Tick Tock

TWO

The gun that Tommy took from the nightstand drawer was a Heckler & Koch P7 M13. He had purchased it years ago, after the Los Angeles riots that had been sparked by the Rodney King case.

In those days, his merciless imagination had plagued him with vivid nightmares of the violent collapse of civilization. His fear had not been limited to dreams, however. He’d been anxiety-stricken for a month or two and uneasy for at least a year, expecting social chaos to erupt at any moment, and for the first time in a decade, he had flashed back to childhood memories of the bloody carnage that had followed the fall of Saigon in the weeks immediately before he and his family had escaped to sea. Having once lived through an apocalypse, he knew that it could happen again.

Orange County had not been besieged by the rampag-ing mobs that had chased Tommy through his dreams, however, and even Los Angeles had soon returned to normal, although normal couldn’t accurately be called civility in the City of Angels these days. He had never needed the pistol.

Until this minute.

Now he desperately needed the weapon not to hold at bay the expected band of looters, not even to defend his home from a single burglar, but to protect himself from a rag doll. Or from whatever was hidden within the rag doll.

As he hurried out of the bedroom and into the second-floor hallway again, Tommy Phan wondered if he might be losing his mind.

Then he wondered why he was wondering. Of course he was losing his mind. He was already past the edge of rationality, plunging off the cliff, on the bobsled of insanity and rocketing down a huge chute that would take him into the cold dark depths of total lunacy.

Rag dolls couldn’t become animate.

Ten-inch-tall humanoid creatures with radiant green snake eyes didn’t exist.

A blood vessel had popped in his brain. Or maybe a cancerous tumour had grown to that critical stage at which it exerted disabling pressure on the brain cells around it. He was hallucinating. That was the only credible explanation.

The door to his office was closed, as he had left it.

The house was as silent as a monastery full of sleeping monks, without even the murmur of whispered prayers. No wind in the eaves. No tick of clock or creak of floorboards.

Trembling, sweating, Tommy sidled along the car-peted hall, approaching the office door with extreme caution.

The pistol shook in his hand. Fully loaded, it weighed only about two and three-quarter pounds, but under the circumstances it felt enormously heavy. It was a squeeze cocker, as safe as any double-action piece on the market, but he pointed the muzzle only at the ceiling and kept his finger lightly on the trigger. Chambered for a.40 Smith & Wesson cartridge, the gun could do serious damage.

He reached the closed door, halted, and hesitated.

The doll - or whatever was hiding in the doll - was far too small to reach the knob. Even if it could climb up to the knob, it would not have sufficient strength - or be able to apply enough leverage - to open the door. The thing was trapped in there.

On the other hand, how could he be so confident that it wouldn’t have the requisite strength or the leverage? This creature was an impossibility to begin with, some-thing out of a science-fiction film, and logic applied to this situation no more than it applied in movies or in dreams.

Tommy stared at the knob, half expecting to see it turn. The polished brass gleamed with a reflection of the hall light overhead. If he peered closely enough, he could discern a weirdly distorted reflection of his own sweat-damp face in the shiny metal: He looked scarier than the thing inside the rag doll.

After a while he put one ear to the door. No sound came from the room beyond - at least none that he could hear over the runaway thudding of his heart.

His legs felt rubbery, and the perceived weight of the Heckler & Koch - more important than its real weight - was now twenty pounds, maybe twenty-five, so heavy that his arm was beginning to ache with the burden of it.

What was the creature doing in there? Was it still ripping out of the cotton fabric, like a waking mummy unwinding its burial wrappings?

He tried again to assure himself that this whole incident was an hallucination brought on by a stroke.

His mother had been right. The cheeseburgers, the French fries, the onion rings, the double-thick choc-olate milkshakes - those were the culprits that had done him in. Although he was only thirty, his abused circulatory system had collapsed under the massive freight of cholesterol that he forced it to carry. When this terminal episode was finished and the pathologists performed an autopsy on him, they would discover that his arteries and veins were clogged with enough greasy fat to lubricate the wheels on all the trains in America. Standing over his coffin, his weeping but quietly smug mother would say, Tuong, I try tell you but you not listen, never listen. Too many cheeseburgers, soon you look like big fat cheeseburger, start seeing little snake-eyed monsters, fall dead of shock in upstairs hall with gun in your hand like dumb whiskey-drinking detective in books. Stupid boy, eating like crazy Americans, and now look what happen.

