Revenge of the Manitou
( The Manitou - 2 )
Graham Masterton
No one believed little Toby Fenner when he described the man in the wardrobe. A man whose face seemed to grow from the very wood. But by then, things had gone too far. Misquamacus has found a way to return, and this time he won't be beaten so easily.
Revenge of the Manitou is the follow-up to The Manitou, which once again features Harry Erskine, Singing Rock, and a host of Indian stories creating a spine-tingling sequel with some disturbingly horrific passages.
Graham Masterton
REVENGE OF THE MANITOU
ONE
He woke up during the night and he was sure there was someone in his room.
He froze, not daring to breathe, his eight-year-old fingers clutching the candy-striped sheet right up to his nose. He strained his eyes and his ears in the darkness, looking and listening for the slightest movement, the slightest squeak of floorboards. His pulse raced silently and endlessly, a steeplechase of boyish terror that ran up every artery and down every vein.
“Daddy” he said, but the word came out so quietly that nobody could have heard him. His parents were sleeping right down at the other end of the corridor, and that meant safety was two doors and thirty feet away, across a gloomy landing where an old grandfather clock ticked, and where even in daytime there was a curious sense of solitude and suffocating stillness.
He was sure he could hear somebody sighing, or breathing. Soft, suppressed sighs, as if they meant sadness, or pain. It may have been nothing more than the rustle of the curtains, as they rose and fell in the draft from the half-open window. Or it may have been the sea, sliding and whispering over the dark beach, just a half-mile away.
He waited and waited, but nothing happened. Five minutes passed. Ten. He lifted his blond, tousled head from the pillow, and looked around the room with widened eyes.
There was the carved pine footboard, at the end of his bed. There was the walnut wardrobe. There was his toy box, its lid only half-closed because of the model tanks and cranes and baseball gloves that were always crammed in there.
There were his clothes, his jeans and his T-shirt, over the back of his upright ladder-backed chair.
He waited a little longer, frowning. Then he carefully climbed out of bed, and walked across to the window. Outside, under a grayish sky of torn clouds and fitful predawn winds, a night heron called kwawk, kwawk, and a wooden door banged and banged.
He looked down at the untidy backyard, and the leaning fence that separated the Fenners’ house from the grassy dunes of the Sonoma coastline. There was nobody there.
He went back to bed, and pulled the sheets almost over his head. He knew it was silly, because his daddy had told him it was silly. But somehow tonight was different from those times when he was just afraid of the shadows, or overexcited from watching flying-saucer movies on television. Tonight, there was someone there.
Someone who sighed.
He lay there tense for nearly twenty minutes. The wooden door kept banging, with mindless regularity, but he didn’t hear anything else. After a while, his eyes began to close. He jerked awake once, but then they closed again, and he slept.
It was the worst nightmare he had ever had. It didn’t seem as though he was dreaming at all. He rose from his bed, and turned toward the wardrobe, his head moving in an odd, stiff way. The grain of the walnut on the wardrobe doors had always disturbed him a little, because it was figured with foxlike faces. Now, it was terrifying. It seemed as if there was someone inside the surface of the wood, someone who was calling out to him, trying desperately to tell him something. Someone who was trapped, but also frightening.
He could hear a voice, like the voice of someone speaking through a thick glass window. “… Alien … Alien … for God’s sake, Alien … for God’s sake, help me …
Alien …,” the voice called.
The boy went closer to the wardrobe, one hand raised in front of him, as if he was going to touch the wood to find where the voice was coming from. Dimly, scarcely visible except as a faint luminosity on the varnish, he could make out a gray face, a face whose lips were moving in a blurry plea for mercy, for assistance, for some way out of an unimaginable hell.
“Alien., ” pleaded the voice, monotonously. “Alien … for God’s sake …”
The boy whispered, “Who’s Alien? Who’s Alien? My name’s Toby. I’m Toby Fenner.
Who’s Alien?”
