Dean Koontz - The Door To December

Outside, no rain was falling, but the winter day was sunless and somber. The night fog had not lifted. Beyond the motel parking lot, the traffic on the street was barely visible through curtains of gray mist.

Laura glanced at Dan Haldane, who was perched on the edge of one of the beds.

He nodded.

She turned again to Melanie and said, 'Where are you, honey?'

The girl shuddered. 'The dungeon,' she said softly.

'Is that what you call the gray room?'

'The dungeon.'

'Look around the room.'

Eyes closed, in a trance, Melanie turned her head slowly to the left, then to the right, as if studying the other place in which she believed that she was now standing.

'What do you see?' Laura asked.

'The chair.'

'The one with the electric wires and the shock plates?'

'Yes.'

'Do they ever make you sit in that chair?'

The girl shuddered.

'Be calm. Relax. No one can hurt you now, Melanie.'

The girl quieted.

Thus far, the session had been considerably more successful than the one that Laura had conducted the previous day. This time, Melanie answered directly, forthrightly. For the first time since their reunion in the hospital the night before last, Laura knew for sure that her daughter was listening to her, responding to her, and she was excited by this development.

'Do they ever make you sit in that chair?' Laura repeated.

Eyes closed, the girl fisted her small hands, bit her lip.

'Melanie?'

'I hate them.'

'Do they make you sit in the chair?'

'I hate them!'

'Do they make you sit in the chair?'

Tears squeezed out of the girl's eyes, although she tried to hold them back. 'Y-yes Make me… sit… hurts… hurts so bad.'

'And they hook you up to the biofeedback machine beside it?'

'Yes'

'Why?'

'To teach me,' the girl said in a whisper.

'To teach you what?'

She twitched and cried out. 'It hurts! It stings!'

'You aren't in the chair now, Melanie. You're only standing beside it. You aren't being shocked now. It doesn't sting. You're all right now. Do you hear me?'

The agony faded from the child's face.

Laura felt sick, but she had to proceed with the session regardless of how painful it was for Melanie, for on the other side of this pain, beyond these nightmare memories, there were answers, explanations, truth.

'When they make you sit in the chair, when they… hurt you, what are they trying to teach you, Melanie? What are you supposed to learn?'

'Control.'

'Control of what?'

'My thoughts,' the girl said.

'What do they want you to think?'

'Emptiness.'

'What do you mean?'

'Nothingness'

'They want you to keep your mind blank. Is that it?'

'And they don't want me to feel.'

'Feel what?'

'Anything.'

Laura looked at Dan. He was frowning and seemed as perplexed as she was.

To Melanie, she said, 'What else do you see in the gray room.'

'The tank.'

'Do they make you go into the tank?'

'Naked.'

Tremendous emotion was conveyed in the single word 'naked,' more than merely shame and fear, an intense sense of utter helplessness and vulnerability that made Laura's heart ache. She wanted to end the session right then and there, go around the table and hug her daughter, hold the girl tight and close. But if they were to have any hope of saving Melanie, they had to know what she had endured and why; and for the time being, this was the best way they had of discovering what they needed to know.

'Honey, I want you to climb that set of gray steps and go into the tank.'

The girl whimpered and shook her head violently, but she didn't open her eyes or break loose of the trance in which her mother had put her.

'Climb the steps, Melanie.'

'No.'

'You must do as I say.'

'No.'

'Climb the steps.'

'Please…'

The child was frighteningly pale. Tiny beads of sweat had appeared along her hairline. The dark rings around her eyes seemed to grow darker and larger as Laura watched, and it was agonizingly difficult to force the girl to relive her torture.

Difficult but necessary.

'Climb the steps, Melanie.'

An anguished expression distorted the girl's face.

Laura heard Dan Haldane shift uneasily on the edge of the bed where he sat, but she didn't look at him. She couldn't take her eyes off her daughter.

'Open the hatch to the tank, Melanie.'

'I'm… afraid.'

'Don't be afraid. You won't be alone this time. I'll be with you. I won't let anything bad happen.'

'I'm afraid,' Melanie repeated.

Those two words seemed, to Laura, to be an accusation: You couldn't protect me before, Mother, so why should I believe that you can protect me now?

'Open the hatch, Melanie.'

'It's in there,' the girl said shakily.

'What's in there?'

'The way out.'

'The way out of what?'

'The way out of everything.'

'I don't understand.'

'The… way out… of me.'

'What does that mean?'

'The way out of me,' the girl repeated, deeply distressed. Laura decided that she didn't yet know enough to make sense of this twist that the interrogation had taken. If she pursued it, the child's answers would only seem increasingly surreal.

First of all, she had to get Melanie into the tank and find out what happened in there. 'The hatch is in front of you, honey.'

The girl said nothing.

'Do you see it?'

Reluctantly: 'Yes.'

'Open the hatch, Melanie. Stop hesitating. Open it now.'

With a wordless protest that somehow managed to express dread and misery and loathing in a few wretched and meaningless syllables, the child raised her hands and gripped a door that was, in her trance, very real to her, though it could not be seen by Laura or Dan. She pulled on it, and when she had it open, she hugged herself and trembled as though she were in a cold draft. 'I… it… I've opened it.'

'Is this the door, Melanie?'

'It's… the hatch. The tank.'

'But is it also the door to December?'

'No.'

'What is the door to December?'

'The way out.'

'The way out of where?'

'Out… out of… the tank.'

Baffled, Laura took a deep breath. 'Forget about that for now. For now, I just want you to go inside the tank.

Melanie began to cry.

'Go inside, honey.'

'I… I'm s-scared.'

'Don't be afraid.'

'I might…'

'What?'

'If I go inside… I might…'

'You might what?'

'Do something,' the girl said bleakly.

'What might you do?'

'Something…'

'Tell me.'

'Terrible,' Melanie said in a voice so soft that it was almost inaudible.

Not sure that she understood, Laura said, 'You think something terrible is going to happen to you?'

Softer: 'No.'

'Well, then—'

'Yes.'

'Which is it?'

Softer still: 'No… yes…'

'Honey?'

Silence.

The lines in the child's face were no longer entirely lines of fear. Another emotion shared her features, and it might have been despair.

Laura said, 'All right. Don't be afraid. Be calm. Relax. I'm right here with you. You've got to go into the tank. You've got to go in, but you'll be all right.'

The tension drained out of Melanie, and she sagged in her chair. Her face remained grim. Worse than grim. Her eyes were impossibly sunken; they appeared to be in the process of caving into her skull, and it was not difficult to imagine that within minutes she would be left with two empty sockets. Her face was so white that it might have been a mask carved out of soap, and her lips were nearly as bloodless as her skin. She possessed an extremely fragile quality — as if she were not composed of flesh and blood and bone, but as if she were a construct of the thinnest tissue and the lightest powder — as if she would dissolve and blow away if someone spoke too loudly or waved a hand in her direction.