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.”