The Black Phone
Joe Hill
1.
The fat man on the other side of the road was about to drop his groceries. He had a paper bag in each arm, and was struggling to jam a key into the back door of his van. Finney sat on the front steps of Poole’s Hardware, a bottle of grape soda in one hand, watching it all. The fat man was going to lose his groceries the moment he got the door open. The one in his left arm was already sliding free.
He wasn’t any kind of fat, but grotesquely fat. His head had been shaved to a glossy polish, and there were two plump folds of skin where his neck met the base of his skull. He wore a loud Hawaiian shirt—toucans nestled among hanging creepers—although it was too cool for short sleeves. The wind had a brisk edge, so that Finney was always hunching and turning his face away from it. He wasn’t dressed for the weather either. It would’ve made more sense for him to wait for his father inside, only John Finney didn’t like the way old Tremont Poole was always eyeballing him, half-glaring, as if he expected him to break or shoplift something. Finney only went in for grape soda, which he had to have, it was an addiction.
The lock popped and the rear door of the van sprang open.
What happened next was such a perfect bit of slapstick it might have been practiced—and only later did it occur to Finney that probably it had been. The back of the van contained a gathering of balloons, and the moment the door was open, they shoved their way out in a jostling mass . . . thrusting themselves at the 1
20TH CENTURY GHOSTS
fat man, who reacted as if he had no idea they would be there.
He leaped back. The bag under his left arm fell, hit the ground, split open. Oranges rolled crazily this way and that. The fat man wobbled and his sunglasses slipped off his face. He recovered and hopped on his toes, snatching at the balloons, but it was already too late, they were sailing away, out of reach.
The fat man cursed and waved a hand at them in a gesture of angry dismissal. He turned away, squinted at the ground and then sank to his knees. He set his other bag in the back of the van and began to explore the pavement with his hands, feeling for his glasses. He put a hand down on an egg, which splintered beneath his palm. He grimaced, shook his hand in the air. Shiny strings of egg white spattered off it.
By then, Finney was already trotting across the road, left his soda behind on the stoop. “Help, mister?”
The fat man peered blearily up at him without seeming to see him. “Did you observe that bullshit?”
Finney glanced down the road. The balloons were thirty feet off the ground by now, following the double line along the middle of the road. They were black . . . all of them, as black as sealskin.
“Yeah. Yeah, I—” he said, and then his voice trailed off and he frowned, watching the balloons bobbing into the low overcast of the sky. The sight of them disturbed him in some way.
No one wanted black balloons; what were they good for, anyway? Festive funerals? He stared, briefly transfixed, thinking of poisoned grapes. He moved his tongue around in his mouth, and noticed for the first time that his beloved grape soda left a disagreeable metallic aftertaste, a taste like he had been chewing an exposed copper wire.
The fat man brought him out of it. “See my glasses?”
Finney lowered himself to one knee, leaned forward to look beneath the van. The fat man’s glasses were under the bumper.
“Got ’em,” he said, stretching an arm past the fat man’s leg to pick them up. “What were the balloons for?”
“I’m a part-time clown,” said the fat man. He was reaching into the van, getting something out of the paper bag he had set down there. “Call me Al. Hey, you want to see something funny?”
2
THE BLACK PHONE
Finney glanced up, had time to see Al holding a steel can, yellow and black, with pictures of wasps on it. He was shaking it furiously. Finney began to smile, had the wild idea that Al was about to spray him with silly string.
The part-time clown hit him in the face with a blast of white foam. Finney started to turn his head away, but was too slow to avoid getting it in his eyes. He screamed and took some in the mouth, tasted something harsh and chemical. His eyes were coals, cooking in their sockets. His throat burned; in his entire life he had never felt any pain like it, a searing icy-heat. His stomach heaved and the grape soda came back up in a hot, sweet rush.
Al had him by the back of the neck and was pulling him forward, into the van. Finney’s eyes were open but all he could see were pulsations of orange and oily brown that flared, dripped, ran into one another and faded. The fat man had a fistful of his hair and another hand between his legs, scooping him up by the crotch. The inside of Al’s arm brushed his cheek. Finney turned his head and bit down on a mouthful of wobbling fat, squeezed until he tasted blood.
The fat man wailed and let go and for a moment Finney had his feet on the ground again. He stepped back and put his heel on an orange. His ankle folded. He tottered, almost fell and then the fat man had him by the neck again. He shoved him forward.
Finney hit one of the van’s rear doors, head-first, with a low bonging sound, and all the strength went out of his legs.
Al had an arm under his chest, and he tipped him forward, into the back of the van. Only it wasn’t the back of a van. It was a coal chute, and Finney dropped, with a horrifying velocity, into darkness.
2.
A door banged open. His feet and knees were sliding across linoleum. He couldn’t see much, was pulled through darkness toward a faint fluttering moth of gray light that was always dancing away from him. Another door went crash and he was dragged down a flight of stairs. His knees clubbed each step on the way down.
Al said, “Fucking arm. I ought to snap your neck right now, what you did to my arm.”
3