The Door to December

by Dean Koontz

  in front of the house. But at the moment, the butler was calling 911, scared witless by the bloodcurdling screams and battle sounds coming from the library, so the guard had activated the gate controls only when he’d seen headlights knifing down toward him through the early darkness and rain.

  Dan had also slapped the detachable emergency beacon to the roof. He rocketed down the long hill, pressing the accelerator almost to the floor, counting on the gateman to get the barrier out of his way in time to prevent a nasty collision. That ironwork had appeared to be capable of stopping a tank. If he hit it, he would most likely be decapitated or skewered by a jagged bar that would pierce the windshield.

  He could have descended the hill at a more reasonable pace, but seconds counted. Even if the girl’s astral body did not finish with Boothe and Uhlander for a few minutes, it would no doubt return to that Westwood theater well ahead of Dan; the spirit surely didn’t travel as slowly as an automobile, but moved from place to place in the wink of an eye. Besides, the butler might soon collect his wits and get the idea that Dan had done something to cause all the screaming in the library. If such a suspicion arose, the gatehouse guard might be alerted to close the gates again the instant that they finished opening, blocking Dan’s escape; then whole minutes would be lost.

  Thirty feet from the gates, as they continued to swing open, he finally eased up on the accelerator and touched the brakes. The car started to slide, but he held it to the road and kept its nose pointed where it should be. A sharp snap, a thin squeal: the rear bumper scraped one of the still-moving portals. Then he was on that short length of driveway beyond the walls of the estate. No traffic on the street ahead. He didn’t slow down when he turned left. The sedan fishtailed to the far curb, but he maintained control, losing only a little momentum.

  Emergency beacon flashing, he pushed the car to its limits, plunging down from the heights of Bel Air, from one twisting street to another, taking unconscionable chances with his own life and the lives of anyone who might have been in his way around any of several blind and half-blind curves.

  His thoughts arced back in time: Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey . . .

  Not again.

  Melanie was a killer, yes, but she did not deserve to die for what she had done. She’d not been in her right mind when she killed them. Besides, if murder in self-defense had ever been a justifiable plea, it was now. If she hadn’t killed them, every last one, then they would have come for her, not necessarily to exact revenge, but to conduct further experiments with her. If she hadn’t killed all ten men, the torture would have continued.

  He had to get that idea through to her. He thought he knew a way of doing it.

  God, please, let it work.

  Westwood was not far away. With the beacon, with no thought for his own mortality, he should reach the theater in a lot less than five minutes.

  Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey . . . Melanie . . .

  No!

  The theater was a refrigerator.

  Melanie whimpered.

  Laura leaped up from her seat, not sure what to do, knowing only that she couldn’t sit still as It approached.

  The air temperature plummeted. In fact, it seemed colder than it had been in the kitchen the previous night or in the motel room, when It had paid them other visits.

  From the row behind, someone asked Laura to please sit down, and heads turned her way from across the aisle too. But after a moment, everyone’s attention shifted to the incredibly abrupt chill that had gripped the theater.

  Earl was on his feet too, and this time he’d drawn the revolver from his shoulder holster.

  Melanie let out a thin, pathetic cry, but her eyes didn’t open.

  Laura grabbed her, shook her. “Baby, wake up! Wake up!”

  Soft exclamatory comments swept in a wave across the auditorium as other patrons reacted not to Laura and Melanie but to the fact that they were freezing. Then the crowd was shocked into a brief silence as the giant movie screen tore open from top to bottom with a ripping noise that sounded as though God had rent the heavens. A jagged line of blackness appeared through the center of the projected images, and the figures on the screen rippled and acquired distorted faces and bodies as the silvery surface on which they existed began to wrinkle and bulge and sag.

  Melanie writhed in her seat and struck at the empty air. Her blows landed on Laura, who tried to force the girl to wake up.

  No sooner had the screen torn, silencing the audience, than the heavy curtains flanking it were pulled out of the tracks in the ceiling. They flapped in the air like great wings, as if the devil himself had risen into the theater and was unfolding his batlike appendages; then they collapsed with a whoosh! into huge piles of lifeless material.

  That was too much for the audience. Confused and frightened, people rose from their seats.

  After taking a score of hard blows on her arms and face, Laura got hold of Melanie’s wrists and kept her still. She looked over her shoulder, toward the front of the theater.

