Ticktock Read online

  “I’m sure I did it right.”

  “Even your inflatable woman must be frustrated with you. Send it again.”

  After switching on a lamp, Tommy returned to the fax machine once more. He was careful to load the page properly. The mysterious ideograms had to be face-down.

  He watched as the rollers pulled the single sheet of paper through the machine. The small message window displayed Sal’s fax number at the newspaper and the word sending. The page of ideograms slid out of the machine, and after a pause, the word in the message window changed to received. Then the fax disconnected.

  The phone rang. Sal said, “Do I have to drive over there and show you how to do it right?”

  “You mean you got a blank page again?”

  “Just your sender-ID bar at the top.”

  “I absolutely loaded it right this time.”

  “Then something’s wrong with your fax,” Sal said.

  “Must be,” Tommy said, although that answer didn’t satisfy him.

  “You want to bring the note by here?”

  “How long will you be there?”

  “Couple of hours.”

  “I might stop by,” Tommy said.

  “You’ve got me curious now.”

  “If not tonight, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Sal said, “It might be some little girl.”

  “Huh?”

  “Some other figure skater jealous about the one in your article. Remember that Olympic skater, Tonya Harding? Be careful of your kneecaps, Tommy boy. Some little girl out there may have a baseball bat with your name on it.”

  “Thank God we don’t work in the same building any more. I feel so much cleaner.”

  “Kiss Rhonda Rubbergirl for me.”

  “You’re a diseased degenerate.”

  “Well, with Rhonda, you’ll never have to worry about catching anything nasty.”

  “See you later.” Tommy put down the telephone and switched off the lamp. Once more, the only light was a pale pearlescence that spilled in from the second-floor hallway.

  He went to the nearest window and studied the front lawn and the street. The yellowish glow of the streetlamps didn’t reveal anyone lurking in the night.

  A deep ocean of storm clouds had flooded the sky, entirely submerging the moon. The heavens were black and forbidding.

  Tommy went downstairs to the living room, where he discovered the doll slumped on its side on the end table beside the sofa. He had left it propped with its back against the stained-glass lamp, in a sitting position.

  Frowning, Tommy stared at it suspiciously. The doll had seemed to be full of sand, well weighted; it should have stayed where he had put it.

  Feeling foolish, he toured the downstairs, trying the doors. They were all still securely locked, and there were no signs of visitors. No one had entered the house.

  He returned to the living room. The doll might not have been balanced properly against the lamp, in which case the sand could have shifted slowly to one side until the damn thing toppled over.

  Hesitant, not sure why he was hesitant, Tommy Phan picked up the doll. He brought it to his face, examining it more closely than he had done earlier.

  The black sutures that indicated the eyes and the mouth were sewn with heavy thread as coarse as surgical cord. Tommy gently rubbed the ball of his thumb across a pair of crossed stitches that marked one of the doll’s eyes…then across the row of five that formed its grimly set lips.

  As he traced that line of black stitches, Tommy was startled by a macabre image that popped into his mind: the threads abruptly snapping, a real mouth opening in the white cotton cloth, tiny but razor-sharp teeth exposed, a quick but savage snap, and his thumb bitten off, blood streaming from the stump.

  A shudder coursed through him, and he nearly dropped the doll.

  “Dear God.”

  He felt stupid and childish. The stitches had not snapped, and of course no hungry mouth would ever open in the thing.

  It’s just a doll, for God’s sake.

  He wondered what his detective, Chip Nguyen, would do in this situation. Chip was tough, smart, and relentless. He was a master of tae kwon do, able to drink hard all night without losing his edge or suffering a hangover, a chess master who once defeated Bobby Fischer when they encountered each other in a hurricane-hammered resort hotel in Barbados, a lover of such prowess that a beautiful blond socialite had killed another woman over him in a fit of jealousy, a collector of vintage Corvettes who was able to rebuild them from the ground up, and a brooding philosopher who knew that humanity was doomed but who gamely fought the good fight anyway. Already, Chip would have obtained a translation of the note, tracked down the source of the cotton cloth and the black thread, punched out a thug just for the exercise, and (being an equal-opportunity lover) bedded either an aggressive redhead with a gloriously pneumatic body or a slender Vietnamese girl with a shy demeanor that masked a profoundly lascivious mind.

  What a drag it was to be limited by reality. Tommy sighed and wished that he could step magically through the pages of his own books, into the fictional shoes of Chip Nguyen, and know the glory of being totally self-confident and utterly in control of life.

