Sounding as puzzled as Dan felt, Laura said, 'That's what they want you to think about when you're in the tank?'

'Some days, yes. Other days they tell me to think about the window to yesterday, nothing else but the window to yesterday, for hours and hours and hours ... just concentrating on that window ... seeing it ... believing in it ... But the one that always works best is the door.'

'To December.'

'Yes.'

'Tell me about that, honey.'

'It's summer ... July ...'

'Go on.'

'Hot and sticky. I'm so warm ... Aren't you warm?'

'Very warm,' Laura agreed.

'I'd give anything for ... a little cool air. So I open the front door of the house ... and beyond the door it's a cold winter day. Snow is falling. Icicles hanging off the porch roof. I step back to look at the windows on both sides of the door ... and through the windows I can see it's really July ... and I know it's July ... warm ... everywhere, it's July ... except through this door ... on the other side of this one door ... this door to December. And then ...'

'Then what?' Laura urged.

'I go through ...'

'You step through the door?' Laura asked.

Melanie's eyes flew open, and she bolted off her chair, and to Dan's astonishment she began to strike herself as hard as she could. Her small fists delivered a flurry of blows to her frail chest. She thumped her sides, whacked herself on the hips, shouting, 'No, no, no, no!'

'Stop her!' Laura said.

Dan was already off the bed, hurrying to the girl. He grabbed her hands, but she wrenched loose with an ease that startled him. She couldn't be that strong.

'Hate!' Melanie screamed, and she struck herself hard in the face.

Dan made another grab for her.

She dodged him.

'Hate!'

She took fistfuls of her own hair and tried to tear it out of her scalp.

'Melanie, honey, stop!'

Dan grabbed the girl by the wrists and held her tightly. She felt as if she had been reduced to mere bones, and he was afraid of hurting her. But if he released her, she would hurt herself.

'Hate!' she screeched, spraying spittle.

Laura approached cautiously.

Melanie released her own hair, at which she had been tearing, and tried to claw at Dan and pull free of him.

He held on and finally managed to pin her arms at her sides, but she wrenched left and right, kicked his shins, and said, 'Hate, hate, hate!'

Laura put one hand on each side of the girl's face, held her head tightly, trying to force her to pay attention. 'Honey, what is it? What do you hate so much?'

'Hate!'

'What do you hate so much?'

'Going through the door.'

'You hate going through the door?'

'And them.'

'Who are they?'

'I hate them, I hate them!'

'They make me ... think about the door, and they make me believe in the door, and then they make me ... go through it, and I hate them!'

'Do you hate your daddy?'

'Yes!'

'Because he makes you go through the door to December?'

'I hate it!' the girl wailed in fury and misery.

Dan said, 'Melanie, what happens when you go through the door to December?'

In her trance, the girl could hear no voices but her own and her mother's, so Laura repeated the question. 'What happens when you go through the door to December?'

The girl gagged. She'd had no breakfast yet, so there was nothing in her that she could bring up, but she succumbed to dry heaves so violent that they frightened Dan. Holding her, he felt each spasm rack her entire body, and it seemed that she would tear herself apart before she was done.

Laura continued to hold the girl's face, but now she didn't keep a tight grip on it. She held Melanie but stroked her too, smoothed the lines out of her tortured countenance, cooed to her.

At last Melanie stopped struggling, went limp, and Dan released her into her mother's arms.

The girl allowed herself to be embraced by her mother and, in a forlorn voice that chilled Dan's heart, she said, 'I hate them ... all of them ... Daddy ... the others ...'

'I know,' Laura said soothingly.

They hurt me ... hurt me so much ... I hate them!'

'I know.'

'But ... but most of all ...'

Laura sat on the floor and pulled her daughter into her lap. 'Most of all? What do you hate most of all, Melanie?'

'Me,' the girl said.

'No, no.'

'Yes,' the girl said. 'Me. I hate me ... I hate me.'

'Why, honey?'

'Because ... because of what I do,' the girl sobbed.

'What do you do?'

'I go ... through the door.'

'And what happens?'

'I ... go ... through ... the door ...'

'And what do you do on the other side, what do you see, what do you find over there?' Laura asked.

The girl was silent.

