Revenge of the Manitou

THREE

After a few minutes, the noises stopped. They waited breathless-on the landing for almost ten minutes, but there was silence.

Susan asked quietly, “What was it? Neil, what was it?”

He was very drawn and pale. He felt as if his brain had been given a severe electric shock. His lips and his tongue didn’t seem to coordinate properly, so that when he spoke, he jumbled his words.

“I don’t know. It was like a devil. It came right out of the wood, and it must have been made of wood. A wooden devil, walking about.”

“Neil-things like that just don’t happen. It must have been the wind blowing the door or something. Maybe you saw your own reflection.”

Neil, leaning against the wall, shook his head slowly and deliberately.

“Well, maybe it was some kind of hallucination,” Susan suggested. “I mean, Neil, things like that just don’t happen. They don’t exist. A man made of wood stepping out of the wardrobe door? It’s insane.”

Neil looked down at her sharply. She realized what she’d said, and she reached up to hold his hand, and squeeze it. “Oh, Neil, I didn’t mean-”

He pulled away from her, and ran both hands through his hair. “You don’t have to say you’re sorry,” he told her, hoarsely. “You’re probably right.”

“Neil-”

He turned back toward her. “How’s Toby? He looks as though he’s getting his color back.”

Toby had opened his eyes now, and he smiled up at his daddy faintly. Susan stroked his forehead, and said, “It’s all right, darling, you can sleep with us tonight, in our room. You won’t have to sleep in that nasty room again.”

Neil hunkered down beside Toby and touched him affectionately on the nose. “How are you doing, tiger?”

“Okay,” said Toby. “I was scared, that’s all.”

“Can you remember what happened?” asked Neil.

“Neil-” protested Susan. “He’s only just gotten over it.”

Neil said, “Honey, we have to know what happened in there. It was out of this world.

If we’re going to have to fight some ghost or other, then I think we have to know what it is.”

“I think we ought to go downstairs, calm down, and call Doctor Crowder,” said Susan. “I’ll put on the kettle and we can have some strong black coffee.”

Neil said, “Toby-all I want to know is, what happened?”

Toby’s eyes flickered for a moment, and then he said softly, “I was just playing with my bulldozer. Then I heard that man talking again. He sounded real scared. I saw his face in the wardrobe. Then it wasn’t his face anymore, it was Alien’s face. Then it was Alien, and there was somebody else there. He was terrible. He was very tall and he scared me, and he came right out of the wood.”

“Do you know what he was? Or who he was?” Susan said, “Neil, please, he’s almost unconscious.” “Susan, we have to know,” insisted Neil. “If we don’t know, then we can’t protect ourselves. Toby-who was it? Who was the man in the door?”

Toby’s lower lip started to turn down, and tears filled his eyes. He said, “I don’t know.

I don’t know,” and then he shook with uncontrollable sobs. Susan held him close, and soothed him, and Neil slowly got to his feet. “I’m going to call Doc Crowder,” said Neil. “This is one time I don’t believe we can help ourselves.”

He helped Susan and Toby downstairs to the kitchen and lit the gas under the kettle to make coffee. Then he went into the living room and dialed the doctor’s home number. He realized, as he dialled, how much his hands were shaking and, as he leaned back against his rolltop desk, waiting for the doctor to answer, he could see his face reflected in the glass of a desk-top photograph of Susan. He was white and haggard.

The phone rang for almost a minute before it was picked up.

Mrs. Crowder said, “Doctor’s Crowder’s residence. Who is this, please?”

“Emma?” said Neil. “It’s Neil Fenner. Is the doctor home?”

“Why, Neil! How are you? It’s been a long time since you came up this way. How’s Toby?”

Neil rubbed his eyes. “It’s-well, it’s Toby I wanted to talk to the doctor about. We’ve got ourselves a problem here, Emma, and I was wondering if he could find the time to come down here.”

“Is it really urgent? I know he’s got a lot to do tonight. The Baxter sisters just came down with whooping cough.”

“Emma-if it wasn’t serious I wouldn’t ask. I know how hard he works.”

Emma said warmly, “Okay, Neil. I know that. He’s going to call home when he’s through at the Baxters, so I’ll ask him to come on down to see you. It’s nothing too bad, I hope?”

Neil didn’t answer for a moment. He didn’t know how to describe what had happened, or what to say about it. In the end, he said thickly, “No, no. It’s nothing too bad. Nothing to get upset about.”

He hung up and then went back into the kitchen to brew coffee. Toby was looking calmer now, but all three of them were still pale with shock. Neil went to the wooden door that led to the stairs and closed it, turning the key in the lock.

Susan said nervously, “You don’t think it’s still-”

Neil shook his head. “I think it’s gone, or disappeared, whatever it was. But I’m not taking any chances. I’m going to let Doc Crowder take a look at that wardrobe, and then first light tomorrow I’m going to take it outside and I’m going to burn it to ashes.”

Toby looked up at his father with wide eyes. He whispered, “You mustn’t do that, daddy. You mustn’t burn it.”

