Tick Tock

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, paying special attention to the shrubbery, where someone 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 features 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. Nevertheless, 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 surprisingly 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 shimmer 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