Revenge of the Manitou (9 page)

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
skirled, 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. “Didn’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!” “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 dim 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
saying?” 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 air
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 dim 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,