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.
“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