Tick Tock

THREE

Depleted by distance and filtered by trees, the yellowish glow of the streetlamps barely touched the windows. Rain shimmered down the glass, glimmering with a few dull-brass reflections, but none of that light penetrated to the room.

Tommy was frozen by shock, effectively blind, unable to see anything in the room and trying not to see the fearsome images that his imagination conjured in his mind.

The only sounds were the rataplan of rain on the roof and the moaning of wind in the eaves.

Undoubtedly the doll-thing was alive. The electricity hadn’t fazed it any more than a.40-caliber bullet in the midsection.

Tommy clutched the P7 as if it possessed magical power and could protect him from all the known and unknown terrors of the universe, whether physical or spiritual. In fact, the weapon was useless to him in this saturant darkness. He couldn’t stun the mini-kin with a well-placed shot if he couldn’t see it.

He supposed that by now it had dropped the twisted piece of steel spring and had turned away from the electrical outlet. It would be facing him in the gloom. Grinning through its mummy rags.

Maybe he should open fire, squeeze off all nine shots remaining in the magazine, aiming for the general area where the creature had been when the lights went out. He was almost sure to get lucky with one or two rounds out of nine, for God’s sake, even if he wasn’t any Chip Nguyen. With the mini-kin stunned and twitching, Tommy could run into the second-floor hallway, slam the door between them, leap down the stairs two at a time, and get out of the house.

He didn’t know what the hell he would do after that, where he would go in this rain-swept night, to whom he would turn for help. All he knew was that to have any chance of survival whatsoever, he had to escape from this place.

He was loath to squeeze the trigger and empty the gun.

If he didn’t stun the mini-kin with a blind shot, he would never get to the door. It would catch him, climb his leg and his back with centipede-like quickness, bite the nape of his neck, slip around to his throat, and burrow-for-chew-at-tear-out his carotid artery while he flailed ineffectively - or it would scramble straight over his head, intent upon gouging out his eyes.

He wasn’t just letting his imagination carry him away this time. He could vividly sense the thing’s intentions, as though on some level he was in psychic contact with it.

If the attack came after the pistol magazine was empty, Tommy would panic, stumble, crash into furniture, fall. Once he fell, he would never have a chance to get to his feet again.

Better to conserve ammunition.

He backed up one step, two, but then he halted, overcome by the awful certainty that the little beast was not, after all, in front of him where it had been when the lights failed, but behind him. It had circled him as he had dithered; now it was creeping closer.

Spinning around a hundred and eighty degrees, he thrust the pistol toward the suspected threat.

He was facing into a portion of the room that was even blacker than the end with the windows. He might as well have been adrift at the farthest empty edge of the universe to which the matter and the energy of creation had not yet expanded.

He held his breath.

He listened but could not hear the mini-kin.

Only the rain.

The rain.

The rattling rain.

What scared him most about the intruder was not its monstrous and alien appearance, not its fierce hostility, not its physical spryness or speed, not its rodent-like size that triggered primal fears, and not even the fundamental mystery of its very existence. What sent chills up the hollow of Tommy’s spine and squeezed more cold sweat from him was the new realization that the thing was highly intelligent.

Initially he had assumed that he was dealing with an animal, an unknown and clever beast but a beast none-theless. When it thrust the steel spiral into the electrical outlet, however, it revealed a complex and frightening nature. To be able to adapt a simple sofa spring into an essential tool, to understand the electrical system of the house well enough to disable the office circuit, the beast was not only able to think but was possessed of sophis-ticated knowledge that no mere animal could acquire.

The worst thing Tommy could do was trust to his own animal instincts when his adversary was stalking him with the aid of cold reason and logical deliberation. Sometimes the deer did escape the rifleman by natural wiles, yes, but far more often than not, higher intelligence gave the human hunter an advantage that the deer could never hope to overcome.

So he must carefully think through each move before he made it. Otherwise he was doomed.

He might be doomed anyway.

This was no longer a rat hunt.

The mini-kin’s strategic imposition of darkness revealed that this was a contest between equals. Or at least Tommy hoped it was a contest between equals, because if they weren’t equals, then this was a rat hunt after all, and he was the rat.

By opting for darkness, had the creature merely been trying to minimize Tommy’s size advantage and the threat of the gun - or did it gain an advantage of its own from the darkness? Perhaps, like a cat, it could see as well - or better - at night as it could in daylight.

Or maybe, in the manner of a bloodhound, it could track him by his scent.

If the thing benefited from both the superior intelli-gence of a human being and the more acute senses of an animal, Tommy was screwed.

‘What do you want?’ he asked aloud.

He would not have been surprised if a small whispery voice had responded. Indeed, he almost hoped it would speak to him. Whether it spoke or only hissed, its reply would reveal its location - maybe even clearly enough to allow him to open fire.

‘Why me?’ he asked.

The mini-kin made no sound.

Tommy would have been astonished if such a creature had crawled out of the woodwork one day or squirmed from a hole in the backyard. He might have assumed that the thing was extraterrestrial in nature or that it had escaped from a secret genetic-engineering laboratory where a scientist with a conscience deficit had been hard at work on biological weapons. He had seen all the appli-cable scary movies: He had the requisite background for such speculation.

But how much more astonishing that this thing had been placed on his doorstep in the form of a nearly featureless rag doll out of which it had either burst or swiftly metamorphosed. He had never seen any movie that could provide him with an adequate explanation for that.

Swinging the Heckler & Koch slowly from side to side, he tried again to elicit a telltale response from the tiny intruder: ‘What are you?’

The mini-kin, in its original white cotton skin, brought to mind voodoo, of course, but a voodoo doll was nothing like this creature. A voodoo doll was simply a crude fetish, believed to have magical potency, fashioned in the image of the person meant to be harmed, accessorized with a lock of his hair, or with a few of his nail clippings, or with a drop of his blood. Solemnly convinced that any damage done to the fetish would befall the real person as well, the torturer then stuck it full of pins, or burned it, or ‘drowned’ it in a bucket of water, but the doll was never actually animate. It never showed up on the doorstep of the intended victim to bedevil and assault him.

Nevertheless, into the gloom and the incessant drum-ming of the rain, Tommy said, ‘Voodoo?’

Whether this was voodoo or not, the most important thing he had to learn was who had made the doll. Someone had scissored the cotton fabric and sewn it into the shape of a gingerbread man, and someone had stuffed the empty form with a substance that felt like sand but proved to be a hell of a lot stranger than sand. The doll maker was his ultimate enemy, not the critter that was stalking him.

He was never going to find the doll maker by waiting for the mini-kin to make the next move. Action, not reaction, was the source of solutions.

Because he had established a dialogue with the little beast, even if its every response was the choice not to respond, Tommy was more confident than at any time since he’d felt the insectoid squirming of the creature’s heartbeat beneath his thumb. He was a writer, so using words gave him a comforting sense of control.

