Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

Frowning, Tommy stared at it suspiciously. The doll had seemed to be full of sand, well weighted; it should have stayed where he had put it.

Feeling foolish, he toured the downstairs, trying the doors. They were all still securely locked, and there were no signs of visitors. No one had entered the house.

He returned to the living room. The doll might not have been balanced properly against the lamp, in which case the sand could have shifted slowly to one side until the damn thing toppled over.

Hesitant, not sure why he was hesitant, Tommy Phan picked up the doll. He brought it to his face, examining it more closely than he had done earlier.

The black sutures that indicated the eyes and the mouth were sewn with heavy thread as coarse as surgical cord. Tommy gently rubbed the ball of his thumb across a pair of crossed stitches that marked one of the doll’s eyes... then across the row of five that formed its grimly set lips.

As he traced that line of black stitches, Tommy was startled by a macabre image that popped into his mind’s eye: the threads abruptly snapping, a real mouth opening in the white cotton cloth, tiny but razor-sharp teeth exposed, a quick but savage snap, and his thumb bitten off, blood streaming from the stump.

A shudder coursed through him, and he nearly drop-ped the doll.

‘Dear God.’

He felt stupid and childish. The stitches had not snapped, and of course no hungry mouth would ever open in the damn thing.

It’s just a doll, for God’s sake.

He wondered what his detective, Chip Nguyen, would do in this situation. Chip was tough, smart, and relent-less. He was a master of Tae Kwon Do, able to drink hard all night without losing his edge or suffering a hangover, a chess master who had once defeated Bobby Fisher when they encountered each other in a hurricane-hammered resort hotel in Barbados, a lover of such prowess that a beautiful blond socialite had killed another woman over him in a fit of jealousy, a collector of vintage Corvettes who was able to rebuild them from the ground up, and a brooding philosopher who knew that humanity was doomed but who gamely fought the good fight anyway. Already, Chip would have obtained a translation of the note, tracked down the source of the cotton cloth and the black thread, punched out a thug just for the exercise, and (being an equal-opportunity lover) bedded either an aggressive redhead with a gloriously pneumatic body or a slender Vietnamese girl with a shy demeanour that masked a profoundly lascivious mind.

What a drag it was to be limited by reality. Tommy sighed and wished that he could step magically through the pages of his own books, into the fictional shoes of Chip Nguyen, and know the glory of being totally self-confident and utterly in control of life.

The evening was waning, and it was too late to drive to the newspaper offices to see Sal Delano. Tommy just wanted to get a little work done and go to bed.

The rag doll was strange, but it wasn’t half as menacing as he tried to pretend that it was. His fertile imagination had been running away with him again.

He was a master of self-dramatization which, accord-ing to his older brother Ton, was the most American thing about him. Americans, Ton had once said, all think the world revolves around them, think each individual person more important than whole society or whole family. But how can each person be most important thing? Can’t everyone be the most important thing, all equal but all the most important at same time. Makes no sense. Tommy had protested that he didn’t feel more important than anyone else, that Ton was missing the point about American individualism, which was all about the right to pursue dreams, not about dominating others, but Ton had said, Then if you don’t think you better than us, come work in bakery with your father and brothers, stay with family, make family dream come true.

Ton had inherited certain sharp debating skills - and a useful stubbornness - from their mother.

Now Tommy turned the doll over in his hand, and the more that he handled it, the less ominous it seemed. Ultimately, no doubt, the story behind it would turn out to be prosaic. It was probably just a prank perpetrated by children in the neighbourhood.

The pin with the black enamel head, which had fastened the note to the doll’s hand, was no longer on the end table where Tommy had left it. Evidently, when the doll had toppled over, the pin had been knocked to the floor.

He couldn’t see it on the cream-coloured carpet, although the glossy black head should have made it easy to spot. The vacuum cleaner would get it the next time he swept.

From the refrigerator in the kitchen, he retrieved a bottle of beer. Coors. Brewed high in the Colourado Rockies.

With the beer in one hand and the doll in the other, he went upstairs to his office once more. He switched on the desk lamp and propped the doll against it.

He sat in his comfortable chocolate-brown, leather-upholstered office armchair, turned on the computer, and printed out the most recently completed chapter of the new Chip Nguyen adventure. It was twenty pages long.

Sipping the Coors from the bottle, he worked on the manuscript with a red pencil, marking changes.

At first the house was deathly silent. Then the incom-ing storm clouds finally pulled some ground-level tur-bulence with them, and the wind began to sough in the eaves. An overgrown branch on one of the melaleucas rubbed against an outside wall a dry-bone scraping sound. From downstairs in the family room came the faint but distinctive creaking of the damper hinge in the fireplace as the wind reached down the flue to play with it.

From time to time, Tommy glanced at the doll. It sat in the fall of amber light from the desk lamp against which it was propped, arms at its sides, mitten-like hands turned palms up as if in supplication.

By the time he finished editing the chapter, he had also drunk the last of the beer. Before entering the red-lined changes in the computer, he went to the guest bathroom off the upstairs hall.

When he returned to his office a few minutes later, Tommy half expected to discover that the doll had toppled onto its side again. But it was sitting upright, as he had left it.

He shook his head and smiled in embarrassment at his insistence on drama.

Then, lowering himself into his chair, he saw four words on the previously blank computer screen: THE DEADLINE IS DAWN.

‘What the hell...

As he settled all of the way into the chair, a hot sharp pain stabbed through his right thigh. Startled, he shot to his feet, pushing the wheeled armchair away from himself.

He clutched his thigh, felt the tiny lance that had pierced his blue jeans, and plucked it out of both the denim and his flesh. He was holding the straight pin with the black enamel head as large as a pea.

Astonished, Tommy turned the pin between thumb and forefinger, his eyes on the glinting point.

Over the soughing of the wind in the eaves and over the humming of the laser printer in its stand-by mode, he heard a new sound: a soft pop... and then again. Like threads breaking.

He looked at the doll in the fall of light from the desk lamp. It was sitting as before - but the pair of crossed stitches over the spot where a person’s heart would be had snapped and now hung loose on its white cotton breast.

Tommy Phan didn’t realize that he had dropped the pin until he heard it strike - tink, tink - the hard plastic mat under his office chair.

Paralyzed, he stared at the doll for what seemed like an hour but must have been less than a minute. When he could move again, he found himself reaching for the damn thing, and he checked himself when his hand was still ten or twelve inches from it.

His mouth was so dry that his tongue had stuck to his palate. He worked up some saliva, but his tongue never-theless peeled loose as reluctantly as a Velcro fastener.