The Door to December

by Dean Koontz

  Seames told him about the gaudy public execution in the Vegas casino. “It was like a poltergeist,” the agent repeated. “Something unseen. An unknown, unimaginable power that reached into that casino and beat Koliknikov to death in front of hundreds of witnesses! Now there’s no longer any doubt that Hoffritz and Dylan McCaffrey were working on something with serious defense applications, and we’re goddamned determined to know what it was.”

  “You’ve got his papers, the logbooks and files from the house in Studio City—”

  “We had them,” Seames said. “But whatever reached into that casino and wasted Koliknikov also reached into the evidence files in this case and set fire to all of McCaffrey’s papers—”

  Astonished, Dan said, “What? When was this?”

  “Last night. Spontaneous fucking combustion,” Seames said.

  Obviously Seames was teetering on the edge of blind rage, for a federal agent simply did not shout the F-word at the top of his voice in a public place. Such behavior wasn’t good for the image, and to the feds, their image was as important as their work.

  “You said eight,” Dan reminded him. “Eight dead. Who else besides Koliknikov?”

  “Howard Renseveer was found dead in his ski chalet this morning, up in Mammoth. I guess you know about Renseveer too.”

  “No,” Dan lied, afraid that the truth would so enrage Seames that he would put Dan under arrest. “Harold Renseveer?”

  “Howard,” Seames corrected in a sarcastic tone that indicated he was still half convinced that Dan knew the name well. “Another associate of Willy Hoffritz and Dylan McCaffrey. Evidently he was hiding up there. People in another chalet, farther down the mountain, heard screaming during the night, called the sheriff. They found a mess when they got there. And there was another man with Renseveer. Sheldon Tolbeck.”

  “Tolbeck? Who’s he?” Dan asked, playing dumb in the name of self-preservation.

  “Another research psychologist who was involved with Hoffritz and McCaffrey. Indications are that Tolbeck was in the cabin when this thing . . . this power, whatever it is, showed up and started to bash Renseveer’s brains in. Tolbeck ran into the woods. He hasn’t been found yet. He probably never will be, and if he is . . . well, the odds are pretty damned high that the best we can hope for is that he froze to death.”

  This was bad. Terrible. The worst.

  Dan had known that time was running out, but he hadn’t known that it was pouring away like floodwater through the broken breast of a dam. He had thought that at least five of the conspirators from the gray room remained to be disposed of before It would turn Its attention to Melanie. He had figured those executions would require another day or two and, long before the last of the conspirators had been destroyed, he would have confirmed his suspicions about the case and would have found a way to bring the slaughter to an end in time to save Melanie. He’d thought he might even be in time to save one or more of those manipulative and amoral men, although they didn’t deserve to be saved. But suddenly his chances of saving anyone were diminished: Three more were gone. As far as he knew, two conspirators remained: Albert Uhlander, the author; and Palmer Boothe. As soon as they were terminated, It would turn to Melanie with a special rage. It would tear her apart. It would hammer her head to bits, hammer the last glimmer of life out of her brain before finally releasing her. Only Boothe and Uhlander stood between the girl and death. And even now, either the publisher or the author—or both—might be in the merciless grip of their invisible but powerful adversary.

  Dan turned away from Seames, jerked open the door, and plunged out into the parking lot, where a cold wind and a stinging rain and an early fog were industriously putting the lie to the standard postcard image of Southern California. He sloshed through several puddles, getting water in his shoes.

  He heard Seames shouting at him, but he didn’t pause or reply. When he got in the car, dripping and shivering, he looked back and saw Seames standing in the open door of the precinct house. From this distance the agent’s face seemed to have aged in the past few minutes; now it was more in harmony with his gray hair.

  Driving out of the lot, into the street, Dan was surprised that Seames let him go. After all, a great deal was at stake, perhaps even grave national-defense issues; eight people were dead, and the FBI had officially stepped into the case. Seames would have been justified in detaining him; in fact, it was a dereliction of duty not to have done so.

  Dan was relieved to be free, of course, because it was more important than ever that he talk to Boothe soon, damned soon. If Melanie’s life had been hanging by a string, it was now hanging by a thread, and time like a razor was relentlessly sawing through that fragile filament.

  Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey . . .

  No.

  Not this time.

  He would save this woman, this child. He would not fail again.

  He drove through Westwood, reached Wilshire, swung left, heading toward Westwood Boulevard, which would take him to Sunset and to the entrance to Bel Air. He would be arriving at the Boothe house ahead of schedule, but maybe Boothe would be early too.

  Dan went three blocks before it dawned on him that Michael Seames had probably had his car bugged while he was in the precinct house preparing his statement against Wexlersh and Manuello. That was why he hadn’t been detained for questioning or arrested for obstructing a federal officer. Seames had realized that the quickest method of finding Laura and Melanie McCaffrey was to allow Dan to lead the way.

  As a traffic light turned red ahead of him, Dan braked and glanced repeatedly in the rearview mirror. Traffic was heavy. Spotting a tail would be difficult and time-consuming when there was precious little time to consume. Besides, those tracking him were not necessarily within sight of his car; if they had bugged his car, if they were running an electronic tail, they could be several blocks away, watching his progress on a lighted scope overlaid with a computer-generated map of the streets.

  He had to lose them.

  He wasn’t going to the McCaffreys yet, but he didn’t want to be followed to Boothe’s place, either. A tagalong band of FBI agents would not particularly encourage Boothe to open up. Furthermore, if Boothe did spill everything he knew, Dan didn’t want anyone to hear what the publisher had to say, for if Melanie did—by some miracle—survive, that information would be used against her. Then she would have no chance whatsoever of finding her way back from autism, no hope of leading a normal life.

  Already, there was little hope for her, though there was at least a spark. Right now, it was Dan’s job to preserve that spark of hope and try to nurture it into a flame.

  The traffic light changed to green.

  He hesitated, not sure which way to go, what action to take in order to rid himself of his tail.

  Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey . . .

  He looked at his watch.

  His heart was pounding.

  The soft ticking of his watch, the thump-tick of his heartbeat, and the ticking of the rain on the car all blended together in one metronomic sound, and it seemed as though the entire world were a time bomb about to explode.

  chapter thirty-six

  Melanie’s eyes followed the action on the screen. She didn’t make a sound, and she didn’t shift an inch in her seat, but her eyes moved, and that seemed to be a good sign. It was one of the few times in the past two days that Laura had seen the girl actually looking at something in this world. For almost an hour, the movement of her eyes had indicated that she was involved with the movie, which was certainly the first that she had focused on external events for any substantial length of time. Whether Melanie was following the plot or was merely fascinated by the bright images didn’t matter. The important thing was that the music and the color and Spielberg’s cinematic artistry—his imaginative scenes and archetypal characters and bold use of the camera—had done what nothing else could do, had begun to draw the child out of her self-imposed psychological exile.

  Laura knew there would be
no miraculous recovery, no spontaneous rejection of autism simply because of the movie. But it was a start, however small.

  In the meantime, Melanie’s interest in the film made it easier for Laura to monitor her and keep her awake. The girl exhibited no signs of being sleepy or of slipping back into a more profound catatonic state.

  Dan drove back and forth through Westwood, winding from street to street. Each time that he came to a stop sign or a red traffic light, he shifted the car into park, got out, and hastily searched one small portion of the sedan’s body for the compact transmitter that he knew must be attached to some part of the vehicle. He could have pulled to the curb and examined the entire car methodically from end to end, but then the Bureau agents tailing him would catch up and see what he was doing. If they realized that he suspected being monitored they would not give him an opportunity to find and discard the bug and slip away from them; they would most likely arrest him and take him back to Michael Seames. So at the first stop sign, he frantically checked up under the left front fender and in the wheel well around the tire, groping for a magnetically attached electronics package about the size of a pack of cigarettes. At the next stop he checked the left rear wheel well; during the two stops after that, he ran to the right side of the car and explored under those fenders. He knew other motorists were gawking, but because of his zigzagging route of randomly chosen streets, none of them were behind him for more than two stops, so none had enough time to begin to think that his behavior was suspicious rather than merely odd or eccentric.