  The projectionist had not touched his equipment yet, so a queer luminosity still bounced off the ruined screen, and a vague amber radiance was provided by the torch-shaped emergency lamps along the walls. The light was just sufficient for everyone to see what happened next. Empty seats in the front row tore loose of the floor to which they were bolted, and shot violently up and backward, into the air. They struck the large screen, punched through the fabric, destroying what remained of it.

  People began to scream, and a few ran toward the exits at the back of the theater.

  Someone yelled, “Earthquake!”

  An earthquake didn’t explain it, of course, and it wasn’t likely that anyone believed that explanation. But that word, much dreaded in California since the Northridge temblor, stoked the panic. More seats—those in the second row—erupted from the floor: bolts snapped, metal shredded, concrete burst.

  It was, Laura thought, as if some gigantic invisible beast had entered at the front of the theater and was making its way toward them, destroying everything in its path.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Earl shouted, though he knew as well as she did that they could not run from this thing, whatever it was.

  Melanie had ceased struggling. She was limp, like a pile of knotted rags, so limp that she might have been dead.

  The projectionist switched off his machinery and turned up the house lights. Everyone but Laura, Melanie, and Earl had surged to the back of the theater, and half the audience had already spilled out into the lobby.

  Heart jackhammering, Laura scooped Melanie into her arms and stumbled along the row, into the aisle, with Earl following close behind her.

  Now seats were exploding into the air from the fourth row and crashing backward into the demolished screen with thunderous impact. But the worst sound was coming from the emergency-exit doors that flanked the screen. They swung open and slammed shut, again and again, banging back and forth with such tremendous force that their pneumatic cylinders, which should have ensured a soft closing every time, could not cope.

  Laura saw not doors but flapping mouths, hungry mouths, and she knew that if she was foolish enough to try to escape through those exits, she would find herself stepping not into the theater parking lot but into the gullet of some unimaginably foul beast. Crazy thought. Insane. She was teetering on the brink of mindless panic.

  If she had not experienced the poltergeist phenomena on a smaller scale in her own kitchen, she would have been unhinged by the sight before her. What was it? What was It? And why the hell did It want Melanie?

  Dan knew. At least he knew part of it.

  But it didn’t matter what he knew, because he couldn’t help them now. Laura doubted that she would ever see him again.

  Considering that she was hysterical and already emotionally overcharged, the thought of never seeing Haldane again hit her harder than seemed possible.

  She had no sooner reached the aisle than her knees began to buckle under the combined wei
ght of her terror and Melanie. Earl jammed his revolver back into its holster and took the girl out of Laura’s arms.

  Only a few people remained at the lobby doors, pressing against those in front of them. Some were looking back, wide-eyed, at the inexplicable chaos.

  Laura and Earl took only a few steps along that same carpeted route of escape before seats stopped exploding into the air behind them—and erupted, instead, from the rows ahead. After a brief, clumsy, aerial ballet, the mangled seats crashed down into the aisle, blocking it.

  Melanie would not be permitted to leave.

  Holding the girl in his arms, Earl looked this way and that, unsure of his next move.

  Then something shoved him. He staggered backward. Something tore Melanie out of his grip. The girl tumbled along the aisle until she slammed against a row of seats.

  Screaming, Laura scurried to her daughter, rolled the girl over, put a hand to her neck. There was a pulse.

  “Laura!”

  She looked up when she heard her name, and with an enormous rush of relief she saw Dan Haldane. He had entered through the exiting people at the back of the theater. He rushed down the aisle toward them.

  He vaulted the ruined seats that the unseen enemy had piled in the aisle, and as he drew nearer, he shouted, “That’s it! Hold her in your arms, shelter her.” He reached Laura and knelt beside her. “Put yourself between her and It, because I don’t think It’ll hurt you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll explain later,” he said. He turned to Earl, who had gotten to his hands and knees. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Just bruised.”

  Dan got to his feet.

  Laura lay in the aisle, among scattered pieces of popcorn and crumpled paper cups and other debris, embracing Melanie, trying to fold herself around the child. She realized that the theater was silent, that the invisible beast was no longer on the rampage. But the air was cold, blood-freezing.

  It was still there.

  Dan turned slowly in a circle, waiting for something to happen.

  As the silence continued, he said, “You can’t kill yourself unless you kill your mother too. She won’t let you do it unless you kill her first.”

