no entertainment except organ music and church bingo.
    ... in this my hour of need…
    The doll twitched. Its head turned slightly toward Tommy. Its green eye fixed on him.
    He felt his gorge rising, tasted a bitter vileness in the back of his throat, 
swallowed hard, choked it down, and knew beyond doubt that he was not dreaming. He had 
never before nearly puked in a dream. Dreams weren’t this intense.
    On the computer screen, the four words began to flash:
    THE DEADLINE IS DAWN.
    The stitches over the doll’s second eye popped and raveled into its head. The fabric 
bulged and began to split again.
    The creature’s stubby arms twitched. Its small mitten hands flexed. It pushed away 
from the desk lamp and rose stiffly to its feet, all of ten inches tall but nonetheless 
terrifying for its diminutive stature.
    Even Chip Nguyen - toughest of all private detectives, master of Tae Kwon Do, 
fearless fighter for truth and justice - would have done precisely what Tommy Phan did 
then: run. Neither the author nor his creation was a complete fool.
    Recognizing that skepticism in this case could get him killed, Tommy spun away from 
the impossible thing that was emerging from the rag doll. Pushing aside the wheeled 
office chair, he crashed against the corner of the desk, stumbled over his own feet, 
maintained his balance, and staggered out of the room.
    He slammed the office door behind him so hard that the house - and his own bones - 
reverberated with the impact. There was no lock on it. Frantically he considered fetching 
a suitable chair from the master bedroom and bracing it under the knob, but then he 
realized that the door opened into the office beyond and, therefore, could not be wedged 
shut from the hallway.
    He started toward the stairs, but on second thought he dashed into his bedroom, 
switching on the lights as he went.
    The bed was neatly made. The white chenille spread was as taut as a drum skin.
    He kept a neat house, and he was distressed to think of it all splattered with blood, 
especially his own.
    What was that damn thing? And what did it want?
    The rosewood nightstand gleamed darkly from furni-ture polish and diligent care, and 
in the top drawer, next to a box of Kleenex, was a pistol that had been equally well 
maintained.
    
    TWO
    
    The gun that Tommy took from the nightstand drawer was a Heckler & Koch P7 M13. He 
had purchased it years ago, after the Los Angeles riots that had been sparked by the 
Rodney King case.
    In those days, his merciless imagination had plagued him with vivid nightmares of the 
violent collapse of civilization. His fear had not been limited to dreams, however. He’d 
been anxiety-stricken for a month or two and uneasy for at least a year, expecting social 
chaos to erupt at any moment, and for the first time in a decade, he had flashed back to 
childhood memories of the bloody carnage that had followed the fall of Saigon in the 
weeks immediately before he and his family had escaped to sea. Having once lived through 
an apocalypse, he knew that it could happen again.
    Orange County had not been besieged by the rampag-ing mobs that had chased Tommy 
through his dreams, however, and even Los Angeles had soon returned to normal, although 
normal couldn’t accurately be called civility in the City of Angels these days. He had 
never needed the pistol.
    Until this minute.
    Now he desperately needed the weapon not to hold at bay the expected band of looters, 
not even to defend his home from a single burglar, but to protect himself from a rag 
doll. Or from whatever was hidden within the rag doll.
    As he hurried out of the bedroom and into the second-floor hallway again, Tommy Phan 
wondered if he might be losing his mind.
    Then he wondered why he was wondering. Of course he was losing his mind. He was 
already past the edge of rationality, plunging off the cliff, on the bobsled of insanity 
and rocketing down a huge chute that would take him into the cold dark depths of total 
lunacy.
    Rag dolls couldn’t become animate.
    Ten-inch-tall humanoid creatures with radiant green snake eyes didn’t exist.
    A blood vessel had popped in his brain. Or maybe a cancerous tumour had grown to that 
critical stage at which it exerted disabling pressure on the brain cells around it. He 
was hallucinating. That was the only credible explanation.
    The door to his office was closed, as he had left it.
    The house was as silent as a monastery full of sleeping monks, without even the 
murmur of whispered prayers. No wind in the eaves. No tick of clock or creak of 
floorboards.
    Trembling, sweating, Tommy sidled along the car-peted hall, approaching the office 
door with extreme caution.
    The pistol shook in his hand. Fully loaded, it weighed only about two and 
three-quarter pounds, but under the circumstances it felt enormously heavy. It was a 
squeeze cocker, as safe as any double-action piece on the market, but he pointed the 
muzzle only at the ceiling and kept his finger lightly on the trigger. Chambered for a.40 
Smith & Wesson cartridge, the gun could do serious damage.
    He reached the closed door, halted, and hesitated.
    The doll - or whatever was hiding in the doll - was far too small to reach the knob. 
Even if it could climb up to the knob, it would not have sufficient strength - or be able 
to apply enough leverage - to open the door. The thing was trapped in there.
    On the other hand, how could he be so confident that it wouldn’t have the requisite 
strength or the leverage? This creature was an impossibility to begin with, some-thing 
out of a science-fiction film, and logic applied to this situation no more than it 
applied in movies or in dreams.
    Tommy stared at the knob, half expecting to see it turn. The polished brass gleamed 
with a reflection of the hall light overhead. If he peered closely enough, he could 
discern a weirdly distorted reflection of his own sweat-damp face in the shiny metal: He 
looked scarier than the thing inside the rag doll.
    After a while he put one ear to the door. No sound came from the room beyond - at 
least none that he could hear over the runaway thudding of his heart.
    His legs felt rubbery, and the perceived weight of the Heckler & Koch - more 
important than its real weight - was now twenty pounds, maybe twenty-five, so heavy that 
his arm was beginning to ache with the burden of it.
    What was the creature doing in there? Was it still ripping out of the cotton fabric, 
like a waking mummy unwinding its burial wrappings?
    He tried again to assure himself that this whole incident was an hallucination 
brought on by a stroke.
    His mother had been right. The cheeseburgers, the French fries, the onion rings, the 
double-thick choc-olate milkshakes - those were the culprits that had done him in.