The Door To December

PART THREE THE HUNTED

WEDNESDAY, 8:00 P.M. — THURSDAY, 6:00 A.M.

Still sitting at Joseph Scaldone's desk in the office-storeroom behind the shop on Ventura Boulevard, Dan Haldane looked through the diskette storage wheel that stood beside the IBM computer. He read the labels on the floppy disks and saw that most held nothing of interest for him; however, one of them was marked CUSTOMER MAILING LIST, and that one seemed worth examining.

He switched on the computer, studied the menu of options, loaded the proper software, and brought up the mailing list. It appeared in white letters on a blue screen, divided into twenty-six documents, one for each letter of the alphabet.

He summoned the M document and scrolled slowly through it, searching for Dylan McCaffrey. He found the name and address of the house in Studio City.

He called up the H document and located Willy Hoffritz. In the C file, he found Ernest Andrew Cooper, the millionaire businessman whose mangled body had been in that Studio City house last night, with McCaffrey and Hoffritz. Dan called up the R file. Ned Rink was there.

He had discovered a cord that tied all four victims together: an interest in the occult and, more specifically, patronage of the late Joseph Scaldone's bizarre little shop. He checked under U. There was an address in Ojai and a telephone number for Albert Uhlander, the author of those quirky volumes about the occult, which someone had attempted to remove from Ned Rink's house and which now were safely stored in the trunk of the department sedan that Dan was using.

Who else?

He pondered that question, then called up the S file and searched for Regine Savannah. She was the young woman who had been under Hoffritz's total control and whose beating had resulted in the psychologist's removal from the UCLA faculty four years ago. She wasn't one of Scaldone's customers.

The G file. Just in case. But he could find no listing for Irmatrude Gelkenshettle.

He hadn't actually expected to find her there. He was slightly ashamed of himself for even checking on it. But it was the nature of a homicide detective to trust no one.

Calling up the O file, he searched for Mary Katherine O'Hara of Burbank, the secretary of Freedom Now, the organization which Cooper and Hoffritz served as president and treasurer, respectively.

Apparently, Mary O'Hara didn't share her fellow officers' enthusiasm for occult literature and paraphernalia.

Dan couldn't think of any more names to look for, but there would most likely be others of interest when he read through the entire mailing list. He ordered a printout.

The laser printer produced the first page in seconds. Dan snatched the sheet of paper from the tray and read it while the machine continued to print. There were twenty names and addresses, two columns of ten each. He didn't recognize anybody in that first section of the list.

He picked up the second page, and toward the bottom of the second column, he saw a name that was not merely familiar but startling. Palmer Boothe.

Owner of the Los Angeles Journal, heir to a huge fortune, but also one of the shrewdest businessmen in the country, Palmer Boothe had vastly increased the wealth that he had inherited. He kept his hands in not only the newspaper and magazine business but also in real estate, banking, motionpicture production, transportation, a variety of high-technology industries, broadcasting, agriculture, thoroughbred horse breeding, and probably anything else that made money. He was widely and well regarded, a political power broker, a philanthropist who annually earned the gratitude of a score of charities, a man known for his hardheaded pragmatism.

Yeah? How did hardheaded pragmatism coexist with a belief in the occult? Why would a canny businessman, with an appreciation for the no-nonsense rules and methods and laws of capitalism, patronize a strange place like the Sign of the Pentagram?

Curious.

Of course there was virtually no chance whatsoever that Palmer Boothe was involved with men like McCaffrey, Hoffritz, and Rink. The appearance of his name on Scaldone's mailing list did not link him to the McCaffrey case. Not everyone who bought from the Sign of the Pentagram was involved in that conspiracy.

Nevertheless, Dan opened Scaldone's personal address book — the item that had precipitated the confrontation with Mondale — and paged to the B listings, to see if Palmer Boothe was more than merely one of Scaldone's customers. The businessman's name wasn't there. Which probably meant that his sole contact with Joseph Scaldone was as an occasional purchaser of occult books and other items.

Dan reached to an inside coat pocket and withdrew Dylan McCaffrey's address book. Boothe's name wasn't in that one, either.

Dead end.

He had known that it would be.

As an afterthought, he checked McCaffrey's book for Albert Uhlander. The author was there: the same address and phone number in Ojai.

He looked in Scaldone's book again. Uhlander was also listed there. The writer was evidently more than just another customer of the Sign of the Pentagram. He was an integral part of whatever project McCaffrey and Hoffritz had been engaged upon.

They sure had a jolly little group. Dan wondered what they did when they got together. Compare favorite brands of bat shit? Whip up tasty dishes featuring snake eyes? Discuss megalomaniacal schemes to brainwash everyone and rule the world?

Torture little girls?

The printer spewed out the fifteenth and final page long before Dan finished scanning the first fourteen. He collected them, stapled them together, folded the sheets, and put them in his pocket. Nearly three hundred names appeared on the mailing list, and he wanted to go over them later, when he was alone at home, with a beer, and could concentrate better.

He located an empty stationery box and filled it with Dylan McCaffrey's address book, Scaldone's smaller address book, and several other items. He carried the box out of the office, through the store, where the coroner's men were bagging Joseph Scaldone's hideously battered corpse, and he went outside.

The crowd of curiosity seekers had grown smaller, maybe because the night was colder. A few reporters still lingered in the vicinity of the occult shop, standing with shoulders drawn up, hands in their pockets, shivering. A heat-leeching wind alternately hissed and howled along Ventura Boulevard, sucking the warmth out of the city and everyone in it. The air was heavy, moist. The rains would return before morning.

Nolan Swayze, the youngest of the uniformed officers on duty in front of the Sign of the Pentagram, accepted the box when Dan handed it to him.

'Nolan, I want you to take this back to East Valley and give it to clerical. There're two address books among this stuff. I want the contents of both books transcribed, and all the detectives on the special task force should have a copy of the transcriptions in their information packets by tomorrow morning.'

'Can do,' Swayze said.

'There's also a diskette. I want the contents printed out with copies to everyone. There's an appointments calendar in there too.'

'Copies to everyone?'

'You catch on fast.'

Swayze nodded. 'I intend to be chief someday.'

'Good for you.'

'Make my mother proud.'

'If that's your goal, it's probably wiser to stay a patrolman. There's also a sheaf of invoices here—'

'You want the information transcribed into a less cumbersome format.'

'Right,' Dan said.

'With copies to everyone.'

'Maybe you could even be mayor.'

'I've already got my campaign slogan. "Let's Rebuild L.A."'

'Why not? It's worked for every other candidate for thirty years.'

'This ledger—?'

'It's a checkbook,' Dan said.

'You want the information transcribed from the stubs, with copies to everyone. Maybe I could even be governor.'

'No, you wouldn't like the job.'

'Why not?'

'You'd have to live in Sacramento.'

'Hey, that's right. I prefer civilization.'

* * *

Dinner was late because they had to clean up the kitchen. The water for the spaghetti had to be poured out; bits of the demolished radio were floating in it. Laura scrubbed the pot, refilled it, and put it back on the stove to boil.

By the time they sat down to eat, she wasn't hungry anymore. She kept thinking of the radio, which had been infused with a strange and demonic life of its own, and that memory spoiled her appetite. The air was rich with the mouthwatering aromas of garlic and tomato sauce and Parmesan cheese, but there was also an underlying hint of scorched plastic and hot metal that seemed (this was crazy, but true, God help her) like the olfactory trace of an evil spiritual presence.

Earl Benton ate more than she did, but not much. He didn't talk much either. He stared at his plate even when he took a long pause between bites, and the only time he looked up was when he glanced, occasionally, toward that end of the kitchen counter where the Sony had been. His usual efficient, no-nonsense manner wasn't in evidence now; his eyes had a faraway look.

Melanie's eyes were still focused on a far place too, but the girl ate more than either Laura or Earl Benton. Sometimes she chewed slowly and absentmindedly, and sometimes she gobbled up four or five bites in rapid succession, with wolflike hunger. Now and then she altogether forgot that she was eating, and she had to be reminded.

Feeding her daughter, repeatedly wiping spaghetti sauce off the child's chin, Laura could not avoid thinking about her own blighted childhood. Her mother, Beatrice, had been a religious zealot who had permitted no singing or dancing or reading of books other than the Bible and certain religious tracts. A recluse with a persecution complex, Beatrice had labored hard to ensure that Laura would remain shy, withdrawn, and frightened of the world; if Laura had turned out like Melanie was now, Beatrice no doubt would have been delighted. She would have interpreted schizophrenic catatonia as a rejection of the evil world of the flesh, would have seen it as a deep communion with God. Beatrice would not only have been unable but unwilling to help Laura back into the real world.

But I can help you, honey, Laura thought as she wiped a smear of sauce off her daughter's chin. I am able and willing to help you find your way back, Melanie, if only you'll reach out to me, if only you'll let me help.

Melanie's head dropped. Her eyes closed.

Laura twisted more spaghetti onto the fork and put it to the girl's lips, but the child seemed to have slipped from apathy into some deeper level, perhaps even sleep.

'Come on, Melanie, have another bite. You've got to gain some weight, honey.'

Something clicked loudly.

Earl Benton looked up from his plate. 'What was that?'

Before Laura could respond, the back door blew open with shocking force. The security chain ripped out of the doorjamb, and wood cracked with a hard splintering sound.

The first click had been the dead-bolt lock snapping open. All by itself.

Earl had jumped to his feet, knocking over his chair.

From the patio behind the house, out of the darkness and wind, something came through the door.

* * *

At 9:15, after talking to the owner of the shop next door to the Sign of the Pentagram and learning nothing of interest, Dan stopped at a McDonald's for dinner. He bought two cheeseburgers, a large order of fries, and a diet cola, and he ate in the car while he used the unmarked sedan's datalink to try to locate Regine Savannah.

The video display terminal was in the dashboard, mounted at a slant, facing up, so he didn't have to bend over to read it. The programmer's keyboard nearly filled the console between the seats. All LAPD patrol cars and half the unmarked sedans had been fitted with new computer terminals over the past two years. The mobile VDT was linked by microwave transmissions to the underground, high-security, bombproof police communications command center, which in turn had access, via modem, to a variety of government and private-industry data banks.

Taking a bite of a cheeseburger, Dan started the sedan's engine, switched on the VDT, punched in his personal code, and accessed the telephone-company records. He requested a number for Regine Savannah at any address in the Greater Los Angeles area.

In a few seconds, glowing green letters appeared on the screen:

NO LISTING:

SAVANNAH, REGINE

NO LISTING:

SAVANNAH, R.

He typed in a request for any unlisted numbers being billed to an R. or Regine Savannah, but that was a dead end too. He ate a few french fries.

The screen glowed softly, patiently.

He accessed the Department of Motor Vehicles' license files and requested a search for Regine Savannah. That, too, was negative.

As he mulled over another approach, he finished his first cheeseburger and watched the traffic passing on the windswept street. Then he tapped into the DMV files again and requested a search for a driver's license issued to anyone whose first name was Regine and whose middle name was Savannah. Perhaps she had been married and had not abandoned her maiden name altogether.

Pay dirt. The screen flashed up the answer.

REGINE SAVANNAH HOFFRITZ

Dan stared in disbelief. Hoffritz?

Marge Gelkenshettle hadn't said anything about this. Had the girl actually married the man who had beaten her senseless and put her in the hospital?

No. As far as he knew, Wilhelm Hoffritz had been unmarried. Dan hadn't been to Hoffritz's house yet, but he had read over the available background information, which contained no reference to a wife or family. Others had tracked down the next of kin: a sister who was flying in from somewhere — Detroit or Chicago, someplace like that — to handle the funeral arrangements.

Marge Gelkenshettle would have told him if Regine and Hoffritz had married. Unless she didn't know about it. According to the DMV files, Regine Savannah Hoffritz was female, with black hair and brown eyes. She was five-six, one hundred and twenty-five pounds. She had been born on July 3, 1971. That was about the right age for the woman about whom Marge had spoken. The address on her driver's license was in Hollywood, in the hills, and Dan jotted it down in his notebook.

Wilhelm Hoffritz had lived in Westwood. If he had been married to Regine Savannah, why would they have kept two houses?

Divorce. That was a possibility.

However, even if it had ended in divorce, the very fact of the marriage was nonetheless bizarre. What kind of life could it have been for her, married to a vicious sadist who had brainwashed her, who could completely control her, and who had once beaten her so severely that she had wound up in the hospital? If Hoffritz had savagely abused Regine when she was a student of his — at a time when he had his entire career to lose by indulging in such perverse urges — then, how much worse might he have treated her when she was his wife, when they were alone in the privacy and sanctity of their own home?

Thinking about that gave Dan the creeps.

* * *

Earl Benton had his gun in his hand, but what came into the kitchen from the darkness outside wasn't something that he could blow away with a few well-placed rounds from his.38. With a resounding crash, the door was thrown against the wall, and a cold whirlwind surged into the kitchen, a wind like a living beast, hissing and growling, sniffing and capering. And if the substance of the beast was wind, then its coat was made of flowers, for the air was suddenly filled with flowers, yellow and red and white roses, stalky impatiens of every hue, scores of blossoms from the garden behind the house, some with stems attached and some without, some that had been snapped off and some that had been torn out by the roots. The wind-beast shook itself; its coat of flowers flapped and, as if shedding loose hairs, threw off torn leaves, bright petals, crushed stems, clumps of moist earth that had been adhering to the roots. The calendar leaped off the wall and darted halfway around the room on wings of paper before settling to the floor. With a soft rustle not unlike the flutter of feathers, the curtains flew up from the windows and fought to free themselves from the anchoring rods, eager to join this demonic dance of the inanimate. Dirt spattered over Earl, and a rose struck his face; he was aware of a thorn lightly nicking his throat as the flower rebounded from him, and he raised one arm to protect himself. He saw Laura McCaffrey shielding her daughter, and he felt helpless and stupid in the face of this amorphous threat.

The door slammed shut as abruptly as it had been forced open. But the churning column of flowers continued to spin, as if this wind was not part of that greater wind which scoured the night outside but was, instead, a self-sustaining offspring. That was impossible, of course. Crazy. But real. The whirling turbulence whined, hissed, spat out more leaves and blossoms and broken stems, shook off more dirt and buds and bright petals. In its many-windowed, ragtag coat of roiling vegetation, the wind-creature stopped just inside the door (though its breath could be felt in every corner) and remained there, as if watching them, as if deciding what it would do next — and then it simply expired. The wind didn't die slowly; it stopped all at once. The remaining flowers, which it hadn't yet cast off, dropped to the kitchen tiles in a heap, with a soft thump and rustle and whoosh. Then silence, stillness.

* * *

In the unmarked police sedan in the McDonald's parking lot, Dan terminated the link with the DMV computer and accessed the telephone-company data banks once more. He got a number and address for Regine Hoffritz. It was the same address the DMV had provided.

He glanced at his watch: 9:32. He had been working with the VDT for about ten minutes. In the bad old days, before the advent of the mobile computer, he would have wasted at least two hours gathering this information. He switched off the screen, and a deeper darkness crept into the car.

As he finished his second cheeseburger and sipped his cola, he thought about the rapidly changing world in which he lived. A new world, a science-fictional society, was growing up around him with disconcerting speed and vigor. It was both exhilarating and frightening to be alive in these times. Mankind had acquired the ability to reach the stars, to take a giant leap off this world and spread out through the universe, but the species had also acquired the ability to destroy itself before the inevitable emigration could begin. New technology — like the computer — freed men and women from all kinds of drudgery, saved them vast amounts of time. And yet… And yet the time saved did not seem to mean additional leisure or greater opportunities for meditation and reflection. Instead, with each new wave of technology, the pace of life increased; there was more to do, more choices to make, more things to experience, and people eagerly seized upon those experiences and filled the hours that had only moments ago become empty. Each year life seemed to be flitting past with far greater speed than the year before, as if God had cranked up the control knob on the flow of time. But that wasn't right, either, because to many people, even the concept of God seemed dated in an age in which the universe was being forced to let go of its mysteries on a daily basis. Science, technology, and change were the only gods now, the new Trinity; and while they were not consciously cruel and judgmental, as some of the old gods had been, they were too coldly indifferent to offer any comfort to the sick, the lonely, and the lost.

How could a shop like the Sign of the Pentagram flourish in a world of computers, miracle drugs, and spaceships? Who could turn to the occult, seeking answers, when physicists and biochemists and geneticists were providing more answers, day by day, than all the Ouija boards and seances and spiritualists since the dawn of history? Why would men of science, like Dylan McCaffrey and Wilhelm Hoffritz, associate with a purveyor of bat shit and bunkum?

Well, clearly, they hadn't believed it was all bunkum. Some aspect of the occult, some paranormal phenomena, must have been of interest to McCaffrey and Hoffritz and must have seemed, to them, to have a bearing or an application in their own research. Somehow, they had wanted to join science and magic. But how? And why?

As he finished his diet cola, Dan remembered a fragment of rhyme:

We'll plunge into darkness,

into the hands of harm,

when Science and the Devil

go walking arm in arm.

He couldn't recall where he had heard it, but he thought it was part of a song, an old rock-'n'-roll number perhaps, from the days when he had regularly listened to rock. He tried hard to remember, almost had it, thought maybe it was from a protest song about nuclear war and destruction, but he couldn't quite seize the memory.

Science and the Devil, walking arm in arm.

It was a naive image, even simpleminded. The song had probably been nothing but propaganda for the New Luddites who yearned to dismantle civilization and go back to living in tents or caves. Dan had no sympathy for that point of view. He knew that tents were drafty and damp. But for some reason the image of 'Science and the Devil, walking arm in arm, had a powerful effect on him, and a chill spread through his bones.

Suddenly he was no longer in the mood to visit Regine Savannah Hoffritz. He'd put in a long day. Time to go home. His forehead hurt where he'd been hit, and a score of bruises throbbed all over his body. His joints felt as if they were on fire. His eyes were burning, watering, itching. He needed a beer or two — and ten hours of sleep.

But he still had work to do.

* * *

Laura looked around in shock and disbelief.

Dirt, flowers, leaves, and other debris were scattered across the kitchen table and through the uneaten portions of their dinners. Battered roses littered the floor and the counters. Gnarled, broken bunches of red and purple impatiens bristled out of the sink. One white rose hung through the handle of the refrigerator door, and bits of greenery and hundreds of detached petals were stuck to the curtains, the walls, and the doors of the cabinets. On the floor, a mound of limp, ragged greenery and wind-burned blossoms marked the spot where the whirlwind had died.

'Let's get out of here,' Earl said, the gun still in his hand.

'But this mess,' Laura began.

'Later,' he said, going to Melanie, pulling the somnolent child up from her chair.

Dazed, Laura said, 'But I've got to clean up—'

'Come on, come on,' Earl said impatiently. His ruddy, country-boy complexion had vanished. He was now pallid and waxy. 'Into the living room.'

She hesitated, surveying the tangled debris.

'Come on,' Earl said, 'before something worse comes through that door!'

Regine Savannah Hoffritz lived on one of the less expensive streets in the Hollywood hills. Her house was a prime example of the eclectic-anachronistic-madcap architecture which was actually rare in California but which chauvinistic New Yorkers pointed to as an example of typical West Coast tastelessness. Judging by its use of brick and exposed exterior wall beams, Dan supposed that the house was intended to be English Tudor, though there were elaborate carved Victorian eaves, American colonial shutters — and big brass carriage lamps, of no discernible period or style, flanking the front door and the garage. The two pilasters framing the entrance to the walk were stucco with Mexican-tile trim, bearing heavy wrought-iron lamps utterly different from — yet no nearer the Tudor ideal than — the brass fixtures employed elsewhere.

A black Porsche was parked in the driveway. In the ghostly white radiance of the various and clashing lamps, the curvature and sheen of the car's long hood was reminiscent of a beetle's carapace.

Dan rang the doorbell, withdrew his police ID, waited with his shoulders hunched in the chilly wind, and then rang the bell again.

When the door finally opened, it was on a security chain. Half of a lovely face peered out at him: lustrous black hair, porcelain skin, one large and clear brown eye, half a precisely sculpted nose in which the one visible nostril was as delicately formed as if it had been made from blown glass, and one-half of a ripe and alluring mouth.

She said, 'Yes?'

Her voice was soft, breathy. Although it might have been her God-given voice, completely unaffected, it nevertheless sounded phony, calculated.

Dan said, 'Regine Hoffritz?'

'Yes.'

'Lieutenant Haldane. Police. I'd like to talk with you. About your husband.'

She squinted at his identification. 'What husband?'

He heard another quality in her voice: a pliancy, a meekness, a tremulous and yielding weakness. She seemed to be waiting only for a command that would reduce her to unquestioning obedience.

He didn't think her tone had anything to do with his being a cop. He suspected that she was always like this, with everyone. Or, rather, she had always been like this since Willy Hoffritz had changed her.