Perhaps the questions he tossed into the darkness diminished the mini-kin’s confidence in direct proportion to the degree that they increased his own. If phrased crisply and spoken with authority, his questions might convince the beast that its prey wasn’t afraid of it and wasn’t likely to be easily overpowered. Anyway, he was reassured to think this might be the case.

His strategy was akin to one he would have used if confronted by a growling dog: Show no fear.

Unfortunately, he had already shown more than a little fear, so he needed to rehabilitate his image. He wished he could stop sweating; he wondered if the thing could smell his perspiration.

Behind his armour of forcefully stated questions, he found the courage to move toward the centre of the wall opposite the windows, where the door should be: ‘What are you, dammit? What right do you have to come into my house? Who made you, left you on the porch, rang the bell?’

Tommy bumped into the door, fumbled for the knob, found it - and still the mini-kin did not attack.

When he yanked open the door, he discovered that the lights were also off in the upstairs hall, which shared a circuit with his office. Lamps were aglow on the first floor, and pale light rose at the stairs.

As Tommy crossed the threshold, leaving the office, the mini-kin shot between his legs. He didn’t see it at first, but he heard it hiss and felt it brush against his jeans.

He kicked, missed, kicked again.

A scuttling sound and a snarl revealed that the creature was moving away from him. Fast.

At the head of the stairs, it appeared in silhouette against the rising light. It turned and fixed him with its radiant green eyes.

Tommy squeeze-cocked the P7.

The rag-entwined mini-kin raised one gnarly fist, shook it, and shrieked defiantly. Its cry was small but shrill, piercing, and utterly unlike the voice of anything else on earth.

Tommy took aim.

The creature scrambled down the stairs and out of sight before Tommy could squeeze off a shot.

He was surprised that it was fleeing from him, and then he was relieved. The pistol and his new strategy of showing no fear seemed to have given the beast second thoughts.

As quickly as surprise had given way to relief, how-ever, relief now turned to alarm. In the gloom and at a distance, he could not be certain, but he thought that the creature had still been holding the six-inch length of spring steel, not in the fist that it had raised but in the hand held at its side.

‘Oh, shit.’

His newfound confidence rapidly draining away, Tommy ran to the stairs.

The mini-kin wasn’t in sight.

Tommy descended the steps two at a time. He almost fell at the landing, grabbed the newel post to keep his bal-ance, and saw that the lower steps were deserted too.

Movement drew his attention. The mini-kin streaked across the small foyer and vanished into the living room.

Tommy realized that he should have gone to the master bedroom for the flashlight in his nightstand drawer. It was too late to go back for it. If he didn’t move fast, he was going to be in an increasingly untenable position: either trapped in a pitch-black house where all the electrical circuits were disabled or driven on foot into the storm where the mini-kin could repeatedly attack and retreat with the cover of darkness and rain.

Though the thing was only a tiny fraction as strong as he was, its supernatural resilience and maniacal relentlessness compensated for its comparative physical weakness. It was not merely pretending to be fearless, as Tommy had pretended to be while talking his way out of his office. Though the creature was of Lilliputian dimen-sions, its reckless confidence was genuine; it expected to win, to chase him down, to get him.

Cursing, Tommy raced down the last flight. As he came off the bottom step, he heard a hard crackle-snap, and the lights went out in the living room and the foyer.

He turned right, into the dining room. The brass and milk-glass chandelier shed a pleasant light on the highly polished top of the maple table.

He glimpsed himself in the ornately framed mirror above the sideboard. His hair was disarranged. His eyes were wide, whites showing all the way around. He looked demented.

As Tommy pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen, the mini-kin squealed behind him. The familiar sound of an electric arc snapped again, and the dining-room lights went out.

Fortunately the kitchen lights were on a different circuit from those in the dining room. The overhead fluorescent tubes were still bright.

He snatched the car keys off the pegboard. They jangled, and though their ringing was flat and unmusical and utterly unlike bells, Tommy was reminded of the bells that were rung in church during Mass. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. For an instant he felt not like the potential victim that he was but, instead, felt a terrible weight of guilt, as though the extraordinary trouble that had befallen him this night was of his own making and was merely what he deserved.

The easy-action pivot hinges on the door to the dining room swung so smoothly that even the ten-inch mini-kin was able to squeeze into the kitchen close behind Tommy. With the keys ringing in his hand, with the remembered scent of incense as strong and sweet as it had ever been when he had served as an altar boy, he didn’t dare pause to look back, but he could hear the thing’s tiny clawed feet click-click-clicking against the tile floor.

He stepped into the laundry room and slammed the door behind him before the creature could follow.

No lock. Didn’t matter. The mini-kin wouldn’t be able to climb up and turn the knob on the other side. It couldn’t follow him any farther.

Even as Tommy turned away from the door, the lights failed in the laundry room. They must be on the same circuit with those in the kitchen, which the creature evidently had just shorted. He groped forward through the blackness.

At the end of this small rectangular space, past the washer and dryer, opposite the door that he had just closed, was the connecting door to the garage. It featured a dead-bolt lock with a thumb-turn on this side.

In the garage, the lights still functioned.

On this side, the deadbolt on the laundry-room door could be engaged only with a key. He didn’t see any point in taking time to lock it.

The big overhead door began to rumble upward when Tommy tapped the wall switch, and storm wind chuffed like a pack of dogs at the widening space at the bottom.

He hurriedly circled the Corvette to the driver’s side. The garage lights blinked out, and the roll-up door stopped ascending when it was still half blocking the exit.

No.

The mini-kin could not have gotten through two closed doors and into the garage to cause a short circuit. And there hadn’t been time for it to race out of the house, find the electric-service panel, climb the conduit on the wall, open the fuse box, and trip a breaker.

Yet the garage was as black as the darkest hemisphere of some strange moon never touched by the sun. And the roll-up door was only half open.

Maybe power had been lost throughout the neighbourhood because of the storm.

Frantically Tommy pawed at the darkness overhead until he located the dangling release chain that dis-connected the garage door from the electric motor that operated it. Still clutching the pistol, he rushed to the door and manually pushed it up, all the way open.

A noisy burst of November wind threw shatters of cold rain in his face. The balminess of the afternoon was gone. The temperature had plummeted at least twenty degrees since he had left the Corvette dealership in his new car and headed south along the coast.

He expected to see the mini-kin in the driveway, green eyes glaring, but the sodium-yellow drizzle from a nearby streetlamp revealed that the thing was not there.

Across the street, warm welcoming lights shone in the windows of other houses. The same was true at the homes to the left and right of his own.

The loss of power in his garage had nothing to do with the storm. He had never really believed that it did.

Although he was convinced he would be attacked before he reached the Corvette, he got behind the steering wheel and slammed the door without encountering the mini-kin.

He put the pistol on the passenger seat, within easy reach. He had been gripping the weapon so desperately and for so long that his right hand remained curled to the shape of it. He was forced to concentrate on flexing his half-numb fingers in order to relax them and regain use of them.

The engine started with no hesitation.

The headlights splashed against the back wall of the garage, revealing a workbench, neatly racked tools, a cool forty-year-old sign from a Shell service station, and a framed poster of Jimmy Dean leaning against the 1949 Mercury that he had driven in Rebel Without a Cause.

