The Door to December

charredplastic odor.
     Melanie moaned softly. Twitched.
     'Easy, honey, easy.'
     The girl looked up at her mother, and Laura was jolted by the eye contact. Melanie was no longer gazing through her. She had come back from her dark world again, and Laura prayed that this time the girl was back for good, although that was unlikely.
     'I ... want,' Melanie said.
     'What is it, honey? What do you want?'
     The girl's eyes searched Laura's. 'I ... need.'
     'Anything, Melanie. Anything you want. Just tell me. Tell Mommy what you need.'
     'It'll get them all,' Melanie said, her voice heavy with dread.
     Earl had looked up from the smoldering scraps of the radio and was watching intently.
     'What?' Laura asked. 'What will get them, honey?'
     'And then it'll ... get ... me,' the girl said.
     'No,' Laura said quickly. 'Nothing's going to get you. I'll take care of you. I'll—'
     'It'll ... come up from ... inside.'
     'Inside where?'
     '... from inside ...'
     'What is it, honey? What're you afraid of. What is it?'
     '... it'll ... come ... and eat me ...'
     'No.'
     '... eat me ... all up,' the girl said, and she shuddered. 'No, Melanie. Don't worry about ...' She let her voice trail away because she saw that the girl's eyes had shifted subtly. They were not entirely out of focus, but neither were they fixed on Laura anymore.
     The child sighed and her breathing changed. She had gone back into that private place where she had been hiding ever since they'd found her wandering naked in the street.
     Earl said, 'Doc, can you make anything of this?'
     'No.'
     'Because I can't figure it at all.'
     'Me neither.'
     Earlier, cooking dinner, she had begun to feel better about Melanie and the future. She'd begun to feel almost normal. But their situation had changed for the worse, and now her nerves were frayed again.
     In this city, there were people who wanted to kidnap Melanie in order to continue experimenting with her. Laura didn't know what they hoped to achieve or why they had picked on Melanie, but she was certain they were out there. Even the FBI seemed sure of that. Other people wanted the girl dead. The discovery of Ned Rink's body seemed to prove that Melanie's life was indisputably in danger. But now it appeared that those faceless people were not the only ones who wanted to get their hands on Melanie. Now there was another enemy as well. That was the essence of the warning that had come to them through the radio.
     But who or what had been controlling the radio? And how? Who or what had sent the warning? And why? More important, who was this new enemy?
     'It,' the radio had said, and the implication had been that this enemy was more frightening and more dangerous than all the others combined. It was loose, the radio had said. It was coming. They had to run, the radio said. They had to hide. From It.
     'Mommy? Mom?'
     'Right here, honey.'
     ' Mommmeeee! '
     'Right here. It's okay. I'm right here.'
     'I'm ... I'm ... I'm ... scared.'
     Melanie was not speaking to Laura or Earl. She seemed not to have heard Laura's reassurance. She was talking only to herself, in a tone of voice that was the essence of loneliness, the voice of the lost and abandoned. 'So scared. Scared.

PART THREE
    THE HUNTED

WEDNESDAY, 8:00 P.M.- THURSDAY, 6:00 A.M.

22
    Still sitting at Joseph Scaldone's desk in the office-storeroom behind the shop on Ventura Boulevard, Dan Haldane looked through the diskette storage wheel that stood beside the IBM computer. He read the labels on the floppy disks and saw that most held nothing of interest for him; however, one of them was marked CUSTOMER MAILING LIST, and that one seemed worth examining.
     He switched on the computer, studied the menu of options, loaded the proper software, and brought up the mailing list. It appeared in white letters on a blue screen, divided into twenty-six documents, one for each letter of the alphabet.
     He summoned the M document and scrolled slowly through it, searching for Dylan McCaffrey. He found the name and address of the house in Studio City.
     He called up the H document and located Willy Hoffritz. In the C file, he found Ernest Andrew Cooper, the millionaire businessman whose mangled