'Your husband,' he said. 'Wilhelm Hoffritz.'

'Oh. Just a minute.'

She closed the door, and it stayed closed for ten seconds, twenty, half a minute, longer. Dan was just about to ring the bell again when he heard the security chain being disengaged.

The door opened. She stepped back, and Dan entered past three pieces of luggage that stood to one side. In the living room, he sat in an armchair, and she chose the rust-brown sofa. Her posture and manner were demure, yet her primary effect was powerfully seductive.

Although she was a striking woman, something about her was not quite right. Her considerable femininity seemed studied, exaggerated. Her hair was so perfectly coiffed and her makeup was so exactingly and faultlessly applied that she looked as if she were about to step before the cameras to film a Revlon commercial. She wore a floor-length, cream-colored silk robe cinched tightly at the waist to emphasize her full breasts, flat belly, and flaring hips. The robe was excessively frilly as well, with silk ruffles up the lapels, at the collar and cuffs and hem. At her tender throat she wore a gold mesh dog collar; it was one of those close-fitting necklaces that had been popular years ago. These days, among the general population, where such jewelry had no significance beyond mere decoration, dog collars could be seen only occasionally, though among sadomasochistic couples, such items remained in demand, because they were seen as a symbol of sexual subservience. And though Dan had met Regine only a minute ago, he knew that she wore her collar with that submissive and masochistic intent, for a crushed and obedient spirit was evident in the way she averted her face, in the graceful and yet humbled way she moved (as if anticipating and perversely welcoming a blow, a slap, a cruel pinch), and in her avoidance of eye contact.

She waited for him to begin.

For a moment he said nothing, listened to the house. Her delay in removing the security chain from the door led him to suspect that she was not alone. She had hurriedly consulted with someone and had obtained permission before letting Dan in. But the rest of the house was quiet and apparently deserted.

Half a dozen photographs were arranged on the coffee table, and all were of Willy Hoffritz. Or at least the three facing Dan were of Hoffritz, and he imagined that the others were too. It was the same unremarkable face, the same wideset eyes, the same slightly plump cheeks and piggish nose that Dan had seen in the driver's license photo in the wallet of one of the dead men in Studio City, the previous night.

He finally said, 'I'm sure you know that your husband is dead.'

'Willy, you mean?'

'Yes, Willy.'

'I know.'

I'd like to ask you some questions.'

'I'm sure I can't help you,' she said softly, meekly, looking at her hands.

'When was the last time you saw Willy?'

'More than a year ago.'

'Divorced?'

'Well…'

'Separated?'

'Yes, but not… in the way you mean.'

He wished that she would look at him. 'Then in what way do you mean it?'

She nervously shifted positions on the sofa. 'We were never… legally married.'

'No? But you have his name now.'

Still considering her hands, she nodded. 'Yes, he let me change mine.'

'You went to court, had your name changed to Hoffritz? When, why?'

'Two years ago. Because… because… you won't understand.'

'Try me.'

Regine didn't answer at once, and as Dan waited for her to form her explanation, he looked around the room. On the mantel above the white brick fireplace was another gallery of photographs of Willy Hoffritz: eight more.

Although the house was warm, Dan felt as though he were in a Rocky Mountain January night as he stared at those silver-framed, carefully arranged images of the dead psychologist.

Regine said, 'I wanted to show Willy that I was his, completely and forever his.'

'He didn't object to your taking his name? He didn't think you might be setting him up for a palimony case?'

'No, no. I'd never have done something like that to Willy. He knew I'd never do something like that. Oh, no. Impossible.'

'If he wanted you to have his name, why didn't he marry you?'

'He didn't want to be married,' she said with unmistakable disappointment and regret.

Although Regine's face was bowed, Dan saw sadness, like a sudden gravitational force, pull at her features.

Amazed, he said, 'He didn't want to marry you, but he wanted you to carry his name. To indicate that you… belonged to him?'

'Yes.'

'Taking his name was like… being branded?'

'Oh, yes,' she said in a hoarse whisper, and upon her face blossomed a smile of genuine pleasure at the memory of this strange act of submission. 'Yes. Like being branded.'

'He sounds like a sweetheart,' Dan said. But she was unaware of his ironic tone, so he decided to needle her, hoping to break through her whipped-dog demeanor. 'Jesus, he must've been a real egomaniac!'

Her head jerked up, and she met his eyes at last. 'Oh, no,' she said, frowning. She did not speak with anger or impatience but with a warmth, eager to correct what she saw as his misapprehension of the dead man's character. 'Oh, no. Not Willy. There was no one like Willy. He was wonderful. There wasn't anything I wouldn't have done for Willy. Not anything. He was so special. You didn't know him, or you wouldn't say a word against him. Not against Willy. You couldn't. Not if you'd known him.'

'There are those who did know him who don't speak so highly of him. I'm sure you're aware of that.'

She lowered her gaze to her hands again. 'They're all just envious, jealous, lying bastards,' she said, but in the same soft, sweet, breathlessly feminine manner, as if she had been forbidden to mar her perfect femininity with a shrill tone of voice or any other display of anger.

'He was thrown out of UCLA.'

She said nothing.

'Because of what he did to you.'

Regine still said nothing, continued to avert her eyes, but she shifted uneasily again. Her robe fell open to reveal one perfectly formed calf. A bruise the size of a half dollar marred the creamy flesh. Two smaller bruises were visible at the ankle.

'I want you to talk about Willy.'

'I won't.

'I'm afraid you must.'

She shook her head.

'What was he doing with Dylan McCaffrey in Studio City?'

'I'll never say a word against Willy. I don't care what you do to me. Throw me in jail if you want. I don't care. I don't care.' This was said quietly but with fierce emotion. 'Too many hard things have been said about poor Willy by people not good enough to lick his shoes.'

Dan said, 'Regine, look at me.'

She raised one hand to her mouth, put a knuckle to her teeth, and gently chewed on it.

'Regine? Look at me, Regine.'

Nervously sucking-chewing at that knuckle, she raised her head, but she didn't meet his eyes. She stared over his shoulder, past him.

'Regine, he beat you up.'

She said nothing.

'He put you in hospital.'

'I loved him,' she said, speaking around the knuckle upon which her attention was becoming increasingly fixated.

'He used sophisticated brainwashing techniques on you, Regine. He somehow got in your mind, and he changed you, twisted you, and that is not the work of a sweet and wonderful man.'

Tears sprang from her and streamed down her cheeks, and her face contorted in grief. 'I loved him so much.'

The sleeve of Regine's robe slid up her arm when she brought her hand to her mouth. Dan saw a small bruise on the meaty part of her forearm — and what appeared to be rope abrasions on her wrist.

She had told him that she hadn't seen Willy Hoffritz for a year, but someone had been playing bondage games with her, and recently.

Dan studied the ornately framed photographs on the coffee table, the thin smile on the dead psychologist's face. The air suddenly seemed thick, oily, unclean. A desire for fresh air almost propelled him from the chair, almost sent him stumbling toward the door.

He stayed where he was. 'But how could you love a man who hurt you so?'

'He freed me.'

'No, he enslaved you.'

'He freed me to be…'

'To be what?'

'What I was meant to be.'

'And what were you meant to be?'

'What I am.'

And what is that?'

'Whatever is wanted of me.'

Her tears had stopped.

A smile flickered at the corners of her mouth as she considered what she had said. 'Whatever is wanted of me.' And she shivered, as though the very thought of slavery and degradation sent a current of physical pleasure through her.

With growing frustration and anger, he said, 'Are you telling me that you were born to be only what Willy Hoffritz wanted you to be, born to do anything he wanted you to do?'

'Whatever is wanted,' Regine repeated, looking directly into his eyes now.

He wished that she had continued staring into space beyond him, for he saw — or imagined that he saw — grave torment, self-loathing, and desperation of an intensity that made his heart clutch up. He glimpsed a soul in rags: a tattered, wrinkled, frayed, and soiled spirit. Within this woman's ripe, full, exquisitely sensuous body, and within the outwardly visible persona of the submissive child-woman, there was another Regine, a better Regine, trapped, buried alive, existing beyond whatever psychological blocks Hoffritz had implanted but unable to escape or even to imagine any hope of escape. In that brief moment of contact between them, Dan saw that the real woman, the woman who had existed before Hoffritz had come along, was like a withered straw doll, dried out by all these years of ceaseless abuse, now a juiceless, miserable creature who'd been transformed into kindling by a nightmare of humiliation and torture; she longed for the match that would ignite and, mercifully, extinguish her.

Horrified, he could not look away.

She lowered her eyes first.

He was relieved. And sick.

His lips were dry. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. 'Do you know what research Willy was doing after he was booted out of UCLA?'

'No.'

'What project were he and Dylan McCaffrey working on?'

'I don't know.'

'Did you ever see the gray room in Studio City?'

'No.'

'Do you know a man named Ernest Andrew Cooper?'

'No.'

'Joseph Scaldone?'

'I wish you would go away.'

'Ned Rink?'

'No. None of them.'

'What did those men do to Melanie McCaffrey? What did they want from her?'

'I don't know.'

'Who was funding their project?'

'I don't know.'

Dan was sure she was lying. Along with her self-assurance and self-respect and independence, she had also lost the ability to prevaricate with confidence or conviction.

Now that he'd seen Regine and knew the amazing, monstrous thing that had been done to her, Dan had no respect for Hoffritz as a man, but more than ever he feared Hoffritz's manipulative abilities, his vicious cruelty, and his dark genius, and more than ever he realized the need to arrive at a timely solution in this case. If Hoffritz had transformed Regine this completely, what might he have achieved in his research with Dylan McCaffrey, for which he'd had more time and resources? Dan had a new sense that time was swiftly running out, a growing urgency. Hoffritz had set some terrible engine in motion, and it would crush many more people, soon, unless it was understood, located, and stopped. Regine was lying to him, and he couldn't allow that. He had to find some answers quickly, before he was too late to help Melanie.

They retreated from the flower- and dirt-strewn kitchen, but Laura felt no safer. One weirdness had followed another since they had come home that afternoon. First, Melanie had awakened from her nap, screaming in terror, clawing and punching herself as if she were a penitent religious fanatic scourging the devil from her flesh. Then the radio had come to life, followed by the whirlwind that had burst through the back door. If someone had told her that the house was haunted, she would not have scoffed.

Apparently, the move from kitchen to living room didn't make Earl feel any safer. He shushed Laura when she tried to talk. He led her and Melanie into the study, found a pad of paper and a pen in the desk drawer, and quickly scribbled a message.

Baffled by his mysterious behaviour, Laura stood beside him and read what he wrote: We're leaving the house.

Laura wasn't reluctant to comply. She vividly remembered the warning that had been delivered to them through the radio: It was coming. The flower-filled whirlwind had seemed to be another warning with the same message. It was coming. It wanted Melanie. And it knew where they were.

Earl wrote more: Pack a suitcase for yourself and one for Melanie.

Evidently, he was prepared to believe that someone had planted listening devices in the house.

Apparently, he also believed he might not be able to spirit Laura and Melanie away if the listeners knew that they planned to leave. That made sense. Whoever had financed Dylan and Hoffritz would want to know where Melanie was at all times, so they would eventually have a chance to either kill her or snatch her away. And the FBI would want to know where she was at all times, so they would be able to nab the people who tried to nab Melanie. Unless it was the FBI that wanted her in the first place.

Laura had that trapped-in-a-nightmare feeling again.

Maybe everyone in the world wasn't out to get them, but it sure seemed that way. Worse, it wasn't only someone out to get them — it was something.

Hide. That was all they could do right now. They had to go where no one could follow or find them.

Laura grabbed the pencil and wrote: Where will we go?

'Later,' he said softly. 'Now, we've got to hurry.'

It was coming.

In the bedroom, he helped Laura pack two suitcases, one for Melanie and one for herself.

It was coming. And the fact that she didn't know what It was — that she even felt slightly foolish for believing It existed in the first place — did nothing whatsoever to alleviate her fear of It.

When the bags were packed, when they had their coats on, Laura repeatedly called Pepper. The cat wouldn't respond to her, and a quick tour of the house didn't turn it up anywhere. Pepper was hiding, being difficult, as any self-respecting cat would have been in those circumstances.

'Leave it,' Earl whispered. 'Someone can stop by to feed it tomorrow.'

They went through the laundry room into the garage. They didn't switch off any lights behind them, because that might have signaled their intentions. Earl put the suitcases in the trunk of Laura's blue Honda.

She didn't need to ask why they were taking her car instead of his. His was parked outside, at the curb, and if those FBI agents across the street saw Laura and Melanie heading for it, they'd want to know where they were going and why; they might even prevent them from leaving.

Of course, their hurried flight might be a mistake because the FBI might want nothing more than to help. Or it might not. In either case, their best hope was to trust only in Earl Benton.

He put Melanie in the backseat and fastened the belt across her lap.

From the front seat, Laura glanced back and was startled by her daughter's appearance. In the closed garage, illuminated only by the car's ceiling light, the girl's gaunt face was fleshed out by shadows; the harsh lines and sharp bones were softened by the moon-pale glow. For the first time, Laura realized how very pretty her little girl would be when she had gained some weight. She would be utterly and miraculously transformed by a few pounds and by peace of mind, both of which would come with time. Abruptly, Laura was able to see the potential within the battered clay, the familiar within the alien, the beauty within the grayness. Time, like a painter's brush, would layer other experiences and emotions over Melanie's now-bright agony, and when the paint of days and weeks and years had become sufficiently thick to all but conceal the horror of her ordeal with her father, she would no longer be a skeletal, angular, strange creature with death-pale skin and wounded eyes; she would, in fact, be quite lovely. That realization made Laura's breath catch, and it renewed her hope.

More important, the kind light and caressing shadows allowed her to perceive much of herself in her daughter, and that perception had an even more profound effect on her. Intellectually, she had known that Melanie resembled her — evidence of her genes was clear in the child's haunted face, in spite of the abuse that had pulled it into a tortured mask — but until now she had not quite related to that likeness on a deep emotional level. Seeing herself in her daughter, she had a more intense awareness that her child's suffering was her own suffering, that her child's future was her own future, and that she could have no happiness until Melanie was happy too. Whereas the realization of the girl's underlying beauty had renewed Laura's hope, this second insight renewed her determination to find the truth and to beat their enemies even if the whole damned world was aligned against them.

Earl got behind the wheel. He looked over at Laura and said, 'It's going to get a little wild for the next few minutes.'

'It's already gotten wild,' she said, buckling her seat belt.

'I've had a driving course that teaches avoidance of terrorists and kidnappers, so I'm not being as reckless as it's going to seem.'

'Recklessness won't bother me in the least,' she said. 'Not after seeing that wind-thing smash its way into my kitchen. Besides, I've always thought it would be a lot of fun to drive like James Bond.'

He smiled at her. 'You've got grit.'

As he started the engine, she picked up the automatic garage-door opener that lay on the console tray between the seats.

He said, 'Now.'

Laura pressed the button on the remote-control device, and the garage door started to swing up. Before the door had lifted all the way, Earl threw the car into reverse and backed under it with only an inch to spare, moving fast.

Laura expected to crash through the rising door, but they slipped out of the garage and reversed away from the house at high speed. They slowed where the driveway met the street, but not much, and Earl pulled the steering wheel hard right, so they were facing down the long hill.

The FBI, in its fake telephone-company van, had not yet reacted. Earl hit the brakes, shifted the Honda out of reverse into drive, jammed his foot down on the accelerator. Tires squealed, and the car seemed to stick to the pavement, but then they rocketed forward, down the dark and sloping street.

Two blocks downhill, Earl glanced at the rearview mirror and said, 'They're coming.'

Laura looked through the rear window, and saw the van just pulling away from the curb.

Earl tapped the brakes and swung the steering wheel hard to the right, and the Honda half turned, half slid around the corner, into the cross street. At the next intersection, he turned left, then right again at the end of that block, speeding and weaving through the quiet residential neighborhood, finally out of Sherman Oaks altogether, to the top of the valley wall, over the ridge line, into Benedict Canyon, and down the forested slopes, through the darkness, toward the distant lights of Beverly Hills and Los Angeles beyond.

'We've lost them,' he said happily.

Laura was not completely relieved. She wasn't convinced that they could lose their inhuman enemy — the unseen It — as easily as they had shaken the FBI van.

Dan watched Regine closely, trying to figure how he could force her to tell him what she knew. She was so pliable that he could surely bend her to his purposes if he could only determine how and where to apply pressure.

Regine was no longer biting on her knuckle. She had slipped a thumb into her mouth and gently sucked on it. Her pose was so provocative — innocence waiting to be despoiled — that he was certain it was something that Hoffritz had taught her to do. Something he had programmed her to do? But it was clear that she also was soothed by the thumbsucking; her inner torment was so severe that it had driven her to seek solace in the simplest, most infantile rituals of reassurance.

From the moment that she had put her thumb in her mouth, she had stopped sitting erect and ladylike. Now she slumped into the corner of the sofa. The neckline of her robe had parted, revealing deep, smooth, shadowed cleavage.

Dan had a pretty good idea how to make her talk, but he didn't like doing what he would have to do.

She took her thumb out of her mouth long enough to say, 'I can't help you. I really can't. Will you go now? Please?'

He didn't answer. He got up from the armchair, walked around the coffee table, and stood over her, frowning down at her.

She kept her head bowed.

Sternly, almost harshly, he said, 'Look at me.'

She looked at him. In a tremulous voice that indicated she expected to be ignored, she said, 'Will you go now? Please? Will you go now?'

'You're going to answer my questions, Regine,' he said, scowling at her. 'You're not going to lie to me. If you won't answer, or if you lie to me…'

'Will you hit me?' she asked.

He was confronted not by a woman any longer but by a sick, lost, miserable creature. Not a frightened creature, however. The prospect of being struck did not fill her with terror. Quite the opposite. She was sick, lost, miserable — and hungry. Hungry for the thrill of being hit, starving for the pleasure of pain.

Repressing his revulsion, making his voice as cold as he could, he said, 'I won't hit you. I won't touch you. But you'll tell me what I want to know because that's the reason you exist right now.'

Her eyes shone with a curious light, like those of an animal seen at night.

'You always do what's wanted of you, right? You are what you're expected to be. I expect you to be cooperative, Regine. I want you to answer my questions, and you will, because that's the only damned thing you're good for — answering questions.'

She stared up at him expectantly.

'Have you ever met Ernest Andrew Cooper?'

'No.'

'You're lying.'

'Am I?'

Suppressing all the sympathy and compassion he felt for her, he made his voice even colder, and he raised one fist over her, although he had no intention of using it. 'Do you know Cooper?'

She didn't answer, but her eyes focused on his big fist with an unholy adoration that he couldn't bear to contemplate.

With sudden inspiration, he feigned an anger that he didn't feel and said, 'Answer me, you bitch!'

She flinched at the derogatory address, but not because it hurt or surprised her. She flinched, instead, as if a shock of delight had passed through her. Even that meager verbal abuse had been a key that unlocked her.

Gazing at his fist, she said, 'Please.'

'Maybe.'

'You'd like to.'

'Maybe… if you tell me what I want to know. Cooper.'

'They don't tell me their last names. I knew an Ernie somebody, but I don't know if it was Cooper.'

He described the dead millionaire.

'Yeah,' she said, her gaze shifting between his fist and his eyes. 'That was him.'

'You met him through Willy?'

'Yes.'

'And Joseph Scaldone?'

'Willy… introduced me to this guy named Joe, but I never knew his last name, either.'

Dan described Joseph Scaldone.

She nodded. 'That was him.'

'And Ned Rink?'

'I don't think I ever met him.'

'A short, stocky, rather ugly man.'

As he fleshed out that description, she began to shake her head. 'No. I never met that one.'

'You've seen the gray room?'

'Yes. I dream of it sometimes. Of sitting in that chair, and they do it to me, the shocks, the electricity.'

'When did you see it? The room, the chair?'

'Oh, a few years ago, when they were first painting the room, putting in the equipment, getting it ready…'

'What were they doing with Melanie McCaffrey?'

'I don't know.'

'Don't lie to me, damn it. You are what you're expected to be, and you do what's wanted of you, always what's wanted of you, so cut the shit and answer me.'

'No, really. I don't know,' she said meekly. 'Willy never told me. It was secret. An important secret. It'd change the world, he said. That's all I know. He didn't include me in those things very much. His life with me was separate from his work with those other men.'

Dan continued to stand over her, and she continued to cower in a corner of the sofa, and although the threat he posed to her was entirely theatrical, he nevertheless felt uncomfortably like a bully. 'What did the occult have to do with their experiments?'

'I haven't any idea.'

'Did Willy believe in the supernatural?'

'No.'

'Why do you say that?'

'Well… because Dylan McCaffrey believed indiscriminately in it — all of it, ghosts and seances and even goblins for all I know — and Willy used to make fun of him, said he was gullible.'

'Then why was he working with McCaffrey?'

