The Door to December

Melanie.'
     'It's in there,' the girl said shakily.
     'What's in there?'
     'The way out.'
     'The way out of what?'
     'The way out of everything.'
     'I don't understand.'
     'The ... way out ... of me.'
     'What does that mean?'
     'The way out of me,' the girl repeated, deeply distressed. Laura decided that she didn't yet know enough to make sense of this twist that the interrogation had taken. If she pursued it, the child's answers would only seem increasingly surreal.
     First of all, she had to get Melanie into the tank and find out what happened in there. 'The hatch is in front of you, honey.'
     The girl said nothing.
     'Do you see it?'
     Reluctantly: 'Yes.'
     'Open the hatch, Melanie. Stop hesitating. Open it now.'
     With a wordless protest that somehow managed to express dread and misery and loathing in a few wretched and meaningless syllables, the child raised her hands and gripped a door that was, in her trance, very real to her, though it could not be seen by Laura or Dan. She pulled on it, and when she had it open, she hugged herself and trembled as though she were in a cold draft. 'I ... it ... I've opened it.'
     'Is this the door, Melanie?'
     'It's ... the hatch. The tank.'
     'But is it also the door to December?'
     'No.'
     'What is the door to December?'
     'The way out.'
     'The way out of where?'
     'Out ... out of ... the tank.'
     Baffled, Laura took a deep breath. 'Forget about that for now. For now, I just want you to go inside the tank.
     Melanie began to cry.
     'Go inside, honey.'
     'I ... I'm s-scared.'
     'Don't be afraid.'
     'I might ...'
     'What?'
     'If I go inside ... I might...'
     'You might what?'
     'Do something,' the girl said bleakly.
     'What might you do?'
     'Something ...'
     'Tell me.'
     'Terrible,' Melanie said in a voice so soft that it was almost inaudible.
     Not sure that she understood, Laura said, 'You think something terrible is going to happen to you?'
     Softer: 'No.'
     'Well, then—'
     'Yes.'
     'Which is it?'
     Softer still: 'No ... yes...'
     'Honey?'
     Silence.
     The lines in the child's face were no longer entirely lines of fear. Another emotion shared her features, and it might have been despair.
     Laura said, 'All right. Don't be afraid. Be calm. Relax. I'm right here with you. You've got to go into the tank. You've got to go in, but you'll be all right.'
     The tension drained out of Melanie, and she sagged in her chair. Her face remained grim. Worse than grim. Her eyes were impossibly sunken; they appeared to be in the process of caving into her skull, and it was not difficult to imagine that within minutes she would be left with two empty sockets. Her face was so white that it might have been a mask carved out of soap, and her lips were nearly as bloodless as her skin. She possessed an extremely fragile quality — as if she were not composed of flesh and blood and bone, but as if she were a construct of the thinnest tissue and the lightest powder — as if she would dissolve and blow away if someone spoke too loudly or waved a hand in her direction.
     Dan Haldane said, 'Maybe we've gone far enough for one day.'
     'No,' Laura said. 'We have to do this. It's the quickest way to find out what the hell's been going on. I can guide her through the memories, no matter how bad they are. I've done this sort of thing before. I'm good at it.'
     But as Laura looked across the table at her wan and withered daughter, a sinking feeling filled her, and she had to choke back a wave of nausea. It seemed as if Melanie was already dead. Stumped in her chair, eyes closed, the child appeared lifeless; her face was the face of a cold corpse, the features frozen in the final, painful grimace of death.
     Could these memories be terrible enough to kill her if she were forced to bring them into the light before she was ready?
     No. Surely not. Laura had never heard of hypnotic-regression therapy being dangerous to any patient's physical health.
     Yet ... being taken back into the gray room, being forced to speak of the chair where she had received electric-shock aversion