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 made 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 dialled, 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.
The phone rang for almost a minute before it was picked up.
Mrs. Crowder said, “Doctor’s Crowder’s residence. Who is this, please?”
“Emma?” said Neil. “It’s Neil Fenner. Is the doctor home?”
“Why, Neil! How are you? It’s been a long time since you came up this way. How’s Toby?”
Neil rubbed his eyes. “It’s-well, it’s Toby I wanted to talk to the doctor about. We’ve got ourselves a problem here, Emma, and I was wondering if he could find the time to come down here.”
“Is it really urgent? I know he’s got a lot to do tonight. The Baxter sisters just came down with whooping cough.”
“Emma-if it wasn’t serious I wouldn’t ask. I know how hard he works.”
Emma said warmly, “Okay, Neil. I know that. He’s going to call home when he’s through at the Baxters, so I’ll ask him to come on down to see you. It’s nothing too bad, I hope?”
Neil didn’t answer for a moment. He didn’t know how to describe what had happened, or what to say about it. In the end, he said thickly, “No, no. It’s nothing too bad. Nothing to get upset about.”
He hung up and then went back into the kitchen to brew coffee. Toby was looking calmer now, but all three of them were still pale with shock. Neil went to the wooden door that led to the stairs and closed it, turning the key in the lock.
Susan said nervously, “You don’t think it’s still-”
Neil shook his head. “I think it’s gone, or disappeared, whatever it was. But I’m not taking any chances. I’m going to let Doc Crowder take a look at that wardrobe, and then first light tomorrow I’m going to take it outside and I’m going to burn it to ashes.”
Toby looked up at his father with wide eyes. He whispered, “You mustn’t do that, daddy. You mustn’t burn it.”
Neil pulled out a chair and sat down beside him. “Mustn’t? What do you mean, tiger?”
Toby licked his lips, and he began to pant a little, as if he were short of breath. “He says-he says that-”
“Who?” asked Susan. “Who says?”
Toby’s eyes flickered, and then the pupils rolled upward, so that his naked whites were all that they could see. His small fingers, spread on the pine kitchen table, began to clench and scratch at the wood. Susan reached out for him, reached out to hold and protect him, but then he said in a hoarse, accented voice: “He says you mustn’t disturb the gateway. He says you will die if you disturb it.”
“Toby?” demanded Neil, leaning forward. “Toby!’
Toby opened his eyes, and for a fleeting second Neil saw again that dead, flat, menacing expression. There was a cold sourness about Toby’s breath, and when he spoke it seemed as if a freezing, fetid wind blew from his mouth.
“You must disturb nothing. You must not interfere. You are dust in the storms of time.
I care nothing for you, but if you interfere you will be destroyed, even as you destroyed my brothers.”
Susan was screaming, but Neil hardly heard her. He took Toby by the shoulders and shouted, “Who are you? I want to know who you are! Who are you?”
Toby smiled. It was an uncanny, unnatural, poisonous smile. In the same grating voice, he said: “The prophecy that is still buried on the great stone redwood is about to come to pass. It is almost the day of the dark stars.”
Neil said, “Prophecy? Dark stars? What are you talking about?”
But then Toby abruptly vomited Coca-Cola and half-digested cookies, and fell off his chair like a rag doll.
Doctor Crowder took Neil out onto the boardwalk veranda and lit up his brierwood pipe. It was almost ten o’clock now, and a cool wind was flowing in from the sea. Neil was calmer, as a dose of Valium began to take effect, and he sat down on the rail and faced the doctor with a serious, concerned face.
The old doctor purled away for a while, listening to the night birds and the rustle of dry grass. He was a short, white-whiskered man with a bald, tanned dome and a bulbous nose. He’d been practicing in Sonoma County most of his life, except for a spell during the war when he served on Guadalcanal as a senior medical officer.
He’d delivered Toby, but he didn’t know the Fenners too well. They were a young, hardworking family, and most of the time they kept to themselves.
