Ticktock Read Free

was dark. The only relief from blackness was the unnatural glow from the houses on the eastern hills and from the cars and trucks racing along the coast. The flashes of headlights and taillights suddenly seemed frenzied and ominous, as though all the drivers of those vehicles were speeding toward appointments with one form of damnation or another.
    Mild shivers swept through Tommy, and then he was shaken by a series of more profound chills that made his teeth chatter.
    As a novelist, he had never written a scene in which a character’s teeth had chattered, because he had always thought it was a cliché more important, he assumed that it was a cliché without any element of truth, that shivering until teeth rattled was not physically possible. In his thirty years, he had never, for even as much as a day, lived in a cold climate, so he couldn’t actually vouch for the effect of a bitter winter wind. Characters in books usually found their teeth chattering from fear, however, and Tommy Phan knew a good deal about fear. As a small boy on a leaky boat on the South China Sea, fleeing from Vietnam with his parents and two brothers and infant sister, under ferocious attack by Thai pirates who would have raped the women and killed everyone if they had been able to get aboard, Tommy had been terrified but had never been so fearful that his teeth had rattled like castanets.
    They were chattering now. He clenched his teeth until his jaw muscles throbbed, and that stopped the chattering. But as soon as he relaxed, it started again.
    The coolness of the November evening hadn’t yet leached into the Corvette. The chill that gripped him was curiously internal, but he switched on the heater anyway.
    As another series of icy tremors shook him, he remembered the peculiar moment earlier in the parking lot at the car dealership: the flitting shadow with no cloud or bird that could have cast it, the deep coldness like a wind that stirred nothing else in the day except him.
    He glanced away from the road ahead, up at the deep sky, as if he might glimpse some pale shape passing through the darkness above.
    What
pale shape, for God’s sake?
    â€œYou’re spooking me, Tommy boy,” he said. Then he laughed drily. “And now you’re even talking to yourself.”
    Of course, nothing sinister was shadowing him in the night sky above.
    He had always been too imaginative for his own good, which was why writing fiction came so naturally to him. Maybe he’d been born with a strong tendency to fantasize—or maybe his imagination had been encouraged to grow by the seemingly bottomless fund of folk tales with which his mother had entertained him and soothed him to sleep when he was a little boy during the war, back in the days when the communists had fought so fiercely to rule Vietnam, the fabled Land of Seagull and Fox. When the warm humid nights in Southeast Asia had rattled with gunfire and reverberated with the distant boom of mortars and bombs, he’d seldom been afraid, because her gentle voice had enraptured him with stories of spirits and gods and ghosts.
    Now, lowering his gaze from the sky to the highway, Tommy Phan thought of the tale of Le Loi, the fisherman who cast his nets into the sea and came up with a magical sword rather like King Arthur’s shining Excalibur. He recalled “The Raven’s Magic Gem” as well, and “The Search for the Land of Bliss,” and “The Supernatural Crossbow,” in which poor Princess My Chau betrayed her worthy father out of love for her sweet husband and paid a terrible price, and the “Da-Trang Crabs,” and “The Child of Death,” and dozens more.
    Usually, when something reminded him of one of the legends that he had learned from his mother, he could not help but smile, and a happy peace would settle over him as though she herself had just then appeared and embraced him. This time, however, those tales had no consoling