Neil pulled out a chair and sat down beside him. “Mustn’t? What do you mean, tiger?”

Toby licked his lips, and he began to pant a little, as if he were short of breath. “He says-he says that-”

“Who?” asked Susan. “Who says?”

Toby’s eyes flickered, and then the pupils rolled upward, so that his naked whites were all that they could see. His small fingers, spread on the pine kitchen table, began to clench and scratch at the wood. Susan reached out for him, reached out to hold and protect him, but then he said in a hoarse, accented voice: “He says you mustn’t disturb the gateway. He says you will die if you disturb it.”

“Toby?” demanded Neil, leaning forward. “Toby!’

Toby opened his eyes, and for a fleeting second Neil saw again that dead, flat, menacing expression. There was a cold sourness about Toby’s breath, and when he spoke it seemed as if a freezing, fetid wind blew from his mouth.

“You must disturb nothing. You must not interfere. You are dust in the storms of time.

I care nothing for you, but if you interfere you will be destroyed, even as you destroyed my brothers.”

Susan was screaming, but Neil hardly heard her. He took Toby by the shoulders and shouted, “Who are you? I want to know who you are! Who are you?”

Toby smiled. It was an uncanny, unnatural, poisonous smile. In the same grating voice, he said: “The prophecy that is still buried on the great stone redwood is about to come to pass. It is almost the day of the dark stars.”

Neil said, “Prophecy? Dark stars? What are you talking about?”

But then Toby abruptly vomited Coca-Cola and half-digested cookies, and fell off his chair like a rag doll.

Doctor Crowder took Neil out onto the boardwalk veranda and lit up his brierwood pipe. It was almost ten o’clock now, and a cool wind was flowing in from the sea. Neil was calmer, as a dose of Valium began to take effect, and he sat down on the rail and faced the doctor with a serious, concerned face.

The old doctor purled away for a while, listening to the night birds and the rustle of dry grass. He was a short, white-whiskered man with a bald, tanned dome and a bulbous nose. He’d been practicing in Sonoma County most of his life, except for a spell during the war when he served on Guadalcanal as a senior medical officer.

He’d delivered Toby, but he didn’t know the Fenners too well. They were a young, hardworking family, and most of the time they kept to themselves.

After a few minutes’ silence, Neil said, “I get the feeling you don’t believe me. You think I’ve been hallucinating.”

Doctor Crowder studiously examined the bowl of his pipe. “I wouldn’t say that. Not hallucinating, exactly.”

“But you don’t believe that what I saw was real? You don’t believe that a wooden man came out of that wardrobe door?”

The doctor glanced at him. “Would you?” he asked. “If I told you that story?”

Neil scratched the back of his neck. “I guess not. The only difference is, it’s true. I saw it as plain as I can see you now.”

“That’s what most people say, when they’ve seen an unidentified flying object-or a ghost. There used to be a woman who lived up at Oakmont, and she swore blind that she’d seen phantom riders crossing her backyard, not just once, but every once in a while.”

Neil said, “Doctor, you have to admit that some of this is spooky. What about all these schoolchildren having the same nightmare? There has to be something in that.”

“Well,” said Doctor Crowder, “I think that Mrs. Novato put her finger on it when she talked about mild collective hysteria. Children are open to any kind of silly idea, and it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for a whole school to have the same kind of nightmare. Mind you, they could be pulling your leg. They may just have got together and cooked up this whole thing to scare you witless.”

Neil looked at the doctor in disappointment. “You don’t really think that, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” Doctor Crowder told him. “But you have to investigate every possibility before you start jumping off in all kinds of directions shouting about spirits and demons. In my book, Neil Fenner, spirits and demons don’t exist. They’re a figment of man’s imagination, and the only way they’ll ever take hold of a man, or a boy, is if that man or that boy allows his imagination to run away with him.”

“What are you trying to tell me, doctor? You’re trying to say that I’m getting hysterical, too?”

Doctor Crowder raised his hand in a pacifying gesture and firmly shook his head.

“I’m not trying to tell you that at all. I wouldn’t presume. But what I am saying is that if Toby’s suffering from this kind of mild frenzy, then it’s up to you to stay as stable and as rational as you possibly can, because otherwise you’ll only make him worse.”

Neil stood up, and took a few testy paces up and down the boardwalk. “Doctor,” he said, “I’m as rational and stable as you are. I swear to you, deaf, dumb, and blind, that I saw that wooden man come out of the wardrobe, and what’s more, Susan heard him. We can’t both be wrong.”

“You could have heard anything. A window banging, maybe.”

“It was a wooden demon, dammit! That’s what it was, and nobody can persuade me otherwise. I don’t know why it was there, or what it really was, or what the hell was going on, but I saw it, and I heard it, and I was as scared as I’ve ever been in my whole life.”

Doctor Crowder took his pipe out of his mouth and spent a long while staring out at the night sky. It was partly cloudy, and only a few stars sparkled above the Bodega valley. In the distance, the Pacific surf was as soft and persistent as breathing.

