-exploration.'

He said, 'From your tone, I think maybe you don't approve of that.'

'Well, I don't exactly disapprove,' she said. 'But if you've got a psychologically disturbed individual who already feels adrift, only half in control of himself… the disorientation of a deprivation chamber is almost certain to have negative effects. Some patients need every grip on the physical world, every external stimulus, they can get.' She shrugged. 'But then again, maybe I'm too cautious, old-fashioned. After all, they've been selling these things for use in private homes, must've sold a few thousand over the past few years, and surely a few of those were used by unstable people, yet I haven't heard of anyone going all the way 'round the bend because of it.'

'Must be expensive.'

'A tank? Sure is. Most units in private homes are… new toys for the rich, I guess.'

'Why would anyone buy one for his home?'

'Aside from the hallucinatory period and the eventual clarity of the mental processes, everyone reports being tremendously relaxed and revitalized by a session in a tank. After you spend an hour floating, your brain waves match those of a Zen monk in deep meditation. Call it a lazy man's way to meditate: no studying required, no religious principles to be learned or obeyed, an easy way of packing a week's relaxation into a couple of hours.'

'But your husband wasn't using this just to relax.'

'I doubt it,' she agreed.

'Then what was he after, specifically?'

'I really have no way of knowing.' Anguish returned to her face, her eyes.

Dan said, 'I think this wasn't just his lab, I think it was your daughter's room too. I think she was a virtual prisoner in here. And I think she slept in this tank every night and maybe spent days at a time in it.'

'Days? No. That's not… possible.'

'Why isn't it?'

'The potential for psychological damage, the risks—'

'Maybe your husband didn't care about the risks.'

'But she was his daughter. He loved Melanie. I'll give him that much. He genuinely loved her.'

'We've found a journal in which your husband seems to account for every minute of your daughter's time during the past five and a half years.'

Her eyes narrowed. 'I want to see it.'

'In a minute. I haven't studied it closely yet, but I don't think your daughter was ever out of this house in five and a half years. Not to school. Not to a doctor. Not to a movie or the zoo or anywhere. And even if you say it's not possible, I think, from what I've seen, that she sometimes spent as much as three or four days in the tank without coming out.'

'But food—'

'I don't think she was fed in that time.'

'Water—'