He waited and waited, but nothing happened. Five minutes passed. Ten. He lifted his blond, tousled head from the pillow, and looked around the room with widened eyes. There was the carved pine footboard, at the end of his bed. There was the walnut wardrobe. There was his toy box, its lid only half-closed because of the model tanks and cranes and baseball gloves that were always crammed in there.

There were his clothes, his jeans and his T-shirt, over the back of his upright ladder-backed chair.

He waited a little longer, frowning. Then he carefully climbed out of bed, and walked across to the window. Outside, under a grayish sky of torn clouds and fitful predawn winds, a night heron called kwawk, kwawk, and a wooden door banged and banged. He looked down at the untidy backyard, and the leaning fence that separated the Fenners’ house from the grassy dunes of the Sonoma coastline. There was nobody there.

He went back to bed, and pulled the sheets almost over his head. He knew it was silly, because his daddy had told him it was silly. But somehow tonight was different from those times when he was just afraid of the shadows, or overexcited from watching flying-saucer movies on television. Tonight, there was someone there. Someone who sighed.

He lay there tense for nearly twenty minutes. The wooden door kept banging, with mindless regularity, but he didn’t hear anything else. After a while, his eyes began to close. He jerked awake once, but then they closed again, and he slept.

It was the worst nightmare he had ever had. It didn’t seem as though he was dreaming at all. He rose from his bed, and turned toward the wardrobe, his head moving in an odd, stiff way. The grain of the walnut on the wardrobe doors had always disturbed him a little, because it was figured with foxlike faces. Now, it was terrifying. It seemed as if there was someone inside the surface of the wood, someone who was calling out to him, trying desperately to tell him something. Someone who was trapped, but also frightening.

He could hear a voice, like the voice of someone speaking through a thick glass window. “…Allen… Allen… for God’s sake, Allen… for God’s sake, help me… Allen…,” the voice called.

The boy went closer to the wardrobe, one hand raised in front of him, as if he was going to touch the wood to find where the voice was coming from. Dimly, scarcely visible except as a faint luminosity on the varnish, he could make out a gray face, a face whose lips were moving in a blurry plea for mercy, for assistance, for some way out of an unimaginable hell.

“Allen…” pleaded the voice, monotonously. “Allen… for God’s sake…”

The boy whispered, “Who’s Allen? Who’s Allen? My name’s Toby. I’m Toby Fenner. Who’s Allen?”