Dean Koontz: Tick Tock

He supposed that even if he became a billionaire, moved into a thousand-room house on the highest cliff overlooking the Pacific Coast, with solid-gold toilets and chandeliers hung not with mere crystals but with huge diamonds, his mother and father would still think of him as the ‘failed’ son who had forgotten his roots and turned his back on his heritage.

As Tommy swung into his driveway, the bordering beds of white and coral-red impatiens glowed in the headlights as if iridescent. Swift shadows crawled up through the raggedly peeling bark of several melaleucas, swarming into higher branches, where moonlight-silvered leaves shuddered in the night breeze.

In the garage, once the big door closed behind him, he remained in the silent car for a few minutes, savouring the smell of leather upholstery, basking in the pride of ownership. If he could have slept sitting upright in the driver’s seat, he would have done so.

He disliked leaving the ‘vette in the dark. Because it was so beautiful, the car should remain under flattering spotlights, as though it were an art object in a museum.

In the kitchen, as he hung the car keys on the peg-board by the refrigerator, he heard the doorbell at the front of the house. Though recognizable, the ring-ing was different from the usual sound, like a hol-low and ominous summons in a dream. The curse of home ownership: something always needed to be repaired.

He wasn’t expecting anyone this evening. In fact, he intended to spend an hour or two in his study, revising a few pages of the current manuscript. His fictional private detective, Chip Nguyen, had been get-ting wordy in his first-person narration of the story, and the tough but sometimes garrulous gumshoe needed to be edited.

When Tommy opened the front door, ice-cold wind assaulted him, frigid enough to take his breath away. A whirl of dead melaleuca leaves like hundreds of tiny flensing knives spun over him, whispering-buzzing against one another, and he stumbled backward two steps, shielding his eyes with one hand, gasping in surprise.

A dry, papery leaf blew into his mouth. The hard little point pricked his tongue.

Startled, he bit down on the leaf, which had a bitter taste. Then he spit it out.

As suddenly as it had burst through the door, the whirlwind now wound up tight and disappeared into itself, leaving only silence and stillness in its wake. The air was no longer cold.

He brushed leaves out of his hair and off his shoulders, plucked them from his soft flannel shirt and blue jeans. The wood floor of the foyer was littered with crisp brown leaves, bits of grass, and sandy grit.

‘What the hell?’

No visitor waited beyond the threshold.

Tommy moved into the open doorway, peering left and right along the dark front porch. It was little more than a stoop - ten feet wide and six feet deep.

No one was on the two steps or on the walkway that cleaved the shallow front lawn, no one in sight who might have rung the doorbell. Under tattered clouds back lighted by a lambent moon, the street was quiet and deserted, so hushed that he could half believe that a breakdown in the machinery of the cosmos had brought time to a complete halt for everyone and for all things except for he himself.

Tommy switched on the outside light and saw a strange object on the porch floor immediately in front of him. It was a doll: a rag doll no more than ten inches tall, lying on its back, its stubby arms spread wide.

Frowning, he surveyed the night once more, pay-ing special attention to the shrubbery, where some-one might be crouched and watching him. He saw no one.

The doll at his feet was unfinished, covered entirely with white cotton fabric, unclothed, without facial fea-tures or hair. Where each eye should have been, two crossed stitches of coarse black thread dimpled the white cloth. Five sets of crossed black stitches marked the mouth, and another pair formed an X over the heart.

Tommy eased across the threshold onto the porch. He squatted on his haunches beside the doll.

The bitterness of the dry leaf no longer lingered in his mouth, but he tasted something equally unpleasant if more familiar. He stuck out his tongue, touched it, and then looked at the tip of his finger: a small red smear. The point of the leaf had drawn blood.

His tongue didn’t hurt. The wound was tiny. Neverthe-less, for reasons that he could not fully explain, Tommy was unnerved by the sight of the blood.

In one of the doll’s crude mitten-like hands was a folded paper. It was held firmly in place by a straight pin with a glossy black enamel head as large as a pea.

Tommy picked up the doll. It was solid and surpris-ingly heavy for its size, but loose-jointed and limp - as though it might be filled with sand.

When he pulled the pin out of the doll’s hand, the death-still street briefly came alive again. A chilly breeze swept across the porch. Shrubbery rustled, and trees shuddered sufficiently to cause moon shadows to shim-mer across the black lawn. Then all fell quiet and motionless again.

The paper was unevenly yellowed, as though it might be a scrap of ancient parchment, slightly oily, and splintered along the edges. It had been folded in half, then folded in half again. Opened, it was about three inches square.

The message was in Vietnamese: three columns of gracefully drawn ideograms in thick black ink. Tommy recognized the language but was not able to read it.

Rising to his full height, he stared thoughtfully at the street, then down at the doll in his hand.

After refolding the note and putting it in his shirt pocket, he went inside and closed the door. He engaged the dead-bolt lock. And the security chain.

In the living room, Tommy put the strange blank-faced doll on the end table beside the sofa, propping it against a Stickley-style lamp with a green stained-glass shade, so it was sitting with its round white head cocked to the right and its arms straight down at its side. Its mitten-like hands were open, as they had been since he had first seen it on the porch, but now they seemed to be seeking something.

He put the pin on the table beside the doll. Its black enamel head glistened like a drop of oil, and silvery light glinted off the sharp point.

He closed the drapes over each of the three living-room windows. He did the same in the dining room and family room. In the kitchen, he twisted shut the slats on the Levolor blinds.

He still felt watched.

Upstairs in the bedroom that he had outfitted as an office, where he wrote his novels, he sat at the desk without turning on a lamp. The only light came through the open door from the hall. He picked up the phone, hesitated, and then called the home number of Sal Delano, who was a reporter at the Register, where Tommy had worked until yesterday. He got an answer-ing machine but left no message.

He called Sal’s pager. After inputting his own number, he marked it urgent.

Less than five minutes later, Sal returned the call. ‘What’s so urgent, cheese head?' he asked. ‘You forget where you put your dick?’

‘Where are you?’ Tommy asked.

‘In the sweatshop.’

‘At the office?’ ‘Wrangling the news.’

‘Late on another deadline,’ Tommy guessed.

‘You called just to question my professionalism? You’re out of the news racket one day and already you’ve lost all sense of brotherhood?’

Leaning forward in his chair, hunched over his desk, Tommy said, ‘Listen, Sal, I need to know something about the gangs.’

‘You mean the fat cats who run Washington or the punks that lean on the businessmen in Little Saigon?’

‘Local Vietnamese gangs. The Santa Ana Boys...’ Cheap Boys, Natoma Boys. You already know about them.’

‘Not as much as you do,’ Tommy said. Sal was a crime reporter with a deep knowledge of the Vietnamese gangs that operated not only in Orange County but nationwide. While with the news-paper, Tommy had written primarily about the arts and entertainment.