Backing out of the garage, Tommy expected the mini-kin to ravel down from the rafters on a web of its own making, directly onto the windshield. Still largely concealed by the increasingly soiled and ragged fabric that had been the skin of its doll phase, the creature had appeared to be partly reptilian, with the scales and the eyes of a serpent, but Tommy had perceived insectile qualities to it as well, features and capabilities not yet fully revealed.

He reversed into the driveway, into torrents of rain, switched on the windshield wipers, and continued into the street, leaving the garage door open, other doors unlocked.

At worst, what might get into the house during his absence? A stray cat or dog? Maybe a burglar? A couple of dim-witted, doped-up kids with a can of red spray paint and vandalism on their minds?

After escaping from the devil doll, Tommy was ready and able to deal with any number of ordinary uninvited guests.

But as he shifted the Corvette out of reverse and drove away from his house, he was stricken by an unsettling premonition: I’ll never see this place again.

He was driving too fast for a residential neighbourhood, almost flying, casting up ten-foot high wings of white water as he raced through a flooded intersection, but he was unwilling to slow down. He felt that the gates of Hell had been flung open and that each creature among the legion of monstrosities seething out of those portals was intent on the same prey: Tommy Phan.

Maybe it was foolish to believe that demons existed, and it was certainly foolish to believe - if they did exist - that he could outrun them by virtue of owning a sports car with three hundred horsepower. Nevertheless, he drove as if pursued by Satan.

A few minutes later, on University Drive, passing the Irvine campus of the University of California, Tommy realized that he was squinting at the rear-view mirror every few seconds - as if one of the cars far behind him on the rain-washed, tree-lined avenue might be driven by the mini-kin. The absurdity of that thought was like a hammer that broke some of the chains of his anxiety, and he finally eased up on the accelerator.

Still damp with cold sweat and with the slanting rain that had blown through the open garage door, Tommy shivered violently. He switched on the car heater.

He was half dazed, as though the dose of terror he had taken was a potent drug with a lingering narcotic effect. His thinking was cloudy. He couldn’t focus on what needed to be done next, on deciding where - and to whom - he should turn.

He wanted to be Chip Nguyen and live in the world of detective fiction, where blazing guns and hard fists and sardonic wit always led to satisfactory resolutions. Where the motives of adversaries were simple greed, envy, and jealousy. Where angst was fun, and where amused misanthropy was a sure sign of a private investigator’s superior moral character. Where bouts of alcoholic mel-ancholy were comforting rather than dispiriting. Where the villains, by God, never had serpent eyes, or sharp little yellow teeth, or rat like tails.

Living in Chip’s world was impossible, however, so Tommy was willing to settle for a nap. He wanted to pull off the road, lie down, curl into the foetal position, and go to sleep for a few hours. He was exhausted. His limbs felt weak. As though the earth was suddenly rotating at a much higher speed than before, a heavier gravity oppressed his mind and heart.

In spite of the hot air streaming from the heater vents, he was not getting warmer. The chill that afflicted him didn’t come from the November night or from the rain; it arose from deep within him.

The metronomic thump of the windshield wipers lulled him, and more than once he came out of a sort of waking dream to find that he was in a different neighbourhood from the one he last remembered. He relentlessly cruised residential streets, as if searching for the address of a friend, although every time that he ascended from his strange daze, he was never on a street where anyone of his acquaintance had ever lived.

He understood what was wrong. He was a well-educated man with an unshakably rational viewpoint; he had always assumed that he could clearly read the big map of life and that he had both hands firmly on the controls of his destiny as he cruised confidently into the future. From the moment that the two black sutures had popped and the green eye had glared at him out of the doll’s torn face, however, his world began to collapse. It was collapsing still. Forget the great laws of physics, the logic of mathematics, the dissectible truths of biology that, as a student, he had struggled so hard to grasp. They might still apply, but they didn’t explain enough, not any more. Once he had thought that they explained everything, but everything that he believed was proving to be only half the story. He was confused, lost, and dispirited, as only a rationalist of utter conviction could be upon encountering irrefutable evidence that something supernatural was at play in the universe.

He might have accepted the devil doll with greater equanimity if he had still been in Vietnam, the Land of Seagull and Fox, where his mother’s folk tales were set. In that Asian world of jungles, limpid waters, and blue mountains like mirages, it was easier to believe in the fantastic, such as the story of the mandarin named Tu Thuc, who had climbed Mount Phi Lai and, at the top, had found the Land of Bliss where the immortals lived in perfect happiness and harmony. On humid nights along the banks of the Mekong River or on the shores of the South China Sea, the air seemed thickened by magic, which Tommy could remember even after twenty-two years, and in that far place, one could give some credit to the tale of the good genie of medicine, Tien Thai, and his flying mountain, or to the story of beautiful Nhan Diep, the faithless wife who, after her death, returned to earth in the form of the first buzzing cloud of mosquitoes ever seen, initially to afflict her husband and then all of humankind. If Tommy were in Vietnam again - and returned to childhood - he might be able to believe in devil dolls too, although Vietnamese folk tales were generally gentle in nature and featured no monsters like the shrieking, sharp-toothed mini-kin.

But this was the United States of America, the land of the free and the brave, the land of Big Business and Big Science, from which men had gone to the moon and back, where movies and television had been invented, where the atom had first been split, where scientists were rapidly mapping the human genome and devel-oping nanotechnology and shining light into the deepest mysteries of existence - where eighty-five percent of the citizenry declared themselves deeply religious, yes, but where fewer than three in ten attended church. This was America, damn it, where you could solve any problem with a screwdriver and a wrench, or with a computer, or with fists and a handgun, or at worst with the help of a therapist and a twelve-step program to effect personal enlightenment and change.

Screwdrivers, wrenches, computers, fists, guns, and therapists weren’t going to help him cope with the mini-kin if he returned to his house and found the creature still in residence. And it would be there; he had no doubt about that.

It would be waiting.

It had a job to finish.

It had been sent to kill him.

Tommy didn’t know how he could be so sure of the mini-kin’s ultimate purpose, but he knew that what he intuited was true. Little assassin.

He could still feel a vaguely sore spot on his tongue where he had been pricked by the wind-blown melaleuca leaf when he had opened the front door of his house and discovered the doll lying on the porch.

Holding the steering wheel with only his left hand, he pressed his right hand to his thigh. He had no difficulty locating the spot where the pin with the black enamel head had pierced his flesh.

Two wounds. Both small but clearly symbolic.

Now, Tommy cruised Spyglass Drive, piloting the Cor-vette along ridges stippled with million-dollar houses that overlooked Newport Beach, past graceful California -pepper trees thrashing in the wind, and his thoughts were as chaotic as his driving was aimless. Cold drowning tides of rain came off the black Pacific and, although the torrents couldn’t touch him now, they seemed to wash confidence and reason out of him, leaving him limp with doubt and feverish with superstitious speculations.

