Tick Tock

stray cat or dog? Maybe a burglar? A couple of dim-witted, doped-up kids with a can of red spray paint and vandalism on their minds?
    After escaping from the devil doll, Tommy was ready and able to deal with any number of ordinary uninvited guests.
    But as he shifted the Corvette out of reverse and drove away from his house, he was stricken by an unsettling premonition: I'll never see this place again.
    He was driving too fast for a residential neighbourhood, almost flying, casting up ten-foot high wings of white water as he raced through a flooded intersection, but he was unwilling to slow down. He felt that the gates of Hell had been flung open and that each creature among the legion of monstrosities seething out of those portals was intent on the same prey: Tommy Phan.
    Maybe it was foolish to believe that demons existed, and it was certainly foolish to believe—if they did exist—that he could outrun them by virtue of owning a sports car with three hundred horsepower. Nevertheless, he drove as if pursued by Satan.
     
    A few minutes later, on University Drive, passing the Irvine campus of the University of California, Tommy realized that he was squinting at the rear-view mirror every few seconds—as if one of the cars far behind him on the rain-washed, tree-lined avenue might be driven by the mini-kin. The absurdity of that thought was like a hammer that broke some of the chains of his anxiety, and he finally eased up on the accelerator.
    Still damp with cold sweat and with the slanting rain that had blown through the open garage door, Tommy shivered violently. He switched on the car heater.
    He was half dazed, as though the dose of terror he had taken was a potent drug with a lingering narcotic effect. His thinking was cloudy. He couldn't focus on what needed to be done next, on deciding where—and to whom—he should turn.
    He wanted to be Chip Nguyen and live in the world of detective fiction, where blazing guns and hard fists and sardonic wit always led to satisfactory resolutions. Where the motives of adversaries were simple greed, envy, and jealousy. Where angst was fun, and where amused misanthropy was a sure sign of a private investigator's superior moral character. Where bouts of alcoholic melancholy were comforting rather than dispiriting. Where the villains, by God, never had serpent eyes, or sharp little yellow teeth, or rat like tails.
    Living in Chip's world was impossible, however, so Tommy was willing to settle for a nap. He wanted to pull off the road, lie down, curl into the foetal position, and go to sleep for a few hours. He was exhausted. His limbs felt weak. As though the earth was suddenly rotating at a much higher speed than before, a heavier gravity oppressed his mind and heart.
    In spite of the hot air streaming from the heater vents, he was not getting warmer. The chill that afflicted him didn't come from the November night or from the rain; it arose from deep within him.
    The metronomic thump of the windshield wipers lulled him, and more than once he came out of a sort of waking dream to find that he was in a different neighbourhood from the one he last remembered. He relentlessly cruised residential streets, as if searching for the address of a friend, although every time that he ascended from his strange daze, he was never on a street where anyone of his acquaintance had ever lived.
    He understood what was wrong. He was a well-educated man with an unshakably rational viewpoint; he had always assumed that he could clearly read the big map of life and that he had both hands firmly on the controls of his destiny as he cruised confidently into the future. From the moment that the two black sutures had popped and the green eye had glared at him out of the doll's torn face, however, his world began to collapse. It was collapsing still. Forget the great laws of physics, the logic of mathematics, the dissectible truths of biology that, as a student, he had struggled so hard to grasp. They might still apply, but they didn't explain enough, not any more. Once he had thought that they explained everything, but everything that he believed was proving to be only half the story. He was confused, lost, and dispirited, as only a rationalist of utter conviction could be upon encountering irrefutable evidence that something supernatural was at play in the universe.
    He might have accepted the devil doll with greater equanimity if he had still been in Vietnam, the Land of Seagull and Fox, where his