‘Then,’ Uhlander said, ‘two nights ago, Melanie finally broke through. During her longest session ever in the sensory-deprivation tank, in her cocoon, she achieved what Dylan had always believed she could achieve.’
From the purple-gray twilight by the windows, Boothe said, ‘The girl seized her full psychic potential. She separated her astral body from her physical body and rose out of that tank.’
‘But what happened after that was something none of us had anticipated,’ Uhlander said. ‘In a rage, she killed her father, Willy Hoffritz, and Ernie Cooper, who happened to be there at the time.’
‘But how?’ Dan asked, although he had already decided that it must be true. ‘You said that the astral body usually has the power to observe but can perform no physical act. And even if that wasn’t the case this time … well, she’s only a frail little girl. Those people were beaten to death. Savagely beaten.’
Palmer Boothe had moved to the deepening shadows along one wall of books and had vanished within them. His disembodied voice rose from the gloom: ‘Her talent for astral projection wasn’t the only psychic ability the little bitch learned how to use that night. She’s apparently discovered how to teleport her astral body great distances—’
‘To Las Vegas, to the mountains above Mammoth,’ Albert Uhlander elaborated.
‘—and how to move objects without touching them. Telekinesis,’ Boothe said. He paused. In the darkness where he stood, his whiskey glass clicked against his teeth. The swallowing sound he made was preternaturally loud. ‘Her strength is psychic, the strength of the mind, which is virtually beyond limit. She’s stronger than ten men, a hundred, a thousand. She easily disposed of her father, Hoffritz, and Cooper … and now she’s been coming after the rest of us, one by one, and she seems to be able to sense where we are, regardless of how hard we try to hide.’
* * *
Melanie sighed.
Laura leaned over and looked at her in the dim backwash of light from the movie screen.
The girl’s eyes were getting heavy.
Worried, Laura put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder and shook gently, then harder.
Melanie blinked.
‘Watch the movie, honey. Watch the movie.’
The child’s eyes swam back into focus and reconnected with the action on the screen.
* * *
Boothe had moved out of the shadows.
Uhlander was leaning forward in his chair.
They both seemed to be waiting for Dan to say something, to assure them that he would kill the girl and stop the slaughter.
Instead, he said nothing because he wanted them to sweat for a while. Besides, his emotions were in such turmoil that he didn’t trust himself to speak yet.
Murder, Dan knew, was a human potential as universal as love. It existed in the kind and the meek, in the gentle and the innocent, though perhaps it lay more deeply buried in them than in others. He was no more surprised to discover it in Melanie McCaffrey than he had been surprised by the murderous impulses of the scores of killers that he’d put in prison over the years — though this discovery left him distraught, sick, and profoundly depressed.
Indeed, Melanie’s homicidal urges were more understandable than most. Imprisoned, physically and psychologically tortured, denied love and comfort and understanding, treated more like a laboratory monkey than like a human being, forced to endure long years of mental and emotional and physical pain, she had developed a superhuman rage and hatred, diamond-hard and gas-flame-bright, that could have been relieved only by violent, brutal, bloody revenge. Perhaps her rage and hatred — and the need to relieve those inner pressures — were as much responsible for her psychic breakthrough as any of the exercises and conditions that her father had imposed upon her.
Now she stalked her tormentors, a frail nine-year-old girl, yet as deadly and dangerous and efficient a killer as Jack the Ripper or as any member of the Manson Family. But she wasn’t entirely depraved. That was a thought to cling to. Evidently a part of her was shocked and repelled by what she had done. After all, horrified by her own thirst for blood, she’d sought refuge in a catatonic state, crawling down into that dark place where she could hide the terrible truth of the murders from the world … and even from herself. As long as she had a conscience, she hadn’t descended all the way into savagery, and maybe her sanity was retrievable.