The Door to December

the girl agreed.
     'Good. Very good. Now ... even though the door can't be opened, I'd like to know what's on the other side of it.'
     The girl said nothing.
     'Honey? Remember the strong lock. You're safe now. So tell me what's on the other side of the door.'
     Melanie's small white hands pulled and patted the empty air under the desk, as though she were attempting to draw a picture of something.
     'What's on the other side of the door?' Laura asked again. The hands moved ceaselessly. The girl made wordless, frustrated sounds.
     'Tell me, honey.'
     'The door...'
     'Where does the door lead?'
     'The door...'
     'What kind of room is on the other side?'
     'The door to...'
     'To where?'
     'The door ... to ... December,' Melanie said. Her fear broke under the crushing weight of many other emotions — misery, despair, grief, loneliness, frustration — all of which were audible in the wordless sounds that she made and in her uncontrollable sobbing. Then: 'Mommy? Mommy?'
     'I'm right here, baby,' Laura said, startled to hear her daughter calling for her.
     'Mommy?'
     'Right here. Come to me, baby. Come out from under there.'
     Weeping, the girl did not come but cried, again, 'Mommy?' She seemed to think she was alone, far from Laura's consoling embrace, though in fact they were only inches apart. 'Oh, Mommy! Mommy !'
     Staring into the shadowy recess beneath the desk, watching her little girl weep and gibber, reaching back in there, touching the child, Laura shared some of Melanie's feelings, especially grief and frustration, but she was also filled with a powerful curiosity. The door to December?
     'Mama?'
     'Here. Right here.'
     They were so close yet they remained separated by an immense and mysterious gulf.
    17
    Luther Williams was a young black pathologist working for the LAPD. He dressed as though he were the ghost of Sammy Davis, Jr. — leisure suits and too much jewelry — but was as articulate and amusing as Thomas Sowell, the black sociologist. Luther was an admirer of Sowell and of other sociologists and economists in the burgeoning conservative movement within the black intellectual community, and could quote from their books at length. Too great a length. Several times, he had lectured Dan on pragmatic politics and had expounded upon the virtues of free-market economics as a mechanism for lifting the poor out of poverty. He was such a fine pathologist, with such a sensitive eye for the anomalous details that were important in forensic medicine, that it was almost worth tolerating his tedious political dissections in order to obtain the information he collected from his dissections of the flesh. Almost.
     Luther was sitting at a microscope, examining a tissue sample, when Dan entered the green-tiled lab. He looked up and grinned when he saw who was visiting him. 'Danny boy! Did you use those tickets I gave you?'
     For a moment, Dan didn't know what the pathologist was talking about, but then he remembered. Luther had bought two tickets to a debate between G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary, and then something had come up to prevent him from going. He had run into Dan in the hall a week ago and had insisted that Dan take the tickets. 'It'll raise your consciousness,' he had said.
     Now, Dan fidgeted. 'Well, I told you last week that I probably couldn't make it. I asked you to give the tickets to someone else.'
     'You didn't go?' Luther asked, disappointed.
     'No time.'
     'Danny, Danny, you've got to make time for these things. There's a battle raging that'll shape our lives, a battle between those who love freedom and those who don't, a quiet war between freedom-loving libertarians and freedom-hating fascists and leftists.'
     Dan hadn't voted — or even registered to vote — in twelve years. He didn't much care which party or ideological faction was in power. It wasn't that he thought Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, were all screwups; they probably were, but he didn't really care, and that wasn't the reason for his stubborn political indifference. He figured society would muddle through regardless of who was in charge, and he had no time to listen to boring political arguments.
     His main interest, his consuming interest, was murder, which was why he had no