Eventually, the doctor said, “I don’t know what else to say to you, Neil. You haven’t convinced me that any of this is indisputable fact, and until you do, I can only treat it like a medical or a psychological complaint. You see my problem, don’t you?”

‘I guess so.”

“I’m glad,” said Doctor Crowder. “And I’ll tell you this much. I don’t believe you’re going crazy, or anything terrible like that I think you may be suffering from strain or hypertension, and I think that you owe it to yourself to look at your work situation and even your marriage situation to find out if that’s true. It could be that you’re feeling some kind of delayed shock, some kind of psychological ripple effect, from the death of your brother. It could be that you’re just tired. But I’ll grant that you believe sincerely That what you saw was real, and I’m even prepared to keep a little bit of my mind open-though not much, I’ll tell you-just in case you can prove to me that wooden men really do step out of solid wardrobe doors.”

Neil nodded. “Okay, doctor. I’m sorry if I sounded sore.”

Doctor Crowder laid a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve got to look forward, Neil. You’ve got to think of the future, and what you can do to make your life better. Then I guarantee that you won’t be bothered by the ghosts of the past.”

Just then, Susan came out of the kitchen door. She said, “Toby’s sleeping now. I tucked him up in our bed. Do you think he’s going to be all right, doctor?”

“There’s nothing to worry yourself about at all,” Doctor Crowder told her, reassuringly. “He’s a highly strung boy, and I think that things have gotten a little out of hand, that’s all. It sometimes happens at this age, when their imagination begins to develop. They see monsters, pirates, devils, all that kind of thing. But it’ll pass, and the next you know he’ll be dreaming about girls.” v

Susan laughed, and it seemed like the first laugh for a long time. Neil took her arm and kissed her, and then reached out his hand to say good night to the doctor.

“You can call me any time,” said Doctor Crowder as they shook hands. “Don’t be shy. It’s about time we got to know each other better.”

They watched him walk across the darkened yard to his dusty black Impala. He gave them a wave, and then he drove off into the night, leaving the Fenners alone again with their fears, imagined or real. Neil scratched at his nose with the back of his hand, and then said, “I could do with a drink.”

Susan put her arm around his waist. “I bought a bottle of Riesling at the store today.

We were going to have it with dinner.”

He nuzzled her hair. It smelled fresh and good. He suddenly realized how much he relied on her, and how much he loved her. If there was any hypertension in his life, it certainly didn’t have anything to do with Susan. He took a last look out at the night, and then they went inside.

In the morning, after Neil had driven Toby to school, he came back to the house and went upstairs. He crossed the landing to Toby’s room, and gingerly opened the door.

He was pretty sure there was nobody in there. After all, he’d taken Doc Crowder up there last night, and showed him the wardrobe, and the room had been as empty and ordinary as ever. But he still pushed the door back with caution, and he still stepped in with his heart beating irregularly and fast.

The room was silent and empty. The wardrobe stood where it always had. It wasn’t even a special wardrobe. Neil had picked it up for four bucks at a garage sale in Tomales, along with a bed and his rolltop desk.

He stood for a while looking at it and then approached it. He knew that it was stupid to feel frightened, but he did. He turned the small brass key in the door and jerked it open. Inside, there was nothing but Toby’s T-shirts, neatly folded, his shorts, and his baseball outfit. No demons with wolflike faces. No men in white coats.

It seemed almost dumb to take the wardrobe out and smash it up. It was a perfectly good piece of furniture, and where was he going to find another one like it for the same price? New furniture was always so tacky.

But then he remembered the face again, and the terrible stumbling sound of the wooden man, and he remembered Toby growling, “He says you mustn’t touch the gateway. He says you will die if you touch it.”

He took out Toby’s clothes and laid them on the bed. Then he locked the wardrobe doors, and began to shuffle and hump it across the bedroom. It was a heavy old piece, but all he was going to do was slide it out of Toby’s bedroom window so that it dropped into the yard below.

Sweating and straining, he shifted the wardrobe across to the window, and then he stood it on its side while he opened the shutters. Outside it was a dull, warm day, typical north Pacific coast weather, and he could hear Susan’s radio playing pop music through the wide-open kitchen window.

He was about to turn back to the wardrobe when he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. He looked again across the dust-colored yard, and he saw the man in the long white coat standing in the grass by the fence.

A cold, unnerving chill went down his back. He closed his eyes and then looked again, and the man was still there. The man’s face was hidden under the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, but Neil could see that he had a tawny, light-colored beard, and that he was wearing a gun belt outside his coat.

The voice breathed, “Alien, for God’s sake … Alien, help me …”

And the figure was beckoning. With wide sweeps of his arm, he was beckoning.

Neil felt stunned, as if he had been anesthetized with novocaine. He stood by the open window for a long, paralyzed moment, and then he turned and ran down the stairs as fast as he could, almost twisting his ankle on the bottom stair.

Susan called, “Neil!” but he was already out of the house and running across the yard, running hard for the fence. He could hear his own panting in his ears, and the sound of his feet on the hard dust. The morning of gray clouds and warm wind jumbled past his eyes as he ran.

