“Thanks, Sal.”
“Now at last maybe you’ll be able to get girls, won’t have to make it anymore with Rhonda Rubbergirl, the inflatable woman.”
“Asshole,” Tommy said affectionately.
“Fax the note.”
“Right away,” Tommy said, and he hung up.
A small Xerox machine stood in one corner of his office. Without turning on any room lights, he made a photocopy of the note, returned the note to his shirt pocket, and faxed the copy to Sal at the Register.
The phone rang a minute later. Sal said, “You put it through the fax wrong-side up, dickhead. All I’ve got is a blank sheet of paper with your number at the top.”
“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 knee caps, 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 pearlesence 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’s eye: 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.