The Door to December

girl. Then the coup de grâce: a bullet in the ear for each of them, just to make sure they were stone dead. The job done, Rink would leave immediately, return to the public rest room, pick up his raincoat and attaché case, and get the hell out of the hospital.
     The plan was clean and uncomplicated. There was almost nothing about it that could go wrong.
     Before opening the door and getting out of the Volvo, he looked carefully around the parking lot to be sure that he wasn't observed. Although the storm had passed and the rain had stopped falling half an hour ago, light fog marked the direction of a gentle breeze and eddied in lazy patterns off from the main current, shrouding some objects, distorting others. Every depression in the macadam was filled with a pool of rainwater, and the many wind-stirred puddles shimmered with yellow reflections of the light from the tall sodium-vapor lamps.
     Except for the drifting fog, the night was perfectly still. Rink decided he was alone, unseen.
     To the east, the gray-black sky had a pale, opalescent, pinkish-blue tint. The first faint flow of dawn's radiant face. In another hour, the quiet night routine of the hospital would begin to give way to the business and busyness of the day. It was time to go.
     He was looking forward to the work ahead. He had never killed a child before. It ought to be interesting.
    9
    Alone, the girl woke. She sat straight up in bed, trying to scream. Her mouth was open wide, the muscles in her neck were taut, the blood vessels in her throat and temples throbbed with the effort that she was making, but she couldn't produce a sound.
     She sat like that for half a minute, her small fists full of sweat-soaked sheets. Eyes wide. She wasn't looking at or reacting to anything in the room. The terror lay beyond those walls.
     Briefly, her eyes cleared. She was no longer oblivious of the hospital room.
     She realized for the first time that she was alone. Remembered who she was. She desperately desired company, someone to hold, human contact, comfort.
     'Hello?' she whispered. 'S-s-somebody? Somebody? Somebody? Mommy?'
     If people had been with her, perhaps her attention would have been altogether captured by them and drawn permanently away from the things that so frightened her. Alone, however, she could not shake the nightmare that had its talon in her, and her eyes glazed over again. Her gaze fixed once more on a scene elsewhere.
     Finally, with a desperate, wordless whimper, she clambered over the safety railing and got out of bed. She tottered a few steps. Went down on her knees. Breathing hard, wheezing with panic, she crawled into the darker half of the room, past the untenanted bed, into the corner where friendly shadows offered consolation. She put her back to the wall and faced into the room, knees drawn up. The hospital gown bunched at her hips. She wrapped her arms around her thin legs and pulled herself into a tight ball.
     She remained in the corner only a minute before she began to whimper and mewl like a frightened animal. She raised her hands and covered her face, striving to block out a hideous sight.
     'Don't, please, please, please.'
     Breathing rapidly and shallowly, with ever-increasing panic, she lowered her hands and squeezed them into fists. She pounded her own breast, hard, harder.
     'Don't, don't, don't,' she said.
     She was pounding hard enough to hurt herself, yet she couldn't feel the blows.
     'The door,' she said softly. 'The door ... the door ...'
     It wasn't the hospital-room door or the door to the adjoining bath that frightened her. She was looking at neither. She was dimly aware of the world around her, but she was focused instead on things no one else could have seen from any vantage point in that room.
     She raised both hands, held them out in front of her, as though pressing on the unseen door, frantically attempting to hold it shut.
     'Stop.'
     The meager muscles in her frail arms popped up, and then her elbows bent, as if the invisible door actually had substantial weight and was swinging open against all her protests. As if something big pushed relentlessly against the other side of it. Something inhuman and unimaginably strong.
     Abruptly, with a gasp, she scrambled out of the shadow-shrouded corner and across the floor. She went under