Tick Tock Page 5

  under the furniture.

  In the sudden brightness, the minikin 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 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-penciled chapter of the latest book and the empty bottle of beer were where he had left them, undisturbed.

  The snake-eyed minikin 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 shredded, they had a recognizable mittenlike shape—obviously 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 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 place of that cryptic yet fearsome message was a single word: TICKTOCK.

  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 of 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 minikin 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 threateningly from within the rag face. They were the 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 favorite films. Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. 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 minikin wasn’t hiding behind either of them.

  The sofa was built to the floor rather than supported 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 cushion, within easy reach, and dragged the sofa 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 jea
ns 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 pant leg, clawing and biting him as it ascended.

  The minikin had not taken refuge behind the sofa.

  Relieved but also frustrated, Tommy left the cumbersome piece standing away from the wall and picked up the pistol.

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

  Perspiration stung the corner 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 pairs of doors. He considered firing a few rounds through them before daring 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 minikin 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.

  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 panel, but no snake-eyed minikin hung from the back of it, either.

  At the second window, his colorless reflection in the rain-sheathed glass caught his attention, but he averted his gaze when he glimpsed such 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 paralyzed 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. Gold 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 minikin hanging above him, not from the liner of the drape, but from the brass rod, suspended 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 flood-tide surge.

  The minikin 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, 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 minikin 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 minikin, and it gnashed its teeth, trying to bite his fingers, striving to sink its claws into him again.

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

  The creature’s cold, slick tail slithered around Tommy’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 it shrieking as it was hurled across the room, and then heard the shriek cut off abruptly as the thing 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 Gulliv
er resisting capture in the land of Lilliput.

  The hideous minikin 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 minikin’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, hammering 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 minikin, 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 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 was one not 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 minikin 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 minikin tossed the chunk of lead aside.

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

  He felt his scalp, where the puncture wounds from the thing’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 minikin and perhaps thirty times its weight, Tommy was so terrified that he felt as though he might pee in his pants.

  Chip Nguyen, hard-boiled 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 minikin, 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 minikin 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 dropped from the drapery rod onto his head. Two more when he was 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