Revenge of the Manitou

H
e 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.’ “

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?