Dean Koontz - The Door To December

'You're an officer of the law,' Boothe said angrily. 'You have a duty to prevent violence wherever you can.'

'Shooting a nine-year-old girl is the commission of violence, not the prevention.'

'But if you don't kill her, she'll kill us,' Boothe said. 'Two deaths instead of one. Kill her, and the net effect is that you save one life.'

'A net balance of one life to my credit, huh? Gee, what an interesting way to think of it. You know, Mr. Boothe, when you get down there in Hell, I'll bet the devil makes you an accountant of souls.'

A sudden all-consuming fury pulled the white-haired publisher's face into a grotesque mask of hatred and impotent rage. He threw his whiskey glass at Dan's head.

Dan ducked, and the fine crystal struck the floor far behind him, shattering on impact.

'You stupid fucking son of a bitch,' Boothe said.

'My, my. Mustn't ever let your friends at the Rotary Club hear you talking like that. Why, they'd be shocked.'

Boothe turned away from him, stood facing the darkness where the books waited silently on their shelves. He was shaking with rage, but he did not speak.

Dan had learned everything he needed to know. He was ready to leave.

* * *

Laura couldn't wake Melanie. She was causing an ever greater disturbance in the theater, angering other patrons, but she couldn't make the child respond with even a murmur or a flutter of her eyes.

Earl had stood up and put his hand on the gun inside his coat.

Laura looked around wildly, waiting for the first sign of the apparition, the explosion of occult force.

But the chill abruptly went away, and the air grew warm again without any supernatural violence.

Whatever had been there a moment ago had now gone.

* * *

Uhlander's gaze had drifted back to the mosaic of stained glass through which the room's only light rose in colorful beams. Though he stared at the scene depicted on the shade, he did not seem to see it; the unfocused nature of his stare was reminiscent of Melanie's haunting detachment. The author was probably seeing his future in that light, although his future was only darkness. In a thin and tremulous voice, he said, 'Lieutenant, listen, please… you don't have to like us… to take pity on us.'

'Pity? You think it would be an appropriate expression of pity for me to blow the brains out of a nine-year-old girl?'

Trembling, Palmer Boothe swung back to him. 'It won't just be our lives you'll be saving. For God's sake, don't you see? She's running amok. She has a taste for blood, and it's not very damned likely that she'll stop with us. She's crazy. You said so yourself. You said we drove her crazy and she's not responsible for what she's done. All right! She's not responsible, but she's out of control, and she's probably getting more powerful all the time, learning more about her psychic abilities every hour, and maybe if somebody doesn't stop her soon, maybe nobody will ever be able to stop her. It's not just Albert and me. How many others may die?'

'No others,' Dan said.

'What?'

'She'll kill the two of you, the last of the conspirators from the gray room, and then… then she'll kill herself.'

When he put it in words, it hit him hard. A sudden, heavy ache bloomed in his chest at the prospect of Melanie taking her own life in despair over what she had done.

'Kill herself?' Boothe said.

'Where'd you get an idea like that?' Uhlander asked.

Succinctly, he told them about Laura's hypnotic-therapy sessions and about the strange things that Melanie had said regarding her own vulnerability. 'When she said It would come after her once it had killed everyone else, we had no idea what the creature might be. Spirit, demon — it seemed impossible that such a thing could exist, but we saw evidence that something strange was loose in the world. Now we know it wasn't a spirit or a demon, and we know that… well, once she's eliminated the two of you, she plans to take her own life, turn her psychic powers upon herself. So you see, the only lives hanging in the balance are yours and hers, and I'm afraid hers is the only one I have any chance of saving.'

Boothe, whose morality was about as admirable as that of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin, who had hired torturers and murderers with a clear conscience, who would clearly have committed any number of murders with his own bare hands if that were the only way he could save his own damned skin, this thoroughly corrupted and corrupting snake was aghast that Dan, an officer of the law, was not only going to let them die but seemed to welcome the idea that they would soon be removed from this world. 'But… but… if she kills us, and you could have stopped her and didn't… then you're just as guilty of our murder as she is.'

Dan stared at him, then nodded. 'Yes. But that doesn't shock me. I've always known I'm like everyone else in that regard. I've always known, given the right circumstances, I have the capacity for cold-blooded murder.'

He turned his back on them.

He walked away from them, toward the library door.

When Dan was halfway to the door, Uhlander said, 'How long do you think we have?'

Dan paused, looked back at them. 'After reading part of your book this morning, I thought I understood at least some of what was going on. So when I left them, I warned Laura to keep Melanie awake and to keep her from slipping into a deeper catatonic state. I didn't want her to come for you until we had a chance to talk. But tonight I don't intend to keep Melanie from going to bed. And when she goes to bed and finally sleeps…'

They were all silent.

The only sound was the faraway gurgle and sizzle of rain.

'So we have a few hours,' Boothe said at last, and he sounded like a different man from the one who had welcomed Dan into the library a short while ago, a much weaker and less impressive man. 'Just a few hours…'

But they didn't even have that much time. As Palmer Boothe's voice faded into a silence composed of terror and self-pity, the air temperature in the library dropped twenty degrees from one second to the next.

Laura hadn't been able to keep Melanie alert.

'No!' Uhlander gasped.

Books exploded off one of the highest library shelves and rained over Boothe and Uhlander.

The two men cried out and threw their arms over their heads.

A heavy chair rose off the floor, eight feet into the air, hung there, spinning around and around, then was thrown all the way across the library, where it struck the French windows. The brittle sounds of breaking glass and splintering mullions was followed by the crash of the chair rebounding from the window frame and falling to the floor.

Melanie was there. The etheric half of her. The astral body or psychogeist.

Dan thought of trying to speak to her and reason with her now, before she killed again, but he knew there was no hope of getting through to her, no more hope than her mother had had in hypnotic-therapy sessions. He could not save Boothe and Uhlander, and he really had no desire to save them. The only life he might be able to save now was Melanie's, for he had thought of something — a plan, a trick — that might stop her from turning her psychic power upon herself in a suicidal response to her self-loathing and horror. It was a shaky plan. Not much chance that he could make it work. But in order even to try, he had to be with the girl's body, with her physical self, when her astral body returned. Which meant he had to get back to Westwood, to the theater, before she was finished in Bel Air, and he didn't have time to waste in a fruitless attempt to dissuade her from destroying Boothe and Uhlander.

Unseen hands swept another shelf clean of books, and the volumes crashed to the floor, all across the room.

Boothe was screaming.