He half-expected the man in the long white coat to vanish. But the figure was still there, tantalizingly close, a strange white specter on a humid and ordinary day. Neil reached the fence, clambered over it, and jogged across the rough grass to where the man was standing.

Even this close, it was difficult to make out the man’s features. They were shaded so deeply by his hat that Neil could only just distinguish his dull, dark eyes.

The two of them stood ten feet apart, and the grass rustled around them. Crickets jumped and skirred, and the wind blew toward the ocean, the wind from the valleys of Sonoma and Napa and Lake counties, and the broad, harsh plain that led out to Sacramento.

Neil said, “Who are you? What do you want? You’ve been around here for days.”

When he answered, the man’s voice seemed curiously close, as if he were whispering in Neil’s ear. His lips scarcely moved, if they moved at all.

He said, “Alien?”

Neil shook his head. “I’m not Alien. Who’s Alien?”

“Alien went for help” breathed the man. “For God’s sake, Alien.”

“Who is Alien?” demanded Neil. “Tell me who Alien is and maybe I can help you.”

From the house, he heard Susan call: “Neil? Neil?”

The man in the long white duster turned his head slightly. “Alien went for help,” he repeated, in a flat, desperate whisper. “Alien went down toward the creek for help.”

“But who is he?” asked Neil. “Who is he?”

“They’re all around us” said the man. “They’re all around us and they won’t take prisoners. For God’s sake, Alien. Help us, Alien.”

Susan was running toward them. Neil turned, and he could see her bright apron in the dull morning sunlight. He turned back again, and in a curious way the man in the long white duster was fading. He seemed to be retreating from Neil, shrinking, yet at the same time vanishing into the air. In a few seconds, he had disappeared.

Susan reached the fence, panting for breath. Neil walked back toward her silently, and took her hands across the split-log fence.

She asked, “What are you doing here? What’s happening?”

Neil looked down at her. “Didn’t you see him?” “Who?”

He turned, and pointed to the place where the man had been standing. “Don’t you see the man in the white coat? He was right over there. I was talking to him.”

“You were talking to him? Where did he go?”

“He went-well, he just kind of went.”

Susan frowned. “Neil,” she said, “you’re sure you’re not-”

He stared at her. “Not what? Not nuts? Not ready for the funny farm?”

“Neil, you mustn’t think that I-”

“Susan, he was there!” Neil shouted. “He was right there, right there by that patch of grass! I talked to him!”

She let go of his hands. He stood by the fence and watched her as she walked back across the yard to the house, with her head lowered. She climbed up the steps to the veranda, went into the kitchen door, and closed it behind her. He banged his fist against the fence railing in frustration. Of all the damned, stupid, ridiculous things. He needed help and reassurance more than he ever had in his whole life, and everybody, including his wife, thought he was turning into a raving lunatic. He looked back at the grass where the man had been standing, and he felt confused, frightened, and helpless. Almost as helpless as the day that the jack had slipped, and Jim had reached out his hand toward him and begged for some miraculous salvation which Neil just didn’t have the power to give him.

Neil climbed over the fence and trudged back to the house. In the kitchen, Susan was sitting at the table scraping carrots. The tears were running down her cheeks into the salad.

Neil put his arm around her. He said, “Susan?”

There was a moment when she tried to be strong, but then she burst into tears and clung to him, and for a long time they held each other close, her hot cheek wet against his; he was almost moved to tears himself..

At last she looked up at him, flushed and unhappy, her eyelashes stuck together with crying.

She said, “I don’t know what to do. It’s all so frightening.”

He shrugged, “I know. I don’t know what to do either. But I’m doing whatever I can.”

She swallowed, and then she said, “You won’t mind me asking this, will you? I know it sounds awful, but I have to ask it.”

“Go right ahead.”

“Well,” she said uncertainly, “you’re not-you’re not going mad are you? You don’t have madness in your family?”

He couldn’t help smiling. “Not that I know of. I think my grandfather used to fly Chinese kites out on the point, and got himself a name for being quite an eccentric, but real madness …”

“Not even way back? I couldn’t bear it if Toby-” He squeezed her close. “Listen, I’m not going mad, and neither is Toby, and neither is anyone else. We just have one of those weird situations that nobody quite understands. It’s like flying saucers, Doctor Crowder told me, or ghosts. All we have to do is find out what it is, and when we know, we’ll be fine.”

Susan dabbed at her eyes with her apron. “I’m sorry. I guess it’s been a strain, that’s all. I was sitting there thinking that you must have had a mad cousin in your dun and distant past, and that you and Toby were paying the price for it. I’m real sorry, Neil. I mean it.”

Neil kissed her. “I’m glad you came straight out and asked. If I’d have been you, I would have been thinking the same thing. I’m happy to say, though, that there hasn’t been anybody in my family’s illustrious history who-”

He paused. She stopped in the middle of drying her tears and looked up at him. He gave her a quick, uncertain smile.

“What were you saving?” she asked him. He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. It seems ridiculous. I guess I’m allowing this thing to get under my skin.”

“You mustn’t, honey,” she said gently. “We’ll work it out somehow.”