'Baby?'

No response.

'Talk to me, Melanie.'

Nothing.

Dan stooped to examine the child's face. Since she had been found wandering in the street, naked, two nights ago, her eyes had been unfocused and distant, but now they were far emptier and far more strange than ever before. They didn't even seem like eyes any more. Peering into them, Dan thought they were like two oval windows offering a view of an immense void that was as empty as the cold reaches of space at the center of the universe.

Sitting on the floor of the motel room, clutching her daughter, Laura wept but made no sound. Her mouth softened and trembled. She rocked her girl, and tears spilled from her eyes, coursed down her cheeks. The perfect quietness of her grief indicated its intensity.

Shaken by the look on her face, Dan wanted to take her in his arms and rock her the way she cradled her daughter. All he could do was put one hand upon her shoulder.

When Laura's tears began to dry, Dan said, 'Melanie says she hates herself because of what she's done. What do you think she means by that? What has she done?'

'Nothing,' Laura said.

'She evidently thinks she has.'

'It's a common syndrome in cases like this, in almost all child-abuse cases,' Laura said.

Although Laura's voice was for the most part low and even, Dan could hear tension and fear just below the surface. Clearly, she was making a major effort to control the emotional turmoil that Melanie's deteriorating condition stirred in her.

She said, 'There's so much shame involved. You can't imagine. Their sense of shame is overwhelming, not just in cases of sexual abuse, but in other kinds of abuse as well. Frequently, an abused child isn't only ashamed of having been abused, but she actually feels guilty about it, as if she were somehow responsible. See, these kids are confused, shattered by their experiences. They don't know what to feel, except that they know what happened to them was wrong, and by some tortuous logic they come to blame themselves rather than the adults who abused them. Well, after all, they're accustomed to the idea that adults are wiser and more knowledgeable than kids, that adults are always right. God, you'd be surprised how often they fail to realize they're victims, that they've nothing to be ashamed about. They lose all sense of self-worth. They hate themselves because they hold themselves responsible for things they didn't do and couldn't prevent. And if they hate themselves enough, they withdraw ... further and further ... and the therapist finds it increasingly difficult to bring them back.'

Melanie seemed totally insensate now. She lolled limply, silently, almost lifelessly in her mother's arms.

Dan said, 'So you think when she says she hates herself because she's done terrible things, she's really just blaming herself for what was done to her.'

'No doubt about it,' Laura said emphatically. 'I can see now that her guilt and self-hatred are going to be even worse than in most cases. After all, she was mistreated—tortured—for nearly six years. And it was extremely intense and bizarre psychological abuse, even considerably more destructive than what the average child-victim endures.'

Dan understood everything Laura had said, and he was sure there was much truth in it. But a minute ago, while listening to Melanie, a monstrous possibility had occurred to him, and now he could not dismiss it. A shocking and disturbing suspicion had planted itself with hooks and barbs. The suspicion didn't entirely make sense. The thing he suspected seemed impossible, ludicrous. And yet ...

He thought he knew what It was.

And it wasn't anything he had previously imagined. It was something far worse than all the nightmarish creatures he had thus far considered.

He stared at the girl with a mixture of sympathy, compassion, awe, and cold hard fear.

*  *  *

After Laura had gone through all the necessary steps to talk Melanie up from her deep hypnotic state, the girl's condition did not change. Both in a trance and out, her withdrawal from the world was virtually complete. They would not be able to elicit any more information from her.

Laura appeared to be almost physically ill with worry. Dan didn't blame her.

They moved Melanie to one of the unmade beds, where she lay in a catatonic state, moving only to bring her left thumb to her mouth so she could suck on it.

Laura called the hospital where she was on staff and from which she had taken a leave of absence, to make certain that no emergencies had arisen that would require her attention, and she checked in with her secretary at her own office to ascertain if all of her private patients had been placed with other psychiatrists for the duration of her leave. Then, not yet having had her shower, she said, 'I'll be ready in half an hour or forty-five minutes,' and went into the bathroom and closed the door.

