The Door to December

by Dean Koontz

  lab, and Dan disliked having to take her in there. But that was the main reason he had called her out in the middle of the night. Although she hadn’t seen her husband in six years, no one knew the man better than she knew him. Since she was a psychiatrist as well, perhaps she would recognize the nature of the experiments and research that Dylan McCaffrey had been conducting. And Dan had a hunch that he wasn’t going to solve these homicides—or locate Melanie—until he could figure out what Dylan McCaffrey had been doing.

  Laura followed him through the doorway.

  In the gray room, he watched her face. She registered surprise, puzzlement, and uneasiness.

  The two-car garage had been closed off and remodeled into a single large, windowless, relentlessly drab room. Gray ceiling. Gray walls. Gray carpet. Fluorescent ceiling lights glowed softly behind grayish plastic panels. Even the handles on the sliding gray closet doors were painted gray. Though the heating vents must have been bare gray metal in the first place, they also had been painted, apparently because, unpainted, they had been shiny. No spot of color or brightwork had been allowed. The effect was not merely cold and institutional, but funereal.

  The most impressive piece of equipment in the room was a metal tank that resembled an old-fashioned iron lung, although it was considerably larger than that. It was painted the same drab gray as the room. Pipes led from it, into the floor, and an electrical cable went straight up to a junction box on the ceiling. Three movable wooden steps provided access to the tank’s elevated entrance hatch, which stood open.

  Laura went up the steps and peered inside.

  Dan knew what she would find: a featureless black interior that was barely illuminated by the meager light that found its way through the hatch; the sound of water stirred by the vibrations transmitted through the steps and into the tank frame; a dampish odor with a hint of salt to it.

  “Know what it is?” he asked.

  She descended the three steps. “Sure. A sensory-deprivation chamber.”

  “What was he doing with it?”

  “You mean, what are its scientific applications?”

  Dan nodded.

  “Well, you fill it with a few feet of water.... Actually, you use a solution of ten percent magnesium sulfate in water for maximum buoyancy. Heat it to ninety-three degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature at which a floating body is least affected by gravity. Or depending on the nature of the experiment, maybe you heat it to ninety-eight degrees to reduce the differential between body temperature and water temperature. Then the subject—”

  “Which is a person—not an animal?”

  She looked surprised by the question. Dan Haldane felt woefully undereducated, but Laura didn’t disparage him or let any impatience creep into her tone, and he felt at ease again almost immediately.

  She said, “Yes. A person. Not an animal. Anyway, when the water’s ready, the subject undresses, enters the chamber, closes the door after himself, and floats in total darkness, in total silence.”

  “Why?”

  “To deprive himself of all sensory stimulation. No sight. No sound. Little or no taste. Minimal olfactory stimulation. No sense of weight or place or time.”

  “But why would anyone want to do that?”

  “Well, initially, when the first tanks were used, they did it because they wanted to find out what would happen when someone was deprived of nearly all external stimuli.”

  “Yeah? And what happened?”

  “Not what they expected. No claustrophobia. No paranoia. A brief moment of fear, yes, but then . . . a not unpleasant temporal and spatial disorientation. The sense of confinement disappeared in a minute or so. Some subjects reported being certain they were not in a small chamber but a huge one, with endless space around them. With no external stimuli to occupy it, the mind turns inward to explore a whole new world of internal stimuli.”

  “Hallucinations?”

  For a moment, her anxiety faded. Her professional interest in the functioning of the human mind became evident, and Dan could see that, if she had chosen a career in the classroom, she would have proven a natural-born teacher. She clearly took pleasure in explaining, illuminating.

  She said, “Yes, hallucinations, sometimes. But not frightening or threatening hallucinations, nothing like what you’d expect from a drug experience. Intense and extraordinarily vivid sexual fantasies in many cases. And virtually every subject reports a sharpening and clearing of thought processes. Some subjects have solved complex problems in algebra and calculus without even the benefit of paper and pencil, problems that would ordinarily be beyond their abilities. There’s even a cult system of psychotherapy that uses deprivation chambers to encourage the patient to concentrate on guided self-exploration.”