  The evening was waning, and it was too late to drive to the newspaper offices to see Sal Delario. Tommy just wanted to get a little work done and go to bed.

  The rag doll was strange, but it wasn’t half as menacing as he had tried to pretend that it was. His fertile imagination had been running away with him again.

  He was a master of self-dramatization, which, according to his older brother Ton, was the most American thing about him. Americans, Ton had once said, all think the world revolves around them, think each individual person more important than whole society or whole family. But how can each person be most important thing? Can’t everyone be the most important thing, all equal but all the most important at same time. Makes no sense. Tommy had protested that he didn’t feel more important than anyone else, that Ton was missing the point about American individualism, which was all about the right to pursue dreams, not about dominating others, but Ton had said, Then if you don’t think you better than us, come work in bakery with your father and brothers, stay with family, make family dream come true.

  Ton had inherited certain sharp debating skills—and a useful stubbornness—from their mother.

  Now Tommy turned the doll over in his hand, and the more that he handled it, the less ominous it seemed. Ultimately, no doubt, the story behind it would turn out to be prosaic. It was probably just a prank perpetrated by children in the neighborhood.

  The pin with the black enamel head, which had fastened the note to the doll’s hand, was no longer on the end table where Tommy had left it. Evidently, when the doll had toppled over, the pin had been knocked to the floor.

  He couldn’t see it on the cream-colored carpet, although the glossy black head should have made it easy to spot. The vacuum cleaner would get it the next time he swept.

  From the refrigerator in the kitchen, he retrieved a bottle of beer. Coors. Brewed high in the Colorado Rockies.

  With the beer in one hand and the doll in the other, he went upstairs to his office once more. He switched on the desk lamp and propped the doll against it.

  He sat in his comfortable chocolate-brown, leather-upholstered office armchair, turned on the computer, and printed out the most recently completed chapter of the new Chip Nguyen adventure. It was twenty pages long.

  Sipping the Coors from the bottle, he worked on the manuscript with a red pencil, marking changes.

  At first the house was deathly silent. Then the incoming storm clouds finally pulled some ground-level turbulence with them, and the wind began to sough in the eaves. An overgrown branch on one of the melaleucas rubbed against an outside wall, a dry-bone scraping sound. From downstairs in the family room came the faint but distinctive creaking of the damper hinge in the fireplace as the wind reached down the flue to play with it.

  From time
to time, Tommy glanced at the doll. It sat in the fall of amber light from the desk lamp against which it was propped, arms at its sides, mittenlike hands turned palms up as if in supplication.

  By the time he finished editing the chapter, he had also drunk the last of the beer. Before entering the red-lined changes in the computer, he went to the guest bathroom off the upstairs hall.

  When he returned to his office a few minutes later, Tommy half expected to discover that the doll had toppled onto its side again. But it was sitting upright, as he had left it.

  He shook his head and smiled in embarrassment at his insistence on drama.

  Then, lowering himself into his chair, he saw four words on the previously blank computer screen: THE DEADLINE IS DAWN.

  “What the hell…?”

  As he settled all the way into the chair, a hot sharp pain stabbed through his right thigh. Startled, he shot to his feet, pushing the wheeled armchair away from himself.

  He clutched his thigh, felt the tiny lance that had pierced his blue jeans, and plucked it out of both the denim and his flesh. He was holding the straight pin with the black enamel head as large as a pea.

  Astonished, Tommy turned the pin between thumb and forefinger, his eyes on the glinting point.

  Over the soughing of the wind in the eaves and the humming of the laser printer in its stand-by mode, he heard a new sound: a soft pop…and then again. Like threads breaking.

  He looked at the doll in the fall of light from the desk lamp. It was sitting as before—but the pair of crossed stitches over the spot where a person’s heart would be had snapped and now hung loose on its white cotton breast.

  Tommy Phan didn’t realize that he had dropped the pin until he heard it strike—tink, tink—the hard plastic mat under his office chair.

  Paralyzed, he stared at the doll for what seemed like an hour but must have been less than a minute. When he could move again, he found himself reaching for the damn thing, and he checked himself when his hand was still ten or twelve inches from it.

  His mouth was so dry that his tongue had stuck to his palate. He worked up some saliva, but his tongue nevertheless peeled loose as reluctantly as a Velcro fastener.

  His frantic heart hammered so hard that his vision blurred at the edges with each beat, as blood surged through him in artery-stretching quantities. He felt as though he were on the verge of a stroke.

