Revenge of the Manitou

ONE

He woke up during the night and he was sure there was someone in his room.

He froze, not daring to breathe, his eight-year-old fingers clutching the candy-striped sheet right up to his nose. He strained his eyes and his ears in the darkness, looking and listening for the slightest movement, the slightest squeak of floorboards. His pulse raced silently and endlessly, a steeplechase of boyish terror that ran up every artery and down every vein.

“Daddy” he said, but the word came out so quietly that nobody could have heard him. His parents were sleeping right down at the other end of the corridor, and that meant safety was two doors and thirty feet away, across a gloomy landing where an old grandfather clock ticked, and where even in daytime there was a curious sense of solitude and suffocating stillness.

He was sure he could hear somebody sighing, or breathing. Soft, suppressed sighs, as if they meant sadness, or pain. It may have been nothing more than the rustle of the curtains, as they rose and fell in the draft from the half-open window. Or it may have been the sea, sliding and whispering over the dark beach, just a half-mile away.

He waited and waited, but nothing happened. Five minutes passed. Ten. He lifted his blond, tousled head from the pillow, and looked around the room with widened eyes.

There was the carved pine footboard, at the end of his bed. There was the walnut wardrobe. There was his toy box, its lid only half-closed because of the model tanks and cranes and baseball gloves that were always crammed in there.

There were his clothes, his jeans and his T-shirt, over the back of his upright ladder-backed chair.

He waited a little longer, frowning. Then he carefully climbed out of bed, and walked across to the window. Outside, under a grayish sky of torn clouds and fitful predawn winds, a night heron called kwawk, kwawk, and a wooden door banged and banged.

He looked down at the untidy backyard, and the leaning fence that separated the Fenners’ house from the grassy dunes of the Sonoma coastline. There was nobody there.

He went back to bed, and pulled the sheets almost over his head. He knew it was silly, because his daddy had told him it was silly. But somehow tonight was different from those times when he was just afraid of the shadows, or overexcited from watching flying-saucer movies on television. Tonight, there was someone there.

Someone who sighed.

He lay there tense for nearly twenty minutes. The wooden door kept banging, with mindless regularity, but he didn’t hear anything else. After a while, his eyes began to close. He jerked awake once, but then they closed again, and he slept.

It was the worst nightmare he had ever had. It didn’t seem as though he was dreaming at all. He rose from his bed, and turned toward the wardrobe, his head moving in an odd, stiff way. The grain of the walnut on the wardrobe doors had always disturbed him a little, because it was figured with foxlike faces. Now, it was terrifying. It seemed as if there was someone inside the surface of the wood, someone who was calling out to him, trying desperately to tell him something. Someone who was trapped, but also frightening.

He could hear a voice, like the voice of someone speaking through a thick glass window. “… Alien … Alien … for God’s sake, Alien … for God’s sake, help me …

Alien …,” the voice called.

The boy went closer to the wardrobe, one hand raised in front of him, as if he was going to touch the wood to find where the voice was coming from. Dimly, scarcely visible except as a faint luminosity on the varnish, he could make out a gray face, a face whose lips were moving in a blurry plea for mercy, for assistance, for some way out of an unimaginable hell.

“Alien., ” pleaded the voice, monotonously. “Alien … for God’s sake …”

The boy whispered, “Who’s Alien? Who’s Alien? My name’s Toby. I’m Toby Fenner.

Who’s Alien?”

He could see the face was fading. And yet, for one moment, he had an indescribable sense of freezing dread, as if a cold wind had blown across him from years and years ago. There was a feeling of someplace else … someplace known and familiar and yet frighteningly strange. The feeling was there and it was gone, so quickly that he couldn’t grasp what it was.

He banged his hands against the wardrobe door and said, “Who’s Alien? Who’s Alien?”

He was more and more alarmed, and he screeched at the top of his high-pitched voice, “Who’s Alien? Who’s Alien? Who’s Alien?”

The bedroom door burst open and his daddy said, “Toby? Toby-what in hell’s the matter?”

Over breakfast at the pine kitchen table, bacon and eggs and pancakes, his daddy sat munching and drinking coffee and watching him fixedly. The San Francisco Examiner lay folded and unread next to his elbow. Toby, already dressed for school in a pale-blue summer shirt and jeans, concentrated his attention on his pancakes.

Today, they were treasure islands on a sea of syrup, gradually being excavated by a giant fork.

At the kitchen stove, his mommy was cleaning up. She was wearing her pink gingham print apron, and her blond hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was slim and young and she cooked bacon just the way Toby liked it. His daddy was darker and quieter, and spoke slower, but there was deep affection between them which didn’t have much need of words. They could fly kites all Sunday afternoon on the shoreline, or go fishing in one of the boats from his daddy’s boatyard, and say no more than five words between lunch and dusk.

Through the kitchen window, the sky was a pattern of white clouds and blue. It was September on the north California shore, warm and windy, a time when the sand blew between the rough grass, and the laundry snapped on the line.

