The Door to December
Page 36

Though many years had passed, though he had long ago resigned himself to having a brother forever unknowable, Dan felt his mouth go dry again. His throat tightened. A tightness filled his chest too. He might have wept quietly then, for he had wept other nights when that memory had come to him unbidden; he was so weary that tears would have risen easily. But Melanie murmured and made a small sound of fear in her sleep, and her distress brought him instantly off his own bed.
The girl writhed beneath the sheets, but not like before, not with her previous vitality. She groaned softly in terror, not loud enough to wake her mother. Melanie struggled as if fending off an attacker, but she seemed to lack the strength to resist effectively.
Dan wondered what nightmare monster stalked her. Then the room suddenly grew cold, and he realized that the monster might be stalking her not in a nightmare but in reality.
He stepped quickly to his own bed and picked up the gun that lay on the nightstand.
The air was arctic. And getting colder.
*  *  *
The two men sat at a table by a large mullioned window, playing cards, drinking Scotch and milk, and pretending to be just a couple of guys batching it and having a good time.
Wind soughed in the eaves of the cabin.
The night was bitterly cold and blustery outside, as befitted February in the mountains, but there would be no new snow anytime soon. Beyond the window, a large moon drifted in a star-spattered sky, casting pearly luminescence on the snowcaked pines and firs and on the white-clad mountain meadow.
They were a long way from the busy streets and bright lights of the Big Orange.
Sheldon Tolbeck had fled from Los Angeles with Howard Renseveer in the desperate hope that distance would provide safety. They had told no one where they were going—in the equally desperate hope that the murderous psychogeist would be unable to follow them to a place that it did not know.
Yesterday afternoon, they had driven north and then northeast, into the high Sierras, to a ski chalet near Mammoth, where they had settled in a few hours ago. The place was owned by Howard's brother, but Howard himself had never used it before, had no association with it, and could not be expected to go there.
It'll find us anyway, Tolbeck thought miserably. It'll sniff us out somehow.
He didn't voice the thought because he didn't want to anger Howard Renseveer. Howard, still somewhat boyish at forty, was an outgoing type who, until recently, had been certain that he was going to live forever. Howard jogged; Howard was careful not to eat much fat or refined sugar; Howard meditated half an hour every day; Howard always expected the best from life, and life usually obliged. And Howard was optimistic about their chances. Howard was—or said he was—absolutely convinced that the creature they feared could not journey this far and could not follow them if they took care to cover their trail. Yet Tolbeck couldn't fail to notice that Howard glanced nervously at the window each time that the gusty wind raised a louder protest in the eaves, that he jumped when the burning logs popped in the fireplace. Anyway, the very fact that they were awake at that dead dark hour of the morning was enough to put the lie to Howard's supposed optimism.
Tolbeck was pouring more Scotch and milk for himself, and Howard Renseveer was shuffling the cards when the room turned cold. They glanced at the fireplace, but the flames were leaping high; the fans in the Heatolator were purring, driving currents of hot air outward from the hearth. No window or door had come open. And in a moment it became frighteningly clear that the chill they felt was not merely a vagrant draft, for the air grew rapidly colder, colder.
It had come. A miraculous, malevolent advent. One moment it was not there, and the next moment it was in their midst, a demonic and deadly coalescence of psychic energy.
Tolbeck got to his feet.
Howard Renseveer leaped up so abruptly that he knocked over his Scotch and milk, then his chair, and dropped the deck of cards. The interior of the cabin had become a freezer, although the fire continued to blaze undiminished.
A large round rag rug lay on the floor between the two hunter-green sofas, and now it rose into the air until it was six feet off the floor. It hung there, not floppy and rumpled the way it should have been but stiff, rigid. Then it spun around faster and faster, as though it were a giant phonograph record whirling on an unseen turntable.
With fevered thoughts of escape that seemed foolish and hopeless even as they took possession of him, Tolbeck backed toward the rear door of the cabin.
Renseveer stood by the table, transfixed by the sight of the spinning rug, apparently unable to move.
Abruptly, the rug dropped in a lifeless heap. One of the sofas was pitched across the room with such force that it knocked over a small table and lamp, snapped off two of its own legs, and smashed a magazine rack, sending glossy publications tumbling and flapping along the floor, like a flock of birds incapable of taking flight.