'Willy thought Dylan was a genius.'

'In spite of his superstitions?'

'Yeah.'

'Who was funding them, Regine?'

'I don't know.'

She moved in such a way that her robe parted further, revealing more cleavage, most of one full breast.

'Come on,' he said impatiently. 'Who's been paying their bills? Who, Regine?'

'I swear, I don't know.'

He sat on the couch beside her. He took her by the chin, held her face, not gently, not with erotic intention, but as an extension of the threat first embodied by his raised fist.

Meaningless as the threat was, she nevertheless responded to it. This was what she wanted: to be intimidated, to be commanded, and to obey.

'Who?' he repeated.

She said, 'I don't know. I really, really don't. I'd tell you if I did. I swear. Anything you want, I'd tell you.'

This time he believed her. But he didn't let go of her face. 'I know Melanie McCaffrey endured a lot of mental and physical abuse in that gray room. But I want to know… Christ, I don't want to know, but I've got to know… was there sexual abuse too?'

Regine's mouth was somewhat compressed by his grip on her chin and jaws, so her voice was slightly distorted. 'How would I know?'

'You would have known,' he insisted. 'One way or the other, you would have sensed a thing like that, even if Hoffritz didn't talk to you much about what went on in Studio City. He might not have talked about what he was trying to achieve with the girl, but he would have bragged about his control of her. I'm sure of that. I never met him, but I know him well enough to be sure of that.'

'I don't believe there was anything sexual about it,' Regine said.

He squeezed her face, and she winced, but he saw (with dismay) that she liked it nonetheless, so he relaxed his hand, though he didn't let go of her. 'Are you sure?'

'Almost certain. He might have liked… to have her. But I think you're right: He would have told me that, if he'd done it, if he'd been with her like that…'

'Did he even hint at it?'

'No.'

Dan was profoundly relieved. He even smiled. At least the child hadn't been subjected to that indignity. Then he remembered what indignities she had endured, and his smile quickly died.

He let go of Regine's face but stayed beside her on the couch. Gradually fading red spots marked where his fingers had pressed into her tender skin. 'Regine, you said you hadn't seen Willy in more than a year. Why?'

She lowered her eyes, bent her neck. Her shoulders softened even more, and she slumped further into the corner of the sofa.

'Why?' he repeated.

'Willy… got tired of me.'

That she should care so much about Willy made Dan ill.

'He didn't want me any more,' she said in a tone of voice more suited to announcing imminent death from cancer. Willy not wanting her any more was clearly the worst, most devastating development that she could imagine. 'I did everything, anything, but nothing was enough…'

'He just broke it off, cold?'

'I never saw him after he… sent me away. But we talked on the phone now and then. We had to.'

'Had to talk on the phone? About what?'

Almost whispering: 'About the others he sent around to see me.'

'What others?'

'His friends. The other… men.'

'He sent men to you?'

'Yes.'

'For sex?'

'For sex. For anything they wanted. I do anything they want. For Willy.'

Dan's mental image of the late Wilhelm Hoffritz was growing more monstrous by the minute. The man had been a viper.

He not only brainwashed and established control of Regine for his own sexual gratification, but even after he no longer wanted her, he continued to control her and abuse her secondhand. Apparently, the mere fact that she continued to be abused, even beyond his sight, gratified him sufficiently to maintain an iron grip on her tortured mind. He had been a singularly sick man. Worse than sick: demented.

Regine raised her head and said, not without enthusiasm, 'Do you want me to tell you some of the things they made me do?'

Dan stared at her, speechless with revulsion.

'I don't mind telling you,' she assured him. 'You might enjoy hearing. I didn't mind doing those things, and I don't mind telling you exactly what I did.'

'No,' he said hoarsely.

'You might like to hear.'

'No.'

She giggled softly. 'It might give you some ideas.'

'Shut up!' he said, and he nearly slapped her.

She bowed her head as if she were a dog that had been cowed by a scolding master.

He said, 'The men Hoffritz sent to you — who were they?'

'I only know their first names. One of them was Andy, and you've told me his last name was Cooper. Another one was Joe.'

'Scaldone? Who else?'

'Howard, Shelby… Eddie.'

'Eddie who?'

'I told you, I don't know their last names.'

'How often did they come?'

'Most of them… once or twice a week.'

'They still come here?'

'Oh, sure. I'm what they need. There was only one guy who came once and never came back.'

'What was his name?'

'Albert.'

'Albert Uhlander?'

'I don't know.'

'What did he look like?'

'Tall, thin, with a… bony face. I don't know how else to describe him. I guess you'd say he sort of looked like a hawk… hawkish… sharp features.'

Dan had not looked at the author's photograph on the books now in the trunk of his car, but he intended to do so when he left Regine.

He said, 'Albert, Howard, Shelby, Eddie… anybody else?'

'Well, like I said, Andy and Joe. But they're dead now, huh?'

'Very.'

'And there's one other man. He comes by all the time, but I don't even know his first name.'

'What's he look like?'

'About six-foot, distinguished. Beautiful white hair. Beautiful clothes. Not handsome, you know, but elegant. He carries himself so well, and he speaks very well. He's… cultured. I like him. He hurts me so… beautifully.'

Dan took a deep breath. 'If you don't even know his first name, what do you call him?'

She grinned. 'Oh, there's only one thing he wants me to call him.' She looked mischievous, winked at Dan. 'Daddy.'

'What?'

'I call him Daddy. Always. I pretend he's my daddy, see, and he pretends I'm really his daughter, and I sit on his lap and we talk about school, and I—'

'That's enough,' he said, feeling as if he had stepped into a corner of Hell, where knowing the local customs was an obligation to live by them. He preferred not knowing.

He wanted to sweep the photographs off the table, smash the glass that shielded them, pull the other pictures off the mantel and throw them in the fireplace and light them with a match. But he knew that he would be of no help to Regine merely by destroying those reminders of Hoffritz. The hateful man was dead, yes, but he would live for years in this woman's mind, like a malevolent troll in a secret cave. Dan touched her face again, but briefly and tenderly this time. 'Regine, what do you do with your time, your days, your life?'

She shrugged.

'Do you go to movies, dancing, out to dinner with friends — or do you just sit here, waiting for someone to need you?'

'Mostly I stay here,' she said. 'I like it here. This is where Willy wanted me.'

'And what do you do for a living?'

'I do what they want.'

'You've got a degree in psychology, for God's sake.'

She said nothing.

'Why did you finish your degree at UCLA if you didn't intend to use it?'

'Willy wanted me to finish. It was funny, you know. They threw him out, those bastards at the university, but they couldn't throw me out so easily. I was there to remind them about Willy. That pleased him. He thought that was a terrific joke.'

'You could do important work, interesting work.'

'I'm doing what I was made for.'

'No. You aren't. You're doing what Hoffritz said you were made for. That's very different.'

'Willy knew,' she said. 'Willy knew everything.'

'Willy was a rotten pig,' he said.

'No.' Tears formed in her eyes again.

'So they come here and use you, hurt you.' He grabbed her arm, pulled up the sleeve of her robe, revealing the bruise that he had spotted earlier and the rope burns at her wrist. 'They hurt you, don't they?'

'Yeah, in one way or another, some of them more than others. Some of them are better at it. Some of them make it feel so sweet.'

'Why do you put up with it?'

'I like it.'

The air seemed even more oppressive than it had a few minutes ago. Thick, moist, heavy with a grime that couldn't be seen, a filth that settled not on the skin but on the soul. Dan didn't want to breathe it in. It was dangerously corrupting air.

'Who pays your rent?' he asked.

'There is no rent.'

'Who owns the house?'

'A company.'

'What company?'

'What can I do for you?'

'What company?'

'Let me do something for you.'

'What company?' he persisted.

'John Wilkes Enterprises.'

'Who's John Wilkes?'

'I don't know.'

'You've never had a man here named John?'

'No.'

'How do you know about this John Wilkes Enterprises?'

'I get a check from them every month. A very nice check.'

Shakily, Dan got to his feet.

Regine was visibly disappointed.

He looked around, spotted the suitcases by the door, which he had noticed when he'd first come in. 'Going away?'

'For a few days.'

'Where?'

'Las Vegas.'

'Are you running, Regine?'

'What would I be running from?'

'People are getting killed because of what happened in that gray room.'

'But I don't know what happened in the gray room, and I don't care,' she said. 'So I'm safe.'

Staring down at her, Dan realized that Regine Savannah Hoffritz had a gray room all of her own. She carried it with her wherever she went, for her gray room was where the real Regine was locked away, trapped, imprisoned.

He said, 'Regine, you need help.'

'I need to be what you want.'

'No. You need—'

'I'm fine.'

'You need counseling.'

'I'm free. Willy taught me how to be free.'

'Free from what?'

'Responsibility. Fear. Hope. Free from everything.'

'Willy didn't free you. He enslaved you.'

'You don't understand.'

'He was a sadist.'

'There's nothing wrong with that.'

'He got inside your mind, twisted you. We're not talking about some half-baked psychology professor, Regine. This lunatic was a heavyweight. This was a guy who worked for the Pentagon, researching behavior modification, developing new methods of brainwashing. Ego-repressing drugs, Regine. Subliminal persuasion. Willy was to Big Brother what Merlin was to King Arthur. Except Willy did bad magic, Regine. He transformed you into… into this… into a masochist, for his amusement.'

'And that's how he freed me,' she said serenely. 'You see, when you no longer fear pain, when you learn to love pain, then you can't be afraid of anything anymore. That's why I'm free.'

Dan wanted to shake her, but he knew that shaking her would do no good. Quite the opposite. She would only beg for more.

He wanted to get her in front of a sympathetic judge and have her committed without her consent, so she could receive psychiatric treatment. But he wasn't related to her; he was virtually a stranger to her; no judge would play along with him; it just wasn't done that way. There seemed to be nothing he could do for her.

She said, 'You know something interesting? I think maybe Willy's not really dead.'

'Oh, he's dead, all right.'

'Maybe not.'

'I saw the body. We got a positive ID match from dental records and fingerprints.'

'Maybe,' she said. 'But… well, I get the feeling he's still alive. Sometimes I sense him out there… I feel him. It's strange. I can't explain it. But that's why I'm not as broken up as I might have been. Because I'm not convinced he's dead. Somehow, he's still… out there.'

Her self-image and her primary reasons for continuing to live were so dependent upon Willy Hoffritz, upon the prospect of receiving his praise and his approval or at least upon hearing his voice on the telephone every once in a while, that she was never going to be able to accept his death. Dan suspected that he could take her to the morgue, confront her with the bloody corpse, force her to place her hands upon the cold dead flesh, make her stare into the grotesquely battered countenance, shove the coroner's report in front of her — and nevertheless fail to convince her that Hoffritz had been killed. Hoffritz had gotten inside her, had shattered her psyche, then had rejoined the pieces in a pattern that was more pleasing to himself, with himself as the bonding agent holding her together. If Regine accepted the reality of his death, there would be no glue binding her anymore, and she might collapse into insanity. Her only hope — or so it must seem to her — was to believe that Willy was still alive.

'Yes, he's out there,' she said again. 'I feel it. Somehow, somewhere, he's out there.'

Feeling utterly ineffectual, loathing his powerlessness, Dan headed toward the door.

Behind him, Regine rose quickly from the sofa and said, 'Please. Wait.'

He glanced back at her.

She said, 'You could… have me.'

'No, Regine.'

'Do anything to me.'

'No.'

'I'll be your animal.'

He continued to the door.

She said, 'Your little animal.'

He resisted the urge to run.

She caught up with him as he opened the door. Her perfume was subtle but effective. She put one hand on his shoulder and said, 'I like you.'

'Where are your folks, Regine?'

'You make me hot.'

'Your mother and father? Where do they live?'

She put her slender fingers to his lips. They were warm.

She traced the outline of his mouth.

He pushed her hand away.

She said, 'I really, really like you.'

'Maybe your folks could help you through this.'

'I like you.'

'Regine—'

'Hurt me. Hurt me very badly.'

He pushed her away from him as a compassionate hypochondriac might push away a grasping leper: firmly, with distaste, with fear of contagion, but with a regard for the delicacy of her condition.

She said, 'When Willy put me in the hospital, he came to visit me every day. He arranged a private room for me and always closed the door when he came, so we'd be alone. When we were alone, he kissed my bruises. Every day he came and kissed my bruises. You can't know how good his lips felt on my bruises, Lieutenant. One kiss, and each spot of soreness — each little tender contusion — was transformed. Instead of pain, each bruise was filled with pleasure. It was as if… as if a clitoris sprang up in the place of every bruise, and when he kissed me I climaxed, again and again.

Dan got the hell out of there and slammed the door behind him.

With a cold and gusty wind blowing scraps of litter along the night streets, and with the portent of rain heavy in the air, Earl Benton took Laura and Melanie to an apartment on the first floor of a rambling three-story complex in Westwood, south of Wilshire Boulevard. It had a living room, a dining alcove, a kitchen, one bedroom, and one bath. The place didn't seem quite as small as it actually was, because big windows looked out on a lushly landscaped courtyard which, at that time of night, was illuminated by blue- and green-filtered spotlights concealed throughout the shrubbery.

The apartment was owned by California Paladin and was used as a 'safe house.' The agency was occasionally hired to retrieve teenagers and college-age kids from fanatical religious cults with which they had become entangled; immediately upon being freed, they were brought to that apartment, where they underwent several days of deprogramming before returning to their parents. The safe house also had been used as a secure way station for wives who were threatened by estranged husbands, and on several occasions high corporate executives in a variety of industries had met there for days at a time to plan secret and hostile take-over bids of other companies because they could be free of worry about electronic eavesdropping and corporate espionage. California Paladin had also once stashed a Baptist minister in those rooms after a youth gang in south-central L.A. had put out a contract on his life to repay him for testimony against one of their brothers. A rock-music star had passed through while dodging a particularly onerous subpoena in an expensive civil suit. And a big-name actress had needed just this degree of total privacy in just such an unlikely location as this, in order to recuperate from secret cancer surgery that, if revealed, would have cost her roles in upcoming pictures; producers were reluctant to hire stars who would be ineligible for completion bonds and who might get sick or even die halfway through filming.

Melanie and Laura would make use of those quiet, modest rooms, at least for the night. Laura hoped that the hideaway would be as safe from the strange force pursuing them as it was from youth gangs and process servers.

Earl turned on the heat and went into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee.

Laura tried to interest Melanie in some hot chocolate, but the girl wanted none. Melanie moved like a sleepwalker to the largest chair in the living room, climbed onto it, curled her legs beneath her, and sat staring down at her hands, which lethargically pulled and rubbed and scratched and massaged each other. Her fingers interlaced and knotted and then untied themselves and then knotted together again. She stared at her hands so raptly that it almost began to seem as if she didn't realize that they were a part of her but thought, instead, that they were two small, busy animals at play in her lap.

The coffee countered the chill they had gotten while coming from the windswept parking lot to the apartment, but it could not relieve that other chill — the one caused not by physical stimuli but by their unexpected and unwanted encounter with the unknown.

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.

So it had been Uhlander who had visited Regine, but only on one occasion, not motivated by overpowering and perverse sexual needs, as were the others, but perhaps by curiosity, as if he needed to see for himself that she was real and that Hoffritz had thoroughly enslaved her. Maybe Uhlander had wished to satisfy himself as to Hoffritz's genius in these matters before joining him and Dylan McCaffrey on the strange project that they had undertaken with Melanie.

Whatever the case, Dan wanted to talk to him. He added Uhlander to the mental list of those whom he intended to question, a list that already included Mary O'Hara, Ernest Andrew Cooper's wife, Joseph Scaldone's wife (if he had one), the executives and/or owners of John Wilkes Enterprises, the silver-haired and distinguished pervert who visited Regine regularly and whom she knew only as 'Daddy,' and the other men who used her — Eddie, Shelby, and Howard.

He put the book back in the carton, closed the trunk, and got into the car just as a few fat drops of rain began to splatter the pavement. Scaldone's mailing list was still in his pocket, and he was certain that he would soon find last names for Eddie, Shelby, and Howard among those three hundred customers of the Sign of the Pentagram. The light there was poor, however, and he was tired, and his eyes felt sandy, and he still wanted to talk to Laura McCaffrey before it got too late, so he left the list in his pocket, started the engine, and drove out of the Hollywood hills.

At 10:44, when he reached Laura's house in Sherman Oaks, a cold rain was falling. Although lights were on in several rooms, no one answered the door. He rang the bell, then knocked, then pounded on the door, to no avail.

Where was Earl Benton? He was supposed to remain there until midnight, when another agent from California Paladin was scheduled to relieve him.

Dan thought of the crushed and disfigured corpses in Studio City the previous night, and he thought of the dead hit man, Ned Rink, and with growing anxiety he moved away from the door, squished across the wet lawn, pushed between two flower-laden hibiscus bushes, and peered in the nearest window. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, no bodies or blood or wreckage. He went to the next window, and still he saw nothing, so he hurried to the gate at the side of the house and went through it and along the walk to the rear, his heart racing and an ulcerous pain flaring in his gut.

The kitchen door was unlocked. As he pushed it open and stepped inside, he noted that the door frame was splintered and that a ruined security chain hung from its mounting. Then he saw the mess in the room beyond: torn and wilted flowers, shredded and wadded leaves, other greenery, clods of moist earth.

No blood.

On the table were three unfinished spaghetti dinners speckled with dirt and debris.

One overturned chair.

A tangled mass of impatiens bristled from the sink.

But no blood. Thank God. No blood. So far.

He drew his revolver.

Full of dread, with incipient grief welling in anticipation of the battered corpses that must lie somewhere in the house, he edged out of the kitchen and moved cautiously from one room to the next. He found nothing but a wary cat that dashed away from him.

Checking the garage, he saw that Laura McCaffrey's blue Honda was gone. He didn't know what to make of that. When he uncovered no bodies anywhere, his relief was as great as if he had been trudging along an ocean floor with billions of tons of water pressing on him and was now abruptly transported to dry land where only air weighed on his shoulders. The extent and depth of his relief, and the great exhilaration that accompanied it, forced him to admit to himself that his feelings for this woman and her troubled child were different from his feelings for all the other victims whom he had known in fourteen years of policework. Nor could his unusual involvement and empathy be attributed to the vague parallels between this case and that of Fran and Cindy Lakey, years ago; he was not drawn to Laura McCaffrey solely because, by saving her and Melanie, he could atone for his failure to save Cindy Lakey's life. That was part of it, certainly, but he was also attracted to this woman. The influence that she had on him was not quite like anything he'd ever known before; he was drawn to her not only because of her beauty, which was undeniably affecting, and not only because of her intelligence, which was important to him since he had never shared most men's fascination with dumb blondes and airhead brunettes, but also because of her incredible strength and determination in the face of horror and adversity.

But even if she and Melanie get out of this predicament alive, Dan thought, there's probably little hope of a relationship between her and me. She's a doctor of psychology, for God's sake. I'm a cop. She's better educated than I am. She makes more money than I do. Forget it, Haldane. You're out of your class.

Nevertheless, when he found no bodies anywhere in the house, he was immensely relieved, and his heart swelled with a particular joy that he would not have felt if the escapees from death had been any other escapees than this woman and her daughter.

When he returned to the kitchen to have a closer look at the wreckage there, Dan found that he was no longer alone in the house. Michael Seames, the FBI agent he'd met a few hours ago at the Sign of the Pentagram, was standing by the table, hands in the pockets of his raincoat, studying the floral debris that filled the room. Beneath his graying hair, above his apparently aged shoulders, a troubled and puzzled expression lay upon Seames's anachronistically young face.

'Where have they gone?' Dan asked.

'I was hoping you could tell me,' Seames said.

'At my suggestion, she hired around-the-clock bodyguards—'

'California Paladin.'

'Yeah, that's right. But as far as I know, they weren't going to recommend that she go into hiding or anything like that. They were going to stay here with her.'

'One of them was here. An Earl Benton—'

'Yes, I know him.'

'Until about an hour ago. Then, without warning, he split with Laura McCaffrey and the girl, went out of here like a bat out of hell. We have a surveillance van across the street.'

'Oh?'

'They tried to follow Benton, but he was moving too fast,' Seames frowned. 'In fact, it seemed like he was trying to give us the slip as much as anything else. You have any idea why he'd want to do that?'

'Just a wild guess. I'm probably totally off the wall to even suggest it. But maybe he doesn't trust you.'

'We're here to protect the child.'

'You sure our government wouldn't like to have her for a while, to try to figure out what McCaffrey and Hoffritz were doing with her in that gray room?'

'We might,' Seames admitted. 'That decision hasn't been made yet. But this is America, you know—'

'So I've heard.'

'—and we wouldn't kidnap her.'

'What would you call it—"borrowing" her?'

'We'd want to have her mother's permission for whatever tests we'd run.'

Dan sighed, not sure what to believe.

