TWO

Neil was shaking and shaking Toby as if he wanted to shake that terrible head right off him. But then, through the blindness of his fright and his anxiety, he heard Toby crying “Daddy-daddy!” and he stopped shaking and looked down at his son in bewilderment.

The face, the image of a face, had vanished. Toby was just Toby, and there were tears in his eyes from being battered so hard. Neil couldn’t say anything, couldn’t speak at all, but he held Toby close, and stroked his head, and rocked backward and forward on the bed to soothe him.

Susan came into the room, bleary with sleep. “Neil- what’s happening!”

Neil’s throat was choked with fright and tears. He just shook his head, and cradled Toby closer.

Susan said, “I heard somebody shouting. It didn’t sound like you at all. Neil-what’s happening? What’s going on here?”

Neil took a deep breath. “I don’t know. It just seems crazy.”

“But what was it?”

Neil ran his fingers through Toby’s hair, and then sat his son up straight so that he could take a look at.him. Toby was tired, with plum-colored circles under his eyes, and he was pale, but otherwise he looked all right. All trace of that lined, hard-bitten face had vanished.

Neil said, “There’s something going on here, Susan. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a bad dream and it’s not Toby’s imagination.”

“What do you mean-‘something’? What kind of a something?”

“I don’t have any idea. But I heard voices coming out of this room tonight, and when I came in here, Toby was different.”

“Different?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Neil. “It looked as though he was wearing some kind of a mask, only it wasn’t a mask at all. He looked like an old man.”

“An old man? Are you kidding me, Neil?”

Neil held Toby close again. He could feel the boy’s heart beating against his own heart, a birdlike flutter. He said, dryly, “I wouldn’t kid you, Susan. You know that. I came in here and Toby had his back to me. He turned around and there he was, with this lined old face.”

“But I don’t understand. What do you mean, a lined old face?”

“For Christ’s sake, Susan, I don’t understand, either. But that’s what it was. He looked like an old man.”

Susan bent down and stroked Toby’s smooth, pale cheek. “I’m calling Doctor Crowder,” she said. “There’s something wrong here, and I want to know what.”

Toby said softly, “I’m all right, Daddy. I’m really all right.”

Susan took Toby from Neil’s arms, and cuddled him. He seemed so thin and bony and vulnerable in his blue-striped pajamas. She whispered in his ear, “Was it the bad dream again, honey? Is that what it was?”

He nodded. “I heard the man saying Alien again. I saw the face in the wardrobe. It was the same man that was by the school fence.”

“You mean the man you dreamed about was the man you saw at school? The same man?” asked Neil.

Toby, drowsy and heavy-lidded, mumbled, “Yes.”

“He had a beard and a hat?”

Toby said, “Yes.” His eyes were beginning to close now, and his head was resting heavily on Susan’s shoulder. After the emotional excitement of his nightmare, he was seeking refuge in deep sleep. Neil said, “Toby- Toby-don’t go to sleep-” but Susan shushed him, gently laid the boy back in his bed, and covered him with his comforter.

Neil looked at Toby for a while, and then went across to the wardrobe and gingerly touched the polished surface.

“I don’t know what the hell’s the matter,” he said. “Maybe it’s some kind of silly hysteria. Maybe Toby’s transmitting it to me. But I can tell you something, Susan, 7

saw that face tonight. I saw that face for real.”

“Did it look like anyone you knew?”

He shook his head. “I never saw anyone like that in my whole life.”

They switched off Toby’s light, but they left the door ajar and the light burning in the passage outside. Then they went downstairs to the kitchen, and Neil poured them both a glass of red wine. It was the only liquor they had in the house.

“I’m really worried,” said Susan. “It seems to be getting worse. And it doesn’t seem to sound like the usual kind of nightmare at all. I mean, he saw this man in the daylight.”

Neil took a large swallow of wine, and grimaced. “If you ask me, it’s a ghost. Or a poltergeist. Or whatever they call those damned mischievous spirits.”

“You’re not serious.”

“I don’t know what the hell I am. But all I know is that I walked in there and saw this old man’s face right on top of Toby’s body. It had wrinkles around the eyes, and a little black mustache, and those deep-lined cheeks that some old folks have. It was so clear. If I saw the old guy again, I’d know him at once.”

Susan sipped her wine and sighed. “I don’t know what to say. I believe you, Neil, and I believe Toby. But maybe it just isn’t what it seems.”

“Then what could it be?”

“I don’t know. But I think we ought to call Doctor Crowder in the morning. And Mrs.

Novato.”

Neil sat down at the kitchen table and took her hand. “Right now, I feel more like calling a shrink.”

Susan stroked the back of his fingers, briefly touching the worn gold wedding band.

“You don’t need a psychiatrist. If you ask me, Toby’s had a recurring nightmare, and because you love him so much, you’re kind of identifying with it. Taking the fright onto yourself, because you want to protect Toby.”

“I don’t know. Is there any more wine In that bottle?”

