Tick Tock

that he entered the room.
    Just as Tommy had turned the doorknob as far as it would go, a thunderous crash shook the house, rattling window panes. He gasped, let go of the knob, backed across the hall, and assumed a shooter's stance with the Heckler & Koch gripped in both hands and aimed at the office door.
    Then he realized that the crash was thunderous precisely because it was thunder.
    When the first peal faded to a soft rumble in a distant corner of the sky, he glanced toward the end of the hallway, where pale flickers of lightning played across the window as a second hard explosion shook the night.
    He recalled watching the sable-black clouds roll in from the sea and shroud the moon a little earlier in the evening. Soon the rain would come.
    Embarrassed by his overreaction to the thunder, Tommy returned boldly to the office door. He opened it.
    Nothing leaped at him.
    The only light issued from the desk lamp, leaving deep and dangerous shadows throughout the room. Nevertheless, Tommy was able to see that the mini-kin was not on the floor immediately beyond the doorway.
    He stepped across the threshold, fumbled for the wall switch, and turned on the ceiling light. Quicker than a litter of black cats, shadows fled behind and under the furniture.
    In the sudden brightness, the mini-kin was not revealed. The creature was no longer on the desk—unless it was crouched against the far side of the computer monitor, waiting for him to venture closer.
    When he had entered the office, Tommy had intended to leave the door open behind him, so he could get out fast should a hasty retreat seem wise. Now, however, he realized that were the doll to escape this room, he would have little chance of locating it when required to search the entire house.
    He closed the door and stood with his back against it.
    Prudence required that he proceed as though on a rat hunt. Keep the little beast confined to one room. Search methodically under the desk. Under the sofa. Behind the pair of filing cabinets. Search in every cranny where the vermin might be hiding until, at last, it was flushed into the open.
    The pistol wasn't the most desirable weapon for a rat hunt. A shovel might have been better. He could have beaten the creature to death with a shovel, but hitting a small target with a round from a pistol might not be easy, even though he was a good marksman.
    For one thing, he wouldn't have the leisure to aim carefully and squeeze off a well-calculated shot as he did on the target range. Instead, he would have to conduct himself in the manner of a soldier at war, relying on instinct and quick reflexes, and he wasn't sure that he was adequately equipped with either.
    “I am no Chip Nguyen,” he admitted softly.
    Besides, he suspected that the doll-thing was capable of moving fast. Very fast. Even quicker than a rat.
    He briefly considered going down to the garage for a shovel but decided that the pistol would have to be good enough. If he left now, he wasn't confident that he would have the courage to return to the office a second time.
    A sudden patter, as of small swift feet, alarmed Tommy. He swung the pistol left, right, left—but then realized that he was hearing only the first fat drops of rain snapping against the clay-tile roof.
    His stomach churned with an acidic tide that seemed sufficiently corrosive to dissolve steel nails in an instant if he ate them. Indeed, he felt as though he had eaten about a pound of nails. He wished that he'd had com tay cam for dinner instead of cheeseburgers, stir-fried vegetables with Nuoc Mam sauce instead of onion rings.
    Hesitantly he edged across the room and around the desk. The red-pencilled chapter of the latest book and the empty bottle of beer were where he had left them, undisturbed.
    The snake-eyed mini-kin was not hiding on the far side of the computer monitor. It wasn't lurking behind the laser printer, either.
    Under the gooseneck desk lamp were two ragged scraps of white cotton fabric. Although somewhat shredded, they had a recognizable mitten like shape—obviously the cloth that had covered the thing's hands. They appeared to have been torn off—perhaps chewed off—at the wrists to free the creature's real hands from confinement.
    Tommy didn't understand how there could have been any living creature in the doll when he had first handled it and brought it upstairs. The soft cloth casing had seemed to be filled with sand. He had detected no hard edges whatsoever inside the damn thing,