Tolbeck had retreated from the living room of the cabin into the kitchen annex, which was really part of one large chamber that constituted the entire ground floor of the structure. He had almost reached the rear door. He was beginning to think he might make it. Not daring to turn his back to the invisible but undeniable entity in the living-room area, he extended one arm behind him, scrabbling at the empty air with his hand, seeking the doorknob.
Around Renseveer, the dropped cards whirled up from the floor, full of a magical and menacing life not unlike that which had made mere brooms such a tribulation for the Sorcerer's Apprentice. They swarmed around Renseveer as if they were leaves caught in a wind devil, clicked and scraped against one another in a dizzying dance. Something about the sound made Tolbeck think of small knives being sharpened. Even as that unsettling image occurred to him, he saw that Howard Renseveer, who was frantically flailing at the storm of plastic-coated rectangles, was bleeding from both hands and was nicked all over the head and face. Surely, cards were neither rigid enough nor sharp enough to inflict even minor wounds ... yet they slashed, slashed, and Renseveer shrieked in pain.
Groping behind him with one hand, Tolbeck found the doorknob. It wouldn't turn. Locked. He could have swung around, found the thumb latch, and been out of the cabin in a wink, but he was half mesmerized by the spectacle in the living room. Fear both energized and paralyzed him, filled him with an urgent desire to flee but simultaneously numbed his mind and his legs.
The cards collapsed into lifelessness as the rug had done before them. Howard Renseveer's wounded hands appeared to be encased in tight crimson gloves.
Even as the cards were falling, the fire screen was pitched off the stone hearth. A blazing log erupted from the fireplace, shot across the room, and struck Renseveer, who was too dazed to attempt to dodge that projectile. The log was half eaten away by flames, a missile composed of wood and crumbly coals and ashes and licking fire. When it struck Renseveer in the gut, the charred and brittle part of the log dissolved into black smoking rubble that rained down on his shoes. The unburned core of the wood, however, was hard and jagged, a crude and particularly sadistic spear that punctured his stomach and stabbed brutally, not merely severing blood vessels and rupturing organs as it went, but also carrying fire deep into him.
That grotesque and heart-freezing sight was sufficient to cure the paralysis of fear that had left Tolbeck standing at the kitchen door for long, precious seconds. He found the lock, twisted the knob, threw open the door, burst out into the night and wind and darkness, and ran for his life.
*  *  *
The air temperature had risen as quickly as it had fallen. The motel room was warm again.
Dan Haldane wondered what the hell had happened—or had almost happened. What did the change of temperature signify? Had some occult presence been there for a few seconds? If so, why had it come, if not to attack Melanie? And what had made it leave?
Melanie seemed to sense the dissipation of the threat, for she grew still and quiet under the covers.
Standing by the bed, Dan stared at the gaunt child and, for the first time, realized that she would grow up to be as beautiful as her mother. That thought made him turn to Laura, who was lying beside her daughter, fast asleep, undisturbed by the girl's brief spate of soft murmuring and unaware of the bitter cold that had gripped the room for half a minute or more. In repose, her lovely face reminded him of the faces of Madonnas that he'd seen in paintings in museums. Fanned out across the pillow in the pale-amber light of the single lamp, Laura's thick, silky auburn hair looked as if it had been spun from the red-gold light of an autumn sunset, and Dan had an urge to put his hands into it and let it spill through his fingers.
He returned to his own bed.
He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling.
He thought of Cindy Lakey. Dead at the hands of her mother's crazy-jealous boyfriend.
He thought of his brother, Delmar. Dead at the hands of his drug-blasted, hallucinating, adoptive father.
He thought of his sister too, of course. It was an inevitable progression of memory, the same on any night when he had trouble sleeping: Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey.
Eventually, through the records of the child-placement agency that had dispersed the Detwiler family on the death of their mother, Dan had found the sister from whom he had been separated when he had been a month-old infant and she had been six. Like Delmar, she was in a graveyard by the time Dan finally tracked her down.
