Revenge of the Manitou (7 page)

“What would you
say this was?” asked Neil, showing it to Susan.

She looked at
it carefully. “It seems pretty obvious, A fight between cowboys and Indians.”

“Who’s
winning?”

“The cowboys?”

“Why do you say
that?”

Susan looked
again. “Well, there’s one cowboy in the middle there and he seems to be
standing up shooting his pistol and looking very happy about it.”

“That’s true,”
said Neil, “but look at the other cowboys. Most of them seem pretty upset. And
a whole lot of them are lying there with arrows sticking out of them. It’s the
same in this next picture, and this one. It seems like the Indians are
definitely getting the best of this fight.”

Susan skimmed
through nine or ten more drawings, and then nodded. “I think you’re right,” she
said. “But what does it mean?”

“I don’t know.
Maybe it just means that all the kids in the class read about the same battle,
or went to see the same movie. Can you remember a movie that Toby might have
seen on television or something, with this kind of a battle in it?”

She ran her
hand through her loosely tied blond hair.

“They had a
movie about Custer about a month ago.”

“Then maybe
that is what this is all about,” said Neil.

“This grinning
cowboy standing here could be General Custer, and maybe this is the Little Big
Horn.”

“There’s no
river, though, is there?” Susan pointed out. “The Little Big Horn didn’t take
place up in the mountains, and all these drawings have mountains. I’d say this
looks like someplace up in the Sonoma or the
Vaca
Mountains, wouldn’t you?”

“Could be,”
admitted Nell.

He took a last
shuffle through the drawings and was about to slide them back into their
envelope when something caught his attention. He peered closer at Ben
Nichelini’s
drawing, and right at the back of a crowd of
blood-splattered white men, he saw what looked distinctly like a childish
rendering of a man in a white duster coat, with a beard and a wide-brimmed hat.
There was a large arrow sticking out of the man’s back.

He went across
to the parlor window and opened it. He called: “Toby –
c’mere
a minute, will you?”

Susan asked,
“What is it? Have you seen something?”

“I’m just
guessing,” Neil told her. “Wait and see what Toby says.”

Toby came
running in through the kitchen, still clutching his bulldozer. “What is it,
sir?”

Neil held up
the drawings. “You know what these are, Toby?”

“Sure do. They
were all the dreams you asked us to draw. That’s Ben
Nichelini’s
,
isn’t it?”

“That’s right.
Did you look at it before?”

“No, sir.
Mrs. Novato said we weren’t to. She said we had to
draw the pictures all by ourselves, without copying or anything.” Neil handed
the drawing over. Very softly, he said, “I want you to look at that picture
really closely, Toby, and I want you to tell me if you see anything that you’re
familiar with. Is there anything there that reminds you of someone or something
you’ve seen before?”

Toby scrutinized
the drawing with an intent frown. While he did so, Neil glanced across at
Susan, and raised a finger to tell her that he would explain everything later.
Susan watched her son worriedly, her flour-white hands clasped together in the
lap of her apron.

Eventually,
Toby handed the drawing back. He said in a small voice, “There’s a man who
looks like the man I saw by the school fence-.”

“Is that him?”
asked Neil, pointing.

Toby replied,
“Yes. But there’s something wrong with that picture.”

“Something wrong?”
asked Susan. “What do you mean, honey?”

Toby said,
“Alien’s not there. He should be there, but he’s not.”

“Alien? Then
this man in the white coat-he’s not
Alien
?”

“No, sir.
Alien’s this one.”

Toby looked through
the drawings until he found the picture of the smiling cowboy with the pistol,
the one who was standing up looking happy while all the other cowboys fell to
the ground around him, pierced by Indian arrows.

“That’s Alien?”
asked Neil. “How do you know?”

“I just do.
That’s what he looks like.”

“But have you
ever met him? Ever seen him before?”

Toby shook his
head.
“No, sir.”

“Did you dream
about him?”

“No, sir.”

“Then what
makes him Alien? How do you know this man isn’t Alien, or the man in the white coat
isn’t Alien?”

“The man in the
white coat is always asking Alien for help,” said Toby, straight-faced. “So he
couldn’t be Alien. And anyway, Alien is just Alien. None of these other men are
Alien.”

Susan and Neil
looked at each other for a while, and then Susan said, “It looks like a dead
end, doesn’t it? Where do we go from here?”

“I don’t know,”
answered Neil. “The whole damned thing is so meaningless.” Susan waited a while
longer, but outside it was beginning to grow dusky. After a few minutes she touched
Neil’s hand and went back to her baking in the kitchen. Toby took his bulldozer
upstairs to his bedroom, and Neil could hear him making motor noises all around
the floor. The sweet aroma of apple cookies soon began to remind him that he
hadn’t eaten yet, and that he was hungry.

