Revenge of the Manitou Read Online Free PDF Page A

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
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