They drained the Pinot Noir, and then they went back to bed. It was almost dawn, five o’clock, and Neil lay there for the rest of the night without sleeping, staring at the ceiling. The Pacific wind began to warm, and the lace curtains stirred themselves, casting flowery patterns across the room. Could that really be true-that he was trying to take Toby’s nightmares onto himself? Or was there something really inside that wardrobe, and had that old-timer’s face really superimposed itself on Toby’s features?

At six, he almost fell asleep, but he jerked awake again. He went downstairs and made himself a pot of strong black coffee, and drank it looking out over the grassy wasteland that led to Schoolhouse Beach and the ocean.

The next morning, he parked the Chevy pickup outside the school gates and walked Toby up to the classroom door. Mrs. Novato smiled when she saw him, and they shook hands.

“Mr. Fenner,” said Mrs. Novato. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” said Neil. “I just thought I’d come along to make sure Toby was okay.”

Toby saw Linus, and tugged his hand away from Neil to run after him. Mrs. Novato smiled, and said, “They’re a couple of menaces, those two, when they get together.”

Neil gave her a quick, uncertain smile in reply.

“Mind you,” said Mrs. Novato, “I prefer boys with spirit. It’s the spirited ones who always do the best. Did you know that Senator Openhauer went to school here? He was one of the most disobedient pupils we ever had, or so the principal says.”

“Mrs. Novato,” put in Neil, uncomfortably, “I’m kind of worried about Toby. He says he saw a man here yesterday, out by the school fence, and whatever happened, that man scared the living daylights out of him.”

“He saw a man? Here?”

“Just before he fainted, he told us. Some man in a long, white old-fashioned duster coat, and a beard, and a broad-brimmed hat.”

Mrs. Novato frowned. Behind her, in the classroom, the children were running around and flicking paper pellets. She turned around for a moment, and called:

“Class! Let’s have some silence!” Immediately, the children were hushed. Mrs.

Novato always meant what she said, and if you disobeyed you got to write out the Pledge of Allegiance ten times.

She turned back to Neil. Thinking very carefully, she said, “I know Toby’s a truthful boy, Mr. Fenner. I never knew him tell him a lie. But I was out there when he fainted, and there wasn’t anybody in sight.” “He couldn’t have run off?”

Mrs. Novato pointed toward the fence. “You can see for yourself. It’s wide open for two hundred, three hundred feet. If there had been a man there, I would have seen him for sure.”

Neil rubbed the back of his neck and looked out across the hills. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem like Toby to make things up. He was sure that he saw this man, and he dreamed about him last night.”

Mrs. Novato laid a reassuring hand on his arm. “I shouldn’t worry about it too much, Mr. Fenner. A lot of the children have been having bad dreams of late. I think it’s become the class craze to have nightmares. Children are very psychologically suggestible, and I think they’ve gotten themselves into what you might call a state of, well, very mild hysteria.”

Neil looked across the porch toward the classroom. The children all looked normal enough. They were giggling and playing around just like ordinary kids, and they certainly didn’t seem to be suffering from any kind of collective breakdown.

“Have you talked to the school doctor about them?” he asked Mrs. Novato. “I mean, as far as Toby’s concerned, I wouldn’t like things to get any worse.”

“I can call the doctor it you like,” agreed Mrs. Novato. “But I think he’ll simply confirm my opinion that this is some kind of passing fad.”

Inside the classroom, the children were playing cowboys and Indians, and pretending to shoot at each other with their fingers. Neil grinned, and said, “I shouldn’t bother, Mrs. Novato. It looks as though they’re pretty healthy to me. Mind you, I don’t know how you manage to keep control.”

“It comes with practice-and iron discipline,” laughed Mrs. Novato.

Neil said, “Okay. If you could just keep an eye on Toby for me, I’d appreciate it.”

“Sure thing.”

He had just turned to leave the porch when he heard one of the children calling above the hubbub of the classroom-calling something in a high, piping voice that penetrated the shouting and laughing and pseudo “gunfire.” It wasn’t Toby. It was one of the other children-a small dark-haired boy in a green T-shirt.

He was calling, “Where’s Alien gone? Where’s Alien gone? Did Alien go for help?"

Neil felt a chill, prickling sensation around his scalp and wrists as if all his nerves were shrinking. He turned back to Mrs. Novato and barked, “Mrs. Novato-Mrs.

Novato!”

The teacher blinked at him uncertainly. “Yes, Mr. Fenner? Was there something else?”

Neil could hardly find the words. He was breathing in tight, suffocated gasps, and there seemed to be something pressing on him. Too much gravity, too much air.

And all the time, over the noise of the classroom, the boy was calling: “Has anyone seen where Alien went? For the love of God, where’s Alien?”

“Mrs. Novato,” said Neil, “could I speak to your children for just a couple of minutes?”

