The Door To December

PART FOUR IT

THURSDAY

8:30 A.M. — 5:00 P.M.

Laura was at the small table by the window, where she had sat with Dan last night. Melanie sat across from her, the table between them. The girl was in a hypnotic state; she had been regressed back in time. In every sense but the physical, she was in that Studio City house once more.

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

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

He nodded.

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

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

'Is that what you call the gray room?'

'The dungeon.'

'Look around the room.'

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

'What do you see?' Laura asked.

'The chair.'

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

'Yes.'

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

The girl shuddered.

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

The girl quieted.

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

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

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

'Melanie?'

'I hate them.'

'Do they make you sit in the chair?'

'I hate them!'

'Do they make you sit in the chair?'

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

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

'Yes'

'Why?'

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

'To teach you what?'

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

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

The agony faded from the child's face.

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

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

'Control.'

'Control of what?'

'My thoughts,' the girl said.

'What do they want you to think?'

'Emptiness.'

'What do you mean?'

'Nothingness'

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

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

'Feel what?'

'Anything.'

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

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

'The tank.'

'Do they make you go into the tank?'

'Naked.'

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

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

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

'Climb the steps, Melanie.'

'No.'

'You must do as I say.'

'No.'

'Climb the steps.'

'Please…'

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

Difficult but necessary.

'Climb the steps, Melanie.'

An anguished expression distorted the girl's face.

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

'Open the hatch to the tank, Melanie.'

'I'm… afraid.'

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

'I'm afraid,' Melanie repeated.

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

'Open the hatch, Melanie.'

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

'What's in there?'

'The way out.'

'The way out of what?'

'The way out of everything.'

'I don't understand.'

'The… way out… of me.'

'What does that mean?'

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

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

The girl said nothing.

'Do you see it?'

Reluctantly: 'Yes.'

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

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

'Is this the door, Melanie?'

'It's… the hatch. The tank.'

'But is it also the door to December?'

'No.'

'What is the door to December?'

'The way out.'

'The way out of where?'

'Out… out of… the tank.'

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

Melanie began to cry.

'Go inside, honey.'

'I… I'm s-scared.'

'Don't be afraid.'

'I might…'

'What?'

'If I go inside… I might…'

'You might what?'

'Do something,' the girl said bleakly.

'What might you do?'

'Something…'

'Tell me.'

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

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

Softer: 'No.'

'Well, then—'

'Yes.'

'Which is it?'

Softer still: 'No… yes…'

'Honey?'

Silence.

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

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

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

Dan Haldane said, 'Maybe we've gone far enough for one day.'

'No,' Laura said. 'We have to do this. It's the quickest way to find out what the hell's been going on. I can guide her through the memories, no matter how bad they are. I've done this sort of thing before. I'm good at it.'

But as Laura looked across the table at her wan and withered daughter, a sinking feeling filled her, and she had to choke back a wave of nausea. It seemed as if Melanie was already dead. Stumped in her chair, eyes closed, the child appeared lifeless; her face was the face of a cold corpse, the features frozen in the final, painful grimace of death.

Could these memories be terrible enough to kill her if she were forced to bring them into the light before she was ready?

No. Surely not. Laura had never heard of hypnotic-regression therapy being dangerous to any patient's physical health.

Yet… being taken back into the gray room, being forced to speak of the chair where she had received electric-shock aversion therapy, being forced to climb into the sensory-deprivation tank… well, it seemed to be draining the life out of the girl. If memories could be vampiric, these were exactly that, sucking the blood and vitality from her.

'Melanie?'

'Mmmmmm?'

'Where are you now?'

'Floating.'

'In the tank?'

'Floating.'

'What do you feel?'

'Water. But…'

'But what?'

'But that's fading too…'

'What else do you feel?'

'Nothing.'

'What do you see?'

'Darkness.'

'What do you hear?'

'My… heart… beating, beating… But… that's fading too…'

'What do they want you to do?'

The girl was silent.

'Melanie?'

Nothing.

With sudden urgency, Laura said, 'Melanie, don't drift away from me. Stay with me.'

The girl stirred and breathed, though shallowly, and it was as though she had come back from the faraway and lightless shore of the river that flowed darkly between this world and the next.

'Mmmmmm.'

'Are you with me?'

'Yes,' the girl said, but so quietly that the spoken word was barely more than a shadow of the thought.

'You're in the tank,' Laura said. 'It's like it always is in the tank… except that I'm there with you this time: a safety line, a hand to grasp. You understand? Now… floating. Feeling nothing, seeing nothing, hearing nothing… but why are you there?'

'To learn to…'

'What?'

'… to let go.'

'Let go of what?'

'Everything.'

'I don't understand, honey.'

'Let go. Of everything. Of me.'

'They want you to learn to let go of yourself? What does that mean, exactly?'

'Slip out.'

'Out where?'

'Away… away… away…'

Laura sighed with frustration and tried a different tack. 'What are you thinking?'

An even colder and more haunting note entered the child's voice. 'The door…'

'The door to December?'

'Yes.'

'What is the door to December?'

'Don't let it open! Keep it shut!' the girl cried.

'It's shut, honey.'

'No, no, no! It's going to come open. I hate it! Oh, please, please, help me, Jesus, Mommy, help me, Daddy, help me, don't do it, please, help me, I hate it when it comes open, I hate it!'

Melanie was screaming now, and the muscles in her neck were taut. The blood vessels in her temples swelled and throbbed. In spite of this new agitation, she regained no color; if anything, she grew even more pale.

The child was terrified of whatever thing lay beyond the door, and that terror was transmitted to Laura. She felt the skin prickle at the back of her neck and all the way down her spine.

* * *

With considerable admiration, Dan watched Laura calm and quiet the frightened girl.

The session had wound his own nerves so tight that he felt as if he might pop apart like a self-destructing clockwork mechanism.

To Melanie, Laura said, 'Okay. Now… tell me about the door to December.'

The girl was reluctant to reply.

'What is it, Melanie? Explain it to me. Come on, honey.'

In a hushed voice, the child said, 'It's like… the window to yesterday.'

'I don't understand. Explain.'

'It's like… the stairs… that go only sideways… neither up nor down…'

Laura looked at Dan.

He shrugged.

'Tell me more,' Laura said to the girl.

Her voice rising and falling in an eerie rhythm, never too loud, often too soft, the girl said, 'It's like… the cat… the hungry cat that ate itself all up. It's starving. There's no food for it. So… it starts chewing on the tip of its own tail. It begins eating its tail… chewing higher… higher and faster… until the tail is all gone. Then… then it eats its own hindquarters, and then its middle. It keeps on eating and eating, gobbling itself up… until it's eaten every last bit of itself… until it's even eaten its own teeth… and then it just… vanishes. Did you see it vanish? How could it vanish? How could the teeth eat themselves? Wouldn't at least one tooth be left? But it isn't. Not one tooth.'

Sounding as puzzled as Dan felt, Laura said, 'That's what they want you to think about when you're in the tank?'

'Some days, yes. Other days they tell me to think about the window to yesterday, nothing else but the window to yesterday, for hours and hours and hours… just concentrating on that window… seeing it… believing in it… But the one that always works best is the door.'

'To December.'

'Yes.'

'Tell me about that, honey.'

'It's summer… July…'

'Go on.'

'Hot and sticky. I'm so warm… Aren't you warm?'

'Very warm,' Laura agreed.

'I'd give anything for… a little cool air. So I open the front door of the house… and beyond the door it's a cold winter day. Snow is falling. Icicles hanging off the porch roof. I step back to look at the windows on both sides of the door… and through the windows I can see it's really July… and I know it's July… warm… everywhere, it's July… except through this door… on the other side of this one door… this door to December. And then…'

'Then what?' Laura urged.

'I go through…'

'You step through the door?' Laura asked.

Melanie's eyes flew open, and she bolted off her chair, and to Dan's astonishment she began to strike herself as hard as she could. Her small fists delivered a flurry of blows to her frail chest. She thumped her sides, whacked herself on the hips, shouting, 'No, no, no, no!'

'Stop her!' Laura said.

Dan was already off the bed, hurrying to the girl. He grabbed her hands, but she wrenched loose with an ease that startled him. She couldn't be that strong.

'Hate!' Melanie screamed, and she struck herself hard in the face.

Dan made another grab for her.

She dodged him.

'Hate!'

She took fistfuls of her own hair and tried to tear it out of her scalp.

'Melanie, honey, stop!'

Dan grabbed the girl by the wrists and held her tightly. She felt as if she had been reduced to mere bones, and he was afraid of hurting her. But if he released her, she would hurt herself.

'Hate!' she screeched, spraying spittle.

Laura approached cautiously.

Melanie released her own hair, at which she had been tearing, and tried to claw at Dan and pull free of him.

He held on and finally managed to pin her arms at her sides, but she wrenched left and right, kicked his shins, and said, 'Hate, hate, hate!'

Laura put one hand on each side of the girl's face, held her head tightly, trying to force her to pay attention. 'Honey, what is it? What do you hate so much?'

'Hate!'

'What do you hate so much?'

'Going through the door.'

'You hate going through the door?'

'And them.'

'Who are they?'

'I hate them, I hate them!'

'They make me… think about the door, and they make me believe in the door, and then they make me… go through it, and I hate them!'

'Do you hate your daddy?'

'Yes!'

'Because he makes you go through the door to December?'

'I hate it!' the girl wailed in fury and misery.

Dan said, 'Melanie, what happens when you go through the door to December?'

In her trance, the girl could hear no voices but her own and her mother's, so Laura repeated the question. 'What happens when you go through the door to December?'

The girl gagged. She'd had no breakfast yet, so there was nothing in her that she could bring up, but she succumbed to dry heaves so violent that they frightened Dan. Holding her, he felt each spasm rack her entire body, and it seemed that she would tear herself apart before she was done.

Laura continued to hold the girl's face, but now she didn't keep a tight grip on it. She held Melanie but stroked her too, smoothed the lines out of her tortured countenance, cooed to her.

At last Melanie stopped struggling, went limp, and Dan released her into her mother's arms.

The girl allowed herself to be embraced by her mother and, in a forlorn voice that chilled Dan's heart, she said, 'I hate them… all of them… Daddy… the others…'

'I know,' Laura said soothingly.

They hurt me… hurt me so much… I hate them!'

'I know.'

'But… but most of all…'

Laura sat on the floor and pulled her daughter into her lap. 'Most of all? What do you hate most of all, Melanie?'

'Me,' the girl said.

'No, no.'

'Yes,' the girl said. 'Me. I hate me… I hate me.'

'Why, honey?'

'Because… because of what I do,' the girl sobbed.

'What do you do?'

'I go… through the door.'

'And what happens?'

'I… go… through… the door…'

'And what do you do on the other side, what do you see, what do you find over there?' Laura asked.

The girl was silent.

'Baby?'

No response.

'Talk to me, Melanie.'

Nothing.

Dan stooped to examine the child's face. Since she had been found wandering in the street, naked, two nights ago, her eyes had been unfocused and distant, but now they were far emptier and far more strange than ever before. They didn't even seem like eyes any more. Peering into them, Dan thought they were like two oval windows offering a view of an immense void that was as empty as the cold reaches of space at the center of the universe.

Sitting on the floor of the motel room, clutching her daughter, Laura wept but made no sound. Her mouth softened and trembled. She rocked her girl, and tears spilled from her eyes, coursed down her cheeks. The perfect quietness of her grief indicated its intensity.

Shaken by the look on her face, Dan wanted to take her in his arms and rock her the way she cradled her daughter. All he could do was put one hand upon her shoulder.

When Laura's tears began to dry, Dan said, 'Melanie says she hates herself because of what she's done. What do you think she means by that? What has she done?'

'Nothing,' Laura said.

'She evidently thinks she has.'

'It's a common syndrome in cases like this, in almost all child-abuse cases,' Laura said.

Although Laura's voice was for the most part low and even, Dan could hear tension and fear just below the surface. Clearly, she was making a major effort to control the emotional turmoil that Melanie's deteriorating condition stirred in her.

She said, 'There's so much shame involved. You can't imagine. Their sense of shame is overwhelming, not just in cases of sexual abuse, but in other kinds of abuse as well. Frequently, an abused child isn't only ashamed of having been abused, but she actually feels guilty about it, as if she were somehow responsible. See, these kids are confused, shattered by their experiences. They don't know what to feel, except that they know what happened to them was wrong, and by some tortuous logic they come to blame themselves rather than the adults who abused them. Well, after all, they're accustomed to the idea that adults are wiser and more knowledgeable than kids, that adults are always right. God, you'd be surprised how often they fail to realize they're victims, that they've nothing to be ashamed about. They lose all sense of self-worth. They hate themselves because they hold themselves responsible for things they didn't do and couldn't prevent. And if they hate themselves enough, they withdraw… further and further… and the therapist finds it increasingly difficult to bring them back.'

Melanie seemed totally insensate now. She lolled limply, silently, almost lifelessly in her mother's arms.

Dan said, 'So you think when she says she hates herself because she's done terrible things, she's really just blaming herself for what was done to her.'

'No doubt about it,' Laura said emphatically. 'I can see now that her guilt and self-hatred are going to be even worse than in most cases. After all, she was mistreated — tortured — for nearly six years. And it was extremely intense and bizarre psychological abuse, even considerably more destructive than what the average child-victim endures.'

Dan understood everything Laura had said, and he was sure there was much truth in it. But a minute ago, while listening to Melanie, a monstrous possibility had occurred to him, and now he could not dismiss it. A shocking and disturbing suspicion had planted itself with hooks and barbs. The suspicion didn't entirely make sense. The thing he suspected seemed impossible, ludicrous. And yet…

He thought he knew what It was.

And it wasn't anything he had previously imagined. It was something far worse than all the nightmarish creatures he had thus far considered.

He stared at the girl with a mixture of sympathy, compassion, awe, and cold hard fear.

* * *

After Laura had gone through all the necessary steps to talk Melanie up from her deep hypnotic state, the girl's condition did not change. Both in a trance and out, her withdrawal from the world was virtually complete. They would not be able to elicit any more information from her.

Laura appeared to be almost physically ill with worry. Dan didn't blame her.

They moved Melanie to one of the unmade beds, where she lay in a catatonic state, moving only to bring her left thumb to her mouth so she could suck on it.