  He said, “From your tone, I think maybe you don’t approve of that.”

  “Well, I don’t exactly disapprove,” she said. “But if you’ve got a psychologically disturbed individual who already feels adrift, only half in control of himself . . . the disorientation of a deprivation chamber is almost certain to have negative effects. Some patients need every grip on the physical world, every external stimulus, they can get.” She shrugged. “But then again, maybe I’m too cautious, old-fashioned. After all, they’ve been selling these things for use in private homes, must’ve sold a few thousand over the past few years, and surely a few of those were used by unstable people, yet I haven’t heard of anyone going all the way ’round the bend because of it.”

  “Must be expensive.”

  “A tank? Sure is. Most units in private homes are . . . new toys for the rich, I guess.”

  “Why would anyone buy one for his home?”

  “Aside from the hallucinatory period and the eventual clarity of the mental processes, everyone reports being tremendously relaxed and revitalized by a session in a tank. After you spend an hour floating, your brain waves match those of a Zen monk in deep meditation. Call it a lazy man’s way to meditate: no studying required, no religious principles to be learned or obeyed, an easy way of packing a week’s relaxation into a couple of hours.”

  “But your husband wasn’t using this just to relax.”

  “I doubt it,” she agreed.

  “Then what was he after, specifically?”

  “I really have no way of knowing.” Anguish returned to her face, her eyes.

  Dan said, “I think this wasn’t just his lab. I think it was your daughter’s room too. I think she was a virtual prisoner in here. And I think she slept in this tank every night and maybe spent days at a time in it.”

  “Days? No. That’s not . . . possible.”

  “Why isn’t it?”

  “The potential for psychological damage, the risks—”

  “Maybe your husband didn’t care about the risks.”

  “But she was his daughter. He loved Melanie. I’ll give him that much. He genuinely loved her.”

  “We’ve found a journal in which your husband seems to account for every minute of your daughter’s time during the past five and a half years.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I want to see it.”

  “In a minute. I haven’t studied it closely yet, but I don’t think your daughter was ever out of this house in five and a half years. Not to school. Not to a doctor. Not to a movie or the zoo or anywhere. And even if you say it’s not possible, I think, from what I’ve seen, that she sometimes spent as much as three or four days in the tank without coming out.”

  “But food—”

  “I don’t think she was fed in that time.”

  “Water—”

  “Maybe she drank a little of what she was floating in.”

  “She’d have to relieve herself—”

  “From what I’ve seen, there were times when she might have been taken out for only ten or fifteen minutes, long enough to use the bathroom. But in other cases, I think he catheterized her, so she could urinate into a sealed specimen jar without being taken out of the tank and without contaminating the water she was floating
in.”

  The woman looked stricken.

  Wanting to get this over with for her sake and also because he was sick of this place, Dan led her away from the tank, to another piece of equipment.

  “A biofeedback machine,” she told him. “It includes an EEG, an electroencephalograph to monitor brain waves. It supposedly helps you learn to control the patterns of your brain waves and, therefore, your state of mind.”

  “I know about biofeedback.” He pointed past that machine. “And this?”

  It was a chair, from which dangled leather straps and wires that ended in electrodes.

  Laura McCaffrey examined it, and Dan could sense her growing disgust—and terror.

  At last she said, “An aversion-therapy device.”

  “Looks like an electric chair to me.”

  “It is. Not one that kills. The current comes from those batteries, not from a wall socket. And this”—she touched a lever on the side of the chair—“regulates the voltage. You can deliver anything from a tingle to a painful shock.”

  “This is a standard psychological research device?”

  “Good heavens, no!”

  “You ever see one of these in a lab before?”

  “Once. Well . . . twice.”

  “Where?”

  “A rather unscrupulous animal psychologist I once knew. He used electric-shock aversion training with monkeys.”

  “Tortured them?”

  “I’m sure he didn’t see it that way.”

  “All animal psychologists don’t do that?”