Inside the office, something rattled softly.

Tommy pressed his ear lighter to the paper-thin crack between the door and the jamb. He heard nothing more, but he was certain that he hadn’t imagined the first sound. The silence in that room now had a menacing quality.

On one level, he was frustrated and angry with himself for continuing to behave as though the snake-eyed mini-kin was actually inside the office, standing on his desk, shedding its white cotton chrysalis.

But, at the same time, instinctively he knew that he was not truly insane, no matter how much he might wish that he were. And he knew that, in fact, he also was not suffering from a stroke or a cerebral haemorrhage, no matter how much more comforting such a condition might be compared with admitting the reality of the rag doll from Hell.

Or wherever it was from. Certainly not from Toys R Us. Not from one of the shops at Disneyland.

No delusion. No figment of imagination. It’s in there.

Well, all right, if it was in the office, then it couldn’t open the door to get out, so the smartest thing to do was leave it alone, go downstairs or even get out of the house altogether, and call the police. Find help.

Right away he saw one serious problem with that sce-nario: The Irvine Police Department didn’t have a doll -from Hell SWAT team that it customarily dispatched upon request. They didn’t have an anti-werewolf strike force, either, or a vampire-vice squad. This was southern California, after all, not darkest Transylvania or New York City.

The authorities would probably write him off as a crackpot akin to those people who reported being raped by Bigfoot or who wore homemade aluminium-foil hats to defeat the sinister extraterrestrials who were supposedly attempting to enslave them with microwave beams broadcast from the mother ship. The cops wouldn’t bother to send anyone in answer to his call.

Or worse, no matter how calmly he described the encounter with the doll, the police might decide that he was suffering a psychotic episode and was a danger to himself and to others. Then he could be committed to a hospital psychiatric ward for observation.

Usually a young writer, struggling to build a reader-ship, needed all the publicity he could get. But Tommy wasn’t able to imagine how his publisher’s promotion of his future novels could be enhanced by a press kit filled with stories about his vacation in a psycho ward and photographs of him in a chic straitjacket. That wasn’t exactly a John Grisham image.

His head was pressed so hard against the door that his ear began to ache, but still he heard no further noises.

Moving back one step, he put his left hand on the brass knob. It was cool against his palm.

The pistol in his right hand now seemed to weigh forty pounds. The weapon looked powerful. With its thirteen-round magazine, it should have given him confidence, but he continued to tremble.

Although he would have liked to walk out and never return, he couldn’t do that. He was a homeowner. The house was an investment that he couldn’t afford to abandon, and bankers seldom cancelled mortgages as a result of devil-doll infestations.

He was virtually immobilized, and his indecisiveness deeply shamed him. Chip Nguyen, the hardboiled detective whose fictional adventures Tommy chronicled, was seldom troubled by doubt. Chip always knew the best thing to do in the most precarious situations. Usually his solutions involved his fists, or a gun, or any blunt instrument close at hand, or a knife wrenched away from his crazed assailant.

Tommy had a gun, a really good gun, a first-rate gun, and his potential assailant was only ten inches tall, but he could not force himself to open the damn door. Chip Nguyen’s assailants were usually well over six feet tall (except for the demented nun in Murder Is a Bad Habit), and frequently they were virtual giants, usually steroid-pumped bodybuilders with massive biceps that made Schwarzenegger look like a sissy.

Wondering how he could ever again write about a man of action if he failed to act decisively in his own moment of crisis, Tommy finally threw off the chains of paralysis and slowly turned the doorknob. The well-lubricated mechanism didn’t squeak - but if the doll was watching, it would see the knob rotate, and it might leap at him the moment that he entered the room.

Just as Tommy had turned the doorknob as far as it would go, a thunderous crash shook the house, rattling window panes. He gasped, let go of the knob, backed across the hall, and assumed a shooter’s stance with the Heckler & Koch gripped in both hands and aimed at the office door.

Then he realized that the crash was thunderous pre-cisely because it was thunder.

When the first peal faded to a soft rumble in a distant corner of the sky, he glanced toward the end of the hallway, where pale flickers of lightning played across the window as a second hard explosion shook the night.

He recalled watching the sable-black clouds roll in from the sea and shroud the moon a little earlier in the evening. Soon the rain would come.

Embarrassed by his overreaction to the thunder, Tommy returned boldly to the office door. He opened it.