Laura called the hospital where she was on staff and from which she had taken a leave of absence, to make certain that no emergencies had arisen that would require her attention, and she checked in with her secretary at her own office to ascertain if all of her private patients had been placed with other psychiatrists for the duration of her leave. Then, not yet having had her shower, she said, 'I'll be ready in half an hour or forty-five minutes,' and went into the bathroom and closed the door.

Occasionally casting a glance at Melanie, Dan sat at the small table and paged through books written by Albert Uhlander, which he'd obtained at Rink's house the previous day. All seven volumes dealt with the occult: The Modern Ghost; Poltergeists; Twelve Startling Cases; Voodoo Today; The Lives of the Psychics; The Nostradamus Pipeline, OOBE: The Case for Astral Projection; and Strange Powers Within Us. One had been published by Putman, one by Harper & Row, and to his surprise the other five had been published by John Wilkes Press, which was no doubt an operation controlled by John Wilkes Enterprises, the same company that owned the house in which Regine Savannah Hoffritz now lived.

His first reaction to the colorfully jacketed books was that they were trash, filled with junk thoughts aimed at the same people who faithfully read every issue of Fate and believed every story therein, the same people who joined UFO clubs and believed that God was either an astronaut or a two-foot-tall blue man with eyes the size of saucers. But he reminded himself that something inhuman was stalking the people involved with the experiments in the gray room, something that was probably more understandable to Fate's regular readers, even with all the junk thought cluttering their minds, than to people who, like he himself, had always viewed believers in the occult with smug superiority or outright disdain. And now, since observing the hypnotic-regression therapy session with Melanie, he had an unsettling theory of his own that was every bit as fantastical as anything in the pages of Fate. Live and learn.

He found the publisher's address on the copyright page. The office was on Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills. He made a note of it, so he could compare it with the address of John Wilkes Enterprises' corporate headquarters, which was one of the things Earl Benton would be looking into this morning.

Next, he went through all seven volumes, reading the dedications and acknowledgements, in hope of coming across a familiar name that would further tie Uhlander to the McCaffrey-Hoffritz conspiracy or perhaps identify other as-yet-unknown conspirators, but he found nothing that seemed to be of value.

He looked at all the books again and chose one for closer examination. It was the volume that, at a glance, seemed the most likely to offer confirmation of the horrible possibility that had occurred to him while he'd been observing the hypnotic-therapy session with Melanie. He had read thirty pages by the time Laura showered, gave Melanie a bath, and declared herself ready to begin the day; in those pages he had indeed found things that lent substance to his worst fears.

The mists were clearing, the mystery dissolving. He felt that he stood on the edge of an understanding that would make sense of the events of the past two days: the gray room, the hideously battered bodies, the fact that the men in that Studio City house had been able to do nothing to defend themselves, Melanie's miraculous escape from that carnage, Joseph Scaldone's death in a locked room, and all the poltergeist-like phenomena.

It was madness.

Yet… it made sense.

And it scared the hell out of him.

He wanted to share his ideas with Laura, obtain her point of view as a psychiatrist. But what he would be proposing to her was so shocking, so horrible, and so hopeless that he wanted to think it through better than he had thus far. He wanted to be very sure of his chain of reasoning before he broached the subject. If what he suspected was true, Laura would need all the physical, mental, and emotional strength she could muster in order to deal with it.

They left the motel and went to the car. Laura sat in back with Melanie, because she didn't want to stop holding, stroking, and comforting the child, and the computer terminal left room for only two people up front.

Dan had intended to make a brief stop at his place to change clothes. His jacket, shirt, and trousers were limp and rumpled, for he had more or less slept in them. However, now that he believed that he was on the brink of a breakthrough in the case, he no longer cared if he looked seedy. He was eager to find and talk with Howard Renseveer, Sheldon Tolbeck, and others who had been a part of the conspiracy. He wanted to confront them with the ideas that had come to him during the past hour and see how they reacted.

Before driving out of the motel lot, he turned in his seat and studied Melanie.

She was slumped against her mother.

Her eyes were open but vacant.

Am I right, kid? he wondered. Is It what I think It is?

He half expected her to hear the unspoken questions and shift her eyes toward him, but she did not.

I hope I'm wrong, he thought. Because if that's what's been killing all these people, and if it's going to come after you when all the rest are dead, then there's nowhere you can hide, is there, honey? Not from a thing like that. Nowhere in the world you can hope to hide.

He shivered.

He started the car and drove away from the motel.

The previous night's fog continued to linger in the city. Rain began to fall once more. As each cold drop snapped hard against the windshield, the frigid impact seemed to be transmitted through the glass, through Dan's clothes, through his flesh and bones, and into his very soul.

Dan and Laura accomplished nothing of importance that morning, though they didn't fail for lack of trying. The renewed rainfall hampered them because it slowed traffic to a crawl throughout the city. The weather was bad, but the real problem was that the rats who could provide some answers were all deserting the ship: Neither Renseveer nor Tolbeck could be found at work or home. Dan wasted a lot of time tracking them down before he finally had sufficient reason to believe that both men had fled the city for destinations unknown.

At one o'clock, they met Earl Benton at the coffee shop in Van Nuys, as they had arranged the night before. Fortunately, the head wound that he'd suffered at the hands of Wexlersh had not appreciably slowed him down, and his morning had been more productive than Dan's and Laura's. The four of them sat in a booth at the back of the restaurant, as far as possible from the jukebox that was playing country music. They were beside a large plate-glass window, down which a gray film of rain rippled, blurring the world beyond. The place smelled pleasantly of french fries, sizzling hamburgers, bean soup, bacon, and coffee. The waitress was cheerful and efficient, and when she had taken their order and gone, Earl told Dan and Laura everything that he had uncovered. First thing that morning, he had called Mary Katherine O'Hara, the secretary of Freedom Now, and had arranged to see her at ten o'clock. She lived in a neat little bungalow in Burbank, a place half shrouded in bougainvillea, so typical of the architecture of the 1930s and in such good repair that Earl had half expected to see a Packard parked in the driveway.

'Mrs. O'Hara is in her sixties,' Earl said, 'and she's almost as well kept as her house. She's a very handsome woman now, and she must have been a knockout when she was young. She's a retired real-estate saleswoman. Though she isn't rich, I'd say she's definitely comfortable. The house is very nicely furnished, with several superb Art Deco antiques.'

'Was she reluctant to talk about Freedom Now?' Dan asked.

'On the contrary. She was eager to talk about it. You see, your police file on the organization is out of date. She's no longer an officer. She resigned in disgust several months ago.'

'Oh?'

'She's a dedicated libertarian, involved with a dozen different organizations, and when Ernest Cooper invited her to play a major role in a libertarian political-action committee that he had formed, she was happy to volunteer her time. The problem was that Cooper clearly wanted her name in order to lend some legitimacy to his PAC, and he expected her to be manipulable. But manipulating Mary O'Hara would be about as easy as playing football with a live porcupine without getting hurt.'

Dan was surprised and pleased to hear Laura's laughter. She had laughed so little in the past couple of days that he'd forgotten how deeply affected he could be by her delight.

'She sounds tough,' Laura said.

'And smart,' Earl said. 'She reminds me of you.'

'Me? Tough?'

'Tougher than you think you are,' Dan assured her, with the same admiration that Earl evidently felt.

Outside, thunder rolled like great broken wheels of stone across the day. Driven by a gusty wind, rain pummeled the window harder than ever.

Earl said, 'Mrs. O'Hara was there almost a year but, like several legit libertarians before her, she finally walked away from it, because she found out the organization wasn't doing what it was supposedly formed to do. It was taking in a lot of money, but it wasn't supporting a wide array of libertarian candidates or programs. In fact, most of the funds were going to a supposedly libertarian research project headed by Dylan McCaffrey.'

'The gray room,' Dan said.

Earl nodded.

Laura said, 'But what was libertarian about that project?'

'Probably nothing,' Earl said. 'The libertarian label was just a convenient cover. That's what Mary O'Hara finally decided.'

'A cover for what?'

'She didn't know.'

The waitress returned with three cups of coffee and a Pepsi. 'Your lunch will be ready in a couple minutes,' she said. She considered Earl's battered face and the bandage on his head, glanced at the bruise and abrasion on Dan's forehead, and said, 'You guys in a wreck or something?'

'Fell up some stairs,' Dan said.

'Fell up?' she asked.

'Four flights,' Earl said.

'Ah, you're kidding me.'

They grinned at her.

Smiling, she hurried away to take an order at another table.

As Laura unwrapped the straw, put it in the Pepsi, and tried to get Melanie to drink, Dan said to Earl, 'Mrs. O'Hara sounds like the type who would've done more than just walk away from a situation like that. I would expect her to write the Federal Elections Commission and get that PAC closed down.'

'She did write them,' Earl said. 'Twice.'

'And?'

'No reply.'

Dan shifted uneasily in the booth. 'You're saying the people behind Freedom Now have a grip on the Federal Elections Commission?'

'Let's just say they apparently have influence.'

'Which means this is a secret government project,' Dan said. 'And we were smart to get out from under the FBI.'

'Not necessarily.'

'But only the government would be able to pinch off an inquiry by the elections commission, and even they would find it difficult.'

'Patience,' Earl said, lifting his cup.

'You know something,' Dan said.

'I always know something,' Earl said, smiling, pausing to sip his coffee.

Dan saw that Melanie had drunk some of her Pepsi, though not without difficulty. Laura had already used up one napkin, blotting spilled soda from the girl's chin.

Earl said, 'First, let me back up and explain where Freedom Now gets its money. Mrs. O'Hara was only the secretary, but when she began to sense that something was rotten, she went behind Cooper's and Hoffritz's backs and checked the treasurer's records. Ninety-nine percent of the PAC's funds were received as grants from three other PACS: Honesty in Politics, Citizens for Enlightened Government, and the Twenty-second Century Group. Furthermore, when she looked into those groups, she discovered that Cooper and Hoffritz had roles in all of them and that all three of those PACs were primarily funded not, as you would expect, by contributions from ordinary citizens but by two other nonprofit organizations, two charitable foundations.'

'Charitable foundations? Are they permitted to mix in politics?'

Earl nodded. 'Yes, as long as they tread very carefully and if they're properly chartered to support "public-service and better-government programs," which these two foundations were.'

'So where do these foundations get their money?'

'Funny you should ask. Mrs. O'Hara didn't explore any further, but I called the Paladin office from her place and had some of our people start making inquiries. Both of these foundations are funded by another, larger charitable organization.'

Laura said, 'My God, it's a Chinese-box puzzle!'

'Let me get this straight,' Dan said. 'This larger charity funded the two smaller ones, and the two smaller ones funded three political-action committees — Honesty in Politics, uh, Citizens for Enlightened Government, and the Twenty-second Century Group — and then those committees contributed toward the funding of Freedom Now, which did virtually nothing with its money but fund Dylan McCaffrey's work in Studio City.'

'You got it,' Earl said. 'It was an elaborate laundering system to keep the original backers well separated from Dylan McCaffrey in case anything should go wrong and the authorities should find out that he was performing a series of cruel and abusive experiments on his own child.'

The cheerful young waitress arrived with their lunches, and they exchanged innocuous comments about the weather while she put the food in front of them.

When she was gone, no one touched lunch. To Earl, Dan said, 'What's the name of the charitable organization at the center of this Chinese-box puzzle?'

'Hold on to your hat.'

'I don't have a hat.'

'The Boothe Foundation.'

'I'll be damned.'

Laura said, 'The same one that supports orphanages and child-welfare groups and senior-citizen aid programs?'

'The same one,' Earl said.

Dan had been fumbling in a coat pocket. Now he produced the computer printout of the mailing list of customers from the Sign of the Pentagram. He leafed to the third page and showed it to them: Palmer Boothe, heir to the Boothe fortune, current head of the Boothe family, owner and publisher of the Los Angeles Journal, one of the city's most prominent citizens, the guiding force of the Boothe Foundation.

He said, 'I saw this last night, in Joseph Scaldone's office, behind that weird occult shop he was running. It amazed me that a hardheaded businessman like Boothe would be interested in the supernatural. Of course even the hardest heads have soft spots. We all have some weakness, some foolishness in us. But considering Boothe's reputation, his enlightened image… hell, it never occurred to me that he'd be involved in something like this.'

'The devil has advocates in the least likely places,' Earl said.

As Elton John came on the jukebox, Dan looked out at the driving gray rain. 'Two days ago I didn't even believe in the devil.'

'But now?'

'But now,' Dan said.

Laura began to cut Melanie's cheeseburger into bitesize pieces that she might be persuaded to take off a fork. The girl was staring at the wriggling patterns of rain on the window — or at something light-years beyond.

In a far part of the restaurant, a busboy or a waitress dropped a few dishes, and the crash was followed by a burst of laughter.

'Anyway,' Earl said, 'you remember those two letters Mary O'Hara wrote to the Federal Elections Commission? Well, there's not much mystery about why there was no follow-up. Palmer Boothe is a big contributor to both political parties, always a little more to the party currently in power, but always large contributions to both. And here several years ago, when political-action committees first came into vogue, when Boothe apparently saw how useful they could be for things like indirect funding of Dylan McCaffrey's research, he set out to get one or two of his own men on the commission that oversees them.'

Laura finished cutting up the cheeseburger and said, 'Listen, I don't know much about the Federal Elections Commission, but it seems to me that its members wouldn't be political appointees.'

'They aren't,' Earl said. 'Not directly. But the people who manage the bureaucracy that manages the elections commission are political appointees. So if you want to plant someone there, if you want it badly enough, and if you're rich and determined enough, you can accomplish it in a roundabout fashion. Of course, you can't get away with completely corrupting the commission, with outrageous misuse of it, because both political parties watch it intently for abuses. But if your intentions are modest — say, like keeping the commission from looking too closely at a couple of political-action committees that you've established for less than legitimate purposes — then no one's going to notice or particularly care. And if you're as resourceful as Palmer Boothe, you don't use obvious henchmen; you arrange for civic-minded, reputable men from one of the nation's largest charitable foundations to provide their services to the Federal Elections Commission, and everyone is delighted to see such educated, well-meaning types selflessly offering their time and energies to their government.'

With a sigh, Dan said, 'So it's Palmer Boothe, not the government, financing McCaffrey's research. Which means we didn't have to worry that the FBI might want to make Melanie disappear again.'

'I'm not so sure about that,' Earl said. 'It's true that the government wasn't providing the money to support McCaffrey and Hoffritz or to pay for the research that was conducted in that gray room. But now that they've seen the place and had a chance to poke through the papers McCaffrey had there, they might figure there's national-defense applications to what he was doing, and they might like to have a chance to examine and work closely with Melanie… unobstructed.'