  “I said he was unscrupulous. Listen, I hope you’re not one of those new Luddites who think all scientists are fools or monsters.”

  “Not me. When I was a kid, I never missed Mr. Wizard on TV.”

  She managed a faint smile. “Didn’t mean to snap at you.”

  “It’s understandable. Now, you said you’ve seen one of these devices twice before. What about the second time?”

  The meager glow of her weak smile was suddenly extinguished. “I saw the second one in a photograph.”

  “Oh?”

  “In a book about . . . scientific experimentation in Nazi Germany.”

  “I see.”

  “They used it on people.”

  He hesitated. But it had to be said. “So did your husband.”

  Laura McCaffrey regarded him not with disbelief as much as with an ardent desire to disbelieve. Her face was the color of cold ashes, burnt out.

  Dan said, “I think he put your daughter in this chair—”

  “No.”

  “—and I think he and Hoffritz and God knows who else—”

  “No.”

  “—tortured her,” Dan finished.

  “No.”

  “It’s in the journal I told you about.”

  “But—”

  “I think they were using . . . what you called ‘aversion’ therapy to teach her to control her brain-wave patterns.”

  The thought of Melanie strapped in that chair was so disturbing that Laura McCaffrey was profoundly transformed by it. She no longer looked simply burnt out, no longer just ashen; she was now paler than pale, cadaverously pallid. Her eyes appeared to sink deeper into her skull and lose much of their luster. Her face sagged like softening wax. She said, “But . . . but that doesn’t make sense. Aversion therapy is the least likely way to learn biofeedback techniques.”

  Dan had the urge to put his arms around her, hold her close, smooth her hair, comfort her. Kiss her. He had found her appealing from the moment he had seen her, but until now he’d felt no romantic stirrings for her. And that was par for the course, wasn’t it? He always fell for the helpless kittens, the broken dolls, the ones who were lost or weak or in trouble. And he always wound up wishing that he had never gotten involved. Laura McCaffrey hadn’t initially held any attraction for him because she had been self-confident, self-possessed, totally in control. As soon as she’d begun to flounder, as soon as she could no longer conceal her fear and confusion, he was drawn to her. Nick Hammond, another homicide detective and smart-ass, had accused Dan of having a mother-hen instinct, and there was truth in that.

  What is it with me? he wondered. Why do I insist on being a knight-errant, always searching for a damsel in distress? I hardly even know this woman, and I want her to rely entirely on me, put her hopes and fears on my shoulders. Oh, yes, ma’am, you just rely on Big Dan Haldane, nobody else; Big Dan will catch these evil villains and put your broken world back together for you. Big Dan can do it, ma’am, even though he’s still an adolescent idiot at heart.

  No. Not this time. He had a job to do, and he would do it, but he would be entirely professional about it. Personal feelings would not intrude. Anyway, this woman wouldn’t welcome a relationship with him. She was better educated than he was. A lot more stylish. She was a brandy type, while he was strictly beer. Besides, for God’s sake, this wasn’t a time for romance. She was too vulnerable: she was worried sick about her daughter; her husband had been killed, and that must have its effect on her, even if she had stopped loving the guy a long time ago. What kind of man could think of her as a romantic prospect at a time like this? He was ashamed of himself. But still . . .

  He sighed. “Well, once you’ve studied your husband’s journal, maybe you’ll be able to prove he never put the girl in that chair. But I don’t think so.”

  She just stood there, looking lost.

  He went to the closet and opened the doors, revealing several pairs of jeans, T-shirts, sweaters, and shoes that would fit a nine-year-old girl. All were gray.

  “Why?” Dan asked. “What did he hope to prove? What effect was he after with the girl?”

  The woman shook her head, too distraught to speak.

  “And something else I wonder,” Dan said. “All of this, six years of it, took more money than he had when he cleaned out your joint bank accounts and left you. A lot more. Yet he wasn’t working anywhere. He never went out. Maybe Wilhelm Hoffritz gave him money. But there must have been others who contributed as well. Who? Who was financing this work?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “And why?” he wondered.