Nothing leaped at him.

The only light issued from the desk lamp, leaving deep and dangerous shadows throughout the room. Nevertheless, Tommy was able to see that the mini-kin was not on the floor immediately beyond the doorway.

He stepped across the threshold, fumbled for the wall switch, and turned on the ceiling light. Quicker than a litter of black cats, shadows fled behind and under the furniture.

In the sudden brightness, the mini-kin was not revealed. The creature was no longer on the desk - unless it was crouched against the far side of the computer monitor, waiting for him to venture closer.

When he had entered the office, Tommy had intended to leave the door open behind him, so he could get out fast should a hasty retreat seem wise. Now, however, he realized that were the doll to escape this room, he would have little chance of locating it when required to search the entire house.

He closed the door and stood with his back against it.

Prudence required that he proceed as though on a rat hunt. Keep the little beast confined to one room. Search methodically under the desk. Under the sofa. Behind the pair of filing cabinets. Search in every cranny where the vermin might be hiding until, at last, it was flushed into the open.

The pistol wasn’t the most desirable weapon for a rat hunt. A shovel might have been better. He could have beaten the creature to death with a shovel, but hitting a small target with a round from a pistol might not be easy, even though he was a good marksman.

For one thing, he wouldn’t have the leisure to aim carefully and squeeze off a well-calculated shot as he did on the target range. Instead, he would have to conduct himself in the manner of a soldier at war, relying on instinct and quick reflexes, and he wasn’t sure that he was adequately equipped with either.

‘I am no Chip Nguyen,’ he admitted softly.

Besides, he suspected that the doll-thing was capable of moving fast. Very fast. Even quicker than a rat.

He briefly considered going down to the garage for a shovel but decided that the pistol would have to be good enough. If he left now, he wasn’t confident that he would have the courage to return to the office a second time.

A sudden patter, as of small swift feet, alarmed Tommy. He swung the pistol left, right, left - but then realized that he was hearing only the first fat drops of rain snapping against the clay-tile roof.

His stomach churned with an acidic tide that seemed sufficiently corrosive to dissolve steel nails in an instant if he ate them. Indeed, he felt as though he had eaten about a pound of nails. He wished that he’d had com tay cam for dinner instead of cheeseburgers, stir-fried vegetables with Nuoc Mam sauce instead of onion rings.

Hesitantly he edged across the room and around the desk. The red-pencilled chapter of the latest book and the empty bottle of beer were where he had left them, undisturbed.

The snake-eyed mini-kin was not hiding on the far side of the computer monitor. It wasn’t lurking behind the laser printer, either.

Under the gooseneck desk lamp were two ragged scraps of white cotton fabric. Although somewhat shred-ded, they had a recognizable mitten like shape - obvi-ously the cloth that had covered the thing’s hands. They appeared to have been torn off - perhaps chewed off - at the wrists to free the creature’s real hands from confinement.

Tommy didn’t understand how there could have been any living creature in the doll when he had first handled it and brought it upstairs. The soft cloth casing had seemed to be filled with sand. He had detected no hard edges whatsoever inside the damn thing, no indication of a bone structure, no cranium, no cartilage, none of the firmness of flesh, merely a limpness, a loose shifting, an amorphous quality.

THE DEADLINE IS DAWN no longer glowed on the video display terminal. In the place of that cryp-tic yet ominous message was a single word: TICK-TOCK.

Tommy felt as if he had tumbled like poor Alice into a weird alternate world - not down a rabbit hole, however, but into a video game.

He pushed the wheeled office chair out of the way. Holding the pistol in his right hand and thrusting it in front of him, he cautiously stooped to peer into the kneehole in the desk. Banks of drawers flanked that space, and a dark privacy panel shielded the front of it, yet enough light seeped in for him to be sure that the doll-thing was not there.

The banks of drawers were supported on stubby legs, and Tommy had to lower his face all the way to the floor to squint under them as well. He found nothing, and he rose to his feet once more.

To the left of the knee space were one box drawer and a file drawer. To the right was a stack of three box drawers. He eased them open, one at a time, expecting the mini-kin to explode at his face, but he discovered only his usual business supplies, stapler, cellophane-tape dispenser, scissors, pencils, and files.

Outside, driven by a suddenly fierce wind, rain pounded across the roof, roaring like the marching feet of armies. Raindrops rattled against the windows with a sound as hard as distant gunfire.

