by Dean Koontz
He relaxed, resigned to death, afraid of it but willing to face it now that he knew it would not be too painful.
But for the wind, the winter night was silent.
With great weariness, Tolbeck curled up in his tomb and closed his eyes.
Something grabbed his nose, pinched and twisted it so hard that tears burst from his eyes.
He blinked, flailed out, struck empty air.
Something clawed at his ear. Something unseen.
“No,” he pleaded.
Something poked him hard in the right eye, and the pain was so excruciating that he knew he had been blinded.
The psychogeist had slipped through the chinks and had joined him in his makeshift tomb of winter-chilled stone.
His death would not be easy, after all.
During the night, Laura woke and did not know where she was. A lamp with a cocked shade cast faint amber light, created odd and menacing shadows. She saw a bed beside her own. In it, Dan Haldane was sleeping, fully clothed.
The motel. They were hiding out, holed up in a motel room.
Still fuzzy-minded and having trouble keeping her eyes open, she turned over and looked at Melanie, and then she realized what had awakened her. The air temperature was plummeting, and Melanie was squirming weakly under the covers, softly sobbing, murmuring in fear.
Within the room there was now a . . . presence, something either more or less than human but unquestionably alien, invisible yet undeniable. In her drowsiness, Laura was more acutely aware of the entity than she had been when it had twice intruded into her kitchen or when it had earlier visited this very room. Freshly roused from sleep, she was still largely guided by her subconscious, which was far more open to these fantastic perceptions than was the conscious mind, which, by comparison, was conservative and a vigilant doubting Thomas. Now, although she still had no idea what the thing was, she could sense it drifting across the room and hovering above Melanie.
Suddenly Laura was certain that her daughter was about to be beaten to death before her eyes. With a panic that was half like the dreamy terror in a nightmare, she started to get up, shivering, each exhalation instantly transformed to frost. Even as she pushed the covers aside, however, the air grew warm again, and her daughter quieted. Laura hesitated, watching the child, glancing around the room, but the danger—if there had been any—seemed to have passed.
She could no longer sense the malignant entity.
Where had it gone?
Why had it come and then left within seconds?
She slipped back under the covers again and lay facing Melanie. The girl was terribly drawn, thin, and frail.
I’m going to lose her, Laura thought. It’s going to come for her sooner or later, and It’s going to kill her like It killed the others, and I won’t be able to do a damned thing to stop It because I won’t even be able to understand where It comes from or why It wants her or what It is.
For a while she huddled miserably under the covers, draped not only in blankets and sheets but in despair. Nevertheless, it was not in her nature to surrender easily to anyone or anything, and gradually she convinced herself that reason ruled the world and that all things, no matter how mysterious, could eventually be examined and understood if one only applied wit and logic to the problem.
In the morning she would use hypnotic-regression therapy with Melanie once more, and this time she would press the child harder than she had the first time. There was some danger that Melanie would crack completely if forced to recall traumatic memories before she was ready to handle them, but it was also true that risks had to be taken if the child’s life was to be saved.
What was the door to December? What lay on the other side of it? And what was the monstrous thing that had come through it?
She asked herself those questions again and again, until they flowed through her mind like the endlessly repeated verses of a lullaby, rocking her down into darkness.
When dawn came, Laura was deep asleep and dreaming. In the dream she was standing in front of an enormous iron door, and above the door hung a clock that ticked toward midnight. Only seconds remained before all three hands of the clock would point straight up (tick), at which time the door would open (tick), and something eager for blood would burst out upon her (tick), but she couldn’t find anything with which she could bar the door, and she couldn’t move away from it, could only wait (tick), and then she heard sharp claws scraping at the far side of the door, and a wet slobbering sound. Tick. Time was running out.
part four
IT
THURSDAY
8:30 A.M.–5:00 P.M.
chapter thirty-three
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 were already dead. Slumped 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 that 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.”