The Door To December

'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.'