The Door to December

by Dean Koontz

  wake of cold air and exhaust fumes washed over them.

  “I called in to let Mondale know you were here.”

  “How thoughtful of you, George.”

  “He was about to head over to the Sign of the Pentagram on Ventura.”

  “Good for him.”

  “He really wants you to meet him there.”

  “What the hell’s the Sign of the Pentagram? Sounds like a bar where werewolves hang out.”

  “I think it’s a bookstore or something,” Padrakis said, still frowning at the box of books. “Guy’s been killed over there.”

  “What guy?”

  “The owner, I think. Name’s Scaldone. Mondale says it’s like the bodies in Studio City.”

  “There goes dinner,” Dan said. He headed along the sidewalk, through alternating pools of purple-black shadows and wan amber light, toward his own car.

  Padrakis followed him. “Hey, about those books—”

  “Do you read, George?”

  “They’re the property of the deceased—”

  “Nothing like curling up with a good book, though they’re not nearly so entertaining when you’re deceased.”

  “And this isn’t like a crime scene where we can just cart away anything that might be evidence.”

  Dan balanced the box on the bumper of his car, unlocked the trunk, put the box inside, and said, “‘The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.’ Mark Twain said that, George.”

  “Listen, until a member of his family has been located and gives approval, I really don’t think you should—”

  Slamming the lid of the trunk, Dan said, “‘There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates’ loot on Treasure Island.’ Walt Disney. He was right, George. You should read more.”

  “But—”

  “‘Books are not merely lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.’ Gilbert Highet.” He clapped George Padrakis on the shoulder. “Expand your narrow existence, George. Bring color to this drab life as a detective. Read, George, read!”

  “But—”

  Dan got in the car, closed the door, and started the engine. Padrakis frowned at him through the window.

  Dan waved as he drove away.

  After he turned the corner and went a couple of blocks, he pulled the car to the curb. He got out Dylan McCaffrey’s address book. Under the S listings, he found a Joseph Scaldone, followed by the word “Pentagram,” a phone number, and an address on Ventura.

  Almost certainly, the murders in Studio City, the death of Ned Rink, and now the Scaldone killing were linked. It was looking more and more as if someone out there was desperately trying to cover up a bizarre conspiracy by eliminating everybody involved in it. Sooner or later, they would either eliminate Melanie McCaffrey as well—or snatch her away from her mother. And if those faceless enemies got hold of the girl again, she would vanish forever; she would not be fortunate enough to be saved a second time.

  At 7:05, Laura was in the kitchen, preparing dinner for herself, Melanie, and Earl. A big pot of water was working up to a boil on the stove, and a smaller pot of spaghetti sauce and meatballs was also heating. The room was filled with mouthwatering fragrances: garlic, onions, tomatoes, basil, and cheese. Laura rinsed off some black olives and added them to a big bowl of salad.

  Melanie sat at the table, silent, unmoving, staring down at her hands, which were folded in her lap. Her eyes were closed. She might have been asleep. Or perhaps she was just withdrawn further than usual into her secret, private world.

  That was the first meal Laura had made for her daughter in six years, and even Melanie’s depressing condition could not entirely spoil the moment. Laura felt maternal and domestic. It had been a long time since she had experienced either of those feelings, and she had forgotten that being a mother could be as satisfying as anything that she accomplished in her profession.

  Earl Benton had prepared the table with plates, glasses, silverware, and napkins. Now he sat across the table from Melanie, in his shirtsleeves—and shoulder holster—reading the newspaper. When he came across something surprising or shocking or funny in a gossip column, Dear Abby, or Miss Manners, he would read it aloud to Laura.

  Pepper, the calico cat, was curled comfortably in the corner by the refrigerator, lulled by the humming and the vibrations of the motor. She knew that she wasn’t allowed on kitchen counters or tables, and she usually kept a low profile while in the room, to avoid being chased out altogether. Abruptly, however, the cat shrieked and popped onto her feet. Her back arched. Her fur bristled. She was wild-eyed, and she spat angrily.

  Putting down the newspaper, Earl said, “What’s wrong, puss?”

  Laura turned from the cutting board where she was making the salad.

  Pepper was alarmingly agitated. The calico’s ears were flat against her skull, and her lips were drawn back in a snarl, fangs revealed.

  “Pepper, what’s wrong with you?”

  The cat’s eyes seemed to bulge in terror from its head and fixed for an instant on Laura. There was nothing of the domestic pet in those eyes, nothing but sheer wildness.

  “Pepper . . . ?”