The din of the storm would mask the furtive scuttling of the doll-thing if it circled the room to evade him. Or if it crept up behind him.

He glanced over his shoulder, but he wasn’t under imminent attack.

As he searched, he strove to persuade himself that the creature was too small to pose a serious threat to him. A rat was a thoroughly disgusting and frightening little beast too, but it was no match for a grown man and could be dispatched without ever having a chance to inflict a bite. Furthermore, there was no reason to assume that this strange creature’s intention was to harm him any more than he could have had reason to assume that a rat possessed the strength and power and will to plot the murder of a human being.

Nevertheless, he couldn’t convince himself that the threat was less than mortal. His heart continued to race, and his chest was almost painfully tight with apprehension.

He recalled too clearly the radiant green eyes with elliptical black pupils, which had fixed him so threat-eningly from within the rag face. They were the fierce eyes of a predator.

The brass wastebasket was half filled with crumpled sheets of typing paper and pages from a yellow legal pad. He kicked it to see if he could elicit an alarmed response from anything hiding at the bottom of the trash.

The papers rustled when he kicked the can, but at once they settled again into a silent heap.

From the shallow pencil drawer in the desk, Tommy withdrew a ruler and used it to stir the papers in the wastebasket. He poked it violently down into the trash a few times, but nothing squealed or tried to wrest the ruler from his hand.

Chain lightning flared outside, and with arachnid frenzy, the turbulent black shadows of wind-shaken trees thrashed across the glass. Thunder boomed, thunder roared, and thunder tumbled down the coal chute of the night.

Across the room from the desk, a sofa stood against the wall, under framed reproductions of movie posters advertising two of his favourite films. Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward C. Robinson in James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. Bogart and Bacall in Dark Passage.

Occasionally, when his writing wasn’t going well, especially when he was stuck for an engaging plot twist, Tommy stretched out on the sofa, his head elevated on the two decorative red pillows, did some deep-breathing exercises, let his mind drift, and gave his imagination a chance to work. Often he solved the problem within an hour and went back to work. More often he fell asleep - and woke with a flush of shame at his laziness, sticky with perspiration and excessive guilt.

Now Tommy gingerly moved the two red throw pillows. The mini-kin wasn’t hiding behind either of them.

The sofa was built to the floor rather than sup-ported on legs. Consequently, nothing could be hiding under it.

The doll-thing might be behind the sofa, however, and to move such a heavy piece away from the wall, Tommy needed both hands. He would have to put aside the pistol; but he was reluctant to let go of it.

He worriedly surveyed the room.

The only movement was the vaguely phosphorescent wriggle of the rain streaming down the windows.

He placed the gun on a sofa cushion, within easy reach, and he dragged that heavy piece of furniture away from the wall, sure that something hideous, half clothed in torn cotton rags, would come at him, shrieking.

He was uneasily aware of how vulnerable his ankles were to sharp little teeth.

Furthermore, he should have tucked the legs of his jeans into his socks or clamped them shut with rubber bands, as he would have done in an actual rat hunt. He shuddered at the thought of something squirming up the inside of a pants leg, clawing and biting him as it ascended.

The mini-kin had not taken refuge behind the sofa.

Relieved but also frustrated, Tommy left the cumber-some piece standing away from the wall, and he picked up the pistol.

He carefully lifted each of the three square sofa cushions. Nothing waited under them.

Perspiration stung the comer of his right eye. He blotted his face on the sleeve of his flannel shirt and blinked frantically to clear his vision.

The only place left to search was a mahogany credenza to the right of the door, in which he stored reams of typing paper and other supplies. By standing to one side of the cabinet, he was able to peer into the narrow space behind it and satisfy himself that nothing lurked between it and the wall.

The credenza had two pair of doors. He considered firing a few rounds through them before he dared to look inside, but at last he opened them and poked among the supplies without finding the tiny intruder.

Standing in the middle of the office, Tommy turned slowly in a circle, trying to spot the hiding place that he had overlooked. After making a three hundred sixty degree sweep, he was as baffled as ever. He seemed to have searched everywhere.

Yet he was certain that the doll-thing was still in this room. It could not have escaped during the short time that he had been gone to fetch the pistol. Besides, he sensed its hateful presence, the coiled energy of its predatory patience.

He felt something watching him even now.

But watching from where?

‘Come on, damn you, show yourself,’ he said.