  Eventually, at a stop sign at an intersection in a residential neighborhood, two blocks east of Hilgarde and south of Sunset Boulevard, when he was the only motorist in sight, with rain pasting his hair even tighter to his scalp and drizzling under the collar of his coat, he found what he was looking for under the rear bumper. He tore it loose, pitched it into a line of plum-thorn shrubs in the front yard of a big pale yellow Spanish house, got behind the wheel of the sedan again, slammed his door, and got the hell out of there. He repeatedly checked the rearview mirror during the next few blocks, afraid that the men tailing him had gotten close enough to see him discard the bug and were following visually. But he was not pursued.

  His pants legs and shoes were soaked, and a lot of water had gotten under the collar of his coat while he’d twisted and strained to feel beneath various portions of the car. Waves of shivers swept through him. His teeth chattered.

  He turned the car’s heater control to its highest position. But this was a cheapjack city vehicle, and even when the equipment worked, it didn’t work well. The vents spewed a vaguely warm, moist, slightly fetid breeze in his face, as if the car had halitosis, and he didn’t stop shivering until he had driven all the way into the heights of Bel Air, had wound through the tangled network of very private streets, and had found the Boothe estate on the most secluded street of all.

  Beyond the massive pines and intermingled oaks that were almost equally enormous as the ancient evergreens, rose a brick wall the color of old blood, between seven and eight feet tall, capped with black slate and black iron spikes. The wall was so long that it seemed to delineate the property line of an institution—a college, hospital, museum—rather than that of a private residence. But in time Dan came to a place where the brick ramparts curved in on both sides of a driveway, flanking it for twenty feet and terminating at a formidable iron gate.

  The cross-supported bars of the gate were two inches thick. The entire structure, which was flanked and capped by intricately wrought scrolls and fleurs-de-lis of iron, was impressive and elegant and beautifully crafted—and seemed capable of withstanding any number of bomb blasts.

  For a moment Dan thought he was going to have to get out in the rain and search for a call button to announce himself, but then he noticed a guardhouse subtly incorporated into one of the curved brick ramparts. A guard, wearing galoshes and a gray rain slicker with the hood pulled up, stepped out from behind a brick baffle that concealed the door to his small domain; for the first time Dan noticed the round window through which the guard had seen the sedan approaching.

  The man came directly to the car, inquired if he could help, checked Dan’s ID, and informed him that he was expected. He said, “I’ll open the gate, Lieutenant. Just follow the main drive and park along the circle in front of the house.”

  Dan cranked up his window while the guard returned to the booth, and the colossal gates swung inward with ponderous grace. He drove through them with the curious science-fictional feeling that this was not a residence in the same world that he inhabited, but a place in another, better dimension; the gates guarded a magic portal through which one might jump into stranger and more wonderful realms.

  The Boothe estate appeared to encompass eight or ten acres and must have been one of the larger properties in Bel Air. The driveway led up a gentle rise and then curved to the left, through exquisitely maintained, parklike grounds. The house, standing just beyond that point at which the driveway curved back on itself to form a circle, was where God would have lived—if He’d had sufficient money. It resembled one of those baronial homes in films with British settings, like Rebecca and Brideshead Revisited, a great pile of bricks with granite coins and granite window lintels, three stories high, with a black-slate mansard roof and many gables, with half-seen wings and unseen wings angling off from the front-facing portion of the structure. A dozen steps under a portico led up to a set of antique, mahogany entry doors that had probably cost the life of at least one big tree or two younger ones.

  He parked beside a limestone fountain that was centered in the looped circular turnaround. It wasn’t spouting at the moment, but it looked like a backdrop to a love scene featuring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in one of those old movies about European romance and intrigue.

  Dan climbed the steps, and one of the front doors opened before he could begin searching for the bell. Evidently the guard in the gatehouse had called ahead to announce him.

  The entry hall was so grand and large that Dan figured he could have lived comfortably in just that space, even if someday he married and produced two children.

  Forgoing the formal wear of movie butlers in favor of a gray suit and white shirt and black tie, a soft-spoken servant with a British accent took Dan’s streaming coat and had the courtesy not to look askance at his damp, rumpled, day-old clothes.

  “Mr. Boothe is waiting for you in the library,” the butler said.