  The calico bolted out of the corner squealing in fear or rage or both. She dashed toward a row of cabinets but suddenly wheeled away from them as though she’d seen something monstrous. She streaked toward the sink instead, then shrieked and abruptly changed direction again, claws ticking and scraping on the tile. She chased her own tail for half a dozen revolutions, spitting, and snapping her jaws, then leaped straight into the air as if she’d been stung or swatted. Slashing at the air with her claws, she pranced and twisted on her hind paws in a weird Saint Vitus’s dance, came down on all fours, and was moving even as her forepaws touched the tile. She flashed under the table as if running for her life, between the chairs, out the kitchen door, into the dining room. Gone.

  It had been an incredible display. Laura had never seen anything quite like it.

  Melanie had been unaffected by the cat’s performance. She still sat with her hands in her lap, head bowed, eyes closed.

  Earl had dropped the newspaper and had risen from his chair. In another part of the house, Pepper let out one last miserable cry. Then silence.

  The Sign of the Pentagram was a little shop in a bustling block that was the very essence of Southern California hopes and dreams. Photographs of this portion of Ventura Boulevard could have been used in a dictionary as the sole definition of “bootstrap capitalism.” One small store or restaurant shouldered up against another, block after block of enterprises owned and managed by entrepreneurs of all ages and ethnic backgrounds, and there was something for every interest and taste, both the exotic and the mundane: a Korean restaurant with maybe fifteen tables; a feminist bookshop; a purveyor of handmade knives; something called the Gay Resource Center; a dry cleaner and a party-supply store and a frame shop and a couple of delis and an appliance store; a bookstore that sold only fantasy and science fiction; Ching Brothers Finance, “Loans to the Reliable”; a tiny restaurant offering “Americanized Nigerian cuisine” and another specializing in “chinois, French-Chinese cooking”; a merchant who sold military paraphernalia of all kinds, although not weapons. Some of these entrepreneurs were getting rich, and some never would, but all of them had dreams, and it seemed to Dan that, in the early-evening darkness, Ventura Boulevard was nearly as well lighted by hope as it was by streetlamps.

  He parked almost a block from the Sign of the Pentagram and walked past the Eyewitness News van, similar vehicles from the news departments of KNBC and KTLA, marked and unmarked police cars, and a coroner’s wagon. A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk, including curious locals, punk and gangsta-rap kids who wanted to look like street people but probably lived with their parents in three-hundred-thousand-dollar Valley homes, and sensation-hungry media people with the quick-eyed look that always made them seem (to Dan) like jackals. He pushed through the crowd, saw the beat man from the
Los Angeles Times, and tried to stay out of the range of the active minicam in front of which a reporter and his crew were filming a segment for the eleven o’clock news on Channel Four. Dan edged past a teenage girl with blue-and-green-striped hair twisted into punk spikes; she was wearing knee-high black boots, a minuscule red skirt, and a white sweater with a bizarre pattern of dead babies. The entire front of the shop was covered with amateurishly painted but colorful occult and astrological symbols, and a uniformed LAPD officer was standing directly under a faded red pentagram, guarding the entrance. Dan flashed his badge and went inside.

  The extent of the wreckage was familiar. The berserk giant who had smashed his way though that house in Studio City last night had come down his beanstalk again and had stomped through this shop as well. The electronic cash register looked as if someone had slammed a sledgehammer into it; somehow, a current of life remained in its battered circuitry, and one red number flickered in its cracked digital readout window, an inconstant 6, which seemed analogous to a dying victim’s last word, as if the cash register were trying to tell the cops something about its killer. Some of the bookshelves were splintered, and all the volumes were on the floor in mangled heaps of rumpled dust jackets and bent covers and torn pages. But books hadn’t been the only merchandise offered by the Sign of the Pentagram, and the floor was also littered with candles of all shapes and sizes and colors, Tarot decks, broken Ouija boards, a couple of stuffed owls, totems, tikis, and hundreds of exotic powders and oils. The place smelled of attar of roses, strawberry incense, and death.

  Detectives Wexlersh and Manuello were among the cops and SID technicians in the shop, and they spotted Dan as soon as he entered. They headed toward him, wading through the debris. Their icy smiles were identical, with no humor in either of them. They were a couple of land sharks, as cold-blooded and predatory as any real sharks in any sea.

  Wexlersh was short with pale gray eyes and a waxy white face that seemed out of place in California even in winter. He said, “What happened to your head?”

  “Walked into a low tree branch,” Dan said.