Mrs. Novato’s helpful expression tightened a little. “I’m afraid we have to start class in just a moment, Mr. Fenner. I really can’t-”

“Mrs. Novato, I think it would help them. I think this, whatever it is, this hysteria-well, I think it’s a little more than hysteria. I think I should talk to them, just for a few minutes.”

Mrs. Novato’s smile had now faded altogether. She was standing in the classroom door with her hand on the doorknob and Neil could see that she was quite prepared to close it in his face if he became too insistent.

“You’ll really have to talk to Mr. Groh, the principal,” she told him. “I’m not authorized to let anyone speak to the class, unless they’re a qualified lecturer or teacher.”

“Alien!” shouted the boy. “Where did Alien go?” Neil’s hands were shaking, and there was sweat on his upper lip. He wiped his mouth against his sleeve, and he said to Mrs. Novato, “One minute, and that’s all. I promise you. And if I start to say something you don’t like, you can throw me out.”

Mrs. Novato looked more bewildered than anything else. Neil said, “Please,” and at last she sighed, as if she were really allowing this against her better judgment, and as if she couldn’t understand why all the complicated things in life had to happen to her.

She led him up to the front of the class, onto her small plinth, and she raised her hands for silence. Neil felt unexpectedly embarrassed in front of all these expectant childish faces. He looked for Toby, and spotted him at last near the back of the room, sitting next to a pale girl with dark hair. Toby was openly pleased to see his daddy standing up there, but puzzled too. The boy sitting in front of Toby was obviously asking him, behind his hand, what his pop was up to, standing nervously in front of the eight-year-olds at Bodega school-house, his mind crowded with fears and dreams, and Neil wished he could have answered that question himself.

Mrs. Novato rapped her ruler on the desk for silence, and said, “Class, I want your attention for a moment. Mr. Fenner here, Toby’s father, wants to speak a few important words to you. It’s about the bad dreams that some of you have been having, so I believe you ought to pay close attention.”

Neil coughed, and found himself blushing. “Thank you, Mrs. Novato. It’s kind of you to let me speak. All I want to say is, Toby’s been having some pretty unpleasant nightmares lately, and Mrs. Novato tells me that some of the rest of you have, too.

Would you be kind enough to put up your hand if you’ve been having nightmares?”

There was a silence. The children stared at Neil, expressionless. Mrs. Novato gave a twitchy little smile, and said, “Come on now, children. You know that one or two of you have. Petra, how about you?”

Petra, the little girl sitting next to Toby, raised her hand. So did Toby. Then, one by one, others raised their hands. Ben Nichelini, Andy Beaver, Debbie Spurr, Linus Hopland, Daniel Soscol. Every child in the class of twenty-one.

Mrs. Novato glanced worriedly at Neil, and said, “I had no idea that all of them-”

Neil looked around the class. Twenty-one young, serious faces. They may have been normal, well-adjusted, boisterous kids, but they weren’t putting him on. There was no sniggering or whispering. They were all sitting there with their hands raised, and not one of them smiled.

“Okay,” said Neil, hoarsely, “you can put your hands down now.”

Mrs. Novato said, “This is most upsetting, Mr. Fenner. I can’t imagine what’s going on.”

“That’s why I wanted to speak to them,” Neil told her. “I believe that something’s happening here that’s more than bad dreams.”

He turned to the children, and he tried to speak as reassuringly and quietly as he could. “I don’t want to take up too much of your tune,” he said, “but I’d like you to think about these dreams as a land of a class project. The more we find out about them, I think the better chance we have of discovering why you’ve been dreaming them, and what they are. I’d like you all to spend a few minutes.at home tonight, and write or draw what you saw in your dream. Think hard, and remember whatever you can. If you can think of any names you heard in your dreams, jot them down. What you write or draw doesn’t have to make any particular sense. Just put down whatever comes into your mind.”

Mrs. Novato said, “I’m not at all sure that Mr. Groh is going to approve of this, Mr. Fenner.”

“Why not?”

“Well, he doesn’t want to antagonize the parents. Some of them are pretty touchy about nonstandard projects, you know.”

Neil took in the class with a wide sweep of his arm. “Mrs. Novato, did you see how many hands went up?

Twenty-one out of twenty-one. Don’t you think we ought to make just a minimum effort to find out what this is all about?”

The classroom was quiet, except for sporadic coughs and the shuffling of sneakers.

Then Mrs. Novato said, “All right, Mr. Fenner. I’ll give it just one try. But I don’t think the children ought to do this at home. They can draw their dreams right here in the classroom, this afternoon, during their drawing lesson. It should improve the results, too. Not all of them have crayons and paper at home.”

She lifted her hands toward the class, and clapped them once, briskly. “Now then, children,” she said, “I want you all to say good morning to Mr. Fenner, and then I want you to open your geography books to the big color map of northern California, which is on page twenty-five.”

The children sang, “Good morning, Mr. Fenner,” and Neil said “Thanks” to Mrs.

Novato and left the classroom. On his way out, he gave Toby a quick, secret wink.

