Susan said, “I don’t understand. What sort of help did he want?”
Toby looked up at her anxiously. “I couldn’t help him,” he said, in a small voice. “I didn’t know what to do.”
“But Toby,” asked Susan, “what sort of help did he want? What did he want you to do?”
Toby was silent for a moment, and then he said, very quietly, “I don’t know.”
Susan squeezed his hand. Maybe Toby was just going through some kind of imaginative stage in his life. Maybe it was all that ridiculous stuff he saw on television and read in his comic books. She knew that some mothers censored what their children read and watched, but Neil had always insisted that a childhood of Superman and Captain Marvel had never done him any harm, and so they had always allowed Toby to see any trash that he wanted to. As it had turned out, he usually preferred quality programs and good books anyway, but maybe Doctor Strange and the Incredible Hulk had gotten his eight-year-old mind out of gear …
Toby said, “He wasn’t alive.”
Susan, astray with her own thoughts, murmured, “What?”
“The man I saw. He wasn’t alive.”
“But Toby, you said he was standing up by the fence. How could he stand up if he wasn’t alive?”
Toby lowered his eyes. “I don’t know. But he wasn’t alive.”
Susan reached for the soup bowl, and handed it to him. “You listen,” she said, in a quiet, firm voice. “Just forget about what you saw today. It was nothing to worry about. Eat your soup and your crackers, and in a little while Daddy will come up and read you a story.
Then you can get a good night’s sleep, and in the morning you won’t think anything about it.”
She left his bedroom door ajar and went downstairs. Neil has come in a half-hour ago, and was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a Lite beer and reading the paper.
He looked up when she came in.
“How is he now?” he asked her.
She went over to the range and stirred the big black iron pot of vegetable soup. The fragrance of fresh-cooked carrots and leeks filled the kitchen. She said, “He’s a little better. But he says a man frightened him.”
Neil put his paper down. “A man? What man?”
“He doesn’t know. It wasn’t like an indecent assault or anything. The man was just standing by the school fence, and Toby said he scared him somehow. The man wanted help and Toby didn’t know how to help him.”
“Help? What kind of help?”
Susan shook her head. “I don’t know. It worries me. I hope he hasn’t picked up some sort of illness. I mean, he talks as though he’s suffering from fever.”
“Did Doc Crowder check his temperature?”
“Sure. It’s normal. He said there was nothing wrong.”
Neil rubbed his chin. For some reason, he kept remembering that moment on the White Dove, the strange whisper of “Alien.” He stood up and walked to the window. It was dark outside now, and he saw his own thin reflection staring back at him from a ghostly reflected kitchen.
Susan continued, “He kept insisting he wasn’t alive.”
“Who?”
“The man by the school fence. Toby said that he wasn’t alive.”
Neil turned around. “Did he say what he meant by that?”
She shrugged. “I guess he meant it was a ghost.”
Neil let out a long, resigned breath. “A ghost. That means it was my fault. All that talk about ghosts at breakfast.”
“Well, it could have been,” said Susan. “But don’t you think you ought to call Mrs.
Novato, and find out if they’ve had any bums hanging around the school?”
Neil nodded. “Let me go talk to Toby first.”
He went up the narrow stairs onto the wood-paneled landing, and across to Toby’s room. Toby had almost finished his soup and his crackers, and there was a little more color in his cheeks than before. Neil pulled a bentwood chair across and straddled it, looking at his son with affection.
“Hi,” he said gently.
“Hi,” said Toby.
“How was the soup?” asked Neil.
Toby put the empty dish back on his bedside table. “It was good. I feel better now.
Maybe I could get up and watch the flying robot.”
“Maybe you could stay in bed and have a rest.”
“I’m not sick, Daddy. Honest. I just fainted a little.”
Neil grinned. “A little faint is plenty.”
Toby showed him the snap-together Cadillac. “That’s neat, isn’t it? You don’t have to have glue. It just snaps together.”
Neil admired it. “When I was a kid, you had to carve the pieces out yourself, out of balsa wood,” he said. “You had to sand ‘em smooth, and stick ‘em together, and do it all from scratch.”
“That sounds like hard work,” said Toby, sympathetically.
Neil smiled, but didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “Toby, that man you saw. Can you tell me what he looked like?”
Toby lowered his eyes.
“It’s pretty important, Toby,” Neil told him. “The point is, if there really was a man there, and he’s been prowling around the schoolhouse, then the police ought to know.”
Toby was silent.
Neil reached over and took his hand. “Toby,” he said. “I want you to tell me what the man looked like. This isn’t a game. This is for real.”
Toby swallowed, and then he whispered, “He was tall, and he had a hat like a cowboy, and one of those * long white coats that cowboys used to wear.” “A duster, you mean.”
Toby nodded. “He had a beard, I think. A kind of a light-colored beard. And that was all.”
Neil said, “Mommy told me you thought he wasn’t alive.”
“He wasn’t.”
“What makes you think that?” “He just wasn’t. I know he wasn’t” “Was he a ghost?”
Toby lowered his eyes again. He fidgeted with his small fingers, and there was a hint of high color on his cheeks. He didn’t say anything, but then he didn’t know what to say. The man at the schoolhouse hadn’t been a ghost in the way that most people think about ghosts. He hadn’t come to haunt anybody. He had to come to ask for help, some terrible kind of help that Toby couldn’t even begin to understand. The feeling of need that came from the man in the long white duster had been so strong that Toby, just before he fainted, had felt that the man was real and that he, Toby, was a ghost, nothing but a shade of a boy.
Neil said, “I think it’s time you got some sleep now, don’t you? When you wake up in the morning, you’ll have gotten over all this.”
Toby said, “He won’t come again, will he? You see, I don’t know what to do when he comes. I don’t know how to help him.”
“He won’t come again. At least, I don’t believe so.”
Toby snuggled down in bed, and Neil tucked him in. He took the empty soup dish, and stood there for a while, looking down at his son’s mop of sun-bleached hair, at those eyes screwed up in a conscientious attempt at sleep, at those cheeks that were still soft and chubby.
He knelt down beside the bed and touched Toby’s forehead. Then he whispered, “If you do see that man again, you call me, you hear? You call me loud and I’ll come running.”
Toby opened one eye. “Yes, sir,” he said, in a husky voice, and then began the long dark slide into sleep.
He was awakened by the sound of the shed door banging. It was dark, very dark, and there was a rippling wind blowing from the sea. The drapes rose and fell like a huge beast breathing, and it sounded as if every loose floorboard and doorknob in the whole house was being rattled by cold, inquisitive drafts.
He lay there a while, listening. He wished very much he could go back to sleep again. He wished it was morning, and he wished his parents’ room wasn’t so far away, and more than anything he wished he was anyplace else but alone in this bed in the middle of this black breezy night, with the house stirring and shifting as if it had come to life.