“Sure,” he told her, but he didn’t feel very convinced. “Now, I’d better get upstairs and finish off that wardrobe.”

“Do you really have to?” she asked him. “It seems such a pity, just breaking it up for the sake of it”

“Would you sleep with it in the room?” asked Neil. “Would you let Toby sleep with it in the room?”

“I guess not. But Doctor Crowder may have been right. It could have been Toby’s window banging.”

“So you think I’m imagining things, too?”

“Honey, I don’t. I believe what you say. I heard the noises myself. It’s just that, well, a wooden man? It could have been a freak kind of reflection, you know. A trick of the light.”

Neil walked across to the other side of the kitchen, and stared for two or three minutes out of the window. He could see the grass waving on the opposite side of the fence, the grass where the man in the long white duster coat had been standing.

Perhaps, after all, the man was nothing more than an optical illusion. Dave Conway hadn’t seen him in the bay, and Susan hadn’t seen him outside the yard. Perhaps he only existed inside Nell’s mind. And Toby’s, too, of course.

Neil said, “I think I’m going to go out for a few hours. I need to turn this thing over, get it straight in my head.”

Susan came over and put her arms around him. “I love you,” she said in a soft voice.

“I know,” he told her.

“What are you going to do about the wardrobe?” she asked.

“I’ll break it up when I get back. We’ll have a bonfire in the yard. Maybe we can bake some potatoes. It’s about time we tried to have ourselves a little fun.”

“You won’t be long, will you?”

He checked his watch. “It’s eleven-thirty now. I’ll be back in time to pick up Toby from school.”

He gave her a light kiss on the forehead, and then he took the pickup keys from their hook by the door, and left the house without another word. Susan watched him go.

When the dust from the truck had drifted away, she went through to the living room and called her mother on the telephone. She had a feeling that what she had just felt was the first tremor of some kind of earthquake, and that before long she was going to need all the help she could find.

The phone rang and rang but her mother didn’t answer. She hoped that wasn’t a bad omen.

Neil drove through to Santa Rosa, over the winding rural road that took him through Sebastopol, and out onto 101 by the Shell gas station. Inland, it was sunny and hot, and he drove with what he always called his two-fifty ah- conditioning (two windows open at fifty miles an hour). He was sweating, and his shirt stuck to the vinyl seat, but he scarcely noticed the temperature. He turned left on 101 and headed north.

On the pickup’s radio, Warren Zevon was singing Werewolves of London. He wasn’t listening. He was looking for the turnoff to Petrified Forest Road, which would lead him over the redwood-forested Sonoma mountains to Calistoga.

He almost missed it, and when he jammed on his brakes and signaled a right, a lumber truck blared its five-tone horns at him, and the driver leaned over to mouth some unheard obscenity.

Along the twisting, climbing highway, it was peaceful and deserted. The pickup labored on the grades, but now Neil had made up his mind what he was going to do, he didn’t feel the same desperate urgency. Through the forests of pines and cottonwoods, madrona, and red-barked manzanita, he climbed into the clear fragrant mountain air.

The Petrified Forest itself was just below the brim of the mountains that sloped down to the town of Calistoga. Neil had always promised Toby that he would take him there to see the giant petrified redwoods, but it was one of those trips that they’d never gotten around to taking. He drove past the wooden gates of the entrance with his pickup blowing out blue smoke.

In Calistoga’s main street, a sleepy one-horse thoroughfare at the head of Napa Valley, Neil parked the pickup in the shade of an old flat-fronted hotel building and climbed out. It was way up in the high eighties, and he wiped his forehead on his shirt sleeve. Beyond the main street, there were only the dark-green, forested mountains, and the air was heavy with the scent of the trees. The sky was cloudless and inky blue.

He walked along the street until he found a drugstore. Inside, it was air-conditioned and smelled of menthol. He went up to the prescription counter and waited while the short, bespectacled druggist wrote the label for a large bottle of stomach pills.

“Can I help you?” the druggist asked bun. His spectacles had such strong lenses that his eyes were hugely magnified.

“I’m looking for an old man named Billy Ritchie,” said Neil. “I guessed, since he was old, he might come in here for prescriptions.”

The druggist finished off his label. “Sure. I know Billy Ritchie. I’d like to know someone in town who doesn’t. A real old character. Where are you from?”

“Out by Bodega Bay. I met a friend of his, an old sailor, and the sailor said I ought to drop by and see Billy if I was passing.”

The druggist nodded. “Sure. If you cross the street here, and take the first on your right, that’s Washington Street, then take the fifth right again, that’s Lake Street, you’ll find Billy in the green-painted house on the left. You can’t miss it, his name’s on the mailbox.

“Thanks.”

Neil left the store and crossed Lincoln Avenue in the shadowless midday heat. He walked as far as Lake Street, sweating and short of breath, and the house was right there. A small clapboard cabin, painted the color of lawn mowers. It was shaded by maples and firs and looked deserted. Neil went up to the door and knocked.

It took a long time, but after a while he heard a clattering sound inside, and the security chain was drawn back. The door opened, and in the dun hallway, Neil saw a wizened old man in an invalid chair.

