If the thing benefited from both the superior intelli-gence of a human being and the 
more acute senses of an animal, Tommy was screwed.
    ‘What do you want?’ he asked aloud.
    He would not have been surprised if a small whispery voice had responded. Indeed, he 
almost hoped it would speak to him. Whether it spoke or only hissed, its reply would 
reveal its location - maybe even clearly enough to allow him to open fire.
    ‘Why me?’ he asked.
    The mini-kin made no sound.
    Tommy would have been astonished if such a creature had crawled out of the woodwork 
one day or squirmed from a hole in the backyard. He might have assumed that the thing was 
extraterrestrial in nature or that it had escaped from a secret genetic-engineering 
laboratory where a scientist with a conscience deficit had been hard at work on 
biological weapons. He had seen all the appli-cable scary movies: He had the requisite 
background for such speculation.
    But how much more astonishing that this thing had been placed on his doorstep in the 
form of a nearly featureless rag doll out of which it had either burst or swiftly 
metamorphosed. He had never seen any movie that could provide him with an adequate 
explanation for that.
    Swinging the Heckler & Koch slowly from side to side, he tried again to elicit a 
telltale response from the tiny intruder: ‘What are you?’
    The mini-kin, in its original white cotton skin, brought to mind voodoo, of course, 
but a voodoo doll was nothing like this creature. A voodoo doll was simply a crude 
fetish, believed to have magical potency, fashioned in the image of the person meant to 
be harmed, accessorized with a lock of his hair, or with a few of his nail clippings, or 
with a drop of his blood. Solemnly convinced that any damage done to the fetish would 
befall the real person as well, the torturer then stuck it full of pins, or burned it, or 
‘drowned’ it in a bucket of water, but the doll was never actually animate. It never 
showed up on the doorstep of the intended victim to bedevil and assault him.
    Nevertheless, into the gloom and the incessant drum-ming of the rain, Tommy said, 
‘Voodoo?’
    Whether this was voodoo or not, the most important thing he had to learn was who had 
made the doll. Someone had scissored the cotton fabric and sewn it into the shape of a 
gingerbread man, and someone had stuffed the empty form with a substance that felt like 
sand but proved to be a hell of a lot stranger than sand. The doll maker was his ultimate 
enemy, not the critter that was stalking him.
    He was never going to find the doll maker by waiting for the mini-kin to make the 
next move. Action, not reaction, was the source of solutions.
    Because he had established a dialogue with the little beast, even if its every 
response was the choice not to respond, Tommy was more confident than at any time since 
he’d felt the insectoid squirming of the creature’s heartbeat beneath his thumb. He was a 
writer, so using words gave him a comforting sense of control.
    Perhaps the questions he tossed into the darkness diminished the mini-kin’s 
confidence in direct proportion to the degree that they increased his own. If phrased 
crisply and spoken with authority, his questions might convince the beast that its prey 
wasn’t afraid of it and wasn’t likely to be easily overpowered. Anyway, he was reassured 
to think this might be the case.
    His strategy was akin to one he would have used if confronted by a growling dog: Show 
no fear.
    Unfortunately, he had already shown more than a little fear, so he needed to 
rehabilitate his image. He wished he could stop sweating; he wondered if the thing could 
smell his perspiration.
    Behind his armour of forcefully stated questions, he found the courage to move toward 
the centre of the wall opposite the windows, where the door should be: ‘What are you, 
dammit? What right do you have to come into my house? Who made you, left you on the 
porch, rang the bell?’
    Tommy bumped into the door, fumbled for the knob, found it - and still the mini-kin 
did not attack.
    When he yanked open the door, he discovered that the lights were also off in the 
upstairs hall, which shared a circuit with his office. Lamps were aglow on the first 
floor, and pale light rose at the stairs.
    As Tommy crossed the threshold, leaving the office, the mini-kin shot between his 
legs. He didn’t see it at first, but he heard it hiss and felt it brush against his jeans.
    He kicked, missed, kicked again.
    A scuttling sound and a snarl revealed that the creature was moving away from him. 
Fast.
    At the head of the stairs, it appeared in silhouette against the rising light. It 
turned and fixed him with its radiant green eyes.
    Tommy squeeze-cocked the P7.
    The rag-entwined mini-kin raised one gnarly fist, shook it, and shrieked defiantly. 
Its cry was small but shrill, piercing, and utterly unlike the voice of anything else on 
earth.
    Tommy took aim.
    The creature scrambled down the stairs and out of sight before Tommy could squeeze 
off a shot.
    He was surprised that it was fleeing from him, and then he was relieved. The pistol 
and his new strategy of showing no fear seemed to have given the beast second thoughts.
    As quickly as surprise had given way to relief, how-ever, relief now turned to alarm. 
In the gloom and at a distance, he could not be certain, but he thought that the creature 
had still been holding the six-inch length of spring steel, not in the fist that it had 
raised but in the hand held at its side.
    ‘Oh, shit.’
    His newfound confidence rapidly draining away, Tommy ran to the stairs.
    The mini-kin wasn’t in sight.
    Tommy descended the steps two at a time. He almost fell at the landing, grabbed the 
newel post to keep his bal-ance, and saw that the lower steps were deserted too.
    Movement drew his attention. The mini-kin streaked across the small foyer and 
vanished into the living room.
    Tommy realized that he should have gone to the master bedroom for the flashlight in 
his nightstand drawer. It was too late to go back for it. If he didn’t move fast, he was 
going to be in an increasingly untenable position: either trapped in a pitch-black house 
where all the electrical circuits were disabled or driven on foot into the storm where 
the mini-kin could repeatedly attack and retreat with the cover of darkness and rain.
    Though the thing was only a tiny fraction as strong as he was, its supernatural 
resilience and maniacal relentlessness compensated for its comparative physical weakness. 
It was not merely pretending to be fearless, as Tommy had pretended to be while talking 
his way out of his office. Though the creature was of Lilliputian dimen-sions, its 
reckless confidence was genuine; it expected to win, to chase him down, to get him.
    Cursing, Tommy raced down the last flight. As he came off the bottom step, he heard a 
hard crackle-snap, and the lights went out in the living room and the foyer.
    He turned right, into the dining room. The brass and milk-glass chandelier shed a