Neil nodded. “Okay, doctor. I’m sorry if I sounded sore.”
Doctor Crowder laid a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve got to look forward, Neil. You’ve got to think of the future, and what you can do to make your life better. Then I guarantee that you won’t be bothered by the ghosts of the past.”
Just then, Susan came out of the kitchen door. She said, “Toby’s sleeping now. I tucked him up in our bed. Do you think he’s going to be all right, doctor?”
“There’s nothing to worry yourself about at all,” Doctor Crowder told her, reassuringly. “He’s a highly strung boy, and I think that things have gotten a little out of hand, that’s all. It sometimes happens at this age, when their imagination begins to develop. They see monsters, pirates, devils, all that kind of thing. But it’ll pass, and the next you know he’ll be dreaming about girls.” v
Susan laughed, and it seemed like the first laugh for a long time. Neil took her arm and kissed her, and then reached out his hand to say good night to the doctor.
“You can call me any time,” said Doctor Crowder as they shook hands. “Don’t be shy. It’s about time we got to know each other better.”
They watched him walk across the darkened yard to his dusty black Impala. He gave them a wave, and then he drove off into the night, leaving the Fenners alone again with their fears, imagined or real. Neil scratched at his nose with the back of his hand, and then said, “I could do with a drink.”
Susan put her arm around his waist. “I bought a bottle of Riesling at the store today.
We were going to have it with dinner.”
He nuzzled her hair. It smelled fresh and good. He suddenly realized how much he relied on her, and how much he loved her. If there was any hypertension in his life, it certainly didn’t have anything to do with Susan. He took a last look out at the night, and then they went inside.
In the morning, after Neil had driven Toby to school, he came back to the house and went upstairs. He crossed the landing to Toby’s room, and gingerly opened the door.
He was pretty sure there was nobody in there. After all, he’d taken Doc Crowder up there last night, and showed him the wardrobe, and the room had been as empty and ordinary as ever. But he still pushed the door back with caution, and he still stepped in with his heart beating irregularly and fast.
The room was silent and empty. The wardrobe stood where it always had. It wasn’t even a special wardrobe. Neil had picked it up for four bucks at a garage sale in Tomales, along with a bed and his rolltop desk.
He stood for a while looking at it and then approached it. He knew that it was stupid to feel frightened, but he did. He turned the small brass key in the door and jerked it open. Inside, there was nothing but Toby’s T-shirts, neatly folded, his shorts, and his baseball outfit. No demons with wolflike faces. No men in white coats.
It seemed almost dumb to take the wardrobe out and smash it up. It was a perfectly good piece of furniture, and where was he going to find another one like it for the same price? New furniture was always so tacky.
But then he remembered the face again, and the terrible stumbling sound of the wooden man, and he remembered Toby growling, “He says you mustn’t touch the gateway. He says you will die if you touch it.”
He took out Toby’s clothes and laid them on the bed. Then he locked the wardrobe doors, and began to shuffle and hump it across the bedroom. It was a heavy old piece, but all he was going to do was slide it out of Toby’s bedroom window so that it dropped into the yard below.
Sweating and straining, he shifted the wardrobe across to the window, and then he stood it on its side while he opened the shutters. Outside it was a dull, warm day, typical north Pacific coast weather, and he could hear Susan’s radio playing pop music through the wide-open kitchen window.
He was about to turn back to the wardrobe when he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. He looked again across the dust-colored yard, and he saw the man in the long white coat standing in the grass by the fence.
A cold, unnerving chill went down his back. He closed his eyes and then looked again, and the man was still there. The man’s face was hidden under the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, but Neil could see that he had a tawny, light-colored beard, and that he was wearing a gun belt outside his coat.
The voice breathed, “Alien, for God’s sake … Alien, help me …”
And the figure was beckoning. With wide sweeps of his arm, he was beckoning.
Neil felt stunned, as if he had been anesthetized with novocaine. He stood by the open window for a long, paralyzed moment, and then he turned and ran down the stairs as fast as he could, almost twisting his ankle on the bottom stair.
Susan called, “Neil!” but he was already out of the house and running across the yard, running hard for the fence. He could hear his own panting in his ears, and the sound of his feet on the hard dust. The morning of gray clouds and warm wind jumbled past his eyes as he ran.
He half-expected the man in the long white coat to vanish. But the figure was still there, tantalizingly close, a strange white specter on a humid and ordinary day. Neil reached the fence, clambered over it, and jogged across the rough grass to where the man was standing.
Even this close, it was difficult to make out the man’s features. They were shaded so deeply by his hat that Neil could only just distinguish his dull, dark eyes.
The two of them stood ten feet apart, and the grass rustled around them. Crickets jumped and skirred, and the wind blew toward the ocean, the wind from the valleys of Sonoma and Napa and Lake counties, and the broad, harsh plain that led out to Sacramento.
Neil said, “Who are you? What do you want? You’ve been around here for days.”
When he answered, the man’s voice seemed curiously close, as if he were whispering in Neil’s ear. His lips scarcely moved, if they moved at all.
He said, “Alien?”
Neil shook his head. “I’m not Alien. Who’s Alien?”
“Alien went for help” breathed the man. “For God’s sake, Alien.”
“Who is Alien?” demanded Neil. “Tell me who Alien is and maybe I can help you.”
From the house, he heard Susan calclass="underline" “Neil? Neil?”
The man in the long white duster turned his head slightly. “Alien went for help,” he repeated, in a flat, desperate whisper. “Alien went down toward the creek for help.”
“But who is he?” asked Neil. “Who is he?”
“They’re all around us” said the man. “They’re all around us and they won’t take prisoners. For God’s sake, Alien. Help us, Alien.”
Susan was running toward them. Neil turned, and he could see her bright apron in the dull morning sunlight. He turned back again, and in a curious way the man in the long white duster was fading. He seemed to be retreating from Neil, shrinking, yet at the same time vanishing into the air. In a few seconds, he had disappeared.
Susan reached the fence, panting for breath. Neil walked back toward her silently, and took her hands across the split-log fence.
She asked, “What are you doing here? What’s happening?”
Neil looked down at her. “Didn’t you see him?” “Who?”
He turned, and pointed to the place where the man had been standing. “Don’t you see the man in the white coat? He was right over there. I was talking to him.”