Graham Masterton: Revenge of the Manitou

Toby blinked. In the light of day, he didn’t remember the nightmare very clearly at all.

He had a sense that it was something to do with the wardrobe door, but he couldn’t quite think what it was. He remembered a feeling of fright. He remembered bis daddy putting him back to bed, and tucking him in tightly. But the name “Alien” didn’t mean anything.

Susan said, “Was that what he was saying? ‘I’m not Alien, I’m Toby’?”

Neil nodded.

“But kids say all kinds of silly things in their sleep,” she told him. “My younger sister used to sing nursery rhymes in her sleep.”

“This wasn’t the same,” said Neil.

Susan looked at Toby and then back to her husband. She said quietly, “I don’t know what you mean.”

Neil let go of his son’s wrist. He dropped his eyes toward the table, at his scraped-clean plate, and then said, “My brother’s name was Alien. Everybody used to call him Jim on account of his second name, James. But his first name was Alien.”

“But Toby doesn’t know that.”

Neil said, “I know.”

There was an awkward silence. Then Susan said, “What are you trying to say? That Toby’s having nightmares about your brother?”

“I don’t know what I’m trying to say. It just shocked me, that’s all. Toby’s room used to be Alien’s. Jim’s, I mean.”

Susan put down her cup of coffee. She looked at Neil and she could see that he wasn’t pulling her leg. He did, sometimes, with fond but heavy-handed humor which he’d inherited from his Polish mother. Good old middle-European practical jokes. But today, he was edgy and disturbed as if he’d had a premonition of unsettled days ahead.

Susan said, “You think it’s a ghost, or something?”

Neil looked serious for a moment, and then gave a sheepish grin, and shrugged.

“Ghost? I don’t know. I don’t believe in ghosts. I mean, I don’t believe in ghosts that wander around in the night.”

Toby piped up, “Is there a ghost, Daddy? A real ghost?”

Neil said, “No, Toby. There isn’t any such thing. They come out of storybooks, and that’s all.”

“I heard some noises in the night,” Toby told him. “Was that a ghost?”

“No, son. It was just the wind.”

“But what you said about Alien?”

Neil lowered his head. Susan took Toby’s hand and said softly, “Daddy was just saying that you must have had a very special kind of dream, that’s all. It’s nothing to get frightened about. Now, are you going to finish that pancake, because it’s time for school.”

Neil drove Toby in his Chevy pickup as far as Bodega Bay, and dropped him off at the schoolhouse. The bell was ringing plaintively, and most of the kids were already in the building. Toby climbed down to the road, but instead of running straight into school, he stood beside the truck for a moment, looking up at his father. His blond hair was ruffled by the Pacific wind. He said, “Daddy?”

Neil looked at him. “What’s the matter?” Toby said, “I didn’t mean to upset you or anything.” Neil laughed. “Upset me? You haven’t upset me.”

“I thought you were. Mommy said I mustn’t talk about Jim.”

Neil didn’t answer. It was still difficult for him to think about his brother. He no longer got those terrible, clear pictures in his mind. He’d managed, with time, to blur them beyond recognition. But there was still that sensation of breathless pain, like jumping into the ocean on a December day. There was still that helplessness, still that desperation.

Neil said, “You’d better get into school. The teacher’s going to be worrying where you are.”

Toby hesitated. Neil continued, “Go along, now,” and Toby knew that his daddy meant it. He swung his books and his lunch pail over his shoulder and walked slowly across the gray, dusty yard. Neil watched him go into the battered pale-blue door, and then the door swung shut. He sighed.

He knew that he ought to be straight with Toby, and tell him about Jim. But somehow he couldn’t, not until he could get straight about Jim in his own mind. He’d begun, a couple of times, to try and tell Toby what had happened; but the words always came out wrong. What words could there possibly be to describe the experience of watching your own brother being slowly crushed to death under an automobile?

What words could there possibly be to describe the knowledge that it was your fault, that you’d accidentally released the jack?

He could see Jim’s hand reaching out to him even today. He could see Jim’s pleading, swollen face, with the blood running from his mouth and his nose. How do you tell your eight-year-old kid about that?

He drove down to Bodega Bay and parked the Chevy in the parking lot outside the Tides Restaurant. Then he walked out along the gray wooden planks of the jetty to the White Dove, a sailboat he was fixing up for a client. Gulls turned and fluttered in the wind, and the tackle and rigging of all the boats tied up in the bay clattered and clanked.

Bodega Bay was a small, shallow bay, enclosed in a hook of land that came out from the Sonoma coast Uke a beckoning finger. The beaches all around were gray and littered with burnt wood and beer cans, but beyond the beaches were green, rounded hills and quiet farms. The tourists had all gone home now, and the coastline was foggy and silent, except for the meep-meep of gulls, and the slopping of the sea on the piers of the jetty.

Neil clambered down onto the White Dove’s salt-bleached deck and walked aft. The owner had used the boat all summer, and it needed painting, varnishing, and cleaning. Neil glanced up at the mast and saw that several of the lines were frayed and loose.

He was just about to go below and see what repairs were needed in the small cabin when he thought he heard someone speak. He looked up, but there was nobody around, except for old Doughty, Bodega Bay’s Ancient Mariner, who was sitting on a lobster basket thirty or forty feet away.

Neil paused for a couple of seconds, but then he decided he must have made a mistake, and he bent his head to go below.

A voice whispered; “Alien.”

Neil froze. For no reason that he could possibly explain, he felt frightened in a way that he had never felt before. He couldn’t move for a moment, as if the whispered voice had drained him of all energy. Then he turned around, his eyes wide, his face white.

There was nothing there but the foggy bay, the dim, gray Pacific, the swooping gulls.

No other sound but the creak of the ropes and timbers as the White Dove rose and dipped in the swell of Bodega Bay.

Neil took a deep breath, and went down into the boat’s cabin. There were three narrow berths, still covered with rumpled blankets and sheets. In the center of the cabin was a varnished table, littered with Dixie cups and empty bottles of bourbon, and burned by cigarette ends. It disgusted Neil to see people treat boats this way.

Even the simplest boat was a Grafted creation which protected men from the sea, and he believed in treating every vessel, however humble, with care and respect.

He took a look around, and then turned to go back up the companionway. The voice whispered, “Alien, help me … Alien, please help me …”

Totally scared, he turned around. For one ridiculous moment, he was sure that he saw someone looking in at the dun forward porthole, but then the face instantly reassembled itself into a pattern of coiled ropes and clips.

Shaken, he climbed out of the cabin and stood back on the deck. He didn’t know what to think or what to feel. Maybe Toby’s dream was just getting under the skin of his imagination. Maybe he was overworked. He took a couple of steady breaths, and then walked forward, back to the jetty, to collect his tools and his cans of varnish.