He held her close. He was trembling, and he felt shocked, but he had the feeling that he had been saved by some kind of spiritual intervention, that a ghostly force had recognized his danger and come to save him. It gave him, for the first time since Toby had started having nightmares, a feeling of strength and confidence. He gently stroked Susan’s hair and said, “Don’t cry. I think we’re going to make it. I think we’re going to be all right.”

She looked up at him, her face smudged with tears.

“But what did you do in here?” she asked him. “Why is everything burned?”

He stared at her. It occurred to him, with a feeling of awful coldness, that she still didn’t believe what was going on. She hadn’t seen the wooden figure, after all. She had heard nothing but noises. Now, he was standing amid cinders and ashes, with no way to prove what he had seen or heard.

He said, slowly, “The wooden man was here. That’s all that’s left of him.”

“The wooden man?” she frowned. “Neil, I—”

He pointed savagely toward the wardrobe. “The wooden man was here and he talked to me. He told me who he was, and he told me what was happening, and everything that old-timer told me up in Calistoga was right. The Indian medicine men are being reborn, in the bodies of our children, and they’re going to kill as many white men as they possibly can.”

“Neil, stop it! Neil, please, it’s just your imagination!”

“What about the way Toby spoke downstairs? You think that’s imagination?”

Susan held him tight. “Toby’s just unsettled, that’s all. He sees you behaving like this, and it scares him. He says things because he’s sensitive, because he doesn’t understand what’s happening.”

“He says things because he’s possessed by a Red Indian magician!” shouted Neil. “He says things because Misquamacus makes him!”

“Oh, yes?” said a voice. “And who’s Misquamacus?”

Neil looked up. On the landing, in his neatly laundered police uniform, stood Officer Turnbull. He was a lean, punctilious cop with a blue chin and a sharply pointed nose, and Neil had never particularly liked him. He stepped into the room and surveyed the ashes and the burned furnishings with professional detachment.

Neil let Susan go, and stood watching Officer Turnbull poke around without speaking. After a while, Officer Turnbull gave him a dry smile, and said, “You didn’t answer my question yet.”

“I was speaking metaphorically,” mumbled Neil. “It wasn’t intended to be taken as the literal truth.”

Officer Turnbull eyed him for a few seconds. Then he said, “I see. And what’s the literal truth of what happened here? You decide to have a cookin instead of a cookout?”