Ticktock (7 page)

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 dreadlocks.

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

The doll-thing hissed at him.

God in Heaven, what is this—Showdown at the Twilight Zone Corral?

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

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

The fiend hissed again.

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

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

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

The thing disappeared behind the sofa.

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

Tommy eased across the room to peer around the sofa. The far end of it still touched the wall, so the space behind it was a V-shaped dead end, yet the minikin wasn't there.

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

Why?

Why ask why?

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

THE DEADLINE IS DAWN.

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

TICKTOCK
.

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

TICKTOCK
.

Toast for the hungry minikin.

TICKTOCK
.

Munch, munch. Crunch, crunch.

His head was spinning—and not simply because he had thumped it hard against the floor when he fell.

He circled the sofa, studying it as he moved.

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

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

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

Now the minikin was quiet, which didn't mean that it was taking a nap. It was scheming at something.

Tommy needed to scheme too. Desperately.

Think, think.

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

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

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

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

So now who's going to be toast?

Tommy smiled at the thought.

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

Tommy flinched—and lost his smile.

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

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

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

Nevertheless, he was going to ease open the door, step quietly into the hallway, sprint for the can of spot remover, and take his chances with—

From the minikin's lair came the sound of fabric ripping, and one of the seat cushions was dislodged by the beast as it tore out of the sofa directly in front of Tommy. In one dark bony hand it held a six-inch length of a broken seat spring: a spiral of gleaming eighth-inch steel wire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 around him 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 minikin 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 minikin 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 minikin 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 minikin.

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 rodentlike size that triggered primal fears, 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 nonetheless. 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 not only was able to think but was possessed of sophisticated knowledge that no mere animal could acquire.

The worst thing Tommy could do was trust 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 minikin'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 at night as it could in daylight.

Or maybe, like bloodhound, it could track him by his scent.

If the thing benefited from both the superior intelligence 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 minikin 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 applicable 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 minikin, 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 a few of his nail clippings, or 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 drumming 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 dollmaker was his ultimate enemy, not the critter that was stalking him.

He was never going to find the dollmaker by waiting for the minikin 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 index finger. He was a writer, so using words gave him a comforting sense of control.

Perhaps the questions he tossed into the darkness diminished the minikin'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 whether the thing could smell his perspiration.

Behind his armor of forcefully stated questions, he found the courage to move toward the center of the wall opposite the windows, where the door should be. “What are you, damn it? 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 minikin 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 minikin 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 minikin 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, however, 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 minikin 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 balance, and saw that the lower steps were deserted too.

Movement drew his attention. The minikin 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 minikin 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 dimensions, 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 minikin 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, instead of feeling like the potential victim that he was, he 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.