Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

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. 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.