Ticktock (6 page)

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 jeans into his socks or clamped them shut with rubber bands, as he would have done in an actual rat hunt. He shuddered at the thought of something squirming up the inside of a 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 Gulliver 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.