Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

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 pleasant light on the highly polished top of the maple table.

He glimpsed himself in the ornately framed mirror above the sideboard. His hair was disarranged. His eyes were wide, whites showing all the way around. He looked demented.

As Tommy pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen, the mini-kin squealed behind him. The familiar sound of an electric arc snapped again, and the dining-room lights went out.

Fortunately the kitchen lights were on a different circuit from those in the dining room. The overhead fluorescent tubes were still bright.

He snatched the car keys off the pegboard. They jangled, and though their ringing was flat and unmusical and utterly unlike bells, Tommy was reminded of the bells that were rung in church during Mass. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. For an instant he felt not like the potential victim that he was but, instead, felt a terrible weight of guilt, as though the extraordinary trouble that had befallen him this night was of his own making and was merely what he deserved.

The easy-action pivot hinges on the door to the dining room swung so smoothly that even the ten-inch mini-kin was able to squeeze into the kitchen close behind Tommy. With the keys ringing in his hand, with the remembered scent of incense as strong and sweet as it had ever been when he had served as an altar boy, he didn’t dare pause to look back, but he could hear the thing’s tiny clawed feet click-click-clicking against the tile floor.

He stepped into the laundry room and slammed the door behind him before the creature could follow.

No lock. Didn’t matter. The mini-kin wouldn’t be able to climb up and turn the knob on the other side. It couldn’t follow him any farther.

Even as Tommy turned away from the door, the lights failed in the laundry room. They must be on the same circuit with those in the kitchen, which the creature evidently had just shorted. He groped forward through the blackness.

At the end of this small rectangular space, past the washer and dryer, opposite the door that he had just closed, was the connecting door to the garage. It featured a dead-bolt lock with a thumb-turn on this side.

In the garage, the lights still functioned.

On this side, the deadbolt on the laundry-room door could be engaged only with a key. He didn’t see any point in taking time to lock it.

The big overhead door began to rumble upward when Tommy tapped the wall switch, and storm wind chuffed like a pack of dogs at the widening space at the bottom.

He hurriedly circled the Corvette to the driver’s side. The garage lights blinked out, and the roll-up door stopped ascending when it was still half blocking the exit.

No.

The mini-kin could not have gotten through two closed doors and into the garage to cause a short circuit. And there hadn’t been time for it to race out of the house, find the electric-service panel, climb the conduit on the wall, open the fuse box, and trip a breaker.

Yet the garage was as black as the darkest hemisphere of some strange moon never touched by the sun. And the roll-up door was only half open.

Maybe power had been lost throughout the neighbourhood because of the storm.

Frantically Tommy pawed at the darkness overhead until he located the dangling release chain that dis-connected the garage door from the electric motor that operated it. Still clutching the pistol, he rushed to the door and manually pushed it up, all the way open.

A noisy burst of November wind threw shatters of cold rain in his face. The balminess of the afternoon was gone. The temperature had plummeted at least twenty degrees since he had left the Corvette dealership in his new car and headed south along the coast.

He expected to see the mini-kin in the driveway, green eyes glaring, but the sodium-yellow drizzle from a nearby streetlamp revealed that the thing was not there.

Across the street, warm welcoming lights shone in the windows of other houses. The same was true at the homes to the left and right of his own.

The loss of power in his garage had nothing to do with the storm. He had never really believed that it did.

Although he was convinced he would be attacked before he reached the Corvette, he got behind the steering wheel and slammed the door without encountering the mini-kin.

He put the pistol on the passenger seat, within easy reach. He had been gripping the weapon so desperately and for so long that his right hand remained curled to the shape of it. He was forced to concentrate on flexing his half-numb fingers in order to relax them and regain use of them.