Seames said, 'You didn't maybe tell Benton that he should get them out from under us, did you?'

'Why would I do that? I'm a public servant, same as you.'

'Then you always work these hours, all day and half the night, on every case you handle?'

'Not every case.'

'Most cases?'

Dan could honestly say, 'Yeah, in fact, on most cases I put in long hours. You get going on an investigation, and one thing leads to another, and it isn't always possible to stop cold at five o'clock each day. Most detectives work long hours, irregular shifts. You must know that.'

'You work harder than most, I hear.'

Dan shrugged.

Seames said, 'They say you're a bulldog, that you love your work and you really sink your teeth into it, really hang on.'

'Maybe. I guess I work pretty hard. But in a homicide, the trail can get cold fast. Usually, if you don't get a lead on your killer in three or four days, you'll never hang it on anyone.'

'But you're putting more into this case than even the average homicide detective usually does, more than even you usually do. Aren't you, Lieutenant?'

'Maybe.'

'You know you are.'

'Arf, arf.'

'What?'

'The bulldog in me.'

'Why such a bulldog on this case?'

'I guess I was just in the mood for some action.'

'That's no answer.'

'I just ate too much Purina Dog Chow, have too much energy, got to work it off.'

Seames shook his head. 'It's because you've got a special stake in this one.'

'Do I?'

'Don't you?'

'Not that I'm aware of,' Dan said, although an image of Laura McCaffrey's lovely face rose unbidden in his memory.

Seames regarded him with suspicion and said, 'Listen, Haldane, if someone was bankrolling McCaffrey and Hoffritz because their project had a military application, then those same — let's call them financiers — those same financiers might be willing to spread a lot of money around to get their hands on the girl again. But any money they spread would be dirty, damned dirty. Any guy who took it would probably come down with an infection from it. Know what I mean?'

At first it had appeared that Seames was somehow aware of Dan's romantic inclinations toward Laura. Now it was suddenly clear that a darker worry nagged the agent.

For God's sake, Dan thought, he's wondering if I've sold out to the Russians or someone!

'Jesus, Seames, are you ever on the wrong track!'

'They might be willing to pay a lot to get their hands on her, and while a police detective is reasonably well paid in this city, he's never going to get rich — unless he moonlights.'

'I resent the implication.

'And I regret your reluctance to make a plain denial of that implication.'

'No. I haven't sold out to anyone, anywhere, at any time. No, nyet, negative, definitely not. Is that plain enough for you?'

Seames didn't answer. Instead, he said, 'Anyway, when the surveillance team lost Benton, they drove right back here to wait, to see if the woman and girl would return, or whether maybe somebody else would show up. As an afterthought, they came to have a look around the house, found the door the way you found it — and this weird mess.'

Dan said, 'What about the mess? What do you make of it?'

'The flowers are from the garden in the back.'

But what're they doing here? Who brought them inside?'

'We can't figure it.'

'And why's the security chain been torn out of the door?'

'Looks like somebody forced their way inside,' Seames said.

'Really? Gee, you Bureau guys don't miss a trick.'

'I'm at a loss to understand your attitude.'

'So is everyone else.'

'Your lack of cooperation.'

'I'm just a very bad boy.' Dan went to the telephone, and Seames wanted to know what he was doing, and Dan said, 'Calling Paladin. If Earl felt Laura and Melanie were in danger here, he might've moved them in a hurry, the way you say he did, but when he got wherever he was going, he'd call his office and tell them where he was.'

The night operator at California Paladin, Lonnie Beamer, knew Dan well enough to recognize his voice. 'Yeah, Lieutenant, Earl took them to the safe house.'

Lonnie seemed to think Dan knew the address of that place, which he didn't. Earl had spoken of it a few times, when he'd been telling tales about various cases on which he'd worked, but if he had ever said exactly where the safe house was, Dan had forgotten. He could not ask Lonnie Beamer for the address without alerting Seames, who was watching intently. He'd have to call the night operator again from another phone, once he had slipped away from the FBI agent.

On the phone, Lonnie said, 'But they probably won't be there much longer.'

'Why not?'

'Haven't you heard? Mrs. McCaffrey and the kid won't be needing our protection anymore — though she hasn't decided to let us go just yet. She may want us to hang around too, but for the most part, you people are taking over for us. You're giving them police protection.'

'Are you serious?'

'Yeah,' Lonnie said. 'Around-the-clock police protection. Right now, Earl's over there in Westwood, at the safe house, waiting for a couple of your people to show up and take the McCaffreys off his hands. They'll probably be there any minute.'

'Who?'

'Uh… let's see… Captain Mondale ordered the protection, and Earl's been told to relinquish our clients to Detectives Wexlersh and Manuello.'

Something was wrong. Very wrong. The department was too shorthanded to provide around-the-clock protection even in a case like this. And Ross wouldn't have called Paladin himself; that was always delegated to assistants. Besides, if protection were to be offered, it would be in the form of uniformed officers, not vitally needed plainclothes detectives who were in even shorter supply than patrolmen.

And why Wexlersh and Manuello, in particular?

'So you might as well stay there in Sherman Oaks,' Lonnie said, 'because I imagine your people will bring the McCaffreys straight back there.'

Dan wanted to know more, but he couldn't talk freely with Seames breathing down his neck. He said, 'Well, thanks anyway, Lonnie. But I think it's inexcusable that you don't know where your operative is or what's happening to your clients.'

'Huh? But I just said he was—'

'I've always thought Paladin was the best, but if you can't keep track of your agents and your clients, especially clients whose lives might be in jeopardy—'

Lonnie said, 'What's wrong with you, Haldane?'

'Sure, sure,' Dan said for Seames's benefit, 'they're probably safe. I know Earl's a good man, and I'm sure he won't let anything happen to them, but you better start running a tighter ship there or, sooner or later, something will happen to a client, and then there goes the whole agency's license.'

Lonnie started to say something more, but Dan hung up. He was desperate to get away from there, to find another phone and get back to Lonnie to hear more details. However, he didn't want to appear eager to depart, because he didn't want Seames to come with him. And if Seames thought that Dan knew where Laura and Melanie were, there would be no hope of leaving alone and unobstructed.

The FBI agent was staring hard at him.

Dan said, 'They don't know anything at Paladin.'

'Is that what he told you?'

'Yeah.'

'What else did he tell you?'

He wanted and needed to trust Seames and the Bureau. He was, after all, a cop by choice, and he believed in authority, in systems of law and enforcement. Ordinarily, he would have given Seames his trust automatically, unthinkingly. But not this time. This was a twisty situation, with stakes so high that the usual rules did not apply.

'He didn't tell me shit,' Dan said. 'What do you mean?'

'Something's got you really scared all of a sudden.'

'Not me.'

'You just broke into a sweat.'

Dan felt it on his face, cool and trickling. Thinking fast, he said, 'It's this knock I took on the forehead. It feels okay, and I forget about it, and then all of a sudden the pain starts up again so bad it makes me weak.'

'Hats?' Seames said.

'What?'

'At the Sign of the Pentagram, you told me you'd hurt yourself while trying on hats.'

'Did I? Well, I was just being smartass.'

'So… what really happened?'

'Well, see, usually I don't think very much or very hard. Not used to it. Big dumb cop, you know. But today I had to think so hard that my head got hot, blistered the skin right off.'

'I believe you're thinking hard all the time, Haldane. Every minute.'

'You give me too much credit.'

'And I want to warn you to think hard about this: You're just a city cop, while I'm a federal agent.'

'I am acutely aware of your exalted status and the hovering ghost of J. Edgar Hoover.'

'Though I can't meddle in your jurisdiction on just any excuse, I can find ways to make you wish you'd never crossed me.'

'I never would, sir. I swear.'

Seames just stared at him.

Dan said, 'Well, I guess I'll be going.'

'Where?'

'Home, I guess,' Dan lied. 'It's been a long day. You're right: I've been working too much. And this head hurts like hell. Ought to take a few aspirins and make up an ice pack.'

'All of a sudden you're no longer worried at all about the McCaffreys?'

'Oh, well, sure, I'm concerned about them,' Dan said, 'but there's nothing more I can do right now. I mean, this mess here, it's sort of on the suspicious side, but it doesn't necessarily indicate foul play, does it? I figure they're safe with Earl Benton. He's a good guy. Besides, Mr. Seames, a homicide cop has to have a pretty thick skin. Can't start identifying with the victims, you know. If we did that, we'd all be basket cases. Right?'

Seames stared, unblinking.

Dan yawned. 'Well, time to have a beer and hit the sack.' He crossed to the door.

He felt hopelessly obvious, transparent. He had no talent for deception.

Seames spoke to him as he was about to step over the threshold. 'If the McCaffreys are in danger, Lieutenant, and if you really want to help them, you'd be wise to cooperate with me.'

'Well, like I said, I don't suppose they are in danger right this minute,' Dan said, although he could still feel the sweat trickling down his face and though his heart was racing and though his stomach was again tied in a burning knot.

'Damn it, why are you being so stubborn? Why aren't you cooperating, Lieutenant?'

Dan met his eyes. 'Remember when you pretty much accused me of selling out, turning the McCaffreys over to someone?'

'It's part of my job to be suspicious,' Seames said.

'Mine too.'

'You mean… you suspect me of being opposed to that little girl's best interests?'

'Mr. Seames, I'm sorry, but though you have the round, unlined face of a cherub, that doesn't mean you're an angel at heart.'

He left the house, went out to his car, and drove away. They didn't try to follow him, probably because they realized it would be wasted effort.

* * *

The first telephone that Dan saw was one of those artifacts whose steady disappearance seemed to symbolize the decline of modern civilization: a fully enclosed glass booth. It stood at the corner of a property occupied by an Arco service station.

By the time that he saw the booth and parked beside it, he was shaking badly, not in a panic yet but certainly within sight of one, which wasn't like him. Ordinarily he was calm, collected. The worse that things got, the faster a situation deteriorated, the cooler he became. But not this time. Perhaps it was because he couldn't get Cindy Lakey out of his mind, couldn't forget that tragic failure, or perhaps it was because the murders of his own brother and sister had been much on his mind in the past twenty-four hours, or perhaps the attraction Laura McCaffrey had for him was even far greater than he was yet willing to admit and perhaps the loss of her would be far more devastating than he could imagine. But whatever the cause of his crumbling self-control, he was becoming undeniably more frantic by the moment.

Wexlersh.

Manuello.

Why was he suddenly so frightened of them? He had never liked either of them, of course. They were originally vice officers, and word was that they had been among the most corrupt in that division, which was probably why Ross Mondale had arranged for them to transfer under his command in the East Valley; he wanted his right-hand men to be the type who would do what they were told, who wouldn't question any questionable orders, whose allegiance to him would be unshakable as long as he provided for them. Dan knew that they were Mondale's flunkies, opportunists with little or no respect for their work or for concepts like duty and public trust. But they were still cops, lousy cops, lazy cops, but not hit men like Ned Rink. Surely they posed no threat to Laura or Melanie.

And yet…

Something was wrong. Just a hunch. He couldn't explain the intensity of his sudden dread, couldn't give concrete reasons for it, but over the years he had learned to trust his hunches, and now he was scared.

In the booth, he hastily and anxiously fumbled in his pockets for coins, found them. He punched the number for California Paladin into the keypad.

His breath steamed the inner surface of the glass walls, while rain streamed down the exterior. The service station's silvery lights shimmered in the rippling film of water and were diffused through the opalescent condensation.

That curious lambent luminescence, combined with the unsettling harmonics of the storm, gave him the extraordinary sensation of being encapsulated and set adrift outside the flow of time and space. As he punched in the last digit of Paladin's number, he had the weird feeling that the booth door had closed permanently behind him, that he would not be able to force his way out of it, that he would never see or hear or touch another human being again, but would forever remain adrift in that rectangular prison in the Twilight Zone, unable to warn or to help Laura and Melanie, unable to alert Earl to the danger, unable to save even himself. Sometimes he had nightmares of being utterly helpless, powerless, paralyzed, while right before his eyes a vaguely defined but monstrous creature tortured and murdered people whom he loved; however, this was the first time that such a nightmare had attempted to seize him while he was awake.

He finished entering the number. After a few electronic beeps and clicks, a ringing came across the line.

At first even the ringing did not dispel the miasma of fear so thick it inhibited breathing. He half expected it to go on and on, without response, for everyone knew that there were no telephone lines between reality and the Twilight Zone. But after the third ring, Lonnie Beamer said, 'California Paladin.'

Dan almost gasped with relief. 'Lonnie, it's Dan Haldane again.'

'Have you regained your senses?'

'All that stuff I said… that was just for the benefit of a guy who was listening over my shoulder.'

'After you hung up, I figured it out.'

'Listen, as soon as I hang up this time, I want you to call Earl and tell him there's something fishy about all this police-protection crap.'

'What're you talking about?'

'Tell him the guys who come to his door might not really be cops and he shouldn't open up to them.'

'You aren't making sense. Of course they'll be cops.'

'Lonnie, something bad is about to go down. I don't know exactly what or why—'

'But I know I talked to Ross Mondale. I mean, I recognized his voice, but I still called him back at his office number. Just to double check who he was before I told him where Earl was keeping the McCaffreys.'

'All right,' Dan said impatiently, 'even if it's actually Wexlersh and Manuello who show up, tell Earl it stinks. Tell him I said he's in deep shit if he lets them in.'

'Listen, Dan, I can't tell him to shoot it out with a couple of cops.'

'He doesn't have to shoot it out. Just tell him not to let them in. Tell him I'm on my way. He's got to hold out until I get there. Now, what the hell's the address of this safe house?'

'It's actually an apartment,' Lonnie said. He gave Dan an address in Westwood, south of Wilshire. 'Hey, you really think they're in danger?'

'Call Earl!' Dan said.

He slammed down the receiver, threw open the steam-opaqued door of the booth, and ran to the car.

'Under arrest?' Earl repeated, blinking at Wexlersh, frowning at Manuello.

Earl looked every bit as surprised and baffled as Laura felt. She was on the sofa, with Melanie, where the detectives had indicated that they wanted her to remain when they had first come into the room. She felt terribly vulnerable and wondered why she should feel vulnerable when they were only policemen who said they were there to help her. She had seen their identification, and Earl apparently had met them before (although he didn't seem to know them well), so there was every indication that they were what they claimed to be. Yet dark buds of doubt and fear began to flower, and she sensed that something was not right about this, not right at all.

She didn't like the looks of these two cops, either. Manuello had mean eyes, a superior smirk. He moved with a macho swagger, as if waiting for his authority to be questioned so he could kick and stomp someone. Wexlersh, with his waxy white skin and flat gray eyes, gave her chills.

She said, 'What's going on? Mr. Benton is working for me. I hired his company.' And then she had a crazy thought that she voiced at once: 'My God, you didn't think he was holding us here against our will, did you?'

Ignoring her, speaking to Earl Benton, Detective Manuello said, 'You carrying any iron?'

'Sure, but I have a permit,' Earl said.

'Let me have it.'

'The permit?'

'The piece.'

'You want my weapon?'

'Now.'

Drawing his own revolver, Wexlersh said, 'Be real careful when you hand it over.'

Clearly astonished by Wexlersh's tone and suspicion, Earl said, 'You think I'm dangerous, for Christ's sake?'

'Just be careful,' Wexlersh said coldly.

Handing his gun to Manuello, Earl said, 'Why would I draw down on a cop?'

As Manuello stuck the pistol in the waistband of his trousers, the telephone rang.

Laura started to get up, and Manuello said, 'Let it ring.'

'But—'

'Let it ring!' Manuello repeated sharply.

The phone rang again.

A dark stain of worry appeared on Earl's face and grew darker even as Laura watched.

The phone rang, rang, and everyone seemed transfixed by the sound.

Earl said, 'Hey, listen, there's been a serious mistake here.

The phone rang.

Dan had clipped the detachable emergency beacon to the edge of the sedan's roof. Although the car was unmarked, there was a siren too, and he used it and the flashing beacon to command the roadway ahead. Traffic pulled obediently out of his path. Considering the weather, he drove with too little regard for his own safety and for that of everyone else on the streets, plunging toward Westwood with uncharacteristic recklessness.

If someone had corrupted Ross Mondale — and that possibility was far from unthinkable — and had arranged for him to betray Melanie, Mondale would have had no difficulty whatsoever persuading Wexlersh and Manuello to cooperate in the scheme. They could go to the safe house, gain admission with their police ID, and take the child. They would probably have to kill Laura and Earl to cover up the treachery, but the more Dan thought about it, the more certain he became that they wouldn't have any qualms about murder if they stood to gain enough from it. And they weren't taking much of a risk because they could always say that they'd found the bodies when they arrived and that the child had already been missing when they got there.

He came to a place where the street passed beneath a freeway, and the depression in the pavement at the underpass was flooded, barring further progress. One car was stuck out in the middle of the whirling torrent, with water halfway up its doors, and several other vehicles were halted at the edge of the flood zone. A truck from the city's department of streets had just arrived. Workers in reflective orange safety vests were setting up a pump and erecting barriers and starting to get traffic turned away and redirected, but for a minute or more Dan was caught in the jam-up, in spite of the flashing beacon on the roof of his sedan.

As he sat there, furious, cursing, blocked in by a car in front and a truck behind, rain drummed a monotonous rhythm on the roof and hood. The beat of each drop was like the tick of a precious second cast off by a clock, time raining away, valuable minutes streaming over him and pouring down the gutters.

* * *

The phone rang ten times, and each ring increased the tension in the room.

Earl knew something was wrong, but he couldn't quite figure it out. He had met Wexlersh and Manuello before, and he'd heard stories about them, so he knew that they weren't two of the sharpest men on the city's payroll. They could be expected to make mistakes. And this was surely a mistake. Lonnie Beamer had said they were coming to put Laura and Melanie under police protection: he'd said nothing about a warrant for Earl's arrest, and there couldn't be a warrant because Earl hadn't done anything illegal. From what Earl had heard of Wexlersh and Manuello, it would be like them to screw up, to come charging in here misinformed, confused, operating under the gross misapprehension that they had not merely been sent to protect the McCaffreys but to arrest him as well.

But why wouldn't they answer the telephone? The call might be — probably was — for them. He couldn't figure it. The phone finally stopped ringing. Briefly, the silence seemed as absolute as that in a vacuum. Then Earl again became aware of the pounding of rain on the roof and in the courtyard.

To his partner, Wexlersh said, 'Cuff him.'

Earl said, 'What the hell is this? You still haven't told me what I'm being arrested for?'

As Manuello produced a pair of flexible and disposable plastic handcuffs from one of his jacket pockets, Wexlersh said, 'We'll read the charges when we get you to the stationhouse.'

They both seemed nervous, eager to get this over with. Why were they in such a hurry?

* * *

Dan swung hard off Wilshire Boulevard, onto Westwood Boulevard, heading south. He passed through a foot-deep puddle, and on both sides water plumed up as if vaguely phosphorescent wings had suddenly sprouted from the car.

As he squinted through the rain-smeared windshield, the wet black pavement appeared to roll and squirm under the scintillant reflections of streetlights and neon signs. His eyes, already weary and burning, began to sting even worse. His battered head throbbed, but there was another pain as well, an inner pain that grew from unwanted thoughts of failure, from unwelcome and unavoidable premonitions of death and despair.

* * *

Holding the plastic handcuffs, Manuello came toward Earl and said, 'Turn around and put your hands together behind your back.'

Earl hesitated. He looked at Laura and Melanie. He looked at Wexlersh, holding the Smith & Wesson Police Special. These guys were cops, but Earl suddenly was not sure he should have done what they told him to, wasn't sure that he should have given up his gun, and he damned sure didn't like being handcuffed.

'Are you going to resist arrest?' Manuello demanded.

Wexlersh said, 'Yeah, Benton, for Christ's sake, you realize resisting arrest will be the end of your PI license?'

Reluctantly, Earl turned and put his hands behind his back. 'Aren't you going to read me my rights?'

'Plenty of time for that in the car,' Manuello said as he slipped the plastic handcuffs around Earl's wrists and drew them tight.

To Laura and Melanie, Wexlersh said, 'Better get your coats.'

Earl said, 'What about my coat? You should have let me put it on before you cuffed me.'

'You'll manage without your coat,' Wexlersh said.

'It's raining out there.'

'You won't melt,' Manuello said.

The phone began to ring again.

As before, the detectives ignored it.

* * *

The siren failed.

Dan tapped the control switch with his foot, clicked it on and off and on again, but the siren refused to come back to life. He was left with only the flashing red emergency beacon and his horn to get him through the rain-slowed traffic.

He was going to be too late. Again. As with Cindy Lakey. Too late. Whipping and weaving from lane to lane, cutting dangerously in and out of traffic, blasting the horn, he was increasingly sure that they were dead, all dead, that he had lost a friend, and the innocent child he had hoped to protect, and the woman whose impact on him — admit it — had been somewhere in the hundred-megaton range. All dead.

