Inside the office, something rattled softly.
Tommy pressed his ear lighter to the paper-thin crack between the door and the jamb. He heard nothing more, but he was certain that he hadn’t imagined the first sound. The silence in that room now had a menacing quality.
On one level, he was frustrated and angry with himself for continuing to behave as though the snake-eyed mini-kin was actually inside the office, standing on his desk, shedding its white cotton chrysalis.
But, at the same time, instinctively he knew that he was not truly insane, no matter how much he might wish that he were. And he knew that, in fact, he also was not suffering from a stroke or a cerebral haemorrhage, no matter how much more comforting such a condition might be compared with admitting the reality of the rag doll from Hell.
Or wherever it was from. Certainly not from Toys R Us. Not from one of the shops at Disneyland.
No delusion. No figment of imagination. It’s in there.
Well, all right, if it was in the office, then it couldn’t open the door to get out, so the smartest thing to do was leave it alone, go downstairs or even get out of the house altogether, and call the police. Find help.
Right away he saw one serious problem with that scenario: The Irvine Police Department didn’t have a doll from Hell SWAT team that it customarily dispatched upon request. They didn’t have an anti-werewolf strike force, either, or a vampire-vice squad. This was southern California, after all, not darkest Transylvania or New York City.
The authorities would probably write him off as a crackpot akin to those people who reported being raped by Bigfoot or who wore homemade aluminium-foil hats to defeat the sinister extraterrestrials who were supposedly attempting to enslave them with microwave beams broadcast from the mother ship. The cops wouldn’t bother to send anyone in answer to his call.
Or worse, no matter how calmly he described the encounter with the doll, the police might decide that he was suffering a psychotic episode and was a danger to himself and to others. Then he could be committed to a hospital psychiatric ward for observation.
Usually a young writer, struggling to build a readership, needed all the publicity he could get. But Tommy wasn’t able to imagine how his publisher’s promotion of his future novels could be enhanced by a press kit filled with stories about his vacation in a psycho ward and photographs of him in a chic straitjacket. That wasn’t exactly a John Grisham image.
His head was pressed so hard against the door that his ear began to ache, but still he heard no further noises.
Moving back one step, he put his left hand on the brass knob. It was cool against his palm.
The pistol in his right hand now seemed to weigh forty pounds. The weapon looked powerful. With its thirteen-round magazine, it should have given him confidence, but he continued to tremble.
Although he would have liked to walk out and never return, he couldn’t do that. He was a homeowner. The house was an investment that he couldn’t afford to abandon, and bankers seldom cancelled mortgages as a result of devil-doll infestations.
He was virtually immobilized, and his indecisiveness deeply shamed him. Chip Nguyen, the hardboiled detective whose fictional adventures Tommy chronicled, was seldom troubled by doubt. Chip always knew the best thing to do in the most precarious situations. Usually his solutions involved his fists, or a gun, or any blunt instrument close at hand, or a knife wrenched away from his crazed assailant.
Tommy had a gun, a really good gun, a first-rate gun, and his potential assailant was only ten inches tall, but he could not force himself to open the damn door. Chip Nguyen’s assailants were usually well over six feet tall (except for the demented nun in Murder Is a Bad Habit), and frequently they were virtual giants, usually steroid-pumped bodybuilders with massive biceps that made Schwarzenegger look like a sissy.
Wondering how he could ever again write about a man of action if he failed to act decisively in his own moment of crisis, Tommy finally threw off the chains of paralysis and slowly turned the doorknob. The well-lubricated mechanism didn’t squeak—but if the doll was watching, it would see the knob rotate, and it might leap at him the moment that he entered the room.