Revenge of the Manitou by Graham Masterton Page B

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.
    Maybe tonight
would be a night without bad dreams. Maybe the man in the long white coat would
vanish and never appear again. But somehow, depressingly, it seemed to Neil as
if they were all caught up in a strange and mysterious event over which they
had no control. He had a feeling of impending trouble, and it wouldn’t leave
him alone. He tapped his fingers on his rolltop desk
and tried to think what all these signs and drawings and dreams could mean.
    He wondered if
it might be worthwhile taking Doughty’s advice, and
driving over to Calistoga to see Billy Ritchie. If Billy Ritchie knew about the
old days in Napa and Sonoma, then maybe the name Alien would mean something to
him. Maybe he’d heard tales of a notorious man in a white duster, and perhaps
he could tell him what “Ta-La-Ha-Lu-Si” and “ Kaimus ”
meant, too.
    Susan called
from the kitchen: “Do you want to try one of these cookies while they’re still
hot?”
    “Sure thing,”
said Neil. He got out of his chair, but just as he closed the door behind him
he heard a shriek from upstairs that made him jump in nervous shock. It was a
high-pitched, terrified shriek. It was Toby.
    Neil ran up the
stairs three at a time, bounded across the landing and hurled Toby’s door wide
open. The boy was standing in the middle of the room, still clutching his
bulldozer, but staring in paralyzed terror at his wardrobe. There was an oddly
nauseating chill in the room, a chill that reminded Neil of a butcher’s cold
storage. It must have been an illusion but the floor seemed to be swaying, too,
as if there were slow, glutinous waves flowing under the carpet.
    “Toby,” Neil
said shakily. “Toby, what’s wrong?”
    Toby turned to
him with slow, spastic movements. There seemed to be something wrong with the
boy’s face. The outlines of it were blurred, almost phosphorescent and, even
though his lips were closed, he appeared to be