* * *

Laura picked up Melanie's coat and dressed her first. It was a slower procedure than it might have been because the girl didn't help at all.

Manuello said, 'What is she — a retard or something?'

Astonished and angry, Laura said, 'I can't believe you actually said that.'

'Well, she don't act normal,' Manuello said.

'Oh, don't she?' Laura said scathingly. 'Jesus. She's a very sick little girl. What's your excuse?'

While Laura got Melanie into the coat, Earl was directed to sit on the sofa. He perched on the edge. His arms were cuffed behind him.

When Laura finished buttoning her daughter's raincoat, she picked up her own coat.

Wexlersh said, 'Never mind that. You sit there on the sofa beside Benton.'

'But—'

'Sit!' Wexlersh said, pointing at the sofa with his gun.

His ice-gray eyes were unreadable.

Or maybe Laura simply didn't want to read what was evident in them.

She looked at Detective Manuello. He was smirking.

Turning to Earl for guidance, Laura saw that he looked more uneasy than ever.

'Sit,' Wexlersh repeated, not stressing the word this time, almost speaking in a whisper, yet somehow conveying more authority — and a greater potential for violence — with that soft tone than he had when he'd spoken more harshly.

Laura's stomach clenched and twisted. A sickening wave of dread swept through her.

When Laura sat down, Wexlersh went to Melanie, took the girl by the hand, and led her away from the sofa, brought her to where he had been standing, and kept her between himself and Manuello.

'No,' Laura said miserably, but the two detectives ignored her.

Looking at Wexlersh, Manuello said, 'Now?'

'Now,' Wexlersh said.

Manuello reached under his coat and brought out a pistol. It wasn't the weapon that he had taken off Earl, and Laura didn't think that it was the detective's own service weapon either, because she was pretty sure policemen usually used revolvers. That was what Wexlersh was holding: a revolver. The moment she saw the new pistol in Manuello's hand, she had a sharper sense that something was amiss.

Then Manuello took a burnished metal tube from his coat pocket and began to screw it onto the barrel of the pistol. It was a silencer.

Earl said, 'What the hell are you doing?'

Neither Wexlersh nor Manuello answered him.

'Jesus Christ!' Earl said in shock and horror as a sudden and unacceptable realization dawned upon him.

'No shouting,' Wexlersh said. 'No screaming.'

Earl thrust off the sofa, to his feet, uselessly struggling to free himself of the handcuffs.

Wexlersh rushed at him, clubbed him with the revolver, once on the shoulder, once alongside the face.

Earl fell backward onto the sofa.

Manuello had gotten the threads of the silencer misaligned with those that had been machined into the barrel of the pistol, and he had to unscrew it and try again.

Still looming over Earl, Wexlersh looked at his partner and said, 'Will you hurry up?'

'I'm trying, I'm trying,' Manuello said, wrestling with the stubborn attachment to the pistol.

'You crazy bastards are going to kill us,' Earl said through split and bleeding lips.

When Laura heard their fate put into blunt words, she wasn't surprised. She realized that she had known, if only subconsciously, what was coming, had sensed it when the detectives had first entered the room, had felt it even more strongly when they had handcuffed Earl, and had been convinced of it when Wexlersh had taken Melanie away from her, but hadn't wanted to accept the truth.

Manuello had misthreaded the silencer again. 'This thing's a piece of shit.'

'It'll fit if you start it right,' Wexlersh said.

Laura understood that they didn't want to use their own revolvers for fear the murders would be traced to them. And they didn't want to fire the pistol without a silencer, if they could avoid it, because the gunshots would bring neighbors to windows in other apartments, and then someone would see them leaving with Melanie.

Melanie. She was standing near Manuello, whimpering. Her eyes were closed, her head bowed, and she was making small, lost, pathetic sounds. Did she know what was about to happen in this room, that her mother was about to die, or was she whimpering about something else, something in her private inner fantasy world?

In a tone that was part disbelief but mostly rage, Earl said, 'You're cops, for God's sake.'

Wexlersh said, 'You just sit there and be quiet.'

Laura's gaze had settled on a heavy glass ashtray on the coffee table. If she grabbed it, threw it at Wexlersh, and managed to hit him in the head, it might knock him unconscious or cause him to drop his gun, and if he dropped his gun, she might be able to reach it before either he or Manuello could react. But she needed a diversion. She was desperately trying to think of something to distract Wexlersh when Earl evidently decided they had nothing to lose by resisting; he distracted both detectives at exactly the right moment.

As Manuello continued to struggle with the poorly fitted silencer, Earl looked at Wexlersh and said, 'No matter what we do, no matter how loud we scream, you're not going to use your own gun or mine.' Then, shouting for help at the top of his voice, Earl launched himself up toward Wexlersh, using his head as a ram.

Wexlersh stumbled back two steps as Earl butted him in the stomach. But the detective didn't fall. In fact, he struck down with the gun, clubbing the bodyguard to the floor, putting an abrupt end to the attack and to the shouting.

In the brief confusion, Laura snatched up the ashtray even as Wexlersh struck Earl. Manuello saw her and said, 'Hey,' just as she heaved the object at Wexlersh, which was sufficient warning for the detective, who ducked and let the ashtray sail past him. It thudded into the wall, thumped to the floor.

Wexlersh pointed his service revolver straight at Laura, and within the muzzle was the deepest blackness that she had ever seen. 'Listen, you bitch, if you don't sit down right now and keep your trap shut, we'll make this a lot harder on you than it has to be.'

Melanie was mewling softly now, in increasing distress. Her head was still bowed, her eyes closed, but her mouth was open and slack as the pitiful sounds issued from her.

Flopping onto his back, pulling himself up against the sofa, streaming blood from a scalp wound, Earl glared at Wexlersh. 'Yeah? Is that so? Make it harder on us, huh? What the hell could be worse than what you're already planning to do?'

Wexlersh smiled. It was a singularly unsettling expression on his bloodless lips and moon-pale face. 'We could tape your mouth shut and torture you for a while. Then torture this bitch here.'

Shuddering, Laura looked away from his gray eyes.

The room seemed cold, colder than it had been.

'She's a nice piece of ass,' Manuello observed.

'Yeah, we could screw her,' Wexlersh said.

'Screw the kid too,' Manuello said.

'Yeah,' Wexlersh said, still smiling. 'That's right. We could screw the kid.'

'Even though she is a retard,' Manuello said, then cursed the pistol and silencer that wouldn't fit together properly.

Wexlersh said, 'So if you don't just sit there quiet like, we'll tape your mouths shut and screw the kid right in front of you — and then kill you, anyway.'

Gagging, choking down the vomit that rose into her throat, Laura settled back on the sofa, subdued by this crudest of all threats.

Earl had been silenced too.

'Good,' Wexlersh said, massaging his stomach with one hand, where Earl had butted him. 'Much better.'

Melanie's mewling had grown louder and was punctuated with a few words—'open… door… open… no'—and with deep, quaverous gasps.

'Shut up, kid,' Wexlersh said, lightly slapping her face.

Her whimpering subsided, but she wasn't silenced altogether.

Laura wanted to go to the girl, hug her, hold her close, but for her own sake, and Melanie's, she had to stay where she was.

The room was definitely cold and getting colder.

Laura remembered how the kitchen had grown frigid just before the radio had come to life. And again just before the wind-thing had thrown open the door and surged in from the darkness….

Wexlersh said, 'Don't they have heat in this damned place?'

'There!' Manuello said, finally screwing the silencer onto the barrel of the gun.

Colder…

Holstering his own revolver now that his partner was at last ready to do the deed, grabbing Melanie by one arm and pulling her out of the way, Wexlersh edged backward toward the front door of the apartment.

Colder…

Laura was electrified, charged with tension and anticipation. Something was about to happen. Something strange. Manuello stepped closer to Earl, who regarded him with more contempt than terror.

The temperature of the room plunged precipitously now, and behind Wexlersh and Melanie the apartment door flew open with a crash—

But nothing supernatural burst into the room. It was Dan Haldane. He came through the door fast, even as he opened it. He took in the situation with remarkable alacrity and jammed his revolver into Wexlersh's back as that detective was starting to swing toward the door.

Manuello spun around, but Haldane said, 'Drop it! Drop it, you bastard, or I'll blow you away.'

Manuello hesitated, probably not because he was worried about his partner getting killed, but because it was clear that Wexlersh's body would stop the first bullet meant for Dan, and because it was equally clear that Manuello wouldn't have a chance to fire twice before Dan took his head off. He glanced at Melanie too, as though calculating the chances of leaping toward her, grabbing her. But when Dan shouted at him again—'Drop it!'—Manuello finally conceded the game and let the silencer-equipped pistol fall to the floor.

'He's got Earl's gun,' Laura warned Dan.

'And his own service revolver too,' Earl said.

Keeping a grip on Wexlersh's coat, the revolver still jammed hard in the man's back, Dan said, 'Okay, Manuello, get rid of the other two pieces, slow and easy. No funny stuff.'

One at a time, Manuello rid himself of the weapons, then backed across the room and stood against the wall, as Dan directed.

Laura came forth to gather up the three firearms while Dan relieved Wexlersh of his service revolver.

'Why the hell is it so cold in here?' Dan asked.

But even as he voiced the question, the air grew warm again as swiftly as it had turned frigid.

Something almost happened, Laura thought. Something like what happened in the kitchen at our house earlier. But she didn't think that they had been about to get just another warning. Not this time. No, this would have been worse. She had the unsettling feeling that It had been within seconds of making an appearance.

Dan was looking at her strangely, as if he knew that she had an answer for him.

But she couldn't speak. She didn't know how to put it into words that would make any sense at all to him. She knew only that, if It had come, the slaughter here would have been far worse than any that the two corrupt detectives had been planning. If It had come, would they all have wound up like the battered, torn, and mangled bodies in the house in Studio City?

In the emergency room at UCLA Medical Center, Earl was admitted for immediate treatment of his scalp wound and split lips.

Laura and Melanie waited in the lounge adjacent to the emergency admitting desk while Dan went to the nearest pay phone. He called the East Valley Division number and got Ross Mondale's extension.

'Working late, aren't you, Ross?'

'Haldane?'

'Didn't know you were so industrious.'

'What do you want, Haldane?'

'World peace would be nice.'

'I'm not in the mood for—'

'But I guess I'd settle for a solution to this case.'

'Listen, Haldane, I'm busy here, and I—'

'You're going to be even busier, 'cause you're going to have to spend a lot of time thinking up alibis.'

'What're you talking about?'

'Wexlersh and Manuello.'

Mondale was silent.

Dan said, 'Why'd you send them down to Westwood, Ross?'

'I guess you didn't know, but I've decided to provide police protection for the McCaffreys.'

'Even with the current manpower shortage?'

'Well, considering the Scaldone killing tonight and the extreme violence of these crimes, it seemed prudent to—'

'Stuff a sock in it, you son of a bitch.'

'What?'

'I know they were going to kill Earl and Laura—'

'What are you talking about?'

'—and snatch Melanie—'

'Have you been drinking, Haldane?'

'—and then go back later and report that Earl and Laura were already dead when they got there.'

'Am I supposed to be making sense out of this?'

'Your confusion almost sounds genuine.'

'These are serious accusations, Haldane.'

'Oh, you're so smooth, Ross.'

'These are fellow officers we're talking about here. They—'

'Who'd you sell out to, Ross?'

'Haldane, I advise you—'

'And what did you get for selling out? That's the big question. Listen, listen, hold on a sec, bear with me, let me theorize a bit, okay? You wouldn't have sold out just for money. You wouldn't put your entire career on the line just for money. Not unless it was a couple of million, and nobody would've paid that kind of dough for a job like this. Twenty-five thousand. Tops. Probably fifteen. That's more like it. Now, I can believe Wexlersh and Manuello would have done it for that kind of money, maybe even less, but neither of them would've whacked Earl and Laura without your approval, without a guarantee of your protection. So I'd say they got the money, and you got something else. Now what could that something else be, Ross? You'd sell out for power, for a really important promotion maybe, for a guarantee of the chief's post and maybe even for a mayoral nomination. So whoever bought you is somebody who controls political machinery. Am I getting warm, Ross? Did you trade Laura and Melanie McCaffrey for those kinds of promises?'

Mondale was silent.

'Did you, Ross?'

'This sounds worse than drunk, Dan. This is spacey. Are you on drugs, or what?'

'Did you, Ross?'

'Where are you, Dan?'

Dan ignored the question. He said, 'Manuello and Wexlersh are at that apartment in Westwood right now, gagged and hog-tied, one on the commode and the other in the bathtub. I'd have flushed them both down the drain if they'd have fit.'

'You are high on something, by God!'

'Give it a rest, Ross. Paladin is sending a couple of men over there to baby-sit your boys, and I've already called a reporter at the Times and another one at the Journal. Called the division over there, too, told them who I was, told them there'd been an attempted murder, so they've got uniforms on the way. It's going to be a circus.'

After another silence, Mondale said, 'Is Mrs. McCaffrey going to give a statement accusing Wexlersh and Manuello of attempted murder?'

'Beginning to worry, Ross?'

'They're my officers,' Mondale said. 'My responsibility. If they've actually done what you say, then I want to be absolutely sure they're eventually indicted and convicted, and I don't want any damned rotten apples in my barrel. I don't believe in covering up for my men out of some misguided sense of police brotherhood.'

'What's the matter, Ross? Do you think I'm recording this call? You think someone's listening in? Well, there's no one listening, no tape, so you can drop the act.'

'I don't understand your attitude, Dan.'

'Nobody does.'

'I don't know why you suspect me of being involved.' He was a lousy actor; his insincerity was as obvious as a lisp or a stutter. 'And you haven't answered my question. Is Mrs. McCaffrey going to give a statement accusing Wexlersh and Manuello of attempted murder, or isn't she?'

Dan said, 'Not tonight. I've taken Laura and Melanie away from there, and I'm keeping them with me, well hidden, for the duration. I know you're disappointed to hear that. They'd have sure made easy targets for a sniper if they'd hung around, wouldn't they? But I'm not telling anyone where they are. I'm not letting them meet with any cops from any division, either to give a statement or to identify Wexlersh and Manuello in a lineup. I don't trust anyone anymore.'

'You're not talking like a responsible cop, Dan.'

'I'm such an imp.'

'For God's sake, you can't take personal responsibility for the McCaffreys.'

'Just watch me.'

'If they need protection, you've got to arrange it through the department, which is what I thought I was doing when I sent Wexlersh and Manuello over there. You can't handle this by yourself. Good heavens, these people aren't your own family, you know. You can't just take charge of them as if it's your legal right or something.'

'If they want me to, I can. They aren't my family — you're right — but just the same… I've got something at stake here.'

'What're you talking about?'

'You said it yourself, at the Sign of the Pentagram tonight. This isn't an ordinary case for me. That's why I'm holding on so tight. I'm attracted to Laura. And I pity the girl. What I feel for them is stronger than anything I've ever felt for other victims, so you keep that in mind, Ross.'

'Right there's reason enough to disassociate yourself from this case. You're no longer an objective officer of the law.'

'Fuck you.'

'This explains why you're so hostile, hysterical, filled with all these paranoid conspiracy theories.'

'It's not paranoia. It's real, and you know it.'

'I understand now. You're distraught.'

'I'm just warning you, Ross — back off. That's why I even bothered calling you. Those two words: back off.' Mondale said nothing, so Dan said, 'This woman and this child are important to me.'

Mondale breathed softly into the phone but made no promises.

Dan said, 'I swear to God I'll destroy anyone who tries to hurt them. Anyone.'

Silence.

Dan said, 'You may be able to keep Wexlersh and Manuello quiet. You might even find a way to have the charges dropped and the whole thing covered up. But if you keep coming after the McCaffreys, I'll find a way to break your ass. I swear it, Ross.'

At last Mondale spoke, but not to the point, as if he had heard none of Dan's warning. 'Well, if you won't let Mrs. McCaffrey make a statement, then Wexlersh and Manuello can't be arrested.'

'Oh, yes. Earl Benton can make the statement. He was pistol-whipped. By Wexlersh. Earl's at a hospital, getting patched up.'

'Which hospital?'

'Get serious, Ross.'

Finally, out of frustration, Mondale showed a little of what he was really feeling. The dam didn't break, but a hairline crack appeared in it: 'You bastard. I'm sick of you, sick of you and your threats, sick to death of having you hanging over me like a goddamned sword.'

'That's good. Get it out, Ross. Get it off your chest.'

Mondale was silent again.

Dan said, 'Anyway, if Earl's released from the hospital, he's going back to that apartment to talk with the uniforms who answered my call, give them a statement, see to it that Wexlersh and Manuello are booked on charges of assault and battery plus assault with intent to kill.'

Mondale had control of himself now. He wouldn't lose it again.

Dan said, 'And if the doctors want to hold him overnight for observation, then police from this division will be coming here for his statement. Either way, Wexlersh and Manuello aren't going to skip out on this one… unless you work your buns off to slip them free of the hook. Which I figure you'll have to do in order to keep them quiet.'

No response. Just heavy breathing.

'When and if you finally smooth it over, Ross, you might be able to convince Chief Kelsey that you and Wexlersh and Manuello weren't involved in a plot to snatch the girl and kill her mother, but the press will still figure something was going on, and they'll never quite trust you again. Reporters will always be sniffing around you for the rest of your career, waiting for you to put a foot wrong.'

Silence.

'You hear what I'm saying, Ross?'

Silence.

'At best, you'll hold on to your captain's bars, but you won't be on the mayor's short list for chief. Not anymore. Now, see, this is a warning, Ross. This is why I called you. Listen close. Listen good. If you keep coming after the McCaffreys, you'll be completely ruined. I'll see to it. I'll personally guarantee it. You're half ruined now, but if you keep coming after them, you won't even remain a captain. I'll bring you down all the way. No matter who put you up to this, no matter how powerful and influential he is, he won't be able to save your ass if you try to touch the McCaffreys again. He won't be able to save you from me. You get the picture?'

Silence. But it was a silence with an emotional quality now, and the emotion it radiated was hatred.

Dan said, 'I still have to worry about the FBI, and I have to worry about whoever was financing Dylan McCaffrey and Willy Hoffritz, because somebody out there wants that little girl real bad, but I'll be damned if I'm going to keep worrying about you, Ross. Tonight, you're going to relinquish your place on the special task force and hand the whole case over to someone else until you've cleared up this cloud of suspicion hanging over Wexlersh and Manuello. Understand? I'm not suggesting this, Ross. I'm telling you.'

'You shithead.'

'Sticks and stones. Listen good — if you don't say what I want to hear, Ross, I'm going to hang up, and when I hang up, it's too late for you to change your mind.'

Silence.

'Well… good-bye, Ross.'

'Wait.'

'Sorry, got to go.'

All right, all right. I agree.

'What?'

'What you said.'

'Make it plainer.'

'I'll take myself off the case.'

'Very wise.'

'I'll even take a week of sick leave.'

'Ahhh, not feeling well?'

Mondale said, 'I'll get out of this, walk away from it, but I want something from you.'

'What?'

'I don't want Benton or you or the McCaffreys giving any statements about Wexlersh and Manuello.'

'Fat chance.'

'I mean it.'

'Nonsense. The only way we have a hold on you is if we get those two creeps booked for attempted murder.'

'Okay. Let Benton give his statement. But in a couple days, when you feel the McCaffreys are safe, then Benton retracts his accusations.'

'He'd look like a fool.'

'No, no. He can say someone else beat him up and that he took a bad knock on the head, he was confused and he mistakenly accused Wexlersh and Manuello. In a couple days, he can say his head cleared and then he remembered what really happened. He can say it was some other bum who beat on him and that Wexlersh and Manuello actually saved his ass.'

'You're in no position to demand anything from me, Ross.'

'Goddammit, if you don't give me an out, a glimpse of light, then I don't have any reason for playing along with you.'

'Maybe. But if we're bargaining, then I want something else too. I want the name of the man who got to you, Ross.'

'No'.

'Who wants the girl, Ross? Tell me, and we've got a deal.'

'No.'

'Who convinced you to use Wexlersh and Manuello this way?'

'Impossible. I tell you, and I'm really finished. I'm dog meat. I'd rather go down now, fighting, than rat on anybody and maybe wind up like those bodies in Studio City — or worse. I give you the McCaffreys, and after a few days, you give me Wexlersh and Manuello. That's the deal.'

'You've got to at least tell me if he's the one who financed the work in that gray room.'

'I think so.'

'Is he government?'

'Maybe.'

'You have to do better.'

'I just don't know. He's the kind of guy who could be a conduit for the government, or maybe he financed it himself.'

'Rich?'

'I'm not giving you his name, and I'm not giving you so many details you could guess his name. Hell, I'd be signing my own death warrant.'

Dan thought a moment. Then: 'He say anything about what they were trying to prove in that gray room?'

'No.'

'This guy, this one who got to you, this one who financed that crazy research… is he doing the killing, Ross?'

Silence.

'Is he, Ross? Come on. Don't be afraid to talk. You've already said too much. I'm not insisting on his name, but I've got to have an answer to this one. Is he responsible for Scaldone and those bodies in Studio City?'

'No, no. Just the opposite. He's scared that he's going to be the next target.'

'Well, who's he afraid of?'

'I don't think it's a who.'

'What?'

'This is crazy… but the way these people talk, they're so scared you'd think it was Dracula who was after them. I mean, from things I've heard, I somehow get the idea it's not a person they're afraid of. It's a thing. Some thing is killing everyone connected with the gray room. I know that sounds like horseshit, but it's the feeling I get. Now, damn it, do we have a deal or not? I back out of this, give you the McCaffreys, and you give me Wexlersh and Manuello. Is that agreeable?'

Dan pretended to think about it. Then: 'Okay.'

'We got a deal?'

'Yeah.'

Mondale laughed nervously. His laughter had a filthy edge to it, as well. 'You realize what this means, Haldane?'

'What's it mean?'

'You make a deal like this, you drop charges against men you believe to have intended murder… well, then you're just as dirty as anybody.'

'Not as dirty as you. I could float in a sewer for a month and eat whatever drifted by, and I still wouldn't be half as dirty as you, Ross.'

He hung up. He had eliminated one threat. No one would be using police badges to get close to Melanie. They still had an army of enemies, but now there was one less variety of them.

And the beauty of it was that he had not given up anything in return for Ross Mondale's retreat, had not even slightly dirtied his hands, because he didn't intend to uphold his end of the bargain. He would never ask Earl to withdraw his accusations against Wexlersh and Manuello. In fact, when the case was finally broken and it was safe for Laura and Melanie to appear in public, Dan would encourage them to testify, as well, against the two detectives, and he would add his own testimony to the record. Manuello and Wexlersh were finished — and by extension, so was Ross Mondale.

At twenty-five past midnight, the hospital released Earl Benton.

Laura was shocked by the bodyguard's battered appearance even after the blood had been cleaned off his face. On the side of his head, doctors had shaved a spot half as large as the palm of a hand and had closed the wound with seven sutures. Now it was covered with a bandage. His lips were purple and swollen. His mouth was distorted. One eye was black. He looked as if he'd had a close encounter with a truck.

His appearance affected Melanie. The girl's eyes cleared. She seemed to swim up from her trance to peer more closely at him, as if she were a fish rising to the surface of a lake to examine a curious creature standing on the shore.

'Ahhh,' she said sadly.

She seemed to want to say something more to Earl, so he leaned toward her.

She touched his battered face with one hand, and her gaze moved slowly from his bruised chin to his split lips, to his black eye, to the bandage on his head. As she studied him, she chewed worriedly on her lower lip. Her eyes filled with tears. She tried to speak, but no sound came from her.

'What is it, Melanie?' Earl asked.

Laura stooped beside her daughter and put one arm around her. 'What're you trying to tell him, honey? Think one word at a time. Take it nice and slow. You can get it out. You can do it, baby.'

Dan, the doctor who had treated Earl, and a young Latino nurse were watching attentively, expectantly.

The child's tear-blurred gaze continued to move over Earl's face, from one battle scar to another, and at last she said, 'For m-m-me.'

'Yes,' Laura said. 'That's right, baby. Earl was fighting for you. He risked his life for you.'

'For me,' Melanie repeated with awe, as if being loved and protected was an entirely new and amazing concept to her. Excited by this crack in Melanie's autistic armor, hoping to widen it or even shatter the armor completely, Laura said, 'We're all fighting for you, baby. We want to help. We will help you, if you'll let us.'

'For me,' Melanie said again, but she would say no more. Although Laura and Earl continued to coax her, Melanie did not speak again. Her tears dried, and she lowered her hand from Earl's injured face, and that faraway look returned to her eyes. She bowed her head, weary.

Laura was disappointed but not despairing. At least the child seemed to want to come back from her dark and private place, and if she had a strong desire to recover, she would probably do so, sooner or later.

The emergency-room physician suggested that Earl stay overnight for observation, but in spite of the drubbing that he had taken, Earl resisted. He wanted to return to the safe house and make a statement to the police, thereby pounding a few nails into a tandem coffin for Wexlersh and Manuello.

They had all come to the hospital in Dan's car, but now Dan didn't want to go back to the safe house. He didn't want Laura and Melanie to be near any other cops, so they called a taxi for Earl.

'Don't wait with me,' Earl said. 'You guys get out of here.'

'We might as well wait,' Dan said, 'because we've got a few things to talk over anyway.'

Without discussing it, they grouped around Melanie, shielding her. They stood just inside the front entrance of the medical center, where they could see the rain-lashed night and the place where the taxi would pull up. Half the fluorescent lights in the lobby were switched off, for it was well after visiting hours, and the other half cast fuzzy bars of cold, unpleasant light across the large room. The air smelled vaguely of rose-scented disinfectant. Except for the four of them, the place was deserted.

'You want Paladin to send someone out here to take over from me?' Earl asked.

'No,' Dan said.

'Didn't think you would.'

'Paladin's damned good,' Dan said, 'and I've never had reason to doubt their integrity, and I still don't have reason—'

'But, in this particular case, you don't trust anyone at Paladin any more than you trust anyone on the police force,' Earl said.

'Except you,' Laura said. 'We know we can trust you, Earl. Without you, Melanie and I would be dead.'

'Don't credit me with anything heroic,' Earl said. 'I was plain stupid. I opened the door to Manuello.'

'But you had no way of knowing—'

'But I opened the door,' Earl said, and the expression of self-disgust on his face was unmistakable in spite of the way his injuries distorted his features.

Laura could see why Dan and Earl were friends. They shared a devotion to their work, a strong sense of duty, and a tendency to be excessively self-critical. Those were qualities seldom found in a world that seemed daily to put more stock in cynicism, selfishness, and self-indulgence.

To Earl, Dan said, 'I'll find a motel, get a room, and hole up there with Laura and Melanie the rest of the night. I thought of taking them back to my place, but someone might be expecting me to do just that.'

'And tomorrow?' Earl asked.

'There're several people I want to see—'

'Can I help?'

'If you feel up to it when you get out of bed in the morning.'

'I'll feel up to it,' Earl assured him.

Dan said, 'There's a woman named Mary Katherine O'Hara, in Burbank. She's secretary of an organization called Freedom Now.' He gave Earl the address and outlined the information he wanted from O'Hara. 'I also need to find out about a company called John Wilkes Enterprises. Who are its officers, majority stockholders?'

'Is it a California corporation?' Earl asked.

'Most likely,' Dan said. 'I need to know when the incorporation papers were filed, by whom, what business they're supposed to be in.'

'How's this John Wilkes outfit come into it?' Earl asked, which was something Laura wondered about too.

'It'll take a while to explain,' Dan said. 'I'll tell you about it tomorrow. Let's get together for a late lunch, say one o'clock, and try to make something out of the information we've gathered.'

'Yeah, I should have dug up what you want by then,' Earl said. He suggested a coffee shop in Van Nuys because, he said, it was a place in which he had never seen anyone from Paladin.

'It's not a cop hangout, either,' Dan said. 'Sounds good.'

'Here's your cab,' Laura said as headlights swept across the glass doors and briefly sparkled in the raindrops that quivered on those panes.

Earl looked down at Melanie and said, 'Well, princess, can you give me a smile before I go?'

The girl peered up at him, but Laura saw that her eyes were still strange, distant.

'I'm warning you,' Earl said, 'I'm going to hang around and bother you until you finally give me a smile.'

Melanie just stared.

To Laura, Earl said, 'Keep your chin up. Okay? It's going to work out.'

Laura nodded. 'And thanks for—'

'For nothing,' Earl said. 'I opened the door for them. I've got to make up for that. Wait until I make up for that before you start thanking me for anything.' He stepped to the lobby doors, started to push one open, then glanced back at Dan and said, 'By the way, what the hell happened to you?'

'What?' Dan asked.

'Your forehead.'

'Oh.' Dan glanced at Laura, and she could tell by his expression that he'd come by his injury while working on the case, and she could also tell that he didn't want to say as much and make her feel at all responsible. He said, 'There was this little old lady… she hit me with her cane.'

'Oh?' Earl said.

'I helped her across the street.'

'Then why would she hit you?'

'She didn't want to cross the street,' Dan said.

Earl grinned — it was a macabre expression on his battered face — pushed the door open, ran through the rain, and disappeared into the waiting taxi.

Laura zipped up Melanie's jacket. She and Dan kept the girl between them as they hurried out to his unmarked department sedan.

The air was chilly.

The rain was cold.

The darkness seemed to breathe with malevolent life.

Out there, somewhere, It waited.

* * *

The motel room had two queen-size beds with purple-and-green spreads that clashed with the garish orange-and-blue drapes that, in turn, clashed with the loud yellow-and-brown wallpaper. There was a certain kind of eye-searing decor to be found in about one-fourth of the hotels and motels in every state of the union, from Alaska to Florida, an unmistakable bizarre decor of such a particular nature that it seemed, to Dan, that the same grossly incompetent interior decorator must be traveling frantically from one end of the country to the other, papering walls and upholstering furniture and draping windows with factory-rejected patterns and materials.

The beds had mattresses that were too soft, and the furniture was scarred, but at least the place was clean. On the credit side of the ledger, the management provided a percolator and complimentary foil packets of Hills Brothers and Mocha Mix. Dan made coffee while Laura put Melanie to bed.

Although the girl had seemed to drift through the day with all the awareness of a sleepwalker, expending little energy, it was late, and she fell asleep even as her mother was tucking the covers around her.

A small table and two chairs stood by the room's only window, and Dan brought the coffee to it. He and Laura sat mostly in shadow, with one small lamp burning just inside the door. The drapes were partly open to reveal a section of the rain-swept parking lot, where ghostly bluish fight from mercury-vapor lamps made strange patterns on the glass and chrome of the cars and shimmered eerily on the wet macadam.

While Dan listened with growing amazement and disquiet, Laura told him the rest of the story that she had begun in the car: the levitating radio that seemed to broadcast a warning, the whirlwind filled with flowers that had burst through the kitchen door. She clearly found it difficult to credit these apparently supernatural events, though she had witnessed them with her own eyes.

'What do you make of it?' he asked when she had finished.

'I was hoping you could explain it to me.'

He told her about Joseph Scaldone being killed in a room where all the windows and doors had been locked from inside. 'Considering that impossibility on top of what you've told me happened at your place, I guess we've got to accept that there's something here — some power, some force that's beyond human experience. But what the hell is it?'

'Well, I've been thinking about it all evening, and it seems to me that whatever… whatever possessed that radio and carried those flowers into the kitchen is not the same thing that's killing people. In retrospect, scary as it was, the presence in my kitchen wasn't fundamentally threatening. And like I said, it seemed to be warning us that what killed Dylan and Hoffritz and the others is eventually going to come for Melanie too.'

'So we've got both good spirits and bad spirits,' Dan said.

'I guess you could think of them that way.'

'Good ghosts and bad ghosts.'

'I don't believe in ghosts,' she said.

'Neither do I. But, somehow, in their experiments in that room, your husband and Hoffritz seem to have tapped into and then unleashed occult entities, some of which are murderous and some of which are at least benign enough to issue warnings about the bad ones. And until I can think of something better… well, "ghosts" seems to be the best word for them.'

They fell silent. They sipped the last of their coffee. The rain came down hard, harder. It roared.

At the far end of the room, Melanie murmured in her sleep and shifted under the covers, then grew still and quiet again. At last Laura said, 'Ghosts. It's just… crazy.'

'Madness.'

'Insanity.'

He switched on the dim light over the table. From a jacket pocket, he withdrew the printout of the Sign of the Pentagram's mailing list. He unfolded it and put it in front of her. 'Aside from your husband, Hoffritz, Ernest Cooper, and Ned Rink, is there anyone on this list with whom you're familiar?'

She spent ten minutes scanning names and found four additional people who she knew.

'This one,' she said. 'Edwin Koliknikov. He's a professor of psychology at USC. He's a frequent recipient of Pentagon grants for research, and he helped Dylan make some connections at the Department of Defense. Koliknikov's a behaviorist with a special interest in child psychology.'

Dan figured that Koliknikov was also the 'Eddie' who had been at Regine's house in the Hollywood hills and who had, by now, taken her to Las Vegas.

She said, 'Howard Renseveer. He represents some foundation with lots of money to spend. I'm not sure which one, but I know he backed some of Hoffritz's research and talked with Dylan several times about a grant for his work. I didn't know him well, but he seemed to be a thoroughly unpleasant man, distant and arrogant.'

Dan was certain that this was the 'Howard' whom Regine had mentioned.

'This one too,' Laura said, indicating another name on the list. 'Sheldon Tolbeck. His friends call him Shelby. He's a heavyweight, a psychologist and a neurologist, who's done definitive research on various forms of dissociative behavior.'

'What's that?' Dan asked.

'Dissociative behavior? Psychological withdrawal, catatonia, autism — conditions of that sort.'

'Like Melanie.'

'Yes.'

'I've reason to believe these three men were all involved with your husband and with Hoffritz in the research being done in that damned gray room.'

She frowned. 'I could believe it of Koliknikov and Renseveer, but not Sheldon Tolbeck. His reputation is spotless.' She was still looking at the list. 'Here's another. Albert Uhlander. He's an author, writes strange—'

'I know. That box I brought in from the car is full of his books.'

'He and Dylan carried on an extensive correspondence.'

'About what?'

'Various aspects of the occult. I'm not sure exactly.'

She found no other familiar name on the long list, but she had identified every member of the conspiracy except that tall, white-haired, distinguished-looking man whom Regine knew only as 'Daddy.' Dan had a hunch that 'Daddy' was more than just a sadistic pervert, that he was more than just another member of Dylan McCaffrey's ad hoc research team, that he was the key to the entire case, the central figure behind the conspiracy.

Dan said, 'I think these men — Koliknikov, Renseveer, Tolbeck, and Uhlander — are all going to die. Soon. Something is methodically killing everyone involved with the project in that gray room, the something we're calling a "ghost" for want of a better word. It's something that they themselves unleashed but couldn't control. If I'm correct, these four men don't have much time left.'

'Then we should warn them—'

'Warn them? They're responsible for Melanie's condition.'

'Still, as much as I'd like them all punished…'

'Anyway, I think they already know something's coming for them,' Dan said. 'Eddie Koliknikov left town tonight. And the others are probably getting out too, if they're not already gone.'

She was silent a moment. Then: 'And whatever wants them… once it's gotten them… it's also coming after Melanie.'

'If we can believe the message that came through your radio.'

Melanie began to murmur again, and the murmurs quickly escalated into groans of fear. As the girl thrashed under the blankets, Laura got up and took a step toward the bed — but halted suddenly and looked around anxiously.

'What's wrong?' Dan asked.

'The air,' she said.

He felt it even as she spoke.

The air was getting colder.

The late shuttle flight from LAX landed in Las Vegas before midnight, and Regine and Eddie went straight to the Desert Inn, where they had a room reserved. They were registered and unpacked by one o'clock in the morning.

She had been to Vegas with Eddie twice before. They always registered under her name, so she never learned his name from the desk clerks or the bellmen.

One thing that she had learned was that something about Vegas was a turn-on for Eddie. Maybe it was the lights and the excitement, maybe the sight and smell and sound of money. Whatever the cause, his sexual appetite was substantially greater in Vegas than it was back in L.A. Each evening, when they went to dinner and a show, she would wear a lowcut dress that he picked out for her, and he would put her on display, but the rest of the time he made her stay in the room, so she would always be available to him when he came back from a session at the craps or blackjack tables. Two or even three times a day, he would return to the room, keyed-up, his eyes a little wild, tense but not nervous, and he would use her to work off his excess energy. Sometimes he would stop just inside the room, standing with his back against the door, unzip, make her come to him, make her get on her knees, and when he was finished, he would push her away and leave without saying a word. Sometimes he would want to do it in the shower, or on the floor, or in bed but in weird positions that ordinarily would not have interested him. In Vegas, he found greater satisfaction in sex, approached it almost fiercely, and exhibited an even more delicious cruelty than he did back in Los Angeles.

Therefore, when they got settled into their room at the Desert Inn, she expected him to jump her, but he wasn't interested tonight. He had been on edge since he'd come to her house several hours ago, and then he had relaxed a bit when their flight had taken off from LAX, but his relaxation had been short-lived. Now he seemed almost… frantic.

She knew that he was running from someone, from whomever or whatever had killed the others. But the depth and tenacity of his fear surprised her. In her experience, he was always cool, detached, superior. She hadn't thought that he was susceptible to the stronger emotions like joy and terror. If Eddie was afraid, then the threat must be truly horrendous. It didn't matter. She wasn't afraid. Even if someone learned that Eddie had gone to hide in Vegas and came all the way there to get Eddie, and even if she was in danger while with him, she would not be afraid. She had been freed from all fear. Willy had freed her.

But Eddie had not been freed, and he was so afraid that he didn't want to screw or sleep. He wanted to go downstairs to the casino and gamble for a while, but — and this was the unusual part — he wanted her to go with him. He didn't want to be alone among strangers, not even in a crowded public place like a casino.

Indirectly, he was asking her for moral and emotional support, which was something neither he nor any of his friends had ever wanted from her before, and it was something that she was not equipped to give them — not since Willy had changed her. Indeed, she could relate to Eddie only when he used her, when he was dominant and abusive. She was actually disgusted and repelled by his expression of weakness and need.

Nevertheless, at 1:15 in the morning, she accompanied him downstairs to the casino. He wanted her companionship, and she always provided what was wanted of her.

The casino was relatively busy now but would be jammed in half an hour when the showroom had emptied from the midnight performance. At the moment there were hundreds of people at the blinking-flashing-sparkling slot machines, at the semielliptical blackjack tables, and standing around the craps tables: people in suits and evening gowns; people in slacks and jeans; conscientiously rustic cowboy types standing next to people who looked as if they had just survived an explosion in a polyester factory; grandmothers and young hookers; Japanese high rollers in from Tokyo on a junket flight and a flock of secretaries from San Diego; the rich and the not-so-rich; losers and winners; more losers; a three-hundred-pound lady in a bright-yellow caftan and a matching turban, who was betting a thousand dollars a hand at blackjack, but who knew so little about the game that she was routinely splitting pairs of tens; an inebriated oilman from Houston who was betting fifty dollars a hand, every hand, for the dealer, and only twenty-five dollars a hand for himself; uniformed security guards so big that they looked as if they ate furniture for breakfast, but who were soft-spoken and unfailingly polite; blackjack and craps dealers in black slacks and white shirts and black string ties; a tuxedo-clad crew at the baccarat table; pit bosses and their assistants, all in well-tailored dark suits, all with the same sharp, quick, suspicious eyes. It was a people-watcher's paradise.

Staying at Eddie's side as he prowled restlessly around the enormous room, drifting from game to game but playing at none of them, Regine reacted to the Vegas turmoil in a way that was, for her, uncommon. A quickening of the pulse, a sudden rush of adrenaline, a strange electric crackle of excitement that made her skin tingle — all led her to believe that something big was going to happen. She didn't know what it would be, but she knew it was coming. She sensed it. Maybe she would win a lot of money. Maybe this was what people meant when they said they 'felt lucky.' She had never felt lucky before. She had never been lucky before. Maybe she wouldn't be lucky tonight, either, but she sensed that something was going to happen. Something big. And soon.

* * *

The air in the motel room grew colder.

Though apparently still asleep, Melanie writhed and kicked her legs beneath the covers. She gasped and whimpered softly and said, 'The… door… the door…'

Dan went to the door, checked the lock, because the girl seemed to sense that something was coming.

'… keep it shut!'

The door was locked. The air temperature dropped even lower.

Softly but urgently: 'Don't… don't… don't let it out!'

In, Laura thought. She should be afraid of it getting in.

Melanie thrashed, gasped, shuddered violently, but didn't wake.

Oppressed by a feeling of utter helplessness, Laura surveyed the small room, wondering which inanimate objects, like the radio in her kitchen, might abruptly come to life.

Dan Haldane had drawn his revolver.

Laura turned, expecting the window to explode, expecting the door to burst into splinters, expecting the chairs or the television to be infused with sudden malevolent life.

Dan stayed near the door, as if anticipating trouble from that quarter.

But then, as abruptly as the disturbance had begun, it ended. The air grew warm again. Melanie stopped whimpering and gasping, ceased speaking. She was also utterly motionless on the bed, and her breathing was unusually slow and deep.

'What happened?' Dan asked.

Laura said, 'I don't know.'

The room was now as warm as it had been before the disturbance.

'Is it over?' Dan asked.

'I don't know.'

Melanie was death-pale.

