The Door To December

They were silent.

Rain tapped the window, drummed on the roof, gurgled through the gutters and downspouts.

At last, softly, Haldane said, 'A man like that might…'

'Might experiment on his own daughter, might put her through tortures of one kind and another, if he thought he was improving her. Or if he became obsessed with a series of experiments that required a child as the subject.'

'Jesus,' Haldane said in a tone that was part disgust, part shock, part pity.

To her surprise, Laura began to cry.

The detective came to the table. He pulled out a chair and sat beside her.

She blotted her eyes with a Kleenex.

He put a hand on her shoulder. 'It'll be all right.'

She nodded, blew her nose.

'We'll find her,' he said.

'I'm afraid we won't.'

'We will.'

'I'm afraid she's dead.'

'She's not.'

'I'm afraid.'

'Don't be.'

'Can't help it.'

'I know.'

* * *

For half an hour, while Lieutenant Haldane attended to business elsewhere in the house, Laura studied Dylan's handwritten journal, which was actually just a log detailing how Melanie's days had been spent. By the time the detective returned to the kitchen, Laura was numb with horror.

'It's true,' she said. 'They've been here at least five and a half years, as long as he's been keeping this journal, and Melanie hasn't been out of the house once that I can see.'

'And she slept every night in the sensory-deprivation chamber, like I thought?'

'Yes. In the beginning, eight hours a night. Then eight and a half. Then nine. By the end of the first year, she was spending ten hours a night in the chamber and two hours every afternoon.'

She closed the book. The sight of Dylan's neat handwriting suddenly made her furious.

'What else?' Haldane asked.

'First thing in the morning, she spent an hour meditating.'

'Meditating? A little girl like that? She wouldn't even know the meaning of the word.'

'Essentially, meditation is nothing but redirecting the mind inward, blocking out the material world, seeking peace through inner solitude. I doubt if he was teaching Melanie Zen meditation or any other brand with solid philosophical or religious overtones. He was probably just teaching her how to sit still and turn inward and think of nothing.'

'Self-hypnosis.'

'That's another name for it.'

'Why did he want her to do that?'

'I don't know.'

She got up from the chair, nervous and agitated. She wanted to move, walk, work off the frantic energy that crackled through her. But the kitchen was too small. She was at the end of it in five steps. She started toward the hall door but stopped when she realized that she couldn't walk through the rest of the house, past the bodies, through the blood, getting in the way of the coroner's people and the police. She leaned against a counter, flattening her palms on the edge of it, pressing fiercely hard, as if somehow she could get rid of her nervous energy by radiating it into that ceramic surface.

'Each day,' she said, 'after meditation, Melanie spent several hours learning biofeedback techniques.'

'While sitting in the electrified chair?'

'I think so. But…'

'But?' he persisted.

'But I think the chair was used for more than that. I think it was also used to condition her against pain.'

'Say that again?'

'I think Dylan was using electric shock to teach Melanie how to blank out pain, how to endure it, ignore it the way that Eastern mystics do, the way Yogin do.'

'Why?'

'Maybe because, later, being able to tune out pain would help her get through the longer session in the sensory-deprivation tank.'

'So I was right about that?'

'Yes. He gradually increased her time in the tank until, by the third year, she would sometimes remain afloat for three days. By the fourth year, four and five days at a time. Most recently… just last week, he put her in the tank for a seven-day session.

'Catheterized?'

'Yes. And on an IV. Intravenous needle. He was feeding her by glucose drip, so she wouldn't lose too much weight and wouldn't dehydrate.'

'God in Heaven.'

Laura said nothing. She felt as though she might cry again. She was nauseated. Her eyes were grainy, and her face felt greasy. She went to the sink and turned on the cold water, which spilled over the stacks of dirty dishes. She filled her cupped hands, splashed her face. She pulled several paper towels from the wall-mounted dispenser and dried off.

She felt no better.

Haldane said ruminatively, 'He wanted to condition her against pain so she could more easily get through the long sessions in the tank.'

'Maybe. Can't be sure.'

'But what's painful about being in the tank? I thought there was no sensation at all. That's what you told me.'

'There's nothing painful about a session of normal length. But if you're going to be kept in a tank several days, your skin's going to wrinkle, crack. Sores are going to form.'

'Ah.'

'Then there's the damn catheter. At your age, you've probably never been so seriously ill that you've been incontinent, needed a catheter.'

'No. Never.'

'Well, see, after a couple of days, the urethra usually becomes irritated. It hurts.'

'I would guess it does.'

She wanted a drink very badly. She was not much of a drinker, ordinarily. A glass of wine now and then. A rare martini. But now, she wanted to get drunk.

He said, 'So what was he up to? What was he trying to prove? Why did he put her through all this?'

Laura shrugged.

'You must have some idea.'

'None at all. The journal doesn't describe the experiments or mention a single word about his intentions. It's just a record of her sessions with each piece of equipment, an hour-by-hour summary of each of her days here.'

'You saw the papers in his office, scattered all over the floor. They must be more detailed than the journal. There'll be more to be learned from them.'

'Maybe.'

'I've glanced at a few, but I couldn't make much sense of them. Lots of technical language, psychological jargon. Greek to me. If I have them photocopied, have the copies boxed up and sent to you in a couple of days, would you mind going through them, seeing if you can put them in order and if you can learn anything from them?'

She hesitated. 'I… I don't know. I got more than half sick just going through the journal.'

'Don't you want to know what he did to Melanie? If we find her, you'll have to know. Otherwise you won't have much chance of dealing with whatever psychological trauma she's suffering from.'

It was true. To provide the proper treatment, she would have to descend into her daughter's nightmare and make it her own.

'Besides,' Haldane said, 'there might be clues in those papers, things that'll help us determine who he was working with, who might have killed him. If we can figure that out, we might also figure out who has Melanie now. If you go through your husband's papers, you might discover the one bit of information that'll help us find your little girl.'

'All right,' she said wearily. 'When you've got it boxed, have the stuff sent to my house.'

'I know it won't be easy.'

'Damned right.'

'I want to know who financed the torture of a little girl in the name of research,' he said in a tone of voice that seemed, to Laura, to be exceptionally hard and vengeful for an impartial office,r of the law. 'I want to know real bad.'

He was about to say something else, but he was interrupted by a uniformed officer who entered from the hall. 'Lieutenant?'

'What is it, Phil?'

'You're looking for a little girl in all this, aren't you?'