“Are you Billy Ritchie?” he asked, quite loudly, in case the old man was deaf.

“That’s me, sir. What do you want?”

“I’m afraid it’s kind of hard to tell you in one breath. But I was talking to Doughty out on the jetty at Bodega Bay, and he said I should come see you. He said you could tell me some stories of the old days.”

The old man nodded. He was bald, smooth-shaven, and toothless, and the only hairy thing about him was the black chinchilla cat which sat in his lap, and which he endlessly stroked.

“I can tell you stories, sure. What stories do you want to know?”

“I’d like to know about the Fenners, back in the days of the Wappo Indians, if that’s convenient.”

Billy Ritchie coughed. “Those were bad days. What do you want to know about them for?”

“A couple of reasons. For one, my name’s Neil Fenner.”

The old man laughed, and coughed some more.

“Sounds like as good a reason as any. Tell you what, I’ll strike you a bargain. Get yourself back down the road there and bring me a six-pack of Coors and a pint of Old Crow, and that’s all I ask in return. I can’t tell stories on a dry whistle.”

“You’ve got yourself a deal.”

Ten minutes later, his hair dripping with sweat and his shirt soaked, Neil came back with the liquor. The old man had left the front door ajar, and as Neil walked up the path, the host called, “Walk straight in there, friend. Close it behind you, though. You never know who might come prowling to steal my valuables.”

The little house was dark and cool, and surprisingly clean and well cared-for. Billy Ritchie, without his legs, had made his home his whole world, and it was wallpapered from floor to ceiling with color pictures cut from calendars and magazines. Every room was a patchwork of scenic views snipped from tourist brochures, close-ups of butterflies and flowers, religious scenes and snow scenes, cartoons and classic works of art, all interleaved with center spreads from Penthouse and Hustler.

“Most folks comment on every damn picture except the girls,” said Billy Ritchie. “But what I say is, if an old gent can’t admire some young flesh when he’s past everything but spitting contests, then it’s a sad world.”

The old man was sitting in a shadowy corner of the room, his head silhouetted by the light from the half-closed Venetian blinds behind him. Through the slats of the blind, Neil could see a tangled garden, overgrown with wild grass.

“There’s glasses on the side there,” Billy Ritchie said. ‘Tour me a beer and a stiff one, and whatever you want for yourself.”

Neil went across to a low sideboard with a decorated glass front and laid out three glasses. He opened a beer for each of them, and poured out three fingers of bourbon for Billy Ritchie. Then he sat himself down in an uncomfortable, yellow-painted, basketwork chair, lifted his drink, and said; “Good health, Mr. Ritchie.”

The old man raised his glass in return. “Same to you. But call me Billy, and don’t worry too much’ about my health. I lost the use of my legs twenty years ago when I fell off a damn bad-tempered horse, and I’ve been fit as a damn drum ever since. I’ve seen a lot, though, and talked to a whole host of the old-timers, and there isn’t much that’s passed me by.”

“What do you know about Bloody Fenner? That’s what they called him, didn’t they?”

“Oh, they sure did,” said Billy. “Bloody by name and damn bloody by nature. But you have to judge a man like that by the days he lived in, and those days in the Napa Valley weren’t easy. This was fine land, and the Indians weren’t too happy about handing it over. If you wanted to survive, you had to be real tough, and ready to make the best of things. That was what Bloody Fenner was good at. Making the best of things.”

Neil swallowed beer and wiped his mouth with the back of bis hand. “I heard he was a traitor, of sorts.”

Billy Ritchie pulled a face. “Not to himself, he wasn’t. He did pretty well in the 1830s, made himself a fair pile of money, and owned a whole stretch of good land up along the Silverado Trail. Trouble was, the Fenner family lost most of their acreage in the late forties, after the year of the Bear Flag Party across at Sonoma, when the Californians declared independence from the Mexicans. Fenner had gotten along good with the Mexicans, on account of he was smart and wily, and willing to perform a service to any man who paid him.

But when the Bear Flag folks took over, they made life so damn difficult for the Fenner family they sold out and moved to the coast, and I guess the land they bought was where you’re living now.”

Neil nodded. “Part of it, anyway. My grandfather sold about a hundred acres during the Depression.”

Old Billy Ritchie took a mouthful of Old Crow, coughed, and said, “A lot of folks did, especially around Napa. First, prohibition hit the wineries, then the Depression. They weren’t good times.”

“But what about Bloody Fenner?” asked Neil.

“Bloody Fenner?” echoed Billy Ritchie. “Bloody Fenner was the best damn brawler and fighter this side of the Sacramento River. He knew all the Indians by name, the Wappos and the Patwins, and there were plenty who said that he’d been initiated in a Wappo temescal. The stories say that he was a tall man, with a face as fierce as a bear, and that he could shoot a fly off of a horse’s ass if he was blindfolded and standing on his head.”

Neil grinned. “Sounds like that*s one talent that’s gotten bred out of the family.”

