Revenge of the Manitou (8 page)

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 briarwood 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.”

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 Novocain. 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.