Although he was only thirty, his abused circulatory system had collapsed under the 
massive freight of cholesterol that he forced it to carry. When this terminal episode was 
finished and the pathologists performed an autopsy on him, they would discover that his 
arteries and veins were clogged with enough greasy fat to lubricate the wheels on all the 
trains in America. Standing over his coffin, his weeping but quietly smug mother would 
say, Tuong, I try tell you but you not listen, never listen. Too many cheeseburgers, soon 
you look like big fat cheeseburger, start seeing little snake-eyed monsters, fall dead of 
shock in upstairs hall with gun in your hand like dumb whiskey-drinking detective in 
books. Stupid boy, eating like crazy Americans, and now look what happen.
    Inside the office, something rattled softly.
    Tommy pressed his ear lighter to the paper-thin crack between the door and the jamb. 
He heard nothing more, but he was certain that he hadn’t imagined the first sound. The 
silence in that room now had a menacing quality.
    On one level, he was frustrated and angry with himself for continuing to behave as 
though the snake-eyed mini-kin was actually inside the office, standing on his desk, 
shedding its white cotton chrysalis.
    But, at the same time, instinctively he knew that he was not truly insane, no matter 
how much he might wish that he were. And he knew that, in fact, he also was not suffering 
from a stroke or a cerebral haemorrhage, no matter how much more comforting such a 
condition might be compared with admitting the reality of the rag doll from Hell.
    Or wherever it was from. Certainly not from Toys R Us. Not from one of the shops at 
Disneyland.
    No delusion. No figment of imagination. It’s in there.
    Well, all right, if it was in the office, then it couldn’t open the door to get out, 
so the smartest thing to do was leave it alone, go downstairs or even get out of the 
house altogether, and call the police. Find help.
    Right away he saw one serious problem with that sce-nario: The Irvine Police 
Department didn’t have a doll -from Hell SWAT team that it customarily dispatched upon 
request. They didn’t have an anti-werewolf strike force, either, or a vampire-vice squad. 
This was southern California, after all, not darkest Transylvania or New York City.
    The authorities would probably write him off as a crackpot akin to those people who 
reported being raped by Bigfoot or who wore homemade aluminium-foil hats to defeat the 
sinister extraterrestrials who were supposedly attempting to enslave them with microwave 
beams broadcast from the mother ship. The cops wouldn’t bother to send anyone in answer 
to his call.
    Or worse, no matter how calmly he described the encounter with the doll, the police 
might decide that he was suffering a psychotic episode and was a danger to himself and to 
others. Then he could be committed to a hospital psychiatric ward for observation.
    Usually a young writer, struggling to build a reader-ship, needed all the publicity 
he could get. But Tommy wasn’t able to imagine how his publisher’s promotion of his 
future novels could be enhanced by a press kit filled with stories about his vacation in 
a psycho ward and photographs of him in a chic straitjacket. That wasn’t exactly a John 
Grisham image.
    His head was pressed so hard against the door that his ear began to ache, but still 
he heard no further noises.
    Moving back one step, he put his left hand on the brass knob. It was cool against his 
palm.
    The pistol in his right hand now seemed to weigh forty pounds. The weapon looked 
powerful. With its thirteen-round magazine, it should have given him confidence, but he 
continued to tremble.
    Although he would have liked to walk out and never return, he couldn’t do that. He 
was a homeowner. The house was an investment that he couldn’t afford to abandon, and 
bankers seldom cancelled mortgages as a result of devil-doll infestations.
    He was virtually immobilized, and his indecisiveness deeply shamed him. Chip Nguyen, 
the hardboiled detective whose fictional adventures Tommy chronicled, was seldom troubled 
by doubt. Chip always knew the best thing to do in the most precarious situations. 
Usually his solutions involved his fists, or a gun, or any blunt instrument close at 
hand, or a knife wrenched away from his crazed assailant.
    Tommy had a gun, a really good gun, a first-rate gun, and his potential assailant was 
only ten inches tall, but he could not force himself to open the damn door. Chip Nguyen’s 
assailants were usually well over six feet tall (except for the demented nun in Murder Is 
a Bad Habit), and frequently they were virtual giants, usually steroid-pumped 
bodybuilders with massive biceps that made Schwarzenegger look like a sissy.
    Wondering how he could ever again write about a man of action if he failed to act 
decisively in his own moment of crisis, Tommy finally threw off the chains of paralysis 
and slowly turned the doorknob. The well-lubricated mechanism didn’t squeak - but if the 
doll was watching, it would see the knob rotate, and it might leap at him the moment that 
he entered the room.
    Just as Tommy had turned the doorknob as far as it would go, a thunderous crash shook 
the house, rattling window panes. He gasped, let go of the knob, backed across the hall, 
and assumed a shooter’s stance with the Heckler & Koch gripped in both hands and aimed at 
the office door.
    Then he realized that the crash was thunderous pre-cisely because it was thunder.
    When the first peal faded to a soft rumble in a distant corner of the sky, he glanced 
toward the end of the hallway, where pale flickers of lightning played across the window 
as a second hard explosion shook the night.
    He recalled watching the sable-black clouds roll in from the sea and shroud the moon 
a little earlier in the evening. Soon the rain would come.
    Embarrassed by his overreaction to the thunder, Tommy returned boldly to the office 
door. He opened it.
    Nothing leaped at him.
    The only light issued from the desk lamp, leaving deep and dangerous shadows 
throughout the room. Nevertheless, Tommy was able to see that the mini-kin was not on the 
floor immediately beyond the doorway.
    He stepped across the threshold, fumbled for the wall switch, and turned on the 
ceiling light. Quicker than a litter of black cats, shadows fled behind and under the 
furniture.
    In the sudden brightness, the mini-kin was not revealed. The creature was no longer 
on the desk - unless it was crouched against the far side of the computer monitor, 
waiting for him to venture closer.
    When he had entered the office, Tommy had intended to leave the door open behind him, 
so he could get out fast should a hasty retreat seem wise. Now, however, he realized that 
were the doll to escape this room, he would have little chance of locating it when 
required to search the entire house.
    He closed the door and stood with his back against it.
    Prudence required that he proceed as though on a rat hunt. Keep the little beast 
confined to one room. Search methodically under the desk. Under the sofa. Behind the pair 
of filing cabinets. Search in every cranny where the vermin might be hiding until, at 
last, it was flushed into the open.
    The pistol wasn’t the most desirable weapon for a rat hunt. A shovel might have been