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.
12
THE BLACK PHONE
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
20TH CENTURY GHOSTS
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.
14
THE BLACK PHONE
7.