was no longer on the end table where Tommy had left it. Evidently, when the doll had 
toppled over, the pin had been knocked to the floor.
    He couldn’t see it on the cream-coloured carpet, although the glossy black head 
should have made it easy to spot. The vacuum cleaner would get it the next time he swept.
    From the refrigerator in the kitchen, he retrieved a bottle of beer. Coors. Brewed 
high in the Colourado Rockies.
    With the beer in one hand and the doll in the other, he went upstairs to his office 
once more. He switched on the desk lamp and propped the doll against it.
    He sat in his comfortable chocolate-brown, leather-upholstered office armchair, 
turned on the computer, and printed out the most recently completed chapter of the new 
Chip Nguyen adventure. It was twenty pages long.
    Sipping the Coors from the bottle, he worked on the manuscript with a red pencil, 
marking changes.
    At first the house was deathly silent. Then the incom-ing storm clouds finally pulled 
some ground-level tur-bulence with them, and the wind began to sough in the eaves. An 
overgrown branch on one of the melaleucas rubbed against an outside wall a dry-bone 
scraping sound. From downstairs in the family room came the faint but distinctive 
creaking of the damper hinge in the fireplace as the wind reached down the flue to play 
with it.
    From time to time, Tommy glanced at the doll. It sat in the fall of amber light from 
the desk lamp against which it was propped, arms at its sides, mitten-like hands turned 
palms up as if in supplication.
    By the time he finished editing the chapter, he had also drunk the last of the beer. 
Before entering the red-lined changes in the computer, he went to the guest bathroom off 
the upstairs hall.
    When he returned to his office a few minutes later, Tommy half expected to discover 
that the doll had toppled onto its side again. But it was sitting upright, as he had left 
it.
    He shook his head and smiled in embarrassment at his insistence on drama.
    Then, lowering himself into his chair, he saw four words on the previously blank 
computer screen: THE DEADLINE IS DAWN.
    ‘What the hell...
    As he settled all of the way into the chair, a hot sharp pain stabbed through his 
right thigh. Startled, he shot to his feet, pushing the wheeled armchair away from 
himself.
    He clutched his thigh, felt the tiny lance that had pierced his blue jeans, and 
plucked it out of both the denim and his flesh. He was holding the straight pin with the 
black enamel head as large as a pea.
    Astonished, Tommy turned the pin between thumb and forefinger, his eyes on the 
glinting point.
    Over the soughing of the wind in the eaves and over the humming of the laser printer 
in its stand-by mode, he heard a new sound: a soft pop... and then again. Like threads 
breaking.
    He looked at the doll in the fall of light from the desk lamp. It was sitting as 
before - but the pair of crossed stitches over the spot where a person’s heart would be 
had snapped and now hung loose on its white cotton breast.
    Tommy Phan didn’t realize that he had dropped the pin until he heard it strike - 
tink, tink - the hard plastic mat under his office chair.
    Paralyzed, he stared at the doll for what seemed like an hour but must have been less 
than a minute. When he could move again, he found himself reaching for the damn thing, 
and he checked himself when his hand was still ten or twelve inches from it.
    His mouth was so dry that his tongue had stuck to his palate. He worked up some 
saliva, but his tongue never-theless peeled loose as reluctantly as a Velcro fastener.
    His frantic heart hammered so hard that his vision blurred at the edges with each 
beat, as blood surged through him in artery-stretching quantities. He felt as though he 
was on the verge of a stroke.
    In the better and more vivid world that he inhab-ited, Chip Nguyen would have seized 
the doll without hesitation and examined it to determine what device it contained. 
Perhaps a miniature bomb? Perhaps a fiendishly clever clockwork mechanism that would 
eject a poisoned dart?
    Tommy wasn’t half the man that Chip Nguyen was, but he wasn’t a complete coward, damn 
it. Although he was reluctant to pick up the doll, he gingerly extended one index finger 
and experimentally pressed it against the pair of snapped sutures on the white cotton 
breast.
    Inside the dreadful little manlike figure, directly under Tommy’s finger, something 
twitched, throbbed, and throbbed again. Not as though it were a clockwork mechanism, but 
as though it were something alive.
    He snatched his hand back.
    At first, what he had felt made him think of a squirming insect: an obscenely fat 
spider or a frenzied cockroach. Or perhaps a tiny rodent: some god awful pale and 
hairless pink mouse like nothing that anyone had ever seen before.
    Abruptly the dangling black threads unraveled into the needle holes through which 
they had been sewn, disappearing into the doll’s chest as if something had pulled them 
from inside.
    ‘Jesus!’
    Tommy stumbled backward a step and nearly fell into his office chair. He clutched the 
arm of it and kept his balance.
    Pop-pop-pop.
    The stitches over the thing’s right eye broke as the cloth under them bulged with 
internal pressure. Then they, too, raveled into the doll like strands of spaghetti sucked 
into a child’s mouth.
    Tommy was shaking his head in denial. He had to be dreaming.
    Where the broken sutures had disappeared into the face, the fabric split with a 
discrete tearing sound.
    Dreaming.
    The rent in the small blank-white face opened to half an inch, like a gaping wound.
    Definitely dreaming. Big dinner, two cheeseburgers, French fries, onion rings, enough 
cholesterol to kill a horse - and then a bottle of beer. Dozed off at my desk. Dreaming.
    From behind the split fabric came a flash of colour. Green. A fierce radiant green.
    The cotton cloth curled away from the hole, and a small eye appeared in the soft 
round head. It wasn’t the shiny glass eye of a doll, not merely a painted plastic disc, 
either, but as real as Tommy’s own eyes (although infinitely stranger), full of soft 
eerie light, hateful and watchful, with an elliptical black pupil as in the eye of a 
snake.
    Tommy made the sign of the cross. He had been raised as a Roman Catholic, and 
although he had only rarely attended Mass over the past five years, he was suddenly 
devout again.
    ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, hear my plea...‘
    Tommy was prepared to spend - happy to spend - the rest of his life between a 
confessional and a sacristy railing, subsisting solely on the Eucharist and faith, with