Outside in the school yard, it was growing hot. The weather was unusually warm for September, way up in the high seventies and the low eighties. Through the dusty glare, Neil glanced across at the fence where Toby had seen the man in the long white coat, but the scrubby grass wa” deserted. Neil could see why Mrs. Novato hadn’t believed anyone could have been standing there. The fields were wide open for hundreds of feet, and the first patch of cover Was a sparse group of thorn bushes, at least three minutes’ hard running away.

He walked over to the fence and examined the ground. It was hard clay, too rough to show any footprints. He believed that Mrs. Novato hadn’t seen anybody, but he also believed that Toby was telling the truth. Tough little boys didn’t go fainting for no reason at all-and come to that, unimpressionable fathers didn’t go imagining old men’s spectral faces for no reason at all, either.

He went slowly back to Ms pickup truck, and sat behind the wheel for a while, thinking. He had a feeling that something wasn’t right-the same feeling you get on a warm day, when a storm’s beginning to build. He looked in his rearview mirror a couple of times, half-expecting to see the man in the white duster standing by the fence, but nothing appeared. After a few minutes, he turned the key in the ignition and drove off toward the bay, and another day’s work.

Although it was warm and clear in the valleys, there was a foggy chill out on Bodega Bay, and Neil wore his windbreaker while he finished off varnishing the White Dove’s afterdeck and cabin doors. Old Doughty wasn’t far off, smoking his pipe and watching the coast-guard cutters from under his peaked nautical cap, and over by the gift shop a party of Japanese tourists were proudly having their picture taken in front of Bodega Bay’s well-worn collection of whales’ jaws and sharks’ teeth. As Neil put the last licks of varnish on the doors, Doughty got up off his perch and came strolling along the jetty. He paused by the White Dove’s berth, and stood watching Neil for a while, puffing and gurgling at his pipe.

“I reckon you’ve got yourself a few good hours’ work in that beaten-up tub,” he remarked. “I never saw anyone handle a craft so badly, the way that Mr. Collings knocked her about. I was damned surprised he never drowned himself.”

Neil shrugged. “It’s his funeral,” he said, noncommittally.

Doughty grunted. He was nearly eighty, with a big, wrinkled face that was weatherbeaten to a dull red color. He wore the same navy-blue reefer jacket that he had worn the first time Neil’s father had brought him down to the jetty twenty years ago and hefty fisherman’s rubbers. There was a time when he had operated a fishing fleet of his own, but that was long before most people could remember.

“I don’t know why you bother fancying that boat up so nice,” Doughty said. “You know that he’s going to knock her about just as bad next summer.”

“I do it because he pays me,” replied Neil.

Doughty sighed. “You’re not like your father. Nor your grandfather, for that matter.”

“I never said I was. And from what I’ve been told about my grandfather, he drank a bottle of rum a day, and smoked five cigars before breakfast.”

“What’s wrong in that?” Doughty wanted to know.

Neil laughed. He slicked varnish across the bottom of the cabin door and set down his brush.

“They always used to tell stories about the Fenner family on the wharf here,” said Doughty. “I remember when I was round about ten years old, my pa pointed out your great-grandfather Jack Fenner to me, and told me not to displease him, on account of he’d thrown three fishermen into the bay for offering him undersize lobsters.”

“I’ve heard all the stories,” said Neil, tidying up his paint cans. “I freely admit that I’m the most colorless Fenner that ever lived.”

“You’re not the worst, though,” said Doughty, tapping out the dottle of his pipe against a wooden upright.

“So I suppose you’ve got something to be thankful for.” “Oh, yes? And who do you reckon was the worst?” Doughty fumbled in his pocket and brought out two pieces of saltwater taffy. He tossed one to Neil, and unwrapped the other one himself. He said,

“I have to suck these slow, you know, otherwise they get themselves snarled up in my dentures.”

Neil came forward and clambered up onto the jetty. “You still haven’t told me who was the worst Fenner of all. I bet he wasn’t as bad as the worst Doughty of all.” “Oh, he sure was,” said Doughty, shaking his head. “The Doughtys was clergy originally, from Plymouth, England. Highly peaceable folk. But the Fenners were tough farmers, tough settlers, and vigilantes. The Fenners did more to settle Napa Valley than George Yount, and most folks say that George Yount was the father of Napa Valley.”

Neil and Doughty walked side by side to the parking lot, where Neil let down the back of his pickup and heaved out three coils of fresh rope.

“The worst Fenner of all was called Bloody Fenner, and I’m surprised your pa never told you about him,” said Doughty.

“I think he did, when I was younger. An Indian fighter, wasn’t he, back in the 1830s?

They called him ‘Bloody’ Fenner because he collected ears and scalps.”

Doughty nodded. “That’s right. But the story goes that he did worse than that. Back when the white men were fighting the Wappos up in the mountains, he used to fight on one side or another, according to how it took his fancy. If the Wappos offered him a couple of square miles of good farming ground, he’d set traps for the white men; and if the white men were ready to pay him enough, he’d bushwhack the Wappos.

