‘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.