Susan Fenner said, “More coffee? It’s all fresh.”

Neil Fenner raised his cup without taking his eyes off Toby. “Sure. I’d love some.”

Susan glanced at Toby as she filled her husband’s cup. “Are you going to eat those pancakes or what?” she asked him, a little sharply.

Toby looked up. His daddy said, “Eat your pancakes.”

Toby obeyed. The treasure islands were dug up by the giant fork, and shoveled into a monster grinder.

Susan said, “Anything in the paper this morning?”

Neil glanced at it, and shook his head.

“You’re not going to read it?” Susan asked, pulling out one of the pine kitchen chairs and sitting down with her cup of coffee. She never ate breakfast herself, although she wouldn’t let Neil or Toby out of the house without a good cooked meal inside them. She knew that Neil usually forgot to take his lunch break, and that Toby traded his peanut-butter sandwiches for plastic GIs or bubble gum.

Neil said no, and passed the paper across the table. Susan opened it and turned to the Homecraft section.

“Would you believe this?” she said. “It says that Cuisinart cookery is going out of style. And I don’t even have a Cuisinart yet.”

“In that case, we’ve saved ourselves some money,” said Neil, but he didn’t sound as if he was really interested. Susan looked up at him and frowned.

“Is anything wrong, Neil?” she asked.

He shook his head. But then he suddenly reached across the table and held Toby’s wrist, so that the boy’s next forkful of pancake was held poised over his plate. Toby said, “Sir?”

Neil looked at his son carefully and intensely. In a husky voice, he said, “Toby, do you know who Alien is?”

Toby looked at his father uncomprehendingly. “Alien, sir?”

“That’s right. You were saying his name last night, when you were having that nightmare. You were saying ‘I’m not Alien, I’m Toby.’ ”

Toby blinked. In the light of day, he didn’t remember the nightmare very clearly at all.

He had a sense that it was something to do with the wardrobe door, but he couldn’t quite think what it was. He remembered a feeling of fright. He remembered bis daddy putting him back to bed, and tucking him in tightly. But the name “Alien” didn’t mean anything.

Susan said, “Was that what he was saying? ‘I’m not Alien, I’m Toby’?”

Neil nodded.

“But kids say all kinds of silly things in their sleep,” she told him. “My younger sister used to sing nursery rhymes in her sleep.”

“This wasn’t the same,” said Neil.

Susan looked at Toby and then back to her husband. She said quietly, “I don’t know what you mean.”

Neil let go of his son’s wrist. He dropped his eyes toward the table, at his scraped-clean plate, and then said, “My brother’s name was Alien. Everybody used to call him Jim on account of his second name, James. But his first name was Alien.”

“But Toby doesn’t know that.”

Neil said, “I know.”

There was an awkward silence. Then Susan said, “What are you trying to say? That Toby’s having nightmares about your brother?”

“I don’t know what I’m trying to say. It just shocked me, that’s all. Toby’s room used to be Alien’s. Jim’s, I mean.”

Susan put down her cup of coffee. She looked at Neil and she could see that he wasn’t pulling her leg. He did, sometimes, with fond but heavy-handed humor which he’d inherited from his Polish mother. Good old middle-European practical jokes. But today, he was edgy and disturbed as if he’d had a premonition of unsettled days ahead.

Susan said, “You think it’s a ghost, or something?”

Neil looked serious for a moment, and then gave a sheepish grin, and shrugged.

“Ghost? I don’t know. I don’t believe in ghosts. I mean, I don’t believe in ghosts that wander around in the night.”

Toby piped up, “Is there a ghost, Daddy? A real ghost?”

Neil said, “No, Toby. There isn’t any such thing. They come out of storybooks, and that’s all.”

“I heard some noises in the night,” Toby told him. “Was that a ghost?”

“No, son. It was just the wind.”

“But what you said about Alien?”

Neil lowered his head. Susan took Toby’s hand and said softly, “Daddy was just saying that you must have had a very special kind of dream, that’s all. It’s nothing to get frightened about. Now, are you going to finish that pancake, because it’s time for school.”

Neil drove Toby in his Chevy pickup as far as Bodega Bay, and dropped him off at the schoolhouse. The bell was ringing plaintively, and most of the kids were already in the building. Toby climbed down to the road, but instead of running straight into school, he stood beside the truck for a moment, looking up at his father. His blond hair was ruffled by the Pacific wind. He said, “Daddy?”

Neil looked at him. “What’s the matter?” Toby said, “I didn’t mean to upset you or anything.” Neil laughed. “Upset me? You haven’t upset me.”

“I thought you were. Mommy said I mustn’t talk about Jim.”

Neil didn’t answer. It was still difficult for him to think about his brother. He no longer got those terrible, clear pictures in his mind. He’d managed, with time, to blur them beyond recognition. But there was still that sensation of breathless pain, like jumping into the ocean on a December day. There was still that helplessness, still that desperation.

Neil said, “You’d better get into school. The teacher’s going to be worrying where you are.”