'Over my dead body,' Laura said.

'So we're still on our own,' Dan said.

Earl nodded. 'Besides, Boothe apparently managed to get to Ross Mondale, to use the police department against us—'

'Not the department itself,' Dan said. 'Just a few rotten apples in it.'

'Still, who's to say he doesn't have friends in the FBI too? And while we'd be able to get Melanie back from the government if they took her away from us, we'd probably never find her again if Boothe regained control of her.'

For a couple of minutes they were silent. They ate lunch, and Laura tried to feed Melanie, though with little success. A Whitney Houston number faded away on the jukebox, and in a couple of seconds Bruce Springsteen began to sing a haunting song about how everything dies but some things come back and, baby, that's a fact.

In their present situation, there was something decidedly macabre and disquieting about Springsteen's lyrics.

Dan looked at the rain and considered how this new information about Boothe helped them.

They now knew that the enemy was powerful, but that he wasn't as all-powerful as they had feared. That was a damned good thing to know. It improved morale. It was better to deal with an ultrawealthy megalomaniac — with one enemy, regardless of how crazy and influential he might be — than to be confronted by a monolithic bureaucracy determined to carry out a course of action in spite of the fact that it was an insane course of action. The enemy was still a giant, but he was a giant that might be brought down if they found the right slingshot, the perfectly shaped stone.

And now Dan knew the identity of 'Daddy,' the white-haired and oh-so-distinguished pervert who regularly visited Regine Savannah Hoffritz in that Hollywood Hills house that couldn't decide if it wanted to be Tudor or Spanish.

'What about John Wilkes Enterprises?' he asked Earl. Even as he voiced the question, he saw what he should have seen earlier, and in part he answered his own inquiry: 'There's no John Wilkes. It's entirely a corporate name, right? John Wilkes Boothe. The man who assassinated Lincoln, although I think that was spelled B-O-O-T-H, without the E. So this is another company owned by Palmer Boothe, and he called it John Wilkes Enterprises as — what? — a joke?'

Earl nodded. 'Seems like an inside joke to me, but I guess you'd have to ask Boothe himself if you want an explanation. Anyway, Paladin looked into the corporation this morning. It's no deep dark secret or anything. Boothe is listed as sole stockholder. He uses John Wilkes Enterprises to manage a collection of small endeavours that don't fit under his other corporate or foundation umbrellas, one or two of which don't even turn a profit.'

'John Wilkes Press,' Dan said.

Earl raised his eyebrows. 'Yeah, that's one of them. They publish only occult-related books, and they break even some years, lose a few bucks other years. John Wilkes also owns a small legit theater in the Westwood area, a chain of three shops that sell homemade chocolates, a Burger King franchise, and several other things.'

'Including the house where Boothe keeps his mistress,' Laura said.

'I'm not sure he thinks of her as his mistress,' Dan said with considerable distaste. 'More like his pet… a pretty little animal with some really good tricks in its repertoire.'

They finished lunch.

The rain beat on the windows.

Melanie remained silent, empty-eyed, lost.

At last Laura said, 'Now what?'

'Now I go see Palmer Boothe,' Dan said. 'If he hasn't run like all the other rats.'

Before they paid their check and left the coffee shop, they decided that Earl would take Laura and Melanie to a movie. The girl needed a place to hide for a few hours, until Dan had a chance to speak with Palmer Boothe either in person or on the telephone, and seeking shelter in yet another motel room was too depressing to consider. Neither the FBI nor the police — not even the minions that Boothe could marshal — would think of looking for them at an anonymous shopping-center multiplex, and there was virtually no chance that they would be accidentally spotted by someone in the darkness of a theater. In addition, Laura suggested that the right film might hold therapeutic value for Melanie: The forty-foot images, unnaturally bright color, and overwhelming sound of a motion picture sometimes gained the attention of an autistic child when nothing else could.

Newspaper-vending machines stood in front of the restaurant, and Dan dashed into the rain to buy a Journal for its film listings. The irony of using Palmer Boothe's own publication for the purpose of finding a place to hide from him was not lost on any of them. They settled on a Steven Spielberg adventure fantasy and a theater in Westwood. It was a multiplex that was showing a second film suitable for Melanie, so after the Spielberg picture they could take in another feature and pass the rest of the afternoon and the early evening there if necessary. Their intention was to remain at the theater until Dan had either found Boothe or had given up searching for him, at which time he would return for them and relieve Earl.

When they went outside to Earl's car, Dan got in with them for a moment. While the rain fell from a roiling gray sky, he said to Laura, 'There's something you've got to do for me. When you're in the theater, I want you to keep an even closer watch on Melanie than you've done so far. Whatever happens, don't let her go to sleep. If she closes her eyes for any length of time longer than a blink, shake her, pinch her, do whatever you have to do to make sure she's awake.'

Laura frowned. 'Why?'

Not answering the question, he said, 'And even if she remains awake but just seems to be slipping into an even deeper catatonic state, do what you can to pull her back. Talk to her, touch her, demand more of her attention. I know what I'm asking isn't easy. The poor kid's already extremely detached, so it's not going to be easy to tell that she's drifting off a little further, especially not in a dark theater, but do the best you can.'

Earl said, 'You know something, don't you?'

'Maybe,' Dan admitted.

'You know what was going on in that gray room.'

'I don't know. But I have some… vague suspicions.'

'What?' Laura leaned forward from the backseat with pathetic eagerness, so desperate to understand what was happening, so frantic for any knowledge that would shed light on Melanie's ordeal, that she gave no thought to the possibility that knowing might be even worse than not knowing, that knowledge might be a far greater horror than mystery. 'What do you suspect? Why is it so important for her to stay awake, alert?'

'It would take too long to explain right now,' he lied. He wasn't certain that he knew what was happening, and he didn't want to worry her unnecessarily. And there was no doubt, if he were to tell her what he suspected, she would be considerably more distraught than she was now. 'I've got to get moving, find out if Boothe is still in the city. You just keep Melanie as awake and as alert as you can.

'When she's asleep or deeply catatonic,' Laura said, 'she's more vulnerable, isn't she? Somehow, she's more vulnerable. Maybe… maybe It even senses when she's asleep and comes for her then. I mean, last night, in the motel, when she slept, the room got cold and something came, didn't it? And yesterday evening, at the house, when the radio became… possessed… and when that whirlwind full of flowers burst through the door, she had her eyes closed and she was… not asleep but more catatonic than she is most of the time. You remember, Earl? She had her eyes closed, and she seemed unaware of the uproar around her. And somehow It knew she was the least alert, and It came then because she was vulnerable. Is that it? Is that why I have to keep her awake?'

'Yes,' Dan lied. 'That's part of it. And now I've really got to go, Laura.' He wanted to put his hand to her face. He wanted to kiss the corners of her mouth and say good-bye with more feeling than he had any right to express. Instead, he looked at Earl. 'You take good care of them.'

'Like they were my own,' Earl said.

Dan got out of the car, slammed the door, and sprinted across the storm-lashed parking lot to the unmarked sedan that he had left on the other side of the restaurant. By the time Dan started the engine and switched on the windshield wipers, Earl had already pulled out of the lot and was moving off through the hesitant traffic on the rainy street.

Dan wondered if he would ever see them again.

Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey…

The hated, long-remembered, dream-haunting string of failures cycled through his mind for at least the ten thousandth time.

Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey… Laura, Melanie.

No.

He wouldn't fail this time.

In fact, he might be the only cop in the city — the only person within a thousand miles — who was sufficiently fascinated with murder and murderers, sufficiently well versed in their aberrant behavior and psychology, to be able to find his way into the heart of this bizarre case; he was, perhaps, the only one who had any chance of successfully resolving it. He knew more about murder than most men ever would, because he had thought more about it than anyone else he knew and because it had played such an important role in both his personal and his professional life. His contemplation of the subject had long ago brought him to the dismal realization that the capacity for murder existed in everyone, and he was not surprised when he found it in even the least likely suspects. Therefore, he was not now surprised by the suspicions that had grown even more concrete during the past several hours, although Laura and Earl would have been not only surprised but probably devastated by them.

Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey.

The chain of failure ended there.

He drove away from the restaurant, and although he worked hard at keeping his confidence high, he felt almost as bleak as the gray, rain-filled day through which he moved.

* * *

The Spielberg film had come out a few weeks before Christmas, but almost three months later, it was still popular enough to fill half the large theater for a weekday matinee. Now, five minutes before the feature was scheduled to start, the audience was murmuring and laughing and shifting in their seats in happy anticipation.

Laura, Melanie, and Earl took three seats on the right side of the auditorium, halfway down the aisle. Sitting between Laura and Earl, Melanie stared at the giant black screen, expressionless, unmoving, unspeaking, hands limp in her lap, but at least she seemed awake.

Although it would be more difficult to monitor the girl in the dark, Laura wished that the lights would go down and that the movie would start, for she felt vulnerable in the light, naked and observed among all those strangers. She knew it was silly to worry that the wrong people would see them there and make trouble for them. The FBI, crooked police officers, Palmer Boothe and his associates might all be eager to find her, but that meant they would be out searching, not taking in a movie. They were safe. If any place in the world was a haven from harm, it was that ordinary theater on a rainy afternoon.

But then, of course, she had decided some time ago that nowhere in the world was safe anymore.

* * *

Having decided that a forceful, blunt, and surprise approach would be most effective with Palmer Boothe, Dan drove directly from the coffee shop to the Journal building on Wilshire Boulevard, just a couple of blocks east of the point at which Beverly Hills gave way to the enfolding, octopodal city of Los Angeles. He didn't know if Boothe was even in the city any longer, let alone in his office, but it was the best place to start.

He parked in the underground garage beneath the building and rode the elevator to the eighteenth floor, where all the executives of the Journal communications empire — which included nineteen other papers, two magazines, three radio stations, and two television stations — had their offices. The elevator opened on a plushly furnished lounge with ankledeep carpet and two original Rothko oils on the walls.

Unavoidably impressed and overwhelmed by the knowledge that there was probably four or five million dollars' worth of artwork represented in those two simply framed pieces, Dan wasn't able to slip into his Intimidating Homicide Detective role as smoothly and completely as he had planned. Nevertheless, he used his ID and authority to get by the armed security guard and past the coldly polite and supremely efficient receptionist.

A polite young man who might have been an executive secretary or an executive trainee or a bodyguard — or all three — arrived at the receptionist's summons. He led Dan back a long hall so silent that it could have been in deep space between distant stars instead of in the middle of a large city. The hallway terminated in another reception area, an exquisitely appointed decompression chamber outside the sanctum sanctorum of the starship commander himself, Palmer Boothe.

The young man introduced Dan to Mrs. Hudspeth, who was Boothe's secretary, then departed. Mrs. Hudspeth was a handsome, elegant, gray-haired woman in a plum-colored knit suit and a pastel blouse with a plum-colored bow at the throat. Though she was tall and thin and refined and obviously proud of her refinement, she was also brisk and efficient; that no-nonsense aspect of her personality reminded Dan of Irmatrude Gelkenshettle.

'Oh, Lieutenant,' she said, 'I'm so sorry, but Mr. Boothe isn't in the building right now. You've missed him by only a few minutes. He had a meeting to attend. It's been a terribly busy day for him, but then most days are, you know.'

Dan was unsettled to hear that Boothe was carrying on with work as usual. If his theory was correct, if he had correctly identified It, then Palmer Boothe should be in desperate fear for his life, on the run, perhaps barricaded in the basement of some heavily fortified castle, preferably in Tibet or the Swiss Alps, or in some other far and difficult-to-reach corner of the world. If Boothe was attending meetings and making business decisions as usual, that must mean that he was not afraid, and if he was not afraid, that meant Dan's theory about the gray room was incorrect.

He told Mrs. Hudspeth: 'I absolutely must talk with Mr. Boothe. It's an urgent matter. You might say it's even a matter of life or death.'

'Well, of course, he's most anxious to speak with you as well,' she said. 'I'm sure that must have been clear from his message.'

Dan blinked. 'What message?'

'But isn't that why you're here? Didn't you receive the message he left for you at your precinct headquarters?'

'The East Valley Division?'

'Yes, he called first thing this morning, anxious to arrange a meeting with you. But you weren't in yet. We tried your home and got no answer there.'

'I haven't been back to East Valley today,' he said. 'I didn't get any message. I came here because I must talk to Mr. Boothe as soon as possible.'

'Oh, I know he shares your desire for a conference,' she said. 'Indeed, I've got a copy of his schedule for the day — every place he'll be and the time he'll be there — and he asked me to share it with you if you showed up. He requested that you attempt to connect with him at some point that would be convenient for you.'

All right. This was more like it. Boothe was desperate, after all, so desperate that he hoped Dan would either be corruptible or would agree to act as intermediary between Boothe and the particular devil that was stalking the people from the gray room. He wasn't on the run or hiding in some foreign port because he knew perfectly well that it would do no good to run or hide. He was conducting business as usual because the alternative — staring at the walls and waiting for It to come — was simply unthinkable.

Mrs. Hudspeth went to her enormous Henredon desk, opened a leather folder, and pulled out the top sheet of paper — her boss's schedule for the day. She studied it and said, 'I'm afraid you won't be able to catch him where he is now, and then he'll be in transit for a while — the limousine, of course — so I think the earliest you can hope to connect with him is at four o'clock.'

'That's more than an hour and a quarter. Are you sure I can't get hold of him sooner?'

'See for yourself,' she said, handing him the schedule.

She was right. If he tried driving around the city after Boothe, he'd just keep missing him; the publisher was a busy man. But according to the schedule, at 4:00 he expected to be home.

'Where does he live?'

Mrs. Hudspeth told Dan the address, and he wrote it down. It was in Bel Air.

When he finished writing, closed his small notebook, and looked up, she was watching him intently. There was an avaricious curiosity in her eyes. Clearly, she was aware that something extraordinary was happening, but Boothe had for once not taken her into his confidence, and she required all of her refinement and self-control to keep from pumping Dan for information. She was obviously eaten alive by worry too, an emotion which she had thus far been able to conceal from him, but which now surfaced like a drowned and bloated corpse soaring up through dark waters. She would be this worried only if she knew that Boothe himself was worried, and he would have permitted her to see his own concern only if it was too overwhelming to conceal. For a hard-nosed and crafty businessman like him, it would have been impossible to conceal only if it was the next thing to panic.

