He wasn’t just letting his imagination carry him away this time. He could vividly sense the thing’s intentions, as though on some level he was in psychic contact with it.
If the attack came after the pistol magazine was empty, Tommy would panic, stumble, crash into furniture, fall. Once he fell, he would never have a chance to get to his feet again.
Better to conserve ammunition.
He backed up one step, two, but then he halted, overcome by the awful certainty that the little beast was not, after all, in front of him where it had been when the lights failed, but behind him. It had circled him as he had dithered; now it was creeping closer.
Spinning around a hundred and eighty degrees, he thrust the pistol toward the suspected threat.
He was facing into a portion of the room that was even blacker than the end with the windows. He might as well have been adrift at the farthest empty edge of the universe to which the matter and the energy of creation had not yet expanded.
He held his breath.
He listened but could not hear the mini-kin.
Only the rain.
The rain.
The rattling rain.
What scared him most about the intruder was not its monstrous and alien appearance, not its fierce hostility, not its physical spryness or speed, not its rodent-like size that triggered primal fears, and not even the fundamental mystery of its very existence. What sent chills up the hollow of Tommy’s spine and squeezed more cold sweat from him was the new realization that the thing was highly intelligent.
Initially he had assumed that he was dealing with an animal, an unknown and clever beast but a beast none-theless. When it thrust the steel spiral into the electrical outlet, however, it revealed a complex and frightening nature. To be able to adapt a simple sofa spring into an essential tool, to understand the electrical system of the house well enough to disable the office circuit, the beast was not only able to think but was possessed of sophis-ticated knowledge that no mere animal could acquire.
The worst thing Tommy could do was trust to his own animal instincts when his adversary was stalking him with the aid of cold reason and logical deliberation. Sometimes the deer did escape the rifleman by natural wiles, yes, but far more often than not, higher intelligence gave the human hunter an advantage that the deer could never hope to overcome.
So he must carefully think through each move before he made it. Otherwise he was doomed.
He might be doomed anyway.
This was no longer a rat hunt.
The mini-kin’s strategic imposition of darkness revealed that this was a contest between equals. Or at least Tommy hoped it was a contest between equals, because if they weren’t equals, then this was a rat hunt after all, and he was the rat.
By opting for darkness, had the creature merely been trying to minimize Tommy’s size advantage and the threat of the gun - or did it gain an advantage of its own from the darkness? Perhaps, like a cat, it could see as well - or better - at night as it could in daylight.
Or maybe, in the manner of a bloodhound, it could track him by his scent.
If the thing benefited from both the superior intelli-gence of a human being and the more acute senses of an animal, Tommy was screwed.
‘What do you want?’ he asked aloud.
He would not have been surprised if a small whispery voice had responded. Indeed, he almost hoped it would speak to him. Whether it spoke or only hissed, its reply would reveal its location - maybe even clearly enough to allow him to open fire.
‘Why me?’ he asked.
The mini-kin made no sound.
Tommy would have been astonished if such a creature had crawled out of the woodwork one day or squirmed from a hole in the backyard. He might have assumed that the thing was extraterrestrial in nature or that it had escaped from a secret genetic-engineering laboratory where a scientist with a conscience deficit had been hard at work on biological weapons. He had seen all the appli-cable scary movies: He had the requisite background for such speculation.
But how much more astonishing that this thing had been placed on his doorstep in the form of a nearly featureless rag doll out of which it had either burst or swiftly metamorphosed. He had never seen any movie that could provide him with an adequate explanation for that.
Swinging the Heckler & Koch slowly from side to side, he tried again to elicit a telltale response from the tiny intruder: ‘What are you?’
The mini-kin, in its original white cotton skin, brought to mind voodoo, of course, but a voodoo doll was nothing like this creature. A voodoo doll was simply a crude fetish, believed to have magical potency, fashioned in the image of the person meant to be harmed, accessorized with a lock of his hair, or with a few of his nail clippings, or with a drop of his blood. Solemnly convinced that any damage done to the fetish would befall the real person as well, the torturer then stuck it full of pins, or burned it, or ‘drowned’ it in a bucket of water, but the doll was never actually animate. It never showed up on the doorstep of the intended victim to bedevil and assault him.
Nevertheless, into the gloom and the incessant drum-ming of the rain, Tommy said, ‘Voodoo?’
Whether this was voodoo or not, the most important thing he had to learn was who had made the doll. Someone had scissored the cotton fabric and sewn it into the shape of a gingerbread man, and someone had stuffed the empty form with a substance that felt like sand but proved to be a hell of a lot stranger than sand. The doll maker was his ultimate enemy, not the critter that was stalking him.
He was never going to find the doll maker by waiting for the mini-kin to make the next move. Action, not reaction, was the source of solutions.
Because he had established a dialogue with the little beast, even if its every response was the choice not to respond, Tommy was more confident than at any time since he’d felt the insectoid squirming of the creature’s heartbeat beneath his thumb. He was a writer, so using words gave him a comforting sense of control.
Perhaps the questions he tossed into the darkness diminished the mini-kin’s confidence in direct proportion to the degree that they increased his own. If phrased crisply and spoken with authority, his questions might convince the beast that its prey wasn’t afraid of it and wasn’t likely to be easily overpowered. Anyway, he was reassured to think this might be the case.
His strategy was akin to one he would have used if confronted by a growling dog: Show no fear.
Unfortunately, he had already shown more than a little fear, so he needed to rehabilitate his image. He wished he could stop sweating; he wondered if the thing could smell his perspiration.
Behind his armour of forcefully stated questions, he found the courage to move toward the centre of the wall opposite the windows, where the door should be: ‘What are you, dammit? What right do you have to come into my house? Who made you, left you on the porch, rang the bell?’
Tommy bumped into the door, fumbled for the knob, found it - and still the mini-kin did not attack.
When he yanked open the door, he discovered that the lights were also off in the upstairs hall, which shared a circuit with his office. Lamps were aglow on the first floor, and pale light rose at the stairs.
As Tommy crossed the threshold, leaving the office, the mini-kin shot between his legs. He didn’t see it at first, but he heard it hiss and felt it brush against his jeans.
He kicked, missed, kicked again.
A scuttling sound and a snarl revealed that the creature was moving away from him. Fast.
At the head of the stairs, it appeared in silhouette against the rising light. It turned and fixed him with its radiant green eyes.
Tommy squeeze-cocked the P7.
The rag-entwined mini-kin raised one gnarly fist, shook it, and shrieked defiantly. Its cry was small but shrill, piercing, and utterly unlike the voice of anything else on earth.