Toby put the empty dish back on his bedside table. “It was good. I feel better now.
Maybe I could get up and watch the flying robot.”
“Maybe you could stay in bed and have a rest.”
“I’m not sick, Daddy. Honest. I just fainted a little.”
Neil grinned. “A little faint is plenty.”
Toby showed him the snap-together Cadillac. “That’s neat, isn’t it? You don’t have to have glue. It just snaps together.”
Neil admired it. “When I was a kid, you had to carve the pieces out yourself, out of balsa wood,” he said. “You had to sand ‘em smooth, and stick ‘em together, and do it all from scratch.”
“That sounds like hard work,” said Toby, sympathetically.
Neil smiled, but didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “Toby, that man you saw. Can you tell me what he looked like?”
Toby lowered his eyes.
“It’s pretty important, Toby,” Neil told him. “The point is, if there really was a man there, and he’s been prowling around the schoolhouse, then the police ought to know.”
Toby was silent.
Neil reached over and took his hand. “Toby,” he said. “I want you to tell me what the man looked like. This isn’t a game. This is for real.”
Toby swallowed, and then he whispered, “He was tall, and he had a hat like a cowboy, and one of those * long white coats that cowboys used to wear.” “A duster, you mean.”
Toby nodded. “He had a beard, I think. A kind of a light-colored beard. And that was all.”
Neil said, “Mommy told me you thought he wasn’t alive.”
“He wasn’t.”
“What makes you think that?” “He just wasn’t. I know he wasn’t” “Was he a ghost?”
Toby lowered his eyes again. He fidgeted with his small fingers, and there was a hint of high color on his cheeks. He didn’t say anything, but then he didn’t know what to say. The man at the schoolhouse hadn’t been a ghost in the way that most people think about ghosts. He hadn’t come to haunt anybody. He had to come to ask for help, some terrible kind of help that Toby couldn’t even begin to understand. The feeling of need that came from the man in the long white duster had been so strong that Toby, just before he fainted, had felt that the man was real and that he, Toby, was a ghost, nothing but a shade of a boy.
Neil said, “I think it’s time you got some sleep now, don’t you? When you wake up in the morning, you’ll have gotten over all this.”
Toby said, “He won’t come again, will he? You see, I don’t know what to do when he comes. I don’t know how to help him.”
“He won’t come again. At least, I don’t believe so.”
Toby snuggled down in bed, and Neil tucked him in. He took the empty soup dish, and stood there for a while, looking down at his son’s mop of sun-bleached hair, at those eyes screwed up in a conscientious attempt at sleep, at those cheeks that were still soft and chubby.
He knelt down beside the bed and touched Toby’s forehead. Then he whispered, “If you do see that man again, you call me, you hear? You call me loud and I’ll come running.”
Toby opened one eye. “Yes, sir,” he said, in a husky voice, and then began the long dark slide into sleep.
He was awakened by the sound of the shed door banging. It was dark, very dark, and there was a rippling wind blowing from the sea. The drapes rose and fell like a huge beast breathing, and it sounded as if every loose floorboard and doorknob in the whole house was being rattled by cold, inquisitive drafts.
He lay there a while, listening. He wished very much he could go back to sleep again. He wished it was morning, and he wished his parents’ room wasn’t so far away, and more than anything he wished he was anyplace else but alone in this bed in the middle of this black breezy night, with the house stirring and shifting as if it had come to life.
He thought he heard a sound. A slow, deliberate creak, like a heavy foot pressing on a stair tread. He held his breath until he was almost bursting, listening, listening, but he didn’t hear the noise again. The drapes rustled and swished, and outside in the night the shed door banged and paused and banged again. The voice whispered:
“Alien …” He didn’t want to hear it. He buried his head under the bedclothes, and lay there in hot darkness, his heart pounding, almost stifling under the blankets and quilted comforter. He lay there for almost five minutes, but then a terrible thought occurred to him. Supposing, while he was hiding under the bedclothes, the man in the long white duster had come into the room, and was standing over him?
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 no 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-torch
ing 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, weatherbeaten 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”
TWO
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.”
Mrs. Novato laid a reassuring hand on his arm. “I shouldn’t worry about it too much, Mr. Fenner. A lot of the children have been having bad dreams of late. I think it’s become the class craze to have nightmares. Children are very psychologically suggestible, and I think they’ve gotten themselves into what you might call a state of, well, very mild hysteria.”
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