He wanted to go to his parents’ cosy house in Huntington Beach, take refuge in the bosom of his family. His mother was the person most likely to believe his story. Mothers were required by law - not the law of men, but natural law - to be able to discern the truth when their children told it to them, to be quick to defend them against the disbelief of others. If he stared directly into his mother’s eyes and explained about the devil doll, she would know that he was not lying. Then he would no longer be alone in his terror.

His mother would convince his father that the threat, although outlandish, was real, whereupon his father would convince Tommy’s two brothers and his sister. Then there would be six of them - an entire family -standing against the unnatural power that had sent the hateful mini-kin to him. Together they could triumph as they had triumphed so long ago against the communists in Vietnam and against the Thai pirates on the South China Sea.

But instead of turning the Corvette toward Huntington Beach, Tommy swung left on El Capitan and drove higher into the night and the storm. He wove from street to street across Spyglass Hill, past the houses of strangers who would never in this lifetime believe him if he rang their doorbells and told them his incredible story.

He was reluctant to go to his parents for fear that he had put too much emotional distance between them and himself to warrant the unconditional acceptance that they once would have given him. He might babble out the story of the devil doll only to see his mother’s face pinch with disapproval and hear her say, You drink whiskey like your silly detective?

No whiskey, Mom.

I smell whiskey.

I had one beer.

One beer, soon whiskey.

I don’t like whiskey.

You carry guns in every pocket- One gun, Mom.

-drive car like crazy maniac, chase blondes- No blondes.

-drink whiskey like it only tea, then surprised when see demons and dragons- No dragons, Mom.

-demons and ghosts- No ghosts, Mom.

-demons, dragons, ghosts. You better come home to stay, Tuong.

Tommy.

Better start living right way, Tuong.

Tommy.

Better stop drinking whiskey like tough guy, stop trying always to be so American, too American.

Tommy groaned aloud in misery.

Still letting the imaginary conversation play out in his head, he cautiously steered the Corvette around an immense branch from a coral tree that had blown down in the storm and blocked half the street.

He decided not to go home to Huntington Beach, because he was afraid that, once he got there, he would find that it wasn’t really home any more. Then, having discovered that he didn’t belong in the Phan house in quite the way that he had once belonged, and not being able to return to his own mini-kin-haunted house in Irvine, what place would he be able to call home? Nowhere. He would be homeless in a deeper sense than were those vagrants who wandered the streets with all their worldly goods in a shopping cart.

That was a discovery he was not yet prepared to make - even if he had to deal with the mini-kin alone.

Deciding that he should at least call his mother, he picked up the car phone. But he put it down again without punching in her number.

Car phones for big shots. You big shot now? Phone and drive too dangerous. Gun in one hand, whiskey bottle in other, how you hold phone anyway?

Tommy reached to the passenger seat and briefly put his right hand on the Heckler & Koch. The shape of the pistol, the sense of godlike power cast in steel, did not comfort him.

Minutes later, after the rhythmic thump of the wind-shield wipers had once more half hypnotized him, he came out of his daze and saw that he was on MacArthur Boulevard, on the southern end of Newport Beach. He was travelling west in light traffic.

According to the dashboard clock, the time was 10:26

p. m.

He couldn’t go on like this, driving aimlessly through the night until he ran out of fuel. Preoccupied as he was, he might become so inattentive that he skidded on the rain-slick pavement and crashed into another car.

He decided to seek family help, after all, but not from his mother and father. He would go to his older and beloved brother Gi Minh Phan.

Gi had changed his name too - from Phan Minh Gi, merely reversing the order to place the surname last. For a while he had considered taking an American name, as Tommy had done, but decided against it, which earned points with their parents, who were far too conservative to adopt new names themselves. Gi had given American names to his four children - Heather, Jennifer, Kevin, and Wesley; however, that was all right with Mom and Dad because all four had been born in the United States.

The oldest of the three Phan brothers, Ton That, eight years Tommy’s senior, had five children, all born in the USA, and each of them enjoyed both a Vietnamese and an American name. Ton’s first-born was a daughter whose legal name was Mary Rebecca but who was also known as Thu-Ha. Ton’s kids called one another by their Vietnamese names when they were around their grandparents and other traditionalist elders, used their American names when with friends of their own age, and used both names with their parents as the situation seemed to require, yet not one of them had an identity crisis.

In addition to a nagging inability to define his own identity in a way that fully satisfied him - and compared to his brothers - Tommy suffered from an offspring crisis. He didn’t have any. To his mother, this was worse than a crisis; this was a tragedy. His parents were still old-world enough to think of children neither as mere responsibil-ities nor as hostages to fortune, but primarily as wealth, as blessings. In their view, the larger that a family grew, the better chance it had to survive the turmoil of the world and the more successful it would inevi-tably become. At thirty, unmarried, childless, with no prospects - except the prospect of a successful career as a novelist writing silly stories about a whiskey-guzzling maniac detective - Tommy was undermining his parents’ dreams of a sprawling Phan empire and the security that, to them, sheer numbers ensured.

His brother Ton, sixteen when they had fled Vietnam, was still sufficiently mired in the ways of the old world that he shared some of the elder Phans’ frustration with Tommy. Ton and Tommy had been reasonably close as brothers, but they had never been the kind of brothers who were also friends. Gi, on the other hand, though six years older than Tommy, was a brother and a friend and a confidant - or once had been - and if anyone in this world would give the devil-doll story a fair hearing, it would be Gi.

As Tommy crossed San Juaquin Hills Road, less than a mile from Pacific Coast Highway, he was planning the easiest route north to the family bakery in Garden Grove, where Gi managed the graveyard shift, so he didn’t immediately react to the peculiar noise that rose from the Corvette’s engine compartment. When he finally took note of it, he realized that he’d been dimly aware of the noise on a subconscious level for a couple of minutes:

underlying the monotonous squeak-and-thump of the windshield wipers - a soft rattling, a whispery scraping as of metal abrading metal.

He was at last warm. He turned off the heater in order to hear the sound better.

Something was loose… and working steadily looser. Frowning, he leaned over the steering wheel, listening closely.

The noise persisted, low but troubling. He thought he detected an industrious quality to it.

He felt a queer vibration through the floorboards. The noise grew no louder, but the vibration increased.

Tommy glanced at the rear-view mirror. No traffic was close behind him, so he eased his foot off the accelerator.

As the sports car gradually slowed from fifty-five to forty miles per hour, the noise did not diminish in relation to the speed, but continued unabated.

The shoulder on his side of the highway was narrow, with a slope and then a dark field or a gully beyond, and Tommy didn’t want to be forced to pull off here in the blinding downpour. The Newport Beach Library lay in the near distance, deserted looking at this hour, and the lights of the high-rise office buildings and hotels in Fashion Island loomed somewhat farther away through the silvery veils of rain, but in spite of being in a busy commercial and residential area, this stretch of MacArthur Boulevard was less of a boulevard than its name implied, with no sidewalks or streetlamps along its westbound lanes. He wasn’t sure that he would be able to pull off the pavement far enough to eliminate the risk of being sideswiped - or worse - by passing traffic.

