Carefully stepping backward, sweating and trembling, Neil found the edge of Toby’s bed. He reached behind him and fumbled under the comforter for the sheet He heard the wooden man creak and those heels knock against the bedroom floor, and he froze. But then the wooden man stayed where he was, and Neil softly tugged the sheet out, and rolled it up into an untidy ball behind his back.
The wooden man said: “I am the greatest of those outside, the unquestioned master of the wonder-workers of ancient times. I am the chosen of Sadogowah, the instrument of Nashuna. I have scores to settle from times deeper than you can imagine, white man. I have a score with the Dutchmen, for the diseases they brought to Manhattan. I have a-score with the pilgrims, for the ways they taught the Wampanoags and the Nansets. I have a score with the settlers and the fanners and the railroad men, for the Cheyenne who died, and the Sioux who died, and the Apaches and Paiute. We were at one with the lands, white man, and all the forces and the influences of the lands, and all the gods and the spirits for whom trees grow and stones are thrust up from the earth’. We were the greatest of the nations of the earth, and you slew us with rifles and diseases and empty promises. We shall have our revenge, white man, in the way that is prophesied on the great stone redwood, and you shall all taste blood.”
Neil slid his hand in his pocket and felt for the box of matches. He could almost hear old Billy Ritchie now. “A man of rock or wood is just as vulnerable as rock or wood.”
The figure said, “The white man, Fenner, helped my Wappo brothers in years gone by. He helped them because he understood their struggle, and because he had Wappo blood in his own veins. That is why your son is chosen, white man. That is why we were led at last to bring down the spirits of the great Nashuna and Ossadagowah in this place, at this time.”
Neil managed to fumble a match from the box. He scratched it against the side and he smelled burnt phosphorus, but it didn’t catch. He was sweating, in spite of the bitter cold, and his teeth were clenched in tension. As it spoke, the wooden figure came closer and closer, until it was standing only two or three feet away, its dark wooden head towering over him.
“I have a personal score to settle, too,” the wooden man said, in that uncanny voice that was far away, and yet so close that Neil seemed to be hearing it inside his head.
“A personal score?’ asked Neil. He scratched again at the side of the matchbox.
“I have visited your time before, in the body of a young woman. I was reborn to wreak vengeance on those who had laid waste to the islands you now call New York.
I was born as a human, in my own flesh, but I was destroyed in that form by a white charlatan and a treacherous red man from the plains. That is the personal score I have to settle. I will find the white man called Erskine, and the red man called Singing Rock, and I will destroy them both.”
The figure’s body creaked again and it raised one of its arms.
“I am the Guardian of the Ring which holds back those demons which are in no human shape. I am the Messenger of the Great Old One, the Chosen of Sadogowah. I am the Keeper of the Elder Seal, and the worker of wonders unknown in future times. My name is Quamis, known to the Wampanoag as Misquamacus. I have arrived for the day of the dark stars.” The wooden man raised both arms and stretched out for Neil’s throat Neil, with a high-pitched whine of fear, ducked sideways, and simultaneously struck at his match. It flared up, and caught at the crumpled sheet
In the sudden leaping light of orange flames, Neil glimpsed a wooden face that was contorted with anger. Fierce eyes glistened above a hooked Indian nose and a mouth drawn back on wooden teeth. It was Misquamacus, the same face he had seen in Billy Ritchie’s photographs, only this time it was vengeful and twisted with rage.
The sheet flared up even more violently, burning Nefl’s hand. With a sweep of his arm, he threw the fiery cloth over the wooden man’s head, so that the figure was enveloped in flames. Then he pushed his way toward the door, and struggled to open it
“Susan!” he yelled. “Susan! Open this door! It’s jammed! Susan!”
He frantically looked behind him. The wooden figure of Misquamacus was standing beside Toby’s bed, and already its head and shoulders were starting to blaze. There was a rank odor of burned cotton and wood.
“Susan!” he shouted, rattling the door knob. “Susan, for God’s sake!”