In spite of the perspiration that sheathed him and the tremor that periodically fluttered through his belly, Tommy was gaining confidence by the minute. He felt that he was handling this bizarre situation with remarkable aplomb, conducting himself with sufficient courage and calculation to impress even Chip Nguyen.

‘Come on. Where? Where?’

Lightning flashed at the windows, and tree shadows ran spider-quick over glass and streaming rain, and like a warning voice, the tolling thunder seemed to call Tommy’s attention to the drapes.

The drapes. They didn’t extend all the way to the floor, hung only an inch or two below the bottoms of the windows, so he hadn’t thought that the mini-kin could be hiding behind them. But perhaps somehow it had climbed two and a half feet of wall - or had leaped high enough - to snare one of the drapes, and then had pulled itself upward into concealment.

The room had two windows, both facing east. Each window was flanked by panels of heavy fabric, a faux brocade in shades of gold and red, probably polyester, backed by a white lining, which hung from simple brass rods without concealing valances.

All four drapery panels hung in neat folds. None appeared to be pulled out of shape by a rat-size creature clinging to the back.

The fabric was heavy, however, and the doll-thing might have to weigh even more than a rat before it noticeably distorted the gathered pleats of the drapes.

With the pistol cocked and his finger taut on the trigger, Tommy approached the first of the two windows.

Using his left hand, he took hold of one of the drapery panels, hesitated, and then shook it vigorously.

Nothing fell to the floor. Nothing snarled or scrambled for a tighter hold on the fabric.

Although he spread the short drape and lifted it away from the wall, Tommy had to lean behind it to inspect the liner to which the intruder might be clinging. He found nothing.

He repeated the process with the next drapery panel, but no snake-eyed mini-kin hung from the back of it, either.

At the second window, his colourless reflection in the rain-sheathed glass caught his attention, but he averted his gaze when he glimpsed such a stark fear in his own eyes that it belied the confidence and courage on which he had so recently congratulated himself. He didn’t feel as terrified as he looked - but maybe he was successfully repressing his terror in the urgent interest of getting the job done. He didn’t want to think too much about it, because if he acknowledged the truth of what he saw in his eyes, he might be paralysed again by indecision.

Cautious inspection revealed that nothing unnatural was behind the drape to the left of the second window.

One panel of faux brocade remained. Cold and red. Hanging heavy and straight.

He shook it without effect. It felt no different from the other three panels.

Spreading the material, lifting it away from the wall and the window, Tommy leaned in, looked up, and immediately saw the mini-kin hanging above him, not from the liner of the drape, but from the brass rod, sus-pended upside-down by an obscenely glistening black tail that had sprouted from the white cotton fabric, which had once seemed to contain nothing other than the inert filler of a doll. The thing’s two hands, no longer like mittens, sprouting from ragged white cotton sleeves, were mottled black and sour yellow, curled tightly against its cotton-covered chest: four bony fingers and an opposable thumb, as well defined as the hands of a human being, but also exhibiting a reptilian quality, each digit tipped with tiny but wickedly pointed claws.

During two or three eerily and impossibly attenuated seconds of stunned immobility, when it seemed as though the very flow of time had nearly come to a stop, Tommy had an impression of hot green eyes glaring from a loose white sack rather like the headgear worn by the Elephant Man in the old David Lynch movie, numerous small yellow teeth that evidently had chewed open the five sets of crossed black sutures with which the mouth had been sewn shut, and even a pebbled black tongue with a flickering forked tip.

Then a blaze of lightning thawed that moment of heart-freezing confrontation. Time had crept as ponderously as a glacier, but suddenly it was a floodtide surge.

The mini-kin hissed.

Its tail unwound from the brass rod.

It dropped straight at Tommy’s face.

He ducked his head, pulled back.

As thunder crashed in the wake of the lightning, he fired the pistol.

But he had squeezed the trigger in blind panic. The bullet must have torn harmlessly through the top of the drape and lodged in the ceiling.

Hissing fiercely, the doll-thing landed on Tommy’s head. Its tiny claws scrabbled determinedly through his thick hair and pierced his scalp.

Howling, he swiped at the creature with his left hand.

The mini-kin held fast.

Tommy clutched it by the back of the neck and, mercilessly squeezing its throat, tore it off his head.

The beast squirmed ferociously in his grip. It was stronger and more supple than any rat could have been, writhing and flexing and twisting with such shocking power that he could barely hold it.