Abruptly the noise stopped.

The vibration ceased, as well.

The ‘vette purred along as smoothly as the dream machine that it was supposed to be.

Tentatively, he increased his speed.

The rattling and scraping didn’t return.

Tommy leaned back in his seat, letting out his pent-up breath, somewhat relieved but still concerned.

From under the hood came a sharp twang as of metal snapping under tremendous stress.

The steering wheel shuddered in Tommy’s hands. It pulled hard to the left.

‘Oh, God.’

Traffic was headed upslope in the eastbound lanes. Two cars and a van. They were not moving as fast in the rain-slashed night as they would have been in better weather, but they were coming too fast nonetheless.

With both hands, Tommy pulled the wheel to the right. The car responded - but sluggishly.

The oncoming vehicles began to swerve to their right as the drivers saw him cross over the centre line. Not all of them were going to be able to get out of his way. They were restricted by a sidewalk and by the concrete-block wall surrounding a housing development.

The catastrophic twang under the hood was immedi-ately followed by a clattering-pinging-clanking-grinding that instantly escalated into cacophony.

Tommy resisted the powerful urge to stomp the brake pedal flat to the floorboards, which might cast the Corvette into a deadly spin. Instead he eased down on it judiciously. He might as well have stood on the pedal with both feet, because he had no brakes.

None. Nada. Zip. Zero. No stopping power whatso-ever.

And the accelerator seemed to be stuck. The car was picking up speed.

‘Oh, God, no.’

He wrenched at the steering wheel so forcefully that he felt as though he would dislocate his shoulders. At last the car angled sharply back into the westbound lanes where it belonged.

Over in the eastbound lanes, the wildly sweeping glimmer of headlights on the wet pavement reflected the other drivers’ panic.

Then the Corvette’s steering failed altogether. The wheel spun uselessly through his aching hands.

The ‘vette didn’t arc toward oncoming traffic again, thank God, but shot off the highway, onto the shoulder, kicking up gravel that rattled against the undercarriage.

Tommy let go of the spinning steering wheel before the friction between it and his palms could burn his skin. He shielded his face with his hands.

The car flattened a small highway-department sign, tore through tall grass and low brush, and rocketed off the embankment. It was airborne.

The engine was still screaming, demanding accel-eration.

Tommy had the crazy notion that the Corvette would sail on like an aircraft, rising instead of descending, soaring gracefully above a cluster of phoenix palms at the corner of MacArthur and Pacific Coast Highway, then over the businesses and houses that lay in the last couple of blocks before the coast, out across the black waters of the vast Pacific, head-on into the storm, eventually up-up-up and beyond the rain and the turbulence, into a tranquil realm of silence with an eternity of stars above and deep clouds below, with Japan far to the west but growing nearer. If the genie of medicine, Tien Thai, could fly around the world on his own engineless mountain, then surely it was possible to do so even more easily in a Corvette with three hundred horsepower at five thousand rpm.

He had been nearing the end of MacArthur Boulevard when he ramped off the embankment and the drop from the highway was not as drastic here as it would have been if he had lost control just a quarter of a mile earlier. Nevertheless, having been launched at an angle, the car was in the air long enough to tilt slightly to the right; therefore, it came down only on the passenger-side tires, one of which exploded.

The safety harness tightened painfully across Tommy’s chest, cinching the breath out of him. He hadn’t been aware that his mouth was open or that he was screaming, until his teeth clacked together hard enough to crack a walnut Like Tommy, the big engine stopped screaming on impact too, so as the Corvette rolled, he was able to hear the fearsome and familiar shriek of the mini-kin. The beast’s shrill cry was coming through the heating vents from the engine compartment. Gleeful shrieking.

With a hellish clatter to rival the sound of an 8.0 earth-quake shaking through an aluminium-pot factory, the sports car rolled. The laminated glass of the windshield webbed with a million fissures and imploded harmlessly, and the car tumbled through one revolution and started another, whereupon the side windows shattered. The hood buckled with a skreeeeek, started to tear loose, but then was cracked and crunched and twisted and jammed into the engine compartment during the second roll.

With one headlight still aglow, the Corvette finally came to rest on the passenger side, after two and a quarter revolutions. Or maybe it was three. He couldn’t be sure. He was anxious and disoriented and as dizzy as if he had spent the past hour on a roller coaster.

The driver’s side of the car was where the roof should have been, and only the suspending web of the safety harness prevented him from falling into the passenger seat, which was now where the floor should have been.

In the comparative stillness of the aftermath, Tommy could hear his own panicky breathing, the hot tick of overheated engine parts, the tinkle-clink of falling bits of glass, the whistle of pressurized coolant escaping through a punctured line, and rain drumming against the wreckage.

The mini-kin, however, was silent.

Tommy didn’t delude himself that the demon had been killed in the crash. It was alive, all right, and eagerly wriggling toward him through the wreckage. At any moment, it would kick out a vent grill or climb in through the empty windshield frame, and in the confines of the demolished car, he would not be able to get away from it fast enough to save himself.

Gasoline fumes. The chill wind brought him the last thing he wanted to smell: the astringent odour of gasoline fumes so strong that he was briefly robbed of his breath.

The battery still held a charge. The possibility of shorting wires, a spark, was all too real.

Tommy wasn’t sure which fate was worse: having his eyes clawed out by the hissing mini-kin and his carotid artery chewed open - or being immolated in his dream car on the very day that he had bought it. At least James Dean had enjoyed his Porsche Spyder for nine days before he had been killed in it.

Although dizzy, Tommy found the release button for the safety harness. Holding on to the steering wheel with one hand to avoid dropping down into the passenger’s seat, he disentangled himself from the straps.

Tommy located the door handle, which seemed to work well enough. But the lock was shattered or the door was torqued, and no matter how he strained against it, the damn thing wouldn’t open.

The side window had broken out in the crash, leaving not even a fragment of glass stuck in the frame. Cold rain poured through the hole, soaking Tommy.

After pulling his legs out from under the dashboard, he squirmed around to brace his feet against the gear console between the seats. He thrust his head through the window, then his shoulders and arms, and levered himself out of the wreckage.

He rolled off the side of the tipped Corvette into matted brown grass soaked with rain, into a cold puddle, into mud.

The stink of gasoline was stronger than ever.

Pushing onto his feet, swaying unsteadily, he saw that the car had tumbled across a parcel of bare land that was the site of a future shopping centre at the highly desirable corner of MacArthur Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway. In recent years, this field had been used as a Christmas-tree lot every December, sometimes as a pumpkin patch at Halloween, but had served no substantial commercial purpose. He was damn lucky that it was early November and that he had rolled the car through an empty field instead of through happily chattering families in a holiday mood.

Because the Corvette was turned on its side, he was standing next to the undercarriage. From out of the mechanical guts of the machine, the mini-kin issued a shriek of rage and need.

Tommy stumbled back from the car, splashing through another puddle, and nearly fell on his ass.

