Revenge of the Manitou by Graham Masterton Page A

itself in. It can take
on plenty of other shapes, sure. The Narragan -sets,
for instance, used to have stories about medicine men who came back to life by using rocks for flesh, or water, or even wood. There’s some pretty hair-rising stories about the stone men
of the Narragansets who used to walk at night. But a
man made of rock or wood is just as vulnerable as rock or wood, and so the
medicine man wouldn’t take on that kind of flesh unless he had nothing else.”
    Neil, even
though he was trying hard to control it, was shaking. He saw, as vividly as he
had the night before, the wooden arm reaching out from the wardrobe, the fierce
face glaring from the polished walnut. He said, hoarsely, “Go on.”
    Billy Ritchie
shrugged. “I don’t know much more about it. It’s not the kind of stuff a white
man gets to hear about easily.”
    Neil opened
another can of Coors. His throat was dry, and he felt as if he’d been hung up
all afternoon in a tobacco-curing barn. He swallowed lukewarm beer, and then he
said, “What would happen on the day of the dark stars? Would the medicine men
need to find human beings to lodge themselves in? Would they need to use
ordinary people’s bodies to get themselves reborn?”
    “Sure they
would,” nodded Billy Ritchie. “They’d pick themselves a bunch of folks,
probably the land of folks who wouldn’t put up too much of a mental fight, if
you get what I mean, and they’d use their living bodies, their flesh and their
blood and all, to come back to life.”
    Neil whispered,
“The children. My God, the children.”
    Billy Ritchie
said, “What did you say? You’ll have to speak up. I bust an eardrum when I fell
off of that horse.”
    Neil stood up.
If what Billy Ritchie said about Indian medicine men was even half-true, it was
the most terrifying thing he’d ever heard in his life. Everything fitted the
random and scary events of the past few days, and made sense out of them. The
day of the dark stars was going to happen soon, just the way Toby had said.
Toby couldn’t have possibly known about it unless he was really being possessed
for real. And the wooden man from the wardrobe convinced him.
    It seemed
insane, but nothing else explained what was going on. The children of Mrs.
Novato’s class were being gradually infiltrated, mind and body, by the most
powerful gathering of Indian medicine men that had ever taken place, at any
time in America’s history. Toby, his own son, was among them.
    Toby, when he
thought about it, may even have been the catalyst for the whole horrifying
possession. Toby was a Fenner , a descendant of Bloody Fenner , and if Bloody Fenner had helped the Indians in the past against the white man, then maybe he was
doing it again. The ghost or the spirit of Toby’s forefather was back in Sonoma
County, after a hundred and forty years, and preparing for another massacre.
    Neil thought
about the man in the long white duster. The man who kept
begging for help.
    Maybe he was a
ghost, too-a kind of sad warning stirred up from the past. From what he said,
he may have been one of the twenty settlers who died up at Conn Creek. One of the innocent folks who had died at the hands of the Wappos while Bloody Fenner pretended to ride off for help.
    Neil took Billy
Ritchie’s hand and squeezed it
    “You’ve been a
lot of help,” he said softly.
    “What did you
say?” demanded Billy.
    “I said , you’ve been a lot of help. I’m beginning to understand
things that didn’t make any sense before.” Billy Ritchie set down his bourbon
glass. He stared up at Neil with a sharp, canny look in his eye.
    “You’re
worried, aren’t you?” he said.
    “A little,”
admitted Neil.
    “You think it’s
coming-the day of the dark stars?”
    “I’ve seen some
signs.”
    “What kind of
signs?”
    “I’ve seen a
wooden man. Least, I think I have. And I’ve heard voices from the people who
were killed up at Las Posadas.”
    Billy Ritchie
rubbed his chin. “It doesn’t