He thought he heard a sound. A slow, deliberate creak, like a heavy foot pressing on a stair tread. He held his breath until he was almost bursting, listening, listening, but he didn’t hear the noise again. The drapes rustled and swished, and outside in the night the shed door banged and paused and banged again. The voice whispered:
“Alien …” He didn’t want to hear it. He buried his head under the bedclothes, and lay there in hot darkness, his heart pounding, almost stifling under the blankets and quilted comforter. He lay there for almost five minutes, but then a terrible thought occurred to him. Supposing, while he was hiding under the bedclothes, the man in the long white duster had come into the room, and was standing over him?
Toby came struggling up from the blankets like a diver coming up for air. He raised a flushed face from the bed, ready to encounter any kind of terror. But the room was still empty, and the curtains were still rising and falling, and the only sounds were those winds that shook the sash windows and persistently tried the doors. He was scared now. Really, desperately scared. In a tiny, inaudible voice, he called,
“Daddy.”
There was no reply. The house was as dark and noisy as before. But he was sure he could hear footsteps somewhere. He was sure the tall man in the wide-brimmed hat and the long duster was coming up the stairs. He was trembling all over, but he didn’t know what to do.
“Alien, for God’s sake …,” whispered the voice. Toby whimpered no and tried not to look toward the foxy whorls of wood on the wardrobe door, but his fright was so compelling that he couldn’t look away. The whorls twisted, and that gray shadowy face began to materialize, that tired anguished face in its prison of polished wood.
“Alien,” pleaded the voice, monotonously. “Alien … help me … for God’s sake, Alien, help me …”
Toby sat up in bed, rigid and white. The face was looking his way, and yet it didn’t appear to see him. It was gaunt and bearded, and it had the silvery quality of a photograph. Yet its lips moved as it spoke, and its eyes opened and closed in slow, regular blinking movements.
“I’m not Alien,” said Toby, in a small voice. “I’m not Alien, I’m Toby. I can’t help you.
I’m not Alien at all.”
“Alien, help me …” insisted the gray face.
“I can’t” wept Toby. “I don’t know what you want. I can’t.”
“Alien …,” moaned the voice. “Alien, for the love of God … bring them up to the peak … bring them up, or we’re lost …”
Toby cried, “I can’t! I can’t! I don’t know what you mean!”
It seemed at that moment as if the face truly opened its eyes at last. It stared at Toby, and as it stared, Toby felt as if he was being blown by a wind that came from far away and long ago, as if he was standing somewhere out in the open, but under a sky that was a hundred years gone. He had the eerie, terrifying sensation that the face on the wardrobe was real, and that the wardrobe wasn’t a wardrobe at all. He could hear someone calling far off to his left, but for some reason he was incapable of turning his head. The gray, bearded face kept him transfixed.
“Alien,” said the face, in a voice that sounded normal and very close. “Alien, I can’t hold out much longer without you.”
Toby found himself slurring an answer. His own voice seemed to echo and reverberate inside his head, as if he was speaking to himself from another room.
“I’ll do what I can,” he said slowly. “Just you hold out the best way you know how, arid I’ll do what I can.”
He turned and looked down to his left. He knew there was a valley down that way, and he knew that there was help if he could only make it in time. The sun was three hours above the far mountains, and he wasn’t sure that was going to give him long enough. He reckoned his best bet was to ride along the creek, but even then they might run into some nasty surprises.
He said, “Give me till sundown. I’ll do my level darndest.”
Neil came along the landing, tying up his bathrobe. He was sure that he’d heard Toby calling out a few moments ago, although everything seemed quiet now. He’d had a hard day on the White Dove, blow-torching off the discolored paint and the varnish, and he’d been deep in a bottomless sleep. As for Susan, you could have danced a rumba on the bed and she would never have stirred.
As he walked past the grandfather clock, ticking slowly and steadily in its dark coffin, he thought he heard voices. Deep, gruff voices, with a strange twang to them. He paused, listening, and then he went on tiptoe to Toby’s half-open bedroom door.
He peered through the crack in the doorjamb” but he couldn’t see anything. Then he heard one of those gruff voices again, a voice that said, “I’ll do what I can. Just you hold out the best way you know how.”
Neil hesitated. What the hell was going on? He pushed open Toby’s door, and there was Toby, kneeling up on the comforter in his striped pajamas, looking away across the room. It seemed unusually cold and windy, and Neil shivered.
He said, “Toby?” and Toby turned around.
It took Neil seconds upon horrified seconds to realize what he was looking at.
Instead of Toby’s round young face, he was looking into the lined, weatherbeaten face of an old man, a man whose expression was as tough and cold and self-sufficient as a snake’s.
He jerked involuntarily. But then he stared at this grotesque apparition of an old man’s face on his young son’s body, and he whispered, “Who are you? What’s happened to my son? Where’s Toby?”
The old face nodded, as if it hadn’t even heard him. It looked back across the room with its faded, crow’s-footed eyes, and said, “Give me till sundown. I’ll do my level darndest”
TWO
Neil was shaking and shaking Toby as if he wanted to shake that terrible head right off him. But then, through the blindness of his fright and his anxiety, he heard Toby crying “Daddy-daddy!” and he stopped shaking and looked down at his son in bewilderment.
The face, the image of a face, had vanished. Toby was just Toby, and there were tears in his eyes from being battered so hard. Neil couldn’t say anything, couldn’t speak at all, but he held Toby close, and stroked his head, and rocked backward and forward on the bed to soothe him.
Susan came into the room, bleary with sleep. “Neil- what’s happening!”
Neil’s throat was choked with fright and tears. He just shook his head, and cradled Toby closer.
Susan said, “I heard somebody shouting. It didn’t sound like you at all. Neil-what’s happening? What’s going on here?”
Neil took a deep breath. “I don’t know. It just seems crazy.”
“But what was it?”
Neil ran his fingers through Toby’s hair, and then sat his son up straight so that he could take a look at.him. Toby was tired, with plum-colored circles under his eyes, and he was pale, but otherwise he looked all right. All trace of that lined, hard-bitten face had vanished.
Neil said, “There’s something going on here, Susan. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a bad dream and it’s not Toby’s imagination.”
“What do you mean-‘something’? What kind of a something?”
“I don’t have any idea. But I heard voices coming out of this room tonight, and when I came in here, Toby was different.”
“Different?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Neil. “It looked as though he was wearing some kind of a mask, only it wasn’t a mask at all. He looked like an old man.”
“An old man? Are you kidding me, Neil?”
Neil held Toby close again. He could feel the boy’s heart beating against his own heart, a birdlike flutter. He said, dryly, “I wouldn’t kid you, Susan. You know that. I came in here and Toby had his back to me. He turned around and there he was, with this lined old face.”