As the bone-piercing shriek trailed into a snarl and then into an industrious grumble, Tommy heard the demon pounding-straining-clawing, and metal creaked against metal. He couldn’t see into the dark undercarriage, but he sensed that the mini-kin was temporarily trapped in the tangled wreckage and struggling furiously to pry itself free.

The fibreglass body of the Corvette was a mess. His dream car was a total loss.

He was fortunate to have gotten out unscathed. In the morning, of course, he would be crippled by whiplash and a thousand smaller pains - if he lived through the night.

The deadline is dawn.

Ticktock.

Crazily, he wondered what the per-hour cost of his brief ownership had been. Seven thousand dollars. Eight thousand? He looked at his watch, trying to calculate the number of hours since he had made the purchase and been handed the keys, but then he realized that it didn’t matter. It was only money.

What mattered was survival.

Ticktock.

Get moving.

Keep moving.

When he circled around the front of the tipped car, passing through the beam of the sole functioning head-light, he couldn’t see the engine compartment, either, for the hood had compacted into it. But he could hear the demon battering frantically against the walls of its prison.

‘Die, damn you,’ Tommy demanded.

In the distance, someone shouted.

Shaking his head to cast off his remaining dizziness, blinking through the rain, Tommy saw that two cars had stopped along MacArthur Boulevard to the south, near the place where he had run the Corvette off the roadway.

A man with a flashlight was standing at the top of the low embankment about eighty yards away. The guy called again, but the meaning of his words was swallowed by the wind.

Traffic had slowed and a few vehicles were even stopped on Pacific Coast Highway, as well, although no one had gotten out of them yet.

The guy with the flashlight started to descend the embankment, coming to offer assistance.

Tommy raised one arm and waved vigorously, encour-aging the good Samaritan to hurry, to come hear the squawking demon trapped in the smashed machinery, to see the impossible doll-thing with his own eyes if it managed to break loose, to marvel at its existence, to be a witness.

Gasoline, which was evidently pooled under the length of the Corvette, ignited. Blue and orange flames geysered high into the night, vaporizing the falling rain.

The great hot hand of the fire slapped Tommy with such fury that his face stung, and he was staggered backward by the force of the blow. There had been no explosion, but the heat was so intense that he surely would have been set afire in that instant if his hair and his clothes had not been thoroughly soaked.

An unearthly squealing rose from the trapped mini-kin.

At the foot of the embankment, the good Samaritan had halted, startled by the fire.

‘Hurry! Hurry!’ Tommy shouted, although he knew that the roar of rain and wind prevented the man with the flashlight from hearing either him or the demon.

With a boom and a splintery crack like bone breaking, the battered and burning hood exploded off the engine compartment and tumbled past Tommy, spewing sparks and smoke as it clattered toward the stand of phoe-nix palms.

Like a malevolent genie freed from a lamp, the mini-kin flung itself out of the inferno and landed upright in the mud, no more than ten feet from Tommy. It was ablaze, but the streaming cloaks of fire that had replaced its white fabric shroud did not seem to dis-turb it.

Indeed, the creature was no longer shrieking in mind-less rage but appeared to be exhilarated by the blaze. Raising its arms over its head as if joyfully exclaiming hallelujah, swaying almost as if in a state of rapture, it fixed its attention not on Tommy but on its own hands which, like tallow tapers on some dark altar, streamed blue fire.

‘Bigger,’ Tommy gasped in disbelief.

Incredibly, the thing had grown. The doll on his doorstep had been about ten inches long. This demon swaying rapturously before him was approximately eighteen inches tall, nearly twice the size that it had been when he had last seen it streaking across his foyer into the living room to short-circuit the lights. Furthermore, its legs and arms were thicker and its body heavier than they had been earlier.

Because of the masking fire, Tommy could not see details of the creature’s form, although he thought he detected wickedly spiky protrusions extending the length of its spine, which had not been there before. Its back seemed to be more hunched than it had been previously, and perhaps its hands were becoming disproportionately large for the length of its arms. Whether he perceived these details correctly or not, Tommy was certain that he could not be mistaken about the beast’s greater size.

Having expected the mini-kin to wither and collapse in the consuming flames, Tommy was dangerously mes-merized by the sight of it thriving instead.

‘This is nuts,’ he muttered.

The falling rain captured the light of the wildly leaping fire, carrying it into puddles on the ground, which glim-mered like pools of melting doubloons and flickered with the shadow of the capering mini-kin.

How could it possibly have grown so fast? And to add this much body weight, it would have required nourishment, fuel to feed the feverish growth.

What had it eaten?

The good Samaritan was approaching again, behind the bobbling beam of his flashlight, but he was still more than sixty yards away. The burning Corvette was between him and the demon, which he wouldn’t be able to see until he had come virtually to Tommy’s side.

What had it eaten?

Impossibly, the rhapsodic mini-kin appeared to swell larger even as the flames seethed from it.

Tommy began to back slowly away, overcome by the urgent need to flee but reluctant to turn and run. Any too-sudden movement on his part might shatter the demon’s ecstatic fascination with the fire and remind it that its prey was nearby.

The guy with the flashlight was forty yards away. He was a heavyset man in a hooded raincoat that flared behind him. Lumbering through the puddles, slipping in the mud, he resembled a cowled monk.

Suddenly Tommy was afraid for the Samaritan’s life. At first he had wanted a witness; but that was when he thought the mini-kin would perish in the flames. Now he sensed that it wouldn’t allow a witness.

He would have shouted at the stranger to stay away, even at the risk of drawing the mini-kin’s attention, but fate intervened when a gunshot cracked through the rainy night, then a second and a third.

Evidently recognizing the distinctive sound, the heavy-set stranger skidded to a halt in the mud. He was still thirty yards away, with the mined car interven-ing, so he couldn’t possibly have seen the blazing demon.

A fourth shot boomed, a fifth.

In the scramble to get out of the Corvette after the crash, Tommy had not remembered the pistol. He wouldn’t have been able to locate it anyway. Now the intense heat was detonating the ammunition.

Reminded that he lacked even the inadequate protec-tion of the Heckler & Koch, Tommy stopped backing away from the demon and stood in tremulous indecision. Although he was drenched by the storm, his mouth was as dry as the sun-scorched sand on an August beach.

The rain washed parching panic through him, and his fear was like a fever burning in his brow, in his eyes, in his joints.

He turned and ran for his life.

He didn’t know where he was going, didn’t know if he had any hope of escaping, but he was propelled by sheer survival instinct. Maybe he could outrun the mini-kin in the short term, but he didn’t have high expectations of being able to stay beyond its reach for the next six or seven hours, until dawn.

It was growing.

Getting stronger.

Becoming a more formidable predator.

Ticktock.

Mud sucked at Tommy’s athletic shoes. Tangles of dead grass and creeping lantana vines almost snared him, almost brought him down. A palm frond like the feather from a giant bird, torn loose by the wind, spun out of the night and lashed his face as it flew past him. Nature herself seemed to be joined in a conspiracy with the mini-kin.