* * *

Because she was wearing a dress that bared her shoulders, Regine felt the change in the air before Eddie did. They were standing at a craps table, watching the action, and Eddie was deciding whether or not to put a bet down and go with the shooter. People were crowding in on every side, and the casino was warm, so warm that Regine wished that she had something with which to fan herself. Then, abruptly, there was a change of atmosphere. Regine shivered and saw gooseflesh on her arms. For an instant she thought that the management had overreacted to the heat and had turned the air conditioning too high, but then she realized that the temperature had plummeted too quickly and too steeply to be explained merely by the air conditioning.

A couple other women noticed the change, and then Eddie became aware of it, and the effect on him was astonishing. He turned from the craps table, hugging himself, shaking, a look of horror on his face. His skin was bloodless alabaster, and his eyes were bleak. He looked wildly left and right, then pushed through the crowd that had formed around the table, shoving and elbowing toward the broad aisle between rows of gaming tables, moving away from Regine, a desperate jerkiness to his movements.

'Eddie?' she called after him.

He didn't glance back.

'Eddie!'

It was bitterly cold now, at least immediately around the craps tables, and people were commenting on this sudden and inexplicable frigidity.

Regine pushed through the crowd, following Eddie. He shouldered into the main aisle and reached a clear space. He was turning in a circle, his arms raised, as if expecting to be attacked and preparing to ward off the assailant. But no assailant was in sight, and Regine wondered if he had cracked up or something. She continued to make her way toward him, and now she saw that a security guard had noticed Eddie's strange behavior and was heading in his direction too.

She called to Eddie again, but even if he heard her, he had no opportunity to answer, for at that moment he was struck so hard that he stumbled sideways. He collided with people streaming past the blackjack tables, and he went to his knees.

But who had struck him?

For that brief moment, he had been in an island of open space between surging rivers of people. No one had been closer to him than six or eight feet. But he had been hit. His hair was in disarray, and his face was covered with blood.

Jesus, so much blood.

He began to scream.

A torrent of sound had been pouring through the busy casino — the happy shouts and squeals of winning craps shooters, the age-old litany of blackjack dealers and players, the snap of cards, the click of dice, the ticka-ticka-ticka of the wheel of fortune, the clack and rattle of the ball in the roulette wheel, laughter, groans of dismay at the wrong turn of a card, stridently ringing bells and wailing sirens from those slot machines that were making payoffs, pounding music from the quartet playing in the lounge — but it all ground to a silence when Eddie began to scream. His cries were as bone-shaking, as marrow-piercing as the shrieks of any creature in a nightmare. Alone, this shocking series of screeches and ululations would have been enough to turn heads, but now unseen amplifiers — or some strange sound-enhancing quality inherent in the cold and smoky air — seemed to take up his scream, echo and reecho it, double and triple the volume. It was as if some invisible and monstrous presence were mocking him by rebroadcasting his screams at an even more hysterical pitch. All conversation ceased, and then all gambling, and then even the band stopped playing, and the only sound — other than Eddie's tortured cries of pain and terror — was the ringing of a slot machine in some far corner of that vast chamber.

People fell back from Eddie, giving him even more space. Regine stopped too, when she got a closer look at him. His right ear was limp and mangled, half ripped off, streaming blood. That entire side of his face was abraded and bleeding, and some of the hair had been torn out of his head. He appeared to have been clubbed by someone damned strong and in a rage, but he wasn't yet unconscious. He spat blood and broken teeth, started to get up from his knees, and was struck again so hard that his screaming was cut off. He was lifted from the floor and thrown into a crowd of onlookers who stood by one of the craps tables. People scattered, and the brief preternatural silence was broken by their shouts and screams, and now even the security guard, who had been approaching Eddie, stopped in perplexity and fear.

Eddie collapsed in a bloody heap but, in an instant, sprang to his feet again, though not of his own accord. He was jerked erect, as though he were a marionette controlled by a mysterious puppeteer. He took several ungainly, bouncing steps away from the craps table, twisted, turned, stumbled, staggered sideways, leaped, whirled, as if terrible bolts of lightning were striking the unseen puppeteer overhead and then were passing through the strings into this bloody marionette, causing it to cavort spastically.

Regine stepped out of the way as Eddie lurched past her. He was berserk, arms swinging and flapping as if the control strings were tangled. His right eye was smashed shut, but his left was blinking and rolling and searching frantically for his ghostly assailant. He crashed into the untenanted stools of a blackjack table, knocking one over, and the dealer, who had been watching in astonishment, scurried away.

As the pit boss shouted into a phone, demanding additional guards from the security office, Eddie clutched at the blackjack table the way a drowning man might cling to a raft in a storm-tossed sea, trying to resist the unknown entity or force that was pulling at him. But it was far stronger than he, and it lifted him off the floor. He hung above the blackjack table, kicking and squirming in midair, sorcerously suspended there, a sight that elicited from the crowd a babble and then a roar of bewilderment, shock, and terror. Suddenly Eddie was thrown down hard onto the top of the blackjack table, scattering cards and casino chips and half-finished drinks that had been abandoned by the players who had fled from him a moment ago. And he was picked up and thrown down onto the table again, so hard this time that the table collapsed under him; his back surely must have been broken.

But his ordeal was not over. He was pulled to his feet once more and was propelled headlong through the aisle between craps tables and blackjack games, toward the forest of brightly glowing slot machines. His clothes were ragged, blood-soaked, and blood flew from him as he plunged involuntarily across the casino. He was no longer conscious and might even have been dead, hardly more than a limp sack of broken bones and ruptured flesh, supernaturally animated. The crowd's morbid curiosity ceased to be more powerful than its terror. People ran, pushing, shoving, some heading toward the front doors, some toward the showroom or the coffee shop or the stairs to the mezzanine level: in any direction that put distance between them and the shattered, shambling nightmare man who, among these dedicated escapists in this adult Disneyland, was a most unwelcome reminder of death and of the mystery and the perversity of the universe.

In a daze, in the grip of a dark thrill that she could not have defined but that was no less powerful for its lack of definition, Regine followed Eddie on his macabre pilgrimage toward the banks of slot machines. She remained fifteen feet behind him and was aware of the casino's security guards following in her wake.

One of them said, 'Lady, stop. Stop where you are!'

She glanced at them. Three big uniformed men. They had their guns drawn. They were all pale and bewildered.

'Get out of the way,' one of them said, and another one was pointing a revolver at her.

She realized that they might think she was somehow responsible for the impossible things that had just happened to Eddie. But what exactly did they think? That she was gifted with psychic powers and now in the grip of homicidal mania?

She stopped as they directed, but she turned to Eddie again. He was now only ten feet from the slot machines. Immediately in front of Eddie, twenty chrome-plated, one-armed bandits — one entire bank of them — were magically activated. Twenty sets of cylinders spun at once. In the display windows, blurred processions of cherries and bells and limes and other symbols moved so fast that they flowed together in formless bands of color. The cylinders whirled for a few seconds, and then all twenty sets stopped simultaneously, and in every window of every machine, lemons were visible.

Eddie bolted forward, tucking his head down — or, rather, the unseen thing tucked his head down for him — and ran straight into a glowing slot machine, ramming it with his skull hard enough to crack thick bone. He collapsed. But he was instantly picked up, hustled backward, then rushed forward a second time, brutally slammed into the machine again. Collapsed. Was picked up. Pulled back. Was thrown forward. This time he hit the machine with such force that he cracked its Plexiglas window and dislodged it from its mountings.

The dead man dropped to the floor.

He lay there, demolished, still.

The air remained freezing cold for a moment.

Regine hugged herself.

She had the feeling that something was watching her.

Then the air grew warm, and Regine sensed that the thing, whatever it had been, had now departed.

She looked at Eddie. He was an unrecognizable mess. In her heart, Regine found a small measure of pity for him, but mostly she was thinking about what his death must have been like, how it must have felt to live through those final brutal minutes of unimaginably intense pain, all-encompassing pain, excruciating and sweetly fulfilling pain.

* * *

Melanie had been quiet and at rest for a few minutes, long enough for Laura to have decided that the worst had passed and for Dan to put away his revolver. As they were returning to the small table by the window, the girl began to writhe and moan again. The room grew cold. Heart racing, Laura went to the bed again.

Melanie's features were grotesquely distorted — not by pain, but (it seemed) by horror. At the moment, she didn't resemble a child at all. She looked… not old, exactly… but wizened, possessed of some hideous and hurtful knowledge far beyond her years, a knowledge that caused anxiety and anguish, a knowledge of dark things best left unknown.

It was coming or was already present. By primitive, instinctive means that she could not understand, Laura sensed a malevolent force bearing down on them. The fine hairs on her arms prickled, and along the nape of her neck too. It.

Laura looked desperately around the room. No demonic creature. No Hell-born shape.

Show yourself, damn you, she thought angrily. Whoever you are, whatever you are, wherever you come from, give us something to focus on, something to strike at or shoot.

But it remained beyond the reach of her senses, and the only thing about the creature that could be apprehended was the chill in which it always cloaked itself.

The air temperature sank impossibly fast, lower than ever, until their breath gushed out in visible roiling plumes. Condensation appeared on the windows and on the mirror, crystallized into frost, then hardened into ice. But after only thirty or forty seconds, the air began to warm again. The child stopped groaning, and once more the unseen enemy departed without harming her.

Melanie's eyes popped open, but she still seemed to be staring at something in a dream. 'It'll get them.'

Dan Haldane bent over her, put one hand on her small shoulder. 'What is it, Melanie?'

'It. It'll get them,' the girl repeated, not to him as much as to herself.

'What is the damned thing?' Dan asked.

'It'll get them,' the girl said, and shuddered.

'Easy, honey,' Laura said.

'And then,' Melanie said, 'it'll get me too.'

'No,' Laura said. 'We'll take care of you, Mellie. I swear we will.'

The girl said, 'It'll come up… from… inside… and eat me… eat me all up….'

'No,' Laura said. 'No.'

'Inside?' Dan said. 'From inside what?'

'Eat me all up,' the girl said forlornly.

Dan said, 'Where does it come from?'

The child issued a long, slowly fading whimper that seemed more a sigh of resignation than an expression of fear.

'Was something here just a moment ago, Melanie?' Dan asked. 'The thing you're so afraid of… was it here in this room?'

'It wants me,' the girl said.

'If it wants you,' he said, 'then why didn't it take you while it was here?'

The girl wasn't hearing him. Softly, thickly, she said, 'The door…'

'What door?'

'The door to December.'

'What's that mean, Melanie?'

'The door…'

The girl closed her eyes. Her breathing changed. She slipped into sleep.

Looking across the bed at Dan, Laura said, 'It wants the others first, the people involved with the experiments in that gray room.'

'Eddie Koliknikov, Howard Renseveer, Sheldon Tolbeck, Albert Uhlander, and maybe more we don't know about yet.'

'Yes. As soon as they're all dead, then it… It will come for Melanie. That's what she said earlier tonight, at the house, after the radio was… possessed.'

'But how does she know this?'

Laura shrugged.

They stared at the slumbering girl.

At last Dan said, 'We've got to break through this… this trance she's in, so she can tell us what we need to know.'

'I tried earlier today. Hypnotic-regression therapy. But it wasn't terribly successful.'

'Can you try again?'

Laura nodded. 'In the morning, when she's rested a little.'

'We shouldn't waste time—'

'She needs her rest.'

'All right,' he said reluctantly.

She knew what he was thinking: If we wait until morning, let's hope we're not too late.

Laura slept with Melanie in the second bed, and Dan lay in the first bed because it was nearer the door, which was the most likely source of trouble. He was wearing his shirt, trousers, shoes, and socks; he was ready to move fast. They had left a single lamp lit because, after the events of the past day, they distrusted the dark. Dan listened to their deep and even breathing.

He could not sleep. He was thinking about Joseph Scaldone's battered body, about all the dead people in that Studio City house, and about Regine Savannah Hoffritz, who was physically and mentally alive but whose soul had been murdered. And as always, when he thought too long about murder in its myriad forms and wondered about humanity's capacity for it, his thoughts led inexorably to his dead brother and sister.

He had never known them. Not alive. They had been dead by the time that he had learned their names and had gone in search of them. As far as his own name was concerned, he had been born with neither 'Dan' nor 'Haldane.' Pete and Elsie Haldane had adopted him when he'd been less than a month old. His real parents had been Loretta and Frank Detwiler, two Okies who had come to California in search of their fortune but who had never found it. Instead, when Loretta had been carrying her third child, Frank had been killed in a traffic accident; and Loretta, whose pregnancy had been plagued by serious complications, died two days after giving birth to Dan. She had named him James. James Detwiler. But because there had been no relatives, no one to take custody of the three Detwiler children, they had been separated and put up for adoption.

Peter and Elsie Haldane had never concealed the fact that they weren't Dan's actual parents. He loved them and was proud to carry their name, for they were good people to whom he owed everything. At the same time, however, he had always wondered about his natural parents and had longed to know about them.

Because of the rules that governed adoption agencies in those days, Elsie and Pete had been told nothing about their baby's real parents, other than the fact that both the natural mother and father were dead. That single fact made Dan more eager to learn what kind of people they had been, for they had not abandoned him by choice but had been taken from him by a whim of fate.

By the time he got to college, Dan had started wrestling with the child-placement bureaucracy in order to obtain copies of their records. The search took time, but after considerable effort and some expense, he learned his real name and the names of his blood parents, and he was startled to discover that he had a brother and a sister. The brother, Delmar, had been four when Loretta Detwiler died, and the sister, Carrie, had been six.

Through the adoption agency's records, which had been partially damaged in a fire and which were not as complete as Dan would have hoped, he began an even more ardent search for his lost siblings. Pete and Elsie Haldane always gave him a deep and abiding sense of family; he thought of their brothers and sisters as his true aunts and uncles, thought of their parents as his grandparents, and felt that he belonged with them. Nevertheless… well, he was plagued by a peculiar emptiness, a vague and uneasy sense of being adrift, that he knew would be with him until he had found and embraced his kin. A thousand times since then, he wished that he'd never gone looking for them.

Tracking back through the years, he eventually found Delmar, his brother. In a grave. The names on the tombstone weren't Delmar or Detwiler. Rudy Kessman, it said. That was the name Delmar's adoptive parents had given him.

Four years old when their mother died, Delmar had been eminently adoptable and had been placed quickly with a young couple — Perry and Janette Kessman — in Fullerton, California. But the adoption agency had not performed a sufficiently thorough investigation and had not discovered Mr. Kessman's enthusiasm for new, dangerous, and sometimes even unlawful experiences. Perry Kessman drove stock cars, which was legal, of course. He was a motorcycle enthusiast, which was potentially dangerous but certainly not prohibited by law. On paper he was a Catholic, but he frequently experimented with new cults, even attended a pantheists' church for several months, and was for a long while involved with a group that worshiped UFOs; but no one could fault a man who sought God, even if he sought Him in all the wrong places. Kessman also used marijuana, which had been more of an offense at that time than it was now, though it was still illegal. After a while he started using hashish, uppers, downers, and various other substances. One night, hallucinating in a drug-induced state of paranoia or perhaps making a blood offering to some new god, Perry Kessman had killed his wife, his adopted son, and then himself.

Rudy-Delmar Kessman-Detwiler was seven when he was murdered. He had been a Kessman less time than he had been a Detwiler.

Now, lying on the motel bed in the dim light that dispelled little of the darkness but draped every familiar object in mysterious shadows, Dan did not even have to close his eyes to see the cemetery in which he had, at last, found his older brother. The headstones had been all alike, set flat in the ground, so as not to spoil the lovely contours of the rolling land. Each stone was a rectangle of granite, and centered in each rectangle was a polished copper plate bearing the name of the deceased, date of birth, date of death, and in some instances a line of Scripture or a sentiment. In Delmar's case, there had been no Scripture, no words of tribute, only his name and dates, cold and impersonal. Dan could recall that mild October day in the cemetery: the softness of the breeze, the birch and laurel shadows banding the lush green grass. But most of all he recalled what he had felt when he had dropped to his knees and had placed one hand on the copper plaque that marked his unmet brother's resting place: a piercing, wrenching loss that drove the breath out of him.

Though many years had passed, though he had long ago resigned himself to having a brother forever unknowable, Dan felt his mouth go dry again. His throat tightened. A tightness filled his chest too. He might have wept quietly then, for he had wept other nights when that memory had come to him unbidden; he was so weary that tears would have risen easily. But Melanie murmured and made a small sound of fear in her sleep, and her distress brought him instantly off his own bed.

The girl writhed beneath the sheets, but not like before, not with her previous vitality. She groaned softly in terror, not loud enough to wake her mother. Melanie struggled as if fending off an attacker, but she seemed to lack the strength to resist effectively.

Dan wondered what nightmare monster stalked her. Then the room suddenly grew cold, and he realized that the monster might be stalking her not in a nightmare but in reality.

He stepped quickly to his own bed and picked up the gun that lay on the nightstand.

The air was arctic. And getting colder.

* * *

The two men sat at a table by a large mullioned window, playing cards, drinking Scotch and milk, and pretending to be just a couple of guys batching it and having a good time.

Wind soughed in the eaves of the cabin.

The night was bitterly cold and blustery outside, as befitted February in the mountains, but there would be no new snow anytime soon. Beyond the window, a large moon drifted in a star-spattered sky, casting pearly luminescence on the snowcaked pines and firs and on the white-clad mountain meadow.

They were a long way from the busy streets and bright lights of the Big Orange.

Sheldon Tolbeck had fled from Los Angeles with Howard Renseveer in the desperate hope that distance would provide safety. They had told no one where they were going — in the equally desperate hope that the murderous psychogeist would be unable to follow them to a place that it did not know.

Yesterday afternoon, they had driven north and then northeast, into the high Sierras, to a ski chalet near Mammoth, where they had settled in a few hours ago. The place was owned by Howard's brother, but Howard himself had never used it before, had no association with it, and could not be expected to go there.

It'll find us anyway, Tolbeck thought miserably. It'll sniff us out somehow.

He didn't voice the thought because he didn't want to anger Howard Renseveer. Howard, still somewhat boyish at forty, was an outgoing type who, until recently, had been certain that he was going to live forever. Howard jogged; Howard was careful not to eat much fat or refined sugar; Howard meditated half an hour every day; Howard always expected the best from life, and life usually obliged. And Howard was optimistic about their chances. Howard was — or said he was — absolutely convinced that the creature they feared could not journey this far and could not follow them if they took care to cover their trail. Yet Tolbeck couldn't fail to notice that Howard glanced nervously at the window each time that the gusty wind raised a louder protest in the eaves, that he jumped when the burning logs popped in the fireplace. Anyway, the very fact that they were awake at that dead dark hour of the morning was enough to put the lie to Howard's supposed optimism.

Tolbeck was pouring more Scotch and milk for himself, and Howard Renseveer was shuffling the cards when the room turned cold. They glanced at the fireplace, but the flames were leaping high; the fans in the Heatolator were purring, driving currents of hot air outward from the hearth. No window or door had come open. And in a moment it became frighteningly clear that the chill they felt was not merely a vagrant draft, for the air grew rapidly colder, colder.

It had come. A miraculous, malevolent advent. One moment it was not there, and the next moment it was in their midst, a demonic and deadly coalescence of psychic energy.

Tolbeck got to his feet.

Howard Renseveer leaped up so abruptly that he knocked over his Scotch and milk, then his chair, and dropped the deck of cards. The interior of the cabin had become a freezer, although the fire continued to blaze undiminished.

A large round rag rug lay on the floor between the two hunter-green sofas, and now it rose into the air until it was six feet off the floor. It hung there, not floppy and rumpled the way it should have been but stiff, rigid. Then it spun around faster and faster, as though it were a giant phonograph record whirling on an unseen turntable.

With fevered thoughts of escape that seemed foolish and hopeless even as they took possession of him, Tolbeck backed toward the rear door of the cabin.

Renseveer stood by the table, transfixed by the sight of the spinning rug, apparently unable to move.

Abruptly, the rug dropped in a lifeless heap. One of the sofas was pitched across the room with such force that it knocked over a small table and lamp, snapped off two of its own legs, and smashed a magazine rack, sending glossy publications tumbling and flapping along the floor, like a flock of birds incapable of taking flight.

Tolbeck had retreated from the living room of the cabin into the kitchen annex, which was really part of one large chamber that constituted the entire ground floor of the structure. He had almost reached the rear door. He was beginning to think he might make it. Not daring to turn his back to the invisible but undeniable entity in the living-room area, he extended one arm behind him, scrabbling at the empty air with his hand, seeking the doorknob.

