The Black Phone(5)
Finney saw his older sister searching for him down streets that were, in his imagination, free of pedestrians or traffic. The wind was in the trees, flinging the bare branches back and forth so they appeared to rake futilely at the low sky. Sometimes Susannah half-closed her eyes, as if to better concentrate on some distant sound calling to her. She was listening for him, for his unspoken cry, hoping to be guided to him by some trick of telepathy.
She made a left, then a right, moving automatically, and discovered a street she had never seen before, a dead end road.
On either side of it were disused-looking ranches with unraked front lawns, children’s toys left out in driveways. At the sight of this street, her blood quickened. She felt strongly that Finney’s 11
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kidnapper lived somewhere on this road. She biked more slowly, turning her head from side to side, making an uneasy inspection of each house as she went by. The whole road seemed set in a state of improbable silence, as if every person on it had been evacuated weeks ago, taking their pets with them, locking all the doors, turning out all the lights. Not this one, she thought.
Not that one. And on and on, to the dead end of the street, and the last of the houses.
She put a foot down, stood in place with her bike under her.
She hadn’t felt hopeless yet, but standing there, chewing her lip and looking around, the thought began to form that she wasn’t going to find her brother, that no one was going to find him.
It was an awful street, and the wind was cold. She imagined she could feel that cold inside her, a ticklish chill behind the breastbone.
In the next moment she heard a sound, a tinny twanging, which echoed strangely. She glanced around, trying to place it, lifted her gaze to the last telephone pole on the street. A mass of black balloons were caught there, snarled in the lines.
The wind was wrestling to wrench them free, and they bobbled and weaved, pulling hard to escape. The wires held the balloons implacably where they were. She recoiled at the sight of them. They were dreadful—somehow they were dreadful—a dead spot in the sky. The wind plucked at the wires and made them ring.
When the phone rang Finney opened his eyes. The vivid little story he had been telling himself about Susannah fleeted away.
Only a story, not a vision; a ghost story, and he was the ghost, or would be soon. He lifted his head from the mattress, startled to find it almost dark . . . and his gaze fell upon the black phone. It seemed to him that the air was still faintly vibrating, from the brash firehouse clang of the steel clapper on the rusty bells.
He pushed himself up. He knew the phone couldn’t really ring—that hearing it had just been a trick of his sleeping mind—
yet he half-expected it to ring again. It had been stupid to lie there, dreaming the daylight away. He needed an advantage, a bent nail, a stone to throw. In a short time it would be dark, and he couldn’t search the room if he couldn’t see. He stood.
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He felt spacey, empty-headed and cold; it was cold in the basement. He walked to the phone, put the receiver to his ear.
“Hello?” he asked.
He heard the wind sing, outside the windows. He listened to the dead line. As he was about to hang up, he thought he heard a click on the other end.
“Hello?” he asked.
6.
When the darkness gathered itself up and fell upon him, he curled himself on the mattress, with his knees close to his chest.
He didn’t sleep. He hardly blinked. He waited for the door to open and the fat man to come in and shut it behind him, for the two of them to be alone in the dark together, but Al didn’t come. Finney was empty of thought, all his concentration bent to the dry rap of his pulse and the distant rush of the wind beyond the high windows. He was not afraid. What he felt was something larger than fear, a narcotic terror that numbed him completely, made it impossible to imagine moving.
He did not sleep, he was not awake. Minutes did not pass, collecting into hours. There was no point in thinking about time in the old way. There was only one moment and then another moment, in a string of moments that went on in a quiet, deadly procession. He was roused from his dreamless paralysis only when one of the windows began to show, a rectangle of watery gray floating high in the darkness. He knew, without knowing at first how he could know, that he wasn’t meant to live to see the window painted with dawn. The thought didn’t inspire hope exactly, but it did inspire movement, and with great effort he sat up.
His eyes were better. When he stared at the glowing window, he saw twinkling, prismatic lights at the edge of his vision . . .
but he was seeing the window clearly, nonetheless. His stomach cramped from emptiness.
Finney forced himself to stand and he began to patrol the room again, looking for his advantage. In a back corner of the room, he found a place where a patch of cement floor had crumbled into granular, popcorn-size chunks, with a layer of 13
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sandy earth beneath. He was putting a handful of carefully selected nuggets into his pocket when he heard the thump of the bolt turning.
The fat man stood in the doorway. They regarded each other across a distance of five yards. Al wore striped boxers and a white undershirt, stained down the front with old sweat. His fat legs were shocking in their paleness.
“I want breakfast,” Finney said. “I’m hungry.”
“How’s your eyes?”