Revenge of the Manitou (4 page)

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

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

“Alien, for
God’s sake...,” whispered the voice.

Toby whimpered
and tried not to look toward the foxy whorls of wood on the wardrobe door, but
his fright was so compelling that he couldn’t look away. The whorls twisted,
and that gray shadowy face began to materialize, that tired anguished face in
its prison of polished wood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seemed at
that moment as if the face truly opened its eyes at last. It stared at Toby,
and as it stared, Toby felt as if he was being blown by a wind that came from
far away and long ago, as if he was standing somewhere out in the open, but
under a sky that was a hundred years gone. He had the eerie, terrifying
sensation that the face on the wardrobe was real, and that the wardrobe wasn’t
a wardrobe at all. He could hear someone calling far off to his left, but for
some reason he was incapable of turning his head. The gray, bearded face kept
him transfixed. “Alien,” said the face, in a voice that sounded normal and very
close. “Alien, I can’t hold out much longer without you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It took Neil
seconds upon horrified seconds to realize what he was looking at. Instead of
Toby’s round young face, he was looking into the lined, weather-beaten face of
an old man, a man whose expression was as tough and cold and self-sufficient as
a snake’s.

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

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

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.”