He was about to close the door when he heard Toby stirring in his bed. The boy whimpered and moaned, and seemed to struggle for a while with his sheets. Harry turned and raised a questioning eyebrow, but Neil said, “I think he’s all right. He’s been pretty restless ever since the dreams started.”

Harry gave a small, nervous grunt, and made sure that he kept his eye on Toby’s sleeping body until Neil had closed the door. It was only when they were halfway down the landing that both of them felt a strange cold surge in the air, as if an ocean wave had suddenly rippled under the rug. The grandfather clock at the end of the landing abruptly stopped ticking, and there was a sharp odor in the air, like burnt electricity.

Harry said, in a hollow voice, “He knows I’m here.”

“How can he?” asked Neil.

“He knows, that’s all. It’s what he’s been waiting for.”

Neil looked at Harry with a face lined with exhaustion and anxiety. “I just hope we’ve got the strength to fight this thing,” he said, hoarsely. “I just hope to God we’ve got the strength.”

*

On Sunday afternoon, a dry windy afternoon of dust-storms and tumbling newspapers, Harry and Neil and Toby drove around Bodega to visit Toby’s classmates at home. Toby had been quiet and pale all morning, but he hadn’t objected when Neil ushered him into the battered Pinto, and asked him to direct Harry to each of his friends’ houses. He was Toby today, with no sign of the malevolent personality of Misquamacus, although he was unusually listless and distracted. If Neil hadn’t known what was wrong with him, he might have guessed that he was coming down with flu.

“Singing Rock said it was very important to take a look at the opposition,” remarked Harry, smoking a Camel Light down to halfway and tossing the butt out of the window. “He said we need to know names, or signs, or anything which might tell us who these twenty-two medicine men are. Some medicine men, even the most famous, had weak spots we could use to break them up.”

“You think Toby’s classmates are really going to tell us that stuff?”

Harry shook his head. “Of course not. But we have to do our best. If we could find out just one name, that’d be something.”

Toby said flatly, “Here. This is Andy Beaver’s house, right here.”

They pulled up outside a small weatherboard house with an overgrown veranda and a yard full of rye grass and strutting chickens. Henry Beaver, in denims and suspenders, was sitting on the veranda reading the San Francisco Sunday Examiner. Andy was jumping through the grass with a toy pistol, playing explorer.

Harry got out of the car and leaned against the roof.

“How do you do,” he called to Mr. Beaver.