Revenge of the Manitou (3 page)

“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. Their 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
saying, “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 faint.

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, and now 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-jelly 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?