He was caught in the drape. Tangled somehow. Jesus. The front sight on the Heckler & Koch was not prominent, barely more than a nubbin, but it was snagged in the liner, caught as securely as a fishhook.

A wet guttural snarl issued from the mini-kin, and it gnashed its teeth, trying to bite his fingers, striving to sink its claws into him again.

With a zipper like sound, the liner material tore away from the gun sight.

The creature’s cold, slick tail slithered around Tom-my’s wrist, and the feel of it was so singularly repulsive that he gagged with disgust.

Frantically he flailed out from beneath the entangling drape, and with all of his might, he threw the beast as though firing off a killer pitch in a baseball game.

He heard the damn thing shrieking as it was hurled across the room, and then heard the shriek cut off abruptly as it thudded hard against the far wall, perhaps hard enough to snap its spine. But he didn’t see it hit the plaster, because in the process of freeing himself from the drape, he pulled the brass rod out of its supports, and the entire assemblage - rod and two panels of material, trailing cords - fell on him.

Cursing, he tossed the blinding cowl of faux brocade off his head and thrashed loose of the drapery cords, feeling like Gulliver resisting capture in the land of Lilliput.

The hideous mini-kin was crumpled on the carpet against the baseboard at the far side of the room, near the door. For an instant Tommy thought the thing was dead or at least badly stunned. But then it shook itself, moved.

Thrusting the pistol in front of him, Tommy took a step toward the intruder, intending to finish it off. The mound of fallen drapes snared his feet. He stumbled, lost his balance, and slammed to the floor.

With his left cheek flat against the carpet, he now shared the murderous mini-kin’s plane of view, though from a tilted perspective. His vision blurred for a second when his head hit the floor, but it cleared at once. He was staring at his diminutive adversary, which had risen to its feet.

The creature stood as erect as a man, trailing its six-inch black tail, still dressed in - and mostly concealed by - the rags of the doll’s skin in which it had hidden.

Outside, the storm was reaching a crescendo, ham-mering the night with a greater barrage of lightning and thunder than it had produced thus far. The ceiling light and the desk lamp flickered but did not go out.

The creature sprinted toward Tommy, white cotton cloth flapping like tattered banners.

Tommy’s right arm was stretched out in front of him, and the pistol was still firmly in his grip. He raised the weapon perhaps four inches off the floor, squeeze-cocked it, and fired two shots in quick succession.

One of the rounds must have hit the mini-kin, because it flew off its feet. It tumbled backward all the way to the wall against which Tommy had thrown it earlier.

Proportionately, the slug from the.40 Smith & Wesson cartridge was to this beast what a shell from a major piece of battlefield artillery would be to a human being; the damn thing should have been as devastated - as stone dead - as any man would have been after taking a massive mortar round in the chest. It should have been smashed, shattered, blown to bits.

Instead, the small figure appeared to be intact. Sprawled in a tangle of limbs and scorched white cotton cloth. Racked by spasms. Tail slithering spasmodically back and forth on the floor. Wisps of smoke rising from it. But intact.

Tommy raised his throbbing head for a better view. He didn’t see any splatters of blood on the carpet or on the wall. Not one drop.

The beast stopped shuddering and rolled onto its back. Then it sat up and sighed. The sigh wasn’t one of weariness but of pleasure, as though being shot point-blank in the chest had been an interesting and gratifying experience.

Tommy pushed up onto his knees.

Across the office, the mini-kin put its black-and-yellow-mottled hands on its scorched, smoking abdomen. No it actually reached into its abdomen, digging with its claws, and wrenched something out of itself.

Even from a distance of fifteen feet, Tommy was pretty sure that the lumpish object in the beast’s hands was the misshapen slug from the.40-caliber cartridge. The mini-kin tossed the chunk of lead aside.

Shaky, weak-kneed, slightly nauseous, Tommy got to his feet.

He felt his scalp, where the puncture wounds from the beast’s claws still stung. When he checked his fingertips, he saw only tiny dots of blood.

He hadn’t been seriously hurt.

Yet.

His adversary rose to its feet as well.

Although he was seven times taller than the mini-kin and perhaps thirty times its weight, Tommy was so terrified that he felt as though he might pee in his pants.

