The Door to December

Compare favorite brands of bat shit? Whip up tasty dishes featuring snake eyes? Discuss megalomaniacal schemes to brainwash everyone and rule the world?
     Torture little girls?
     The printer spewed out the fifteenth and final page long before Dan finished scanning the first fourteen. He collected them, stapled them together, folded the sheets, and put them in his pocket. Nearly three hundred names appeared on the mailing list, and he wanted to go over them later, when he was alone at home, with a beer, and could concentrate better.
     He located an empty stationery box and filled it with Dylan McCaffrey's address book, Scaldone's smaller address book, and several other items. He carried the box out of the office, through the store, where the coroner's men were bagging Joseph Scaldone's hideously battered corpse, and he went outside.
     The crowd of curiosity seekers had grown smaller, maybe because the night was colder. A few reporters still lingered in the vicinity of the occult shop, standing with shoulders drawn up, hands in their pockets, shivering. A heat-leeching wind alternately hissed and howled along Ventura Boulevard, sucking the warmth out of the city and everyone in it. The air was heavy, moist. The rains would return before morning.
     Nolan Swayze, the youngest of the uniformed officers on duty in front of the Sign of the Pentagram, accepted the box when Dan handed it to him.
     'Nolan, I want you to take this back to East Valley and give it to clerical. There're two address books among this stuff. I want the contents of both books transcribed, and all the detectives on the special task force should have a copy of the transcriptions in their information packets by tomorrow morning.'
     'Can do,' Swayze said.
     'There's also a diskette. I want the contents printed out with copies to everyone. There's an appointments calendar in there too.'
     'Copies to everyone?'
     'You catch on fast.'
     Swayze nodded. 'I intend to be chief someday.'
     'Good for you.'
     'Make my mother proud.'
     'If that's your goal, it's probably wiser to stay a patrolman. There's also a sheaf of invoices here—'
     'You want the information transcribed into a less cumbersome format.'
     'Right,' Dan said.
     'With copies to everyone.'
     'Maybe you could even be mayor.'
     'I've already got my campaign slogan. "Let's Rebuild L.A."'
     'Why not? It's worked for every other candidate for thirty years.'
     'This ledger—?'
     'It's a checkbook,' Dan said.
     'You want the information transcribed from the stubs, with copies to everyone. Maybe I could even be governor.'
     'No, you wouldn't like the job.'
     'Why not?'
     'You'd have to live in Sacramento.'
     'Hey, that's right. I prefer civilization.'
    * * *
    Dinner was late because they had to clean up the kitchen. The water for the spaghetti had to be poured out; bits of the demolished radio were floating in it. Laura scrubbed the pot, refilled it, and put it back on the stove to boil.
     By the time they sat down to eat, she wasn't hungry anymore. She kept thinking of the radio, which had been infused with a strange and demonic life of its own, and that memory spoiled her appetite. The air was rich with the mouthwatering aromas of garlic and tomato sauce and Parmesan cheese, but there was also an underlying hint of scorched plastic and hot metal that seemed (this was crazy, but true, God help her) like the olfactory trace of an evil spiritual presence.
     Earl Benton ate more than she did, but not much. He didn't talk much either. He stared at his plate even when he took a long pause between bites, and the only time he looked up was when he glanced, occasionally, toward that end of the kitchen counter where the Sony had been. His usual efficient, no-nonsense manner wasn't in evidence now; his eyes had a faraway look.
     Melanie's eyes were still focused on a far place too, but the girl ate more than either Laura or Earl Benton. Sometimes she chewed slowly and absentmindedly, and sometimes she gobbled up four or five bites in rapid succession, with wolflike hunger. Now and then she altogether forgot that she was eating, and she had to be reminded.
     Feeding her daughter, repeatedly wiping spaghetti sauce off the child's chin, Laura could not avoid thinking about