Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

The engine started with no hesitation.

The headlights splashed against the back wall of the garage, revealing a workbench, neatly racked tools, a cool forty-year-old sign from a Shell service station, and a framed poster of Jimmy Dean leaning against the 1949 Mercury that he had driven in Rebel Without a Cause.

Backing out of the garage, Tommy expected the mini-kin to ravel down from the rafters on a web of its own making, directly onto the windshield. Still largely concealed by the increasingly soiled and ragged fabric that had been the skin of its doll phase, the creature had appeared to be partly reptilian, with the scales and the eyes of a serpent, but Tommy had perceived insectile qualities to it as well, features and capabilities not yet fully revealed.

He reversed into the driveway, into torrents of rain, switched on the windshield wipers, and continued into the street, leaving the garage door open, other doors unlocked.

At worst, what might get into the house during his absence? A stray cat or dog? Maybe a burglar? A couple of dim-witted, doped-up kids with a can of red spray paint and vandalism on their minds?

After escaping from the devil doll, Tommy was ready and able to deal with any number of ordinary uninvited guests.

But as he shifted the Corvette out of reverse and drove away from his house, he was stricken by an unsettling premonition: I’ll never see this place again.

He was driving too fast for a residential neighbourhood, almost flying, casting up ten-foot high wings of white water as he raced through a flooded intersection, but he was unwilling to slow down. He felt that the gates of Hell had been flung open and that each creature among the legion of monstrosities seething out of those portals was intent on the same prey: Tommy Phan.

Maybe it was foolish to believe that demons existed, and it was certainly foolish to believe - if they did exist - that he could outrun them by virtue of owning a sports car with three hundred horsepower. Nevertheless, he drove as if pursued by Satan.

A few minutes later, on University Drive, passing the Irvine campus of the University of California, Tommy realized that he was squinting at the rear-view mirror every few seconds - as if one of the cars far behind him on the rain-washed, tree-lined avenue might be driven by the mini-kin. The absurdity of that thought was like a hammer that broke some of the chains of his anxiety, and he finally eased up on the accelerator.

Still damp with cold sweat and with the slanting rain that had blown through the open garage door, Tommy shivered violently. He switched on the car heater.

He was half dazed, as though the dose of terror he had taken was a potent drug with a lingering narcotic effect. His thinking was cloudy. He couldn’t focus on what needed to be done next, on deciding where - and to whom - he should turn.

He wanted to be Chip Nguyen and live in the world of detective fiction, where blazing guns and hard fists and sardonic wit always led to satisfactory resolutions. Where the motives of adversaries were simple greed, envy, and jealousy. Where angst was fun, and where amused misanthropy was a sure sign of a private investigator’s superior moral character. Where bouts of alcoholic mel-ancholy were comforting rather than dispiriting. Where the villains, by God, never had serpent eyes, or sharp little yellow teeth, or rat like tails.

Living in Chip’s world was impossible, however, so Tommy was willing to settle for a nap. He wanted to pull off the road, lie down, curl into the foetal position, and go to sleep for a few hours. He was exhausted. His limbs felt weak. As though the earth was suddenly rotating at a much higher speed than before, a heavier gravity oppressed his mind and heart.

In spite of the hot air streaming from the heater vents, he was not getting warmer. The chill that afflicted him didn’t come from the November night or from the rain; it arose from deep within him.

The metronomic thump of the windshield wipers lulled him, and more than once he came out of a sort of waking dream to find that he was in a different neighbourhood from the one he last remembered. He relentlessly cruised residential streets, as if searching for the address of a friend, although every time that he ascended from his strange daze, he was never on a street where anyone of his acquaintance had ever lived.

He understood what was wrong. He was a well-educated man with an unshakably rational viewpoint; he had always assumed that he could clearly read the big map of life and that he had both hands firmly on the controls of his destiny as he cruised confidently into the future. From the moment that the two black sutures had popped and the green eye had glared at him out of the doll’s torn face, however, his world began to collapse. It was collapsing still. Forget the great laws of physics, the logic of mathematics, the dissectible truths of biology that, as a student, he had struggled so hard to grasp. They might still apply, but they didn’t explain enough, not any more. Once he had thought that they explained everything, but everything that he believed was proving to be only half the story. He was confused, lost, and dispirited, as only a rationalist of utter conviction could be upon encountering irrefutable evidence that something supernatural was at play in the universe.

He might have accepted the devil doll with greater equanimity if he had still been in Vietnam, the Land of Seagull and Fox, where his mother’s folk tales were set. In that Asian world of jungles, limpid waters, and blue mountains like mirages, it was easier to believe in the fantastic, such as the story of the mandarin named Tu Thuc, who had climbed Mount Phi Lai and, at the top, had found the Land of Bliss where the immortals lived in perfect happiness and harmony. On humid nights along the banks of the Mekong River or on the shores of the South China Sea, the air seemed thickened by magic, which Tommy could remember even after twenty-two years, and in that far place, one could give some credit to the tale of the good genie of medicine, Tien Thai, and his flying mountain, or to the story of beautiful Nhan Diep, the faithless wife who, after her death, returned to earth in the form of the first buzzing cloud of mosquitoes ever seen, initially to afflict her husband and then all of humankind. If Tommy were in Vietnam again - and returned to childhood - he might be able to believe in devil dolls too, although Vietnamese folk tales were generally gentle in nature and featured no monsters like the shrieking, sharp-toothed mini-kin.

But this was the United States of America, the land of the free and the brave, the land of Big Business and Big Science, from which men had gone to the moon and back, where movies and television had been invented, where the atom had first been split, where scientists were rapidly mapping the human genome and devel-oping nanotechnology and shining light into the deepest mysteries of existence - where eighty-five percent of the citizenry declared themselves deeply religious, yes, but where fewer than three in ten attended church. This was America, damn it, where you could solve any problem with a screwdriver and a wrench, or with a computer, or with fists and a handgun, or at worst with the help of a therapist and a twelve-step program to effect personal enlightenment and change.

Screwdrivers, wrenches, computers, fists, guns, and therapists weren’t going to help him cope with the mini-kin if he returned to his house and found the creature still in residence. And it would be there; he had no doubt about that.

It would be waiting.

It had a job to finish.

It had been sent to kill him.

Tommy didn’t know how he could be so sure of the mini-kin’s ultimate purpose, but he knew that what he intuited was true. Little assassin.