The Door to December

Page 15

'Who financed his primary research?'
'He got some of his money from trust funds set up by alumni for research purposes. And corporate grants, of course. And as I said, the government.'
'Mostly the government?'
'I'd say mostly.'
He frowned. 'Well, if Dylan McCaffrey was a nut, why would the government want to deal with him?'
'Oh, well, he was a nut, and his interest in the occult was as peculiar as it was exasperating, but he was brilliant. I'll give him that. With a more stable personality, his intellect would've taken him all the way. He'd have been famous in his field and maybe even to the general public.'
'Did he get Pentagon funding?'
'Yes.'
'What would he have been working on for the Pentagon?'
'Can't say. For one thing, I don't know. I could check the files, but even if I knew, I couldn't say. You don't have security clearance.'
'Fair enough. What can you tell me about Wilhelm Hoffritz?'
'He was slime.'
Dan laughed. 'Doctor... Marge, you certainly don't mince words.'
'It's only the truth. Hoffritz was an elitist son of a bitch. He wanted in the worst way to be chairman of this department. Never had a chance. Everyone knew what he'd be like if he had power over us. Vicious. Abusive. He'd have run the entire department right into the ground.'
'He was doing Defense research too?'
'Almost exclusively. Can't tell you about that, either.'
'Rumor has it that he was forced out of the university.'
'That was a banner day for UCLA.'
'Why was he gotten rid of?'
'There was this young girl, a student—'
'Ah.'
'Much worse than you think,' Marge said. 'It wasn't just moral turpitude. He wasn't the first professor to sleep with a student. Half the men on the faculty would be dismissed, and maybe as much as a fifth of the women, if that rule was well enforced. He was ha**ng s*x with her, yes, but he also beat her up and put her in hospital. Their relationship was ... Kinky, is a kind word for it. One night, it got out of hand.'
'Are you talking about bondage games or something?' Dan asked.
'Yes. Hoffritz was a sadist.'
'And the girl cooperated? She was a masochist?'
'Yes. But she got more than she bargained for. One night Hoffritz lost control, broke her nose, three fingers, her left arm. I went to hospital, saw her. Both eyes blackened, split lip, badly bruised.'
*  *  *
Laura and Earl stood at the window, watching Flash and the tall man move down the walk in the deepening twilight. The telephone-company van was only a lumpish shape, all details obscured, as the oncoming night knitted together with the shadows under the curbside jacarandas.
She said, 'FBI, huh? They won't go away?'
'No.'
'Even though I'm aware of them now.'
'Well, they're not convinced you were conspiring with your husband. In fact, that would be one of the less likely possibilities in their eyes. They still figure someone—whoever was financing Dylan's research—will come after Melanie, and they want to be here when it happens.'
'But I still need you,' she said. 'In case the FBI itself takes my daughter.'
'Yes. If that's what comes down, you'll need a witness in order to go after them in the courts.'
She went to the couch and sat on the edge, shoulders hunched, head bowed, arms propped on her thighs. 'I feel as if I'm losing my mind.'
'Everything'll work out if—'
He was interrupted by Melanie's scream.
*  *  *
Dan winced at Marge's description of the battered student. 'But Hoffritz has no arrest record.'
'The girl wouldn't press charges.'
'He did that to her, and she let him get away with it? Why?'
Marge got up, went to the window, and stared down at the campus. The orange light of sunset had given way to the grays and blues of twilight. A few clouds had sailed in from the sea. At last, the psychologist said, 'When we put Willy Hoffritz on suspension and started looking into his previous relationships with students, we found this girl wasn't the first. There were at least four others over the years, four that we know of all undergraduates, sexually involved with Hoffritz, all playing masochist to his sadist, although none of them had been seriously injured. Until this girl, it was always more of a nasty game than anything. Those first four were willing to talk about it when we insisted, and because of our interviews with them, we uncovered some interesting, appalling ... and frightening information.'
Dan didn't press her to continue. He suspected that it was painful and humiliating for her to admit that a colleague—even one she didn't like—was capable of these things and that the academic community was no more noble than the human race at large. But she was a realist who could face up to unpleasant truths, a rare creature both in and out of academia, and she would tell him everything. She just needed to do it at her own pace.
