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 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, weatherbeaten 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.”

2

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.”