  “Looks more like you were beating up some poor innocent suspect, violating his civil rights, and the poor innocent suspect was foolish enough to resist.”

  “Is that how you handle suspects in the East Valley Division?”

  “Or maybe it was a hooker who wouldn’t come across with a free sample just ’cause you flashed your badge at her,” Wexlersh said, grinning broadly.

  “You shouldn’t try to be amusing,” Dan told him. “You have about as much wit as a toilet seat.”

  Wexlersh continued to smile, but his gray eyes were mean. “Haldane, what kind of maniac you think we have on our hands here?”

  Manuello, in spite of his name, was not Hispanic in appearance, but tall and blond and square-featured, with a Kirk Douglas dimple in the center of his chin. He said, “Yeah, Haldane, share with us the wisdom of your experience.”

  And Wexlersh said, “Yeah. You’re the lieutenant. We’ve just lowly detectives, first-grade.”

  “Yes, please, we await your observations and your profound insights into this most heinous crime,” Manuello said mockingly. “We are breathless with anticipation.”

  Although Dan was a superior officer, they could get away with this sort of petty insubordination because they were from the East Valley Division, not Central, where Dan usually worked, and most of all because they were Ross Mondale’s pets and knew the captain would protect them.

  Dan said, “You know, you two made the wrong career decision. I’m sure you’d be much happier breaking the law than enforcing it.”

  “But really, now, Lieutenant,” said Wexlersh, “you must have some theories by this time. What sort of maniac would go around beating people into piles of strawberry preserves?”

  “For that matter,” Manuello said, “what sort of maniac was this particular victim?”

  “Joseph Scaldone?” Dan said. “He ran this place, right? What do you mean, he was a maniac?”

  “Well,” Wexlersh said, “he sure to God wasn’t your ordinary businessman.”

  “Don’t think they’d have wanted him in the Chamber of Commerce,” Manuello said.

  “Or the Better Business Bureau,” Wexlersh said.

  “A definite lunatic,” Manuello said.

  “What are you two babbling about?” Dan asked.

  Manuello said, “Don’t you think it’d take a lunatic to run a shop”—and reached into a coat pocket, withdrew a small bottle the same size and shape as those that olives often came in—“a shop selling stuff like this.”

  At first the bottle did, indeed, appear to contain small olives, but then Dan realized they were eyeballs. Not human eyes. Smaller than that. And strange. Some had yellow irises, some green, some orange, some red, but although they differed in color, they all had approximately the same shape: They were not round irises, as in human and most animal eyes, but oblong, elliptical, supremely wicked.

  “Snake eyes,” Manuello said, showing him the label.

  “And how about this?” Wexlersh said, taking a bottle from his jacket pocket.

  This one was filled with a grayish powder. The neatly typed label read BAT GUANO.

  “Bat shit,” Wexlersh said.

  “Powdered bat shit,” Manuello said, “smake eyes, tongues of salamanders, necklaces of garlic, vials of bull blood, magic charms, hexes, and all sorts of other weird crap. What kind of people come in here and buy this stuff, Lieutenant?”

  “Witches,” Wexlersh said before Dan could speak.

  “People who think they’re witches,” Manuello said.

  “Warlocks,” Wexlersh said.

  “People who think they’re warlocks.”

  “Weird people,” Wexlersh said.

  “Maniacs,” Manuello said.

  “But this place, it accepts Visa and MasterCard,” said Wexlersh. “With, of course, acceptable ID.”

  Manuello said, “Yeah, these days, warlocks and maniacs have MasterCard. Isn’t that amazing?”

  “They pay off their bat-shit and snake-eye bills in twelve easy monthly installments,” Wexlersh said.

  “Where’s the victim?” Dan asked.

  Wexlersh jerked a thumb toward the rear of the shop. “He’s back there, auditioning for a major role in a sequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

  “Hope you guys at Central have strong stomachs,” Manuello said as Dan headed toward the back of the store.

  “Don’t barf in here,” Wexlersh said.

  “Yeah, no judge is going to allow evidence into court if some cop barfed on it,” Manuello said.

  Dan ignored them. If he felt like barfing, he’d be sure to do it on Wexlersh and Manuello.

  He stepped over a heap of mangled books that were saturated with spilled jasmine oil, and he moved toward the assistant medical examiner who was crouched over a shapeless crimson thing that was the last of Joseph Scaldone.

  Working on the theory that the calico cat might have detected a stealthy sound too soft to be detected by human hearing and might have been frightened by the presence of an intruder in another part of the house, Earl Benton went from room to room, checking windows and doors. He searched in closets and behind the larger pieces of furniture. But the house was secure.

