Like a malevolent genie freed from a lamp, the mini-kin flung itself out of the inferno and landed upright in the mud, no more than ten feet from Tommy. It was ablaze, but the streaming cloaks of fire that had replaced its white fabric shroud did not seem to disturb it.
Indeed, the creature was no longer shrieking in mind-less rage but appeared to be exhilarated by the blaze. Raising its arms over its head as if joyfully exclaiming hallelujah, swaying almost as if in a state of rapture, it fixed its attention not on Tommy but on its own hands which, like tallow tapers on some dark altar, streamed blue fire.
‘Bigger,’ Tommy gasped in disbelief.
Incredibly, the thing had grown. The doll on his doorstep had been about ten inches long. This demon swaying rapturously before him was approximately eighteen inches tall, nearly twice the size that it had been when he had last seen it streaking across his foyer into the living room to short-circuit the lights. Furthermore, its legs and arms were thicker and its body heavier than they had been earlier.
Because of the masking fire, Tommy could not see details of the creature’s form, although he thought he detected wickedly spiky protrusions extending the length of its spine, which had not been there before. Its back seemed to be more hunched than it had been previously, and perhaps its hands were becoming disproportionately large for the length of its arms.
Whether he perceived these details correctly or not, Tommy was certain that he could not be mistaken about the beast’s greater size.
Having expected the mini-kin to wither and collapse in the consuming flames, Tommy was dangerously mesmerized by the sight of it thriving instead.
‘This is nuts,’ he muttered.
The falling rain captured the light of the wildly leaping fire, carrying it into puddles on the ground, which glimmered like pools of melting doubloons and flickered with the shadow of the capering mini-kin.
How could it possibly have grown so fast? And to add this much body weight, it would have required nourishment, fuel to feed the feverish growth.
What had it eaten?
The good Samaritan was approaching again, behind the bobbling beam of his flashlight, but he was still more than sixty yards away. The burning Corvette was between him and the demon, which he wouldn’t be able to see until he had come virtually to Tommy’s side.
What had it eaten?
Impossibly, the rhapsodic mini-kin appeared to swell larger even as the flames seethed from it.
Tommy began to back slowly away, overcome by the urgent need to flee but reluctant to turn and run. Any too-sudden movement on his part might shatter the demon’s ecstatic fascination with the fire and remind it that its prey was nearby.
The guy with the flashlight was forty yards away. He was a heavyset man in a hooded raincoat that flared behind him.
Lumbering through the puddles, slipping in the mud, he resembled a cowled monk.
Suddenly Tommy was afraid for the Samaritan’s life. At first he had wanted a witness; but that was when he thought the mini-kin would perish in the flames. Now he sensed that it wouldn’t allow a witness.
He would have shouted at the stranger to stay away, even at the risk of drawing the mini-kin’s attention, but fate intervened when a gunshot cracked through the rainy night, then a second and a third.
Evidently recognizing the distinctive sound, the heavy-set stranger skidded to a halt in the mud. He was still thirty yards away, with the mined car intervening, so he couldn’t possibly have seen the blazing demon.
A fourth shot boomed, a fifth.
In the scramble to get out of the Corvette after the crash, Tommy had not remembered the pistol. He wouldn’t have been able to locate it anyway. Now the intense heat was detonating the ammunition.
Reminded that he lacked even the inadequate protection of the Heckler & Koch, Tommy stopped backing away from the demon and stood in tremulous indecision. Although he was drenched by the storm, his mouth was as dry as the sun-scorched sand on an August beach.
The rain washed parching panic through him, and his fear was like a fever burning in his brow, in his eyes, in his joints.