Read Online Revenge of the Manitou by Graham Masterton - Free Book Online

speaking. It was his eyes that
frightened Neil the most, though.
    They weren’t
the eyes of a child at all. They were old, flat, and as dead as iron.
    A deep, turgid
groaning noise shook the room. It was a groan like a ship’s timbers being
crushed by pack ice. A groan like Jim had given when the Buick collapsed onto
his chest, hugely amplified. Neil reached out his hand for Toby, but his son
seemed to have shrunk miles and miles beyond reach, and there was a cold wind
blowing that stiffened the father’s limbs and slowed him down.
    Neil turned and
looked toward the wardrobe. What he saw then almost convinced him that he was
going crazy, that his mind had finally let go. In the wood itself he could see
a fierce, feral face, like a face under the surface of a polished pond. It
stared at him with such viciousness and malevolence that he couldn’t take his eyes
away from it. But far more uncanny and terrifying was that a hand was reaching
out of the flat walnut veneer, a hand that was made of shiny wood, yet alive.
It clawed toward him, sharp-nailed and vicious, and it ripped at his shirt as
he lunged toward Toby and tried to pick the boy up in his arms.
    He didn’t look
any more. If he looked, he knew that his strength and his sanity would break
down. He lifted Toby over his shoulder, and blindly turned back toward the
bedroom door, shielding his face from the sight of that wolfish face in the
wardrobe.
    Susan was
halfway up the stairs toward them as Neil collapsed on the landing, and Toby
rolled to the floor beside him. Neil screamed, “The door! Close the doorl ” and she quickly slammed it and turned the key.
    “Toby! Neil! What’s happening?” she said. “There was such a
noise up here, I didn’t-”
    Neil held her
arm. “It’s in there,” he told her. His voice was unsteady and feverish. “What
Toby saw in his nightmare, it isn’t a nightmare. It’s
real, and it’s in there. There was a face, Susan. A goddamned
face in the wardrobe. And a hand that came right out of the wood. Right out of the damned wood!”
    He climbed to
his feet. She tried to steady him, but he was too jumpy to be touched and he
pushed her away. She knelt down beside Toby, who was shivering and quaking, and
held him close.
    “Listen,”
whispered Neil. “Listen, you can hear it.”
    They were
silent. They heard a soft, peculiar noise, like a wind whistling across a
mountain. Then they heard a sound that made Neil press his hands against his
face, a sound so unnatural and frightening that they could scarcely bear to
listen.
    Across the
floor of the bedroom, wooden feet walked. Stumbling,
uncertain steps. And wooden hands groped across the walls, fumbling for
the door.

THREE
    A fter a few minutes, the noises stopped. They waited breathless-on
the landing for almost ten minutes, but there was silence.
    Susan asked
quietly, “What was it? Neil, what was it?”
    He was very
drawn and pale. He felt as if his brain had been given a severe electric shock.
His lips and his tongue didn’t seem to coordinate properly, so that when he
spoke, he jumbled his words.
    “I don’t know.
It was like a devil. It came right out of the wood, and it must have been ma ,de of wood. A
wooden devil, walking about.”
    “Neil-things
like that just don’t happen. It must have been the wind blowing the door or
something. Maybe you saw your own reflection.”
    Neil, leaning
against the wall, shook his head slowly and deliberately.
    “Well, maybe it
was some kind of hallucination,” Susan suggested. “I mean, Neil, things like
that just don’t happen. They don’t exist. A man made of wood stepping out of
the wardrobe door? It’s insane.”
    Neil looked
down at her sharply. She realized what she’d said, and she reached up to hold
his hand, and squeeze it. “Oh, Neil, I didn’t mean-”
    He pulled away
from her, and ran both hands through his hair. “You don’t have to say you’re
sorry,” he told her, hoarsely. “You’re probably