Nobody never proved nothing, of course, so he never came to trial, but the stories went around for years that Bloody Fenner was responsible for some of the worst of the Indian massacres, and it took a good few years before the Fenner family wasn’t shunned no more.”

Neil hefted the ropes back to the White Dove, and heaved them onto the deck.

“That’s something I wasn’t told,” he said to Doughty. “I guess Bloody Fenner was someone my family preferred to forget.”

Doughty stuck his pinkie up inside his palate to dislodge a sticky lump of taffy. “If you really want to. know about the old days, you ought to take a trip across to Calistoga and talk to Billy Ritchie-that’s if he’s still alive, but I haven’t heard different. Billy Ritchie’s grandpa was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, and a lot of folks say he was the model for Israel Hands in Treasure Island. They were a tough lot, in those days, but they say that Bloody Fenner was the toughest of all.”

Neil climbed down onto the White Dove and started to uncoil one of the ropes. The day was warming up now, out here on the bay, but the gray fog was even denser, and he couldn’t even see as far as the harbor’s inlet. A fishing boat chugged past like a gray ghost.

“Here,” said Neil. He reached in his pocket and handed Doughty a five-dollar bill.

“Why don’t you go set them up in the bar? As soon as I’m through here, I’ll come join you.”

It was a gentle way of buying Doughty a free drink. The unwritten code of behavior on Bodega wharf was that you let Doughty bend your ear for a while, and then you slipped him a little money to make life a little easier for him.

Doughty said, “Don’t forget to come along, mind. I’ll set you up an old-fashioned.”

Then he tipped his nautical cap, and swayed off along the boardwalk as if he were on the deck of an old-time clipper.

Neil grinned to himself and went back to his painting and tidying up. Although the White Dove was superficially battered, it wouldn’t take much to bring back her glamour, and she wasn’t going to need a major overhaul this year. Neil reckoned to have finished her off by the end of the week. Then he could get back to his small yard across the other side of the wharf and complete work on a fishing boat he was refitting.

It was almost eleven o’clock in the morning,and the fog was at its densest. The sun was a pale yellow disk, and the wind had stilled. Neil found that he was sweating as he sorted and tied the new ropes, and he felt for a moment as if he could scarcely breathe.

He glanced out toward the bay and frowned. He was sure he could see something out there in the water. He screwed up his eyes against the yellowish haze of the fog; whatever it was, it was too far away to distinguish clearly. It was tall and pale and upright, like a drifting buoy, or the sail of a small weekend dinghy.

It was only when the fog stirred that he began to understand, with an overwhelming sense of dread, that the shape wasn’t a sail at all, nor a buoy. It was a man. A man in a long white coat, standing silent and unsupported in the middle of the bay.

Biting his lip with uncertainty, Neil rose to his feet. The fog passed in front of the figure in veil after veil, but there was no question at all. It was a man, or the ghost of a man. He wore a dark broad-brimmed hat and a duster, and he stood on the water as if it was dry land. Neil shouted, “Hey! You!” but his voice sounded flat and weak in the fog, and the man took no notice at all.

Panicking, Neil turned back to the wharf and called: “Doughty! Doughty! Come take a look at this! For Christ’s sake! Come take a look at this!” A voice whispered, “Alien.

please, Alien …” “Doughty!” yelled Neil.

The door of the cocktail bar opened, and Dave Co”-way from the fish stall came out, a tall red-bearded man with a well-known line of sarcasm. “Anything wrong there, Neil?” he called out.

“Dave, do you see something out there in the bay or am I crazy?” Neil shouted.

Dave peered out at the fog. It was now so thick that the man had almost disappeared. There was just a fading trace of his white coat.

Dave said, “Sure, I see something. You’re not crazy after all.”

“Tell me what you see! What is it?” “Well,” said Dave, “I wouldn’t like to stick my neck out, but I’d say that’s fog.” Neil, tense, let out a sharp, exasperated breath. “Did I say something wrong?” asked Dave. “It’s not fog? It’s gray lint? It’s cotton candy maybe?”

Neil shook his head. “Forget it. It was just an optical illusion.”

Dave strolled up toward him. “You really thought you saw something out there? What did you think it

was?”

“I don’t know,” said Neil. “It looked so weird I just wanted a second opinion.”

“You can tell me,” Dave encouraged him. “I won’t laugh at you for longer than a half-hour.”

Neil turned away. “I guess it was just my imagination. Forget it.”

“You didn’t tell me what it was, so how can I forget it?”

Neil put down his ropework, “All right,” he said, “I thought I saw somebody, a man, standing out there in the bay.”

“Standing?”

“That’s right. Standing on the water, just the way you’re standing on that jetty.”

Dave pulled a face. “Well, you told me it was crazy, and you’re right. Are you sure you haven’t been reading the Bible too heavily lately?”

“Dave,” asked Neil, “will you just forget it? It was a trick of the light.”