The young executive — or the human equivalent of an attack dog, whichever he was — returned and escorted Dan back to the reception area. The armed guard was still standing alertly by the elevators.

The beautiful but cool receptionist typed at high speed on her computer keyboard. In the muffling acoustics of the room, the nearly silent keys made soft clicking sounds that reminded Dan of ice cubes rattling against one another.

* * *

The movie had started ten minutes ago, much to Laura's relief, and they were now as anonymous as all the other shadowy theatergoers slumped in the highbacked seats.

Melanie stared toward the front of the theater with the same expression that had been on her face when the screen had been blank. The backsplash of light illuminated her face. Distorted reflections of the images in the film moved across her features, bringing moments of artificial color to her, but for the most part the strange light made her look even paler than she was.

At least she's awake, Laura thought.

And then she wondered what Dan Haldane knew. More than he had told her. That was for sure.

On the other side of Melanie, Earl Benton reached a hand inside his suit jacket, quietly reassuring himself that his revolver was in his shoulder holster and that he could draw it unobstructed. Laura had seen him check the weapon twice even before the film had started; she was sure he would check it again in a few minutes. It was a nervous habit, and for a man who was not the type for nervous habits, it was a disconcerting indication of how profoundly worried he was.

Of course, if It came to them here in the theater, and if It was finally ready to take Melanie, the revolver would provide no defense, regardless of how quickly Earl could draw and fire it.

* * *

With an hour and a quarter to kill before he could meet Palmer Boothe in Bel Air, Dan Haldane decided to drop around to the precinct house in Westwood where, the previous night, charges had been filed against Wexlersh and Manuello. The two detectives were being held solely on Earl Benton's sworn statement, and Dan wanted to add his testimony as another weight against their cell door. He had left Ross Mondale under the impression that he would not accuse Wexlersh and Manuello of assault with intent to kill, and he had told Mondale that Earl would withdraw his accusations in a couple of days, when the McCaffreys were safe, but he had been lying. If he achieved nothing else in this case, if he failed to save Melanie and Laura, he would at least see Wexlersh and Manuello behind bars and Ross Mondale ruined.

At the precinct house, the officer in charge of the case, one Herman Dorft, was glad to see Dan. The only thing that Dorft wanted more than Dan's statement was one from Laura McCaffrey. He was not happy to learn that Dr. McCaffrey was unavailable for the foreseeable future. He took Dan to a small interrogation room with a battered desk, VDT, table, and five chairs, and he offered to provide either a stenographer or a tape recorder.

'I'm so familiar with this routine,' Dan said, 'I'd rather just compose the statement myself. I can use the computer if that's all right with you.'

Herman Dorft obligingly left Dan alone with the computer, with the harsh fluorescent light and the sound of rain on the roof, and with the stale, bitter smell of cigarette smoke that had precipitated a thin yellowish film on the walls since the last time the room had been painted.

Twenty minutes later, he had just finished typing the statement and was about to go looking for a police notary, in whose presence he would sign what he had written, when the door opened and Michael Seames, the FBI agent, took one step inside. He said, 'Hello there.' He still seemed, to Dan, to be suffering chronological confusion: His face was that of a thirty-year-old, but his slumped shoulders and stiff movements made him seem like a seasoned Social Security recipient. 'I've been looking for you, Haldane.'

'Good day for ducks, huh?' Dan said, getting to his feet.

'Where are Mrs. McCaffrey and Melanie?' Seames asked.

'Hard to believe that everyone was worried about the drought just a few years ago. Now the winters get rainier every year.'

'Two detectives charged with attempted murder, police violations of civil rights, several potential breaches of national security — the Bureau now has plenty of reasons to step into this case, Haldane.'

'Myself, I'm building an ark,' Dan said, picking up his typed statement and moving toward the door.

Seames didn't get out of his way. 'And we have moved in. We're no longer just observers here. We've exercised the right of federal jurisdiction in these homicides.'

'Good for you,' Dan said.

'You are, of course, obliged to cooperate with us.'

'Sounds like fun,' Dan said, wishing Seames would get the hell out of his way.

'Where are Mrs. McCaffrey and Melanie?'

'Probably at the movies,' Dan said.

'Damn it, Haldane—'

'On a dreary day like this, they aren't going to be at the beach or at Disneyland or having a picnic in Griffith Park, so why not the movies?'

'I'm beginning to think you're an asshole, Haldane.'

'Well, at least it's comforting to hear that you're beginning to think.'

'Captain Mondale warned me about you.'

'Oh, don't take that seriously, Agent Seames. Ross is such a kidder.'

'You're obstructing—'

'No, it's you who's obstructing,' Dan said. 'You're in my way.' And as he spoke, he shouldered past Seames, through the door.

The FBI agent followed him down the hall to the busy uniformed-operations room, where Dan located a notary. 'Haldane, you can't protect them all by yourself. If you insist on handling it this way, they're going to get snatched or killed, and you're going to be to blame.'

Signing his statement in front of the notary, Dan said, 'Maybe. Maybe they'll get killed. But if I turn them over to you, they'll positively be killed.'

Seames gaped at him. 'Are you implying that I… that the FBI… that the government would murder that little girl? Because maybe she's a Russian or Chinese research project? Or maybe because she's one of our projects and she knows too much and now we want to shut her up before this mess becomes too public? Is that what you think?'

'Crossed my mind.'

Spluttering and fuming, filled with either genuine outrage or a good imitation of it, Seames followed Dan from the notary to another desk where Herman Dorft was drinking black coffee and looking through a file of mug shots.

'Are you crazy, Haldane, or what?' Seames demanded.

'Or what.'

'We're the government, for Christ's sake. The United States government.'

'I'm happy for you.'

'This isn't China, where the government knocks on a couple of hundred doors every night and a couple of hundred people disappear.'

'How many disappear here? Ten a night? Makes me feel so much better.'

'This isn't Iran or Nicaragua or Libya. We aren't killers. We're here to protect the public.'

'Does this stirring speech come with background music? It ought to, but I don't hear any.'

'We don't murder people,' Seames said flatly.

Handing his notarized statement to Dorft, Dan said to Seames, 'All right, so the government itself, the institution of government in this country, doesn't make a policy of killing people — except maybe with taxes and paperwork. But the government is composed of people, individuals, and your agency is composed of individuals, and don't tell me that some of those individuals aren't capable of murdering the McCaffreys in return for money or for political concerns, misguided idealism, or any of a thousand other reasons. Don't try to tell me that everyone in your agency is so saintly and so God-fearing that a homicidal thought has never entered any of their minds, because I remember Waco, Texas, and the Weaver family in Idaho and more than a few other Bureau abuses of power, Agent Seames.'

Dorft stared up at them, startled, as Seames shook his head violently and said, 'FBI agents are—'

'Dedicated, professional, and generally damned good at what they do,' Dan finished for him. 'But even the best of us have the capacity for murder, Mr. Seames. Even those of us who appear to be the most dependable — or the most innocent, the gentlest. Believe me, I know. I know all about murder, about the murderers among us, the murderers within us. More than I want to know. Mothers murder their own children. Husbands get drunk and murder their wives, and sometimes they don't have to be drunk, just suffering from indigestion, and sometimes it doesn't even take indigestion. Ordinary secretaries murder their two-timing boyfriends. Last summer, right here in L.A., on the hottest day in July, an ordinary salesman murdered his next-door neighbor over an argument about a borrowed lawn mower. We're a twisted species, Seames. We mean well, and we want to do good for each other, and we try, God knows we try, but there's this darkness in us, this taint, and we've got to struggle against it every minute, struggle against letting the taint spread and overwhelm us, and we do struggle, but sometimes we lose. We murder for jealousy, greed, envy, pride… revenge. Political idealists go on murderous rampages and make life hell on earth for the very people whose lives they profess to want to make better. Even the best government, if it's big enough, is riddled with idealists who'd open up extermination camps and feel righteous about it, if they were just given a chance. Religious zealots kill each other in the name of God. Housewives, ministers, businessmen, plumbers, pacifists, poets, doctors, lawyers, grandmothers, and teenagers — all have the capacity to murder, given the right moment and mood and motivation. And the ones you've got to mistrust the most are the ones who tell you they're men and women of peace, the ones who tell you they're absolutely nonviolent and safe, because they're either lying and waiting for an advantage over you — or they're dangerously naive and know nothing important about themselves. Now, you see, two people I care about — the two people I care about most in the world, it seems — are in danger of their lives, and I won't entrust their care to anyone but me. Sorry. No way. Forget it. And anybody who tries to get in my way, tries to stop me from protecting the McCaffreys, is at least going to get his ass kicked up between his shoulder blades. Oh, at least. And anyone who tries to harm them, tries to lay a finger on them… well, hell, I'll waste the son of a bitch, sure as hell. I have no doubts about that, Seames, because I have absolutely no illusions about my own capacity for murder.'

Shaking, he walked away, heading toward the door that opened on the parking lot beside the precinct house. As he went, he became aware that the room had fallen silent and that everyone was looking at him. He realized that he had been speaking not only angrily and passionately but at the top of his voice as well. He felt fevered. Sweat sheathed his face. People moved out of his way.

He had reached the door and put his hand on it by the time Michael Seames had recovered from that emotional outburst and had come after him. 'Wait, Haldane, for Christ's sake, it just can't work that way. We can't let you play the Lone Ranger. Think, man! There are eight people dead in two days, which makes this case just too damned big to—'

Dan stopped before opening the door, turned sharply to Seames, and interrupted him. 'Eight? Is that what you said? Eight dead?'

Dylan McCaffrey, Willy Hoffritz, Cooper, Rink, and Scaldone. That made five. Not eight. Just five.

'What's happened since last night?' Dan demanded. 'Who else has been hit since Joseph Scaldone?'

'You don't know?'

'Who else?' Dan demanded.

'Edwin Koliknikov.'

'But he got out. He ran, went to Las Vegas.'

Seames was furious. 'You knew about Koliknikov? You knew he was an associate of Hoffritz's, in on this gray room business?'

'Yes.'

'We didn't know until he was dead, for God's sake! You're withholding information from a police investigation, Haldane, and it doesn't matter a rat's ass that you're a cop!'

'What happened to Koliknikov?'

Seames told him about the gaudy public execution in the Vegas casino. 'It was like a poltergeist,' the agent repeated. 'Something unseen. An unknown, unimaginable power that reached into that casino and beat Koliknikov to death in front of hundreds of witnesses! Now there's no longer any doubt that Hoffritz and Dylan McCaffrey were working on something with serious defense applications, and we're goddamned determined to know what it was.'

'You've got his papers, the logbooks and files from the house in Studio City—'

'We had them,' Seames said. 'But whatever reached into that casino and wasted Koliknikov also reached into the evidence files in this case and set fire to all of McCaffrey's papers—'

Astonished, Dan said, 'What? When was this?'

'Last night. Spontaneous fucking combustion,' Seames said.

Obviously Seames was teetering on the edge of blind rage, for a federal agent simply did not shout the F-word at the top of his voice in a public place. Such behavior wasn't good for the image, and to the feds, their image was as important as their work.

'You said eight,' Dan reminded him. 'Eight dead. Who else besides Koliknikov?'

'Howard Renseveer was found dead in his ski chalet this morning, up in Mammoth. I guess you know about Renseveer too.'

'No,' Dan lied, afraid that the truth would so enrage Seames that he would put Dan under arrest. 'Harold Renseveer?'

'Howard,' Seames corrected in a sarcastic tone that indicated he was still half convinced that Dan knew the name well. 'Another associate of Willy Hoffritz and Dylan McCaffrey. Evidently he was hiding up there. People in another chalet, farther down the mountain, heard screaming during the night, called the sheriff. They found a mess when they got there. And there was another man with Renseveer. Sheldon Tolbeck.'

'Tolbeck? Who's he?' Dan asked, playing dumb in the name of self-preservation.

'Another research psychologist who was involved with Hoffritz and McCaffrey. Indications are that Tolbeck was in the cabin when this thing… this power, whatever it is, showed up and started to bash Renseveer's brains in. Tolbeck ran into the woods. He hasn't been found yet. He probably never will be, and if he is… well, the odds are pretty damned high that the best we can hope for is that he froze to death.'

This was bad. Terrible. The worst.

Dan had known that time was running out, but he hadn't known that it was pouring away like floodwater through the broken breast of a damn. He had thought that at least five of the conspirators from the gray room remained to be disposed of before It would turn its attention to Melanie. He had figured those executions would require another day or two and, long before the last of the conspirators had been destroyed, he would have confirmed his suspicions about the case and would have found a way to bring the slaughter to an end in time to save Melanie. He'd thought he might even be in time to save one or more of those manipulative and amoral men, although they didn't deserve to be saved. But suddenly his chances of saving anyone were diminished: Three more were gone. As far as he knew, two conspirators remained: Albert Uhlander, the author; and Palmer Boothe. As soon as they were terminated, It would turn to Melanie with a special rage. It would tear her apart. It would hammer her head to bits, hammer the last glimmer of life out of her brain before finally releasing her. Only Boothe and Uhlander stood between the girl and death. And even now, either the publisher or the author — or both — might be in the merciless grip of their invisible but powerful adversary.

Dan turned away from Seames, jerked open the door, and plunged out into the parking lot, where a cold wind and a stinging rain and an early fog were industriously putting the lie to the standard postcard image of Southern California. He sloshed through several puddles, getting water in his shoes.

He heard Seames shouting at him, but he didn't pause or reply. When he got in the car, dripping and shivering, he looked back and saw Seames standing in the open door of the precinct house. From this distance the agent's face seemed to have aged in the past few minutes; now it was more in harmony with his gray hair.

Driving out of the lot, into the street, Dan was surprised that Seames let him go. After all, a great deal was at stake, perhaps even grave national-defense issues; eight people were dead, and the FBI had officially stepped into the case. Seames would have been justified in detaining him; in fact, it was a dereliction of duty not to have done so.

Dan was relieved to be free, of course, because it was more important than ever that he talk to Boothe soon, damned soon. If Melanie's life had been hanging by a string, it was now hanging by a thread, and time like a razor was relentlessly sawing through that fragile filament.

Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey…

No.

Not this time.

He would save this woman, this child. He would not fail again.

He drove through Westwood, reached Wilshire, swung left, heading toward Westwood Boulevard, which would take him to Sunset and to the entrance to Bel Air. He would be arriving at the Boothe house ahead of schedule, but maybe Boothe would be early too.

