The Door to December

coming.'
     Laura looked through the rear window, and saw the van just pulling away from the curb.
     Earl tapped the brakes and swung the steering wheel hard to the right, and the Honda half turned, half slid around the corner, into the cross street. At the next intersection, he turned left, then right again at the end of that block, speeding and weaving through the quiet residential neighborhood, finally out of Sherman Oaks altogether, to the top of the valley wall, over the ridge line, into Benedict Canyon, and down the forested slopes, through the darkness, toward the distant lights of Beverly Hills and Los Angeles beyond.
     'We've lost them,' he said happily.
     Laura was not completely relieved. She wasn't convinced that they could lose their inhuman enemy — the unseen It — as easily as they had shaken the FBI van.
    25
    Dan watched Regine closely, trying to figure how he could force her to tell him what she knew. She was so pliable that he could surely bend her to his purposes if he could only determine how and where to apply pressure.
     Regine was no longer biting on her knuckle. She had slipped a thumb into her mouth and gently sucked on it. Her pose was so provocative — innocence waiting to be despoiled — that he was certain it was something that Hoffritz had taught her to do. Something he had programmed her to do? But it was clear that she also was soothed by the thumbsucking; her inner torment was so severe that it had driven her to seek solace in the simplest, most infantile rituals of reassurance.
     From the moment that she had put her thumb in her mouth, she had stopped sitting erect and ladylike. Now she slumped into the corner of the sofa. The neckline of her robe had parted, revealing deep, smooth, shadowed cleavage.
     Dan had a pretty good idea how to make her talk, but he didn't like doing what he would have to do.
     She took her thumb out of her mouth long enough to say, 'I can't help you. I really can't. Will you go now? Please?'
     He didn't answer. He got up from the armchair, walked around the coffee table, and stood over her, frowning down at her.
     She kept her head bowed.
     Sternly, almost harshly, he said, 'Look at me.'
     She looked at him. In a tremulous voice that indicated she expected to be ignored, she said, 'Will you go now? Please? Will you go now?'
     'You're going to answer my questions, Regine,' he said, scowling at her. 'You're not going to lie to me. If you won't answer, or if you lie to me ...'
     'Will you hit me?' she asked.
     He was confronted not by a woman any longer but by a sick, lost, miserable creature. Not a frightened creature, however. The prospect of being struck did not fill her with terror. Quite the opposite. She was sick, lost, miserable — and hungry. Hungry for the thrill of being hit, starving for the pleasure of pain.
     Repressing his revulsion, making his voice as cold as he could, he said, 'I won't hit you. I won't touch you. But you'll tell me what I want to know because that's the reason you exist right now.'
     Her eyes shone with a curious light, like those of an animal seen at night.
     'You always do what's wanted of you, right? You are what you're expected to be. I expect you to be cooperative, Regine. I want you to answer my questions, and you will, because that's the only damned thing you're good for — answering questions.'
     She stared up at him expectantly.
     'Have you ever met Ernest Andrew Cooper?'
     'No.'
     'You're lying.'
     'Am I?'
     Suppressing all the sympathy and compassion he felt for her, he made his voice even colder, and he raised one fist over her, although he had no intention of using it. 'Do you know Cooper?'
     She didn't answer, but her eyes focused on his big fist with an unholy adoration that he couldn't bear to contemplate.
     With sudden inspiration, he feigned an anger that he didn't feel and said, 'Answer me, you bitch!'
     She flinched at the derogatory address, but not because it hurt or surprised her. She flinched, instead, as if a shock of delight had passed through her. Even that meager verbal abuse had been a key that unlocked her.
     Gazing at his fist, she said, 'Please.'
     'Maybe.'
     'You'd like to.'
     'Maybe ... if you tell me what I want to know.