Toby hesitated. Neil continued, “Go along, now,” and Toby knew that his daddy meant it. He swung his books and his lunch pail over his shoulder and walked slowly across the gray, dusty yard. Neil watched him go into the battered pale-blue door, and then the door swung shut. He sighed.

He knew that he ought to be straight with Toby, and tell him about Jim. But somehow he couldn’t, not until he could get straight about Jim in his own mind. He’d begun, a couple of times, to try and tell Toby what had happened; but the words always came out wrong. What words could there possibly be to describe the experience of watching your own brother being slowly crushed to death under an automobile?

What words could there possibly be to describe the knowledge that it was your fault, that you’d accidentally released the jack?

He could see Jim’s hand reaching out to him even today. He could see Jim’s pleading, swollen face, with the blood running from his mouth and his nose. How do you tell your eight-year-old kid about that?

He drove down to Bodega Bay and parked the Chevy in the parking lot outside the Tides Restaurant. Then he walked out along the gray wooden planks of the jetty to the White Dove, a sailboat he was fixing up for a client. Gulls turned and fluttered in the wind, and the tackle and rigging of all the boats tied up in the bay clattered and clanked.

Bodega Bay was a small, shallow bay, enclosed in a hook of land that came out from the Sonoma coast Uke a beckoning finger. The beaches all around were gray and littered with burnt wood and beer cans, but beyond the beaches were green, rounded hills and quiet farms. The tourists had all gone home now, and the coastline was foggy and silent, except for the meep-meep of gulls, and the slopping of the sea on the piers of the jetty.

Neil clambered down onto the White Dove’s salt-bleached deck and walked aft. The owner had used the boat all summer, and it needed painting, varnishing, and cleaning. Neil glanced up at the mast and saw that several of the lines were frayed and loose.

He was just about to go below and see what repairs were needed in the small cabin when he thought he heard someone speak. He looked up, but there was nobody around, except for old Doughty, Bodega Bay’s Ancient Mariner, who was sitting on a lobster basket thirty or forty feet away.

Neil paused for a couple of seconds, but then he decided he must have made a mistake, and he bent his head to go below.

A voice whispered; “Alien.”

Neil froze. For no reason that he could possibly explain, he felt frightened in a way that he had never felt before. He couldn’t move for a moment, as if the whispered voice had drained him of all energy. Then he turned around, his eyes wide, his face white.

There was nothing there but the foggy bay, the dim, gray Pacific, the swooping gulls.

No other sound but the creak of the ropes and timbers as the White Dove rose and dipped in the swell of Bodega Bay.

Neil took a deep breath, and went down into the boat’s cabin. There were three narrow berths, still covered with rumpled blankets and sheets. In the center of the cabin was a varnished table, littered with Dixie cups and empty bottles of bourbon, and burned by cigarette ends. It disgusted Neil to see people treat boats this way.

Even the simplest boat was a Grafted creation which protected men from the sea, and he believed in treating every vessel, however humble, with care and respect.

He took a look around, and then turned to go back up the companionway. The voice whispered, “Alien, help me … Alien, please help me …”

Totally scared, he turned around. For one ridiculous moment, he was sure that he saw someone looking in at the dun forward porthole, but then the face instantly reassembled itself into a pattern of coiled ropes and clips.

Shaken, he climbed out of the cabin and stood back on the deck. He didn’t know what to think or what to feel. Maybe Toby’s dream was just getting under the skin of his imagination. Maybe he was overworked. He took a couple of steady breaths, and then walked forward, back to the jetty, to collect his tools and his cans of varnish.

In school, with the sunshine sloping across the desks, Mrs. Novato, a young dark-baked woman with a hairy mole on one cheek and a taste for billowing Indian dresses, announced a class excursion in one week’s time. It would cost a dollar-thirty-five, and every pupil would have to bring a packed lunch. They were going to drive up to Lake Berryessa, in the Vaca Mountains, for nature study and maybe some swimming, too.

Toby was sitting next to Petra Delgada, a serious little girl who never spoke much and always went to mass on Sundays. Mrs. Novato had placed him there because he giggled and talked too much whenever he sat next to his best friend, the coppery-haired Linus Hopland. Linus was in the front row now, his hair shining in the sunshine like the Point Arena lighthouse. Toby whispered to Petra, “Are you going up to the lake? Will your folks let you?”

Petra shrugged, and pursed her lips demurely. “I don’t know. I’ve’ been sick for the past four days. Mommy may not let me.”

“You’ve been sick? You mean, you’ve puked?”

“You mustn’t say puke. It’s disgusting.”

Toby colored a little. He didn’t like Petra to think that he wasn’t grown-up and sophisticated. Petra, after all, was nearly nine, and next in line for class president.

Toby said: “Well, what do you mean? You got the measles?”

“As a matter of fact, I have insomnia,” said Petra.

“Is that catching?”

“Of course not, stupid. Insomnia is when you can’t sleep. Can’t you see these rings around my eyes? Mommy says it’s due to hypertension in prepuberty.”

