Neil scratched the back of his neck. “I guess not. The only difference is, it’s true. I saw it as plain as I can see you now.”

“That’s what most people say, when they’ve seen an unidentified flying object—or a ghost. There used to be a woman who lived up at Oakmont, and she swore blind that she’d seen phantom riders crossing her backyard, not just once, but every once in a while.”

Neil said, “Doctor, you have to admit that some of this is spooky. What about all these schoolchildren having the same nightmare? There has to be something in that.”

“Well,” said Doctor Crowder, “I think that Mrs. Novato put her finger on it when she talked about mild collective hysteria. Children are open to any kind of silly idea, and it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for a whole school to have the same kind of nightmare. Mind you, they could be pulling your leg. They may just have got together and cooked up this whole thing to scare you witless.”

Neil looked at the doctor in disappointment. “You don’t really think that, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” Doctor Crowder told him. “But you have to investigate every possibility before you start jumping off in all kinds of directions shouting about spirits and demons. In my book, Neil Fenner, spirits and demons don’t exist. They’re a figment of man’s imagination, and the only way they’ll ever take hold of a man, or a boy, is if that man or that boy allows his imagination to run away with him.”

“What are you trying to tell me, doctor? You’re trying to say that I’m getting hysterical, too?”

Doctor Crowder raised his hand in a pacifying gesture and firmly shook his head. “I’m not trying to tell you that at all. I wouldn’t presume. But what I am saying is that if Toby’s suffering from this kind of mild frenzy, then it’s up to you to stay as stable and as rational as you possibly can, because otherwise you’ll only make him worse.”

Neil stood up, and took a few testy paces up and down the boardwalk. “Doctor,” he said, “I’m as rational and stable as you are. I swear to you, deaf, dumb, and blind, that I saw that wooden man come out of the wardrobe, and what’s more, Susan heard him. We can’t both be wrong.”

“You could have heard anything. A window banging, maybe.”

“It was a wooden demon, dammit! That’s what it was, and nobody can persuade me otherwise. I don’t know why it was there, or what it really was, or what the hell was going on, but I saw it, and I heard it, and I was as scared as I’ve ever been in my whole life.”