Occasionally casting a glance at Melanie, Dan sat at the small table and paged through books written by Albert Uhlander, which he'd obtained at Rink's house the previous day. All seven volumes dealt with the occult: The Modern Ghost; Poltergeists; Twelve Startling Cases; Voodoo Today; The Lives of the Psychics; The Nostradamus Pipeline, OOBE: The Case for Astral Projection; and Strange Powers Within Us. One had been published by Putman, one by Harper & Row, and to his surprise the other five had been published by John Wilkes Press, which was no doubt an operation controlled by John Wilkes Enterprises, the same company that owned the house in which Regine Savannah Hoffritz now lived.

His first reaction to the colorfully jacketed books was that they were trash, filled with junk thoughts aimed at the same people who faithfully read every issue of Fate and believed every story therein, the same people who joined UFO clubs and believed that God was either an astronaut or a two-foot-tall blue man with eyes the size of saucers. But he reminded himself that something inhuman was stalking the people involved with the experiments in the gray room, something that was probably more understandable to Fate's regular readers, even with all the junk thought cluttering their minds, than to people who, like he himself, had always viewed believers in the occult with smug superiority or outright disdain. And now, since observing the hypnotic-regression therapy session with Melanie, he had an unsettling theory of his own that was every bit as fantastical as anything in the pages of Fate. Live and learn.

He found the publisher's address on the copyright page. The office was on Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills. He made a note of it, so he could compare it with the address of John Wilkes Enterprises' corporate headquarters, which was one of the things Earl Benton would be looking into this morning.

Next, he went through all seven volumes, reading the dedications and acknowledgements, in hope of coming across a familiar name that would further tie Uhlander to the McCaffrey-Hoffritz conspiracy or perhaps identify other as-yet-unknown conspirators, but he found nothing that seemed to be of value.

He looked at all the books again and chose one for closer examination. It was the volume that, at a glance, seemed the most likely to offer confirmation of the horrible possibility that had occurred to him while he'd been observing the hypnotic-therapy session with Melanie. He had read thirty pages by the time Laura showered, gave Melanie a bath, and declared herself ready to begin the day; in those pages he had indeed found things that lent substance to his worst fears.

The mists were clearing, the mystery dissolving. He felt that he stood on the edge of an understanding that would make sense of the events of the past two days: the gray room, the hideously battered bodies, the fact that the men in that Studio City house had been able to do nothing to defend themselves, Melanie's miraculous escape from that carnage, Joseph Scaldone's death in a locked room, and all the poltergeist-like phenomena.

It was madness.

Yet ... it made sense.

And it scared the hell out of him.

He wanted to share his ideas with Laura, obtain her point of view as a psychiatrist. But what he would be proposing to her was so shocking, so horrible, and so hopeless that he wanted to think it through better than he had thus far. He wanted to be very sure of his chain of reasoning before he broached the subject. If what he suspected was true, Laura would need all the physical, mental, and emotional strength she could muster in order to deal with it.

They left the motel and went to the car. Laura sat in back with Melanie, because she didn't want to stop holding, stroking, and comforting the child, and the computer terminal left room for only two people up front.

Dan had intended to make a brief stop at his place to change clothes. His jacket, shirt, and trousers were limp and rumpled, for he had more or less slept in them. However, now that he believed that he was on the brink of a breakthrough in the case, he no longer cared if he looked seedy. He was eager to find and talk with Howard Renseveer, Sheldon Tolbeck, and others who had been a part of the conspiracy. He wanted to confront them with the ideas that had come to him during the past hour and see how they reacted.

Before driving out of the motel lot, he turned in his seat and studied Melanie.

She was slumped against her mother.

Her eyes were open but vacant.

Am I right, kid? he wondered. Is It what I think It is?

He half expected her to hear the unspoken questions and shift her eyes toward him, but she did not.

I hope I'm wrong, he thought. Because if that's what's been killing all these people, and if it's going to come after you when all the rest are dead, then there's nowhere you can hide, is there, honey? Not from a thing like that. Nowhere in the world you can hope to hide.

He shivered.

He started the car and drove away from the motel.

The previous night's fog continued to linger in the city. Rain began to fall once more. As each cold drop snapped hard against the windshield, the frigid impact seemed to be transmitted through the glass, through Dan's clothes, through his flesh and bones, and into his very soul.