Toby frowned. He didn’t like to admit that he didn’t have the faintest idea of what Petra was talking about. He’d kind of heard of “puberty,” and he knew it had something to do with growing hairs on your doodad- which is what his grandpa always used to call it-but that was about the extent of his knowledge. Like most children to — whom the most important things in life are skateboards, Charlie’s Angels, and Captain Cosmic, he’d been told, but had quickly forgotten.

“What do you do all night if you don’t sleep?” asked Toby. “Do you walk about, or what?”

“Oh, I sleep some of the time,” explained Petra. “The trouble is, I keep having bad dreams. They wake me up, and then it takes me a long tune to go back to sleep.”

“Bad dreams? I had a bad dream last night.”

“Well, I’m sure your bad dream wasn’t as bad as my bad dreams,” said Petra. “My bad dreams are simply awful.”

“I dreamed there was somebody stuck in my wardrobe,” said Toby. In the sunlit classroom, it sounded pretty lame. The cold terror of seeing that gray face in the walnut door had been vaporized by the warmth of the day.

Petra tilted her nose up. “That’s nothing. I keep dreaming about blood. I keep dreaming about all these people covered with blood.”

Toby was impressed. “That’s real frightening,” he admitted. “People covered with blood-that’s real frightening.”

“Mommy says it’s prepuberty fears,” said Petra, airily. “She’s says it’s a woman’s fear of her natural function brought about by men’s lack of understanding of what a woman is.”

Mrs. Novato called; “Petra? Are you talking? I’m surprised at you.”

Petra gave Toby a sharp look, and said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Novato. I was trying to explain something to Toby.”

The class of twenty boys and girls, all between the ages of eight and ten, looked around at them. Mrs. Novato said, “If there’s something you don’t understand, Toby, you can always ask me. That’s what I’m paid for. Apart from that, I’m a little better informed than Petra on most subjects.”

Linus Hopland was grinning at Toby and pulling faces. Toby couldn’t help smirking, and he had to bite his tongue to prevent himself from laughing out loud.

Mrs. Novato said; “Stand up, Toby. If you’ve got a question to ask, if there’s something you don’t understand, then let’s share your problem. That is what a class is for, to share.”

Toby reluctantly stood. He kept his eyes fixed on his desk.

“Well?” asked Mrs. Novato. “What was it that you wished to know?”

Toby didn’t answer.

“It was so important that you had to discuss it with Petra in the middle of nature study, and yet you can’t tell me what it was?”

Toby said, in a small, husky voice, “It was Petra’s dreams, Mrs. Novato.”

“Speak up,” insisted his teacher. “I didn’t hear you.”

“It was Petra’s dreams. Petra’s been having bad dreams, and so have I.”

Mrs. Novato blinked at him. “Bad dreams? What kind of bad dreams?”

“I’ve been dreaming about a man stuck in my wardrobe calling for help, and Petfa’s been having dreams about people covered with blood.”

Mrs. Novato walked slowly down the aisle toward them. She looked first at Toby and then at Petra. On the blackboard behind her was the chalked message: “Trees in the Petrified Forest were turned to stone by minerals.’”

Mrs. Novato said, “Have you told your parents about these dreams?”

The children nodded.

“Yes, Mrs. Novato.”

Mrs. Novato smiled. “In that case, I’m sure you’re both going to be fine. Maybe a little less cheese at bedtime, and those dreams are sure to disappear. Now, forget about what goes on in dreams and let’s have your attention on something that’s real. The trees in the Petrified Forest.”

Toby sat down again. Petra, annoyed at having been scolded by Mrs. Novato, pinched him hard on the leg.

During lunch recess, in the hot, dusty school yard with its chain-link fence, Toby sat on a split-log bench and ate his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Today, despite Ben Nichelini’s entreaties to trade a sandwich for a live lizard on a piece of string, he felt hungry, and he ate everything his mother had prepared for him. He carefully saved his Baby Ruth bar until last.

Andy Beaver, who was the envy of the class because his uncle had taken him to see Star Wars, was doing a passable imitation of R-2 D-2, while Karen Doughty was breathing in and out very loudly and panting: “I’m Darth Vader! I’m Darth Vader!”

Daniel Soscol, one of the youngest boys in the class, came across the school yard and sat down next to Toby, watching him eat with silent interest. Daniel wasn’t very popular because he was so young and so quiet. He had thin arms and legs, and big dark eyes. His father was a plumber in Valley Ford, and his mother had died in May.

Toby continued to eat. When he had finished, he took out the square of kitchen towel that his mother had neatly folded under his sandwiches, and wiped his mouth.

Daniel said, “I heard you say about the dreams.”

Toby looked up. “So?” he said, acting a little tough because Daniel was the class runt. He wouldn’t have liked Andy Beaver to see him being too nice to Daniel, in case Andy Beaver’s gang started to treat him the same way. Leaving thumbtacks on his seat, hiding his books, things like that.