Six years old when their mother died, Carrie had not reacted or adapted well to the dissolution of her family. She was emotionally and psychologically damaged by the experience, and her behavioral problems made her a difficult candidate for adoption. She drifted from an orphanage to a series of foster homes, back to the orphanage, then to another series of foster homes, apparently with a growing sense that she belonged nowhere and was wanted nowhere. Her attitude grew worse, until she began running away from her foster homes, and each time that she ran away, the authorities found it increasingly difficult to locate her and bring her back. By the time that she was seventeen, she knew how to dodge those searching for her, and she stayed free, on her own, thereafter. All available photographs revealed that Carrie was a lovely girl, but she didn't do well in school, and she had no job experience, and like a lot of other lovely girls from broken homes, she chose prostitution as the best way to support herself—or, rather, prostitution chose her, for she had little choice.
She was twenty-eight years old and a high-priced call girl by the time her short unhappy life came to an end. One of her johns wanted something kinkier than she was willing to provide, and the argument swiftly led to violence. She was killed five weeks before Dan located her, and she was one month in the ground by the time that he paid a visit. He had missed meeting his brother by twelve years, and that had been sad but not as painful as missing a meeting with his sister by only thirty days.
He told himself that she would have been a stranger to him. They would have had little or nothing in common. She might not have been glad to see him, what with him being a cop and her a call girl. And he very well might have been sorry to meet the woman his sister had become. Almost certainly, given the circumstances, a reunion and any subsequent relationship would have been filled with much anguish and little joy. But he had been only twenty-two, a rookie on the force, when he had found his sister's grave, and at twenty-two he hadn't been as tough emotionally as he was now; he had wept for her. Hell, even these days, after more than fifteen years of policework, fifteen years of seeing people who'd been shot and knifed and beaten and strangled, after being considerably roughened by the work he did, he still sometimes wept for her and for his lost brother when, in the darkest hour of a sleepless night, he dwelt too intently upon the past that might have been.
He held himself, in part, responsible for Carrie's death. He felt that he should have worked harder to track her down, should have located her in time to save her. Yet he also knew that he deserved none of the blame. Even if he had found her sooner, no words or actions would have influenced her to give up life as a call girl; nothing he could have done would have kept her from that rendezvous with the homicidal john. The guilt that nagged at him wasn't earned. It was, instead, just one more example of his Atlas complex: He had a tendency to take the whole world on his shoulders. He understood himself; he could even laugh at himself, and sometimes he said that (considering his capacity and enthusiasm for guilt) he should have been Jewish. But being able to laugh at himself did not in any way lessen his sense of responsibility.
Therefore, when sleep remained teasingly beyond his reach, his thoughts often went to Delmar, Carrie, and Cindy Lakey. In the dark he would ponder humanity's capacity for murder, and he would consider his own frequent inability to save the living, and sooner or later he would even explore the idea that his mother had died at his own hands because complications from childbirth had taken her life. Crazy. But the subject made him a little crazy. The fact of death. The fact of murder. The fact that a violent savage hid deep within every man and woman. He wasn't able to come to terms with those inescapable facts, and he supposed he never would. He persisted in believing that life was precious and that humanity was noble—or at least was meant for nobility. Delmar to Carrie to Cindy Lakey: that was the usual late-night progression of memories. When he got that far, he often found himself teetering on the edge of an abyss of irrationality and guilt and despair, and he would sometimes—not often but sometimes—get up, switch on a lamp, and drink until he knocked himself unconscious.
Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey.
If he failed to save the McCaffreys, their names would be added to that list, and henceforth the progression of unwanted memories would be longer: Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey ... Melanie, and Laura.
He wouldn't be able to live with himself then. He knew he was only one cop, only a man like any other, not Atlas, not a knight in shining armor, but deep inside, there was a part of him that wanted to be that knight; and it was that part—the dreamer, the noble fool—that made living worthwhile. If that part of him were ever snuffed out, he couldn't imagine going on. That was why he had to protect Laura and Melanie as if they were his own family. He had come to care for them, and if he let them die now, he too would be dead—at least emotionally and psychologically.
Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey. .. The progression ran its course, and at last he drifted off to sleep with the soft breathing of Laura and Melanie in the background, like the susurration of a faraway sea.
*  *  *
Sheldon Tolbeck ran into the night, across the white meadow, through snow that was almost knee-deep in places. The mountainside was doubly frosted by both severe cold and frigid lunar light. As he raced from the cabin, he exhaled plumes of vapor and kicked up clouds of snow that drifted away like ghosts behind him; the appearance of ectoplasm was imparted to them by the phantasmagorical radiance of the moon.