He could see the face was fading. And yet, for one moment, he had an indescribable sense of freezing dread, as if a cold wind had blown across him from years and years ago. There was a feeling of someplace else … someplace known and familiar and yet frighteningly strange. The feeling was there and it was gone, so quickly that he couldn’t grasp what it was.
He banged his hands against the wardrobe door and said, “Who’s Alien? Who’s Alien?”
He was more and more alarmed, and he screeched at the top of his high-pitched voice, “Who’s Alien? Who’s Alien? Who’s Alien?”
The bedroom door burst open and his daddy said, “Toby? Toby-what in hell’s the matter?”
Over breakfast at the pine kitchen table, bacon and eggs and pancakes, his daddy sat munching and drinking coffee and watching him fixedly. The San Francisco Examiner lay folded and unread next to his elbow. Toby, already dressed for school in a pale-blue summer shirt and jeans, concentrated his attention on his pancakes.
Today, they were treasure islands on a sea of syrup, gradually being excavated by a giant fork.
At the kitchen stove, his mommy was cleaning up. She was wearing her pink gingham print apron, and her blond hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was slim and young and she cooked bacon just the way Toby liked it. His daddy was darker and quieter, and spoke slower, but there was deep affection between them which didn’t have much need of words. They could fly kites all Sunday afternoon on the shoreline, or go fishing in one of the boats from his daddy’s boatyard, and say no more than five words between lunch and dusk.
Through the kitchen window, the sky was a pattern of white clouds and blue. It was September on the north California shore, warm and windy, a time when the sand blew between the rough grass, and the laundry snapped on the line.
Susan Fenner said, “More coffee? It’s all fresh.”
Neil Fenner raised his cup without taking his eyes off Toby. “Sure. I’d love some.”
Susan glanced at Toby as she filled her husband’s cup. “Are you going to eat those pancakes or what?” she asked him, a little sharply.
Toby looked up. His daddy said, “Eat your pancakes.”
Toby obeyed. The treasure islands were dug up by the giant fork, and shoveled into a monster grinder.
Susan said, “Anything in the paper this morning?”
Neil glanced at it, and shook his head.
“You’re not going to read it?” Susan asked, pulling out one of the pine kitchen chairs and sitting down with her cup of coffee. She never ate breakfast herself, although she wouldn’t let Neil or Toby out of the house without a good cooked meal inside them. She knew that Neil usually forgot to take his lunch break, and that Toby traded his peanut-butter sandwiches for plastic GIs or bubble gum.
Neil said no, and passed the paper across the table. Susan opened it and turned to the Homecraft section.
“Would you believe this?” she said. “It says that Cuisinart cookery is going out of style. And I don’t even have a Cuisinart yet.”
“In that case, we’ve saved ourselves some money,” said Neil, but he didn’t sound as if he was really interested. Susan looked up at him and frowned.
“Is anything wrong, Neil?” she asked.
He
shook his head. But then he suddenly reached across the table and held Toby’s wrist, so that the boy’s next forkful of pancake was held poised over his plate. Toby said, “Sir?”
Neil looked at his son carefully and intensely. In a husky voice, he said, “Toby, do you know who Alien is?”
Toby looked at his father uncomprehendingly. “Alien, sir?”
“That’s right. You were saying his name last night, when you were having that nightmare. You were saying ‘I’m not Alien, I’m Toby.’ ”
Toby blinked. In the light of day, he didn’t remember the nightmare very clearly at all.
He had a sense that it was something to do with the wardrobe door, but he couldn’t quite think what it was. He remembered a feeling of fright. He remembered bis daddy putting him back to bed, and tucking him in tightly. But the name “Alien” didn’t mean anything.
Susan said, “Was that what he was saying? ‘I’m not Alien, I’m Toby’?”
Neil nodded.
“But kids say all kinds of silly things in their sleep,” she told him. “My younger sister used to sing nursery rhymes in her sleep.”
“This wasn’t the same,” said Neil.
Susan looked at Toby and then back to her husband. She said quietly, “I don’t know what you mean.”