He thought for a terrible moment that Toby might have done something to Susan, might even have killed her, but then he heard her calling, “I’m here! I called the police!”
“Push the door!” called Neil “I can’t get out of here! Push the door!”
He turned around again, and to his terror, the fiery figure of Misquamacus was walking slowly toward him, arms outstretched to seize him. There were flames rippling up from the wonder-worker’s chest, and his head was a mass of fire, but he kept coming, and Neil could feel the heat from his burning body.
“You are as weak as the grass.against me,” said the blazing lips. “I shall devour yon if yon try to cross me, and I shall offer yon up to the most terrible of my gods.”
“Susan!” Neil screamed. He shook and tugged at the door, but it still wouldn’t budge.
“The door is fastened by my will alone,” said Misquamacus. “You will never open it in a hundred moons.”
The room was filling with blinding, choking smoke. Through its billows, impossibly tall and shuddering with flame, the wooden figure stalked nearer, until Nefl had to abandon the door and scramble toward the window. He glanced quickly out through the broken pane. It was a long drop onto hard ground, and even if he didn’t break his neck, “he’d probably wind up with a couple of fractured legs.
He turned back toward the medicine men. The breeze from the window was feeding the flames, and the wooden body burned with a soft, sinister, roaring sound.
“I have you now, white man,” whispered the charring mouth. “I have you now.”
Beside him, the linen cover of Toby’s bedroom chair began to smolder and burn, and one of the drapes caught afire.
Neil raised his arm to protect his face from the heat *The fiery fingers clawed closer, and one of them seized his sleeve, viciously strong and searingly hot. He kicked out against the wooden figure, but it slammed him against the window frame, and he heard his back crack. All he seemed to be able to see was fire, and the grotesque outline of a face wrought in blazing charcoal.
Suddenly, the flames burst out higher. The bedroom door was open, and even more oxygen was nourishing the wooden figure’s fire. Neil wrenched Ms arm free and dropped to his knees, scorched and agonized.
The next thing he knew there was a strange series of sounds. They were slow and ghostly, and they sounded like the surf on the ocean shelf, like something being played in slow motion. Above him, the wooden figure faltered, turned, and then abruptly began to burst into thousands of shattering, whirling fragments of blazing ashes.
The fire exploded over Neil as he lay crouched on the floor, raining all around him.
His neck and his hands were prickled with cinders. But then there was nothing but burned-out chunks of blackened walnut, and a fine dusting of gray ash. Neil blinked, and slowly raised his head.
For a fraction of a second, he thought he saw the outline of a man’s feet, and the hem of a pale-colored coat. He thought he saw a hand move, the way a hand moves when a gun goes back to its holster. But then there was nothing but the landing, and Susan, pale-faced and frightened, under the harsh light from the lamp on the ceiling.
She came into the room and helped him up. He brushed ash and burned wood from his shirt and coughed. His hands and his forearm were blistered, and his hair was singed, but apart from that he was unhurt
“Neil’ Susan wept. “Oh, Neil.”
He held her close. He was trembling, and he felt shocked, but he had the feeling that he had been saved by some kind of spiritual intervention, that a ghostly force had recognized his danger and come to save him. It gave him, for the first time since Toby had start
ed having nightmares, a feeling of strength and confidence. He gently stroked Susan’s hair and said, “Don’t cry. I think we’re going to make it. I think we’re going to be all right.”
She looked up at him, her face smudged with tears.
“But what did you do in here?” she asked him. “Why is everything burned?”
He stared at her. It occurred to him, with a feeling of awful coldness, that she still didn’t believe what was going on. She hadn’t seen the wooden figure, after all. She had heard nothing but noises. Now, he was standing amid cinders and ashes, with no way to prove what he had seen or heard.
He said, slowly, “The wooden man was here. That’s all that’s left of him.”
“The wooden man?” she frowned. “Neil, I-”
He pointed savagely toward the wardrobe. “The wooden man was here and he talked to me. He told me who he was, and he told me what was happening, and everything that old-timer told me up in Calistoga was right. The Indian medicine men are being reborn, in the bodies of our children, and they’re going to kill as many white men as they possibly can.”