Daniel said, “I had bad dreams, too. Real scary ones. I dreamed I was walking through this forest and suddenly all these things came dropping out of the trees.”

“What’s scary about that?”

“What’s scary about somebody stuck in a wardrobe?”

“Well, it was scary at the time,” said Toby.

“So was mine.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Toby unwrapped his Baby Ruth and started to chew it. A coolish breeze from the west raised dust on the yard, and in the distance a cock began to crow.

Daniel said, “We’re not the only ones. Ben Nichelini had a bad dream too. He dreamed he was running and running and all these fierce people were trying to catch him.”

“Everybody has dreams like that,” said Toby.

“Well, I guess so,” admitted Daniel. “I just think it’s funny all these kids having bad dreams.”

Andy Beaver, came up, burbling and warbling like R-2 D-2. Daniel didn’t bother to stick around. When Andy was in a playful mood, it usually meant that Daniel was going to get his hair twisted or his shorts pulled down. Daniel said so long to Toby, and ran away across the yard and into the classroom.

“Have you been talking to teacher’s pet?” asked Andy. He was blond and pugnacious, and would probably spend most of his adult life watching baseball and drinking Old Milwaukee.

Toby screwed up his eyes against the sun. “What if I have?”

“You just don’t talk to teacher’s pet, that’s all. He’s a sissy.”

“His mom just died. Maybe you’d be a sissy if your mom just died.”

“I wouldn’t be a sissy for nothing. What were you talking about?”

Toby finished his chocolate bar and screwed up the paper. “What’s it to you?”

Andy Beaver grabbed his hand and bent his fingers back. Toby yelped in pain, but Andy was much stronger, and he couldn’t get free. A couple of the other kids came over, yelling, “Fight! Fight!” Toby and Andy fell to the dusty ground and rolled over and over, kicking and grunting and punching.

At last, Andy held Toby down on the ground, his knees pressed against Toby’s arms.

Both of them were flushed and grubby, and there were tears in their eyes.

Andy said, “Okay-what were you talking about? I want to know!”

Toby coughed. “We were talking about those bad dreams, that’s all. Nothing that you’d understand.”

“Oh yeah?”

Toby pushed bun off and struggled to his feet. His shirt was hanging out at the back, and bis pants were ripped. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face.

“You’re so smart, you think you’re the only person who ever had dreams,” Andy said.

“So when was the last time you had a bad dream?” demanded Toby. “The last time your mother cooked spaghetti, I’ll bet.”

“It was not!” said Andy, hotly. “I had bad dreams last night, and the night before.”

“You had bad dreams?” asked Toby.

“I did too. Nightmares.”

“You shouldn’t have gone to see Star Wars,” said Ben Nichelini. “You’re not man enough to take it.”

“Will you shut up?” said Andy. “I had bad dreams about people having all their hair torn off of their heads. Dozens of ‘em. All screaming and shouting, because somebody was tearing the hair right off of their heads.”

“Gee, that’s scary,” put in Debbie Spurr. She was a thin, mousy little girl in a brown gingham print-frock and her hair in bows. “That’s worse than my bad dream.”

“What is this?” asked Andy. “Just because Toby and Petra and me had bad dreams, that doesn’t mean everybody else has to say they had one too.”

“David had one,” said Toby. “That makes four.”

“I did have one,” insisted Debbie. “I thought I was awake, but I wasn’t. I heard someone calling out. It was terrifically scary. They kept on calling and calling, and I didn’t know what to do. It was a woman, and she sounded awful scared.”

Toby looked at Andy, and for the very first time in their lives they looked at each other as people, not as classmates or as children. Then- young faces were sober and expressionless, as if they had both recognized that what was happening was unusual and dangerous. Then Andy broke the spell by smirking a little, and saving,

“That was nothing compared to my dream. Some woman calling out? I’ll put a thumbtack on Mrs. Novato’s chair, then you’ll hear some woman calling out.”

Just then, Mrs. Novato came to the schoolhouse door and blew her whistle to signal the end of the lunch recess. The talk about bad dreams broke up as they drifted back to the classroom, and Andy Beaver started on his R-2 D-2 impressions again, colliding with the girls and making burbling sounds. Toby walked back to the school door alone, and he was the last to go in. At the door, some feeling made him pause, and he looked back at the schoolhouse fence.

Under the windy sun, a tall man was standing, only about three or four feet beyond the gate. His eyes were shaded by a wide, dusty hat, and he was dressed in worn, dusty clothes. His lips appeared to be moving, and Toby was sure that he could hear the whispered word ‘Alien …”

Right in front of his horrified eyes, the man began to fade in the afternoon heat, like a photograph. In a moment, he had vanished, and there was nothing to see but the rounded hills of Bodega, and the hot blacktop leading westward to the beach.

A scuffling noise right behind Toby made him jump. He looked up and it was Mrs.

Novato. She said, with patronizing patience, “Are you deigning to join us, Mr. Fenner, or are you going to spend the rest of the day admiring the landscape?”