Still facing the twilight, she said, 'None of those first four girls was promiscuous, Dan. Good kids from good families, here to obtain an education, not to escape parental authority and get some kicks. In fact, two of the four were virgins before they fell under Hoffritz's spell. And none was ever involved in sado-masochistic relationships before Hoffritz, and certainly not after. They were repulsed by the memories of what they had let him do to them.'
She fell silent again.
He decided that she wanted him to ask a question now, and he said, 'Well, if they didn't like it, why did they do it?'
'The answer to that is a bit complex.'
'I can handle it. I'm a bit complex myself.'
She turned from the window and smiled, but only briefly. What she had to tell him obviated amusement. 'We discovered that each of those four girls had been voluntarily involved in undisclosed behavior-modification experiments with Hoffritz. Those experiments included posthypnotic suggestion and a variety of ego-suppressing drugs.'
'Why would they want to get involved with something like that?'
'To please a professor, to get a good grade. Or maybe because it actually interested them. Students are sometimes interested in the things they study, even these days, even the low-caliber students we've been getting lately. And Hoffritz did have a certain charm, which was more effective with some people than others.'
'Not with you.'
'When he turned on the charm, I found him even more slimy than usual. Anyway, he was teaching these girls, and he charmed them, and you mustn't forget that he was well published and well known in his field. He had earned a certain respect.'
'And it was after these experiments started that each girl found herself sexually involved with him.'
'Yes.'
'So you think he used hypnosis, drugs, subconscious programming, to ... well, to convert them?'
'To program their psychological matrices to include promiscuity and masochism. Yes. That's exactly what I think.'
*  *  *
Melanie's shrill scream filled the house.
Shouting her daughter's name, Laura hurried behind Earl Benton, down the hall. Revolver in hand, the bodyguard entered the child's room ahead of Laura and snapped on the light.
Melanie was alone. The menace that had elicited her screams was one that only she could see.
Dressed in white socks and the pair of white cotton underpants that she had been wearing during her nap, the child was crouched in a corner, hands held in front of her to ward off an invisible enemy, shrieking so fiercely that she must have been hurting her throat. She looked so fragile, so pitifully vulnerable.
Laura was briefly overwhelmed with loathing for Dylan. She almost sagged, almost went limp, almost crumpled under the weight of her anger.
Earl holstered his gun. He reached out to Melanie, but she struck his hands and scrambled away from him, along the baseboard.
'Melanie, honey, stop! It's all right,' Laura said.
The girl didn't heed her mother. She reached the next corner, sat down, drew her legs up, fisted her small hands, and held them up defensively. She was no longer screaming, but she made a strange, rhythmic, panicky sound: 'Uh ... uh ... uh ... uh ... uh ...'
Crouching in front of her, Earl said, 'It's okay, kid.'
'Uh ... uh ... uh ... uh ...'
'It's okay now. It really is. It's okay, Melanie. I'll take care of you.'
'The d-d-door,' Melanie said. 'The door. Don't let it open!'
'It's shut,' Laura said, hurrying to her, kneeling by her. 'The door is shut and locked, honey.'
'Keep it shut!'
'Don't you remember, baby? There's a big, new, heavy lock on the door,' Laura said. 'Don't you remember?'
Earl glanced at Laura, obviously puzzled.
'The door is shut,' Laura continued. 'Locked. Sealed. Nailed shut. Nobody can open it, honey. Nobody.'
Fat tears welled in the child's eyes, spilled down her cheeks.
'I'll take care of you,' Earl said soothingly.
'Baby, you're safe here. No one can hurt you.'
Melanie sighed, and the fear ebbed out of her face.
'You're safe. Perfectly safe now.'
The girl put one pale hand to her head and began to twist a strand of hair in that absentminded way that any ordinary girl might twist her hair when preoccupied with thoughts of boys or horses or pajama parties or any of the other things that preoccupied kids her age. Indeed, after the bizarre behavior that she had displayed thus far, after alternating between extremes of hysteria and motionless catatonia, it was both moving and encouraging to see her playing with her hair, because that was such a normal act—a small thing, simple, hardly a breakthrough, not a crack in her hard autistic shield, but normal.
