Neil, even though he was trying hard to control it, was shaking. He saw, as vividly as he had the night before, the wooden arm reaching out from the wardrobe, the fierce face glaring from the polished walnut. He said, hoarsely, “Go on.”

Billy Ritchie shrugged. “I don’t know much more about it. It’s not the kind of stuff a white man gets to hear about easily.”

Neil opened another can of Coors. His throat was dry, and he felt as if he’d been hung up all afternoon in a tobacco-curing barn. He swallowed lukewarm beer, and then he said, “What would happen on the day of the dark stars? Would the medicine men need to find human beings to lodge themselves in? Would they need to use ordinary people’s bodies to get themselves reborn?”

“Sure they would,” nodded Billy Ritchie. “They’d pick themselves a bunch of folks, probably the kind of folks who wouldn’t put up too much of a mental fight, if you get what I mean, and they’d use their living bodies, their flesh and their blood and all, to come back to life.”

Neil whispered, “The children. My God, the children.”

Billy Ritchie said, “What did you say? You’ll have to speak up. I bust an eardrum when I fell off of that horse.”

Neil stood up. If what Billy Ritchie said about Indian medicine men was even half-true, it was the most terrifying thing he’d ever heard in his life. Everything fitted the random and scary events of the past few days, and made sense out of them. The day of the dark stars was going to happen soon, just the way Toby had said. Toby couldn’t have possibly known about it unless he was really being possessed for real. And the wooden man from the wardrobe convinced him.

It seemed insane, but nothing else explained what was going on. The children of Mrs. Novato’s class were being gradually infiltrated, mind and body, by the most powerful gathering of Indian medicine men that had ever taken place, at any time in America’s history. Toby, his own son, was among them.

Toby, when he thought about it, may even have been the catalyst for the whole horrifying possession. Toby was a Fenner, a descendant of Bloody Fenner, and if Bloody Fenner had helped the Indians in the past against the white man, then maybe he was doing it again. The ghost or the spirit of Toby’s forefather was back in Sonoma County, after a hundred and forty years, and preparing for another massacre.