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.
With a zipper like sound, the liner material tore away from the gun sight.
The creature’s cold, slick tail slithered around Tommy’s wrist, and the feel of it was so singularly repulsive that he gagged with disgust.
Frantically he flailed out from beneath the entangling drape, and with all of his might, he threw the beast as though firing off a killer pitch in a baseball game.
He heard the damn thing shrieking as it was hurled across the room, and then heard the shriek cut off abruptly as it thudded hard against the far wall, perhaps hard enough to snap its spine. But he didn’t see it hit the plaster, because in the process of freeing himself from the drape, he pulled the brass rod out of its supports, and the entire assemblage – rod and two panels of material, trailing cords – fell on him.
Cursing, he tossed the blinding cowl of faux brocade off his head and thrashed loose of the drapery cords, feeling like Gulliver resisting capture in the land of Lilliput.
The hideous mini-kin was crumpled on the carpet against the baseboard at the far side of the room, near the door. For an instant Tommy thought the thing was dead or at least badly stunned. But then it shook itself, moved.
Thrusting the pistol in front of him, Tommy took a step toward the intruder, intending to finish it off. The mound of fallen drapes snared his feet. He stumbled, lost his balance, and slammed to the floor.
With his left cheek flat against the carpet, he now shared the murderous mini-kin’s plane of view, though from a tilted perspective. His vision blurred for a second when his head hit the floor, but it cleared at once. He was staring at his diminutive adversary, which had risen to its feet.
The creature stood as erect as a man, trailing its six-inch black tail, still dressed in – and mostly concealed by – the rags of the doll’s skin in which it had hidden.
Outside, the storm was reaching a crescendo, hammering the night with a greater barrage of lightning and thunder than it had produced thus far. The ceiling light and the desk lamp flickered but did not go out.
The creature sprinted toward Tommy, white cotton cloth flapping like tattered banners.
Tommy’s right arm was stretched out in front of him, and the pistol was still firmly in his grip. He raised the weapon perhaps four inches off the floor, squeeze-cocked it, and fired two shots in quick succession.
One of the rounds must have hit the mini-kin, because it flew off its feet. It tumbled backward all the way to the wall against which Tommy had thrown it earlier.
Proportionately, the slug from the .40 Smith & Wesson cartridge was to this beast what a shell from a major piece of battlefield artillery would be to a human being; the damn thing should have been as devastated – as stone dead – as any man would have been after taking a massive mortar round in the chest. It should have been smashed, shattered, blown to bits.