Ticktock

by Dean Koontz

He scrambled out of its way, reflexively firing—and wasting—one more round from the P7.

  The beast hadn’t been attacking, after all. The lunge had been a feint. It dropped to the carpet and streaked past Tommy, across the office, around the corner of the desk, and out of sight, moving at least as fast as a rat, although running on its hind feet as if it were a man.

  Tommy went after it, hoping to corner it and jam the muzzle of the Heckler & Koch against its head and squeeze off one-two-three rounds at zero range, smash its brain if, indeed, it had a brain, because maybe that would devastate it as a single bullet in the guts had failed to do.

  When Tommy followed the minikin around the desk, he discovered it at an electrical outlet, looking back and up at him. The creature appeared to be grinning through its mask of rags as it jammed the steel spring into the receptacle.

  Power surged through bare steel—cracklesnap—and outside in the fuse box, a breaker tripped, and all the lights went out except for a shower of gold and blue sparks that cascaded over the minikin. Those fireworks lasted only an instant, however, and then darkness claimed the room.

  THREE

  Depleted by distance and filtered by trees, the yellowish glow of the streetlamps barely touched the windows. Rain shimmered down the glass, glimmering with a few dull-brass reflections, but none of that light penetrated to the room.

  Tommy was frozen by shock, effectively blind, unable to see anything around him and trying not to see the fearsome images that his imagination conjured in his mind.

  The only sounds were the rataplan of rain on the roof and the moaning of wind in the eaves.

  Undoubtedly the doll-thing was alive. The electricity hadn’t fazed it any more than a .40-caliber bullet in the midsection.

  Tommy clutched the P7 as if it possessed magical power and could protect him from all the known and unknown terrors of the universe, whether physical or spiritual. In fact, the weapon was useless to him in this saturant darkness. He couldn’t stun the minikin with a well-placed shot if he couldn’t see it.

  He supposed that by now it had dropped the twisted piece of steel spring and had turned away from the electrical outlet. It would be facing him in the gloom. Grinning through its mummy rags.

  Maybe he should open fire, squeeze off all nine shots remaining in the magazine, aiming for the general area where the creature had been when the lights went out. He was almost sure to get lucky with one or two rounds out of nine, for God’s sake, even if he wasn’t any Chip Nguyen. With the minikin stunned and twitching, Tommy could run into the second-floor hallway, slam the door between them, leap down the stairs two at a time, and get out of the house.

  He didn’t know what the hell he would do after that, where he would go in this rain-swept night, to whom he would turn for help. All he knew was that to have any chance of survival whatsoever, he had to escape from this place.

  He was loath to squeeze the trigger and empty the gun.

  If he didn’t stun the minikin with a blind shot, he would never get to the door. It would catch him, climb his leg and his back with centipede-like quickness, bite the nape of his neck, slip around to his throat, and burrow-for-chew-at-tear-out his carotid artery while he flailed ineffectively—or it would scramble straight over his head, intent upon gouging out his eyes.

  He wasn’t just letting his imagination carry him away this time. He could vividly sense the thing’s intentions, as though on some level he was in psychic contact with it.

  If the attack came after the pistol magazine was empty, Tommy would panic, stumble, crash into furniture, fall. Once he fell, he would never have a chance to get to his feet again.

  Better to conserve ammunition.

  He backed up one step, two, but then he halted, overcome by the awful certainty that the little beast was not, after all, in front of him, where it had been when the lights failed, but behind him. It had circled him as he had dithered; now it was creeping closer.

  Spinning around a hundred and eighty degrees, he thrust the pistol toward the suspected threat.

  He was facing into a portion of the room that was even blacker than the end with the windows. He might as well have been adrift at the farthest empty edge of the universe to which the matter and the energy of Creation had not yet expanded.

  He held his breath.

  He listened but could not hear the minikin.

  Only the rain.

  The rain.

  The rattling rain.

  What scared him most about the intruder was not its monstrous and alien appearance, not its fierce hostility, not its physical spryness or speed, not its rodentlike size that triggered primal fears, not even the fundamental mystery of its very existence. What sent chills up the hollow of Tommy’s spine and squeezed more cold sweat from him was the new realization that the thing was highly intelligent.

  Initially he had assumed that he was dealing with an animal, an unknown and clever beast but a beast nonetheless. When it thrust the steel spiral into the electrical outlet, however, it revealed a complex and frightening nature. To be able to adapt a simple sofa spring into an essential tool, to understand the electrical system of the house well enough to disable the office circuit, the beast not only was able to think but was possessed of sophisticated knowledge that no mere animal could acquire.

