Tick Tock

dining room swung so smoothly that even the ten-inch mini-kin 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 altar boy, 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 mini-kin 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 be on the same circuit with 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 dead-bolt 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 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 mini-kin 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 out 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 neighbourhood 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 had left the Corvette dealership in his new car and headed south along the coast.
    He expected to see the mini-kin 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 mini-kin.
    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 Jimmy Dean leaning against the 1949 Mercury that he had driven in Rebel Without a Cause.
    Backing out of the garage, Tommy expected the mini-kin 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.
    He reversed into the driveway, into torrents of rain, switched on the windshield wipers, and continued into the street, leaving the garage door open, other doors unlocked.
    At worst, what might get into the house during his absence? A