The Black Phone(7)

“Bruce? Bruce Yamada?”

“Who knows?” the boy said. “Tell me if it matters.”

Finney lifted his eyes to the black wire traveling up the wall, stared at the spot where it ended in a spray of copper needles.

He decided it didn’t matter.

“What’s going to be today?” Finney asked.

“I was calling to say he left you a way to fight him.”

16

THE BLACK PHONE

“What way?”

“You’re holding it.”

Finney turned his head, looked at the receiver in his hand.

From the earpiece, which was no longer against his ear, he heard the faraway hiss of static and the tinny sound of the dead boy saying something else.

“What?” Finney asked, putting the receiver to his ear once more.

“Sand,” Bruce Yamada told him. “Make it heavier. It isn’t heavy enough. Do you understand?”

“Did the phone ring for any of the other kids?”

“Ask not for whom the phone rings,” Bruce said, and there came soft, childish laughter. Then he said, “None of us heard it. It rang, but none of us heard. Just you. A person has to stay here a while, before you learn how to hear it. You’re the only one to last this long. He killed the other children before they recovered, but he can’t kill you, can’t even come downstairs.

His brother sits up all night in the living room making phone calls. His brother is a coke-head who never sleeps. Albert hates it, but he can’t make him leave.”

“Bruce? Are you really there or am I losing my mind?”

“Albert hears the phone too,” Bruce replied, continuing as if Finney had said nothing. “Sometimes when he’s down in the basement we prank-call him.”

“I feel weak all the time and I don’t know if I can fight him the way I feel.”

“You will. You’ll be dirty. I’m glad it’s you. You know, she really found the balloons, John. Susannah did.”

“She did?”

“Ask her when you get home.”

There was a click. Finney waited for a dial tone, but there was none.





8.


A wheat-colored light had begun to puddle into the room when Finney heard the familiar slam of the bolt. His back was to the door, he was kneeling in the corner of the room, at the place where the cement had been shattered to show the sandy earth 17

20TH CENTURY GHOSTS

beneath. Finney still had the bitter taste of old copper in his mouth, a flavor like the bad aftertaste of grape soda. He turned his head but didn’t rise, shielding what was in his hands with his body.

He was so startled to see someone besides Albert, he cried out, sprang unsteadily to his feet. The man in the doorway was small, and although his face was round and plump, the rest of his body was too tiny for his clothes: a rumpled army jacket, a loose cable-knit sweater. His unkempt hair was retreating from the egg-shaped curve of his forehead. One corner of his mouth turned up in a wry, disbelieving smile.

“Holy shit,” said Albert’s brother. “I knew he had something he didn’t want me to see in the basement but I mean holy shit.”

Finney staggered toward him, and words came spilling out in an incoherent, desperate jumble, like people who have been stuck for a night in an elevator, finally set free. “Please—my mom—help—call help—call my sister—”

“Don’t worry. He’s gone. He had to run into work,” said the brother. “I’m Frank. Hey, calm down. Now I know why he was freaking out about getting called in. He was worried I’d find you while he’s out.”

Albert stepped into the light behind Frank with a hatchet, and lifted it up, cocked it like a baseball bat over one shoulder.

Albert’s brother went on, “Hey, do you want to know the story how I found you?”

“No,” Finney said. “No, no, no.”

Frank made a face. “Sure. Whatever. I’ll tell you some other time. Everything’s okay now.”

Albert brought the hatchet down into the back of his younger brother’s skull with a hard, wet clunk. The force of the impact threw blood into Al’s face. Frank toppled forward. The ax stayed in his head, and Albert’s hands stayed on the handle. As Frank fell, he pulled Al over with him.

Albert hit the basement floor on his knees, drew a sharp breath through clenched teeth. The ax-handle slipped out of his hands and his brother fell onto his face with a heavy boneless thump. Albert grimaced, then let out a strangled cry, staring at his brother with the ax in him.

18

THE BLACK PHONE

Finney stood a yard away, breathing shallowly, holding the receiver to his chest in one hand. In the other hand was a coil of black wire, the wire that had connected the receiver to the black phone. It had been necessary to chew through it to pull it off.

The wire itself was straight, not curly, like on a modern phone.

He had the line wrapped three times around his right hand.

“You see this,” Albert said, his voice choked, uneven. He looked up. “You see what you made me do?” Then he saw what Finney was holding, and his brow knotted with confusion. “What the fuck you do to the phone?”

Finney stepped toward him and snapped the receiver into his face, across Al’s nose. He had unscrewed the mouthpiece and filled the mostly hollow receiver with sand, and screwed the mouthpiece back in to hold it all in place. It hit Albert’s nose with a brittle snap like plastic breaking, only it wasn’t plastic breaking. The fat man made a sound, a choked cry, and blood blurted from his nostrils. He lifted a hand. Finney smashed the receiver down and crushed his fingers.