The Black Phone(2)

A door banged open. His feet and knees were sliding across linoleum. He couldn’t see much, was pulled through darkness toward a faint fluttering moth of gray light that was always dancing away from him. Another door went crash and he was dragged down a flight of stairs. His knees clubbed each step on the way down.

Al said, “Fucking arm. I ought to snap your neck right now, what you did to my arm.”

3

20TH CENTURY GHOSTS

Finney thought of resisting. They were distant, abstract thoughts. He heard a bolt turn, and he was pulled through a last door, across cement, and finally to a mattress. Al flipped him onto it. The world did a slow, nauseating roll. Finney sprawled on his back and waited for the feeling of motion sickness to pass.

Al sat down beside him, panting for breath.

“Jesus, I’m covered in blood. Like I killed someone. Look at this arm,” he said. Then he laughed, husky, disbelieving laughter. “Not that you can see anything.”

Neither of them spoke, and an awful silence settled upon the room. Finney shook continuously, had been shivering steadily, more or less since regaining consciousness.

At last Al spoke. “I know you’re scared of me, but I won’t hurt you anymore. What I said about I ought to snap your neck, I was just angry. You did a number on my arm, but I won’t hold it against you. I guess it makes us even. You don’t need to be scared because nothing bad is going to happen to you here. You got my word, Johnny.”

At the mention of his name, Finney went perfectly still, abruptly stopped trembling. It wasn’t just that the fat man knew his name. It was the way he said it . . . his breath a little trill of excitement. Johnny. Finney felt a ticklish sensation crawling across his scalp, and realized Al was playing with his hair.

“You want a soda? Tell you what, I’ll bring you a soda and then—wait! Did you hear the phone?” Al’s voice suddenly wavered a little. “Did you hear a phone ringing somewhere?”

From an unguessable distance, Finney heard the soft burr of a telephone.

“Oh, shit,” Al said. He exhaled unsteadily. “That’s just the phone in the kitchen. Of course it’s just the phone in—okay. I’ll go see who it is and get you that soda and come right back and then I’ll explain everything.”

Finney heard him come up off the mattress with a labored sigh, followed the scuffle of his boots as he moved away. A door thumped shut. A bolt slammed. If the phone upstairs rang again, Finney didn’t hear it.

4

THE BLACK PHONE





3.


He didn’t know what Al was going to say when he came back, but he didn’t need to explain anything. Finney already knew all about it.

The first child to disappear had been taken two years ago, just after the last of the winter’s snow melted. The hill behind St. Luke’s was a lumpy slope of greasy mud, so slippery that kids were going down it on sleds, cracking each other up when they crashed at the bottom. A nine-year-old named Loren ran into the brush on the far side of Mission Road to take a whiz, and never came back. Another boy went missing two months later, on the first of June. The papers named the kidnapper The Galesburg Grabber, a name Finney felt lacked something on Jack the Ripper. He took a third boy on the first of October, when the air was aromatic with the smell of dead leaves crunching underfoot.

That night John and his older sister Susannah sat at the top of the stairs and listened to their parents arguing in the kitchen.

Their mother wanted to sell the house, move away, and their father said he hated when she got hysterical. Something fell over or was thrown. Their mother said she couldn’t stand him anymore, was going crazy living with him. Their father said so don’t and turned on the TV.

Eight weeks later, at the very end of November, the Galesburg Grabber took Bruce Yamada.

Finney wasn’t friends with Bruce Yamada, had never even had a conversation with him—but he had known him. They had pitched against each other, the summer before Bruce disappeared. Bruce Yamada was maybe the best pitcher the Galesburg Cardinals had ever faced; certainly the hardest thrower.

The ball sounded different when he threw it in the catcher’s glove, not like it sounded when other kids threw. When Bruce Yamada threw, it was like the sound of someone opening champagne.

Finney pitched well himself, giving up just a pair of runs, and those only because Jay McGinty dropped a big lazy fly to left that anyone else would’ve caught. After the game—Galesburg lost five to one—the teams formed into two lines and started to 5

20TH CENTURY GHOSTS

march past each other, slapping gloves. It was when Bruce and Finney met each other to touch gloves that they spoke to each other for the one and only time in Bruce’s life.

“You were dirty,” Bruce said.

Finney was flustered with happy surprise, opened his mouth to reply—but all that came out was, “good game,” same as he said to everyone. It was a thoughtless, automatic line, repeated twenty straight times, and it was said before he could help himself. Later, though, he wished he had come up with something as cool as You were dirty, something that really smoked.

He didn’t run into Bruce again the rest of the summer, and when he did finally happen to see him—coming out of the movies that fall—they didn’t speak, just nodded to each other. A few weeks later, Bruce strolled out of the Space Port arcade, told his friends he was walking home, and never got there. The dragnet turned up one of his sneakers in the gutter on Circus Street. It stunned Finney to think a boy he knew had been stolen away, yanked right out of his shoes, and was never coming back. Was already dead somewhere, with dirt in his face and bugs in his hair and his eyes open and staring at exactly nothing.