The Door to December

out.'
     Laura nodded. 'And thanks for—'
     'For nothing,' Earl said. 'I opened the door for them. I've got to make up for that. Wait until I make up for that before you start thanking me for anything.' He stepped to the lobby doors, started to push one open, then glanced back at Dan and said, 'By the way, what the hell happened to you?'
     'What?' Dan asked.
     'Your forehead.'
     'Oh.' Dan glanced at Laura, and she could tell by his expression that he'd come by his injury while working on the case, and she could also tell that he didn't want to say as much and make her feel at all responsible. He said, 'There was this little old lady ... she hit me with her cane.'
     'Oh?' Earl said.
     'I helped her across the street.'
     'Then why would she hit you?'
     'She didn't want to cross the street,' Dan said.
     Earl grinned — it was a macabre expression on his battered face — pushed the door open, ran through the rain, and disappeared into the waiting taxi.
     Laura zipped up Melanie's jacket. She and Dan kept the girl between them as they hurried out to his unmarked department sedan.
     The air was chilly.
     The rain was cold.
     The darkness seemed to breathe with malevolent life.
     Out there, somewhere, It waited.
    * * *
    The motel room had two queen-size beds with purple-and-green spreads that clashed with the garish orange-and-blue drapes that, in turn, clashed with the loud yellow-and-brown wallpaper. There was a certain kind of eye-searing decor to be found in about one-fourth of the hotels and motels in every state of the union, from Alaska to Florida, an unmistakable bizarre decor of such a particular nature that it seemed, to Dan, that the same grossly incompetent interior decorator must be traveling frantically from one end of the country to the other, papering walls and upholstering furniture and draping windows with factory-rejected patterns and materials.
     The beds had mattresses that were too soft, and the furniture was scarred, but at least the place was clean. On the credit side of the ledger, the management provided a percolator and complimentary foil packets of Hills Brothers and Mocha Mix. Dan made coffee while Laura put Melanie to bed.
     Although the girl had seemed to drift through the day with all the awareness of a sleepwalker, expending little energy, it was late, and she fell asleep even as her mother was tucking the covers around her.
     A small table and two chairs stood by the room's only window, and Dan brought the coffee to it. He and Laura sat mostly in shadow, with one small lamp burning just inside the door. The drapes were partly open to reveal a section of the rain-swept parking lot, where ghostly bluish fight from mercury-vapor lamps made strange patterns on the glass and chrome of the cars and shimmered eerily on the wet macadam.
     While Dan listened with growing amazement and disquiet, Laura told him the rest of the story that she had begun in the car: the levitating radio that seemed to broadcast a warning, the whirlwind filled with flowers that had burst through the kitchen door. She clearly found it difficult to credit these apparently supernatural events, though she had witnessed them with her own eyes.
     'What do you make of it?' he asked when she had finished.
     'I was hoping you could explain it to me.'
     He told her about Joseph Scaldone being killed in a room where all the windows and doors had been locked from inside. 'Considering that impossibility on top of what you've told me happened at your place, I guess we've got to accept that there's something here — some power, some force that's beyond human experience. But what the hell is it?'
     'Well, I've been thinking about it all evening, and it seems to me that whatever ... whatever possessed that radio and carried those flowers into the kitchen is not the same thing that's killing people. In retrospect, scary as it was, the presence in my kitchen wasn't fundamentally threatening. And like I said, it seemed to be warning us that what killed Dylan and Hoffritz and the others is eventually going to come for Melanie too.'
     'So we've got both good spirits and bad spirits,' Dan said.
     'I guess you could think of them that way.'
     'Good ghosts and bad ghosts.'
     'I don't believe in ghosts,' she said.
     'Neither