Yet he was certain that the doll-thing was still in this room. It could not have escaped during the short time that he had been gone to fetch the pistol. Besides, he sensed its hateful presence, the coiled energy of its predatory patience.
He felt something watching him even now.
But watching from where?
‘Come on, damn you, show yourself,’ he said.
In spite of the perspiration that sheathed him and the tremor that periodically fluttered through his belly, Tommy was gaining confidence by the minute. He felt that he was handling this bizarre situation with remarkable aplomb, conducting himself with sufficient courage and calculation to impress even Chip Nguyen.
‘Come on. Where? Where?’
Lightning flashed at the windows, and tree shadows ran spider-quick over glass and streaming rain, and like a warning voice, the tolling thunder seemed to call Tommy’s attention to the drapes.
The drapes. They didn’t extend all the way to the floor, hung only an inch or two below the bottoms of the windows, so he hadn’t thought that the mini-kin could be hiding behind them. But perhaps somehow it had climbed two and a half feet of wall – or had leaped high enough – to snare one of the drapes, and then had pulled itself upward into concealment.
The room had two windows, both facing east. Each window was flanked by panels of heavy fabric, a faux brocade in shades of gold and red, probably polyester, backed by a white lining, which hung from simple brass rods without concealing valances.
All four drapery panels hung in neat folds. None appeared to be pulled out of shape by a rat-size creature clinging to the back.
The fabric was heavy, however, and the doll-thing might have to weigh even more than a rat before it noticeably distorted the gathered pleats of the drapes.
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.