Dan went three blocks before it dawned on him that Michael Seames had probably had his car bugged while he was in the precinct house preparing his statement against Wexlersh and Manuello. That was why he hadn't been detained for questioning or arrested for obstructing a federal officer. Seames had realised that the quickest method of finding Laura and Melanie McCaffrey was to allow Dan to lead the way.

As a traffic light turned red ahead of him, Dan braked and glanced repeatedly in the rearview mirror. Traffic was heavy. Spotting a tail would be difficult and time-consuming when there was precious little time to consume. Besides, those tracking him were not necessarily within sight of his car; if they had bugged his car, if they were running an electronic tail, they could be several blocks away, watching his progress on a lighted scope overlaid with a computer-generated map of the streets.

He had to lose them.

He wasn't going to the McCaffrey's yet, but he didn't want to be followed to Boothe's place, either. A tag-along band of FBI agents would not particularly encourage Boothe to open up. Furthermore, if Boothe did spill everything he knew, Dan didn't want anyone to hear what the publisher had to say, for if Melanie did — by some miracle — survive, that information would be used against her. Then she would have no chance whatsoever of finding her way back from autism, no hope of leading a normal life.

Already, there was little hope for her, though there was at least a spark. Right now, it was Dan's job to preserve that spark of hope and try to nurture it into a flame.

The traffic light changed to green.

He hesitated, not sure which way to go, what action to take in order to rid himself of his tail.

He looked at his watch.

His heart was pounding.

The soft ticking of his watch, the thump-tick of his heartbeat, and the ticking of the rain on the car all blended together in one metronomic sound, and it seemed as though the entire world were a time bomb about to explode.

Melanie's eyes followed the action on the screen. She didn't make a sound, and she didn't shift an inch in her seat, but her eyes moved, and that seemed to be a good sign. It was one of the few times in the past two days that Laura had seen the girl actually looking at something in this world. For almost an hour, the movement of her eyes had indicated that she was involved with the movie, which was certainly the first that she had focused on external events for any substantial length of time. Whether Melanie was following the plot or was merely fascinated by the bright images didn't matter. The important thing was that the music and the color and Spielberg's cinematic artistry — his imaginative scenes and archetypal characters and bold use of the camera — had done what nothing else could do, had begun to draw the child out of her self-imposed psychological exile.

Laura knew there would be no miraculous recovery, no spontaneous rejection of autism simply because of the movie. But it was a start, however small.

In the meantime, Melanie's interest in the film made it easier for Laura to monitor her and keep her awake. The girl exhibited no signs of being sleepy or of slipping back into a more profound catatonic state.

* * *

Dan drove back and forth through Westwood, winding from street to street. Each time that he came to a stop sign or a red traffic light, he shifted the car into Park, got out, and hastily searched one small portion of the sedan's body for the compact transmitter that he knew must be attached to some part of the vehicle. He could have pulled to the curb and examined the entire car methodically from end to end, but then the Bureau agents tailing him would catch up and see what he was doing. If they realized that he suspected being monitored they would not give him an opportunity to find and discard the bug and slip away from them; they would most likely arrest him and take him back to Michael Seames. So at the first stop sign, he frantically checked up under the left front fender and in the wheel well around the tire, groping for a magnetically attached electronics package about the size of a pack of cigarettes. At the next stop he checked the left rear wheel well; during the two stops after that, he ran to the right side of the car and explored under those fenders. He knew other motorists were gawking, but because of his zigzagging route of randomly chosen streets, none of them were behind him for more than two stops, so none had enough time to begin to think that his behavior was suspicious rather than merely odd or eccentric.

Eventually, at a stop sign at an intersection in a residential neighborhood, two blocks east of Hilgarde and south of Sunset Boulevard, when he was the only motorist in sight, with rain pasting his hair even tighter to his scalp and drizzling under the collar of his coat, he found what he was looking for under the rear bumper. He tore it loose, pitched it into a line of plum-thorn shrubs in the front yard of a big pale-yellow Spanish house, got behind the wheel of the sedan again, slammed his door, and got the hell out of there. He repeatedly checked the rearview mirror during the next few blocks, afraid that the men tailing him had gotten close enough to see him discard the bug and were following visually. But he was not pursued.

His pants legs and shoes were soaked, and a lot of water had gotten under the collar of his coat while he'd twisted and strained to feel beneath various portions of the car. Waves of shivers swept through him. His teeth chattered.

He turned the car's heater control to its highest position. But this was a cheapjack city vehicle, and even when the equipment worked, it didn't work well. The vents spewed a vaguely warm, moist, slightly fetid breeze in his face, as if the car had halitosis, and he didn't stop shivering until he had driven all the way into the heights of Bel Air, had wound through the tangled network of very private streets, and had found the Boothe estate on the most secluded street of all.

Beyond the massive pines and intermingled oaks that were almost equally enormous as the ancient evergreens, rose a brick wall the color of old blood, between seven and eight feet tall, capped with black slate and black iron spikes. The wall was so long that it seemed to delineate the property line of an institution — a college, hospital, museum — rather than that of a private residence. But in time Dan came to a place where the brick ramparts curved in on both sides of a driveway, flanking it for twenty feet and terminating at a formidable iron gate.

The cross-supported bars of the gate were two inches thick. The entire structure, which was flanked and capped by intricately wrought scrolls and fleurs-de-lis of iron, was impressive and elegant and beautifully crafted — and seemed capable of withstanding any number of bomb blasts.

For a moment Dan thought he was going to have to get out in the rain and search for a call button to announce himself, but then he noticed a guardhouse subtly incorporated into one of the curved brick ramparts. A guard, wearing galoshes and a gray rain slicker with the hood pulled up, stepped out from behind a brick baffle that concealed the door to his small domain; for the first time Dan noticed the round window through which the guard had seen the sedan approaching.

The man came directly to the car, inquired if he could help, checked Dan's ID, and informed him that he was expected. He said, 'I'll open the gate, Lieutenant. Just follow the main drive and park along the circle in front of the house.'

Dan cranked up his window while the guard returned to the booth, and the colossal gates swung inward with ponderous grace. He drove through them with the curious science-fictional feeling that this was not a residence in the same world that he inhabited, but a place in another, better dimension; the gates guarded a magic portal through which one might jump into stranger and more wonderful realms.

The Boothe estate appeared to encompass eight or ten acres and must have been one of the larger properties in Bel Air. The driveway led up a gentle rise and then curved to the left, through exquisitely maintained, parklike grounds. The house, standing just beyond that point at which the driveway curved back on itself to form a circle, was where God would have lived — if He'd had sufficient money. It resembled one of those baronial homes in films with British settings, like Rebecca and Brideshead Revisited, a great pile of bricks with granite coins and granite window lintels, three stories high, with a black-slate mansard roof and many gables, with half-seen wings and unseen wings angling off from the front-facing portion of the structure. A dozen steps under a portico led up to a set of antique, mahogany entry doors that had probably cost the life of at least one big tree or two younger ones.

He parked beside a limestone fountain that was centred in the looped circular turnaround. It wasn't spouting at the moment, but it looked like a backdrop to a love scene featuring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in one of those old movies about European romance and intrigue.

Dan climbed the steps, and one of the front doors opened before he could begin searching for the bell. Evidently the guard in the gatehouse had called ahead to announce him.

The entry hall was so grand and large that Dan figured he could have lived comfortably in just that space, even if someday he married and produced two children.

Forgoing the formal wear of movie butlers in favor of a gray suit and white shirt and black tie, a soft-spoken servant with a British accent took Dan's streaming coat and had the courtesy not to look askance at his damp, rumpled, day-old clothes.

'Mr. Boothe is waiting for you in the library,' the butler said.

Dan checked his watch. It was 3:55. Delayed by the necessity of locating and removing the transmitter that had been attached to his car, he'd not arrived too early, after all. He was again seized by an urgent sense of time running out. The butler led him through a series of huge serene rooms, each more elaborately and graciously furnished than the one before it, across antique Persian rugs and Chinese carpets. The deeply coffered ceilings with inlaid-woods might have been imported from classic estates in Europe. They passed through superbly hand-carved doorways and walked past Impressionist paintings by all the masters of that school (and no reason to believe that even one piece was a print or imitation).

The wealth of antiques and the great beauty of the house were awesome and visually appealing, but surprisingly, the succession of paradisiacal rooms gave rise to an increasing uneasiness in Dan. He had a sense of powerful and ominous forces lying dormant but easily disturbed just beyond the walls and under the floors, a pseudopsychic perception of colossal dark machinery purring with malevolent purpose somewhere just out of sight. In spite of the exquisite taste and apparently infinite resources with which the house had been built and appointed, in spite of its soaring spaces — or perhaps in part because of its superhuman scale — it had a quality of medieval oppressiveness.

Furthermore, Dan could not help but grimly wonder how Palmer Boothe could possess the refinement and taste to appreciate a house like this — and still be capable of condemning a little girl to the horrors of the gray room. That contradiction would seem to require a personality so duplicitous as to be virtually indistinguishable from schizophrenic multiplicity. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The great publisher and liberal and philanthropist who, by night, stalks the mean streets with a bludgeon disguised as an innocent walking stick.

The butler opened one of the heavy, paneled doors to the library and stepped through, announcing Dan as he went, and Dan followed with more than a little trepidation, passing between bookcases into which the entry was recessed. The butler immediately withdrew, closing the door behind him.

A twenty-foot-high, richly paneled mahogany ceiling curved down to ten-foot-high mahogany shelves filled with books, some accessible only with the aid of a library ladder. At the far end of the room, enormous French windows occupied the only wall not given completely to books; they presented a view of lush gardens, though heavy green drapes were drawn across more than half the glass. Persian rugs decorated the highly polished wood floor, and groupings of heavily padded armchairs offered elegant comfort. On a desk almost as big as a bed, a Tiffany stained-glass lamp cast such rich colors and exquisite patterns of light that it seemed to be made not of mere glass but of precious gems. Around the side of that desk and through the red-yellow-green-blue beams of filtered lamplight, Palmer Boothe came to greet his guest.

Boothe was six feet tall, broad in the shoulders and chest, narrow in the waist, in his mid- or late-fifties, with the physique and aura of a much younger man. His face was too narrow and his features too elongated to be called handsome. However, a certain ascetic quality in his thin lips and straight thin nose, and a trace of nobility in his chin and jawline, made it impossible to deny him the approbative 'distinguished'.

Holding out his hand as he approached, Boothe said, 'Lieutenant Haldane, I'm so pleased you could come.'

Before Dan realized what he was doing, he found himself shaking Boothe's hand, though the very idea of touching this evil lizard of a man should have repelled him. Furthermore, he saw himself manipulated into reacting to Boothe partly like a vassal unaccountably admitted to the court of the king, partly like a valued acquaintance answering the summons of a nobleman whose approval he wished to elicit by the performance of any favor asked and whose friendship he hoped to gain. How this subtle manipulation was accomplished remained a mystery to him. Which was why Palmer Boothe was worth several hundred million and Dan, by contrast, did far more shopping at K Mart than at Neiman-Marcus. Anyway, he sure as hell hadn't initiated their encounter in the manner of a hard-nosed cop who had come to break someone's ass, which was the impression he had intended to make straightaway.

Dan noticed a movement in a shadowed corner of the wood-dark room and turned to see a tall, thin, hawk-faced man rise from an armchair, a glass of ice and whiskey in one hand. Although he was twenty feet away, the hawkish man's unusually bright and intense eyes conveyed everything essential about his personality: high intelligence, strong curiosity, aggressiveness — and a touch of madness.

As Boothe began to make introductions, Dan interrupted and said, 'Albert Uhlander, the author.'

Uhlander apparently knew that he did not possess Palmer Boothe's uncanny manipulative powers. He didn't smile. He made no attempt to shake hands. That they were of opposing camps and hostile ideologies seemed as apparent to Uhlander as it was to Dan.

'Can I get you a drink?' Boothe asked with a misplaced gentility and excessive civility that was beginning to be maddening. 'Scotch. Bourbon? Perhaps a glass of dry sherry?'

'We don't have time to sit here and drink, for God's sake,' Dan said. 'You're both living on borrowed time, and you know it. The only reason I want to try to save your lives is so I can have the great pleasure of putting both of you bastards in prison for a long, long time.'

There. That was better.

'Very well,' Boothe said coldly, and he returned to his desk. He settled into the brass-studded, dark-green leather club chair behind the desk and was almost entirely in shadow, except for his face, which was part blue and part green and part yellow in the spears of multicolored light from the Tiffany lamp.

Uhlander went to one window that was not concealed by green drapes, and he stood with his back to the French panes. Outside, because the storm-gray afternoon was waning toward an early-winter twilight, not much daylight found its way past the lush vegetation of the formal gardens and to the library window. Nevertheless, sufficient brightness lay behind Uhlander to reduce him to only a silhouette, leaving his face in deep shadows that concealed his expression.

Dan approached the desk, stepped into the circle of jeweled light, and looked down at Boothe, who had lifted a glass of whiskey. 'Why would a man of your position and reputation get involved with someone like Willy Hoffritz?'

'He was brilliant. A genius in his field. I have always sought out and associated with the brightest people,' Boothe said. 'They're the most interesting people, for one thing. And for another, their ideas and enthusiasms are often of great practical use in one of my businesses or another.'

'And besides, Hoffritz could supply you with an utterly passive, totally submissive young woman who would endure any humiliation you wanted to heap on her. Isn't that right, Daddy?'

At last a crack appeared in Boothe's self-possession. For a moment his eyes narrowed hatefully, and his jaw muscles bulged as he clenched his teeth in anger. But his control slipped only one notch, and the crack closed up again in seconds. His face recomposed itself, and he sipped his whiskey.

'All men have… weaknesses, Lieutenant. In that regard, I'm a man like any other.'

Something in his eyes, in his expression, and in his tone of voice belied any admission of weakness. Rather, it seemed as if he were merely being magnanimous by claiming to share the weaknesses of ordinary men. It was all too clear that he didn't believe there was anything wrong or even slightly morally suspect in his behavior with Regine, and his admission was not an act of contrition or humility but one of smug condescension.

Shifting to another tack, Dan said, 'Hoffritz might have been a genius, but he was bent, twisted. He applied his knowledge and his talents not to legitimate behavior-modification research but to developing new techniques of brainwashing. I'm told by people who knew him that he was a totalitarian, a fascist, an elitist of the worst sort. How does that square with your own widely heralded liberalism?'