Toby was pale, and his face was sweaty. Mrs. Novato, instantly regretful of her sarcasm, asked, “Toby-are you all right?”

Toby felt as if his face was being pressed into a pillow. There was a terrible lack of air, a terrible closeness. He felt his legs turning black, and the blackness rose up in him and engulfed his brain. Mrs. Novato caught him as he fell in a dead fault.

That evening, as he lay tucked up in bed, his mother came upstairs with a bowl of Philadelphia pepper pot soup and a plate of crackers. He was feeling much better already, but Doctor Crowder had insisted that he should rest. He had finished a jigsaw of the Monitor and the Merrimac, and snapped and unsnapped a snap-together model of a Cadillac Eldorado, arid how he was reading a Doctor Strange comic.

His mother sat down on the side of his bed, and set his soup and crackers on his bedside table. Outside, the sky was dusking up, and there was a smell of eucalyptus from the row of trees which separated their plot from the MacDeans next door.

Susan Fenner said, “How’s it going, tiger?”

Toby smiled. “I guess I’m okay now.”

“You want to talk about it? You didn’t want to talk to Doctor Crowder.”

Toby turned his head away. He knew just what everyone would say if he told them about the man by the school fence. They’d say he had heat stroke, or too many peanut-butter-and-jeHy sandwiches. It seemed like every weird thing that ever happened, adults attributed it to something you ate. His mommy waited patiently while he kept his head turned away, but he wished she wouldn’t, because he really didn’t want to tell her what had happened.

Eventually, his mommy took his hand. In a soft voice, she said, “Is it because you don’t think I’ll believe you? Is that it?”

He still didn’t turn back, but he swallowed and said, “A little bit.”

“Well,” she said gently, “you don’t have to. You’re entitled to keep anything private that you want to. But you were real sick at school today, and because I love you, and because I care about you, I’d like to know what it was.”

Toby bit his lip. Then he looked back at his mommy, and his face was so crumpled and so distressed that she felt the tears prickle her eyes. She held him close, and hugged him, and they both wept a little, until at last he felt better, and he sat up straight in bed and smiled at her with two trails of tears down his face.

“You’re a silly, wonderful boy,” she chided him. “You know you can tell me anything you want. Anything.”

Toby swallowed, and nodded. The he began, “I was going into school after lunch. I turned around, and I saw a man. He was standing over by the fence.” Susan frowned. “A man? What was he doing?” “He wasn’t doing anything. He was just standing there.”

She softly brushed back his tousled hair. “Are you sure?” she asked him. “I mean, he wasn’t-well, undressed or anything?”

Toby shook his head. There was a long silence while Susan stroked his hair, and tried to think what it was that could have scared Toby so much. Eventually, she said,

“What was he like, this man? Did he looked frightening?”

Toby screwed up his eyes as he thought. Then he told her, slowly and very carefully,

“He wasn’t frightening like a monster or anything. He wasn’t going to chase me. But he wanted me to help. He wanted me to help, and I didn’t know how to.”

Susan said, “I don’t understand. What sort of help did he want?”

Toby looked up at her anxiously. “I couldn’t help him,” he said, in a small voice. “I didn’t know what to do.”

“But Toby,” asked Susan, “what sort of help did he want? What did he want you to do?”

Toby was silent for a moment, and then he said, very quietly, “I don’t know.”

Susan squeezed his hand. Maybe Toby was just going through some kind of imaginative stage in his life. Maybe it was all that ridiculous stuff he saw on television and read in his comic books. She knew that some mothers censored what their children read and watched, but Neil had always insisted that a childhood of Superman and Captain Marvel had never done him any harm, and so they had always allowed Toby to see any trash that he wanted to. As it had turned out, he usually preferred quality programs and good books anyway, but maybe Doctor Strange and the Incredible Hulk had gotten his eight-year-old mind out of gear …

Toby said, “He wasn’t alive.”

Susan, astray with her own thoughts, murmured, “What?”

“The man I saw. He wasn’t alive.”

“But Toby, you said he was standing up by the fence. How could he stand up if he wasn’t alive?”

Toby lowered his eyes. “I don’t know. But he wasn’t alive.”

Susan reached for the soup bowl, and handed it to him. “You listen,” she said, in a quiet, firm voice. “Just forget about what you saw today. It was nothing to worry about. Eat your soup and your crackers, and in a little while Daddy will come up and read you a story.

Then you can get a good night’s sleep, and in the morning you won’t think anything about it.”

She left his bedroom door ajar and went downstairs. Neil has come in a half-hour ago, and was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a Lite beer and reading the paper.

He looked up when she came in.

“How is he now?” he asked her.

She went over to the range and stirred the big black iron pot of vegetable soup. The fragrance of fresh-cooked carrots and leeks filled the kitchen. She said, “He’s a little better. But he says a man frightened him.”

Neil put his paper down. “A man? What man?”

