was?”
“I don’t know,” said Neil. “It looked so weird I just wanted a second opinion.”
“You can tell me,” Dave encouraged him. “I won’t laugh at you for longer than a half-hour.”
Neil turned away. “I guess it was just my imagination. Forget it.”
“You didn’t tell me what it was, so how can I forget it?”
Neil put down his ropework, “All right,” he said, “I thought I saw somebody, a man, standing out there in the bay.”
“Standing?”
“That’s right. Standing on the water, just the way you’re standing on that jetty.”
Dave pulled a face. “Well, you told me it was crazy, and you’re right. Are you sure you haven’t been reading the Bible too heavily lately?”
“Dave,” asked Neil, “will you just forget it? It was a trick of the light.”
“Maybe he was surfing and you didn’t notice the surfboard in the fog,” suggested Dave. “Or maybe he was standing on top of a submarine.”
“Dave, please forget I ever told you,” said Neil. “I’m not in the mood for jokes.”
“Nor would I be, if I’d seen a guy standing on the water in the middle of the bay,” said Dave, with weighty mock seriousness. “Nor would I be.”
That afternoon, Toby brought home a large yellow Manila envelope from school, along with a note from Mrs. Novato. While Toby went out to play with his toy bulldozer, Neil took the package into the parlor and sat down at his old rolltop desk.
Susan came in from the kitchen in her apron and slippers, and said, “What’s that?”
Neil looked at her, and gave a wry little smile. “It’s an experiment, I guess.”
Susan wiped her floury hands on her apron. She’d been making apple cookies, and she smelled of fresh cooking apples and butter. “An experiment?” she asked him.
“You mean, something to do with school?”
He nodded. “You remember Toby kept on about Alien in his nightmares? Well, this morning, when I took him to school, I heard one of the other kids talking about Alien, too, sb I asked Mrs. Novato to let me talk to the class for a couple of minutes. I asked them if any one of them had dreamed dreams like Toby.”
“Well? And had they?”
Neil opened the envelope. “There are twenty-one kids in that class, honey, and every single one of them put up a hand to say yes.”
Susan looked confused. “You mean-they’d all had the same nightmare? Surely they were just pulling your leg, acting like kids.”
“I don’t know what nightmares they’d had. But I asked them to draw what they’d seen in their dreams, and Mrs. Novato agreed to let them do it during their art lesson.
Here’s a note she sent along.”
Susan took the note and scanned it quickly.
It read:
Dear Mr. Fenner,
I am sending you the drawings the children made this afternoon in the hope that they might put your mind at rest. It seems to me that my first opinion of mild collective hysteria is the correct one. I am sure that these nightmares will pass once a new craze starts. There are already signs that Crackling Candy is talking hold! By the way, if Toby wishes to join our little expedition to Lake Berryessa next Wednesday, please give him $1.35 to bring to school tomorrow.
Yours, Nora Novato
Neil rubbed his cheek. “Well,” he said slowly, “that doesn’t sound too promising, does it?”
“I think it sounds marvelous,” said Susan. “The sooner Toby stops having those awful dreams, the better.”
“Susan, it’s not just dreams. It’s waking visions as well. What about that old man’s face I saw on Toby last night? What about the man in the white coat that Toby saw?
What about the guy standing on the bay?”
Susan stared at him. “What guy standing on what bay? What are you talking about?”
He glanced at her, and then he lowered his eyes. “I’m sorry. I was meaning to tell you, but I didn’t know how. It was just something that happened today. Or rather it was something I thought happened today.”
She leaned forward and put her arm around his shoulder. “You didn’t know how to tell me? But Neil, I’m as worried about all this as you are! I’m your wife. That’s what I’m here for, to confide in.”
He said, huskily, “Sure, honey, I know. It’s just that it’s kind of hard to admit to yourself that you might be flipping your lid, or suffering from some kind of kids’
hysteria.”
“Don’t be so ridiculous! If you saw something, you saw it. Maybe there’s a natural explanation. Maybe it was some land of mirage. But if you saw it, that’s it, I believe you.”
He shrugged. “I’m glad you’ve got some confidence in me. I’m not sure that I’ve got much confidence in myself.”
Susan kissed his hah”. “I love you,” she said simply. “If there’s something making you worried, then it worries me, too. Don’t forget that.”
Neil reached inside the Manila envelope and took out a sheaf of brightly colored drawings. Susan drew up a chair beside him, and they looked through them, one by one.
The drawings, although they varied in style and color, were strangely alike. They showed trees, mountains, and struggling figures. Some of them depicted twenty or thirty stick people, their arms all flung up in the air, with splashes of scribbled red all around. Others showed only one or two people, lying on their backs amid the greenery. There were arrows flying through the air in about a dozen drawings, and in others there were men holding rifles.
Only about eight or nine children had written names or words beside their pictures.
Toby had written “Alien, help.” Daniel Soscol had written “Alun” and then crossed it out. Debbie Spurr had put down “Alien, Alien, didn’t come back.”
There were some odd names, too. “Ta-La-Ha-Lu-Si” was written in heavy green crayon on one picture. Another bore the legend “Kaimus.” Yet another said
“Oweaoo” and “Sokwet.”
Susan and Neil spent twenty minutes going through the drawings, but in the end they laid them down on the desk and looked at each other in bewilderment.
“I don’t know what the hell it all means,” admitted Neil. “It just doesn’t seem to make any kind of sense at all.”
“It’s strange that they all have the same kind of picture in their minds, though,” said Susan. “I mean, how many other groups of twenty-one different people would all have the same nightmare? Look at this one- this is Toby’s. His drawing is almost the same as everyone else’s.”
Neil pushed back his chair and stood up. Outside, through the cheap net curtains, he could see Toby in the backyard, shoveling up dust with his Tonka bulldozer. Neil felt such a wave of protectiveness toward him that the tears prickled his eyes. What on God’s earth was Toby caught up in? Were these really just nightmares, or were they something arcane and dangerous?
Susan suggested, “Maybe we ought to talk to Doctor Crowder again. Perhaps it’s some kind of psychological sickness.”
Neil slowly shook his head. “Toby’s not sick, and neither are the rest of those kids.
Nor am I, if it comes to that. I feel it’s more like something from outside, something trying to get through to us, you know?”
“You’re talking about something like a seance? Like a spirit, trying to get through?”
“That’s right, kind of. I just have the feeling that there’s pressure around, something’s pressing in from all around us. I don’t know what the hell it is, but I can feel it. It’s there all the time now, night and day.”
“Neil-” said Susan, guardedly.
He turned away from the window. “I know. It sounds nuts. Maybe it is nuts. But I feel just as sane as I did last week. And if I’m nuts, then all these school children are nuts, too, and I don’t believe they are.”
He picked up one of the drawings, showing a fierce battle between men in big hats and men with long black hair. There were green-and-gray mountains in
the background, and the sky was forested with huge arrows. The arrows were all tipped with black, carefully and deliberately drawn with black crayon.
“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’i^
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 grbaning 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.
THREE
After a few minutes, the noises stopped. They waited breathless-on the landing for almost ten minutes, but there was silence.
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