“Neil, stop it! Neil, please, it’s just your imagination!”
“What about the way Toby spoke downstairs? You think that’s imagination?”
Susan held him tight. “Toby’s just unsettled, that’s all. He sees you behaving like this, and it scares him. He says things because he’s sensitive, because he doesn’t understand what’s happening.”
“He says things because he’s possessed by a Red Indian magician!” shouted Neil.
“He says things because Misquamacus makes him!”
“Oh, yes?” said a voice. “And who’s Misquamacus?”
Neil looked up. On the landing, in his neatly laundered police uniform, stood Officer Turnbull. He was a lean, punctilious cop with a blue chin and a sharply pointed nose, and Neil had never particularly liked him. He stepped into the room and surveyed the ashes and the burned furnishings with professional detachment.
Neil let Susan go, and stood watching Officer Turn-bull poke around without speaking. After a while, Officer Turnbull gave him a dry smile, and said, “You didn’t answer my question yet.”
“I was speaking metaphorically,” mumbled Neil. “It wasn’t intended to be taken as the literal truth.”
Officer Turnbull eyed him for a few seconds. Then he said, “I see. And what’s the literal truth of what happened here? You decide to have a cookin instead of a cookout?”
Neil wiped soot from his face. “I was just breaking up that old wardrobe,” he said. “I guess I had an accident with the matches.”
Officer Turnbull sniffed. “Pretty disastrous accident, I’d say. You sure you weren’t bent on burning the place down?”
“Why the hell would I do that? I had an accident. I told you.”
“Well,” said Officer Turnbull, “some folks who find themselves short of cash think they can make a little extra from torching their houses. It’s the insurance money, you understand?”
Neil looked at rum, disgusted. “Get out of here,” he said sharply.
“I’ll go when I know what happened,” Officer Turnbull told him. “What was that you just said about Misky-something?”
“It’s a pet name,” said Neil. “It’s something we call Toby. Now, will you please get out of here and give me the chance to clean the place up?”
Officer Turnbull took out his pen and studiously wrote in his police notebook. Then he cast his eyes around the room again, and said, “Let’s make this the last fire we have in here, huh? Bodega’s a nice little community, and the last thing we want is to have it looking like the South Bronx.”
“Is there anything else?” asked Neil, with thinly disguised Impatience.
“I reckon that’s all. But IN have to file a report.”
“You can do what you like. Thanks for dropping round. It’s nice to know that you can count on the cops, as long as you’ve done something they can understand.”
Officer Turnbull tucked away his notebook, shrugged, and went downstairs. They heard the kitchen door close, and the sound of his patrol car leaving the yard. Neil sighed, and stepped over the ash and debris to the landing.
Susan said, “You didn’t have to speak to him like that. He was only doing his job.
You should be grateful he came.”
“Yes,” said Neil dully. “I suppose I should. Where’s Toby?”
“He’s downstairs in the kitchen. I think he’s all right now. After you went into his bedroom-well, he seemed to relax. He became his normal self again.”
“That was because Misquamacus left him, and took on the shape of a wooden man.”
Susan didn’t answer that. She said, “Let’s go downstairs. Maybe I should bathe those blisters. Those hands are going to be sore in the morning.”
Neil leaned against the wall. He felt suddenly exhausted, and his eyes hurt. It seemed almost too much to fight this frightening thing on his own. If only Susan believed him. If only one person believed him, apart from old Billy Ritchie.
He said, “I’m okay. I guess my arm could use a little ointment, but everything else is all right. Could you make me some coffee?”
She kissed his cheek solicitously. “Sure. Whatever you want. You just rest up tonight, and in the morning you’ll feel fine.”
He took her hand. “Susan,” he said, looking at her steadily. “Susan, I’m not going nuts. I saw that wooden man up there as close as I’m standing here now.”
She gave him a quick, noncommittal smile. “Yes, honey. I know. There was a wooden man.”