“He doesn’t know. It wasn’t like an indecent assault or anything. The man was just standing by the school fence, and Toby said he scared him somehow. The man wanted help and Toby didn’t know how to help him.”

“Help? What kind of help?”

Susan shook her head. “I don’t know. It worries me. I hope he hasn’t picked up some sort of illness. I mean, he talks as though he’s suffering from fever.”

“Did Doc Crowder check his temperature?”

“Sure. It’s normal. He said there was nothing wrong.”

Neil rubbed his chin. For some reason, he kept remembering that moment on the White Dove, the strange whisper of “Alien.” He stood up and walked to the window. It was dark outside now, and he saw his own thin reflection staring back at him from a ghostly reflected kitchen.

Susan continued, “He kept insisting he wasn’t alive.”

“Who?”

“The man by the school fence. Toby said that he wasn’t alive.”

Neil turned around. “Did he say what he meant by that?”

She shrugged. “I guess he meant it was a ghost.”

Neil let out a long, resigned breath. “A ghost. That means it was my fault. All that talk about ghosts at breakfast.”

“Well, it could have been,” said Susan. “But don’t you think you ought to call Mrs.

Novato, and find out if they’ve had any bums hanging around the school?”

Neil nodded. “Let me go talk to Toby first.”

He went up the narrow stairs onto the wood-paneled landing, and across to Toby’s room. Toby had almost finished his soup and his crackers, and there was a little more color in his cheeks than before. Neil pulled a bentwood chair across and straddled it, looking at his son with affection.

“Hi,” he said gently.

“Hi,” said Toby.

“How was the soup?” asked Neil.

Toby put the empty dish back on his bedside table. “It was good. I feel better now.

Maybe I could get up and watch the flying robot.”

“Maybe you could stay in bed and have a rest.”

“I’m not sick, Daddy. Honest. I just fainted a little.”

Neil grinned. “A little faint is plenty.”

Toby showed him the snap-together Cadillac. “That’s neat, isn’t it? You don’t have to have glue. It just snaps together.”

Neil admired it. “When I was a kid, you had to carve the pieces out yourself, out of balsa wood,” he said. “You had to sand ‘em smooth, and stick ‘em together, and do it all from scratch.”

“That sounds like hard work,” said Toby, sympathetically.

Neil smiled, but didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “Toby, that man you saw. Can you tell me what he looked like?”

Toby lowered his eyes.

“It’s pretty important, Toby,” Neil told him. “The point is, if there really was a man there, and he’s been prowling around the schoolhouse, then the police ought to know.”

Toby was silent.

Neil reached over and took his hand. “Toby,” he said. “I want you to tell me what the man looked like. This isn’t a game. This is for real.”

Toby swallowed, and then he whispered, “He was tall, and he had a hat like a cowboy, and one of those * long white coats that cowboys used to wear.” “A duster, you mean.”

Toby nodded. “He had a beard, I think. A kind of a light-colored beard. And that was all.”

Neil said, “Mommy told me you thought he wasn’t alive.”

“He wasn’t.”

“What makes you think that?” “He just wasn’t. I know he wasn’t” “Was he a ghost?”

Toby lowered his eyes again. He fidgeted with his small fingers, and there was a hint of high color on his cheeks. He didn’t say anything, but then he didn’t know what to say. The man at the schoolhouse hadn’t been a ghost in the way that most people think about ghosts. He hadn’t come to haunt anybody. He had to come to ask for help, some terrible kind of help that Toby couldn’t even begin to understand. The feeling of need that came from the man in the long white duster had been so strong that Toby, just before he fainted, had felt that the man was real and that he, Toby, was a ghost, nothing but a shade of a boy.

Neil said, “I think it’s time you got some sleep now, don’t you? When you wake up in the morning, you’ll have gotten over all this.”

Toby said, “He won’t come again, will he? You see, I don’t know what to do when he comes. I don’t know how to help him.”

“He won’t come again. At least, I don’t believe so.”

Toby snuggled down in bed, and Neil tucked him in. He took the empty soup dish, and stood there for a while, looking down at his son’s mop of sun-bleached hair, at those eyes screwed up in a conscientious attempt at sleep, at those cheeks that were still soft and chubby.

He knelt down beside the bed and touched Toby’s forehead. Then he whispered, “If you do see that man again, you call me, you hear? You call me loud and I’ll come running.”

Toby opened one eye. “Yes, sir,” he said, in a husky voice, and then began the long dark slide into sleep.

He was awakened by the sound of the shed door banging. It was dark, very dark, and there was a rippling wind blowing from the sea. The drapes rose and fell like a huge beast breathing, and it sounded as if every loose floorboard and doorknob in the whole house was being rattled by cold, inquisitive drafts.

He lay there a while, listening. He wished very much he could go back to sleep again. He wished it was morning, and he wished his parents’ room wasn’t so far away, and more than anything he wished he was anyplace else but alone in this bed in the middle of this black breezy night, with the house stirring and shifting as if it had come to life.