Ticktock.

Tommy glanced over his shoulder and saw that the flames at the Corvette, although brightly whipping the night, were subsiding. The smaller conflagration that marked the burning demon was fading much faster than the blaze at the car, but the beast continued to be entranced and was not yet giving chase.

The deadline is dawn.

Tomorrow’s sunrise hung out there just a few minutes this side of eternity.

Almost to the street Tommy dared to glance back again through the obscuring grey curtains of rain. Flames still sputtered from the mini-kin, but only fitfully. Appar-ently, most of the gasoline saturating the creature had burned off. Too little fire remained - mere wisps of yellow - to allow Tommy to see the thing well: just well enough to be certain that it was on the move again and coming after him.

It was not pursuing as fast as it had been before, maybe because it was still inebriated from its infatuation with the flames. But it was coming nonetheless.

Having crossed the empty lot on the diagonal, Tommy reached the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Avo-cado Street skidded across the last stretch of mud like an ice-skater on a frozen pond, and plunged off the curb into the calf-deep water that overflowed the gutters at the intersection.

A car horn blared. Brakes screeched.

He hadn’t checked oncoming traffic because he had been looking over his shoulder and then watching the treacherous ground ahead of him. When he snapped his head up in surprise, an astonishingly colourful Ford van was there, blazing yellow-red-gold-orange-black-green, as if appearing magically - poof! - from another dimen-sion. The dazzling van stopped an instant before Tommy reached it rocking on its springs, but he couldn’t prevent himself from running into it full tilt. He bounced off the fender, spun around to the front of the vehicle, and fell to the pavement.

Clutching the van, he immediately pulled himself up from the blacktop.

The extravagant paint job wasn’t psychedelic, as it had appeared on first impression, but rather an attempt to transform the van into an Art Deco jukebox: images of leaping gazelles amidst stylised palm fronds, streams of luminous silver bubbles in bands of glossy black, and more luminous gold bubbles in bands of Chinese-red lacquer. As the driver’s door opened, the night swung with Benny Goodman’s big-band classic, ‘One O’clock Jump.’

As Tommy regained his feet again, the driver appeared at his side. She was a young woman in white shoes, what might have been a nurse’s white uniform, and a black leather jacket. ‘Hey, are you all right?’

‘Yeah, okay,’ Tommy wheezed.

‘You’re really okay?’

‘Yeah, sure, leave me alone.’

He squinted at the rain-swept vacant lot.

The mini-kin was no longer afire, and the flashing red emergency lights at the back of the van didn’t penetrate far into the gloom. Tommy couldn’t see where the crea-ture was, but he knew it was closing the gap between them, perhaps moving sluggishly but closing the gap.

‘Go,’ he told her, waving her away with one hand.

The woman insisted, ‘You must be-’

‘Go, hurry.’

‘-hurt. I can’t-’

‘Get out of here!’ he said frantically, not wanting to trap her between him and the demon.

He pushed away from her, intending to continue across all six lanes of Pacific Coast Highway. At the moment, there was no traffic except for a few vehicles that had stopped half a block to the south, where their drivers were watching the burning Corvette.

The woman clutched tenaciously. ‘Was that your car back there?’

‘Jesus, lady, it’s coming!’

‘What’s coming?’

‘It!’

‘What?’

‘It!’ He tried to wrench loose of her.

She said, ‘Was that your new Corvette?’

He realized that he knew her. The blond waitress. She had served cheeseburgers and fries to him earlier this evening. The restaurant was across this highway.

The place had closed for the night. She was on her way home.

Again Tommy had the queer sensation that he was riding the bobsled of fate, rocketing down a huge chute toward some destiny he could not begin to understand.

‘You should see a doctor,’ she persisted.

He wasn’t going to be able to shake her loose. When the mini-kin arrived, it wouldn’t want a wit-ness.

Eighteen inches tall and growing. A spiky crest along the length of its spine. Bigger claws, bigger teeth. It would rip her throat out tear her face off.

Her slender throat.

Her lovely face.

Tommy didn’t have time to argue with her. ‘Okay, a doctor, okay, get me out of here.’

Holding his arm as if he were a doddering old man, she started to walk him around to the passenger door, which was the side of the van closest to the vacant lot.

‘Drive the fucking thing!’ he demanded, and at last he tore loose of her.

Tommy went to the passenger door and yanked it open, but the waitress was still standing in front of her jukebox van, stupefied by his outburst.

‘Move or we’ll both die!’ he shouted in frustration. He glanced back into the vacant lot, expecting the mini-kin to spring at him out of the darkness and rain, but it wasn’t here yet, so he clambered into the Ford.

The woman slid into the driver’s seat and slammed her door an instant after Tommy slammed his.

Switching off ‘One O’clock Jump,’ she said, ‘What happened back there? I saw you come shooting off MacArthur Boulevard-’

‘Are you stupid or deaf or both?’ he demanded, his voice shrill and cracking. ‘We gotta get out of here now!’

‘You’ve no right to talk to me that way,’ she said quietly but with visible anger in her crystalline-blue eyes.

Speechless with frustration, Tommy could only sputter. ‘Even if you’re hurt and upset, you can’t talk to me that way. It isn’t nice.’

He glanced out the side window at the vacant lot next to them.

She said, ‘I can’t abide rudeness.’

Forcing himself to speak more calmly, Tommy said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You don’t sound sorry.’

‘Well, I am.’

‘Well, you don’t sound it.’

Tommy thought maybe he would kill her rather than wait for the mini-kin to do it.

‘I’m genuinely sorry,’ he said.

‘Really?’

‘I’m truly, truly sorry.’

‘That’s better.’

‘Can you take me to a hospital,’ he asked, merely to get her moving.

‘Sure.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Put on your seatbelt.’

‘What?’

‘It’s the law.’

Her hair was honey-dark and lank with rain, pasted to her face, and her uniform was saturated. He reminded himself that she had gone to some trouble for him.

As he unreeled the shoulder harness and locked it across his chest he said as patiently as possible: ‘Please, miss, please, you don’t understand what’s happening here-’

‘Then explain. I’m neither stupid nor deaf.’

For an instant the improbability of the night left him without words again, but then suddenly they exploded in a long hysterical gush: ‘This thing, this doll, on my doorstep, and then the stitches pulled out and it had a real eye, green eye, rat’s tail, dropped on my head from behind the drape, and it pretty much eats bullets for breakfast which is bad enough, but then it’s also smart, and it’s growing-’

‘What’s growing?’

Frustration pushed him dangerously close to the edge of rudeness once more: ‘The doll snake rat-quick little monster thing! It’s growing.’

‘The doll snake rat-quick little monster thing,’ she repeated, eyeing him suspiciously.

‘Yes!’ he said exasperatedly.

With a wet thunk, the shrieking mini-kin hit the window in the passenger door, inches from Tommy’s head.

Tommy screamed.

The woman said, ‘Holy shit.’