Boothe regarded Dan with pity, disdain, and amusement. As if speaking to a child, he said, 'Lieutenant, everyone who believes that the problems of society can be solved through the political process is an elitist. Which means most people. It doesn't matter if you're a right-winger, a conservative, a moderate, a liberal, or an extreme left-winger. If you define yourself by any political label, then you're an elitist because you believe that problems could be solved if only the right group of people held power. So Willy Hoffritz's elitism was of no concern to me. I happen to believe the masses need to be guided, controlled—'

'Brainwashed.'

'Yes, brainwashed, but for their own good. As the world's population grows ever larger and as technology leads to a wider dissemination of information and ideas, the old institutions like family and Church break down. There are new, more dangerous ways for the discontented to express their misery and alienation. So we must find methods of eliminating discontent, of controlling thought and action, if we're to have a stable society, a stable world.'

'I see why you used libertarian political-action committees as a front for financing McCaffrey and Hoffritz.'

Boothe raised his eyebrows. 'You know about that, do you?'

'I know considerably more than that.'

Boothe sighed. 'Libertarians are such hopeless dreamers. They want to reduce government to a minimum, virtually eliminate politics. I thought it would be amusing to work toward exactly the opposite ends while employing the cover of a libertarian crusade.'

Albert Uhlander still stood with his back to the French window, attentive but unreadable, a silent silhouette that moved only to raise the black outline of a whiskey glass to unseen lips.

'So you supported Hoffritz and McCaffrey and Koliknikov and Tolbeck and God knows how many other twisted "geniuses,"' Dan said. 'And now, while searching so diligently for a way to control the masses, you've lost control. One of these experiments has run wild, and it's rapidly destroying everyone involved in it. Soon it's going to destroy you as well.'

'I'm sure you find this ironic turn of events to be enormously satisfying,' Boothe said. 'But I don't believe you know as much as you think you do, and when you hear the entire story, when you know what's happening, I think you'll be as eager as we are to stop the killing, to put an end to the terror that came out of that gray room. You're sworn to protect and preserve lives, and I am familiar enough with your record to know that you take your oath seriously, even solemnly. Though the lives you'll have to protect are mine and Albert's, and though you despise us, you'll do what's necessary to help us, once you know the whole story.'

Dan shook his head. 'You have nothing but disdain for the honor and integrity of common people like me, yet you're relying on that honor to save your ass.'

'That… and certain inducements,' Uhlander said from his place at the window.

'What inducements?' Dan asked.

Boothe studied him intently. Bright miniature patterns of Tiffany stained glass reflected in his icy eyes. Finally he said, 'Yes, I suppose it won't hurt to explain the inducements first. Albert, would you bring it here, please?'

Uhlander returned to the chair where he had been sitting, put his whiskey glass on a nearby table, and picked up a suitcase which had been standing beside the chair but which Dan hadn't noticed until now. He brought the piece of luggage to Boothe's desk, put it down, and opened it. The suitcase was filled with fifty- and hundred-dollar bills in neatly banded stacks.

'Half a million dollars, cash,' Boothe said softly. 'But that's only part of what I'm offering you. There's also a position available with the Journal. Head of security. It pays more than twice your current salary.'

Ignoring the cash, Dan said, 'You pretend to be so cool, but this makes it clear just how desperate you are. This is out of panic. You say you know me, so you know an offer like this would almost surely have the opposite effect intended.'

'Yes,' Boothe said, 'if we wanted you to do something that was wrong in order to earn the money. But I hope to show you that what we want you to do is the right thing, the best thing, the only thing that a man of conscience could possibly do under the circumstances. I believe that, once you know what's happening, you'll do the right thing. Which is all that we want. Really. You'll see that the money isn't being offered to alleviate your guilt, but… well, as a bonus for good deeds well done.' He smiled.

'You want the girl,' Dan said.

'No,' Uhlander said, his eyes glittering, his face more hawklike than ever in the queer mix of shadows and colored light. 'We want her dead.'

'And quickly,' Boothe said.

'Did you offer Ross Mondale this much money? Wexlersh and Manuello?' Dan asked.

'Good heavens, no!' Boothe said. 'But now you're the only one who knows where to find Melanie McCaffrey.'

Uhlander said, 'You're the only game in town.'

From their side of the desk, they watched Dan with carnivorous anticipation.

He said, 'Apparently, you're even more depraved than I thought. You think killing an innocent child could in any way be construed as the right thing, a good deed.'

'The operative word is "innocent,"' Boothe said. 'When you understand what happened in that gray room, when you realize what's been killing all these people—'

'I think maybe I already know what's been killing them,' Dan said. 'It's Melanie, isn't it?'

They stared at him, surprised by his perception.

'I read some of your book, the one about astral projection,' he told Uhlander. 'With that and other things, I've begun to piece it together.'

He had hoped that he was wrong, had dreaded finding out that his worst suspicions were correct. But there was no escaping the truth. A cold despair, as real and almost as tangible as the drizzling rain outside, poured over him.

'She's killed all of them,' Uhlander said. 'Six men so far. And she'll kill the rest of us if she has the chance.'

'Not six,' Dan said. 'Eight.'

* * *

The Spielberg film had ended. Earl had bought tickets for the next showing of another PG film in the same multiplex. He and Laura had settled into seats in the new theater, with Melanie ensconced between them once more.

Laura had watched her daughter closely through the first movie, but the child had shown no sign of going to sleep or crawling deeper into her sheltering catatonia. Her eyes had continued to follow the action of the screen through the end of the story, and once a smile had flickered so very briefly at the corners of her mouth. She had not spoken or even made a wordless sound in response to the celluloid fantasy, and she had moved only once or twice, no more than slightly shifting in the theater seat, but even the minimal attention that she had paid to the movie constituted an improvement in her condition. Laura was more hopeful than she had been at any time in the past two days, although she was far from sanguine about the girl's prospects for total recovery.

Besides, It was still out there.

She checked her watch. Two minutes until showtime.

Earl scanned the crowd, which was half the size of that for the previous movie. He appeared to be merely people watching, neither suspicious nor tense. He was less concerned than he had been before the other show had begun; this time, he reached inside his coat to check for his gun only once before the house lights dimmed and the big screen lit up.

Melanie was slumped in her seat more than she had been before, and she looked wearier. But her eyes were open wide, and she seemed to be focused on the screen as previews of coming attractions began.

Laura sighed.

They had gotten through most of the afternoon without incident. Maybe everything would be all right now.

* * *

'Eight?' Uhlander was aghast. 'You say she's killed eight?'

'Six,' Boothe insisted. 'Only six so far.'

'You know about Koliknikov in Vegas?' Dan said.

'Yes,' Boothe said. 'He was the sixth.'

'You know about Renseveer and Tolbeck up in Mammoth?'

'When?' Uhlander asked. 'My God, when did she get them?'

'Last night,' Dan said.

The two men looked at each other, and Dan could feel a surge in the current of fear that passed between them.

Uhlander said, 'She's been disposing of people in a certain order, according to how much time they spent in that gray room and according to how much discomfort they caused her. Palmer and I were there far less than any of the others.'

Dan was tempted to crack sarcastic about Uhlander's choice of the word 'discomfort' instead of the more accurate 'pain.'

He saw why they had been so low-key when he had first arrived, so confident that they had time to enjoy a drink and to proceed cautiously; they had expected to be the last of the ten conspirators to be killed, and as long as they had thought Howard Renseveer and Sheldon Tolbeck were still alive, they had been frightened but not yet panicked.

Beyond the huge French windows, even the dim gray light was fading.

Within the library, shadows were growing and shifting as though they were living creatures.

The glow from the Tiffany lamp seemed to grow brighter as the daylight dimmed. The multicolored, luminescent spots, when combined with the encroaching shadows, made the large room seem smaller, and somehow brought to the decreasing space the feeling of a Gypsy wagon or tent or other fantastic carnivalesque setting.

'But if Howard and Sheldon are dead,' Boothe said, 'then we're next and… she… she could come at any time.

'Any time,' Dan confirmed. 'So we don't have the leisure for drinks or bribery. I want to know exactly what went on in that gray room — and why.'

Boothe said, 'But there's no time to tell it all. You've got to stop her! You evidently know we were encouraging OOBE — out-of-body-experiences — in the girl, and that she—'

'I know some of it, and I suspect more, but most of it I don't yet understand,' Dan said. 'And I want to know it all, every detail, before I decide what to do.'

A tremor shook Boothe's voice: 'I need another drink.' He got up and went unsteadily to the bar, which was tucked in one corner of the room.

Uhlander collapsed into the chair that Boothe had vacated. He looked up at Dan. 'I'll tell you about it.'

Dan pulled up another chair.

At the bar, Boothe was so nervous that he dropped a couple of ice cubes. When he poured more bourbon for himself, the neck of the Wild Turkey bottle chattered against the rim of his glass before he could steady his shaky hand.

* * *

Laura kept leaning over to look in Melanie's face.

The girl had slumped even farther in her chair.

This film, only ten minutes old, obviously wasn't going to be as engaging as the Spielberg movie. Thus far, Melanie's eyes were open and seemed to follow the action, but Laura wondered how long the girl would remain involved.

* * *

Palmer Boothe paced and drank bourbon with an uncharacteristic lack of self-control.

Albert Uhlander sat with his head low on his sharp shoulders, birdlike in every aspect of his face and body, explaining the project in the gray room.

Though he had been a doctor of psychology, Dylan McCaffrey had nurtured a lifelong fascination with various aspects of the occult. He'd read Uhlander's first few books and conducted a correspondence with him, which eventually had centred on the subject of OOBE, out-of-body-experiences, or what was also known as astral projection. The phenomenon of astral projection was based on the theory that two entities existed in each human being: a physical body of flesh, and an astral or etheric body — sometimes called a psychogeist. In other words, each person has a dual nature, including a double that can function separately of the physical body, making it possible to be in two places at one time. Usually the double, the astral body (or as Uhlander called it, 'the body of feeling and sensation'), resided in the physical body and animated it. But under extremely special circumstances (and routinely upon death) the astral body left the physical body.

'Some mediums,' Uhlander said, 'claim to be able to instigate out-of-body experiences at will, though they are very likely lying. There are, however, many fascinating stories told by reputable people who report having dreamed about rising out of their bodies while sleeping; they tell stories about traveling in an invisible state, often to places where loved ones are dying or are in risk of death. Ten years ago, for example, a woman in Oregon had such an experience while sleeping: She rose out of her body, sailed over the rooftop of houses, went out into the countryside, and came to a place where her brother's car was overturned on a lonely stretch of a little-traveled back road. He was pinned in the wreckage and bleeding to death. She couldn't help him while she was in her astral state, for the astral body frequently has no strength, only sensation, no power of any kind other than the ability to observe. But she returned to her sleeping body, woke, called the police, reported the location of her brother's accident, and saved his life.'

'Usually,' Boothe said, 'the astral body isn't visible. It's entirely spiritual.'

'Although visibility and even physical solidity aren't entirely unheard of,' Uhlander said. 'In 1810, while Lord Byron, the poet, was in Patras, Turkey, unconscious with a high fever, several of his friends saw him in London. They said he passed them on the street without speaking and was seen to write down his name on a register of people inquiring about the king's health. Byron thought this was odd but he never realized he'd experienced an OOBE of rare intensity — and then had forgotten it after recovering from his fever. Anyway, every serious occultist has consciously attempted to initiate an OOBE at some time or other… usually without success.'

Boothe had already returned to the bar to pour more bourbon into his glass.

Dan said, 'Don't get drunk. There's sure as hell no safety in being unconscious. It'll just complicate things.'

'I've never been drunk in my life,' Booth said icily. 'I don't run from problems, Lieutenant, I solve them.' He paced again, but he didn't suck at the bourbon as greedily as he had done previously.

Uhlander said, 'Dylan not only believed in astral projection, but he thought he knew why it was so hard to achieve an OOBE.'

Dylan (Uhlander explained) had been certain that people were born with the ability to step in and out of their bodies whenever they wished — all people, everyone. But he was equally sure that the confining, limiting nature of all human society and teaching — with its long list of dos and don'ts, its overly restrictive definitions of what was possible and impossible — effectively brainwashed children so early that the development of their astral-projection potential was, like many other psychic powers, never realized. Dylan believed that a child could discover and develop that potential if raised in cultural isolation, if permitted to learn only those things that sharpened the awareness of the psychic universe — and if subjected to long and frequent sessions in a sensory-deprivation chamber from a young age, in order to direct the mind inward upon its own hidden talents.

'Isolation,' Boothe interrupted, 'was a way of purifying the child's concentration, a way of sealing out all the distractions of day-to-day life in order to focus her mind more intensely upon psychic matters.'

Uhlander said, 'When Mrs. McCaffrey decided to divorce Dylan, he saw an opportunity to raise Melanie according to his own theories, so he abducted her with that intention.'

'And you supported him,' Dan said to Boothe. 'Accessory to a kidnapping, a conspirator in child abuse.'

The white-haired publisher approached Dan's chair, loomed over him, stared down with undisguised disdain. He had a haughty disregard for the pain that he'd caused. 'It was necessary. An opportunity that could not be missed. Think of it! If astral projection could be proved possible, if the child could be taught to leave her body at will, then perhaps a system could be developed for teaching adults as well… selected adults. Imagine what it would mean if a select group, an intellectual elite, possessed the ability to enter undetected into any room in the world, no matter how heavily guarded, could listen in on any conversation no matter how secret. No government, no business competitor, no one in the world, could hide their plans or intentions from us. Without anyone knowing what we were doing or how, we could at last orchestrate the evolution of one worldwide government without effective opposition or, indeed, without any opposition at all. How could opposition exist if we could sit in on their strategy sessions, know their names, intentions, and secret organizations?'

Boothe was breathing hard, partly because of the effect of the whiskey, but largely due to the dark dreams of power that filled him with a megalomaniacal excitement. The Tiffany lamp cast amber circles of light on his cheeks, smaller spots of blue on his chin, stained his lips yellow, and painted his nose and forehead green, so he again reminded Dan of someone from a carnival, a malevolent roadshow like that in Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. He was a bizarre and demented clown in whose eyes one could see the crimson flickering fires of Hell, a soul in damnation.

'The world would be ours,' Boothe said.

Both the publisher and Uhlander smiled, and they seemed to have forgotten how badly their scheme had worked out and how deep was the trouble in which they now found themselves.

'You're both insane,' Dan said thinly.

'Farsighted,' Uhlander said.

'Insane.'

'Visionaries,' Boothe said. He turned away from Dan and began to pace once more.

Uhlander's smile gradually bled away as he remembered why they were there, and he continued the explanation that Dan had demanded. Dylan McCaffrey had lived in that Studio City house twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year after year, staying close to Melanie, making himself nearly as much a prisoner as she was, seeing only a handful of sympathizers from his small circle of friends who bridged the scientific and occult communities and shared his interest — and who were all on the Palmer Boothe dole, one way or another. Dylan became increasingly obsessed with his project, and the regimen he designed for Melanie became ever more harsh, more demanding, less forgiving of her human failings, weaknesses, and limitations. The gray room, which was painted and soundproofed and furnished in such a way as to reduce all distraction to a minimum, became Melanie's entire universe and also the center of her father's world. Those privileged few who knew of the experiment all thought that they were involved in a noble attempt to transform the human race, and they held the secret of Melanie's torture as though they were protecting something magnificent and holy.

'Then,' Uhlander said, 'two nights ago, Melanie finally broke through. During her longest session ever in the sensory-deprivation tank, in her cocoon, she achieved what Dylan had always believed she could achieve.'

From the purple-gray twilight by the windows, Boothe said, 'The girl seized her full psychic potential. She separated her astral body from her physical body and rose out of that tank.'

'But what happened after that was something none of us had anticipated,' Uhlander said. 'In a rage, she killed her father, Willy Hoffritz, and Ernie Cooper, who happened to be there at the time.'

'But how?' Dan asked, although he had already decided that it must be true. 'You said that the astral body usually has the power to observe but can perform no physical act. And even if that wasn't the case this time… well, she's only a frail little girl. Those people were beaten to death. Savagely beaten.'

Palmer Boothe had moved to the deepening shadows along one wall of books and had vanished within them. His disembodied voice rose from the gloom: 'Her talent for astral projection wasn't the only psychic ability the little bitch learned how to use that night. She's apparently discovered how to teleport her astral body great distances—'

'To Las Vegas, to the mountains above Mammoth,' Albert Uhlander elaborated.

'—and how to move objects without touching them. Telekinesis,' Boothe said. He paused. In the darkness where he stood, his whiskey glass clicked against his teeth. The swallowing sound he made was preternaturally loud. 'Her strength is psychic, the strength of the mind, which is virtually beyond limit. She's stronger than ten men, a hundred, a thousand. She easily disposed of her father, Hoffritz, and Cooper… and now she's been coming after the rest of us, one by one, and she seems to be able to sense where we are, regardless of how hard we try to hide.'

* * *

Melanie sighed.

Laura leaned over and looked at her in the dim backwash of light from the movie screen.

The girl's eyes were getting heavy.

Worried, Laura put a hand on her daughter's shoulder and shook gently, then harder.

Melanie blinked.

'Watch the movie, honey. Watch the movie.'

The child's eyes swam back into focus and reconnected with the action on the screen.

* * *

Boothe had moved out of the shadows.

Uhlander was leaning forward in his chair.

They both seemed to be waiting for Dan to say something, to assure them that he would kill the girl and stop the slaughter.

Instead, he said nothing because he wanted them to sweat for a while. Besides, his emotions were in such turmoil that he didn't trust himself to speak yet.

Murder, Dan knew, was a human potential as universal as love. It existed in the kind and the meek, in the gentle and the innocent, though perhaps it lay more deeply buried in them than in others. He was no more surprised to discover it in Melanie McCaffrey than he had been surprised by the murderous impulses of the scores of killers that he'd put in prison over the years — though this discovery left him distraught, sick, and profoundly depressed.

Indeed, Melanie's homicidal urges were more understandable than most. Imprisoned, physically and psychologically tortured, denied love and comfort and understanding, treated more like a laboratory monkey than like a human being, forced to endure long years of mental and emotional and physical pain, she had developed a superhuman rage and hatred, diamond-hard and gas-flame-bright, that could have been relieved only by violent, brutal, bloody revenge. Perhaps her rage and hatred — and the need to relieve those inner pressures — were as much responsible for her psychic breakthrough as any of the exercises and conditions that her father had imposed upon her.

Now she stalked her tormentors, a frail nine-year-old girl, yet as deadly and dangerous and efficient a killer as Jack the Ripper or as any member of the Manson Family. But she wasn't entirely depraved. That was a thought to cling to. Evidently a part of her was shocked and repelled by what she had done. After all, horrified by her own thirst for blood, she'd sought refuge in a catatonic state, crawling down into that dark place where she could hide the terrible truth of the murders from the world… and even from herself. As long as she had a conscience, she hadn't descended all the way into savagery, and maybe her sanity was retrievable.

She was the power that had taken possession of the radio in the kitchen. She could not throw off the heavy weight of guilt and self-disgust that kept her pressed down in her quasi-autistic subworld, could not bear to speak of what she had done or might do, but she could send warnings and pleas for help through the radio. That's what those messages had meant: 'Help me, stop me. Help me. Stop me.'

And the whirlwind filled with flowers had been… what? Not at all threatening, of course. It had seemed threatening to Laura and Earl, but only because they hadn't understood. No, the flower-laden whirlwind had been a pathetic, desperate expression of Melanie's love for her mother.

Her love for her mother.

In that love, the girl might find salvation.

Boothe was impatient with Dan's silence. 'When she broke through, when she finally cast off all restraints of the flesh, and found her great powers and saw how to use them, she should have been grateful to us. The rotten little bitch should have been grateful to her father and to all of us who helped her to become more than just a child, more than just human.'

'Instead,' Uhlander whined with childish self-pity, 'the vicious little brat turned on us.'

Dan said, 'So you told Ned Rink to kill her.'

Boothe was as quick as ever with the self-justifications. 'We had no choice. She was infinitely valuable, and we wanted to study and understand her. But we knew she was after us, and recapturing her and studying her was a risk we simply couldn't take.'

'We didn't want to kill her,' Uhlander said. 'We created her, after all. We made her what she became. But we had to remove her. It was self-preservation. Self-defense. She'd become a monster.'

Dan stared at Uhlander and Boothe, as though peering through the bars of a cage, into a cell in a zoo. It must have been an alien zoo as well, on some distant planet, for it didn't seem that this world could have produced creatures as bizarre, bloodless, and cruel as these. He said, 'Melanie wasn't the monster. You were. You are.' He got up, too tense and angry to remain seated, and stood with his hands fisted at his sides. 'What the hell did you expect to happen if she ever actually achieved this breakthrough you wanted? Did you think she'd say, "Oh, thank you so much, now what can I do for you, what wishes can I grant, what deeds perform?" Did you think she would be like a genie let loose of a lamp, subservient and eager to please those who'd rubbed the brass and let her out?' He realized he was shouting. He tried to lower his voice, but he couldn't. 'For God's sake, you people imprisoned her for six years! Tortured her! Do you think prisoners are usually grateful to their jailers and torturers?'

'It wasn't torture!' Boothe protested. 'It was… education. Guidance. Scientifically encouraged evolution!'

'We were showing her The Way,' Uhlander said.

* * *

Melanie murmured.

Laura barely heard the girl above the music and screeching of car tires in the movie. She leaned closer to her daughter. 'What is it, honey?'

'The door…' Melanie whispered.

In the pulsating light from the film, Laura saw that the girl's eyes were going shut again.

'The door…'

* * *

Beyond the French windows, night had come to Bel Air.

Boothe had gone to the bar for more bourbon.

Uhlander had gotten up too. He was standing behind the desk, staring down into the panoply of colors that composed the Tiffany lampshade.

Dan said, 'What is this "door to December," this door that opens onto a different season of the year than any other door or window in the house? I read a little about it in your book. You said it was a paradoxical image used as a key to the psyche, but I didn't have a chance to finish the chapter, and I wasn't entirely sure I grasped the concept, anyway.'

Uhlander spoke without looking up from the lamp. 'As part of the attempt to get Melanie to view anything as possible, to open her to fantastic concepts like astral projection, she was given specially designed concepts on which to concentrate during long sessions in the sensory-deprivation chamber. Each concept was an impossible situation… a carefully designed paradox. Like that door to December about which you read. It was my theory… it still is my theory that these mind-stretching exercises are useful for people who want to develop their psychic potential. It's a way of training yourself to explore the unthinkable, a way to readjust your worldview to include what you formerly thought impossible.'

From the bar, Boothe said, 'Albert is brilliant, a genius. He's spent years developing a synthesis of science and the occult. He's found places where both those disciplines intersect. He has so much to teach us, so much to contribute. He mustn't die. That's why you mustn't let that little bitch kill us, Lieutenant. We both have so much to give the world.'

Uhlander continued to stare into the jewel-rich colors of the lamp. 'By visualizing impossibilities, by working hard to make each of these strange concepts seem possible and real and familiar, you can eventually liberate your psychic powers from the mental box in which you've sealed them with your socially acquired, culturally imposed disbelief. Preferably, the visualization would take place during deep meditation or after being hypnotized in order to fully concentrate the mind. This theory has never been proved. Because scientists are barred from subjecting human subjects to the lengthy and somewhat painful steps necessary to reshape the psyche.'

'Too bad you weren't around in Germany when the Nazis were in power,' Dan said bitterly. 'I'm sure they would have provided hundreds of human subjects for such an interesting experiment, and they wouldn't have given a damn what you had to do to reshape their psyches.'

As if he hadn't heard the insult, Uhlander said, 'But then, with Melanie, subjected as she was to years of drug-induced states of prolonged and intense concentration, then those longer sessions floating in the sensory-deprivation chamber… well, it was an ideal approach, and the breakthrough was at last achieved.'

There had been other mind-stretching concepts besides the door to December, the occultist explained. Sometimes Melanie had been instructed to concentrate on a staircase that went only sideways. Uhlander said, 'Imagine you are on an enormous, eternal Victorian staircase with an elaborately carved handrail. Suddenly you become aware that you're neither climbing higher nor descending. Instead, you're on a stairway that leads only sideways, which has no beginning or end. Other concepts included the cat that ate itself, beginning with its tail, the story that Melanie recounted while hypnotically regressed in the motel room that morning, and there was one about a window to yesterday. 'You are standing at a window in your bedroom, looking out on the lawn. You don't see the lawn as it is today, but as it was yesterday, when you were out there, sunbathing. You see yourself out there, lying on a beach towel. This isn't the same scene you can see through the other windows in the room. This isn't an ordinary window. It's a window looking out on yesterday. And if you went through that window, would you be back there in yesterday, standing beside yourself as you were sunbathing?'

Boothe left the bar, glided through shadows, and stopped in the penumbra at the edge of the lamp's rainbow glow. 'Once the subject is able to believe in the paradox, then he must not only believe in it but actually enter it. For instance, if the stairway to nowhere had worked best for Melanie, there would have come a point at which she would've been told to step off the end of those stairs, even though there was no end. And the instant she'd done that, she would have left her body as well and begun her first out-of-body experience. Or if the window to yesterday had worked for her, she would have stepped into yesterday, and the dislocation involved in becoming part of the impossible would have triggered an astral projection. That was the theory, anyway.'

'Madness,' Dan said again.

'Not madness at all.' Uhlander finally looked up from the lamp. 'It worked, you see. It was the door to December that the girl was most able to visualize, and as soon as she stepped through it, she was in touch with her psychic abilities. She learned how to control them.'

Contrary to what Dan and Laura had thought, the girl was not afraid of what would come through the door from some supernatural dimension. Instead, she had been afraid, once she opened the door, that she would go through it and kill again. She had been torn between two opposing and powerful desires: the urge to kill every last one of her tormentors, and the desperate need to stop killing.

Jesus.

Boothe stepped to the desk and put his hand on some of the tightly banded hundred-dollar bills that filled the open suitcase. He looked hard at Dan. 'Well?'

Instead of answering him, Dan said to Uhlander, 'When she enters this psychic state, uses these powers, is there a change in the air around her that people would notice?'

A new intensity entered Uhlander's bird-bright eyes. 'What sort of change?'

'A sudden, inexplicable chill.'

'Could be,' Uhlander said. 'Perhaps an indication of a rapid accumulation of occult energies. Such a phenomenon is associated with the poltergeist, for instance. You've been present when this has happened?'

'Yes I think it happens each time she leaves her body — or returns to it,' Dan said.

* * *

Suddenly the air in the theater turned cold.

Laura had just looked away from Melanie, no more than two or three seconds ago, and the girl's eyes had been open wide. Now they were closed, and already It was coming. It must have been waiting, watching, ready to take advantage of the girl's first moment of vulnerability.

Laura grabbed Melanie and shook her, but her eyes did not open. 'Melanie? Melanie, wake up!'

The air grew colder.

'Melanie!'

Colder.

In the grip of panic, Laura pinched her daughter's face. 'Wake up, wake up!'

Two rows back in the theater, someone said, 'Hey… quiet over there.'

Colder.

* * *

Boothe's hand was on the money, caressing it. 'You know where she is. You've got to kill her. It's the right thing to do.'

Dan shook his head. 'She's only a child.'

'She's killed eight men already,' Boothe said.

'Men?' Dan laughed humorlessly. 'Could men have done to her what you people did? Tortured her with electric shock? Where did you put the electrodes? On her neck? On her arms? On her little backside? On her genitals? Yes, I'll bet you did. On the genitals. Maximum effect. That's what torturers always go for. Maximum effect. Men? Eight men, you say? There's a certain level of amorality, a bottom line of ruthlessness below which you can't call yourself a man anymore.'

'Eight men.' Boothe refused to acknowledge what Dan had said. 'The girl's a monster, a psychopathic monster.'

'She's deeply disturbed. She can't be held accountable for her actions.' Dan had never imagined that he could enjoy seeing another human being squirm as much as he was enjoying the growing horror and desperation on these bastards' faces as they realized that their last hope of survival had been a false hope.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

Whatever had been there a moment ago had now gone.

* * *

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

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

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

'No others,' Dan said.

'What?'

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

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

'Kill herself?' Boothe said.

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

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

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

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

He turned his back on them.

He walked away from them, toward the library door.

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

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

They were all silent.

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

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

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

Laura hadn't been able to keep Melanie alert.

'No!' Uhlander gasped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boothe was screaming.

The bar exploded as if a bomb had gone off in it, and the air reeked of whiskey.

Uhlander was begging for mercy.

Dan saw the Tiffany lamp rising into the air, floating up like a balloon on its cord. Before the lamp had risen to the length of that tether, Dan recovered his wits, regained his sense of urgency. He ran the last few steps to the end of the room. As he pulled open the door, the light went out behind him, and the library was plunged into darkness.