He thought he heard a sound. A slow, deliberate creak, like a heavy foot pressing on a stair tread. He held his breath until he was almost bursting, listening, listening, but he didn’t hear the noise again. The drapes rustled and swished, and outside in the night the shed door banged and paused and banged again. The voice whispered:

“Alien …” He didn’t want to hear it. He buried his head under the bedclothes, and lay there in hot darkness, his heart pounding, almost stifling under the blankets and quilted comforter. He lay there for almost five minutes, but then a terrible thought occurred to him. Supposing, while he was hiding under the bedclothes, the man in the long white duster had come into the room, and was standing over him?

Toby came struggling up from the blankets like a diver coming up for air. He raised a flushed face from the bed, ready to encounter any kind of terror. But the room was still empty, and the curtains were still rising and falling, and the only sounds were those winds that shook the sash windows and persistently tried the doors. He was scared now. Really, desperately scared. In a tiny, inaudible voice, he called,

“Daddy.”

There was no reply. The house was as dark and noisy as before. But he was sure he could hear footsteps somewhere. He was sure the tall man in the wide-brimmed hat and the long duster was coming up the stairs. He was trembling all over, but he didn’t know what to do.

“Alien, for God’s sake …,” whispered the voice. Toby whimpered no and tried not to look toward the foxy whorls of wood on the wardrobe door, but his fright was so compelling that he couldn’t look away. The whorls twisted, and that gray shadowy face began to materialize, that tired anguished face in its prison of polished wood.

“Alien,” pleaded the voice, monotonously. “Alien … help me … for God’s sake, Alien, help me …”

Toby sat up in bed, rigid and white. The face was looking his way, and yet it didn’t appear to see him. It was gaunt and bearded, and it had the silvery quality of a photograph. Yet its lips moved as it spoke, and its eyes opened and closed in slow, regular blinking movements.

“I’m not Alien,” said Toby, in a small voice. “I’m not Alien, I’m Toby. I can’t help you.

I’m not Alien at all.”

“Alien, help me …” insisted the gray face.

“I can’t” wept Toby. “I don’t know what you want. I can’t.”

“Alien …,” moaned the voice. “Alien, for the love of God … bring them up to the peak … bring them up, or we’re lost …”

Toby cried, “I can’t! I can’t! I don’t know what you mean!”

It seemed at that moment as if the face truly opened its eyes at last. It stared at Toby, and as it stared, Toby felt as if he was being blown by a wind that came from far away and long ago, as if he was standing somewhere out in the open, but under a sky that was a hundred years gone. He had the eerie, terrifying sensation that the face on the wardrobe was real, and that the wardrobe wasn’t a wardrobe at all. He could hear someone calling far off to his left, but for some reason he was incapable of turning his head. The gray, bearded face kept him transfixed.

“Alien,” said the face, in a voice that sounded normal and very close. “Alien, I can’t hold out much longer without you.”

Toby found himself slurring an answer. His own voice seemed to echo and reverberate inside his head, as if he was speaking to himself from another room.

“I’ll do what I can,” he said slowly. “Just you hold out the best way you know how, arid I’ll do what I can.”

He turned and looked down to his left. He knew there was a valley down that way, and he knew that there was help if he could only make it in time. The sun was three hours above the far mountains, and he wasn’t sure that was going to give him long enough. He reckoned his best bet was to ride along the creek, but even then they might run into some nasty surprises.

He said, “Give me till sundown. I’ll do my level darndest.”

Neil came along the landing, tying up his bathrobe. He was sure that he’d heard Toby calling out a few moments ago, although everything seemed quiet now. He’d had a hard day on the White Dove, blow-torching off the discolored paint and the varnish, and he’d been deep in a bottomless sleep. As for Susan, you could have danced a rumba on the bed and she would never have stirred.

As he walked past the grandfather clock, ticking slowly and steadily in its dark coffin, he thought he heard voices. Deep, gruff voices, with a strange twang to them. He paused, listening, and then he went on tiptoe to Toby’s half-open bedroom door.

He peered through the crack in the doorjamb” but he couldn’t see anything. Then he heard one of those gruff voices again, a voice that said, “I’ll do what I can. Just you hold out the best way you know how.”

Neil hesitated. What the hell was going on? He pushed open Toby’s door, and there was Toby, kneeling up on the comforter in his striped pajamas, looking away across the room. It seemed unusually cold and windy, and Neil shivered.

He said, “Toby?” and Toby turned around.

It took Neil seconds upon horrified seconds to realize what he was looking at.

Instead of Toby’s round young face, he was looking into the lined, weatherbeaten face of an old man, a man whose expression was as tough and cold and self-sufficient as a snake’s.

He jerked involuntarily. But then he stared at this grotesque apparition of an old man’s face on his young son’s body, and he whispered, “Who are you? What’s happened to my son? Where’s Toby?”

The old face nodded, as if it hadn’t even heard him. It looked back across the room with its faded, crow’s-footed eyes, and said, “Give me till sundown. I’ll do my level darndest”