“Just as well, if you ask my opinion,” Billy Ritchie rejoined. “Bloody Fenner wasn’t loved by nobody, except for his wife, and by all accounts she was twice as hard-bitten as he was.”

Neil was silent for a moment, watching the old-timer sitting in his invalid chair, stroking and stroking that black, furry cat. Then the guest said softly, “Did you ever hear tell of a battle? A battle that Bloody Fenner might have fought in?”

“Sure. He fought in plenty. He fought for Jose San-chez back in the early days, and the story goes that he helped Father Altamira round up Patwins and put them to work for the mission at Sonoma. That was back in the late 1820s, and times were raw then, I can tell you.”

“I’m thinking of one battle in particular,” said Neil. “A battle where the white men came off pretty badly, and the Indians did well.”

“There were a few of those,” said Billy Ritchie, shaking his head. “I heard tell of a massacre of ten white farmers and their families by the Wappos up at St. Helena, and there was an ambush of three white squatters by Wappos in York Creek. Maybe the worst, though, was the time they say Bloody Fenner took a league of land from the Wappo Indians in exchange for leading twenty settlers and their families into a trap set in the forest up at Las Posadas, close to Conn Creek. The settlers had trusted Fenner, you see, and paid him in gold to act as their scout and interpreter, so that they could lay out claims to farmland in Bell Canyon. But he took them slap-bang into a Wappo ambush, and they were all killed. Twenty farmers, and their twenty wives, and fifty-three young children.”

Neil licked his lips. “Did anyone prove that it was Fenner who did it? Or was it just hearsay?”

“What proof did anyone have in them days?” asked Billy Ritchie. “The land was rough and the folks were rougher. You stayed alive if you were hard and dogged and used your gun without thinking twice. But the stories say that Fenner was the only white man who came out of that massacre alive, and that’s suspicious in itself. He said that he left the settlers, and rode back along Conn Creek to bring help from his Mexican soldier friends, and there’s nothing to say that he didn’t. But if he did bring help, it was a sight too late to save anyone; and what was oddest of all, the settlers’

bodies were all scalped, and their ears cut off.”

“What was odd about that?” asked Neil. “The Wappos were pretty fierce sometimes, weren’t they?”

“Oh, they could be. But what they didn’t do was take scalps, or ears, or genitalia, like some of the Indians did. It wasn’t their style. They were diggers, not fighters, and all they cared about was protecting their good agricultural land from the white men.

They weren’t interested in trophies.”

“You’re saying that Fenner took the scalps? A white man took white scalps?”

“You don’t have to look so shocked. It wasn’t unusual in them days. In fact, some of the old-tuners say it was white men who taught the Indians to take scalps in the first place.”

“That’s horrific,” said Neil.

Old Billy Ritchie shrugged, and swilled some bourbon down with a mouthful of beer.

Neil said, “Did you ever see a picture of Bloody Fenner? An engraving or anything like that?”

Billy Ritchie shook his head. “The only drawings I ever saw of Napa Valley in them days were landscapes. Mainly forests, it was. But I don’t think nobody ever took it into their heads to draw Bloody Fenner.”

“There’s something else,” said Neil. “Did you ever hear of a prophecy connected with Bloody Fenner? Something that was supposed to be written on a stone redwood tree?”

Billy Ritchie thought about that, and then shook his head again. “No, sir, I can’t say that I ever did.”

“Then how about the day of the dark stars?”

Billy Ritchie lifted his head slowly and stared at him. For the first time since Neil had walked into the house, he stopped stroking the cat, and his old hand lay on her black fur like a dead, dried leaf.

“Did I hear you right?” he said, in a soft, unsettling tone.

“The day of the dark stars,” repeated Neil. “That was all I said.”

The old man quivered in his chair, as if a cold wind had blown across the room. But the air was still, and growing stuffy, and outside it must have been close to 100

degrees.

“Where did you hear about the day of the dark stars?” he asked Neil. “I lay my life I didn’t believe I’d ever hear that phrase again.”

“I don’t know,” said Neil, reluctant to tell the old man about Toby until he knew what the “day of the dark stars” was, and why the mention of it seemed to be so unnerving. “I guess I just kind of picked it up.”

Billy Ritchie looked at Neil as if he knew that he was only telling him half of the truth, but then he piloted his wheel chair across the room, and silently poured himself another large shot of bourbon. As he screwed the cap back on the bottle, he looked up at Neil, and said: “The first and last time I heard of the day of the dark stars was from a trapper I met when I was a young man up in the Modoc Forest. This man was old and he was thin as a polecat, and he had scars on every spare inch of his body from fighting Indians and annuals. We spent two nights and two days together, and then we went our separate ways.”

“But what did he tell you?” asked Neil.