He pulled the door shut as he stepped out of the room. He raced back through the house, retracing the route along which the butler had brought him earlier.

In a room with peach-colored walls and an elaborately molded white ceiling, he encountered that servant rushing the opposite direction in response to the hideous screaming in the library.

Dan said, 'Call the police!' He was sure that Melanie wouldn't harm anyone other than those who had been in the gray room or those closely associated with the conspiracy against her. Nevertheless, as the butler stopped in confusion, Dan said, 'Don't go in the library. Call the police. For God's sake, don't go in there yourself'.

* * *

The dark theater no longer seemed like a sanctuary to Laura. She was claustrophobic. The rows of seats were confining. The darkness threatened her. Why in the name of God had they taken refuge in a place of darkness. It probably thrived on darkness.

What would happen if the air grew cold again and the thing returned.

And it would return.

She was sure of that.

Soon.

* * *

The enormous iron gates began to swing slowly open when Dan had descended half the long driveway.

Ordinarily, the butler probably called ahead to the gatehouse, and the guard opened the gates even as the guest was pulling his car out of the parking circle in front of the house. But at the moment, the butler was calling 911, scared witless by the bloodcurdling screams and battle sounds coming from the library, so the guard had activated the gate controls only when he'd seen the headlights knifing down toward him through the early darkness and rain.

Dan had also slapped the detachable emergency beacon to the roof. He rocketed down the long hill, pressing the accelerator almost to the floor, counting on the gateman to get the barrier out of his way in time to prevent a nasty collision. That ironwork had appeared to be capable of stopping a tank. If he hit it, he would most likely be decapitated or skewered by a jagged bar that would pierce the windshield.

He could have descended the hill at a more reasonable pace, but seconds counted. Even if the girl's astral body did not finish with Boothe and Uhlander for a few minutes, it would no doubt return to that Westwood theater well ahead of Dan; the spirit surely didn't travel as slowly as an automobile, but moved from place to place in the wink of an eye. Besides, the butler might soon collect his wits and get the idea that Dan had done something to cause all the screaming in the library. If such a suspicion arose, the gatehouse guard might be alerted to close the gates again the instant that they finished opening, blocking Dan's escape; then whole minutes would be lost.

Thirty feet from the gates, as they continued to swing open, he finally eased up on the accelerator and touched the brakes. The car started to slide, but he held it to the road and kept its nose pointed where it should be. A sharp snap, a thin squeal: the rear bumper scraped one of the still-moving portals. Then he was on that short length of driveway beyond the walls of the estate. No traffic on the street ahead. He didn't slow down when he turned left. The sedan fishtailed to the far curb, but he maintained control, losing only a little momentum.

Emergency beacon flashing, he pushed the car to its limits, plunging down from the heights of Bel Air, from one twisting street to another, taking unconscionable chances with his own life and the lives of anyone who might have been in his way around any of several blind and half-blind curves.

His thoughts arced back in time: Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey…

Not again.

Melanie was a killer, yes, but she did not deserve to die for what she had done. She'd not been in her right mind when she killed them. Besides, if murder in self-defense had ever been a justifiable plea, it was now. If she hadn't killed them, every last one, then they would have come for her, not necessarily to exact revenge, but to conduct further experiments with her. If she hadn't killed all ten men, the torture would have continued.

He had to get that idea through to her. He thought he knew a way of doing it.

God, please, let it work.

Westwood was not far away. With the beacon, with no thought for his own mortality, he should reach the theater in a lot less than five minutes.

Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey… Melanie…

No!

* * *

The theater was a refrigerator.

Melanie whimpered.

Laura leaped up from her seat, not sure what to do, knowing only that she couldn't sit still as It approached.

The air temperature plummeted. In fact, it seemed colder than it had been in the kitchen the previous night or in the motel room, when It had paid them other visits.

From the row behind, someone asked Laura to please sit down, and heads turned her way from across the aisle too. But after a moment, everyone's attention shifted to the incredibly abrupt chill that had gripped the theater.

Earl was on his feet too, and this time he'd drawn the revolver from his shoulder holster.

Melanie let out a thin, pathetic cry, but her eyes didn't open.

Laura grabbed her, shook her. 'Baby, wake up! Wake up!' Soft exclamatory comments swept in a wave across the auditorium as other patrons reacted not to Laura and Melanie but to the fact that they were freezing. Then the crowd was shocked into a brief silence as the giant movie screen tore open from top to bottom with a ripping noise that sounded as though God had rent the heavens. A jagged line of blackness appeared through the center of the projected images, and the figures on the screen rippled and acquired distorted faces and bodies as the silvery surface on which they existed began to wrinkle and bulge and sag.

Melanie writhed in her seat and struck at the empty air. Her blows landed on Laura, who tried to force the girl to wake up.

No sooner had the screen torn, silencing the audience, than the heavy curtains flanking it were pulled out of the tracks in the ceiling. They flapped in the air like great wings, as if the devil himself had risen into the theater and was unfolding his batlike appendages; then they collapsed with a whoosh! into huge piles of lifeless material.

That was too much for the audience. Confused and frightened, people rose from their seats.

After taking a score of hard blows on her arms and face, Laura got hold of Melanie's wrists and kept her still. She looked over her shoulder, toward the front of the theater.

The projectionist had not touched his equipment yet, so a queer luminosity still bounced off the ruined screen, and a vague amber radiance was provided by the torch-shaped emergency lamps along the walls. The light was just sufficient for everyone to see what happened next. Empty seats in the front row tore loose of the floor, to which they were bolted, and shot violently up and backward, into the air. They struck the large screen, punched through the fabric, destroying what remained of it.

People began to scream, and a few ran toward the exits at the back of the theater.

Someone yelled, 'Earthquake!'

An earthquake didn't explain it, of course, and it wasn't likely that anyone believed that explanation. But that word, much dreaded in California since the Northridge temblor, stoked the panic. More seats — those in the second row — erupted from the floor: bolts snapped, metal shredded, concrete burst.

It was, Laura thought, as if some gigantic invisible best had entered at the front of the theater and was making its way toward them, destroying everything in its path.

'Let's get out of here,' Earl shouted, although he knew as well as she did that they could not run from this thing, whatever it was.

Melanie had ceased struggling. She was limp, like a pile of knotted rags, so limp that she might have been dead. The projectionist switched off his machinery and turned up the house lights. Everyone but Laura, Melanie, and Earl had surged to the back of the theater, and half the audience had already spilled out into the lobby.

Heart jackhammering, Laura scooped Melanie into her arms and stumbled along the row, into the aisle, with Earl following close behind her.

Now seats were exploding into the air from the fourth row and crashing backward into the demolished screen with thunderous impact. But the worst sound was coming from the emergency-exit doors that flanked the screen. They swung open and slammed shut, again and again, banging back and forth with such tremendous force that their pneumatic cylinders, which should have ensured a soft closing every time, could not cope.

Laura saw not doors but flapping mouths, hungry mouths, and she knew that if she was foolish enough to try to escape through those exits, she would find herself stepping not into the theater parking lot but into the gullet of some unimaginably foul beast. Crazy thought. Insane. She was teetering on the brink of mindless panic.

If she had not experienced the poltergeist phenomena on a smaller scale in her own kitchen, she would have been unhinged by the sight before her. What was it? What was It? And why the hell did it want Melanie?

Dan knew. At least he knew part of it.

But it didn't matter what he knew, because he couldn't help them now. Laura doubted that she would ever see him again.

Considering that she was hysterical and already emotionally overcharged, the thought of never seeing Haldane again hit her harder than seemed possible.

She had no sooner reached the aisle than her knees began to buckle under the combined weight of her terror and Melanie. Earl jammed his revolver back into its holster and took the girl out of Laura's arms.

Only a few people remained at the lobby doors, pressing against those in front of them. Some were looking back, wide-eyed, at the inexplicable chaos.

Laura and Earl took only a few steps along that same carpeted route of escape before seats stopped exploding into the air behind them — and erupted, instead, from the rows ahead. After a brief, clumsy, aerial ballet, the mangled seats crashed down into the aisle, blocking it.

Melanie would not be permitted to leave.

Holding the girl in his arms, Earl looked this way and that, unsure of his next move.

Then something shoved him. He staggered backward. Something tore Melanie out of his grip. The girl tumbled along the aisle until she slammed against a row of seats.

Screaming, Laura scurried to her daughter, rolled the girl over, put a hand to her neck. There was a pulse.

'Laura!'

She looked up when she heard her name, and with an enormous rush of relief she saw Dan Haldane. He had entered through the exiting people at the back of the theater. He rushed down the aisle toward them.

He vaulted the ruined seats that the unseen enemy had piled in the aisle, and as he drew nearer, he shouted, 'That's it! Hold her in your arms, shelter her.' He reached Laura and knelt beside her. 'Put yourself between her and It, because I don't think it'll hurt you.

'Why not?'

'I'll explain later,' he said. He turned to Earl, who had gotten to his hands and knees. 'You okay?'

'Yeah. Just bruised.'

Dan got to his feet.

Laura lay in the aisle, among scattered pieces of popcorn and crumpled paper cups and other debris, embracing Melanie, trying to fold herself around the child. She realized that the theater was silent, that the invisible beast was no longer on the rampage. But the air was cold, blood-freezing.

It was still there.

* * *

Dan turned slowly in a circle, waiting for something to happen.

As the silence continued, he said, 'You can't kill yourself unless you kill your mother too. She won't let you do it unless you kill her first.'

Looking up at him, Laura said, 'Who are you talking to?' And then she cried out and pressed closer to Melanie. 'Something's pulling at me! Dan, something's trying to tear me away from her!'

'Fight it.'

She held tightly to Melanie, and for a moment she looked like an epileptic, jerking and twitching in a fit upon the floor.

But the attack ended, and she stopped struggling.

'Gone?' Dan asked.

Gaunt, baffled, she said, 'Yes.'

Dan spoke to the air, for he could sense that the astral body was hovering out there in the theater somewhere. 'She won't let you pry her away just so you can hammer yourself to pieces. She loves you. If she has to, she'll die to protect you.,

Across the theater, three seats were torn loose of their moorings, and were swept up into the air. They whirled and slammed against one another for a half minute before they dropped back to the floor.

'No matter what you think,' Dan said to the psychogeist, 'you don't deserve to die. What you did was horrible, but it wasn't much more than you had to do.'

Silence.

Stillness.

He said, 'Your mother loves you. She wants you to live. That's why she's holding on to you with all her strength.'

A wretched sound from Laura indicated that she understood the whole terrible truth, at last.

At the front of the theater, the crumpled curtains stirred and rose slightly, in a halfhearted attempt to spread themselves into menacing wing-shapes as before, but after a few seconds they sagged into a formless heap.

Earl had gotten to his feet. He stepped beside Dan. Surveying the theater, he said, 'It was the girl herself?'

Dan nodded.

Weeping in shock and grief and fear, Laura cradled her daughter.

The air was still frigid.

Something touched Dan with invisible hands of ice and shoved him backward, but not hard.

'You can't kill yourself. We won't let you kill yourself,' he told the unseen astral body. 'We love you, Melanie. You've never had a chance, and we want to give you a chance.'

Silence.

Earl started to say something, and then several rows down from them the psychogeist rushed along a line of seats, snapping the backs off them as it went, and the fallen curtains did rise this time, and the exit doors began to bang open and shut again, and scores of acoustic ceiling tiles rained down, and a cold keening arose that must have been an astral voice, for it came out of midair and filled the theater at such volume that both Earl and Dan clamped their hands over their ears.

Dan saw Laura wincing, but she didn't let go of Melanie to cover her own ears. She maintained her loving grip, squeezing the girl tight, holding on.

The noise rose to an unbearable level, and Dan thought he had misjudged the girl, thought she was going to bring the roof down on all of them and kill everyone in order to kill herself. But abruptly the cacophony stopped, and the animated wreckage crashed back onto the floor, and the doors stopped slamming open and shut.

One last ceiling tile sailed down, struck the aisle beyond them, and tumbled over twice before coming to rest.

Stillness again.

Silence again.

For more than a minute they waited fearfully — and then the air grew warm.

At the back of the theater, a man who might have been the manager said, 'What the hell happened in here?'

An usher, standing at the manager's side, having apparently seen the start of the destruction, tried to explain but couldn't.

Dan noticed movement up at the projectionist's booth and saw a man peering out of one of the portals there. He looked amazed.

Laura finally pulled back from Melanie while Dan and Earl crouched at her side.

The child's eyes were open, but she wasn't looking at anyone. Her gaze remained unfocused. But it wasn't the same haunted look that had possessed her before. She was not yet focused on anything in this world, but she had ceased to gaze inward upon the haven in which she'd recently taken refuge. She was now on the borderline between that fantasy and this reality, between that introverted darkness and the world of light in which she would eventually have to make her life.

'If the suicidal urge is gone — and I think it is — then the worst is past,' Dan said. 'I think she'll come back all the way, in time. But it'll take an infinite amount of patience and a lot of love.'

'I've got enough of both,' Laura said.

'We'll help,' Earl said.

'Yes,' Dan said. 'We'll help.'

Years of therapy lay ahead for Melanie, and there was a chance she might remain autistic. But Dan had a feeling that she had closed the door to December for good, that she would never let it come open again. And if it was closed, if she could make herself forget how to open it, perhaps she could eventually forget the pain and violence and death that had occurred on the other side of that door.

Forgetting was the start of healing.

He realized that this was a lesson he himself needed to learn. A lesson in forgetting. He needed to forget the pain of his own failures. Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey. A desperate, childish hope flooded him: If only he could at last put those grim memories behind him and close his own door, then perhaps the girl would be able to close hers too; perhaps her recovery would be encouraged by his own determination to turn away from death.

He decided to bargain with God: Look here, Lord, I promise I'll put the past behind me, stop dwelling too much on thoughts of blood and death and murder, take more time to live and to appreciate the blessings of life You've given me, be more grateful for what You've given me, and in return, God, all I want from You is, please, for Melanie to come all the way back. Please. Deal?

Holding and rocking her daughter, Laura looked at him. 'You seem so… intense. What's wrong? What're you thinking?'

Even smeared with dirt and spotted with blood and disheveled, she was beautiful.

Dan said, 'Forgetting is the start of healing.'

'That's what you were thinking?'

'Yes.'

'That's all?'

'It's enough,' he said. 'It's enough.'