  The worst thing Tommy could do was trust his own animal instincts when his adversary was stalking him with the aid of cold reason and logical deliberation. Sometimes the deer did escape the rifleman by natural wiles, yes, but far more often than not, higher intelligence gave the human hunter an advantage that the deer could never hope to overcome.

  So he must carefully think through each move before he made it. Otherwise he was doomed.

  He might be doomed anyway.

  This was no longer a rat hunt.

  The minikin’s strategic imposition of darkness revealed that this was a contest between equals. Or at least Tommy hoped it was a contest between equals, because if they weren’t equals, then this was a rat hunt after all, and he was the rat.

  By opting for darkness, had the creature merely been trying to minimize Tommy’s size advantage and the threat of the gun—or did it gain an advantage of its own from the darkness? Perhaps, like a cat, it could see as well at night as it could in daylight.

  Or maybe, like bloodhound, it could track him by his scent.

  If the thing benefited from both the superior intelligence of a human being and the more acute senses of an animal, Tommy was screwed.

  “What do you want?” he asked aloud.

  He would not have been surprised if a small whispery voice had responded. Indeed, he almost hoped it would speak to him. Whether it spoke or only hissed, its reply would reveal its location—maybe even clearly enough to allow him to open fire.

  “Why me?” he asked.

  The minikin made no sound.

  Tommy would have been astonished if such a creature had crawled out of the woodwork one day or squirmed from a hole in the backyard. He might have assumed that the thing was extraterrestrial in nature or that it had escaped from a secret genetic-engineering laboratory where a scientist with a conscience deficit had been hard at work on biological weapons. He had seen all the applicable scary movies: He had the requisite background for such speculation.

  But how much more astonishing that this thing had been placed on his doorstep in the form of a nearly featureless rag doll out of which it had either burst or swiftly metamorphosed. He had never seen any movie that could provide him with an adequate explanation for that.

  Swinging the Heckler & Koch slowly from side to side, he tried again to elicit a telltale response from the tiny intruder: “What are you?”

  The minikin, in its original white cotton skin, brought to mind voodoo, of course, but a voodoo doll was nothing like this creature. A voodoo doll was simply a crude fetish, believed to have magical potency, fashioned in the image of the person meant to be harmed, accessorized with a lock of his hair, or a few of his nail clippings,
or a drop of his blood. Solemnly convinced that any damage done to the fetish would befall the real person as well, the torturer then stuck it full of pins, or burned it, or “drowned” it in a bucket of water. But the doll was never actually animate. It never showed up on the doorstep of the intended victim to bedevil and assault him.

  Nevertheless, into the gloom and the incessant drumming of the rain, Tommy said, “Voodoo?”

  Whether this was voodoo or not, the most important thing he had to learn was who had made the doll. Someone had scissored the cotton fabric and sewn it into the shape of a gingerbread man, and someone had stuffed the empty form with a substance that felt like sand but proved to be a hell of a lot stranger than sand. The dollmaker was his ultimate enemy, not the critter that was stalking him.

  He was never going to find the dollmaker by waiting for the minikin to make the next move. Action, not reaction, was the source of solutions.

  Because he had established a dialogue with the little beast, even if its every response was the choice not to respond, Tommy was more confident than at any time since he’d felt the insectoid squirming of the creature’s heartbeat beneath his index finger. He was a writer, so using words gave him a comforting sense of control.

  Perhaps the questions he tossed into the darkness diminished the minikin’s confidence in direct proportion to the degree that they increased his own. If phrased crisply and spoken with authority, his questions might convince the beast that its prey wasn’t afraid of it and wasn’t likely to be easily overpowered. Anyway, he was reassured to think this might be the case.

  His strategy was akin to one he would have used if confronted by a growling dog: Show no fear.

  Unfortunately, he had already shown more than a little fear, so he needed to rehabilitate his image. He wished he could stop sweating; he wondered whether the thing could smell his perspiration.

  Behind his armor of forcefully stated questions, he found the courage to move toward the center of the wall opposite the windows, where the door should be. “What are you, damn it? 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 minikin 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 minikin 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 minikin 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, however, 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 minikin 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 balance, and saw that the lower steps were deserted too.

  Movement drew his attention. The minikin 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 minikin 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 dimensions, 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 minikin 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, instead of feeling like the potential victim that he was, he 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 minikin 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 altarboy, 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 minikin 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 have been on the same circuit as 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 deadbolt 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 the 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 minikin 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 ou
t 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 neighborhood because of the storm.

  Frantically Tommy pawed at the darkness overhead until he located the dangling release chain that disconnected 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 left the Corvette dealership in his new car and headed south along the coast.

  He expected to see the minikin 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 minikin.

  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.

  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 James Dean leaning against the 1949 Mercury that he drove in Rebel Without a Cause.

  Backing out of the garage, Tommy expected the minikin 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.