What was the door to December? What lay on the other side of it? And what was the monstrous thing that had come through it?

She asked herself those questions again and again, until they flowed through her mind like the endlessly repeated verses of a lullaby, rocking her down into darkness.

When dawn came, Laura was deep asleep and dreaming. In the dream she was standing in front of an enormous iron door, and above the door hung a clock that ticked toward midnight. Only seconds remained before all three hands of the clock would point straight up (tick), at which time the door would open (tick), and something eager for blood would burst out upon her (tick), but she couldn't find anything with which she could bar the door, and she couldn't move away from it, could only wait (tick), and then she heard sharp claws scraping at the far side of the door, and a wet slobbering sound. Tick. Time was running out.

PART FOUR

IT

THURSDAY

8:30 A.M.—5:00 P.M.

33

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.'