Revenge of the Manitou Read Online Free PDF

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, weather-beaten 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.”
    “But I don’t
understand. What do you mean, a lined old face?”
    “For Christ’s
sake, Susan, I don’t understand, either. But that’s what it was. He looked like
an old man.” Susan bent down and stroked Toby’s smooth, pale cheek. “I’m
calling Doctor Crowder,” she said. “There’s something wrong here, and I want to
know what.”
    Toby said
softly, “I’m all right, Daddy. I’m really all right.”
    Susan took Toby
from Neil’s arms, and cuddled him. He seemed so thin and bony and vulnerable in
his blue-striped pajamas. She whispered in