  Looking up at him, Laura said, “Who are you talking to?” And then she cried out and pressed closer to Melanie. “Something’s pulling at me! Dan, something’s trying to tear me away from her!”

  “Fight it.”

  She held tightly to Melanie, and for a moment she looked like an epileptic, jerking and twitching in a fit upon the floor. But the attack ended, and she stopped struggling.

  “Gone?” Dan asked.

  Gaunt, baffled, she said, “Yes.”

  Dan spoke to the air, for he could sense that the astral body was hovering out there in the theater somewhere. “She won’t let you pry her away just so you can hammer yourself to pieces. She loves you. If she has to, she’ll die to protect you.”

  Across the theater, three seats were torn loose of their moorings and were swept up into the air. They whirled and slammed against one another for a half minute before they dropped back to the floor.

  “No matter what you think,” Dan said to the psychogeist, “you don’t deserve to die. What you did was horrible, but it wasn’t much more than you had to do.”

  Silence.

  Stillness.

  He said, “Your mother loves you. She wants you to live. That’s why she’s holding on to you with all her strength.”

  A wretched sound from Laura indicated that she understood the whole terrible truth, at last.

  At the front of the theater, the crumpled curtains stirred and rose slightly, in a halfhearted attempt to spread themselves into menacing wing-shapes as before, but after a few seconds they sagged into a formless heap.

  Earl had gotten to his feet. He stepped beside Dan. Surveying the theater, he said, “It was the girl herself?”

  Dan nodded.

  Weeping in shock and grief and fear, Laura cradled her daughter.

  The air was still frigid.

  Something touched Dan with invisible hands of ice and shoved him backward, but not hard.

  “You can’t kill yourself. We won’t let you kill yourself,” he told the unseen astral body. “We love you, Melanie. You’ve never had a chance, and we want to give you a chance.”

  Silence.

  Earl started to say something, and then several rows down from them the psychogeist rushed along a line of seats, snapping the backs of them as it went, and the fallen curtains did rise this time, and the exit doors began to bang open and shut again, and scores of acoustic ceiling tiles rained down, and a cold keening arose that must have been an astral voice, for it came out of midair and filled the theater at such volume that both Earl and Dan clamped their hands over their ears.

  Dan saw Laura wincing, but she didn’t let go of Melanie to cover her own ears. She maintained her loving grip, squeezing the girl tight, holding on.

  The noise rose to an unbearable level, and Dan thought he had misjudged the girl, thought she was going to bring the roof down on all of them and kill everyone in order to kill herself. But abruptly the cacophony stopped, and the animated wreckage crashed back onto the floor, and the doors stopped slamming open and shut.

  One last ceiling tile sailed down, struck the aisle beyond them, and tumbled over twice before coming to rest.

  Stillness again.

  Silence again.

  For more than a minute they waited fearfully—and then the air grew warm.

  At the back of the theater, a man who might have been the manager said, “What the hell happened in here?”

  An usher, standing at the manager’s side, having apparently seen the start of the destruction, tried to explain but couldn’t.

  Dan noticed movement up at the projectionist’s booth and saw a man peering out of one of the portals there. He looked amazed.

  Laura finally pulled back from Melanie while Dan and Earl crouched at her side.

  The child’s eyes were open, but she wasn’t looking at anyone. Her gaze remained unfocused. But it wasn’t the same haunted look that had possessed her before. She was not yet focused on anything in this world, but she had ceased to gaze inward upon the haven in which she’d recently taken refuge. She was now on the borderline between that fantasy and this reality, between that introverted darkness and the world of light in which she would eventually have to make her life.

  “If the suicidal urge is gone—and I think it is—then the worst is past,” Dan said. “I think she’ll come back all the way, in time. But it’ll take an infinite amount of patience and a lot of love.”

  “I’ve got enough of both,” Laura said.

  “We’ll help,” Earl said.

  “Yes,” Dan said. “We’ll help.”

  Years of therapy lay ahead for Melanie, and there was a chance she might remain autistic. But Dan had a feeling that she had closed the door to December for good, that she would never let it come open again. And if it was closed, if she could make herself forget how to open it, perhaps she could eventually forget the pain and violence and death that had occurred on the other side of that door.

  Forgetting was the start of healing.

