better. He could have beaten the creature to death with a shovel, but hitting a small 
target with a round from a pistol might not be easy, even though he was a good marksman.
    For one thing, he wouldn’t have the leisure to aim carefully and squeeze off a 
well-calculated shot as he did on the target range. Instead, he would have to conduct 
himself in the manner of a soldier at war, relying on instinct and quick reflexes, and he 
wasn’t sure that he was adequately equipped with either.
    ‘I am no Chip Nguyen,’ he admitted softly.
    Besides, he suspected that the doll-thing was capable of moving fast. Very fast. Even 
quicker than a rat.
    He briefly considered going down to the garage for a shovel but decided that the 
pistol would have to be good enough. If he left now, he wasn’t confident that he would 
have the courage to return to the office a second time.
    A sudden patter, as of small swift feet, alarmed Tommy. He swung the pistol left, 
right, left - but then realized that he was hearing only the first fat drops of rain 
snapping against the clay-tile roof.
    His stomach churned with an acidic tide that seemed sufficiently corrosive to 
dissolve steel nails in an instant if he ate them. Indeed, he felt as though he had eaten 
about a pound of nails. He wished that he’d had com tay cam for dinner instead of 
cheeseburgers, stir-fried vegetables with Nuoc Mam sauce instead of onion rings.
    Hesitantly he edged across the room and around the desk. The red-pencilled chapter of 
the latest book and the empty bottle of beer were where he had left them, undisturbed.
    The snake-eyed mini-kin was not hiding on the far side of the computer monitor. It 
wasn’t lurking behind the laser printer, either.
    Under the gooseneck desk lamp were two ragged scraps of white cotton fabric. Although 
somewhat shred-ded, they had a recognizable mitten like shape - obvi-ously the cloth that 
had covered the thing’s hands. They appeared to have been torn off - perhaps chewed off - 
at the wrists to free the creature’s real hands from confinement.
    Tommy didn’t understand how there could have been any living creature in the doll 
when he had first handled it and brought it upstairs. The soft cloth casing had seemed to 
be filled with sand. He had detected no hard edges whatsoever inside the damn thing, no 
indication of a bone structure, no cranium, no cartilage, none of the firmness of flesh, 
merely a limpness, a loose shifting, an amorphous quality.
    THE DEADLINE IS DAWN no longer glowed on the video display terminal. In the place of 
that cryp-tic yet ominous message was a single word: TICK-TOCK.
    Tommy felt as if he had tumbled like poor Alice into a weird alternate world - not 
down a rabbit hole, however, but into a video game.
    He pushed the wheeled office chair out of the way. Holding the pistol in his right 
hand and thrusting it in front of him, he cautiously stooped to peer into the kneehole in 
the desk. Banks of drawers flanked that space, and a dark privacy panel shielded the 
front of it, yet enough light seeped in for him to be sure that the doll-thing was not 
there.
    The banks of drawers were supported on stubby legs, and Tommy had to lower his face 
all the way to the floor to squint under them as well. He found nothing, and he rose to 
his feet once more.
    To the left of the knee space were one box drawer and a file drawer. To the right was 
a stack of three box drawers. He eased them open, one at a time, expecting the mini-kin 
to explode at his face, but he discovered only his usual business supplies, stapler, 
cellophane-tape dispenser, scissors, pencils, and files.
    Outside, driven by a suddenly fierce wind, rain pounded across the roof, roaring like 
the marching feet of armies. Raindrops rattled against the windows with a sound as hard 
as distant gunfire.
    The din of the storm would mask the furtive scuttling of the doll-thing if it circled 
the room to evade him. Or if it crept up behind him.
    He glanced over his shoulder, but he wasn’t under imminent attack.
    As he searched, he strove to persuade himself that the creature was too small to pose 
a serious threat to him. A rat was a thoroughly disgusting and frightening little beast 
too, but it was no match for a grown man and could be dispatched without ever having a 
chance to inflict a bite. Furthermore, there was no reason to assume that this strange 
creature’s intention was to harm him any more than he could have had reason to assume 
that a rat possessed the strength and power and will to plot the murder of a human being.
    Nevertheless, he couldn’t convince himself that the threat was less than mortal. His 
heart continued to race, and his chest was almost painfully tight with apprehension.
    He recalled too clearly the radiant green eyes with elliptical black pupils, which 
had fixed him so threat-eningly from within the rag face. They were the fierce eyes of a 
predator.
    The brass wastebasket was half filled with crumpled sheets of typing paper and pages 
from a yellow legal pad. He kicked it to see if he could elicit an alarmed response from 
anything hiding at the bottom of the trash.
    The papers rustled when he kicked the can, but at once they settled again into a 
silent heap.
    From the shallow pencil drawer in the desk, Tommy withdrew a ruler and used it to 
stir the papers in the wastebasket. He poked it violently down into the trash a few 
times, but nothing squealed or tried to wrest the ruler from his hand.
    Chain lightning flared outside, and with arachnid frenzy, the turbulent black shadows 
of wind-shaken trees thrashed across the glass. Thunder boomed, thunder roared, and 
thunder tumbled down the coal chute of the night.
    Across the room from the desk, a sofa stood against the wall, under framed 
reproductions of movie posters advertising two of his favourite films. Fred MacMurray, 
Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward C. Robinson in James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. Bogart and 
Bacall in Dark Passage.
    Occasionally, when his writing wasn’t going well, especially when he was stuck for an 
engaging plot twist, Tommy stretched out on the sofa, his head elevated on the two 
decorative red pillows, did some deep-breathing exercises, let his mind drift, and gave 
his imagination a chance to work. Often he solved the problem within an hour and went 
back to work. More often he fell asleep - and woke with a flush of shame at his laziness, 
sticky with perspiration and excessive guilt.
    Now Tommy gingerly moved the two red throw pillows. The mini-kin wasn’t hiding behind 
either of them.
    The sofa was built to the floor rather than sup-ported on legs. Consequently, nothing 
could be hiding under it.
    The doll-thing might be behind the sofa, however, and to move such a heavy piece away 
from the wall, Tommy needed both hands. He would have to put aside the pistol; but he was 
reluctant to let go of it.
    He worriedly surveyed the room.
    The only movement was the vaguely phosphorescent wriggle of the rain streaming down 
the windows.
    He placed the gun on a sofa cushion, within easy reach, and he dragged that heavy 
piece of furniture away from the wall, sure that something hideous, half clothed in torn 
cotton rags, would come at him, shrieking.
    He was uneasily aware of how vulnerable his ankles were to sharp little teeth.