The Door to December

mixture of sympathy, compassion, awe, and cold hard fear.
    * * *
    After Laura had gone through all the necessary steps to talk Melanie up from her deep hypnotic state, the girl's condition did not change. Both in a trance and out, her withdrawal from the world was virtually complete. They would not be able to elicit any more information from her.
     Laura appeared to be almost physically ill with worry. Dan didn't blame her.
     They moved Melanie to one of the unmade beds, where she lay in a catatonic state, moving only to bring her left thumb to her mouth so she could suck on it.
     Laura called the hospital where she was on staff and from which she had taken a leave of absence, to make certain that no emergencies had arisen that would require her attention, and she checked in with her secretary at her own office to ascertain if all of her private patients had been placed with other psychiatrists for the duration of her leave. Then, not yet having had her shower, she said, 'I'll be ready in half an hour or forty-five minutes,' and went into the bathroom and closed the door.
     Occasionally casting a glance at Melanie, Dan sat at the small table and paged through books written by Albert Uhlander, which he'd obtained at Rink's house the previous day. All seven volumes dealt with the occult: The Modern Ghost; Poltergeists; Twelve Startling Cases; Voodoo Today; The Lives of the Psychics; The Nostradamus Pipeline, OOBE: The Case for Astral Projection; and Strange Powers Within Us. One had been published by Putman, one by Harper & Row, and to his surprise the other five had been published by John Wilkes Press, which was no doubt an operation controlled by John Wilkes Enterprises, the same company that owned the house in which Regine Savannah Hoffritz now lived.
     His first reaction to the colorfully jacketed books was that they were trash, filled with junk thoughts aimed at the same people who faithfully read every issue of Fate and believed every story therein, the same people who joined UFO clubs and believed that God was either an astronaut or a two-foot-tall blue man with eyes the size of saucers. But he reminded himself that something inhuman was stalking the people involved with the experiments in the gray room, something that was probably more understandable to Fate 's regular readers, even with all the junk thought cluttering their minds, than to people who, like he himself, had always viewed believers in the occult with smug superiority or outright disdain. And now, since observing the hypnotic-regression therapy session with Melanie, he had an unsettling theory of his own that was every bit as fantastical as anything in the pages of Fate. Live and learn.
     He found the publisher's address on the copyright page. The office was on Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills. He made a note of it, so he could compare it with the address of John Wilkes Enterprises' corporate headquarters, which was one of the things Earl Benton would be looking into this morning.
     Next, he went through all seven volumes, reading the dedications and acknowledgements, in hope of coming across a familiar name that would further tie Uhlander to the McCaffrey-Hoffritz conspiracy or perhaps identify other as-yet-unknown conspirators, but he found nothing that seemed to be of value.
     He looked at all the books again and chose one for closer examination. It was the volume that, at a glance, seemed the most likely to offer confirmation of the horrible possibility that had occurred to him while he'd been observing the hypnotic-therapy session with Melanie. He had read thirty pages by the time Laura showered, gave Melanie a bath, and declared herself ready to begin the day; in those pages he had indeed found things that lent substance to his worst fears.
     The mists were clearing, the mystery dissolving. He felt that he stood on the edge of an understanding that would make sense of the events of the past two days: the gray room, the hideously battered bodies, the fact that the men in that Studio City house had been able to do nothing to defend themselves, Melanie's miraculous escape from that carnage, Joseph Scaldone's death in a locked room, and all the poltergeist-like phenomena.
     It was madness.
     Yet ... it made sense.
     And it scared the hell out of him.
     He wanted to share his ideas with Laura, obtain her point of view as a psychiatrist. But what he