  He realized that this was a lesson he himself needed to learn. A lesson in forgetting. He needed to forget the pain of his own failures. Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey. A desperate, childish hope flooded him: If only he could at last put those grim memories behind him and close his own door, then perhaps the girl would be able to close hers too; perhaps her recovery would be encouraged by his own determination to turn away from death.

  He decided to bargain with God: Look here, Lord, I promise I’ll put the past behind me, stop dwelling too much on thoughts of blood and death and murder, take more time to live and to appreciate the blessings of life You’ve given me, be more grateful for what You’ve given me, and in return, God, all I want from You is, please, for Melanie to come all the way back. Please. Deal?

  Holding and rocki
ng her daughter, Laura looked at him. “You seem so . . . intense. What’s wrong? What’re you thinking?”

  Even smeared with dirt and spotted with blood and disheveled, she was beautiful.

  Dan said, “Forgetting is the start of healing.”

  “That’s what you were thinking?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It’s enough,” he said. “It’s enough.”

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  AFTERWORD

  I originally published The Door to December under a pen name.

  Novelists write under pen names for many reasons.

  Perhaps you write bestselling novels about bricklayers and associated masonry trades, and after producing fifteen or twenty such tales, you wish to write a book about some of the intrepid, multitalented, four-hundred-pound men who are both Sumo wrestlers and FBI agents. With the quite reasonable expectation that the established audience for your bricklaying adventures might be displeased by such a sudden shift in your subject matter, you might concoct a pen name for this new work.

  Or perhaps under your real and true name, you have contracted with Publisher A for several books, to be delivered at the rate of one per year, but because of weak moral character or because you’re keeping company with the wrong crowd, you have gotten into a twenty-four-can-a-day Diet Pepsi habit, and the resultant surfeit of nervous energy requires that you either enter a Twelve Step program or write a second book each year. To you, in your caffeine buzz, a Twelve Step program seems like a dreary, plodding business, but no one is offering either a Three Step program or a Twelve Running Steps program; besides, this treatment requires an outlay of funds, whereas writing a second book produces additional income. Because Publisher A’s contract gives it the exclusive use of your name, you must publish your second book under a pen name. Consequently, you make a deal with Publisher Q or Publisher Z (either has a more exotic and more thrilling name than does bland old Publisher A), and the world now knows you by your real and true identity, John Smith, and also by your pen name, Obadiah Furk.

  In less enlightened days, a female novelist, writing in a genre with a largely male readership, often chose to disguise her gender under a pen name. Likewise, men writing romance novels often hid behind women’s names. The danger here, obviously, is that ego and alter ego might become confused, whereupon you could discover one day that you have acquired an entirely different wardrobe from the one you owned just a year previously and that some of the most treasured parts of your anatomy have been left on a surgeon’s table.

  Writers of literary fiction have occasionally used pen names for work that people might actually enjoy reading. They believe that the existence of a satisfied audience is absolute proof that a work of fiction is utterly worthless, and while they wish to have the income produced by popular fiction, they are loath to be identified as the author of it. Until the late 1940s, the distinction between literary and popular fiction was so blurry as to be nearly nonexistent. Many authors wrote both literary and popular novels under their real names and suffered no diminution of their authorial reputations. One fine example was John P. Marquand, who won the Pulitzer Prize and critical acclaim for his literary fiction while at the same time producing a series of detective novels featuring a character named Mr. Moto. This couldn’t happen in our time. For one thing, having died many years ago, Mr. Marquand can’t be expected to meet contractual deadlines, to review copyedited manuscripts, or to make himself available for long publicity tours. Furthermore, since the end of World War II, the U.S. academic community has assumed an increasingly elitist viewpoint bordering on contempt for the masses, which is expressed in numerous ways, including the assiduous segregation of fiction into approved and condemned genres. This has the expected effect of making the most passionate genre writers into the best chroniclers of the common man and woman, a job once held by literary writers—and the unanticipated effect of turning most literary writers into creative cowards afraid to operate outside of the narrow boundaries drawn by the elites.

  Some writers use pen names because they are on the “to-abduct” list of evil extraterrestrials and they feel the need to hide out to avoid unwanted proctological exams aboard the mother ship.

  Some writers resort to pen names after waking in a strange city to discover that they suffer from permanent amnesia, that they are carrying no identification, that their fingerprints have been burned off with multiple applications of acid, and that they have recently undergone plastic surgery that