Perhaps the questions he tossed into the darkness diminished the mini-kin’s confidence in direct proportion to the degree that they increased his own. If phrased crisply and spoken with authority, his questions might convince the beast that its prey wasn’t afraid of it and wasn’t likely to be easily overpowered. Anyway, he was reassured to think this might be the case.
His strategy was akin to one he would have used if confronted by a growling dog: Show no fear.
Unfortunately, he had already shown more than a little fear, so he needed to rehabilitate his image. He wished he could stop sweating; he wondered if the thing could smell his perspiration.
Behind his armour of forcefully stated questions, he found the courage to move toward the centre of the wall opposite the windows, where the door should be: ‘What are you, dammit? What right do you have to come into my house? Who made you, left you on the porch, rang the bell?’
Tommy bumped into the door, fumbled for the knob, found it – and still the mini-kin did not attack.
When he yanked open the door, he discovered that the lights were also off in the upstairs hall, which shared a circuit with his office. Lamps were aglow on the first floor, and pale light rose at the stairs.
As Tommy crossed the threshold, leaving the office, the mini-kin shot between his legs. He didn’t see it at first, but he heard it hiss and felt it brush against his jeans.
He kicked, missed, kicked again.
A scuttling sound and a snarl revealed that the creature was moving away from him. Fast.
At the head of the stairs, it appeared in silhouette against the rising light. It turned and fixed him with its radiant green eyes.
Tommy squeeze-cocked the P7.
The rag-entwined mini-kin raised one gnarly fist, shook it, and shrieked defiantly. Its cry was small but shrill, piercing, and utterly unlike the voice of anything else on earth.
Tommy took aim.
The creature scrambled down the stairs and out of sight before Tommy could squeeze off a shot.
He was surprised that it was fleeing from him, and then he was relieved. The pistol and his new strategy of showing no fear seemed to have given the beast second thoughts.
As quickly as surprise had given way to relief, how-ever, relief now turned to alarm. In the gloom and at a distance, he could not be certain, but he thought that the creature had still been holding the six-inch length of spring steel, not in the fist that it had raised but in the hand held at its side.
‘Oh, shit.’
His newfound confidence rapidly draining away, Tommy ran to the stairs.
The mini-kin wasn’t in sight.
Tommy descended the steps two at a time. He almost fell at the landing, grabbed the newel post to keep his balance, and saw that the lower steps were deserted too.
Movement drew his attention. The mini-kin streaked across the small foyer and vanished into the living room.
Tommy realized that he should have gone to the master bedroom for the flashlight in his nightstand drawer. It was too late to go back for it. If he didn’t move fast, he was going to be in an increasingly untenable position: either trapped in a pitch-black house where all the electrical circuits were disabled or driven on foot into the storm where the mini-kin could repeatedly attack and retreat with the cover of darkness and rain.
Though the thing was only a tiny fraction as strong as he was, its supernatural resilience and maniacal relentlessness compensated for its comparative physical weakness. It was not merely pretending to be fearless, as Tommy had pretended to be while talking his way out of his office. Though the creature was of Lilliputian dimensions, its reckless confidence was genuine; it expected to win, to chase him down, to get him.
Cursing, Tommy raced down the last flight. As he came off the bottom step, he heard a hard crackle-snap, and the lights went out in the living room and the foyer.
He turned right, into the dining room. The brass and milk-glass chandelier shed a pleasant light on the highly polished top of the maple table.