20th Century Ghosts (21 page)

"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.

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 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?"

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.

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 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.

"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."

"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.

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 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.

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.

Albert dropped his shattered hand and looked up, an animal sound rising in his throat. Finney hit him again to shut him up, clubbed the receiver against the bare curve of his skull. It hit with a satisfying knocking sound, and a spray of glittering sand leaped into the sunlight. Screaming, the fat man propelled himself off the floor, staggering forward, but Finney skipped back—so much faster than Albert—striking him across the mouth, hard enough to turn his head halfway around, then in the knee to drop him, to make him stop.

Al fell, throwing his arms out, caught Finney at the waist and slammed him to the floor. He came down on top of Finney's legs. Finney struggled to pull himself out from under. The fat man lifted his head, blood drizzling from his mouth, a furious moan rising from somewhere deep in his chest. Finney still held the receiver in one hand, and three loops of black wire in the other. He sat up, meant to club Albert with the receiver again, but then his hands did something else instead. He put the wire around the fat man's throat and pulled tight, crossing his wrists behind Al's neck. Albert got a hand on his face and scratched him, flaying Finney's right cheek. Finney pulled the wire a notch tighter and Al's tongue popped out of his mouth.

Across the room, the black phone rang. The fat man choked. He stopped scratching at Finney's face and set his fingers under the wire around his throat. He could only use his left hand, because the fingers of his right were shattered, bent in unlikely directions. The phone rang again. The fat man's gaze flicked toward it, then back to Finney's face. Albert's pupils were very wide, so wide the golden ring of his irises had shrunk to almost nothing. His pupils were a pair of black balloons, obscuring twin suns. The phone rang and rang. Finney pulled at the wire. On Albert's dark, bruise-colored face was a horrified question.