The Door to December

withstanding any number of bomb blasts.
     For a moment Dan thought he was going to have to get out in the rain and search for a call button to announce himself, but then he noticed a guardhouse subtly incorporated into one of the curved brick ramparts. A guard, wearing galoshes and a gray rain slicker with the hood pulled up, stepped out from behind a brick baffle that concealed the door to his small domain; for the first time Dan noticed the round window through which the guard had seen the sedan approaching.
     The man came directly to the car, inquired if he could help, checked Dan's ID, and informed him that he was expected. He said, 'I'll open the gate, Lieutenant. Just follow the main drive and park along the circle in front of the house.'
     Dan cranked up his window while the guard returned to the booth, and the colossal gates swung inward with ponderous grace. He drove through them with the curious science-fictional feeling that this was not a residence in the same world that he inhabited, but a place in another, better dimension; the gates guarded a magic portal through which one might jump into stranger and more wonderful realms.
     The Boothe estate appeared to encompass eight or ten acres and must have been one of the larger properties in Bel Air. The driveway led up a gentle rise and then curved to the left, through exquisitely maintained, parklike grounds. The house, standing just beyond that point at which the driveway curved back on itself to form a circle, was where God would have lived — if He'd had sufficient money. It resembled one of those baronial homes in films with British settings, like Rebecca and Brideshead Revisited , a great pile of bricks with granite coins and granite window lintels, three stories high, with a black-slate mansard roof and many gables, with half-seen wings and unseen wings angling off from the front-facing portion of the structure. A dozen steps under a portico led up to a set of antique, mahogany entry doors that had probably cost the life of at least one big tree or two younger ones.
     He parked beside a limestone fountain that was centred in the looped circular turnaround. It wasn't spouting at the moment, but it looked like a backdrop to a love scene featuring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in one of those old movies about European romance and intrigue.
     Dan climbed the steps, and one of the front doors opened before he could begin searching for the bell. Evidently the guard in the gatehouse had called ahead to announce him.
     The entry hall was so grand and large that Dan figured he could have lived comfortably in just that space, even if someday he married and produced two children.
     Forgoing the formal wear of movie butlers in favor of a gray suit and white shirt and black tie, a soft-spoken servant with a British accent took Dan's streaming coat and had the courtesy not to look askance at his damp, rumpled, day-old clothes.
     'Mr. Boothe is waiting for you in the library,' the butler said.
     Dan checked his watch. It was 3:55. Delayed by the necessity of locating and removing the transmitter that had been attached to his car, he'd not arrived too early, after all. He was again seized by an urgent sense of time running out. The butler led him through a series of huge serene rooms, each more elaborately and graciously furnished than the one before it, across antique Persian rugs and Chinese carpets. The deeply coffered ceilings with inlaid-woods might have been imported from classic estates in Europe. They passed through superbly hand-carved doorways and walked past Impressionist paintings by all the masters of that school (and no reason to believe that even one piece was a print or imitation).
     The wealth of antiques and the great beauty of the house were awesome and visually appealing, but surprisingly, the succession of paradisiacal rooms gave rise to an increasing uneasiness in Dan. He had a sense of powerful and ominous forces lying dormant but easily disturbed just beyond the walls and under the floors, a pseudopsychic perception of colossal dark machinery purring with malevolent purpose somewhere just out of sight. In spite of the exquisite taste and apparently infinite resources with which the house had been built and appointed, in spite of its soaring spaces — or perhaps in part because of its superhuman scale — it had a quality of medieval