“Maybe he was surfing and you didn’t notice the surfboard in the fog,” suggested Dave. “Or maybe he was standing on top of a submarine.”

“Dave, please forget I ever told you,” said Neil. “I’m not in the mood for jokes.”

“Nor would I be, if I’d seen a guy standing on the water in the middle of the bay,” said Dave, with weighty mock seriousness. “Nor would I be.”

That afternoon, Toby brought home a large yellow Manila envelope from school, along with a note from Mrs. Novato. While Toby went out to play with his toy bulldozer, Neil took the package into the parlor and sat down at his old rolltop desk.

Susan came in from the kitchen in her apron and slippers, and said, “What’s that?”

Neil looked at her, and gave a wry little smile. “It’s an experiment, I guess.”

Susan wiped her floury hands on her apron. She’d been making apple cookies, and she smelled of fresh cooking apples and butter. “An experiment?” she asked him.

“You mean, something to do with school?”

He nodded. “You remember Toby kept on about Alien in his nightmares? Well, this morning, when I took him to school, I heard one of the other kids talking about Alien, too, sb I asked Mrs. Novato to let me talk to the class for a couple of minutes. I asked them if any one of them had dreamed dreams like Toby.”

“Well? And had they?”

Neil opened the envelope. “There are twenty-one kids in that class, honey, and every single one of them put up a hand to say yes.”

Susan looked confused. “You mean-they’d all had the same nightmare? Surely they were just pulling your leg, acting like kids.”

“I don’t know what nightmares they’d had. But I asked them to draw what they’d seen in their dreams, and Mrs. Novato agreed to let them do it during their art lesson.

Here’s a note she sent along.”

Susan took the note and scanned it quickly.

It read:


Dear Mr. Fenner,

I am sending you the drawings the children made this afternoon in the hope that they might put your mind at rest. It seems to me that my first opinion of mild collective hysteria is the correct one. I am sure that these nightmares will pass once a new craze starts. There are already signs that Crackling Candy is talking hold! By the way, if Toby wishes to join our little expedition to Lake Berryessa next Wednesday, please give him $1.35 to bring to school tomorrow.

Yours, Nora Novato


Neil rubbed his cheek. “Well,” he said slowly, “that doesn’t sound too promising, does it?”

“I think it sounds marvelous,” said Susan. “The sooner Toby stops having those awful dreams, the better.”

“Susan, it’s not just dreams. It’s waking visions as well. What about that old man’s face I saw on Toby last night? What about the man in the white coat that Toby saw?

What about the guy standing on the bay?”

Susan stared at him. “What guy standing on what bay? What are you talking about?”

He glanced at her, and then he lowered his eyes. “I’m sorry. I was meaning to tell you, but I didn’t know how. It was just something that happened today. Or rather it was something I thought happened today.”

She leaned forward and put her arm around his shoulder. “You didn’t know how to tell me? But Neil, I’m as worried about all this as you are! I’m your wife. That’s what I’m here for, to confide in.”

He said, huskily, “Sure, honey, I know. It’s just that it’s kind of hard to admit to yourself that you might be flipping your lid, or suffering from some kind of kids’

hysteria.”

“Don’t be so ridiculous! If you saw something, you saw it. Maybe there’s a natural explanation. Maybe it was some land of mirage. But if you saw it, that’s it, I believe you.”

He shrugged. “I’m glad you’ve got some confidence in me. I’m not sure that I’ve got much confidence in myself.”

Susan kissed his hah”. “I love you,” she said simply. “If there’s something making you worried, then it worries me, too. Don’t forget that.”

Neil reached inside the Manila envelope and took out a sheaf of brightly colored drawings. Susan drew up a chair beside him, and they looked through them, one by one.

The drawings, although they varied in style and color, were strangely alike. They showed trees, mountains, and struggling figures. Some of them depicted twenty or thirty stick people, their arms all flung up in the air, with splashes of scribbled red all around. Others showed only one or two people, lying on their backs amid the greenery. There were arrows flying through the air in about a dozen drawings, and in others there were men holding rifles.

Only about eight or nine children had written names or words beside their pictures.

Toby had written “Alien, help.” Daniel Soscol had written “Alun” and then crossed it out. Debbie Spurr had put down “Alien, Alien, didn’t come back.”

There were some odd names, too. “Ta-La-Ha-Lu-Si” was written in heavy green crayon on one picture. Another bore the legend “Kaimus.” Yet another said

“Oweaoo” and “Sokwet.”

Susan and Neil spent twenty minutes going through the drawings, but in the end they laid them down on the desk and looked at each other in bewilderment.

“I don’t know what the hell it all means,” admitted Neil. “It just doesn’t seem to make any kind of sense at all.”

“It’s strange that they all have the same kind of picture in their minds, though,” said Susan. “I mean, how many other groups of twenty-one different people would all have the same nightmare? Look at this one- this is Toby’s. His drawing is almost the same as everyone else’s.”