Billy Ritchie’s eyes were rheumy and distant. “He told me all about the old days in Modoc country, just so that I could pass his stories on, so they wouldn’t be lost. What he said was that once the Indians knew they couldn’t hold back the white man any longer, they kind of bowed their heads and accepted their fate after a fashion, because they always knew that their gods would give them revenge. It was a Wappo belief, for instance, that for every Indian who died from cholera or smallpox, or was shot down by scalp hunters, a white man would die in return. They said that it might not happen in a month, in a year, or even in twenty years, but that one day the stars would go dark because they would call down the most powerful and evil Indian demons there ever were, the demons they didn’t even dare to call down in their own lifetimes, like Nashuna and Pa-la-kai and Ossadagowah, and that the demons would slaughter a man for a man, a woman for a woman, a child for a child.”

Billy Ritchie took another.swig from his glass, and then he said, “The way I heard it, Nashuna was the demon of darkness, and Pa-la-kai was the demon of blood, and Ossadagowah was a land of a beast-thing that nobody could even describe, a kind of a wild demon that scared everyone witless.”

“You sound as though you believe it,” said Neil, carefully.

The old man gave a wry smile. “I’d believe it before I believed some of the words I read in the Bible,” he said, quietly. “Them Indians knew their lands, you see, and they knew their skies and their waters, and they knew all about the spirits and the demons that dwelled in those lands and those skies and those waters. The way that trapper told me, the day of the dark stars was going to happen before the twentieth century turned-he wasn’t sure when, but that was what he was told.”

Neil raised his eyebrows. “Sounds scary, doesn’t it? But who’s going to call these demons down? I’ve been to powwows at a couple of Indian reservations, and there’s an Indian who comes down to Bodega Bay to fish, and it seems to me that there isn’t much magic left in any of today’s red people.”

“It’s not today’s red people you’ve got to worry about,” said Billy Ritchie. “It’s the spirits of the red people from out of the past. What this trapper told me was that the greatest of all the medicine men, the twenty-two most powerful wonder-workers from all the main tribes, all of their spirits would come together, God knows how, and they’d call down the worstest demons they could, and get their revenge.”

“You mean the ghosts of twenty-two old-time medicine men are supposed to be getting together to punish us? Come on, Billy. That’s a tall story and you know it.”

Billy Ritchie didn’t look offended. ‘People have said that before,” he said, philosophically. “But let me show you something, before you make up your mind that all those old Indian legends were nonsense.”

He propelled himself across to a small bureau which stood in the far corner of the room and opened the top drawer. He shuffled through a heap of untidy papers and news clippings while Neil watched him silently and drank his beer.

“Here we are,” said Billy Ritchie, after a while, and wheeled himself over. He gave Neil two black-and-white photographs, full plate size, and told him, ‘Take a close look at those.”

One of the photographs showed a street scene in Calistoga. It was hard to tell when it was, because the town had hardly changed in fifty years. There were horses and buggies, and men in wide-brimmed hats, but it could have been taken any time between 1890 and 1920.

In the foreground of the picture stood a group of men with drooping mustaches, and just to their left, sitting on the edge of the boardwalk, was an Indian, in a dusty, black business suit. He was handsome and well-built, and around his neck he wore strings of necklaces and beads, which indicated that he was a medicine man.

The other photograph was taken in the woods someplace. Neil didn’t recognize the scenery at all. A group of Indians were standing by a fallen tree, squinting at the camera as if they mistrusted it. Among them was the same medicine man, in a woollen robe this time, but wearing the same necklaces and beads.

“All right,” said Neil, “it’s two pictures of the same Indian. What’s that supposed to prove?”

“Look at the dates on the back,” suggested Billy Ritchie.

Neil turned the photographs over. One, the street scene in Calistoga, was marked 8/1/15. The woodland scene was marked August 5th, 1915.

“I don’t get it,” persisted Neil. “These were taken three days apart. What’s so strange about that?”

Billy Ritchie cackled. “What’s so strange about it is that the picture in the woods was taken by a photographer called Lewis Clifton, of Massachusetts, up by the Wampanoag settlement on the Miskatonic River in New England. These photographs were taken three days apart, sure. But they were also taken three thousand miles apart.”

“That’s impossible,” said Neil. “In 1915, it would have taken almost a week to get from New England to the Napa Valley.”

“That’s right,” nodded Billy Ritchie. “And yet both of these photographs are authenticated, and their dates are plumb correct.”

Neil peered closer at the calm, amused face of the Wampanaug medicine man. Even though the pictures were almost seventy years old, they had a curious freshness about them, as if they had been taken only a few weeks ago. He said, “That’s strange, that’s really strange.”

“Not strange at all when you know who that is,” said Billy Ritchie. “That’s the best-known of all the Indian men, the most powerful Indian sorcerer who ever lived. That’s Misquamacus.”

“Misquamacus?”

“That was what they called him, among a whole lot of other names. But the reason I spent some time finding those photographs is because of what that trapper told me, up in the Modoc Forest. He said that when the day of the dark stars came around, this man Misquamacus would be the fellow to bring all the twenty-two wonderworkers together. This man Misquamacus, he said, was obsessed with taking his revenge on the white folks, and that his whole aim in life was to see white people die in the cruelest way possible.”

Billy Ritchie began to stroke his cat again. “I’d say that the cruelest way possible would be to call down Nashuna and Pa-la-kai and Ossadagowah, and let them loose. Now, that would be cruel.”