He glimpsed himself in the ornately framed mirror above the sideboard. His hair was disarranged. His eyes were wide, whites showing all the way around. He looked demented.
As Tommy pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen, the mini-kin squealed behind him. The familiar sound of an electric arc snapped again, and the dining-room lights went out.
Fortunately the kitchen lights were on a different circuit from those in the dining room. The overhead fluorescent tubes were still bright.
He snatched the car keys off the pegboard. They jangled, and though their ringing was flat and unmusical and utterly unlike bells, Tommy was reminded of the bells that were rung in church during Mass. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. For an instant he felt not like the potential victim that he was but, instead, felt a terrible weight of guilt, as though the extraordinary trouble that had befallen him this night was of his own making and was merely what he deserved.
The easy-action pivot hinges on the door to the dining room swung so smoothly that even the ten-inch mini-kin was able to squeeze into the kitchen close behind Tommy. With the keys ringing in his hand, with the remembered scent of incense as strong and sweet as it had ever been when he had served as an altar boy, he didn’t dare pause to look back, but he could hear the thing’s tiny clawed feet click-click-clicking against the tile floor.
He stepped into the laundry room and slammed the door behind him before the creature could follow.
No lock. Didn’t matter. The mini-kin wouldn’t be able to climb up and turn the knob on the other side. It couldn’t follow him any farther.
Even as Tommy turned away from the door, the lights failed in the laundry room. They must be on the same circuit with those in the kitchen, which the creature evidently had just shorted. He groped forward through the blackness.
At the end of this small rectangular space, past the washer and dryer, opposite the door that he had just closed, was the connecting door to the garage. It featured a dead-bolt lock with a thumb-turn on this side.
In the garage, the lights still functioned.
On this side, the deadbolt on the laundry-room door could be engaged only with a key. He didn’t see any point in taking time to lock it.
The big overhead door began to rumble upward when Tommy tapped the wall switch, and storm wind chuffed like a pack of dogs at the widening space at the bottom.
He hurriedly circled the Corvette to the driver’s side. The garage lights blinked out, and the roll-up door stopped ascending when it was still half blocking the exit.
No.
The mini-kin could not have gotten through two closed doors and into the garage to cause a short circuit. And there hadn’t been time for it to race out of the house, find the electric-service panel, climb the conduit on the wall, open the fuse box, and trip a breaker.
Yet the garage was as black as the darkest hemisphere of some strange moon never touched by the sun. And the roll-up door was only half open.
Maybe power had been lost throughout the neighbourhood because of the storm.
Frantically Tommy pawed at the darkness overhead until he located the dangling release chain that dis-connected the garage door from the electric motor that operated it. Still clutching the pistol, he rushed to the door and manually pushed it up, all the way open.
A noisy burst of November wind threw shatters of cold rain in his face. The balminess of the afternoon was gone. The temperature had plummeted at least twenty degrees since he had left the Corvette dealership in his new car and headed south along the coast.
He expected to see the mini-kin in the driveway, green eyes glaring, but the sodium-yellow drizzle from a nearby streetlamp revealed that the thing was not there.
Across the street, warm welcoming lights shone in the windows of other houses. The same was true at the homes to the left and right of his own.
The loss of power in his garage had nothing to do with the storm. He had never really believed that it did.