The Altar

waking him up without being cruel; he never had liked mornings.

He crawled out of bed, remembering the ordeal of the night before and silently thanking God that his son was all right. It could have been a real tragedy.

He came downstairs and saw that Todd and Vickie were already having breakfast. Todd was playing with his Corn Flakes instead of eating them, and Vickie nibbled on a piece of toast and watched him with a worried expression.

“Morning,” Erik said.

“Morning,” Vickie replied, while Todd looked up at his father and forced a smile.

“How you doing, Sport?” Erik asked, tousling his son’s hair as he shared a nervous smile with Vickie.

Todd shrugged.

“I think he’s got a fever,” Vickie said.

Erik placed his hand over Todd’s forehead. “He does feel warm. Maybe you’d better get some Tylenol into him.”

“Already did.”

He poured himself a large mug of coffee, dumped in two spoonfuls of powdered creamer and three spoons of sugar and then sat down at the table.

“Do you want any breakfast?”

“No, thanks. It’s too early to eat.”

“It’s nine o’clock.”

“That’s right. It’s too early. You know I never eat before noon.”

“You writers,” Vickie said, shaking her head.

They quickly ran out of small talk and watched Todd absently playing with his cereal.

“So, Todd,” Erik said, trying to act nonchalant. “Want to talk about what happened last night?”

“No,” the boy mumbled, looking down into his cereal bowl.

Erik looked helplessly at his wife. The boy had refused to talk last night, but they had hoped he’d say something this morning, in the light of day. The kid had been frightened terribly-they all had.

“It’s all right, Todd, Erik said in a reassuring voice. “I’m not going to yell at you. I’m not even going to punish you. I don’t think you’ll be pulling that stunt again in a hurry. We just want to know what happened. What ever possessed you to go off into the woods like that anyway?”

Todd shivered as if an ice cube had slithered down his back.

“Nothin’,” he said softly, still staring down.

“He doesn’t want to talk, Erik. He doesn’t feel well.”

“I want to know what happened, Vic.”

“He got lost in the woods, for God’s sake. It was darker than pitch out there. That’s enough to scare the hell out of anyone. Hey, I was scared. And so were you. Admit it.”

“I was afraid for Todd,” he said, telling only half the truth. He wanted to tell her about the scream he’d heard, and about his own terror of the woods. But he was embarrassed by his own weakness. And the scream-who knew what he had really heard.

“He’ll tell us about it when he’s ready,” she said.

“All right. All right. I’ll leave him alone, ok?”

Erik finished his coffee and poured himself a second mugful.

“How’d we do on getting the house in order?” he asked, deliberately changing the subject.

“Pretty good. The kitchen’s in good shape, and so is the bedroom. The living room’s a mess, though. But at least we can eat and sleep.”

“Well, don’t kill yourself. Wait until I get home before you do any heavy stuff.”

“I will. You didn’t think doing a radio talk show would get you out of doing work, did you?”

“Hey, I scheduled this appointment a month ago. How was I supposed to know we’d still be unpacking?”

“You had it planned all along,” she teased. “I know your kind. You’ll do anything to avoid an honest day’s work. But I’m wise to your tricks.”

“That’s why I became a writer,” he said, and laughed. Then he looked over at Todd who was still stone- faced.

“So what do you say, Sport? Are you going to listen to your Dad on the radio this afternoon?”

Todd suddenly looked up at him as if he’d just come back from another world. He looked into his father’s eyes for a long moment, and Erik realized that his eyes looked like those of a man, not a little boy. Then he spoke in a soft, trembling voice.

“The stone bled.”

“What?”

“The giant stone. In the woods. I hit it with my hammer and…it bled. The stone bled.”

Then he broke out in a fit of sobbing and returned to being a 10-year-old boy again. Vickie rushed to his side to hug him. She spoke soothingly, trying to calm him down.

“Did you dream about a stone?” Erik asked.

“No!” he said, meeting his father’s eyes. “It wasn’t a dream. It was real! The stone bled and it was real!”

“It’s ok,” Vickie said. “Whatever happened, it’s over now. Come on. Let’s go to your room. I think you should get some rest.”

Trembling with a dreadful nervousness of his own, Erik watched them go up the stairs.

“Ever since he saw that damned Indian,” Erik muttered to himself.

And as he remembered Dovecrest’s piercing, black eyes, the hair on his own back tingled with the electricity of fear.

2

Erik arrived at the radio station at 11:30, a half hour before he was scheduled to go on the air. An attractive blond receptionist ushered him into a small waiting room where he sat down and pretended to thumb through an old Time magazine.

He found that he couldn’t concentrate on either the magazine or what he’d planned to say for the two-hour talk show. He was too worried about Todd.

As if the kid’s terrifying experience hadn’t been bad enough, he’d managed to pick up a nasty cold as well, helped along, no doubt, by last night’s unseasonably cool and damp air. At least the boy had finally told Vickie what had happened-or what he thought had happened, because the story was too farfetched to be true. He’d claimed to have found a huge rock in the woods, right in the middle of an open field. The rock had “called out to him” somehow, and he’d hit it with his geologist’s hammer. Then, the thing had begun to bleed.

Todd had screamed-which was what Erik had heard from the house-and had run off blindly into the darkness before the stone could get him. The kid was convinced that the thing was alive and was “after him,” as he said it, and would do something terrible to him once it caught him. The next thing he’d known, he had run straight into Johnny Dovecrest.

The story had obviously been the product of his son’s overactive imagination, coupled with the beginnings of the cold he was now suffering from. The darkness and the eerie atmosphere were enough to frighten anyone. Dovecrest’s bizarre visit on the night they had moved in and his insistence that they hang up his magic talisman only added strangeness to the situation. And the tempered edge of the geologist’s hammer had been neatly broken off, which made Erik wonder what had happened out there.

Still, the real problem wasn’t what Todd thought he had seen. The problem was that the kid believed it, despite its impossibility, and the belief triggered the fear. When Erik looked into his son’s eyes he had seen his terror, seen his belief in that horrible vision. Nothing either he or Vickie could say would change that belief or eliminate his irrational fear. No amount of explanations would satisfy him-according to Todd it had happened and that was all there was to it. And before he had left home, Erik noticed that Vickie had hung Dovecrest’s charm on the back door.