Biting his lip with uncertainty, Neil rose to his feet. The fog passed in front of the figure in veil after veil, but there was no question at all. It was a man, or the ghost of a man. He wore a dark broad-brimmed hat and a duster, and he stood on the water as if it was dry land. Neil shouted, “Hey! You!” but his voice sounded flat and weak in the fog, and the man took no notice at all.
Panicking, Neil turned back to the wharf and called: “Doughty! Doughty! Come take a look at this! For Christ’s sake! Come take a look at this!” A voice whispered, “Alien.
please, Alien …” “Doughty!” yelled Neil.
The door of the cocktail bar opened, and Dave Co”-way from the fish stall came out, a tall red-bearded man with a well-known line of sarcasm. “Anything wrong there, Neil?” he called out.
“Dave, do you see something out there in the bay or am I crazy?” Neil shouted.
Dave peered out at the fog. It was now so thick that the man had almost disappeared. There was just a fading trace of his white coat.
Dave said, “Sure, I see something. You’re not crazy after all.”
“Tell me what you see! What is it?” “Well,” said Dave, “I wouldn’t like to stick my neck out, but I’d say that’s fog.” Neil, tense, let out a sharp, exasperated breath. “Did I say something wrong?” asked Dave. “It’s not fog? It’s gray lint? It’s cotton candy maybe?”
Neil shook his head. “Forget it. It was just an optical illusion.”
Dave strolled up toward him. “You really thought you saw something out there? What did you think it
was?”
“I don’t know,” said Neil. “It looked so weird I just wanted a second opinion.”
“You can tell me,” Dave encouraged him. “I won’t laugh at you for longer than a half-hour.”
Neil turned away. “I guess it was just my imagination. Forget it.”
“You didn’t tell me what it was, so how can I forget it?”
Neil put down his ropework, “All right,” he said, “I thought I saw somebody, a man, standing out there in the bay.”
“Standing?”
“That’s right. Standing on the water, just the way you’re standing on that jetty.”
Dave pulled a face. “Well, you told me it was crazy, and you’re right. Are you sure you haven’t been reading the Bible too heavily lately?”
“Dave,” asked Neil, “will you just forget it? It was a trick of the light.”
“Maybe he was surfing and you didn’t notice the surfboard in the fog,” suggested Dave. “Or maybe he was standing on top of a submarine.”
“Dave, please forget I ever told you,” said Neil. “I’m not in the mood for jokes.”
“Nor would I be, if I’d seen a guy standing on the water in the middle of the bay,” said Dave, with weighty mock seriousness. “Nor would I be.”
That afternoon, Toby brought home a large yellow Manila envelope from school, along with a note from Mrs. Novato. While Toby went out to play with his toy bulldozer, Neil took the package into the parlor and sat down at his old rolltop desk.
Susan came in from the kitchen in her apron and slippers, and said, “What’s that?”
Neil looked at her, and gave a wry little smile. “It’s an experiment, I guess.”
Susan wiped her floury hands on her apron. She’d been making apple cookies, and she smelled of fresh cooking apples and butter. “An experiment?” she asked him.
“You mean, something to do with school?”
He nodded. “You remember Toby kept on about Alien in his nightmares? Well, this morning, when I took him to school, I heard one of the other kids talking about Alien, too, sb I asked Mrs. Novato to let me talk to the class for a couple of minutes. I asked them if any one of them had dreamed dreams like Toby.”
“Well? And had they?”
Neil opened the envelope. “There are twenty-one kids in that class, honey, and every single one of them put up a hand to say yes.”
Susan looked confused. “You mean-they’d all had the same nightmare? Surely they were just pulling your leg, acting like kids.”
“I don’t know what nightmares they’d had. But I asked them to draw what they’d seen in their dreams, and Mrs. Novato agreed to let them do it during their art lesson.
Here’s a note she sent along.”
Susan took the note and scanned it quickly.
It read:
Dear Mr. Fenner,
I am sending you the drawings the children made this afternoon in the hope that they might put your mind at rest. It seems to me that my first opinion of mild collective hysteria is the correct one. I am sure that these nightmares will pass once a new craze starts. There are already signs that Crackling Candy is talking hold! By the way, if Toby wishes to join our little expedition to Lake Berryessa next Wednesday, please give him $1.35 to bring to school tomorrow.
Yours, Nora Novato
Neil rubbed his cheek. “Well,” he said slowly, “that doesn’t sound too promising, does it?”
“I think it sounds marvelous,” said Susan. “The sooner Toby stops having those awful dreams, the better.”
“Susan, it’s not just dreams. It’s waking visions as well. What about that old man’s face I saw on Toby last night? What about the man in the white coat that Toby saw?
What about the guy standing on the bay?”
Susan stared at him. “What guy standing on what bay? What are you talking about?”
He glanced at her, and then he lowered his eyes. “I’m sorry. I was meaning to tell you, but I didn’t know how. It was just something that happened today. Or rather it was something I thought happened today.”
She leaned forward and put her arm around his shoulder. “You didn’t know how to tell me? But Neil, I’m as worried about all this as you are! I’m your wife. That’s what I’m here for, to confide in.”
He said, huskily, “Sure, honey, I know. It’s just that it’s kind of hard to admit to yourself that you might be flipping your lid, or suffering from some kind of kids’
hysteria.”
“Don’t be so ridiculous! If you saw something, you saw it. Maybe there’s a natural explanation. Maybe it was some land of mirage. But if you saw it, that’s it, I believe you.”
He shrugged. “I’m glad you’ve got some confidence in me. I’m not sure that I’ve got much confidence in myself.”
Susan kissed his hah”. “I love you,” she said simply. “If there’s something making you worried, then it worries me, too. Don’t forget that.”
Neil reached inside the Manila envelope and took out a sheaf of brightly colored drawings. Susan drew up a chair beside him, and they looked through them, one by one.
The drawings, although they varied in style and color, were strangely alike. They showed trees, mountains, and struggling figures. Some of them depicted twenty or thirty stick people, their arms all flung up in the air, with splashes of scribbled red all around. Others showed only one or two people, lying on their backs amid the greenery. There were arrows flying through the air in about a dozen drawings, and in others there were men holding rifles.
Only about eight or nine children had written names or words beside their pictures.
Toby had written “Alien, help.” Daniel Soscol had written “Alun” and then crossed it out. Debbie Spurr had put down “Alien, Alien, didn’t come back.”
There were some odd names, too. “Ta-La-Ha-Lu-Si” was written in heavy green crayon on one picture. Another bore the legend “Kaimus.” Yet another said
“Oweaoo” and “Sokwet.”
Susan and Neil spent twenty minutes going through the drawings, but in the end they laid them down on the desk and looked at each other in bewilderment.
“I don’t know what the hell it all means,” admitted Neil. “It just doesn’t seem to make any kind of sense at all.”