Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

The creature’s cold, slick tail slithered around Tom-my’s wrist, and the feel of it was so singularly repulsive that he gagged with disgust.

Frantically he flailed out from beneath the entangling drape, and with all of his might, he threw the beast as though firing off a killer pitch in a baseball game.

He heard the damn thing shrieking as it was hurled across the room, and then heard the shriek cut off abruptly as it thudded hard against the far wall, perhaps hard enough to snap its spine. But he didn’t see it hit the plaster, because in the process of freeing himself from the drape, he pulled the brass rod out of its supports, and the entire assemblage - rod and two panels of material, trailing cords - fell on him.

Cursing, he tossed the blinding cowl of faux brocade off his head and thrashed loose of the drapery cords, feeling like Gulliver resisting capture in the land of Lilliput.

The hideous mini-kin was crumpled on the carpet against the baseboard at the far side of the room, near the door. For an instant Tommy thought the thing was dead or at least badly stunned. But then it shook itself, moved.

Thrusting the pistol in front of him, Tommy took a step toward the intruder, intending to finish it off. The mound of fallen drapes snared his feet. He stumbled, lost his balance, and slammed to the floor.

With his left cheek flat against the carpet, he now shared the murderous mini-kin’s plane of view, though from a tilted perspective. His vision blurred for a second when his head hit the floor, but it cleared at once. He was staring at his diminutive adversary, which had risen to its feet.

The creature stood as erect as a man, trailing its six-inch black tail, still dressed in - and mostly concealed by - the rags of the doll’s skin in which it had hidden.

Outside, the storm was reaching a crescendo, ham-mering the night with a greater barrage of lightning and thunder than it had produced thus far. The ceiling light and the desk lamp flickered but did not go out.

The creature sprinted toward Tommy, white cotton cloth flapping like tattered banners.

Tommy’s right arm was stretched out in front of him, and the pistol was still firmly in his grip. He raised the weapon perhaps four inches off the floor, squeeze-cocked it, and fired two shots in quick succession.

One of the rounds must have hit the mini-kin, because it flew off its feet. It tumbled backward all the way to the wall against which Tommy had thrown it earlier.

Proportionately, the slug from the.40 Smith & Wesson cartridge was to this beast what a shell from a major piece of battlefield artillery would be to a human being; the damn thing should have been as devastated - as stone dead - as any man would have been after taking a massive mortar round in the chest. It should have been smashed, shattered, blown to bits.

Instead, the small figure appeared to be intact. Sprawled in a tangle of limbs and scorched white cotton cloth. Racked by spasms. Tail slithering spasmodically back and forth on the floor. Wisps of smoke rising from it. But intact.

Tommy raised his throbbing head for a better view. He didn’t see any splatters of blood on the carpet or on the wall. Not one drop.

The beast stopped shuddering and rolled onto its back. Then it sat up and sighed. The sigh wasn’t one of weariness but of pleasure, as though being shot point-blank in the chest had been an interesting and gratifying experience.

Tommy pushed up onto his knees.

Across the office, the mini-kin put its black-and-yellow-mottled hands on its scorched, smoking abdomen. No it actually reached into its abdomen, digging with its claws, and wrenched something out of itself.

Even from a distance of fifteen feet, Tommy was pretty sure that the lumpish object in the beast’s hands was the misshapen slug from the.40-caliber cartridge. The mini-kin tossed the chunk of lead aside.

Shaky, weak-kneed, slightly nauseous, Tommy got to his feet.

He felt his scalp, where the puncture wounds from the beast’s claws still stung. When he checked his fingertips, he saw only tiny dots of blood.

He hadn’t been seriously hurt.

Yet.

His adversary rose to its feet as well.

Although he was seven times taller than the mini-kin and perhaps thirty times its weight, Tommy was so terrified that he felt as though he might pee in his pants.

Chip Nguyen, hardboiled detective, would never lose control of himself in that fashion, humiliate himself to that extent, but Tommy Phan no longer gave a damn what Chip Nguyen would do. Chip Nguyen was an idiot, a whiskey-drinking fool who put too much faith in guns, martial arts, and tough talk. The most precisely executed and powerfully delivered Tae Kwan Do kick wouldn’t stop a supernaturally animated devil doll that could take a 40-caliber round in its guts and keep on ticking.

Now there was an indisputable truth. Not the kind of truth you would hear on the evening news or read in the newspaper. Not a truth they taught in school or church. Not a truth that would be acclaimed by Carl Sagan or the scientific establishment. Truth nonetheless, from Tommy’s point of view, truth even if the only forum that might report it was a rag like the National Enquirer in a story about the ominous rise of demonic presences in our apocalyptic age and the inevitable forthcoming battle between Satan Incarnate and Saint Elvis on the eve of the new millennium.

Pointing the P7 at the mini-kin, Tommy felt a mad laugh swelling in him, but he choked it down. He wasn’t insane. He had gotten past that fear. It was God Himself who must be mad - and the universe a lunatic asylum - if He made room in Creation for something like this predatory gremlin in a rag-doll disguise.

If the mini-kin was a supernatural presence, as it seemed to be, resistance to it might be stupid and pointless, but Tommy couldn’t very well throw the gun aside, bare his throat, and wait for the killing bite. At least the round from the pistol had knocked the thing down and temporarily stunned it. He might not be able to kill it with the gun, but at least he could fend it off.

Until he ran out of ammunition.

He had fired three rounds. One when the thing had dropped from the drapery rod onto his head. Two more when he had been lying on the floor.

Ten rounds remained in the thirteen-shot magazine. And in his bedroom closet was a box of ammunition, which would buy more time if he could get to it.

The doll-thing cocked its rag-swaddled head and regarded him with a fierce green-eyed hunger. The strips of cotton hanging over its face looked like white dreadlocks.

Thus far the gunfire had probably been pretty much masked by the peals of thunder. Eventually, however, the neighbours in this peaceful city of Irvine would realize that a battle was being waged next door, and they would call the cops.

The doll-thing hissed at him.

God in heaven, what is this - Showdown at the Twilight Zone Corral?

When the police arrived, he would have to tell them what was happening, even though he would sound like a poster boy for paranoid dementia. Then the mini-kin would either brazenly reveal itself, and the rest of the world would plummet into this nightmare with Tommy - or the cunning little demon would hide and let the police transfer their raving ward to a windowless but well-lighted room with rubber wallpaper.

At this moment, Tommy almost didn’t care which of the two scenarios played out. In either case, the immedi-ate terror would be over, and he would be able to avoid peeing in his pants. He’d have time to catch his breath, think about this, maybe even puzzle out an explanation for what had happened here - although that seemed no more likely than his arriving at an understanding of the meaning of life.

The fiend hissed again.

A new possibility occurred to Tommy, and it wasn’t a good one. Maybe the hateful little thing would secretly follow him to the psychiatric ward and continue to torment him there for the rest of his tortured life, cleverly avoiding being seen by the physicians and attendants.