Maybe tonight
would be a night without bad dreams. Maybe the man in the long white coat would
vanish and never appear again. But somehow, depressingly, it seemed to Neil as
if they were all caught up in a strange and mysterious event over which they
had no control. He had a feeling of impending trouble, and it wouldn’t leave
him alone. He tapped his fingers on his
rolltop
desk
and tried to think what all these signs and drawings and dreams could mean.

He wondered if
it might be worthwhile taking
Doughty’s
advice, and
driving over to Calistoga to see Billy Ritchie. If Billy Ritchie knew about the
old days in Napa and Sonoma, then maybe the name Alien would mean something to
him. Maybe he’d heard tales of a notorious man in a white duster, and perhaps
he could tell him what “Ta-La-Ha-Lu-Si” and “
Kaimus
”
meant, too.

Susan called
from the kitchen: “Do you want to try one of these cookies while they’re still
hot?”

“Sure thing,”
said Neil. He got out of his chair, but just as he closed the door behind him
he heard a shriek from upstairs that made him jump in nervous shock. It was a
high-pitched, terrified shriek. It was Toby.

Neil ran up the
stairs three at a time, bounded across the landing and hurled Toby’s door wide
open. The boy was standing in the middle of the room, still clutching his
bulldozer, but staring in paralyzed terror at his wardrobe. There was an oddly
nauseating chill in the room, a chill that reminded Neil of a butcher’s cold
storage. It must have been an illusion but the floor seemed to be swaying, too,
as if there were slow, glutinous waves flowing under the carpet.

“Toby,” Neil
said shakily. “Toby, what’s wrong?”

Toby turned to
him with slow, spastic movements. There seemed to be something wrong with the
boy’s face. The outlines of it were blurred, almost phosphorescent and, even
though his lips were closed, he appeared to be speaking. It was his eyes that
frightened Neil the most, though.

They weren’t
the eyes of a child at all. They were old, flat, and as dead as iron.

A deep, turgid
groaning noise shook the room. It was a groan like a ship’s timbers being
crushed by pack ice. A groan like Jim had given when the Buick collapsed onto
his chest, hugely amplified. Neil reached out his hand for Toby, but his son
seemed to have shrunk miles and miles beyond reach, and there was a cold wind
blowing that stiffened the father’s limbs and slowed him down.

Neil turned and
looked toward the wardrobe. What he saw then almost convinced him that he was
going crazy, that his mind had finally let go. In the wood itself he could see
a fierce, feral face, like a face under the surface of a polished pond. It
stared at him with such viciousness and malevolence that he couldn’t take his eyes
away from it. But far more uncanny and terrifying was that a hand was reaching
out of the flat walnut veneer, a hand that was made of shiny wood, yet alive.
It clawed toward him, sharp-nailed and vicious, and it ripped at his shirt as
he lunged toward Toby and tried to pick the boy up in his arms.

He didn’t look
any more. If he looked, he knew that his strength and his sanity would break
down. He lifted Toby over his shoulder, and blindly turned back toward the
bedroom door, shielding his face from the sight of that wolfish face in the
wardrobe.

Susan was
halfway up the stairs toward them as Neil collapsed on the landing, and Toby
rolled to the floor beside him. Neil screamed, “The door! Close the
doorl
” and she quickly slammed it and turned the key.

“Toby!
Neil! What’s happening?” she said. “There was such a
noise up here, I didn’t-”

Neil held her
arm. “It’s in there,” he told her. His voice was unsteady and feverish. “What
Toby saw in his nightmare, it isn’t a
nightmare.
It’s
real, and it’s in there. There was a face, Susan.
A goddamned
face in the wardrobe.
And a hand that came right out of the wood.
Right out of the damned wood!”

He climbed to
his feet. She tried to steady him, but he was too jumpy to be touched and he
pushed her away. She knelt down beside Toby, who was shivering and quaking, and
held him close.

“Listen,”
whispered Neil. “Listen, you can hear it.”

They were
silent. They heard a soft, peculiar noise, like a wind whistling across a
mountain. Then they heard a sound that made Neil press his hands against his
face, a sound so unnatural and frightening that they could scarcely bear to
listen.

Across the
floor of the bedroom, wooden feet walked.
Stumbling,
uncertain steps.
And wooden hands groped across the walls, fumbling for
the door.

A
fter 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
ma
,de
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 dialed, 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.