The Black Phone(9)
Elena’s mother hurried after her, full of anxious questions.
“Remote control,” the producer said, her tone curt. She looked back over her shoulder with an expression of distate.
“When did you bury your husband, ma’am? A week ago?
What’s wrong with you?”
None of the other television stations were interested. The man at the newspaper said it didn’t sound like their kind of thing. Even some of their relatives suspected it was a prank in bad taste. Elena’s mother went to bed and stayed there for several weeks, flattened by a terrific migraine, despondent and confused. And in the basement, every night, the typewriter worked on, flinging words onto paper in noisy chattering bursts.
The dead man’s daughter attended to the Selectric. She learned just when to roll a fresh sheet of paper in, so that each night the machine produced three new pages of story, just as it had when her father was alive. In fact, the machine seemed to wait for her, humming in a jovial sort of way, until it had a fresh sheet to stain with ink.
Long after no one else wanted to think about the typewriter anymore, Elena continued to go into the basement at night, to listen to the radio, and fold laundry, and roll a new sheet of paper into the IBM when it was necessary. It was a simple enough way to pass the time, mindless and sweet, rather like visiting her father’s grave each day to leave fresh flowers.
Also, she had come to like reading the stories when they were finished. Stories about masks and baseball and fathers and their children . . . and ghosts. Some of them were ghost stories. She liked those the best. Wasn’t that the first thing you learned in every fiction course everywhere? Write what you know? The ghost in the machine wrote about the dead with great authority.
After a while, the ribbons for the typewriter were only available by special order. Then even IBM stopped making them.
The typeball wore down. She replaced it, but then the carriage started sticking. One night, it locked up, wouldn’t move forward, and oily smoke began to trickle from under the iron
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
hood of the machine. The typewriter hammered letter after letter, one right on top of the other, with a kind of mad fury, until Elena managed to scramble over and shut it off.
She brought it to a man who repaired old typewriters and other appilances. He returned it in perfect operating condition, but it never wrote on its own again. In the three weeks it was at the shop, it lost the habit.
As a little girl, Elena had asked her father why he went into the basement each night to make things up, and he had said it was because he couldn’t sleep until he had written. Writing things warmed his imagination up for the work of creating an evening full of sweet dreams. Now she was unsettled by the idea that his death might be a restless, sleepless thing. But there was no help for it.
She was by then in her twenties and when her mother died—
an unhappy old woman, estranged not just from her family but the entire world—she decided to move out, which meant selling the house and all that was in it. She had hardly started to sort the clutter in the basement, when she found herself sitting on the steps, rereading the stories her father had written after he died. In his life, he had given up the practice of submitting his work to publishers, had wearied of rejection. But his postmortem work seemed to the girl to be much—livelier—than his earlier work, and his stories of hauntings and the unnatural seemed especially arresting. Over the next few weeks, she collected his best into a single book, and began to send it to publishers. Most said there was no market in collections by writers of no reputation, but in time she heard from an editor at a small press who said he liked it, that her father had a fine feel for the supernatural.
“Didn’t he?” she said.
Now this is the story as I first heard it myself from a friend in the publishing business. He was maddeningly ignorant of the all-important details, so I can’t tell you where the book was finally published or when or, really, anything more regarding this curious collection. I wish I knew more. As a man who is fascinated with the occult, I would like to obtain a copy.
Unfortunately, the title and author of the unlikely book are not common knowledge.
About the Author
Joe Hill is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller Heart-Shaped Box, a two-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, and a past recipient of the World Fantasy Award. His stories have appeared in a variety of journals and Year’s Best collections. He calls New England home.