Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

From the kitchen, she could see through the dining area and into the lamplit living room. Her mother wasn't in view, but that didn't mean she wasn't present. By this hour, old Sinsemilla would have been dragged so low by her demons and her drugs that she was less likely to be found in an armchair than hiding behind a sofa or curled in die fetal position on the floor of a closet.

As might be expected in an ancient and fully furnished mobile home available for by-the-week rental, the decor didn't rank with that in Windsor Castle. Acoustic ceiling tiles crawled with water stains from a long-ago leak, all vaguely resembling large insects. Sunlight had bleached the drapes into shades no doubt familiar to chronic depressives from their dreams; the rotting fabric sagged in greasy folds, reeking of years of cigarette smoke. Scraped, gouged, stained, patched furniture stood on an orange shag carpet that could no longer manage to be shaggy: The knotted nap was flat, all springiness crushed out of it, as if by the weight of all the hopes and dreams that people had allowed to die here over the years.

Sinsemilla wasn't in the living room.

The closet just inside the front door provided a perfect haven from the goblins that were sometimes unleashed by a double dose of blotter acid, peyote buttons, or angel dust. If Sinsemilla had taken refuge here, imaginary goblins bad eaten her as neatly as a duchess might eat pudding with a spoon. Currently the closet contained only a cluster of unused wire coat hangers that jangled in the influx of air when Leilani pulled open the door.

She hated searching for her mother like this. She never knew in what condition Sinsemilla would be found.

Sometimes dear Mater came complete with a mess to clean up. Leilani could handle messes. She didn't want to make a life's work out of swabbing up puke and urine, but she could do what needed to be done without adding two half-used pieces of apple pie to the mix.

The blood was worse. There were never oceans of it; but a little blood can appear to be a lot before you've assessed the situation.

Old Sinsemilla would never intentionally kill herself. She ate no red meat, restricted her smoking solely to dope, drank ten glasses of bottled water a day to cleanse herself of toxins, took twenty-seven tablets and capsules of vitamin supplements, and spent a lot of time worrying about global warming. She had been alive for thirty-six years, she said, and she intended to hang around for fifty more or until human pollution and the sheer weight of human population caused Earth's axis to shift violently and wipe out ninety-nine percent of all life on the planet, whichever came first.

Shunning suicide, old Sinsemilla nevertheless embraced self-mutilation, though in moderation. She worked on herself no more than once a month. She always sterilized the scalpel with a candle flame and her skin with alcohol, and she made each cut only after much judicious consideration.

Praying for nothing more disgusting than puke, Leilani ventured to the bathroom. This cramped, mildew-scented space was deserted and no worse of a mess than it had been when they moved in here.

A short hall, lined with imitation wood paneling, featured three doors. Two bedrooms and a closet.

In the closet: no Mom, no puke, no blood, no hidden passageway leading to a magical kingdom where everyone was beautiful and rich and happy. Leilani didn't actually search for the passageway, but based on past experience, she made the logical assumption that it wasn't here; as a much younger girl, she had often expected to find a secret door to fantastic other lands, but she had been routinely disappointed, so she had decided that if any such door existed, it would have to find her. Besides, if this closet were the equivalent of a bus station between California and a glorious domain of fun-loving wizards, surely there would be crumpled wrappers from weird and unknown brands of candy discarded by traveling trolls or at least a pile of elf droppings, but the closet held nothing more exotic than one dead cockroach.

Two doors remained, both closed. On the right lay the small bedroom assigned to Leilani. Directly ahead was the room that her mother shared with Preston.

Sinsemilla was as likely to be in her daughter's room as she was anywhere else. She had no respect for other people's personal space and never demanded respect for her own, perhaps because with drugs she created a vast wilderness in her mind, where she enjoyed blissful solitude whenever she required it.

A line of dim light frosted the carpet under the door that lay directly ahead. No light, however, was visible under the door to the right.

This didn't mean anything, either. Sinsemilla liked to sit alone in the dark, sometimes trying to communicate with the spirit world, sometimes just talking to herself.

Leilani listened intently. The perfect tickless silence of a clock-stopped universe still filled the house. Bleeding, of course, is a quiet process.

In spite of a free-spirited tendency to be unrestrained in all things, Sinsemilla had thus far restricted her artistic scalpel work to her left arm. A six-inch-long, two-inch-wide snowflake pattern of carefully connected scars, as intricate as lacework, decorated or disfigured her forearm, depending on your taste in these matters. The smooth, almost shiny, scar tissue glowed whiter than the surrounding skin, an impressive tone-on-tone design, although the contrast became more pronounced when she tanned.

Leave the house. Sleep in the yard. Let Dr. Doom deal with the mess if there is one.

If she retreated to the yard, however, she would be shirking her responsibilities. Which was exactly what old Sinsemilla would do in a similar situation. In any predicament whatsoever, if Leilani wondered which among many courses of action was the right one and the wisest, she ultimately made her decision based on the same guiding principle: Do the opposite of what Sinsemilla would do, and there is a better chance that you'll come through all right, as well as an immeasurably higher likelihood that you'll be able to look in the mirror again without cringing.

Leilani opened the door to her room and switched on the light. Her bed was as neatly made as the ratty spread would allow, just as she'd left it. Her few personal items hadn't been disturbed. The Sinsemilla circus had not played an engagement here.

One door remained.

Her palms were damp. She blotted them on her T-shirt.

She remembered an old short story that she'd read, "The Lady or the Tiger," in which a man was forced to choose between two doors, with deadly consequences if he opened the wrong one. Behind this door waited neither a lady nor a tiger, but an altogether unique specimen. Leilani would have preferred the tiger.

Not out of morbid interest but with some degree of alarm, she'd researched self-mutilation soon after her mother became interested in it. According to psychologists, most self-mutilators were teenage girls and young women in their twenties. Sinsemilla was too old for this game. Self-mutilators frequently suffered from low self-esteem, even self-loathing. By contrast, Sinsemilla seemed to like herself enormously, most of the time, or at least when medicated, which was in fact most of the time. Of course, you had to suppose that she had originally gotten into heavy drugs not merely because "they taste so good," as she put it, but because of a self-destructive impulse.

Leilani's palms were still damp. She blotted them again. In spite of the August heat, her hands were cold. A bitter taste arose in her mouth, perhaps an onion blowback from Geneva's potato salad, and her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.

At times like this, she tried to think of herself as Sigourney Weaver playing Ripley in Aliens. Your hands were damp, sure, and your hands were cold, all right, and your mouth was dry, but nevertheless you had to stiffen your spine, work up some spit, open the damn door, go in there where the beast was, and you had to do what needed to he done.