Neil pushed back his chair and stood up. Outside, through the cheap net curtains, he could see Toby in the backyard, shoveling up dust with his Tonka bulldozer. Neil felt such a wave of protectiveness toward him that the tears prickled his eyes. What on God’s earth was Toby caught up in? Were these really just nightmares, or were they something arcane and dangerous?

Susan suggested, “Maybe we ought to talk to Doctor Crowder again. Perhaps it’s some kind of psychological sickness.”

Neil slowly shook his head. “Toby’s not sick, and neither are the rest of those kids.

Nor am I, if it comes to that. I feel it’s more like something from outside, something trying to get through to us, you know?”

“You’re talking about something like a seance? Like a spirit, trying to get through?”

“That’s right, kind of. I just have the feeling that there’s pressure around, something’s pressing in from all around us. I don’t know what the hell it is, but I can feel it. It’s there all the time now, night and day.”

“Neil-” said Susan, guardedly.

He turned away from the window. “I know. It sounds nuts. Maybe it is nuts. But I feel just as sane as I did last week. And if I’m nuts, then all these school children are nuts, too, and I don’t believe they are.”

He picked up one of the drawings, showing a fierce battle between men in big hats and men with long black hair. There were green-and-gray mountains in the background, and the sky was forested with huge arrows. The arrows were all tipped with black, carefully and deliberately drawn with black crayon.

“What would you say this was?” asked Neil, showing it to Susan.

She looked at it carefully. “It seems pretty obvious, A fight between cowboys and Indians.”

“Who’s winning?”

“The cowboys?”

“Why do you say that?”

Susan looked again. “Well, there’s one cowboy in the middle there and he seems to be standing up shooting his pistol and looking very happy about it.”

“That’s true,”-said Neil, “but look at the other cowboys. Most of them seem pretty upset. And a whole lot of them are lying there with arrows sticking out of them. It’s the same in this next picture, and this one. It seems like the Indians are definitely getting the best of this fight.”

Susan skimmed through nine or ten more drawings, and then nodded. “I think you’i^

right,” she said. “But what does it mean?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it just means that all the kids in the class read about the same battle, or went to see the same movie. Can you remember a movie that Toby might have seen on television or something, with this kind of a battle in it?”

She ran her hand through her loosely tied blond hair.

“They had a movie about Custer about a month ago.”

“Then maybe that is what this is all about,” said Neil.

“This grinning cowboy standing here could be General Custer, and maybe this is the Little Big Horn.”

“There’s no river, though, is there?” Susan pointed out. “The Little Big Horn didn’t take place up in the mountains, and all these drawings have mountains. I’d say this looks like someplace up in the Sonoma or the Vaca Mountains, wouldn’t you?”

“Could be,” admitted Nell.

He took a last shuffle through the drawings and was about to slide them back into their envelope when something caught his attention. He peered closer at Ben Nichelini’s drawing, and right at the back of a crowd of blood-splattered white men, he saw what looked distinctly like a childish rendering of a man in a white duster coat, with a beard and a wide-brimmed hat. There was a large arrow sticking out of the man’s back.

He went across to the parlor window and opened it. He called: “Toby-c’mere a minute, will you?”

Susan asked, “What is it? Have you seen something?”

“I’m just guessing,” Neil told her. “Wait and see what Toby says.”

Toby came running in through the kitchen, still clutching his bulldozer. “What is it, sir?”

Neil held up the drawings. “You know what these are, Toby?”

“Sure do. They were all the dreams you asked us to draw. That’s Ben Nichelini’s, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. Did you look at it before?”

“No, sir. Mrs. Novato said we weren’t to. She said we had to draw the pictures all by ourselves, without copying or anything.”

Neil handed the drawing over. Very softly, he said, “I want you to look at that picture really closely, Toby, and I want you to tell me if you see anything that you’re familiar with. Is there anything there that reminds you of someone or something you’ve seen before?”

Toby scrutinized the drawing with an intent frown. While he did so, Neil glanced across at Susan, and raised a finger to tell her that he would explain everything later.

Susan watched her son worriedly, her flour-white hands clasped together in the lap of her apron.

Eventually, Toby handed the drawing back. He said in a small voice, “There’s a man who looks like the man I saw by the school fence-.”

“Is that him?” asked Neil, pointing.

Toby replied, “Yes. But there’s something wrong with that picture.”

“Something wrong?” asked Susan. “What do you mean, honey?”

Toby said, “Alien’s not there. He should be there, but he’s not.”

“Alien? Then this man in the white coat-he’s not Alien?”

“No, sir. Alien’s this one.”

Toby looked through the drawings until he found the picture of the smiling cowboy with the pistol, the one who was standing up looking happy while all the other cowboys fell to the ground around him, pierced by Indian arrows.

“That’s Alien?” asked Neil. “How do you know?”

“I just do. That’s what he looks like.”

“But have you ever met him? Ever seen him before?”

Toby shook his head. “No, sir.”

“Did you dream about him?”

“No, sir.”

