Mrs. Dai checked her wristwatch.
Tommy consulted his as well.
Ticktock.
Half snarling, half whining nervously, the Samaritan-thing climbed through the broken window into the living room.
“Better stand together,” said Mrs. Dai.
Tommy, Del, and Scootie moved out from behind the coffee table, joining his mother and Mrs. Dai in a tight grouping.
The serpent-eyed fat man no longer wore the hooded raincoat. The fire from the yacht should have burned away all attire, but curiously the flames had only singed its clothes, as though its imperviousness to fire extended somewhat to the garments it wore. The black wingtip shoes were badly scuffed and caked with mud. The filthy and rumpled trousers, the equally dishevelled and bullet-torn shirt and vest and suit jacket, the acrid smell of smoke that seeped from the creature, combined with its gardenia-white skin and inhuman eyes, gave it all the charm of a walking corpse.
For half a minute or more, the demon stood in indecision and evident uneasiness, perhaps waiting to be punished for violating the sanctity of Mrs. Dai’s house.
Ticktock.
Then it shook itself. Its plump hands curled into fists, relaxed, curled into fists. It licked its lips with a fat pink tongue—and it shrieked at them.
The deadline is dawn.
Beyond the windows the sky was still dark—though perhaps more charcoal grey than black.
Ticktock.
Mrs. Dai startled Tommy by raising her left hand to her mouth and savagely biting the meatiest part of her palm, below her thumb, drawing blood. She smacked her bloody hand against his forehead, in the manner of a faith healer knocking illness out of a penitent sufferer.
When Tommy started to wipe the blood away, Mrs. Dai said, “No, leave. I safe from demon because I summon into rag doll. Can’t harm me. If you smell like me, smell like my blood, it can’t know who you really are, think you me, then not harm you either.”
As the Samaritan-thing approached, Mrs. Dai smeared her blood on Del’s forehead, on Mother Phan’s forehead, and after hesitating only briefly, on Scootie’s head as well.
“Be still,” she instructed them in an urgent whisper. “Be still, be quiet.”
Grumbling, hissing, the creature approached to within a foot of the group. Its fetid breath was repulsive, reeking of dead burnt flesh and curdled milk and rancid onions—as though, in another life, it had eaten hundreds of cheeseburgers and had been plagued with indigestion even in Hell.
With a wet crackling sound, the plump white hands metamorphosed into serrated pincers that were designed for efficient slashing and rending.
When the radiant green eyes fixed on Tommy’s eyes, they seemed to look through him, as if the beast were reading his identity on the bar code of his soul.
Tommy remained still. Silent.
The demon sniffed him, not as a snorting pig might revel in the delicious stink of its slops, but as a master viniculturist with an exquisitely sensitive nose might seek to isolate and identify each of the many delicate aromas rising from a glassful of fine Bordeaux.
Hissing, the beast turned to sniff Del, lingering less than it had with Tommy.
Then Mrs. Dai.
Then Mother Phan.
When the creature bent down to sniff Scootie, the Labrador returned the compliment.
Apparently puzzled by finding the scent of the sorceress on all of them, the demon circled the group, grumbling, mumbling to itself in some strange language.
As one, without having to discuss it, Tommy and the three women and the dog shuffled in a circle to keep their blood-smeared faces toward the Samaritan-thing as it prowled for prey.
When they had shuffled all the way around, three hundred and sixty degrees, and were back where they had started, the creature focused on Tommy once more. It leaned closer, until their faces were only three inches apart, and it sniffed. Sniffed. Sniffed. With a disgusting squishy sound, the fat man’s nose broadened and darkened into a scaly reptilian snout with wide, pug nostrils. It breathed in slowly and deeply, held its breath, exhaled, breathed in even slower and deeper than before.
The serpent-eyed thing opened its mouth and shrieked at Tommy, but though his heart raced faster, Tommy neither flinched nor cried out.