  Dan checked his watch. It was 3:55. Delayed by the necessity of locating and removing the transmitter that had been attached to his car, he’d not arrived too early, after all. He was again seized by an urgent sense of time running out.

  The butler led him through a series of huge serene rooms, each more elaborately and graciously furnished than the one before it, across antique Persian rugs and Chinese carpets. The deeply coffered ceilings with inlaid-woods might have been imported from classic estates in Europe. They passed through superbly hand-carved doorways and walked past Impressionist paintings by all the masters of that school (and no reason to believe that even one piece was a print or imitation).

  The wealth of antiques and the great beauty of the house were awesome and visually appealing, but surprisingly, the succession of paradisiacal rooms gave rise to an increasing uneasiness in Dan. He had a sense of powerful and ominous forces lying dormant but easily disturbed just beyond the walls and under the floors, a pseudopsychic perception of colossal dark machinery purring with malevolent purpose somewhere just out of sight. In spite of the exquisite taste and apparently infinite resources with which the house had been built and appointed, in spite of its soaring spaces—or perhaps in part because of its superhuman scale—it had a quality of medieval oppressiveness.

  Furthermore, Dan could not help but grimly wonder how Palmer Boothe could possess the refinement and taste to appreciate a house like this—and still be capable of condemning a little girl to the horrors of the gray room. That contradiction would seem to require a personali
ty so duplicitous as to be virtually indistinguishable from schizophrenic multiplicity. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The great publisher and liberal and philanthropist who, by night, stalks the mean streets with a bludgeon disguised as an innocent walking stick.

  The butler opened one of the heavy, paneled doors to the library and stepped through, announcing Dan as he went, and Dan followed with more than a little trepidation, passing between bookcases into which the entry was recessed. The butler immediately withdrew, closing the door behind him.

  A twenty-foot-high, richly paneled mahogany ceiling curved down to ten-foot-high mahogany shelves filled with books, some accessible only with the aid of a library ladder. At the far end of the room, enormous French windows occupied the only wall not given completely to books; they presented a view of lush gardens, though heavy green drapes were drawn across more than half the glass. Persian rugs decorated the highly polished wood floor, and groupings of heavily padded armchairs offered elegant comfort. On a desk almost as big as a bed, a Tiffany stained-glass lamp cast such rich colors and exquisite patterns of light that it seemed to be made not of mere glass but of precious gems. Around the side of that desk and through the red-yellow-green-blue beams of filtered lamplight, Palmer Boothe came to greet his guest.

  Boothe was six feet tall, broad in the shoulders and chest, narrow in the waist, in his mid- or late-fifties, with the physique and aura of a much younger man. His face was too narrow and his features too elongated to be called handsome. However, a certain ascetic quality in his thin lips and straight thin nose, and a trace of nobility in his chin and jawline, made it impossible to deny him the approbative “distinguished.”

  Holding out his hand as he approached, Boothe said, “Lieutenant Haldane, I’m so pleased you could come.”

  Before Dan realized what he was doing, he found himself shaking Boothe’s hand, though the very idea of touching this evil lizard of a man should have repelled him. Furthermore, he saw himself manipulated into reacting to Boothe partly like a vassal unaccountably admitted to the court of the king, partly like a valued acquaintance answering the summons of a nobleman whose approval he wished to elicit by the performance of any favor asked and whose friendship he hoped to gain. How this subtle manipulation was accomplished remained a mystery to him. Which was why Palmer Boothe was worth several hundred million and Dan, by contrast, did far more shopping at Kmart than at Neiman-Marcus. Anyway, he sure as hell hadn’t initiated their encounter in the manner of a hard-nosed cop who had come to break someone’s ass, which was the impression he had intended to make straightaway.

  Dan noticed movement in a shadowed corner of the wood-dark room and turned to see a tall, thin, hawk-faced man rise from an armchair, a glass of ice and whiskey in one hand. Although he was twenty feet away, the hawkish man’s unusually bright and intense eyes conveyed everything essential about his personality: high intelligence, strong curiosity, aggressiveness—and a touch of madness.

  As Boothe began to make introductions, Dan interrupted and said, “Albert Uhlander, the author.”