Chip Nguyen, hardboiled detective, would never lose control of himself in that fashion, humiliate himself to that extent, but Tommy Phan no longer gave a damn what Chip Nguyen would do. Chip Nguyen was an idiot, a whiskey-drinking fool who put too much faith in guns, martial arts, and tough talk. The most precisely executed and powerfully delivered Tae Kwan Do kick wouldn’t stop a supernaturally animated devil doll that could take a 40-caliber round in its guts and keep on ticking.

Now there was an indisputable truth. Not the kind of truth you would hear on the evening news or read in the newspaper. Not a truth they taught in school or church. Not a truth that would be acclaimed by Carl Sagan or the scientific establishment. Truth nonetheless, from Tommy’s point of view, truth even if the only forum that might report it was a rag like the National Enquirer in a story about the ominous rise of demonic presences in our apocalyptic age and the inevitable forthcoming battle between Satan Incarnate and Saint Elvis on the eve of the new millennium.

Pointing the P7 at the mini-kin, Tommy felt a mad laugh swelling in him, but he choked it down. He wasn’t insane. He had gotten past that fear. It was God Himself who must be mad - and the universe a lunatic asylum - if He made room in Creation for something like this predatory gremlin in a rag-doll disguise.

If the mini-kin was a supernatural presence, as it seemed to be, resistance to it might be stupid and pointless, but Tommy couldn’t very well throw the gun aside, bare his throat, and wait for the killing bite. At least the round from the pistol had knocked the thing down and temporarily stunned it. He might not be able to kill it with the gun, but at least he could fend it off.

Until he ran out of ammunition.

He had fired three rounds. One when the thing had dropped from the drapery rod onto his head. Two more when he had been lying on the floor.

Ten rounds remained in the thirteen-shot magazine. And in his bedroom closet was a box of ammunition, which would buy more time if he could get to it.

The doll-thing cocked its rag-swaddled head and regarded him with a fierce green-eyed hunger. The strips of cotton hanging over its face looked like white dreadlocks.

Thus far the gunfire had probably been pretty much masked by the peals of thunder. Eventually, however, the neighbours in this peaceful city of Irvine would realize that a battle was being waged next door, and they would call the cops.

The doll-thing hissed at him.

God in heaven, what is this - Showdown at the Twilight Zone Corral?

When the police arrived, he would have to tell them what was happening, even though he would sound like a poster boy for paranoid dementia. Then the mini-kin would either brazenly reveal itself, and the rest of the world would plummet into this nightmare with Tommy - or the cunning little demon would hide and let the police transfer their raving ward to a windowless but well-lighted room with rubber wallpaper.

At this moment, Tommy almost didn’t care which of the two scenarios played out. In either case, the immedi-ate terror would be over, and he would be able to avoid peeing in his pants. He’d have time to catch his breath, think about this, maybe even puzzle out an explanation for what had happened here - although that seemed no more likely than his arriving at an understanding of the meaning of life.

The fiend hissed again.

A new possibility occurred to Tommy, and it wasn’t a good one. Maybe the hateful little thing would secretly follow him to the psychiatric ward and continue to torment him there for the rest of his tortured life, cleverly avoiding being seen by the physicians and attendants.

Instead of charging again, the mini-kin abruptly darted toward the sofa, which still stood away from the wall where Tommy had left it during the search.

With the pistol sight, Tommy followed the creature, but he wasn’t able to track it closely enough to justify squeezing off one of his remaining shots.

The thing disappeared behind the sofa.

Buoyed slightly by his adversary’s retreat, Tommy dared to hope that the.40-caliber round had done some damage after all, at least enough to make the little beast cautious. Seeing the mini-kin run from him, he regained a degree perspective regarding the indisputable advantage of size that he enjoyed. A modest measure of his lost confidence returned to him.

Tommy eased across the room to peer around that big piece of furniture. The far end of the sofa still touched the wall, and it was built to the floor, so the space behind it was a V-shaped dead end, yet the mini-kin wasn’t there.

Then he saw the torn flaps of fabric and the ragged hole in the upholstery. The creature had burrowed into the sofa and was now hiding inside it.

Why?

Why ask why?

From the moment the stitches had pulled out of the doll’s face and the first monstrous eye had blinked at him through the tear in the cloth, Tommy had been beyond all the why questions. They were more suitable for a sane universe where logic ruled, not for this place in which he currently found himself. The main issue now was how - how could he stop the beast, how could he save himself? And he also had to ask what next? Even if the utter irrationality of these events made it impossible to anticipate where the night would lead before dawn, he had to try to puzzle out the purpose behind the doll, the course of the plot.

