Graham Masterton: Revenge of the Manitou

He woke up during the night and he was sure there was someone in his room.

He froze, not daring to breathe, his eight-year-old fingers clutching the candy-striped sheet right up to his nose. He strained his eyes and his ears in the darkness, looking and listening for the slightest movement, the slightest squeak of floorboards. His pulse raced silently and endlessly, a steeplechase of boyish terror that ran up every artery and down every vein.

“Daddy” he said, but the word came out so quietly that nobody could have heard him. His parents were sleeping right down at the other end of the corridor, and that meant safety was two doors and thirty feet away, across a gloomy landing where an old grandfather clock ticked, and where even in daytime there was a curious sense of solitude and suffocating stillness.

He was sure he could hear somebody sighing, or breathing. Soft, suppressed sighs, as if they meant sadness, or pain. It may have been nothing more than the rustle of the curtains, as they rose and fell in the draft from the half-open window. Or it may have been the sea, sliding and whispering over the dark beach, just a half-mile away.

He waited and waited, but nothing happened. Five minutes passed. Ten. He lifted his blond, tousled head from the pillow, and looked around the room with widened eyes.

There was the carved pine footboard, at the end of his bed. There was the walnut wardrobe. There was his toy box, its lid only half-closed because of the model tanks and cranes and baseball gloves that were always crammed in there.

There were his clothes, his jeans and his T-shirt, over the back of his upright ladder-backed chair.

He waited a little longer, frowning. Then he carefully climbed out of bed, and walked across to the window. Outside, under a grayish sky of torn clouds and fitful predawn winds, a night heron called kwawk, kwawk , and a wooden door banged and banged.

He looked down at the untidy backyard, and the leaning fence that separated the Fenners’ house from the grassy dunes of the Sonoma coastline. There was nobody there.

He went back to bed, and pulled the sheets almost over his head. He knew it was silly, because his daddy had told him it was silly. But somehow tonight was different from those times when he was just afraid of the shadows, or overexcited from watching flying-saucer movies on television. Tonight, there was someone there.

Someone who sighed.

He lay there tense for nearly twenty minutes. The wooden door kept banging, with mindless regularity, but he didn’t hear anything else. After a while, his eyes began to close. He jerked awake once, but then they closed again, and he slept.

It was the worst nightmare he had ever had. It didn’t seem as though he was dreaming at all. He rose from his bed, and turned toward the wardrobe, his head moving in an odd, stiff way. The grain of the walnut on the wardrobe doors had always disturbed him a little, because it was figured with foxlike faces. Now, it was terrifying. It seemed as if there was someone inside the surface of the wood, someone who was calling out to him, trying desperately to tell him something. Someone who was trapped, but also frightening.

He could hear a voice, like the voice of someone speaking through a thick glass window. “… Alien … Alien … for God’s sake, Alien … for God’s sake, help me …

Alien …,” the voice called.

The boy went closer to the wardrobe, one hand raised in front of him, as if he was going to touch the wood to find where the voice was coming from. Dimly, scarcely visible except as a faint luminosity on the varnish, he could make out a gray face, a face whose lips were moving in a blurry plea for mercy, for assistance, for some way out of an unimaginable hell.

“Alien., ” pleaded the voice, monotonously. “Alien … for God’s sake …”

The boy whispered, “Who’s Alien? Who’s Alien? My name’s Toby. I’m Toby Fenner.

Who’s Alien?”

He could see the face was fading. And yet, for one moment, he had an indescribable sense of freezing dread, as if a cold wind had blown across him from years and years ago. There was a feeling of someplace else … someplace known and familiar and yet frighteningly strange. The feeling was there and it was gone, so quickly that he couldn’t grasp what it was.

He banged his hands against the wardrobe door and said, “Who’s Alien? Who’s Alien?”

He was more and more alarmed, and he screeched at the top of his high-pitched voice, “Who’s Alien? Who’s Alien? Who’s Alien?”

The bedroom door burst open and his daddy said, “Toby? Toby-what in hell’s the matter?”

Over breakfast at the pine kitchen table, bacon and eggs and pancakes, his daddy sat munching and drinking coffee and watching him fixedly. The San Francisco Examiner lay folded and unread next to his elbow. Toby, already dressed for school in a pale-blue summer shirt and jeans, concentrated his attention on his pancakes.

Today, they were treasure islands on a sea of syrup, gradually being excavated by a giant fork.

At the kitchen stove, his mommy was cleaning up. She was wearing her pink gingham print apron, and her blond hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was slim and young and she cooked bacon just the way Toby liked it. His daddy was darker and quieter, and spoke slower, but there was deep affection between them which didn’t have much need of words. They could fly kites all Sunday afternoon on the shoreline, or go fishing in one of the boats from his daddy’s boatyard, and say no more than five words between lunch and dusk.

Through the kitchen window, the sky was a pattern of white clouds and blue. It was September on the north California shore, warm and windy, a time when the sand blew between the rough grass, and the laundry snapped on the line.

Susan Fenner said, “More coffee? It’s all fresh.”

Neil Fenner raised his cup without taking his eyes off Toby. “Sure. I’d love some.”

Susan glanced at Toby as she filled her husband’s cup. “Are you going to eat those pancakes or what?” she asked him, a little sharply.

Toby looked up. His daddy said, “Eat your pancakes.”

Toby obeyed. The treasure islands were dug up by the giant fork, and shoveled into a monster grinder.

Susan said, “Anything in the paper this morning?”

Neil glanced at it, and shook his head.

“You’re not going to read it?” Susan asked, pulling out one of the pine kitchen chairs and sitting down with her cup of coffee. She never ate breakfast herself, although she wouldn’t let Neil or Toby out of the house without a good cooked meal inside them. She knew that Neil usually forgot to take his lunch break, and that Toby traded his peanut-butter sandwiches for plastic GIs or bubble gum.

Neil said no, and passed the paper across the table. Susan opened it and turned to the Homecraft section.

“Would you believe this?” she said. “It says that Cuisinart cookery is going out of style. And I don’t even have a Cuisinart yet.”

“In that case, we’ve saved ourselves some money,” said Neil, but he didn’t sound as if he was really interested. Susan looked up at him and frowned.

“Is anything wrong, Neil?” she asked.

He shook his head. But then he suddenly reached across the table and held Toby’s wrist, so that the boy’s next forkful of pancake was held poised over his plate. Toby said, “Sir?”

Neil looked at his son carefully and intensely. In a husky voice, he said, “Toby, do you know who Alien is?”

Toby looked at his father uncomprehendingly. “Alien, sir?”

“That’s right. You were saying his name last night, when you were having that nightmare. You were saying ‘I’m not Alien, I’m Toby.’ ”