After a few minutes’ silence, Neil said, “I get the feeling you don’t believe me. You think I’ve been hallucinating.”
Doctor Crowder studiously examined the bowl of his pipe. “I wouldn’t say that. Not hallucinating, exactly.”
“But you don’t believe that what I saw was real? You don’t believe that a wooden man came out of that wardrobe door?”
The doctor glanced at him. “Would you?” he asked. “If I told you that story?”
Neil scratched the back of his neck. “I guess not. The only difference is, it’s true. I saw it as plain as I can see you now.”
“That’s what most people say, when they’ve seen an unidentified flying object-or a ghost. There used to be a woman who lived up at Oakmont, and she swore blind that she’d seen phantom riders crossing her backyard, not just once, but every once in a while.”
Neil said, “Doctor, you have to admit that some of this is spooky. What about all these schoolchildren having the same nightmare? There has to be something in that.”
“Well,” said Doctor Crowder, “I think that Mrs. Novato put her finger on it when she talked about mild collective hysteria. Children are open to any kind of silly idea, and it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for a whole school to have the same kind of nightmare. Mind you, they could be pulling your leg. They may just have got together and cooked up this whole thing to scare you witless.”
Neil looked at the doctor in disappointment. “You don’t really think that, do you?”
“No, I don’t,” Doctor Crowder told him. “But you have to investigate every possibility before you start jumping off in all kinds of directions shouting about spirits and demons. In my book, Neil Fenner, spirits and demons don’t exist. They’re a figment of man’s imagination, and the only way they’ll ever take hold of a man, or a boy, is if that man or that boy allows his imagination to run away with him.”
“What are you trying to tell me, doctor? You’re trying to say that I’m getting hysterical, too?”
Doctor Crowder raised his hand in a pacifying gesture and firmly shook his head.
“I’m not trying to tell you that at all. I wouldn’t presume. But what I am saying is that if Toby’s suffering from this kind of mild frenzy, then it’s up to you to stay as stable and as rational as you possibly can, because otherwise you’ll only make him worse.”
Neil stood up, and took a few testy paces up and down the boardwalk. “Doctor,” he said, “I’m as rational and stable as you are. I swear to you, deaf, dumb, and blind, that I saw that wooden man come out of the wardrobe, and what’s more, Susan heard him. We can’t both be wrong.”
“You could have heard anything. A window banging, maybe.”
“It was a wooden demon, dammit! That’s what it was, and nobody can persuade me otherwise. I don’t know why it was there, or what it really was, or what the hell was going on, but I saw it, and I heard it, and I was as scared as I’ve ever been in my whole life.”
Doctor Crowder took his pipe out of his mouth and spent a long while staring out at the night sky. It was partly cloudy, and only a few stars sparkled above the Bodega valley. In the distance, the Pacific surf was as soft and persistent as breathing.
Eventually, the doctor said, “I don’t know what else to say to you, Neil. You haven’t convinced me that any of this is indisputable fact, and until you do, I can only treat it like a medical or a psychological complaint. You see my problem, don’t you?”
‘I guess so.”
“I’m glad,” said Doctor Crowder. “And I’ll tell you this much. I don’t believe you’re going crazy, or anything terrible like that I think you may be suffering from strain or hypertension, and I think that you owe it to yourself to look at your work situation and even your marriage situation to find out if that’s true. It could be that you’re feeling some kind of delayed shock, some kind of psychological ripple effect, from the death of your brother. It could be that you’re just tired. But I’ll grant that you believe sincerely That what you saw was real, and I’m even prepared to keep a little bit of my mind open-though not much, I’ll tell you-just in case you can prove to me that wooden men really do step out of solid wardrobe doors.”
Neil nodded. “Okay, doctor. I’m sorry if I sounded sore.”
Doctor Crowder laid a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve got to look forward, Neil. You’ve got to think of the future, and what you can do to make your life better. Then I guarantee that you won’t be bothered by the ghosts of the past.”