THE DEADLINE IS DAWN.

He didn’t understand that message at all. What dead-line, for God’s sake? Who had established it? What did he have to do to meet the deadline?

TICKTOCK.

Oh, he understood that message well enough. Time was running out. The night was passing as fast as the rain was falling outside, and if he didn’t get his act together, then he was going to be toast before sunrise.

TICKTOCK.

Toast for the hungry mini-kin.

TICKTOCK.

Munch, munch. Crunch, crunch.

His head was spinning - and not simply because he had thumped it hard against the floor when he’d fallen.

He circled the sofa, studying it as he moved.

Fire. Maybe a roaring fire could achieve better results than a bullet.

While the creature was building a nest - or doing whatever the hell it was doing in there - Tommy might be able to sneak down to the garage, siphon a quart of gasoline out of the Corvette, grab a pack of matches from a drawer in the kitchen, and return to set the sofa on fire.

No. No, that would take too long. The repulsive little creepozoid would realize that he was gone, and when he came back, the thing probably wouldn’t be inside the sofa any more.

Now the mini-kin was quiet, which didn’t mean that it was taking a nap. It was scheming at something.

Tommy needed to scheme too. Desperately.

Think, think.

Because of the light-beige carpet, Tommy kept one can of spot remover downstairs and another upstairs in the master bathroom, so he would be able to attack an accidental spill of Pepsi - or whatever - before it became a permanent stain. The can contained approximately one pint of fluid, and in bold red letters the label warned highly flammable.

Highly flammable. That had a pleasant ring to it. Highly flammable, hugely flammable, spectacularly flammable, explosively flammable - no words in the English language sounded sweeter than those.

And on the hearth of the small fireplace in the master bedroom was a battery-sparked butane match with which he could light the gas under the ceramic logs. He should be able to leave the office, grab the spot remover, pluck the match off the hearth, and return here in a minute, maybe less.

One minute. Even as clever as it seemed to be, the mini-kin probably wouldn’t realize that Tommy was out of the room for that brief time.

So now who’s going to be toast?

Tommy smiled at the thought.

From deep in the mysterious creature’s upholstered haven came a creaking and then a sharp twang.

Tommy flinched - and lost his smile.

The beast fell silent once more. It was up to something, all right. But what?

If Tommy retrieved the spot remover and set the sofa on fire, the flames would spread across the carpet and swiftly to the walls. The house might burn down, even if he telephoned the fire department immediately after setting the blaze.

He was fully insured, of course, but the insurance company would refuse to pay if arson was suspected. The fire marshal would probably investigate and discover traces of an accelerant - the spot remover - in the rubble. Tommy would never be able to convince them that he had set the fire as an act of self-defence.

Nevertheless, he was going to ease open the door, step quietly into the hallway, sprint for the can of spot remover, and take his chances withFrom the mini-kin’s lair came the sound of fabric ripping, and one of the seat cushions was dislodged by the beast as it tore out of the sofa directly in front of Tommy. In one dark bony hand it held a six-inch length of a broken seat spring: a spiral of gleaming eighth-inch steel wire.

Shrieking with rage and mindless hatred, its piercing voice as shrill as an electronic oscillation, the creature flung itself off the sofa and at Tommy with such force and velocity that it almost seemed to fly.

He scrambled out of its way, reflexively firing - and wasting - one more round from the P7.

The beast hadn’t been attacking, after all. The lunge had been a feint. It dropped to the carpet and streaked past Tommy, across the office, around the corner of the desk, and out of sight, moving at least as fast as a rat, although running on its hind feet as if it were a man.

Tommy went after it, hoping to comer it and jam the muzzle of the Heckler & Koch against its head and squeeze off one-two-three rounds at zero range, smash its brain if, indeed, it had a brain, because maybe that would devastate it as a single bullet in the guts had failed to do.

When Tommy followed the mini-kin around the desk, he discovered it at an electrical outlet, looking back and up at him. The creature appeared to be grinning through its mask of rags as it jammed the steel spring into the receptacle.

Power surged through bare steel - cracklesnap - and outside in the fuse box, a breaker tripped, and all the lights went out except for a shower of gold and blue sparks that cascaded over the mini-kin. Those fireworks lasted only an instant, however, and then darkness claimed the room.