“Then what makes him Alien? How do you know this man isn’t Alien, or the man in the white coat isn’t Alien?”

“The man in the white coat is always asking Alien for help,” said Toby, straight-faced.

“So he couldn’t be Alien. And anyway, Alien is just Alien. None of these other men are Alien.”

Susan and Neil looked at each other for a while, and then Susan said, “It looks like a dead end, doesn’t it? Where do we go from here?”

“I don’t know,” answered Neil. “The whole damned thing is so meaningless.”

Susan waited a while longer, but outside it was beginning to grow dusky. After a few minutes she touched Neil’s hand and went back to her baking in the kitchen. Toby took his bulldozer upstairs to his bedroom, and Neil could hear him making motor noises all around the floor. The sweet aroma of apple cookies soon began to remind him that he hadn’t eaten yet, and that he was hungry.

Maybe tonight would be a night without bad dreams. Maybe the man in the long white coat would vanish and never appear again. But somehow, depressingly, it seemed to Neil as if they were all caught up in a strange and mysterious event over which they had no control. He had a feeling of impending trouble, and it wouldn’t leave him alone. He tapped his fingers on his rolltop desk and tried to think what all these signs and drawings and dreams could mean.

He wondered if it might be worthwhile taking Doughty’s advice, and driving over to Calistoga to see Billy Ritchie. If Billy Ritchie knew about the old days in Napa and Sonoma, then maybe the name Alien would mean something to him. Maybe he’d heard tales of a notorious man in a white duster, and perhaps he could tell him what

“Ta-La-Ha-Lu-Si” and “Kaimus” meant, too.

Susan called from the kitchen: “Do you want to try one of these cookies while they’re still hot?”

“Sure thing,” said Neil. He got out of his chair, but just as he closed the door behind him he heard a shriek from upstairs that made him jump in nervous shock. It was a high-pitched, terrified shriek. It was Toby.

Neil ran up the stairs three at a time, bounded across the landing and hurled Toby’s door wide open. The boy was standing in the middle of the room, still clutching his bulldozer, but staring in paralyzed terror at his wardrobe. There was an oddly nauseating chill in the room, a chill that reminded Neil of a butcher’s cold storage. It must have been an illusion but the floor seemed to be swaying, too, as if there were slow, glutinous waves flowing under the carpet.

“Toby,” Neil said shakily. “Toby, what’s wrong?”

Toby turned to him with slow, spastic movements. There seemed to be something wrong with the boy’s face. The outlines of it were blurred, almost phosphorescent and, even though his lips were closed, he appeared to be speaking. It was his eyes that frightened Neil the most, though. They weren’t the eyes of a child at all. They were old, flat, and as dead as iron.

A deep, turgid grbaning noise shook the room. It was a groan like a ship’s timbers being crushed by pack ice. A groan like Jim had given when the Buick collapsed onto his chest, hugely amplified. Neil reached out his hand for Toby, but his son seemed to have shrunk miles and miles beyond reach, and there was a cold wind blowing that stiffened the father’s limbs and slowed him down.

Neil turned and looked toward the wardrobe. What he saw then almost convinced him that he was going crazy, that his mind had finally let go. In the wood itself he could see a fierce, feral face, like a face under the surface of a polished pond. It stared at him with such viciousness and malevolence that he couldn’t take his eyes away from it. But far more uncanny and terrifying was that a hand was reaching out of the flat walnut veneer, a hand that was made of shiny wood, yet alive. It clawed toward him, sharp-nailed and vicious, and it ripped at his shirt as he lunged toward Toby and tried to pick the boy up in his arms.

He didn’t look any more. If he looked, he knew that his strength and his sanity would break down. He lifted Toby over his shoulder, and blindly turned back toward the bedroom door, shielding his face from the sight of that wolfish face in the wardrobe.

Susan was halfway up the stairs toward them as Neil collapsed on the landing, and Toby rolled to the floor beside him. Neil screamed, “The door! Close the doorl” and she quickly slammed it and turned the key.

“Toby! Neil! What’s happening?” she said. “There was such a noise up here, I didn’t-”

Neil held her arm. “It’s in there,” he told her. His voice was unsteady and feverish.

“What Toby saw in his nightmare, it isn’t a nightmare. It’s real, and it’s in there. There was a face, Susan. A goddamned face in the wardrobe. And a hand that came right out of the wood. Right out of the damned wood!”

He climbed to his feet. She tried to steady him, but he was too jumpy to be touched and he pushed her away. She knelt down beside Toby, who was shivering and quaking, and held him close.

“Listen,” whispered Neil. “Listen, you can hear it.”

They were silent. They heard a soft, peculiar noise, like a wind whistling across a mountain. Then they heard a sound that made Neil press his hands against his face, a sound so unnatural and frightening that they could scarcely bear to listen.

Across the floor of the bedroom, wooden feet walked. Stumbling, uncertain steps.

And wooden hands groped across the walls, fumbling for the door.

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