Melanie sighed.
Laura leaned over and looked at her in the dim backwash of light from the movie screen.
The girl's eyes were getting heavy.
Worried, Laura put a hand on her daughter's shoulder and shook gently, then harder.
Melanie blinked.
'Watch the movie, honey. Watch the movie.'
The child's eyes swam back into focus and reconnected with the action on the screen.
Boothe had moved out of the shadows.
Uhlander was leaning forward in his chair.
They both seemed to be waiting for Dan to say something, to assure them that he would kill the girl and stop the slaughter.
Instead, he said nothing because he wanted them to sweat for a while. Besides, his emotions were in such turmoil that he didn't trust himself to speak yet.
Murder, Dan knew, was a human potential as universal as love. It existed in the kind and the meek, in the gentle and the innocent, though perhaps it lay more deeply buried in them than in others. He was no more surprised to discover it in Melanie McCaffrey than he had been surprised by the murderous impulses of the scores of killers that he'd put in prison over the years — though this discovery left him distraught, sick, and profoundly depressed.
Indeed, Melanie's homicidal urges were more understandable than most. Imprisoned, physically and psychologically tortured, denied love and comfort and understanding, treated more like a laboratory monkey than like a human being, forced to endure long years of mental and emotional and physical pain, she had developed a superhuman rage and hatred, diamond-hard and gas-flame-bright, that could have been relieved only by violent, brutal, bloody revenge. Perhaps her rage and hatred — and the need to relieve those inner pressures — were as much responsible for her psychic breakthrough as any of the exercises and conditions that her father had imposed upon her.
Now she stalked her tormentors, a frail nine-year-old girl, yet as deadly and dangerous and efficient a killer as Jack the Ripper or as any member of the Manson Family. But she wasn't entirely depraved. That was a thought to cling to. Evidently a part of her was shocked and repelled by what she had done. After all, horrified by her own thirst for blood, she'd sought refuge in a catatonic state, crawling down into that dark place where she could hide the terrible truth of the murders from the world ... and even from herself. As long as she had a conscience, she hadn't descended all the way into savagery, and maybe her sanity was retrievable.
She was the power that had taken possession of the radio in the kitchen. She could not throw off the heavy weight of guilt and self-disgust that kept her pressed down in her quasi-autistic subworld, could not bear to speak of what she had done or might do, but she could send warnings and pleas for help through the radio. That's what those messages had meant: 'Help me, stop me. Help me. Stop me.'
And the whirlwind filled with flowers had been ... what? Not at all threatening, of course. It had seemed threatening to Laura and Earl, but only because they hadn't understood. No, the flower-laden whirlwind had been a pathetic, desperate expression of Melanie's love for her mother.
Her love for her mother.
In that love, the girl might find salvation.
Boothe was impatient with Dan's silence. 'When she broke through, when she finally cast off all restraints of the flesh, and found her great powers and saw how to use them, she should have been grateful to us. The rotten little bitch should have been grateful to her father and to all of us who helped her to become more than just a child, more than just human.'
'Instead,' Uhlander whined with childish self-pity, 'the vicious little brat turned on us.'
Dan said, 'So you told Ned Rink to kill her.'
Boothe was as quick as ever with the self-justifications. 'We had no choice. She was infinitely valuable, and we wanted to study and understand her. But we knew she was after us, and recapturing her and studying her was a risk we simply couldn't take.'
'We didn't want to kill her,' Uhlander said. 'We created her, after all. We made her what she became. But we had to remove her. It was self-preservation. Self-defense. She'd become a monster.'
Dan stared at Uhlander and Boothe, as though peering through the bars of a cage, into a cell in a zoo. It must have been an alien zoo as well, on some distant planet, for it didn't seem that
this
world could have produced creatures as bizarre, bloodless, and cruel as these. He said, 'Melanie wasn't the monster.
You
were. You
are
.' He got up, too tense and angry to remain seated, and stood with his hands fisted at his sides. 'What the hell did you expect to happen if she ever actually achieved this breakthrough you wanted? Did you think she'd say, "Oh, thank you so much, now what can I do for you, what wishes can I grant, what deeds perform?" Did you think she would be like a genie let loose of a lamp, subservient and eager to please those who'd rubbed the brass and let her out?' He realized he was shouting. He tried to lower his voice, but he couldn't. 'For God's sake, you people imprisoned her for six years! Tortured her! Do you think prisoners are usually
grateful
to their jailers and torturers?'
'It wasn't torture!' Boothe protested. 'It was ... education. Guidance. Scientifically encouraged evolution!'
'We were showing her The Way,' Uhlander said.
Melanie murmured.
Laura barely heard the girl above the music and screeching of car tires in the movie. She leaned closer to her daughter. 'What is it, honey?'
'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.'
'Eight men.' Boothe refused to acknowledge what Dan had said. 'The girl's a monster, a psychopathic monster.'
'She's deeply disturbed. She can't be held accountable for her actions.' Dan had never imagined that he could enjoy seeing another human being squirm as much as he was enjoying the growing horror and desperation on these bastards' faces as they realized that their last hope of survival had been a false hope.
'You're an officer of the law,' Boothe said angrily. 'You have a duty to prevent violence wherever you can.'
'Shooting a nine-year-old girl is the commission of violence, not the prevention.'
'But if you don't kill her, she'll kill us,' Boothe said. 'Two deaths instead of one. Kill her, and the net effect is that you save one life.'
'A net balance of one life to my credit, huh? Gee, what an interesting way to think of it. You know, Mr. Boothe, when you get down there in Hell, I'll bet the devil makes you an accountant of souls.'
A sudden all-consuming fury pulled the white-haired publisher's face into a grotesque mask of hatred and impotent rage. He threw his whiskey glass at Dan's head.
Dan ducked, and the fine crystal struck the floor far behind him, shattering on impact.
'You stupid fucking son of a bitch,' Boothe said.
'My, my. Mustn't ever let your friends at the Rotary Club hear you talking like that. Why, they'd be shocked.'
Boothe turned away from him, stood facing the darkness where the books waited silently on their shelves. He was shaking with rage, but he did not speak.
Dan had learned everything he needed to know. He was ready to leave.