They went downstairs. Toby was back at the table, finishing his drawing, and when Neil came down he looked up at him with deep, serious eyes. Neil regarded his son for a long, silent moment, trying to see the spirit of the wonder-worker who might be lurking someplace inside him, but there didn’t seem to be any sign at all.
He came up close and hunkered down beside Toby’s chair. The boy gave him a cautious grin, and said, “What’s the matter, Daddy? Is everything okay?”
“Sure,” nodded Neil. “We just had a little accident with matches, that’s all. You should learn something from it. Don’t play with fire.”
“Yes, sir,” said Toby, politely.
For some reason, Toby’s manner seemed to discourage any further conversation, and Neil couldn’t think what else to say. He glanced at Toby’s drawing, and asked,
“How’s it going? You finished it yet?”
“Sure.”
“Can I see it?”
Toby nodded. “If you want.”
The boy took his crooked arm away from the paper, and Neil took it off the table and examined it. It was almost an abstract, colored mainly in blues and grays and dull greens. There seemed to be clouds, with twisting tentacles writhing in between them, and a suggestion of a face that wasn’t truly a face at all. It was crude, and drawn with Toby’s usual heavy-handedness, but there was something strangely subtle and disturbing about it as well.
“What is it?” asked Neil.
Toby gave a quick shrug. “I don’t know, sir. It isn’t a person.”
Neil ran his fingers lightly over the waxed surface of the drawing. In the back of his mind, he heard that strange, distant voice again, the voice of the wooden man. “I am the Guardian of the Ring which holds back those demons which are in no human shape.”
He ruffled Toby’s hair, and laid the drawing back on the table. From across the kitchen, Susan was eyeing him closely.
“It’s a nice picture,” said Neil, for want of anything else to say. “It looks like some kind of octopus.”
Susan said, “Your coffee’s almost ready.”
Late that night, when Susan and Toby had gone to bed, Neil went silently downstairs and into the den. He sat at his desk in the darkness, and moved the telephone toward him. He looked at the dial for a while, as if he were thinking, and then he picked up the receiver and called information.
It took him a half-hour to locate the number he wa
nted. It was a Manhattan number, from an address on Tenth Avenue. He checked his watch. It was almost three o’clock in the morning in New York, but he knew that he wouldn’t be able to wait any longer. He had to know now, before another day dawned, before the spirits gained even more time and even more strength.
The phone rang and rang for almost ten minutes. When there was no reply, he put down the receiver, dialed the number again, and let it ring some more.
Eventually, he heard the phone at the other end being picked up. A nasal, sleep-worn voice said, “Yes? Who the hell’s this?”
Neil coughed. I’m sorry to wake you. I wouldn’t have called at all, but it’s desperately urgent.”
“What’s happening? Is the world coming to an imminent end?”
“Something almost as bad,” said Neil.
“Don’t tell me. They’re banning hot dogs because they give you bowlegs.”
“Mr. Erskine,” said Neil, and he felt himself unexpectedly close to tears, “I’m calling you because there’s nobody else.”
“Well,” answered the voice, “if it’s that critical, you’d better tell me what you want.”
“This isn’t a joke, Mr. Erskine. I’m calling because of Misquamacus.”
There was silence. To begin with, Neil wondered if Mr. Erskine had put the phone down. But he could still hear the singing noise of the transcontinental telephone cables. The silence lasted almost half a minute. Then Mr. Erskine queried softly,
“Misquamacus? What about Misquamacus? Where did you ever hear about Misquamacus?”
“Mr. Erskine, I have met Misquamacus. Or a form that Misquamacus took. He came this evening, and it was only luck that I wasn’t killed.”
Again, there was silence.
“Are you there?” asked Neil.
“Sure I’m here,” said Mr. Erskine. ‘I'm just thinking, that’s all. I'm thinking that I’m hoping that you’re not telling me the truth, only I know that you are because nobody knows about Misquamacus except for the people who helped me get rid of him.”
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