Dean Koontz - The Door To December

While Earl called his office to report their move from the house in Sherman Oaks, Laura stood at the living-room window, holding the coffee mug in both hands, breathing in the fragrant vapors. As she stared out at the lakes of shadow, at the sprays and pools of green and blue light, the first fat droplets of rain began to snap against the palm fronds.

Somewhere in the night, something was stalking Melanie, something beyond human understanding, an invulnerable creature that left its victims looking as if they had gone through half the cycle in a trash compactor before someone had pushed the emergency-stop button. Laura's university degrees, her doctorate in psychology, might make it possible for her to eventually bring Melanie out of quasi-autistic withdrawal, but nothing taught and nothing learned in any university could help her deal with It. Was it demon, spirit, psychic force? Those things did not exist. Right? Did not exist. Yet… what had Dylan and Hoffritz unleashed? And why?

Dylan had believed in the supernatural. Periodically, he had been obsessed with one aspect of the occult or another, and during those periods he had been more intense and nervous and argumentative than usual. In fact, when thus obsessed, he reminded Laura of her mother because his adamant belief in — and constant preaching about — the reality of the occult was akin to the religious fanaticism and superstitious mania that had made Beatrice such a terror; it was this, as much as anything, that had driven Laura to divorce, for she could not abide anything that reminded her of her fear-ridden childhood.

Now, she tried to remember specific enthusiasms that had gripped Dylan, theories that had obsessed him. She strove to recall something that might explain what was happening now, but she could not remember anything important, because she had always refused to listen to him when he had spoken of those things that had seemed, to her, like the sheerest flights of fancy — or madness.

In reaction to her mother's irrationality and gullibility, Laura had built a life strictly on logic and reason, trusting in only those things that she could see, hear, touch, smell, and feel. She did not believe that a cracked mirror meant seven years of bad luck, and she did not throw spilled salt over her shoulder. Given the choice, she would always walk under a ladder rather than around it, merely to prove that there was nothing of her mother in her. She didn't believe in devils, demons, possession, and exorcism. In her heart, she felt there was a God, but she didn't attend church or identify with any particular religion. She didn't read ghost stories, had no interest in movies about vampires and werewolves. She didn't believe in psychics, premonitions, clairvoyant visions.

She was profoundly unprepared for the events of the past twenty-four hours.

While logic and reason made the most solid foundation on which to construct a life, she realized that the mortar ought to be mixed with a sense of wonder, with a respect for the unknown, or at least leavened with open-mindedness. Otherwise, it would be brittle mortar that would dry, crack, and flake away. Her mother's extreme reliance on religion and superstition was undoubtedly sick. But perhaps it wasn't wise to have rushed to the other extreme of the philosophical spectrum. The universe seemed considerably more complicated than it had been before.

Something was out there.

Something she couldn't understand.

And it wanted Melanie.

But even as she stood by the window and studied the rainy night with a new respect for things mysterious and uncanny, her mind sought more rational explanations, tangible villains of flesh and blood. She heard Earl talking on the telephone with someone at his office, and suddenly it occurred to her that no one except California Paladin knew where she and her daughter were. For a terrible moment, she felt that she had done something very wrong, very stupid, in allowing herself to be spirited away from the watchful eyes of the FBI, from contact with friends and neighbors and the police. Melanie had not been targeted solely by the unseen It of which they had been warned, but by real people too, people like that hired killer who had been found in the hospital parking lot. And what if those people had contacts inside California Paladin? What if Earl himself was the executioner?

Stop!

She took a deep breath. Another.

She was standing on a slope of slippery emotions, sliding toward hysteria. For Melanie's sake, if not her own, she had to maintain control of herself.

Dan stepped out of Regine's house and slammed the door behind him, but he didn't head down the walk. He waited, listening at the door, and his suspicion was confirmed when he heard a man's voice: She hadn't been alone.

The man was furious. He shouted, and she called him Eddie and responded in a meek and wheedling voice. The flat, hard, unmistakable sound of a slap was followed by her cry — a bleat composed partly of pain, partly of fear, but also partly of pleasure and excitement.

Around Dan, the wind huffed noisily and the branches of the trees were scraped against one another, and it wasn't possible to hear exactly what was being said in the house. He picked up enough words to know that Eddie was angry because Regine had revealed too much. In a miserable, servile voice, Regine tried to explain that she'd had no choice but to tell Dan what she knew; Dan hadn't asked for answers, he had demanded answers — and, more important, he had demanded in a way that pushed all her buttons. She was an obedient creature who found meaning, purpose, and joy only in doing what she was told to do. Eddie and his friends liked her that way, she said, wanted her that way, she said, and it wasn't possible for her to be that way with them and not that way with other people. 'Don't you understand, Eddie? Don't you understand?' He might have understood, but her explanation did nothing to ameliorate his fury. He slapped her again, again, and her tortured but dismayingly eager cry did not bear contemplation.

Dan moved away from the door, along the front of the house, to the first window. He wanted to get a look at Eddie. Through a gap in the drapes, he saw a portion of the living room and a man of about forty-five. The guy had red hair, a mustache, and doughy features. He was dressed in black slacks, white shirt, gray sweater-vest, and bow tie. His face was that of an aging, spoiled child. He had an effete quality, and he moved with a bantam-rooster strut that wasn't natural to him, as if he thought that authority must always be expressed by a puffing of the chest, a rolling of the shoulders, and a cocky attitude. In spite of his posturing, he looked weak and ineffectual, like a wimpy high-school English teacher who had trouble controlling his students. He was not at all the kind of man who would slap a woman around; very likely, he would not have been slapping Regine if she'd been any other woman than she was, for another woman might have slapped him back.

More than anything else, Eddie was distressed that Regine had told Dan about John Wilkes Enterprises, the company that was her keeper, that owned the house in which she lived, and that sent her a check each month. Regine was on her knees before him, head bowed, like a vassal humbling herself before her feudal lord, and he loomed over her, shifting from foot to foot, gesticulating with nervous energy, repeatedly castigating her for having such a loose tongue.

John Wilkes Enterprises.

Dan knew he had been given another key to another lock in this many-doored mystery.

He turned away from the house and returned to the street where he had parked the car. He opened the trunk and plucked one of the seven Albert Uhlander books from the carton that he had carried out of Ned Rink's house earlier in the evening. Regine had said that a man named Albert had visited her once and, unlike the others who used her, had never visited her again; she had said that he'd had a bony face with sharp features, hawklike. Now, in the ghostly radiance of a mercury-vapor streetlight and in the even more eldritch glow of the bulb in the car's trunk, Dan studied the photograph of the author on the book jacket. Uhlander's face was long, narrow, almost cadaverous, with prominent brow, cheekbones, and jawline; his eyes were cold and predatory, at least in the context of his hooked and beakish nose, and he did indeed have the aspect of a hawk or some other ferocious bird of prey.