  Uhlander apparently knew that he did not possess Palmer Boothe’s uncanny manipulative powers. He didn’t smile. He made no attempt to shake hands. That they were of opposing camps and hostile ideologies seemed as apparent to Uhlander as it was to Dan.

  “Can I get you a drink?” Boothe asked with a misplaced gentility and excessive civility that was beginning to be maddening. “Scotch. Bourbon? Perhaps a glass of dry sherry?”

  “We don’t have time to sit here and drink, for God’s sake,” Dan said. “You’re both living on borrowed time, and you know it. The only reason I want to try to save your lives is so I can have the great pleasure of putting both of you bastards in prison for a long, long time.”

  There. That was better.

  “Very well,” Boothe said coldly, and he returned to his desk. He settled into the brass-studded, dark green leather club chair behind the desk and was almost entirely in shadow, except for his face, which was part blue and part green and part yellow in the spears of multicolored light from the Tiffany lamp.

  Uhlander went to one window that was not concealed by green drapes, and he stood with his back to the French panes. Outside, because the storm-gray afternoon was waning toward an early-winter twilight, not much daylight found its way past the lush vegetation of the formal gardens and to the library window. Nevertheless, sufficient brightness lay behind Uhlander to reduce him to only a silhouette, leaving his face in deep shadows that concealed his expression.

  Dan approached the desk, stepped into the circle of jeweled light, and looked down at Boothe, who had lifted a glass of whiskey. “Why would a man of your position and reputation get involved with someone like Willy Hoffritz?”

  “He was brilliant. A genius in his field. I have always sought out and associated with the brightest people,” Boothe said. “They’re the most interesting people, for one thing. And for another, their ideas and enthusiasms are often of great practical use in one of my businesses or another.”

  “And besides, Hoffritz could supply you with an utterly passive, totally submissive young woman who would endure any humiliation you wanted to heap on her. Isn’t that right, Daddy?”

  At last a crack appeared in Boothe’s self-possession. For a moment his eyes narrowed hatefully, and his jaw muscles bulged as he clenched his teeth in anger. But his control slipped only one notch, and the crack closed up again in seconds. His face recomposed itself, and he sipped his whiskey.

  “All men have . . . weaknesses, Lieutenant. In that regard, I’m a man like any other.”

  Something in his eyes, in his expression, and in his tone of voice belied any admission of weakness. Rather, it seemed as if he were merely being magnanimous by claiming to share the weaknesses of ordinary men. It was all too clear that he didn’t believe there was anything wrong or even slightly morally suspect in his behavior with Regine, and his admission was not an act of contrition or humility but one of smug condescension.

  Shifting to another tack, Dan said, “Hoffritz might have been a genius, but he was bent, twisted. He applied his knowledge and his talents not to legitimate behavior-modification research but to developing new techniques of brainwashing. I’m told by people who knew him that he was a totalitarian, a fascist, an elitist of the worst sort. How does that square with your own widely heralded liberalism?”

  Boothe regarded Dan with pity, disdain, and amusement. As if speaking to a child, he said, “Lieutenant, everyone who believes that the problems of society can be solved through the political process is an elitist. Which means most people. It doesn’t matter if you’re a right-winger, a conservative, a moderate, a liberal, or an extreme left-winger. If you define yourself by any political label, then you’re an elitist because you believe that problems could be solved if only the right group of people held power. So Willy Hoffritz’s elitism was of no concern to me. I happen to believe the masses need to be guided, controlled—”

  “Brainwashed.”

  “Yes, brainwashed, but for their own good. As the world’s population grows ever larger and as technology leads to a wider dissemination of information and ideas, the old institutions like family and Church break down. There are new, more dangerous ways for the discontented to express their misery and alienation. So we must find methods of eliminating discontent, of controlling thought and action, if we’re to have a stable society, a stable world.”

  “I see why you used libertarian political-action committees as a front for financing McCaffrey and Hoffritz.”

  Boothe raised his eyebrows. “You know about that, do you?”

  “I know considerably more than that.”

  Boothe sighed. “Libertarians are such hopeless dreamers. They want to reduce government to a minimum, virtually eliminate politics. I thought it would be amusing to work toward exactly the opposite ends while employing the cover of a