The mini-kin was growing, all right, but it was also changing into something less humanoid than it had been when it first began to emerge from the doll form. Its head was proportionately larger than before, and repulsively misshapen, and the radiant green eyes bulged from deep sockets under an irregular bony brow.

The waitress released the emergency brake. ‘Knock it off the window.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Knock it off the window!’

‘How, for God’s sake?’

Although the mini-kin still had hands, its five digits were half like fingers, half like the spatulate tentacles of a squid. It held fast to the glass with pale sucker pads on both its hands and feet.

Tommy wasn’t going to roll down the window and try to knock the thing off. No way.

The blonde shifted the Ford into drive. She stomped on the accelerator hard enough to punch the van into warp speed and put them on the far side of the galaxy in maybe eighteen seconds.

As the engine shrieked louder than the mini-kin, the tires spun furiously on the slick pavement, and the Ford didn’t go across the galaxy or even to the end of the block, but just hung there, kicking up sprays of dirty water from all four wheels.

The mini-kin’s mouth was open wide. Its glisten-ing black tongue flickered. Black teeth snapped against the glass.

The tires found traction, and the van shot forward.

‘Don’t let it in,’ she implored.

‘Why would I let it in?’

‘Don’t let it in.’

‘Do you think I’m insane?’

The Ford van was a rocket, screaming north on the Pacific Coast Highway, and Tommy felt as if he were pulling enough Gs to distort his face like an astronaut in a space-shuttle launch, and rain was hitting the windshield with a clatter almost as loud as submachine gun fire, but the stubborn mini-kin was glued to the glass.

‘It's trying to get in,’ she said.

‘Yeah.’

‘What does it want?’

He said, ‘Me.’

‘Why?’

‘For some reason, I just piss it off.’

The beast was still mostly black mottled with yellow, but its belly was entirely pus yellow, pressed against the glass. A slit opened the length of its underside, and obscenely wriggling tubes with sucker like mouths slithered out of its guts and attached themselves to the window.

The light inside the van wasn’t good enough to reveal exactly what was happening, but Tommy saw the glass begin to smoke.

He said, ‘Uh-oh.’

‘What?’

‘It’s burning through the glass.’

‘Burning?’

‘Eating.’

‘What?’

‘Acid.’

Barely braking for the turn, she hung a hard right off the highway into the entrance drive of the Newport Beach Country Club.

The van canted drastically to the right and centrifugal force threw Tommy against the door, pressing his face to the window, beyond which the mini-kin’s extruded guts wriggled on the smoking glass.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Country club,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Truck,’ she said.

She turned sharply to the left, into the parking lot a manoeuvre that pulled Tommy away from the door and the dissolving window.

At that late hour the parking lot was mostly deserted. Only a few vehicles stood on the blacktop. One of them was a delivery truck.

Aiming the van at the back of the truck, she accel-erated.

‘What’re you doing?’ he demanded.

‘Detachment.’

At the last moment she swung to the left of the parked truck, roaring past it so close that she stripped the elaborate custom paint job off the front fender and tore off the van’s side mirror. Showers of sparks streamed from tortured metal, and the mini-kin was jammed between the van window and the flank of the big truck. The rocker panel peeled off the side of the van, but the mini-kin seemed tougher than the Ford - until its suckers abruptly popped loose with a sound Tommy could hear even above all the other noise. The window in the passenger door burst, and tempered glass showered across Tommy, and he thought the beast was falling into his lap, Jesus, but then they were past the parked truck, and he realized that the creature had been torn away from the van.

‘Want to circle back and run over the damn thing a few times?’ she shouted over the howling of the wind at the broken-out window.

He leaned toward her, raising his voice, ‘Hell no. That won’t work. It’ll grab the tire as you pass over it, and this time we’ll never shake it loose. It’ll crawl up into the undercarriage, tear through, squeeze through, get at us one way or another.’

‘Then let’s haul ass out of here.’

At the end of the country-club drive, she turned right onto the highway at such high speed that Tommy expected the Ford to blow a tire or roll, but they came through all right, and she put the pedal to the metal with less respect for the speed limit than she had shown, earlier, for the seatbelt law.

Tommy half expected the mini-kin to explode out of the storm again. He didn’t feel safe until they crossed Jam-boree Road and began to descend toward the Newport harbour.

Rain slashed through the missing window and snapped against the side of his head. It didn’t bother him. He couldn’t get any wetter than he already was.

At the speed they were making, the hooting and gibbering of the wind was so great that neither of them made an effort to engage in conversation.

As they crossed the bridge over the back-bay channel, a couple of miles from the parking lot where they had left the demon, the blonde finally reduced speed. The noise of the wind abated somewhat.

She looked at Tommy in a way that no one had ever looked at him before, as though he was green, warty, with a head like a watermelon, and had just stepped out of a flying saucer.

Well, in fact his own mother had looked at him that way when he first talked about being a detective-story writer.

He cleared his throat nervously and said, ‘You’re a pretty good driver.’

Surprisingly she smiled. ‘You really think so?’

‘Actually, you’re terrific.’

‘Thanks. You’re not bad yourself.’

‘Me?’

‘That was some stunt with the Corvette.’

‘Very funny.’

‘You went airborne pretty straight and true, but you just lost control of it in flight.’

‘Sorry about your van.’

‘It comes with the territory,’ she said cryptically.

‘I’ll pay for the repairs.’

‘You’re sweet.’

‘We should stop and get something to block this window.’

‘You don’t need to go straight to a hospital?’

‘I’m okay,’ he assured her. ‘But the rain’s going to ruin your upholstery.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘But-’

‘It’s blue,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘The upholstery.’

‘Yeah, blue. So?’

‘I don’t like blue.’

‘But the damage-’

‘I’m used to it.’

‘You are?’

She said, ‘There’s frequently damage.’

‘There is?’

‘I lead an eventful life.’

‘You do?’

‘I’ve learned to roll with it.’

‘You’re a strange woman,’ he said. She grinned. ‘Thank you.’

He felt disoriented again. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Deliverance,’ she said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Deliverance Payne. P-a-y-n-e. It was a hard birth, and my mom has a weird sense of humour.’

He didn’t get it. And then he did. ‘Ah.’

‘People just call me Del.’

‘Del. That’s nice.’

‘What’s your name?

‘Tuong Phan.’ He startled himself. ‘I mean Tommy.’

‘Tuong Tommy?’

‘Tuong nothing. My name’s Tommy Phan.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Most of the time.’

‘You’re a strange man,’ she said, as if that pleased her, as if returning a comptiment.

‘There really is a lot of water coming in this window.’

‘We’ll stop soon.’

‘Where’d you learn to drive like that, Del?’

‘My mom.’

‘Some mother you have.’

‘She’s a hoot. She races stock cars.’

‘Not my mother,’ Tommy said.

‘And power boats. And motorcycles. It has an engine, my mom wants to race it.’

Del braked at a red traffic light.

They were silent for a moment.

Rain poured down as if the sky were a dam and the breast had broken.

Finally Del said, ‘So… back there… That was the doll snake rat-quick little monster thing, huh?’