Neil let go of his son’s wrist. He dropped his eyes toward the table, at his scraped-clean plate, and then said, “My brother’s name was Alien. Everybody used to call him Jim on account of his second name, James. But his first name was Alien.”
“But Toby doesn’t know that.”
Neil said, “I know.”
There was an awkward silence. Then Susan said, “What are you trying to say? That Toby’s having nightmares about your brother?”
“I don’t know what I’m trying to say. It just shocked me, that’s all. Toby’s room used to be Alien’s. Jim’s, I mean.”
Susan put down her cup of coffee. She looked at Neil and she could see that he wasn’t pulling her leg. He did, sometimes, with fond but heavy-handed humor which he’d inherited from his Polish mother. Good old middle-European practical jokes. But today, he was edgy and disturbed as if he’d had a premonition of unsettled days ahead.
Susan said, “You think it’s a ghost, or something?”
Neil looked serious for a moment, and then gave a sheepish grin, and shrugged.
“Ghost? I don’t know. I don’t believe in ghosts. I mean, I don’t believe in ghosts that wander around in the night.”
Toby piped up, “Is there a ghost, Daddy? A real ghost?”
Neil said, “No, Toby. There isn’t any such thing. They come out of storybooks, and that’s all.”
“I heard some noises in the night,” Toby told him. “Was that a ghost?”
“No, son. It was just the wind.”
“But what you said about Alien?”
Neil lowered his head. Susan took Toby’s hand and said softly, “Daddy was just saying that you must have had a very special kind of dream, that’s all. It’s nothing to get frightened about. Now, are you going to finish that pancake, because it’s time for school.”
Neil drove Toby in his Chevy pickup as far as Bodega Bay, and dropped him off at the schoolhouse. The bell was ringing plaintively, and most of the kids were already in the building. Toby climbed down to the road, but instead of running straight into school, he stood beside the truck for a moment, looking up at his father. His blond hair was ruffled by the Pacific wind. He said, “Daddy?”
Neil looked at him. “What’s the matter?” Toby said, “I didn’t mean to upset you or anything.” Neil laughed. “Upset me? You haven’t upset me.”
“I thought you were. Mommy said I mustn’t talk about Jim.”
Neil didn’t answer. It was still difficult for him to think about his brother. He no longer got those terrible, clear pictures in his mind. He’d managed, with time, to blur them beyond recognition. But there was still that sensation of breathless pain, like jumping into the ocean on a December day. There was still that helplessness, still that desperation.
Neil said, “You’d better get into school. The teacher’s going to be worrying where you are.”
Toby hesitated. Neil continued, “Go along, now,” and Toby knew that his daddy meant it. He swung his books and his lunch pail over his shoulder and walked slowly across the gray, dusty yard. Neil watched him go into the battered pale-blue door, and then the door swung shut. He sighed.
He knew that he ought to be straight with Toby, and tell him about Jim. But somehow he couldn’t, not until he could get straight about Jim in his own mind. He’d begun, a couple of times, to try and tell Toby what had happened; but the words always came out wrong. What words could there possibly be to describe the experience of watching your own brother being slowly crushed to death under an automobile?
What words could there possibly be to describe the knowledge that it was your fault, that you’d accidentally released the jack?
He could see Jim’s hand reaching out to him even today. He could see Jim’s pleading, swollen face, with the blood running from his mouth and his nose. How do you tell your eight-year-old kid about that?
He drove down to Bodega Bay and parked the Chevy in the parking lot outside the Tides Restaurant. Then he walked out along the gray wooden planks of the jetty to the White Dove, a sailboat he was fixing up for a client. Gulls turned and fluttered in the wind, and the tackle and rigging of all the boats tied up in the bay clattered and clanked.
Bodega Bay was a small, shallow bay, enclosed in a hook of land that came out from the Sonoma coast Uke a beckoning finger. The beaches all around were gray and littered with burnt wood and beer cans, but beyond the beaches were green, rounded hills and quiet farms. The tourists had all gone home now, and the coastline was foggy and silent, except for the meep-meep of gulls, and the slopping of the sea on the piers of the jetty.
