From time to time, Tommy glanced at the doll. It sat in the fall of amber light from the desk lamp against which it was propped, arms at its sides, mitten-like hands turned palms up as if in supplication.
By the time he finished editing the chapter, he had also drunk the last of the beer. Before entering the red-lined changes in the computer, he went to the guest bathroom off the upstairs hall.
When he returned to his office a few minutes later, Tommy half expected to discover that the doll had toppled onto its side again. But it was sitting upright, as he had left it.
He shook his head and smiled in embarrassment at his insistence on drama.
Then, lowering himself into his chair, he saw four words on the previously blank computer screen:
THE DEADLINE IS DAWN.
“What the hell…”
As he settled all of the way into the chair, a hot sharp pain stabbed through his right thigh. Startled, he shot to his feet, pushing the wheeled armchair away from himself.
He clutched his thigh, felt the tiny lance that had pierced his blue jeans, and plucked it out of both the denim and his flesh. He was holding the straight pin with the black enamel head as large as a pea.
Astonished, Tommy turned the pin between thumb and forefinger, his eyes on the glinting point.
Over the soughing of the wind in the eaves and over the humming of the laser printer in its stand-by mode, he heard a new sound: a soft pop… and then again. Like threads breaking.
He looked at the doll in the fall of light from the desk lamp. It was sitting as before—but the pair of crossed stitches over the spot where a person’s heart would be had snapped and now hung loose on its white cotton breast.
Tommy Phan didn’t realize that he had dropped the pin until he heard it strike—tink, tink—the hard plastic mat under his office chair.
Paralyzed, he stared at the doll for what seemed like an hour but must have been less than a minute. When he could move again, he found himself reaching for the damn thing, and he checked himself when his hand was still ten or twelve inches from it.
His mouth was so dry that his tongue had stuck to his palate. He worked up some saliva, but his tongue nevertheless peeled loose as reluctantly as a Velcro fastener.
His frantic heart hammered so hard that his vision blurred at the edges with each beat, as blood surged through him in artery-stretching quantities. He felt as though he was on the verge of a stroke.
In the better and more vivid world that he inhabited, Chip Nguyen would have seized the doll without hesitation and examined it to determine what device it contained. Perhaps a miniature bomb? Perhaps a fiendishly clever clockwork mechanism that would eject a poisoned dart?
Tommy wasn’t half the man that Chip Nguyen was, but he wasn’t a complete coward, damn it. Although he was reluctant to pick up the doll, he gingerly extended one index finger and experimentally pressed it against the pair of snapped sutures on the white cotton breast.
Inside the dreadful little manlike figure, directly under Tommy’s finger, something twitched, throbbed, and throbbed again. Not as though it were a clockwork mechanism, but as though it were something alive.
He snatched his hand back.
At first, what he had felt made him think of a squirming insect: an obscenely fat spider or a frenzied cockroach. Or perhaps a tiny rodent: some god awful pale and hairless pink mouse like nothing that anyone had ever seen before.
Abruptly the dangling black threads unraveled into the needle holes through which they had been sewn, disappearing into the doll’s chest as if something had pulled them from inside.
“Jesus!”
Tommy stumbled backward a step and nearly fell into his office chair. He clutched the arm of it and kept his balance.
Pop-pop-pop.
The stitches over the thing’s right eye broke as the cloth under them bulged with internal pressure. Then they, too, raveled into the doll like strands of spaghetti sucked into a child’s mouth.