For one thing, he wouldn’t have the leisure to aim carefully and squeeze off a well-calculated shot as he did on the target range. Instead, he would have to conduct himself in the manner of a soldier at war, relying on instinct and quick reflexes, and he wasn’t sure that he was adequately equipped with either.
‘I am no Chip Nguyen,’ he admitted softly.
Besides, he suspected that the doll-thing was capable of moving fast. Very fast. Even quicker than a rat.
He briefly considered going down to the garage for a shovel but decided that the pistol would have to be good enough. If he left now, he wasn’t confident that he would have the courage to return to the office a second time.
A sudden patter, as of small swift feet, alarmed Tommy. He swung the pistol left, right, left – but then realized that he was hearing only the first fat drops of rain snapping against the clay-tile roof.
His stomach churned with an acidic tide that seemed sufficiently corrosive to dissolve steel nails in an instant if he ate them. Indeed, he felt as though he had eaten about a pound of nails. He wished that he’d had com tay cam for dinner instead of cheeseburgers, stir-fried vegetables with Nuoc Mam sauce instead of onion rings.
Hesitantly he edged across the room and around the desk. The red-pencilled chapter of the latest book and the empty bottle of beer were where he had left them, undisturbed.
The snake-eyed mini-kin was not hiding on the far side of the computer monitor. It wasn’t lurking behind the laser printer, either.
Under the gooseneck desk lamp were two ragged scraps of white cotton fabric. Although somewhat shredded, they had a recognizable mitten like shape – obviously the cloth that had covered the thing’s hands. They appeared to have been torn off – perhaps chewed off – at the wrists to free the creature’s real hands from confinement.
Tommy didn’t understand how there could have been any living creature in the doll when he had first handled it and brought it upstairs. The soft cloth casing had seemed to be filled with sand. He had detected no hard edges whatsoever inside the damn thing, no indication of a bone structure, no cranium, no cartilage, none of the firmness of flesh, merely a limpness, a loose shifting, an amorphous quality.
THE DEADLINE IS DAWN no longer glowed on the video display terminal. In the place of that cryptic yet ominous message was a single word: TICK-TOCK.
Tommy felt as if he had tumbled like poor Alice into a weird alternate world – not down a rabbit hole, however, but into a video game.
He pushed the wheeled office chair out of the way. Holding the pistol in his right hand and thrusting it in front of him, he cautiously stooped to peer into the kneehole in the desk. Banks of drawers flanked that space, and a dark privacy panel shielded the front of it, yet enough light seeped in for him to be sure that the doll-thing was not there.
The banks of drawers were supported on stubby legs, and Tommy had to lower his face all the way to the floor to squint under them as well. He found nothing, and he rose to his feet once more.
To the left of the knee space were one box drawer and a file drawer. To the right was a stack of three box drawers. He eased them open, one at a time, expecting the mini-kin to explode at his face, but he discovered only his usual business supplies, stapler, cellophane-tape dispenser, scissors, pencils, and files.
Outside, driven by a suddenly fierce wind, rain pounded across the roof, roaring like the marching feet of armies. Raindrops rattled against the windows with a sound as hard as distant gunfire.
The din of the storm would mask the furtive scuttling of the doll-thing if it circled the room to evade him. Or if it crept up behind him.
He glanced over his shoulder, but he wasn’t under imminent attack.
As he searched, he strove to persuade himself that the creature was too small to pose a serious threat to him. A rat was a thoroughly disgusting and frightening little beast too, but it was no match for a grown man and could be dispatched without ever having a chance to inflict a bite. Furthermore, there was no reason to assume that this strange creature’s intention was to harm him any more than he could have had reason to assume that a rat possessed the strength and power and will to plot the murder of a human being.