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 drapery panel, but no snake-eyed mini-kin hung from the back of it, either.
At the second window, his colourless reflection in the rain-sheathed glass caught his attention, but he averted his gaze when he glimpsed such a 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 paralysed 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. Cold 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 mini-kin 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 floodtide surge.
The mini-kin 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 fiercely, 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 mini-kin 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 mini-kin, and it gnashed its teeth, trying to bite his fingers, striving to sink its claws into him again.