Maybe Bruce Yamada picked up a rock as he was being kidnapped, and later saw a chance to show the Galesburg Grabber his fastball. There was a hell of an idea.
Only Bruce didn’t kill the Grabber, the Grabber had killed him, like he had killed three others, and like he was going to kill Finney. Finney was one of the black balloons now. There was no one to pull him back, no way to turn himself around.
He was sailing away from everything he knew, into a future that stretched open before him, as vast and alien as the winter sky.
6
THE BLACK PHONE
4.
He risked opening his eyes. The air stung his eyeballs, and it was like looking through a Coke bottle, everything distorted and tinted an unlikely shade of green, although that was an improvement on not being able to see at all. He was on a mattress at one end of a room with white plaster walls. The walls seemed to bend in at the top and bottom, enclosing the world between like a pair of white parentheses. He assumed—hoped—this was only an illusion created by his poisoned eyes.
Finney couldn’t see to the far end of the room, couldn’t see the door he had been brought in through. He might have been underwater, peering into silty jade depths, a diver in the cabin room of a sunken cruise liner. To his left was a toilet with no seat. To his right, midway down the room, was a black box or cabinet bolted to the wall. At first he couldn’t recognize it for what it was, not because of his unclear vision, but because it was so out of place, a thing that didn’t belong in a prison cell.
A phone. A large, old-fashioned, black phone, the receiver hanging from a silver cradle on the side.
Al wouldn’t have left him in a room with a working phone.
If it worked, one of the other boys would’ve used it. Finney knew that, but he felt a thrill of hope anyway, so intense it almost brought tears to his eyes. Maybe he had recovered faster than the other boys. Maybe the others were still blind from the wasp poison when Al killed them, never even knew about the phone. He grimaced, appalled by the force of his own longing.
But then he started crawling toward it, plunged off the edge of the mattress and fell to the floor, three stories below. His chin hit the cement. A black flashbulb blinked in the front of his brain, just behind his eyes.
He pushed himself up on all fours, shaking his head slowly from side to side, insensible for a moment, then recovering himself. He started to crawl. He crossed a great deal of floor without seeming to get any closer to the phone. It was as if he were on a conveyer belt, bearing him steadily back, even as he plodded forward on hands and knees. Sometimes when he squinted at the phone, it seemed to be breathing, the sides swelling and then bending inward. Once, Finney had to stop to rest his hot 7
20TH CENTURY GHOSTS
forehead against the icy concrete. It was the only way to make the room stop moving.
When he next looked up, he found the phone directly above him. He pulled himself to his feet, grabbing the phone as soon as it was in reach and using it to hoist himself up. It was not quite an antique, but certainly old, with a pair of round silver bells on top and a clapper between them, a dial instead of buttons. Finney found the receiver and held it to his ear, listened for a dial tone. Nothing. He pushed the silver cradle down, let it spring back up. The black phone remained silent. He dialed for the operator. The receiver went click-click-click in his ear, but there was no ring on the other end, no connection.
“It doesn’t work,” Al said. “It hasn’t worked since I was a kid.”
Finney swayed on his heels, then steadied himself. He for some reason didn’t want to turn his head and make eye contact with his captor, and he allowed himself only a sideways glance at him. The door was close enough to see now, and Al stood in it.
“Hang up,” he said, but Finney stood as he was, the receiver in one hand. After a moment, Al went on. “I know you’re scared and you want to go home. I’m going to take you home soon. I just—everything’s all fucked up and I have to be upstairs for a while. Something’s come up.”
“What?”
“Never mind what.”
Another helpless, awful surge of hope. Poole maybe—old Mr. Poole had seen Al shoving him into the van and called the police. “Did someone see something? Are the police coming? If you let me go, I won’t tell, I won’t—”
“No,” the fat man said, and laughed, harshly and unhappily.
“Not the police.”
“Someone, though? Someone’s coming?”
The kidnapper stiffened, and the close-set eyes in his wide, homely face were stricken and wondering. He didn’t reply, but he didn’t need to. The answer Finney wanted was there in his look, his body language. Either someone was on the way—or already there, upstairs somewhere.
“I’ll scream,” Finney said. “If there’s someone upstairs, they’ll hear me.”
8
THE BLACK PHONE
“No he won’t. Not with the door shut.”
“He?”
Al’s face darkened, the blood rushing to his cheeks. Finney watched his hands squeeze into fists, then open slowly again.
“When the door’s shut you can’t hear anything down here,”
Al went on in a tone of forced calm. “I soundproofed it myself.
So shout if you want, you won’t bother anyone.”
“You’re the one who killed those other kids.”
“No. Not me. That was someone else. I’m not going to make you do anything you won’t like.”
Something about the construction of this phrase— I’m not going to make you do anything you won’t like— brought a fever heat to Finney’s face and left his body cold, roughened with gooseflesh.
“If you try to touch me, I’ll scratch your face, and whoever is coming to see you will ask why.”
Al gazed at him blankly for a moment, absorbing this, then said, “You can hang up the phone now.”
Finney set the receiver back in the cradle.
“I was in here and it rang once,” Al said. “Creepiest thing.