  “And where have they taken Melanie?” she asked. “And what are they doing to her now?”

  chapter five

  The kitchen wasn’t exactly filthy, but it wasn’t clean, either. Stacks of dirty dishes filled the sink. Crumbs littered the table that stood by the room’s only window.

  Laura sat at the table and brushed some of the crumbs aside. She was eager to look at the log of Dylan’s experiments with Melanie. Haldane wasn’t ready to give it to her. He held it—a ledger-size book bound in imitation brown leather—and paced around the kitchen as he talked.

  Rain struck the window and streamed down the glass. When an occasional flicker of lightning brightened the night and passed through the window, it briefly projected the random rippling patterns of water from the glass onto the walls, which made the room seem as amorphous and semitransparent as a mirage.

  “I want to know a lot more about your husband,” Haldane said, pacing.

  “Like what?”

  “Like why you decided to divorce him.”

  “Is that relevant?”

  “Could be.”

  “How?”

  “For one thing, if there was another woman involved, then maybe she can tell us more about what he was doing here. Maybe she can even tell us who killed him.”

  “There was no other woman.”

  “Then why did you decide to divorce him?”

  “It was just that . . . I no longer loved him.”

  “But you had loved him once.”

  “Yes. But he wasn’t the man I married.”

  “How had he changed?”

  She sighed. “He didn’t. He was never the man I married. I only thought he was. Later, as time went by, I realized how thoroughly I’d misunderstood him, right from the start.”

  Haldane stopped pacing, leaned against a counter, crossing h
is arms on his chest, still holding the log book. “Just how had you misunderstood him?”

  “Well . . . first, you have to understand something about me. In high school and college, I was never a particularly popular girl. Never had many dates.”

  “I find that difficult to believe.”

  She blushed. She wished she could control it, but couldn’t. “It’s true. I was crushingly shy. Avoided boys. Avoided everyone. Never had any close girlfriends, either.”

  “Didn’t anyone tell you about the right mouthwash and dandruff shampoo?”

  She smiled at his attempt to put her at ease, but she was never comfortable talking about herself. “I didn’t want anyone to get to know me because I figured they’d dislike me, and I couldn’t stand rejection.”

  “Why should they dislike you?”

  “Oh . . . because I wouldn’t be witty enough or bright enough or pretty enough to suit them.”

  “Well, I can’t say whether or not you’re witty, but then, David Letterman would have trouble coming up with one-liners in this place. But you’re clearly intelligent. After all, you earned a doctorate. And I don’t see how you could look in a mirror and think you were anything less than beautiful.”

  She glanced up from the crumb-carpeted table. The lieutenant’s gaze was direct, engaging, warm, though neither bold nor suggestive. His attitude was merely that of a policeman, making an observation, stating a fact. Yet, under that surface professionalism, deep down, she sensed that he was attracted to her. His interest made her uneasy.

  Self-conscious, studying the vague silvery tracks of rain on the black window, she said, “I had a terrible inferiority complex back then.”

  “Why?”

  “My parents.”

  “Isn’t it always?”

  “No. Not always. But in my case . . . mainly my mother.”

  “What were your folks like?”

  “They have nothing to do with this case,” she said. “They’re both gone now, anyway.”

  “Passed away?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to be. I’m not.”

  “I see.”

  That was a harsh thing for her to have said. She was surprised to realize that she didn’t want him to think badly of her. On the other hand, she was not prepared to tell him about her parents and the loveless childhood she had endured.

  “But about Dylan . . . ,” she began, and then wasn’t sure where she had left off.

  Haldane said, “You were telling me why you misjudged him right from the start.”

  “See, I was so good at fending people off, so good at alienating everyone and keeping myself snug in my shell, that no one ever got close to me. Especially not boys . . . or men. I knew how to turn them off fast. Until Dylan. He wouldn’t give up. He kept asking me for dates. No matter how often I rejected him, he came back. My shyness didn’t deter him. Rudeness, indifference, cold rejection—nothing