  In the better and more vivid world that he inhabited, Chip Nguyen would have seized the doll without hesitation and examined it to determine what device it contained. Perhaps a miniature bomb? Perhaps a fiendishly clever clockwork mechanism that would eject a poisoned dart?

  Tommy wasn’t half the man that Chip Nguyen was, but he wasn’t a complete coward, damn it. Although he was reluctant to pick up the doll, he gingerly extended one index finger and experimentally pressed it against the pair of snapped sutures on the white cotton breast.

  Inside the dreadful little manlike figure, directly under Tommy’s finger, something twitched, throbbed, and throbbed again. Not as though it were a clockwork mechanism, but as though it were something alive.

  He snatched his hand back.

  At first, what he had felt made him think of a squirming insect: an obscenely fat spider or a frenzied cockroach. Or perhaps a tiny rodent: some God-awful pale and hairless pink mouse like nothing that anyone had ever seen before.

  Abruptly the dangling black threads unraveled into the needle holes through which they had been sewn, disappearing into the doll’s chest as if something had pulled them from inside.

  “Jesus!”

  Tommy stumbled backward a step and nearly fell into his office chair. He clutched the arm of it and kept his balance.

  Pop-pop-pop.

  The stitches over the thing’s right eye broke as the cloth under them bulged with internal pressure. Then they, too, raveled into the doll like strands of spaghetti sucked into a child’s mouth.

  Tommy was shaking his head in denial. He had to be dreaming.

  Where the broken sutures had disappeared into the face, the fabric split with a discrete tearing sound.

  Dreaming.

  The rent in the small blank-white face opened to half an inch, like a gaping wound.

  Definitely dreaming. Big dinner, two cheeseburgers, french fries, onion rings, enough cholesterol to kill a horse—and then a bottle of beer. Dozed off at my desk. Dreaming.

  From behind the split fabric came a flash of color. Green. A fierce radiant green.

  The cotton cloth curled away from the hole, and a small eye appeared in the soft round head. It wasn’t the shiny glass eye of a doll, not merely a painted plastic disc, either, but as real as Tommy’s own eyes (although infinitely stranger), full of soft eerie light, hateful and watchful, with an elliptical black pupil as in the eye of a snake.

  Tommy made the sign of the cross. He had been raised a Roman Catholic, and although he had only rarely attended Mass over the past five years, he was suddenly devout again.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God, hear my plea….”

  Tommy was prepared to spend—happy to spend—the rest of his life between a confessional and a sacristy railing, subsisting solely on the Eucharist and faith, with no entertainment except organ music and church bingo.

  “…in this my hour of need…”

  The doll twitched. Its head turned slightly toward Tommy. Its green eye fixed on him.

  He felt his gorge rising, tasted a bitter vileness in the back of his throat, swallowed hard, choked it down, and knew beyond doubt that he was not dreaming. He had never before nearly puked in a dream. Dreams weren’t this intense.

  On the computer screen, the four words began to flash: THE DEADLINE IS DAWN.

  The stitches over the doll’s second eye popped and raveled into its head. The fabric bulged and began to split again.

  The creature’s stubby arms twitched. Its small mitten hands flexed. It pushed away from the desk lamp and rose stiffly to its feet, all of ten inches tall but nonetheless terrifying for its diminutive stature.

  Even Chip Nguyen—toughest of all private detectives, master of tae kwon do, fearless fighter for truth and justice—would have done precisely what Tommy Phan did then: run. Neither the author nor his creation was a complete fool.

  Recognizing that skepticism in this case could get him killed, Tommy spun away from the impossible thing that was emerging from the rag doll. Pushing aside the wheeled office chair, he crashed against the corner of the desk, stumbled over his own feet, maintained his balance, and staggered out of the room.

  He slammed the office door behind him so hard that the house—and his own bones—reverberated with the impact. There was no lock on it. Frantically he considered fetching a suitable chair from the master bedroom and bracing it under the knob, but then he realized that the door opened into the office beyond and, therefore, could not be wedged shut from the hallway.

  He started toward the stairs, but on second thought he dashed into his bedroom, switching on the lights as he went.

  The bed was neatly made. The white chenille spread was as taut as a drum skin.

  He kept a neat house, and he was distressed to think of it all splattered with blood, especially his own.

  What was that damn thing? And what did it want?

  The rosewood nightstand gleamed darkly from furniture polish and diligent care, and in the top drawer, next to a box of Kleenex, was a pistol that had been equally well maintained.

  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 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 th
e 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 rampaging 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 luge 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 tumor 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 carpeted 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.