‘What is the damned thing?’ Dan asked.
‘It’ll get them,’ the girl said, and shuddered.
‘Easy, honey,’ Laura said.
‘And then,’ Melanie said, ‘it’ll get me too.’
‘No,’ Laura said. ‘We’ll take care of you, Mellie. I swear we will.’
The girl said, ‘It’ll come up … from … inside … and eat me … eat me all up….’
‘No,’ Laura said. ‘No.’
‘Inside?’ Dan said. ‘From inside what?’
‘Eat me all up,’ the girl said forlornly.
Dan said, ‘Where does it come from?’
The child issued a long, slowly fading whimper that seemed more a sigh of resignation than an expression of fear.
‘Was something here just a moment ago, Melanie?’ Dan asked. ‘The thing you’re so afraid of … was it here in this room?’
‘It wants me,’ the girl said.
‘If it wants you,’ he said, ‘then why didn’t it take you while it was here?’
The girl wasn’t hearing him. Softly, thickly, she said, ‘The door …’
‘What door?’
‘The door to December.’
‘What’s that mean, Melanie?’
‘The door …’
The girl closed her eyes. Her breathing changed. She slipped into sleep.
Looking across the bed at Dan, Laura said, ‘It wants the others first, the people involved with the experiments in that gray room.’
‘Eddie Koliknikov, Howard Renseveer, Sheldon Tolbeck, Albert Uhlander, and maybe more we don’t know about yet.’
‘Yes. As soon as they’re all dead, then it … It will come for Melanie. That’s what she said earlier tonight, at the house, after the radio was … possessed.’
‘But how does she know this?’
Laura shrugged.
They stared at the slumbering girl.
At last Dan said, ‘We’ve got to break through this … this trance she’s in, so she can tell us what we need to know.’
‘I tried earlier today. Hypnotic-regression therapy. But it wasn’t terribly successful.’
‘Can you try again?’
Laura nodded. ‘In the morning, when she’s rested a little.’
‘We shouldn’t waste time—’
‘She needs her rest.’
‘All right,’ he said reluctantly.
She knew what he was thinking: If we wait until morning, let’s hope we’re not too late.
32
Laura slept with Melanie in the second bed, and Dan lay in the first bed because it was nearer the door, which was the most likely source of trouble. He was wearing his shirt, trousers, shoes, and socks; he was ready to move fast. They had left a single lamp lit because, after the events of the past day, they distrusted the dark. Dan listened to their deep and even breathing.
He could not sleep. He was thinking about Joseph Scaldone’s battered body, about all the dead people in that Studio City house, and about Regine Savannah Hoffritz, who was physically and mentally alive but whose soul had been murdered. And as always, when he thought too long about murder in its myriad forms and wondered about humanity’s capacity for it, his thoughts led inexorably to his dead brother and sister.
He had never known them. Not alive. They had been dead by the time that he had learned their names and had gone in search of them. As far as his own name was concerned, he had been born with neither ‘Dan’ nor ‘Haldane.’ Pete and Elsie Haldane had adopted him when he’d been less than a month old. His real parents had been Loretta and Frank Detwiler, two Okies who had come to California in search of their fortune but who had never found it. Instead, when Loretta had been carrying her third child, Frank had been killed in a traffic accident; and Loretta, whose pregnancy had been plagued by serious complications, died two days after giving birth to Dan. She had named him James. James Detwiler. But because there had been no relatives, no one to take custody of the three Detwiler children, they had been separated and put up for adoption.
Peter and Elsie Haldane had never concealed the fact that they weren’t Dan’s actual parents. He loved them and was proud to carry their name, for they were good people to whom he owed everything. At the same time, however, he had always wondered about his natural parents and had longed to know about them.
Because of the rules that governed adoption agencies in those days, Elsie and Pete had been told nothing about their baby’s real parents, other than the fact that both the natural mother and father were dead. That single fact made Dan more eager to learn what kind of people they had been, for they had not abandoned him by choice but had been taken from him by a whim of fate.