Graham Masterton - Revenge of the Manitou

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.