Seizing the moment, Laura said, 'Would you like to go to a beauty shop with me, baby? Hmmmm? You've never been to a real beauty shop. We'll go and get our hair done together. How would you like that?'
Although her eyes remained somewhat glassy, Melanie's brow furrowed, and she seemed to be considering the proposition.
'Lord knows, you need something done with your hair,' Laura said, anxiously trying to preserve the moment, expand upon it, deepen and broaden this unexpected contact with the girl inside the autistic shell. 'We'll get it cut and styled. Maybe curled. How would you like your hair curled, honey? Oh, you'd look just great with lots of curls.'
The girl's face softened, and a smile threatened to take possession of her mouth.
'And after the beauty shop, we could go shopping for clothes. How about that, honey? Lots of new dresses. Dresses and sweaters. Even one of the glitzy new jackets the kids are wearing. You'd like that, I bet.'
Melanie's unfinished smile stopped forming. Although Laura kept talking, the mood was gone as suddenly as it had come. The girl's placid expression gave way to a look of disgust, as if she had seen something in her private world that horrified and repulsed her.
Then she did a startling and disturbing thing: She struck herself with her small fists, struck hard at her knees and thighs, with a loud smacking sound, then pounded her chest—
'Melanie!'
—and swung both fists at the same time, pounding her withered biceps and her shoulders, pummeling herself fiercely, with unexpected strength and fury, trying to hurt herself.
'Stop it! Melanie!' Laura was shocked and frightened by her daughter's sudden self-destructive frenzy.
Melanie punched herself in the face.
'I got her!' Earl shouted.
The girl bit him as he tried to restrain her. She freed one hand and clawed her own chest with sufficient ferocity to draw blood.
'Jesus!' Earl said as the girl kicked him with her bare feet and twisted loose again.
*  *  *
Frowning at Marge, Dan said, 'Programmed them to be promiscuous and masochistic? Is that sort of thing possible?'
She nodded. 'If the psychologist has a deep and broad knowledge of modern brainwashing techniques, and if he's unscrupulous, and if he has either a willing subject or one he can physically detain and control for lengthy periods—then it's possible. But it usually takes a long time, a lot of patience and perseverance. The astonishing and frightening thing in this case is that Hoffritz seems to have been able to program these girls in a matter of weeks, after working with them only an hour or two a day, just three or four times a week. Apparently, he developed some new and damned effective methods of psychological conditioning. But with the first four, it wasn't long-lasting, never longer than a few weeks or months. Eventually, each girl's original personality resurfaced. First she felt guilty about her sexual acrobatics with Hoffritz but continued to take perverse pleasure in the humiliation and pain of her masochistic role. Then she gradually grew to fear and despise the whole sadomasochistic aspect of the relationship. Each of these kids said it was like waking from a dream when they finally began to want to be free to Hoffritz. All four girls eventually found the will to break it off.'
'Good God,' Dan said.
'I believe there is a good one, but sometimes I wonder why He lets men like Hoffritz walk the earth.'
'Why didn't these girls report him to the police ... or at least to university officials?'
'They were deeply ashamed. And until we found and questioned them, they never suspected that their masochistic aberrations were Hoffritz's work. They all thought those twisted desires had been in them all along.'
'But that's amazing. They knew they were involved in behavior-modification experiments. So when they started behaving in ways they'd never behaved before—'
She held up one hand, stopping him. 'Willy Hoffritz probably implanted posthypnotic directives that inhibited each girl from considering the possibility that he was responsible for her new behavior.'
It scared Dan to think the brain was just so much Silly Putty that could be so easily manipulated.
*  *  *
Melanie scuttled past Earl and sprang to her feet and took two awkward steps into the middle of the bedroom, where she stopped and swayed and almost fell. She began once more to scourge herself, hammering herself as if she felt that she deserved to be punished or as if she were trying to drive some dark spirit from her traitorous flesh.
Stepping close, grunting as the small fists glanced off her, Laura threw her arms around her daughter, hugged her, trying to pin the child's arms at her sides.
When her hands were restrained, Melanie still didn't settle down. She kicked and screamed.