Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

He could still feel a vaguely sore spot on his tongue where he had been pricked by the wind-blown melaleuca leaf when he had opened the front door of his house and discovered the doll lying on the porch.

Holding the steering wheel with only his left hand, he pressed his right hand to his thigh. He had no difficulty locating the spot where the pin with the black enamel head had pierced his flesh.

Two wounds. Both small but clearly symbolic.

Now, Tommy cruised Spyglass Drive, piloting the Cor-vette along ridges stippled with million-dollar houses that overlooked Newport Beach, past graceful California -pepper trees thrashing in the wind, and his thoughts were as chaotic as his driving was aimless. Cold drowning tides of rain came off the black Pacific and, although the torrents couldn’t touch him now, they seemed to wash confidence and reason out of him, leaving him limp with doubt and feverish with superstitious speculations.

He wanted to go to his parents’ cosy house in Huntington Beach, take refuge in the bosom of his family. His mother was the person most likely to believe his story. Mothers were required by law - not the law of men, but natural law - to be able to discern the truth when their children told it to them, to be quick to defend them against the disbelief of others. If he stared directly into his mother’s eyes and explained about the devil doll, she would know that he was not lying. Then he would no longer be alone in his terror.

His mother would convince his father that the threat, although outlandish, was real, whereupon his father would convince Tommy’s two brothers and his sister. Then there would be six of them - an entire family -standing against the unnatural power that had sent the hateful mini-kin to him. Together they could triumph as they had triumphed so long ago against the communists in Vietnam and against the Thai pirates on the South China Sea.

But instead of turning the Corvette toward Huntington Beach, Tommy swung left on El Capitan and drove higher into the night and the storm. He wove from street to street across Spyglass Hill, past the houses of strangers who would never in this lifetime believe him if he rang their doorbells and told them his incredible story.

He was reluctant to go to his parents for fear that he had put too much emotional distance between them and himself to warrant the unconditional acceptance that they once would have given him. He might babble out the story of the devil doll only to see his mother’s face pinch with disapproval and hear her say, You drink whiskey like your silly detective?

No whiskey, Mom.

I smell whiskey.

I had one beer.

One beer, soon whiskey.

I don’t like whiskey.

You carry guns in every pocket- One gun, Mom.

-drive car like crazy maniac, chase blondes- No blondes.

-drink whiskey like it only tea, then surprised when see demons and dragons- No dragons, Mom.

-demons and ghosts- No ghosts, Mom.

-demons, dragons, ghosts. You better come home to stay, Tuong.

Tommy.

Better start living right way, Tuong.

Tommy.

Better stop drinking whiskey like tough guy, stop trying always to be so American, too American.

Tommy groaned aloud in misery.

Still letting the imaginary conversation play out in his head, he cautiously steered the Corvette around an immense branch from a coral tree that had blown down in the storm and blocked half the street.

He decided not to go home to Huntington Beach, because he was afraid that, once he got there, he would find that it wasn’t really home any more. Then, having discovered that he didn’t belong in the Phan house in quite the way that he had once belonged, and not being able to return to his own mini-kin-haunted house in Irvine, what place would he be able to call home? Nowhere. He would be homeless in a deeper sense than were those vagrants who wandered the streets with all their worldly goods in a shopping cart.

That was a discovery he was not yet prepared to make - even if he had to deal with the mini-kin alone.

Deciding that he should at least call his mother, he picked up the car phone. But he put it down again without punching in her number.

Car phones for big shots. You big shot now? Phone and drive too dangerous. Gun in one hand, whiskey bottle in other, how you hold phone anyway?

Tommy reached to the passenger seat and briefly put his right hand on the Heckler & Koch. The shape of the pistol, the sense of godlike power cast in steel, did not comfort him.

Minutes later, after the rhythmic thump of the wind-shield wipers had once more half hypnotized him, he came out of his daze and saw that he was on MacArthur Boulevard, on the southern end of Newport Beach. He was travelling west in light traffic.

According to the dashboard clock, the time was 10:26

p. m.

He couldn’t go on like this, driving aimlessly through the night until he ran out of fuel. Preoccupied as he was, he might become so inattentive that he skidded on the rain-slick pavement and crashed into another car.

He decided to seek family help, after all, but not from his mother and father. He would go to his older and beloved brother Gi Minh Phan.

Gi had changed his name too - from Phan Minh Gi, merely reversing the order to place the surname last. For a while he had considered taking an American name, as Tommy had done, but decided against it, which earned points with their parents, who were far too conservative to adopt new names themselves. Gi had given American names to his four children - Heather, Jennifer, Kevin, and Wesley; however, that was all right with Mom and Dad because all four had been born in the United States.

The oldest of the three Phan brothers, Ton That, eight years Tommy’s senior, had five children, all born in the USA, and each of them enjoyed both a Vietnamese and an American name. Ton’s first-born was a daughter whose legal name was Mary Rebecca but who was also known as Thu-Ha. Ton’s kids called one another by their Vietnamese names when they were around their grandparents and other traditionalist elders, used their American names when with friends of their own age, and used both names with their parents as the situation seemed to require, yet not one of them had an identity crisis.

In addition to a nagging inability to define his own identity in a way that fully satisfied him - and compared to his brothers - Tommy suffered from an offspring crisis. He didn’t have any. To his mother, this was worse than a crisis; this was a tragedy. His parents were still old-world enough to think of children neither as mere responsibil-ities nor as hostages to fortune, but primarily as wealth, as blessings. In their view, the larger that a family grew, the better chance it had to survive the turmoil of the world and the more successful it would inevi-tably become. At thirty, unmarried, childless, with no prospects - except the prospect of a successful career as a novelist writing silly stories about a whiskey-guzzling maniac detective - Tommy was undermining his parents’ dreams of a sprawling Phan empire and the security that, to them, sheer numbers ensured.

His brother Ton, sixteen when they had fled Vietnam, was still sufficiently mired in the ways of the old world that he shared some of the elder Phans’ frustration with Tommy. Ton and Tommy had been reasonably close as brothers, but they had never been the kind of brothers who were also friends. Gi, on the other hand, though six years older than Tommy, was a brother and a friend and a confidant - or once had been - and if anyone in this world would give the devil-doll story a fair hearing, it would be Gi.

As Tommy crossed San Juaquin Hills Road, less than a mile from Pacific Coast Highway, he was planning the easiest route north to the family bakery in Garden Grove, where Gi managed the graveyard shift, so he didn’t immediately react to the peculiar noise that rose from the Corvette’s engine compartment. When he finally took note of it, he realized that he’d been dimly aware of the noise on a subconscious level for a couple of minutes: