THREE
Depleted by distance and filtered by trees, the yellowish glow of the streetlamps barely touched the windows. Rain shimmered down the glass, glimmering with a few dull-brass reflections, but none of that light penetrated to the room.
Tommy was frozen by shock, effectively blind, unable to see anything in the room and trying not to see the fearsome images that his imagination conjured in his mind.
The only sounds were the rataplan of rain on the roof and the moaning of wind in the eaves.
Undoubtedly the doll-thing was alive. The electricity hadn’t fazed it any more than a .40-caliber bullet in the midsection.
Tommy clutched the P7 as if it possessed magical power and could protect him from all the known and unknown terrors of the universe, whether physical or spiritual. In fact, the weapon was useless to him in this saturant darkness. He couldn’t stun the mini-kin with a well-placed shot if he couldn’t see it.
He supposed that by now it had dropped the twisted piece of steel spring and had turned away from the electrical outlet. It would be facing him in the gloom. Grinning through its mummy rags.
Maybe he should open fire, squeeze off all nine shots remaining in the magazine, aiming for the general area where the creature had been when the lights went out. He was almost sure to get lucky with one or two rounds out of nine, for God’s sake, even if he wasn’t any Chip Nguyen. With the mini-kin stunned and twitching, Tommy could run into the second-floor hallway, slam the door between them, leap down the stairs two at a time, and get out of the house.
He didn’t know what the hell he would do after that, where he would go in this rain-swept night, to whom he would turn for help. All he knew was that to have any chance of survival whatsoever, he had to escape from this place.
He was loath to squeeze the trigger and empty the gun.
If he didn’t stun the mini-kin with a blind shot, he would never get to the door. It would catch him, climb his leg and his back with centipede-like quickness, bite the nape of his neck, slip around to his throat, and burrow-for-chew-at-tear-out his carotid artery while he flailed ineffectively – or it would scramble straight over his head, intent upon gouging out his eyes.
He wasn’t just letting his imagination carry him away this time. He could vividly sense the thing’s intentions, as though on some level he was in psychic contact with it.
If the attack came after the pistol magazine was empty, Tommy would panic, stumble, crash into furniture, fall. Once he fell, he would never have a chance to get to his feet again.
Better to conserve ammunition.
He backed up one step, two, but then he halted, overcome by the awful certainty that the little beast was not, after all, in front of him where it had been when the lights failed, but behind him. It had circled him as he had dithered; now it was creeping closer.
Spinning around a hundred and eighty degrees, he thrust the pistol toward the suspected threat.
He was facing into a portion of the room that was even blacker than the end with the windows. He might as well have been adrift at the farthest empty edge of the universe to which the matter and the energy of creation had not yet expanded.
He held his breath.
He listened but could not hear the mini-kin.
Only the rain.
The rain.
The rattling rain.
What scared him most about the intruder was not its monstrous and alien appearance, not its fierce hostility, not its physical spryness or speed, not its rodent-like size that triggered primal fears, and not even the fundamental mystery of its very existence. What sent chills up the hollow of Tommy’s spine and squeezed more cold sweat from him was the new realization that the thing was highly intelligent.
Initially he had assumed that he was dealing with an animal, an unknown and clever beast but a beast nonetheless. When it thrust the steel spiral into the electrical outlet, however, it revealed a complex and frightening nature. To be able to adapt a simple sofa spring into an essential tool, to understand the electrical system of the house well enough to disable the office circuit, the beast was not only able to think but was possessed of sophisticated knowledge that no mere animal could acquire.