The Black Phone(6)

Finney didn’t reply.

“What are you doing over there?”

Finney squatted in the corner, glaring.

Al said, “I can’t bring you anything to eat. You’ll have to wait.”

“Why? Is there someone upstairs who would see you taking me food?”

Again, Al’s face darkened, his hands squeezed into fists.

When he replied, however, his tone was not angry, but glum and defeated. “Never mind.” Finney took that to mean yes.

“If you aren’t going to feed me why did you even come down here?” Finney asked him.

Al shook his head, staring at Finney with a kind of morose resentment, as if this was another unfair question he couldn’t possibly be expected to answer. But then he shrugged and said,

“Just to look at you. I just wanted to look at you.” Finney’s upper lip drew back from his teeth in an unreasoned expression of disgust, and Al visibly wilted. “I’ll go.”

When he opened the door, Finney sprang to his feet and began to scream help. Al stumbled over the doorjamb in his haste to back out and almost fell, then slammed the door.

Finney stood in the center of the room, sides heaving for breath. He had never really imagined he could get past Al and out the door—it was too far away—had only wanted to test his reaction time. Fatty was even slower than he thought. He was slow, and there was someone else in the house, someone upstairs. Almost against his will, Finney felt a building sense of charge, a nervous excitement that was almost like hope.

For the rest of the day, and all that night, Finney was alone.

14

THE BLACK PHONE





7.


When the cramps came again, late on his third day in the basement, he had to sit down on the striped mattress to wait for them to pass. It was like someone had thrust a spit through his side and was turning it slowly. He ground his back teeth until he tasted blood.

Later, Finney drank out of the tank on the back of the toilet, and then stayed there, on his knees, to investigate the bolts and the pipes. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of the toilet before. He worked until his hands were raw and abraded, trying to unscrew a thick iron nut, three inches in diameter, but it was caked with rust, and he couldn’t budge it.

He lurched awake, the light coming through the window on the west side of the room, falling in a beam of bright yellow sunshine filled with scintillating mica-flecks of dust. It alarmed him that he couldn’t remember lying down on the mattress to nap. It was hard to piece thoughts together, to reason things through. Even after he had been awake for ten minutes, he felt as if he had only just come awake, empty-headed and disorientated.

For a long time he was unable to rise, and sat with his arms wound around his chest, while the last of the light fled, and the shadows rose around him. Sometimes a fit of shivering would come over him, so fierce his teeth chattered. As cold as it was, it would be worse after dark. He didn’t think he could wait out another night as cold as the last one. That was Al’s plan maybe.

To starve and freeze the fight out of him. Or maybe there was no plan, maybe the fat man had keeled over of a heart attack, and this was just how Finney was going to die, one cold minute at a time. The phone was breathing again. Finney stared at it, watching as the sides inflated, withdrew, and inflated again.

“Stop that,” he said to it.

It stopped.

He walked. He had to, to stay warm. The moon rose, and for a while it lit the black phone like a bone-colored spotlight.

Finney’s face burned and his breath smoked, as if he were more demon than boy.

He couldn’t feel his feet. They were too cold. He stomped 14

20TH CENTURY GHOSTS

around, trying to bring the life back into them. He flexed his hands. His fingers were cold too, stiff and painful to move.

He heard off-key singing and realized it was him. Time and thought were coming in leaps and pulses. He fell over something on the floor, then went back, feeling around with both hands, trying to figure out what had tripped him up, if it was something he could use as a weapon. He couldn’t find anything and finally had to admit to himself he had tripped over his own feet. He put his head on the cement and shut his eyes.

He woke to the sound of the phone ringing again. He sat up and looked across the room at it. The eastern-facing window was a pale, silvery shade of blue. He was trying to decide if it had really rung, or if he had only dreamed it ringing, when it rang once more, a loud, metallic clashing.

Finney rose, then waited for the floor to stop heaving underfoot; it was like standing on a waterbed. The phone rang a third time, the clapper clashing at the bells. The abrasive reality of the sound had the effect of sweeping his head clear, returning him to himself.

He picked up the receiver and put his ear to it.

“Hello?” he asked.

He heard the snowy hiss of static.

“John,” said the boy on the other end. The connection was so poor, the call might have been coming from the other side of the world. “Listen, John. It’s going to be today.”

“Who is this?”

“I don’t remember my name,” the boy said. “It’s the first thing you lose.”

“First thing you lose when?”

“You know when.”

But Finney thought he recognized the voice, even though they had only spoken to each other that one time.