Neil clambered down onto the White Dove’s salt-bleached deck and walked aft. The owner had used the boat all summer, and it needed painting, varnishing, and cleaning. Neil glanced up at the mast and saw that several of the lines were frayed and loose.
He was just about to go below and see what repairs were needed in the small cabin when he thought he heard someone speak. He looked up, but there was nobody around, except for old Doughty, Bodega Bay’s Ancient Mariner, who was sitting on a lobster basket thirty or forty feet away.
Neil paused for a couple of seconds, but then he decided he must have made a mistake, and he bent his head to go below.
A voice whispered; “Alien.”
Neil froze. For no reason that he could possibly explain, he felt frightened in a way that he had never felt before. He couldn’t move for a moment, as if the whispered voice had drained him of all energy. Then he turned around, his eyes wide, his face white.
There was nothing there but the foggy bay, the dim, gray Pacific, the swooping gulls.
No other sound but the creak of the ropes and timbers as the White Dove rose and dipped in the swell of Bodega Bay.
Neil took a deep breath, and went down into the boat’s cabin. There were three narrow berths, still covered with rumpled blankets and sheets. In the center of the cabin was a varnished table, littered with Dixie cups and empty bottles of bourbon, and burned by cigarette ends. It disgusted Neil to see people treat boats this way.
Even the simplest boat was a Grafted creation which protected men from the sea, and he believed in treating every vessel, however humble, with care and respect.
He took a look around, and then turned to go back up the companionway. The voice whispered, “Alien, help me … Alien, please help me …”
Totally scared, he turned around. For one ridiculous moment, he was sure that he saw someone looking in at the dun forward porthole, but then the face instantly reassembled itself into a pattern of coiled ropes and clips.
Shaken, he climbed out of the cabin and stood back on the deck. He didn’t know what to think or what to feel. Maybe Toby’s dream was just gettin
g under the skin of his imagination. Maybe he was overworked. He took a couple of steady breaths, and then walked forward, back to the jetty, to collect his tools and his cans of varnish.
In school, with the sunshine sloping across the desks, Mrs. Novato, a young dark-baked woman with a hairy mole on one cheek and a taste for billowing Indian dresses, announced a class excursion in one week’s time. It would cost a dollar-thirty-five, and every pupil would have to bring a packed lunch. They were going to drive up to Lake Berryessa, in the Vaca Mountains, for nature study and maybe some swimming, too.
Toby was sitting next to Petra Delgada, a serious little girl who never spoke much and always went to mass on Sundays. Mrs. Novato had placed him there because he giggled and talked too much whenever he sat next to his best friend, the coppery-haired Linus Hopland. Linus was in the front row now, his hair shining in the sunshine like the Point Arena lighthouse. Toby whispered to Petra, “Are you going up to the lake? Will your folks let you?”
Petra shrugged, and pursed her lips demurely. “I don’t know. I’ve’ been sick for the past four days. Mommy may not let me.”
“You’ve been sick? You mean, you’ve puked?”
“You mustn’t say puke. It’s disgusting.”
Toby colored a little. He didn’t like Petra to think that he wasn’t grown-up and sophisticated. Petra, after all, was nearly nine, and next in line for class president.
Toby said: “Well, what do you mean? You got the measles?”
“As a matter of fact, I have insomnia,” said Petra.
“Is that catching?”
“Of course not, stupid. Insomnia is when you can’t sleep. Can’t you see these rings around my eyes? Mommy says it’s due to hypertension in prepuberty.”
Toby frowned. He didn’t like to admit that he didn’t have the faintest idea of what Petra was talking about. He’d kind of heard of “puberty,” and he knew it had something to do with growing hairs on your doodad- which is what his grandpa always used to call it-but that was about the extent of his knowledge. Like most children to — whom the most important things in life are skateboards, Charlie’s Angels, and Captain Cosmic, he’d been told, but had quickly forgotten.
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