The Door to December

fulfilling pain.
    * * *
    Melanie had been quiet and at rest for a few minutes, long enough for Laura to have decided that the worst had passed and for Dan to put away his revolver. As they were returning to the small table by the window, the girl began to writhe and moan again. The room grew cold. Heart racing, Laura went to the bed again.
     Melanie's features were grotesquely distorted — not by pain, but (it seemed) by horror. At the moment, she didn't resemble a child at all. She looked ... not old, exactly ... but wizened, possessed of some hideous and hurtful knowledge far beyond her years, a knowledge that caused anxiety and anguish, a knowledge of dark things best left unknown.      It was coming or was already present. By primitive, instinctive means that she could not understand, Laura sensed a malevolent force bearing down on them. The fine hairs on her arms prickled, and along the nape of her neck too. It .
     Laura looked desperately around the room. No demonic creature. No Hell-born shape.
     Show yourself, damn you, she thought angrily. Whoever you are, whatever you are, wherever you come from, give us something to focus on, something to strike at or shoot.
     But it remained beyond the reach of her senses, and the only thing about the creature that could be apprehended was the chill in which it always cloaked itself.
     The air temperature sank impossibly fast, lower than ever, until their breath gushed out in visible roiling plumes. Condensation appeared on the windows and on the mirror, crystallized into frost, then hardened into ice. But after only thirty or forty seconds, the air began to warm again. The child stopped groaning, and once more the unseen enemy departed without harming her.
     Melanie's eyes popped open, but she still seemed to be staring at something in a dream. 'It'll get them.'
     Dan Haldane bent over her, put one hand on her small shoulder. 'What is it, Melanie?'
     ' It . It'll get them,' the girl repeated, not to him as much as to herself.
     'What is the damned thing?' Dan asked.
     'It'll get them,' the girl said, and shuddered.
     'Easy, honey,' Laura said.
     'And then,' Melanie said, 'it'll get me too.'
     'No,' Laura said. 'We'll take care of you, Mellie. I swear we will.'
     The girl said, 'It'll come up ... from ... inside ... and eat me ... eat me all up....'
     'No,' Laura said. 'No.'
     'Inside?' Dan said. 'From inside what?'
     'Eat me all up,' the girl said forlornly.
     Dan said, 'Where does it come from?'
     The child issued a long, slowly fading whimper that seemed more a sigh of resignation than an expression of fear.
     'Was something here just a moment ago, Melanie?' Dan asked. 'The thing you're so afraid of ... was it here in this room?'
     'It wants me,' the girl said.
     'If it wants you,' he said, 'then why didn't it take you while it was here?'
     The girl wasn't hearing him. Softly, thickly, she said, 'The door ...'
     'What door?'
     'The door to December.'
     'What's that mean, Melanie?'
     'The door ...'
     The girl closed her eyes. Her breathing changed. She slipped into sleep.
     Looking across the bed at Dan, Laura said, 'It wants the others first, the people involved with the experiments in that gray room.'
     'Eddie Koliknikov, Howard Renseveer, Sheldon Tolbeck, Albert Uhlander, and maybe more we don't know about yet.'
     'Yes. As soon as they're all dead, then it ... It will come for Melanie. That's what she said earlier tonight, at the house, after the radio was ... possessed.'
     'But how does she know this?'
     Laura shrugged.
     They stared at the slumbering girl.
     At last Dan said, 'We've got to break through this ... this trance she's in, so she can tell us what we need to know.'
     'I tried earlier today. Hypnotic-regression therapy. But it wasn't terribly successful.'
     'Can you try again?'
     Laura nodded. 'In the morning, when she's rested a little.'
     'We shouldn't waste time—'
     'She needs her rest.'
     'All right,' he said reluctantly.
     She knew what he was thinking: If we wait until morning, let's hope we're not too late.
    32
    Laura slept with Melanie in the second bed, and Dan lay in the first bed because it was nearer the