The Door to December

holster — reading the newspaper. When he came across something surprising or shocking or funny in a gossip column, Dear Abby, or Miss Manners, he would read it aloud to Laura.
     Pepper, the calico cat, was curled comfortably in the corner by the refrigerator, lulled by the humming and the vibrations of the motor. She knew that she wasn't allowed on kitchen counters or tables, and she usually kept a low profile while in the room, to avoid being chased out altogether. Abruptly, however, the cat shrieked and popped onto her feet. Her back arched. Her fur bristled. She was wild-eyed, and she spat angrily.
     Putting down the newspaper, Earl said, 'What's wrong, puss?'
     Laura turned from the cutting board where she was making the salad.
     Pepper was alarmingly agitated. The calico's ears were flat against her skull, and her lips were drawn back in a snarl, fangs revealed.
     'Pepper, what's wrong with you?'
     The cat's eyes seemed to bulge in terror from its head and fixed for an instant on Laura. There was nothing of the domestic pet in those eyes, nothing but sheer wildness.
     'Pepper ... ?'
     The calico bolted out of the corner, squealing in fear or rage or both. She dashed toward a row of cabinets but suddenly wheeled away from them as though she'd seen something monstrous. She streaked toward the sink instead, then shrieked and abruptly changed direction again, claws ticking and scraping on the tile. She chased her own tail for half a dozen revolutions, spitting, and snapping her jaws, then leaped straight into the air as if she'd been stung or swatted. Slashing at the air with her claws, she pranced and twisted on her hind paws in a weird Saint Vitus's dance, came down on all fours, and was moving even as her forepaws touched the tile. She flashed under the table as if running for her life, between the chairs, out the kitchen door, into the dining room. Gone.
     It had been an incredible display. Laura had never seen anything quite like it.
     Melanie had been unaffected by the cat's performance. She still sat with her hands in her lap, head bowed, eyes closed. Earl had dropped the newspaper and had risen from his chair. In another part of the house, Pepper let out one last miserable cry. Then silence.
    * * *
    The Sign of the Pentagram was a little shop in a bustling block that was the very essence of Southern California hopes and dreams. Photographs of this portion of Ventura Boulevard could have been used in a dictionary as the sole definition of 'bootstrap capitalism.' One small store or restaurant shouldered up against another, block after block of enterprises owned and managed by entrepreneurs of all ages and ethnic backgrounds, and there was something for every interest and taste, both the exotic and the mundane: a Korean restaurant with maybe fifteen tables; a feminist bookshop; a purveyor of handmade knives; something called the Gay Resource Center; a dry cleaner and a party-supply store and a frame shop and a couple of delis and an appliance store; a bookstore that sold only fantasy and science fiction; Ching Brothers Finance, 'Loans to the Reliable'; a tiny restaurant offering 'Americanized Nigerian cuisine' and another specializing in 'chinois, French-Chinese cooking'; a merchant who sold military paraphernalia of all kinds, although not weapons. Some of these entrepreneurs were getting rich, and some never would, but all of them had dreams, and it seemed to Dan that, in the early evening darkness, Ventura Boulevard was nearly as well lighted by hope as it was by streetlamps.
     He parked almost a block from the Sign of the Pentagram and walked past the Eyewitness News van, similar vehicles from the news departments of KNBC and KTLA, marked and unmarked police cars, and a coroner's wagon. A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk, including curious locals, punk and gangsta-rap kids who wanted to look like street people but probably lived with their parents in three-hundred-thousand-dollar Valley homes, and sensation-hungry media people with the quick-eyed look that always made them seem (to Dan) like jackals. He pushed through the crowd, saw the beat man from the Los Angeles Times , and tried to stay out of the range of the active minicam in front of which a reporter and his crew were filming a segment for the eleven o'clock news on Channel Four. Dan edged past a teenage girl with blue-and-green-striped hair twisted into punk