The Door To December

'And it was after these experiments started that each girl found herself sexually involved with him.'

'Yes.'

'So you think he used hypnosis, drugs, subconscious programming, to… well, to convert them?'

'To program their psychological matrices to include promiscuity and masochism. Yes. That's exactly what I think.'

* * *

Melanie's shrill scream filled the house.

Shouting her daughter's name, Laura hurried behind Earl Benton, down the hall. Revolver in hand, the bodyguard entered the child's room ahead of Laura and snapped on the light.

Melanie was alone. The menace that had elicited her screams was one that only she could see.

Dressed in white socks and the pair of white cotton underpants that she had been wearing during her nap, the child was crouched in a corner, hands held in front of her to ward off an invisible enemy, shrieking so fiercely that she must have been hurting her throat. She looked so fragile, so pitifully vulnerable.

Laura was briefly overwhelmed with loathing for Dylan. She almost sagged, almost went limp, almost crumpled under the weight of her anger.

Earl holstered his gun. He reached out to Melanie, but she struck his hands and scrambled away from him, along the baseboard.

'Melanie, honey, stop! It's all right,' Laura said.

The girl didn't heed her mother. She reached the next corner, sat down, drew her legs up, fisted her small hands, and held them up defensively. She was no longer screaming, but she made a strange, rhythmic, panicky sound: 'Uh… uh… uh… uh… uh…'

Crouching in front of her, Earl said, 'It's okay, kid.'

'Uh… uh… uh… uh…'

'It's okay now. It really is. It's okay, Melanie. I'll take care of you.'

'The d-d-door,' Melanie said. 'The door. Don't let it open!'

'It's shut,' Laura said, hurrying to her, kneeling by her. 'The door is shut and locked, honey.'

'Keep it shut!'

'Don't you remember, baby? There's a big, new, heavy lock on the door,' Laura said. 'Don't you remember?'

Earl glanced at Laura, obviously puzzled.

'The door is shut,' Laura continued. 'Locked. Sealed. Nailed shut. Nobody can open it, honey. Nobody.'

Fat tears welled in the child's eyes, spilled down her cheeks.

'I'll take care of you,' Earl said soothingly.

'Baby, you're safe here. No one can hurt you.'

Melanie sighed, and the fear ebbed out of her face.

'You're safe. Perfectly safe now.'

The girl put one pale hand to her head and began to twist a strand of hair in that absentminded way that any ordinary girl might twist her hair when preoccupied with thoughts of boys or horses or pajama parties or any of the other things that preoccupied kids her age. Indeed, after the bizarre behavior that she had displayed thus far, after alternating between extremes of hysteria and motionless catatonia, it was both moving and encouraging to see her playing with her hair, because that was such a normal act — a small thing, simple, hardly a breakthrough, not a crack in her hard autistic shield, but normal.

Seizing the moment, Laura said, 'Would you like to go to a beauty shop with me, baby? Hmmmm? You've never been to a real beauty shop. We'll go and get our hair done together. How would you like that?'

Although her eyes remained somewhat glassy, Melanie's brow furrowed, and she seemed to be considering the proposition.

'Lord knows, you need something done with your hair,' Laura said, anxiously trying to preserve the moment, expand upon it, deepen and broaden this unexpected contact with the girl inside the autistic shell. 'We'll get it cut and styled. Maybe curled. How would you like your hair curled, honey? Oh, you'd look just great with lots of curls.'

The girl's face softened, and a smile threatened to take possession of her mouth.

'And after the beauty shop, we could go shopping for clothes. How about that, honey? Lots of new dresses. Dresses and sweaters. Even one of the glitzy new jackets the kids are wearing. You'd like that, I bet.'

Melanie's unfinished smile stopped forming. Although Laura kept talking, the mood was gone as suddenly as it had come. The girl's placid expression gave way to a look of disgust, as if she had seen something in her private world that horrified and repulsed her.

Then she did a startling and disturbing thing: She struck herself with her small fists, struck hard at her knees and thighs, with a loud smacking sound, then pounded her chest—

'Melanie!'

— and swung both fists at the same time, pounding her withered biceps and her shoulders, pummeling herself fiercely, with unexpected strength and fury, trying to hurt herself.

'Stop it! Melanie!' Laura was shocked and frightened by her daughter's sudden self-destructive frenzy.

Melanie punched herself in the face.

'I got her!' Earl shouted.

The girl bit him as he tried to restrain her. She freed one hand and clawed her own chest with sufficient ferocity to draw blood.

'Jesus!' Earl said as the girl kicked him with her bare feet and twisted loose again.

* * *

Frowning at Marge, Dan said, 'Programmed them to be promiscuous and masochistic? Is that sort of thing possible?'

She nodded. 'If the psychologist has a deep and broad knowledge of modern brainwashing techniques, and if he's unscrupulous, and if he has either a willing subject or one he can physically detain and control for lengthy periods — then it's possible. But it usually takes a long time, a lot of patience and perseverance. The astonishing and frightening thing in this case is that Hoffritz seems to have been able to program these girls in a matter of weeks, after working with them only an hour or two a day, just three or four times a week. Apparently, he developed some new and damned effective methods of psychological conditioning. But with the first four, it wasn't long-lasting, never longer than a few weeks or months. Eventually, each girl's original personality resurfaced. First she felt guilty about her sexual acrobatics with Hoffritz but continued to take perverse pleasure in the humiliation and pain of her masochistic role. Then she gradually grew to fear and despise the whole sadomasochistic aspect of the relationship. Each of these kids said it was like waking from a dream when they finally began to want to be free to Hoffritz. All four girls eventually found the will to break it off.'

'Good God,' Dan said.

'I believe there is a good one, but sometimes I wonder why He lets men like Hoffritz walk the earth.'

'Why didn't these girls report him to the police… or at least to university officials?'

'They were deeply ashamed. And until we found and questioned them, they never suspected that their masochistic aberrations were Hoffritz's work. They all thought those twisted desires had been in them all along.'

'But that's amazing. They knew they were involved in behavior-modification experiments. So when they started behaving in ways they'd never behaved before—'

She held up one hand, stopping him. 'Willy Hoffritz probably implanted posthypnotic directives that inhibited each girl from considering the possibility that he was responsible for her new behavior.'

It scared Dan to think the brain was just so much Silly Putty that could be so easily manipulated.

* * *

Melanie scuttled past Earl and sprang to her feet and took two awkward steps into the middle of the bedroom, where she stopped and swayed and almost fell. She began once more to scourge herself, hammering herself as if she felt that she deserved to be punished or as if she were trying to drive some dark spirit from her traitorous flesh.