  He found Pepper in the living room, no longer frightened but wary. The cat was lying on top of the television. She allowed herself to be petted, and she began to purr.

  “What got into you, puss?” he asked.

  After being petted awhile, she stretched one leg over the side of the TV and pointed at the controls with one paw. She gave him a look that seemed to inquire if he would be so kind as to switch on the heater-with-pictures-and-voices, so her chosen perch would warm up a bit.

  Leaving the TV off, he returned to the kitchen. Melanie was still sitting at the table, as animated as a carrot.

  Laura was at the counter where Earl had left her, still holding a knife. She didn’t seem to have been working
on dinner while he’d been gone. She’d just been waiting, knife in hand, in case someone else returned in Earl’s place.

  She was obviously relieved when she saw him, and she put the knife down. “Well?”

  “Nothing.”

  The refrigerator door suddenly came open of its own volition. The jars, bottles, and other items on the glass shelves began to wobble and rattle. As though touched by invisible hands, several cupboard doors flew open.

  Laura gasped.

  Instinctively, Earl reached for the gun in his holster, but he had no one to shoot at. He stopped with his hand on the butt of the weapon, feeling slightly foolish and more than a little perplexed.

  Dishes jiggled and clattered on the shelves. A calendar, hanging on the wall by the back door, fell to the floor with a sound like frantic wings.

  After ten or fifteen seconds, which seemed like an hour, the dishes stopped rattling, and the cupboard doors stopped swinging on their hinges, and the contents of the refrigerator grew still.

  “Earthquake,” Earl said.

  “Was it?” Laura McCaffrey said doubtfully.

  He knew what she meant. It had been similar to the effects of a moderate earthquake yet . . . somehow different. An odd pressure change had seemed to condense the air, and the sudden chill had been too harsh to be attributed entirely to the open refrigerator door. In fact, when the trembling stopped, the air warmed up in an instant, even though the refrigerator door was still open.

  But if not a quake, what had it been? Not a sonic boom. That wouldn’t explain the chill or the pressure in the air. Not a ghost. He didn’t believe in ghosts. And where the hell had such a thought come from, anyway? He’d run Poltergeist on his VCR a couple nights ago. Maybe that was it. But he was not so impressionable that one good scary movie would make him reach for a supernatural explanation here, now, when a considerably less exotic answer was so evident.

  “Just an earthquake,” he assured her, although he was far from convinced of that.

  They figured he was Joseph Scaldone, the owner, because all the paper in his wallet was for Scaldone. But until they got a dental-records confirmation or a fingerprint match, the wallet was the only way they could peg him. No one who knew Scaldone would be able to make a visual identification because the poor bastard didn’t have a face left. There wasn’t even much hope of getting an ID based on scars or on other identifying marks, because the body was smashed and torn and flayed and gouged so badly that old scars or birthmarks were lost in the bloody ruins. Splintered ribs poked up through holes in his shirt, and a jagged lance of bone had pierced both his leg and trousers.

  He looked . . . squashed.

  Turning from the body, Dan encountered a man whose biological clock seemed to be suffering from chronological confusion. The guy had the smooth, unlined wide-open face of a thirty-year-old, the graying hair of a fifty-year-old, and the age-rounded shoulders of a retiree. He wore a well-cut dark blue suit, a white shirt, a dark blue tie, and a gold tie chain instead of a clip or tack. He said, “You’re Haldane?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Michael Seames, FBI.”

  They shook hands. Seames’s hand was cold and clammy. They moved away from the corpse, into a corner that was clear of debris.

  “Are you guys on this one now?” Dan asked.

  “Don’t worry. We aren’t pushing you out of it,” Seames assured him diplomatically. “We just want to be part of it. Just observers . . . for the time being.”

  “Good,” Dan said bluntly.

  “I’ve talked to everyone else working on the case, so I just wanted to tell you what I’ve told them. Please keep me informed. Any development at all, no matter how unimportant it seems, I want to be informed.”

  “But what justification does the FBI have for stepping into this at all?”

  “Justification?” Seames’s face creased with a pained smile. “Whose side are you on, Lieutenant?”

  “I mean, what federal statutes have been broken?”

  “Let’s just say it’s a national-security matter.”

  In the middle of his young face, Seames’s eyes were old, ancient, and watchful. They were like the eyes of a reptilian hunter that had been around since the Mesozoic Era and knew all the tricks.

  Dan said, “Hoffritz used to work for the Pentagon. Did research for them.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Was he doing defense research when he was killed?”