TickTock by Dean Koontz

confidence, but he continued to tremble.
    Although he would have liked to walk out and never return, he couldn’t do that. He was a homeowner. The house was an investment that he couldn’t afford to abandon, and bankers seldom canceled mortgages as a result of devil-doll infestations.
    He was virtually immobilized, and his indecisiveness deeply shamed him. Chip Nguyen, the hard-boiled detective whose fictional adventures Tommy chronicled, was seldom troubled by doubt. Chip always knew the best thing to do in the most precarious situations. Usually his solutions involved his fists, or a gun, or any blunt instrument close at hand, or a knife wrenched away from his crazed assailant.
    Tommy had a gun, a really good gun, a first-rate gun, and his potential assailant was only ten inches tall, but
he could not force himself to open the damn door.
Chip Nguyen’s assailants were usually well over six feet tall (except for the demented nun in
Murder Is a Bad Habit
), and frequently they were virtual giants, usually steroid-pumped bodybuilders with massive biceps that made Schwarzenegger look like a sissy.
    Wondering how he could ever again write about a man of action if he failed to act decisively in his own moment of crisis, Tommy finally threw off the chains of paralysis and slowly turned the doorknob. The well-lubricated mechanism didn’t squeak—but if the doll was watching, it would see the knob rotate, and it might leap at him the moment 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 windowpanes. 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 minikin 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 minikin 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 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