Graham Masterton - Revenge of the Manitou

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.