Ticktock by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page B

maybe a cancerous tumor had grown to that critical stage at which it exerted disabling pressure on the brain cells around it. He was hallucinating. That was the only credible explanation.
    The door to his office was closed, as he had left it.
    The house was as silent as a monastery full of sleeping monks, without even the murmur of whispered prayers. No wind in the eaves. No tick of clock or creak of floorboards.
    Trembling, sweating, Tommy sidled along the carpeted hall, approaching the office door with extreme caution.
    The pistol shook in his hand. Fully loaded, it weighed only about two and three-quarter pounds, but under the circumstances it felt enormously heavy. It was a squeeze cocker, as safe as any double-action piece on the market, but he pointed the muzzle only at the ceiling and kept his finger lightly on the trigger. Chambered for a .40 Smith & Wesson cartridge, the gun could do serious damage.
    He reached the closed door, halted, and hesitated.
    The doll—or whatever was hiding in the doll—was far too small to reach the knob. Even if it could climb up to the knob, it would not have sufficient strength—or be able to apply enough leverage—to open the door. The thing was trapped in there.
    On the other hand, how could he be so confident that it wouldn’t have the requisite strength or leverage? This creature was an impossibility to begin with, something out of a science-fiction film, and logic applied to this situation no more than it applied in movies or in dreams.
    Tommy stared at the knob, half expecting to see it turn. The polished brass gleamed with a reflection of the hall light overhead. If he peered closely enough, he could discern a weirdly distorted reflection of his own sweat-damp face in the shiny metal: He looked scarier than the thing inside the rag doll.
    After a while he put one ear to the door. No sound came from the room beyond—at least none that he could hear over the runaway thudding of his heart.
    His legs felt rubbery, and the perceived weight of the Heckler & Koch—more important than its
real
weight—was now twenty pounds, maybe twenty-five, so heavy that his arm was beginning to ache with the burden of it.
    What was the creature doing in there? Was it still ripping out of the cotton fabric, like a waking mummy unwinding its burial wrappings?
    He tried again to assure himself that this whole incident was a hallucination brought on by a stroke.
    His mother had been right. The cheeseburgers, the french fries, the onion rings, the double-thick chocolate milk shakes—those were the culprits that had done him in. Although he was only thirty, his abused circulatory system had collapsed under the massive freight of cholesterol that he forced it to carry. When this terminal episode was finished and the pathologists performed an autopsy on him, they would discover that his arteries and veins were clogged with enough greasy fat to lubricate the wheels on all the trains in America. Standing over his coffin, his weeping but quietly smug mother would say,
Tuong, I try tell you but you not listen, never listen. Too many cheeseburgers, soon you look like big fat cheeseburger, start seeing little snake-eyed monsters, fall dead of shock in upstairs hall with gun in your hand like dumb whiskey-drinking detective in books. Stupid boy, eating like crazy Americans, and now look what happen.
    Inside the office, something rattled softly.
    Tommy pressed his ear tighter to the paper-thin crack between the door and the jamb. He heard nothing more, but he was certain that he hadn’t imagined the first sound. The silence in that room now had a menacing quality.
    On one level, he was frustrated and angry with himself for continuing to behave as though the snake-eyed minikin was actually inside the office, standing on his desk, shedding its white cotton chrysalis.
    But at the same time, instinctively he knew that he was not truly insane, no matter how much he might wish that he