Tick Tock

step toward the intruder, intending to finish it off. The mound of fallen drapes snared his feet. He stumbled, lost his balance, and slammed to the floor.
    With his left cheek flat against the carpet, he now shared the murderous mini-kin's plane of view, though from a tilted perspective. His vision blurred for a second when his head hit the floor, but it cleared at once. He was staring at his diminutive adversary, which had risen to its feet.
    The creature stood as erect as a man, trailing its six-inch black tail, still dressed in—and mostly concealed by—the rags of the doll's skin in which it had hidden.
    Outside, the storm was reaching a crescendo, hammering the night with a greater barrage of lightning and thunder than it had produced thus far. The ceiling light and the desk lamp flickered but did not go out.
    The creature sprinted toward Tommy, white cotton cloth flapping like tattered banners.
    Tommy's right arm was stretched out in front of him, and the pistol was still firmly in his grip. He raised the weapon perhaps four inches off the floor, squeeze-cocked it, and fired two shots in quick succession.
    One of the rounds must have hit the mini-kin, because it flew off its feet. It tumbled backward all the way to the wall against which Tommy had thrown it earlier.
    Proportionately, the slug from the .40 Smith & Wesson cartridge was to this beast what a shell from a major piece of battlefield artillery would be to a human being; the damn thing should have been as devastated—as stone dead—as any man would have been after taking a massive mortar round in the chest. It should have been smashed, shattered, blown to bits.
    Instead, the small figure appeared to be intact. Sprawled in a tangle of limbs and scorched white cotton cloth. Racked by spasms. Tail slithering spasmodically back and forth on the floor. Wisps of smoke rising from it. But intact.
    Tommy raised his throbbing head for a better view. He didn't see any splatters of blood on the carpet or on the wall. Not one drop.
    The beast stopped shuddering and rolled onto its back. Then it sat up and sighed. The sigh wasn't one of weariness but of pleasure, as though being shot point-blank in the chest had been an interesting and gratifying experience.
    Tommy pushed up onto his knees.
    Across the office, the mini-kin put its black-and-yellow-mottled hands on its scorched, smoking abdomen. No it actually reached into its abdomen, digging with its claws, and wrenched something out of itself.
    Even from a distance of fifteen feet, Tommy was pretty sure that the lumpish object in the beast's hands was the misshapen slug from the .40-caliber cartridge. The mini-kin tossed the chunk of lead aside.
    Shaky, weak-kneed, slightly nauseous, Tommy got to his feet.
    He felt his scalp, where the puncture wounds from the beast's claws still stung. When he checked his fingertips, he saw only tiny dots of blood.
    He hadn't been seriously hurt.
    Yet.
    His adversary rose to its feet as well.
    Although he was seven times taller than the mini-kin and perhaps thirty times its weight, Tommy was so terrified that he felt as though he might pee in his pants.
    Chip Nguyen, hardboiled detective, would never lose control of himself in that fashion, humiliate himself to that extent, but Tommy Phan no longer gave a damn what Chip Nguyen would do. Chip Nguyen was an idiot, a whiskey-drinking fool who put too much faith in guns, martial arts, and tough talk. The most precisely executed and powerfully delivered Tae Kwan Do kick wouldn't stop a supernaturally animated devil doll that could take a 40-caliber round in its guts and keep on ticking.
    Now there was an indisputable truth. Not the kind of truth you would hear on the evening news or read in the newspaper. Not a truth they taught in school or church. Not a truth that would be acclaimed by Carl Sagan or the scientific establishment. Truth nonetheless, from Tommy's point of view, truth even if the only forum that might report it was a rag like the National Enquirer in a story about the ominous rise of demonic presences in our apocalyptic age and the inevitable forthcoming battle between Satan Incarnate and Saint Elvis on the eve of the new millennium.
    Pointing the P7 at the mini-kin, Tommy felt a mad laugh swelling in him, but he choked it down. He wasn't insane. He had gotten past that fear. It was God Himself who must be mad—and the universe a lunatic asylum—if He made room in Creation for something like this predatory gremlin in a