Just then, Susan came out of the kitchen door. She said, “Toby’s sleeping now. I tucked him up in our bed. Do you think he’s going to be all right, doctor?”
“There’s nothing to worry yourself about at all,” Doctor Crowder told her, reassuringly. “He’s a highly strung boy, and I think that things have gotten a little out of hand, that’s all. It sometimes happens at this age, when their imagination begins to develop. They see monsters, pirates, devils, all that kind of thing. But it’ll pass, and the next you know he’ll be dreaming about girls.” v
Susan laughed, and it seemed like the first laugh for a long time. Neil took her arm and kissed her, and then reached out his hand to say good night to the doctor.
“You can call me any time,” said Doctor Crowder as they shook hands. “Don’t be shy. It’s about time we got to know each other better.”
They watched him walk across the darkened yard to his dusty black Impala. He gave them a wave, and then he drove off into the night, leaving the Fenners alone again with their fears, imagined or real. Neil scratched at his nose with the back of his hand, and then said, “I could do with a drink.”
Susan put her arm around his waist. “I bought a bottle of Riesling at the store today.
We were going to have it with dinner.”
He nuzzled her hair. It smelled fresh and good. He suddenly realized how much he relied on her, and how much he loved her. If there was any hypertension in his life, it certainly didn’t have anything to do with Susan. He took a last look out at the night, and then they went inside.
In the morning, after Neil had driven Toby to school, he came back to the house and went upstairs. He crossed the landing to Toby’s room, and gingerly opened the door.
He was pretty sure there was nobody in there. After all, he’d taken Doc Crowder up there last night, and showed him the wardrobe, and the room had been as empty and ordinary as ever. But he still pushed the door back with caution, and he still stepped in with his heart beating irregularly and fast.
The room was silent and empty. The wardrobe stood where it always had. It wasn’t even a special wardrobe. Neil had picked it up for four bucks at a garage sale in Tomales, along with a bed and his rolltop desk.
He stood for a while looking at it and then approached it. He knew that it was stupid to feel frightened, but he did. He turned the small brass key in the door and jerked it open. Inside, there was nothing but Toby’s T-shirts, neatly folded, his shorts, and his baseball outfit. No demons with wolflike faces. No men in white coats.
It seemed almost dumb to take the wardrobe out and smash it up. It was a perfectly good piece of furniture, and where was he going to find another one like it for the same price? New furniture was always so tacky.
But then he remembered the face again, and the terrible stumbling sound of the wooden man, and he remembered Toby growling, “He says you mustn’t touch the gateway. He says you will die if you touch it.”
He took out Toby’s clothes and laid them on the bed. Then he locked the wardrobe doors, and began to shuffle and hump it across the bedroom. It was a heavy old piece, but all he was going to do was slide it out of Toby’s bedroom window so that it dropped into the yard below.
Sweating and straining, he shifted the wardrobe across to the window, and then he stood it on its side while he opened the shutters. Outside it was a dull, warm day, typical north Pacific coast weather, and he could hear Susan’s radio playing pop music through the wide-open kitchen window.
He was about to turn back to the wardrobe when he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. He looked again across the dust-color
ed yard, and he saw the man in the long white coat standing in the grass by the fence.
A cold, unnerving chill went down his back. He closed his eyes and then looked again, and the man was still there. The man’s face was hidden under the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, but Neil could see that he had a tawny, light-colored beard, and that he was wearing a gun belt outside his coat.
The voice breathed, “Alien, for God’s sake … Alien, help me …”
And the figure was beckoning. With wide sweeps of his arm, he was beckoning.
Neil felt stunned, as if he had been anesthetized with novocaine. He stood by the open window for a long, paralyzed moment, and then he turned and ran down the stairs as fast as he could, almost twisting his ankle on the bottom stair.
Susan called, “Neil!” but he was already out of the house and running across the yard, running hard for the fence. He could hear his own panting in his ears, and the sound of his feet on the hard dust. The morning of gray clouds and warm wind jumbled past his eyes as he ran.
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 skirred, 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.”
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