Around Renseveer, the dropped cards whirled up from the floor, full of a magical and menacing life not unlike that which had made mere brooms such a tribulation for the Sorcerer's Apprentice. They swarmed around Renseveer as if they were leaves caught in a wind devil, clicked and scraped against one another in a dizzying dance. Something about the sound made Tolbeck think of small knives being sharpened. Even as that unsettling image occurred to him, he saw that Howard Renseveer, who was frantically flailing at the storm of plastic-coated rectangles, was bleeding from both hands and was nicked all over the head and face. Surely, cards were neither rigid enough nor sharp enough to inflict even minor wounds… yet they slashed, slashed, and Renseveer shrieked in pain.

Groping behind him with one hand, Tolbeck found the doorknob. It wouldn't turn. Locked. He could have swung around, found the thumb latch, and been out of the cabin in a wink, but he was half mesmerized by the spectacle in the living room. Fear both energized and paralyzed him, filled him with an urgent desire to flee but simultaneously numbed his mind and his legs.

The cards collapsed into lifelessness as the rug had done before them. Howard Renseveer's wounded hands appeared to be encased in tight crimson gloves.

Even as the cards were falling, the fire screen was pitched off the stone hearth. A blazing log erupted from the fireplace, shot across the room, and struck Renseveer, who was too dazed to attempt to dodge that projectile. The log was half eaten away by flames, a missile composed of wood and crumbly coals and ashes and licking fire. When it struck Renseveer in the gut, the charred and brittle part of the log dissolved into black smoking rubble that rained down on his shoes. The unburned core of the wood, however, was hard and jagged, a crude and particularly sadistic spear that punctured his stomach and stabbed brutally, not merely severing blood vessels and rupturing organs as it went, but also carrying fire deep into him.

That grotesque and heart-freezing sight was sufficient to cure the paralysis of fear that had left Tolbeck standing at the kitchen door for long, precious seconds. He found the lock, twisted the knob, threw open the door, burst out into the night and wind and darkness, and ran for his life.

* * *

The air temperature had risen as quickly as it had fallen. The motel room was warm again.

Dan Haldane wondered what the hell had happened — or had almost happened. What did the change of temperature signify? Had some occult presence been there for a few seconds? If so, why had it come, if not to attack Melanie? And what had made it leave?

Melanie seemed to sense the dissipation of the threat, for she grew still and quiet under the covers.

Standing by the bed, Dan stared at the gaunt child and, for the first time, realized that she would grow up to be as beautiful as her mother. That thought made him turn to Laura, who was lying beside her daughter, fast asleep, undisturbed by the girl's brief spate of soft murmuring and unaware of the bitter cold that had gripped the room for half a minute or more. In repose, her lovely face reminded him of the faces of Madonnas that he'd seen in paintings in museums. Fanned out across the pillow in the pale-amber light of the single lamp, Laura's thick, silky auburn hair looked as if it had been spun from the red-gold light of an autumn sunset, and Dan had an urge to put his hands into it and let it spill through his fingers.

He returned to his own bed.

He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling.

He thought of Cindy Lakey. Dead at the hands of her mother's crazy-jealous boyfriend.

He thought of his brother, Delmar. Dead at the hands of his drug-blasted, hallucinating, adoptive father.

He thought of his sister too, of course. It was an inevitable progression of memory, the same on any night when he had trouble sleeping: Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey.

Eventually, through the records of the child-placement agency that had dispersed the Detwiler family on the death of their mother, Dan had found the sister from whom he had been separated when he had been a month-old infant and she had been six. Like Delmar, she was in a graveyard by the time Dan finally tracked her down.

Six years old when their mother died, Carrie had not reacted or adapted well to the dissolution of her family. She was emotionally and psychologically damaged by the experience, and her behavioral problems made her a difficult candidate for adoption. She drifted from an orphanage to a series of foster homes, back to the orphanage, then to another series of foster homes, apparently with a growing sense that she belonged nowhere and was wanted nowhere. Her attitude grew worse, until she began running away from her foster homes, and each time that she ran away, the authorities found it increasingly difficult to locate her and bring her back. By the time that she was seventeen, she knew how to dodge those searching for her, and she stayed free, on her own, thereafter. All available photographs revealed that Carrie was a lovely girl, but she didn't do well in school, and she had no job experience, and like a lot of other lovely girls from broken homes, she chose prostitution as the best way to support herself — or, rather, prostitution chose her, for she had little choice.

She was twenty-eight years old and a high-priced call girl by the time her short unhappy life came to an end. One of her johns wanted something kinkier than she was willing to provide, and the argument swiftly led to violence. She was killed five weeks before Dan located her, and she was one month in the ground by the time that he paid a visit. He had missed meeting his brother by twelve years, and that had been sad but not as painful as missing a meeting with his sister by only thirty days.

He told himself that she would have been a stranger to him. They would have had little or nothing in common. She might not have been glad to see him, what with him being a cop and her a call girl. And he very well might have been sorry to meet the woman his sister had become. Almost certainly, given the circumstances, a reunion and any subsequent relationship would have been filled with much anguish and little joy. But he had been only twenty-two, a rookie on the force, when he had found his sister's grave, and at twenty-two he hadn't been as tough emotionally as he was now; he had wept for her. Hell, even these days, after more than fifteen years of policework, fifteen years of seeing people who'd been shot and knifed and beaten and strangled, after being considerably roughened by the work he did, he still sometimes wept for her and for his lost brother when, in the darkest hour of a sleepless night, he dwelt too intently upon the past that might have been.

He held himself, in part, responsible for Carrie's death. He felt that he should have worked harder to track her down, should have located her in time to save her. Yet he also knew that he deserved none of the blame. Even if he had found her sooner, no words or actions would have influenced her to give up life as a call girl; nothing he could have done would have kept her from that rendezvous with the homicidal john. The guilt that nagged at him wasn't earned. It was, instead, just one more example of his Atlas complex: He had a tendency to take the whole world on his shoulders. He understood himself; he could even laugh at himself, and sometimes he said that (considering his capacity and enthusiasm for guilt) he should have been Jewish. But being able to laugh at himself did not in any way lessen his sense of responsibility.

Therefore, when sleep remained teasingly beyond his reach, his thoughts often went to Delmar, Carrie, and Cindy Lakey. In the dark he would ponder humanity's capacity for murder, and he would consider his own frequent inability to save the living, and sooner or later he would even explore the idea that his mother had died at his own hands because complications from childbirth had taken her life. Crazy. But the subject made him a little crazy. The fact of death. The fact of murder. The fact that a violent savage hid deep within every man and woman. He wasn't able to come to terms with those inescapable facts, and he supposed he never would. He persisted in believing that life was precious and that humanity was noble — or at least was meant for nobility. Delmar to Carrie to Cindy Lakey: that was the usual late-night progression of memories. When he got that far, he often found himself teetering on the edge of an abyss of irrationality and guilt and despair, and he would sometimes — not often but sometimes — get up, switch on a lamp, and drink until he knocked himself unconscious.

Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey.

If he failed to save the McCaffreys, their names would be added to that list, and henceforth the progression of unwanted memories would be longer: Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey… Melanie, and Laura.

He wouldn't be able to live with himself then. He knew he was only one cop, only a man like any other, not Atlas, not a knight in shining armor, but deep inside, there was a part of him that wanted to be that knight; and it was that part — the dreamer, the noble fool — that made living worthwhile. If that part of him were ever snuffed out, he couldn't imagine going on. That was why he had to protect Laura and Melanie as if they were his own family. He had come to care for them, and if he let them die now, he too would be dead — at least emotionally and psychologically.

Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey.. The progression ran its course, and at last he drifted off to sleep with the soft breathing of Laura and Melanie in the background, like the susurration of a faraway sea.

* * *

Sheldon Tolbeck ran into the night, across the white meadow, through snow that was almost knee-deep in places. The mountainside was doubly frosted by both severe cold and frigid lunar light. As he raced from the cabin, he exhaled plumes of vapor and kicked up clouds of snow that drifted away like ghosts behind him; the appearance of ectoplasm was imparted to them by the phantasmagorical radiance of the moon.

From the cabin came Renseveer's screams, which carried well on the bitter air and echoed back from some far-off vale. The clarity of the air and the peculiarities of the terrain were such that even the echo re-echoed, again and again, until there was a hideous chorus of screams. From that unnerving cacophony, one might have thought the door of Hell itself lay in this high fastness and was open wide. The screams put the fear of the devil in Tolbeck, and he ran as if the hounds of Hell were nipping at his heels.

He was wearing boots but no coat, and at first the piercingly cold wind was painful. But then, as he persisted in his mad plunge toward the far end of the meadow, the wind became like a thousand needles delivering a dose of powerful anesthetic. Within fifty or sixty yards of the cabin, his face and hands went half numb. The sharp air penetrated his flannel shirt and his jeans, and within a hundred yards his entire body seemed to be under the influence of Novocaine. He knew this merciful lack of feeling would not last more than a few minutes; it was nothing more than shock. Soon, the pain would return, and the cold would be like a crab moving through his bones and tearing out bits of his marrow with its icy claws.

Not sure where he was going, driven not by reason but by stark terror, he floundered through a drift that was piled up along one edge of the meadow, and then he was into the woods. Massive firs and spruces and pines towered over him. The phosphoric moonlight reached the forest floor only through a few scattered holes between the giant and closely packed trees. Where the rays of the moon got through, they were like wan searchlight beams, and everything in those shafts of faint luminescence seemed unreal, otherworldly. Elsewhere, the forest was wrapped in darkness that varied from pitch black to blue, to purple, to charcoal gray.

Tolbeck staggered forward, his hands held out in front of him. He walked into trees. He tripped over rocks and exposed roots. He plunged unexpectedly down the side of a gully, fell on his face, got up, went on. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness but not quickly, and for the most part he could see little of the land ahead of him, yet he rushed forward at a fast walk, often at a run, for Renseveer's screams had come to an end a few minutes ago — which meant that Tolbeck himself was now the prey. He stumbled and dropped painfully to his knees. He got up. He went on. He blundered through ice-sheathed brush that crackled, poked at him, scratched, and scraped. He went on. He ran into a low-hanging pine branch that lacerated his scalp, and the blood that flowed down his face seemed boiling hot by contrast with his half-frozen skin. He went on.

He found himself in a wide, shallow wash bottomed with rocks, pieces of deadwood, and occasional heaps of withered brush and silt deposited by the runoff from the last rain before autumn had phased into winter. There was some ice, a little snow where the densely packed boughs of the trees parted to let it in, but for the most part the going was easier than it had been outside the wash. He followed it upward for a few hundred yards until it narrowed and then choked off near the top of the ridge.

He scrambled up a short steep slope, into an area where the trees thinned out, clutching at brush and granite outcroppings that were partly crusted with snow and partly swept clean by the wind. His hands were so cold and stiff that he could not feel the cuts and bruises that he surely had sustained in the climb.

Finally, on the high crest of the ridge, his total exhaustion overcame his panic. Tolbeck crumpled in a heap, unable to go another step.

The trees were sparse, the wind found him again, and moonlight and snow were all around. After a moment in which he unsuccessfully tried to catch his breath, Tolbeck crawled into the shelter and the shadows afforded by a nearby tooth of granite. He slumped there, peering down the wall of the ravine, squinting with bleak expectation into the lightless lower slopes of the wash through which he had ascended.

The only sound was the wind hissing through the needled branches of the evergreens and whispering across the rocky crag of the ledge. Of course, that didn't mean the psychogeist was not stalking him. It might be down there, coming toward him out of the trees, but it would make no sound as it approached.

Nothing moved except occasional snow devils whirling across the crest of the ridge and evergreen boughs stirred by the wind. But even as he squinted into the darkness below, Tolbeck realized that watching for his enemy was pointless, stupid, for if the psychogeist was moving in on him, he would not see it. It had no substance, but infinite power. It had no form, only strength. It had no body, just consciousness and will… and a maniacal thirst for vengeance and blood.

He would not detect it until it was upon him.

If it found him, he could do nothing to defeat it.

However, he was not a quitter, never had been and never would be, so he was unable to accept the hopelessness of his situation. Hugging himself and shivering, pressing up against the sheltering granite formation, Tolbeck peered intently into the forest below, strained to hear any sound that was not produced by the wind — and told himself, over and over, that the thing would not come, would not find him, would not tear him limb from limb.

Immobility meant less body heat, and within minutes the cold had sunk numberless talons into his flesh. He shuddered uncontrollably, and his teeth chattered, and he found that he couldn't completely uncurl the bent fingers of his gloveless hands. His skin was not only cold but dry, and his lips were cracking, bleeding. His misery was so complete that he couldn't restrain his tears, which collected in his mustache and beard stubble, where they quickly froze.

With all his heart, Tolbeck wished that he had never met Dylan McCaffrey and Willy Hoffritz, wished that he had never seen that gray room or the girl who had been taught to find the door to December.

Who would have imagined the experiments could get this far out of hand or that such a thing as this would be unleashed?

Something moved below.

Tolbeck gasped, and the sudden intake of subfreezing air hurt his throat and made his lungs ache.

Something cracked, thudded, snapped.

A deer, he thought. There are deer in these mountains. But it wasn't a deer.

He remained on his knees, cowering against the rocks, hoping that he might still be able to hide, although he knew that he was deluding himself.

Something rattled below. The queer noise grew louder, closer. A small, hard object snapped against Tolbeck's chest, startling him, then clattered to the frozen ground.

He saw it roll away from him and come to rest in the moonlight. A pebble.

From below, the malign, psychotic spirit-thing had thrown a pebble at him.

Silence.

It was playing with him.

More rattling. He was struck again, twice, not hard, but harder than he had been struck the first time.

He saw another stone drop to the ground in front of him: a white pebble about the size of a marble. The clattering was made by pebbles rolling and bouncing and skipping up the side of the ravine, snapping against larger stones and rebounding as they came.

The psychogeist pitched with unerring accuracy. Tolbeck wanted to run. He had no strength.

He looked wildly left and right. Even if he had possessed the strength to run, he had nowhere to go.

He looked at the night sky. The stars were sharp and cold. He had never seen a sky so forbidding.

He realized that he was praying. The Lord's Prayer. He hadn't prayed in twenty years.

Suddenly a lot more rattling arose, a torrent of up-rushing pebbles, dozens, scores, hundreds of little stones, a rattle-tick-snick-snap-click-clack-crack that built until it was like the sound of a hailstorm on a concrete parking lot. Abruptly a squall of stones burst over the crest of the ridge, spewing out of the darkness, waves of half-glimpsed missiles in the pale moonlight, spinning at Tolbeck, ricocheting off his skull, rapping his face and arms and hands and body. None of the projectiles was traveling at the speed of a bullet or even half fast enough to be lethal, but all of them were painful.

And now it was not as if the pebbles were being thrown at him but as if the laws of gravity had been suspended on the slope, at least in respect to small stones, for they came up in a veritable river, Jesus, hundreds of them, and he was caught in the center of those punishing currents. He drew his knees up. He tucked his head down and covered it with his arms. He tried to squeeze even farther into the granite niche where he had hoped to hide, but the pebbles found him.

Occasionally, he was pummeled by pieces of stone too large to be called pebbles. Small rocks. And some that were not so small. He cried out each time that one of those found him, for it was worse than taking a blow from a fist.

He was bleeding and bruised. He thought one of the rocks had broken his left wrist.

The hard music on the slope, a deadly song of pure percussion, changed: The hailstorm patter of upwardly cascading pebbles was now punctuated by heavier thuds and cracks. Those noises were made by the small rocks bounding along the ridge wall to take their whacks at him. He was being stoned to death by something he could not see, and he was no longer praying but was screaming instead. However, even above his screams, he could hear the distant and terrible sound of boulders rolling inexorably toward the top of the ridge.

The entire slope below seemed to be tearing loose and churning upward, cataclysmically divorcing itself from the crust of the earth, as though divine judgment had required the planet to disperse its substance, and as though the fulfillment of that harsh judgment was beginning here. The ground shook with a series of violent concussions transmitted through the rough granite beneath him, as each bounce of each oncoming boulder generated the energy equivalent to a grenade explosion.

He was screaming at the top of his lungs now, but he couldn't hear himself above the thunderous roar of the antigravity avalanche. The boulders exploded over the crest and rained down around him with earsplitting force. Splinters of stone broke from them and gouged him, drew more blood, but he was not crushed as he expected. Two, three, half a dozen, ten boulders slammed down around him and piled up above him, though he was not struck by anything other than the shards cast off by each jarring impact.

Then the rocks were still.

Tolbeck waited, breathless with terror.

Gradually, he became aware of the cold again. And the wind.

Feeling around, he discovered that the boulders had piled on all sides and had stacked up overhead, forming a rude tomb. They were too heavy to be shoved out of the way. There were chinks in the tomb, hundreds of them, and a few admitted the moon's radiant gaze. The wind whistled and moaned and hissed at other openings, but no hole large enough to permit Tolbeck to escape.

In essence, though air could still reach him, he had been buried alive.

For a moment his terror swelled, but then he thought of what had happened to McCaffrey and Hoffritz and some of the others, and this death seemed almost merciful. The cold was painful again, as if some rodent with teeth of ice were chewing on his guts and nibbling on his bones. But that would pass, and quickly. In a few more minutes he would grow numb again, and this time the numbness would last. The blood had already begun to drain inward, away from his freezing skin, in a desperate effort to protect vital organs. The blood supply to his brain would be reduced as well, to a minimal maintenance level, and he would become drowsy. He would go to sleep and never wake up. Not so bad. Not as bad as what had been done to Ernie Cooper and the others.

He relaxed, resigned to death, afraid of it but willing to face it now that he knew it would not be too painful.

But for the wind, the winter night was silent.

With great weariness, Tolbeck curled up in his tomb and closed his eyes.

Something grabbed his nose, pinched and twisted it so hard that tears burst from his eyes.

He blinked, flailed out, struck empty air.

Something clawed at his ear. Something unseen.

'No,' he pleaded.

Something poked him hard in the right eye, and the pain was so excruciating that he knew he had been blinded. The psychogeist had slipped through the chinks and had joined him in his makeshift tomb of winter-chilled stone. His death would not be easy, after all.

* * *

During the night, Laura woke and did not know where she was. A lamp with a cocked shade cast faint amber light, created odd and menacing shadows. She saw a bed beside her own. In it, Dan Haldane was sleeping, fully clothed.

The motel. They were hiding out, holed up in a motel room.

Still fuzzy-minded and having trouble keeping her eyes open, she turned over and looked at Melanie, and then she realized what had awakened her. The air temperature was plummeting, and Melanie was squirming weakly under the covers, softly sobbing, murmuring in fear.

Within the room there was now a… presence, something either more or less than human but unquestionably alien, invisible yet undeniable. In her drowsiness, Laura was more acutely aware of the entity than she had been when it had twice intruded into her kitchen or when it had earlier visited this very room. Freshly roused from sleep, she was still largely guided by her subconscious, which was far more open to these fantastic perceptions than was the conscious mind, which, by comparison, was conservative and a vigilant doubting Thomas. Now, although she still had no idea what the thing was, she could sense it drifting across the room and hovering above Melanie.

Suddenly Laura was certain that her daughter was about to be beaten to death before her eyes. With a panic that was half like the dreamy terror in a nightmare, she started to get up, shivering, each exhalation instantly transformed to frost. Even as she pushed the covers aside, however, the air grew warm again, and her daughter quieted. Laura hesitated, watching the child, glancing around the room, but the danger — if there had been any — seemed to have passed.

She could no longer sense the malignant entity.

Where had it gone?

Why had it come and then left within seconds?

She slipped back under the covers again and lay facing Melanie. The girl was terribly drawn, thin, and frail.

I'm going to lose her, Laura thought. It's going to come for her sooner or later, and It's going to kill her like It killed the others, and I won't be able to do a damned thing to stop It because I won't even be able to understand where It comes from or why It wants her or what It is.

For a while she huddled miserably under the covers, draped not only in blankets and sheets but in despair. Nevertheless, it was not in her nature to surrender easily to anyone or anything, and gradually she convinced herself that reason ruled the world and that all things, no matter how mysterious, could eventually be examined and understood if one only applied wit and logic to the problem.

In the morning she would use hypnotic-regression therapy with Melanie once more, and this time she would press the child harder than she had the first time. There was some danger that Melanie would crack completely if forced to recall traumatic memories before she was ready to handle them, but it was also true that risks had to be taken if the child's life was to be saved.

What was the door to December? What lay on the other side of it? And what was the monstrous thing that had come through it?

She asked herself those questions again and again, until they flowed through her mind like the endlessly repeated verses of a lullaby, rocking her down into darkness.

When dawn came, Laura was deep asleep and dreaming. In the dream she was standing in front of an enormous iron door, and above the door hung a clock that ticked toward midnight. Only seconds remained before all three hands of the clock would point straight up (tick), at which time the door would open (tick), and something eager for blood would burst out upon her (tick), but she couldn't find anything with which she could bar the door, and she couldn't move away from it, could only wait (tick), and then she heard sharp claws scraping at the far side of the door, and a wet slobbering sound. Tick. Time was running out.