I think static electricity does it. It went off once when I was standing right beside it, and I picked it up, without thinking, you know, to see if anyone was there.”
Finney didn’t want to make conversation with someone who meant to kill him at the first convenient opportunity, and was taken by surprise when he opened his mouth and heard himself asking a question. “Was there?”
“No. Didn’t I say it doesn’t work?”
The door opened and shut. In the instant it was ajar, the great, ungainly fat man slipped himself out, bouncing on his toes—a hippo performing ballet—and was gone before Finney could open his mouth to yell.
5.
He screamed anyway. Screamed and threw himself at the door, crashing his whole body against it, not imagining it could be knocked open, but thinking if there was someone upstairs they might hear it banging in the frame. He didn’t shout until his 9
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throat was raw, though; a few times was enough to satisfy him that no one was going to hear.
Finney quit hollering to peer around his underwater compartment, trying to figure where the light was coming from.
There were two little windows—long glass slots—set high in the wall, well out of easy reach, emitting some faint, weed-green light. Rusty grilles had been bolted across them.
Finney studied one of the windows for a long time, then ran at the wall, didn’t give himself time to think how drained and sick he was, planted a foot against the plaster and leaped. For one moment he grabbed the grille, but the steel links were too close together to squeeze a finger in, and he dropped back to his heels, then fell on his rear, shivering violently. Still. He had been up there long enough to get a glimpse through the filth-obscured glass. It was a double window, ground-level, almost completely hidden behind strangling brush. If he could break it, someone might hear him shouting.
They all thought of that, he thought. And you see how far it got them.
He went around the room again, and found himself standing before the phone once more. Studying it. His gaze tracked a slender black wire, stapled to the plaster above it. It climbed the wall for about a foot, then ended in a spray of frayed copper filaments. Finney discovered he was holding the receiver again, had picked it up without knowing he was doing it, was even holding it to his ear . . . an unconscious act of such hopeless, awful want, it made him shrink into himself a little. Why would anyone put a phone in their basement? But then there was the toilet, too. Maybe, probably—awful thought—someone had once lived in this room.
Then he was on the mattress, staring through the jade murk at the ceiling. He noted, for the first time, that he hadn’t cried, and didn’t feel like he was going to. He was very intentionally resting, building up his energy for the next round of exploration and thought. Would be circling the room, looking for an advantage, something he could use, until Al came back. Finney could hurt him if he had anything, anything at all, to use as a weapon. A piece of broken glass, a rusted spring. Were there 10
THE BLACK PHONE
springs in the mattress? When he had the energy to move again he’d try to figure out.
By now his parents had to know something had happened to him. They had to be frantic. But when he tried to picture the search, he didn’t visualize his weeping mother answering a detective’s questions in her kitchen, and he didn’t see his father, out in front of Poole’s Hardware, turning away from the sight of a policeman carrying an empty bottle of grape soda in an evidence bag.
Instead he imagined Susannah, standing on the pedals of her ten-speed and gliding down the center of one wide residential avenue after another, the collar of her denim jacket turned up, grimacing into the icy sheer of the wind. Susannah was three years older than Finney, but they had both been born on the same day, June 21, a fact she held to be of mystical importance. Susannah had a lot of occultish ideas, owned a deck of Tarot cards, read books about the connection between Stonehenge and aliens. When they were younger, Susannah had a toy stethoscope, which she would press to his head, in an attempt to listen in on his thoughts. He had once drawn five cards out of a deck at random and she had guessed all of them, one after another, holding the end of the stethoscope to the center of his forehead—five of spades, six of clubs, ten and jack of diamonds, ace of hearts—but she had never been able to repeat the trick.
Finney saw his older sister searching for him down streets that were, in his imagination, free of pedestrians or traffic. The wind was in the trees, flinging the bare branches back and forth so they appeared to rake futilely at the low sky. Sometimes Susannah half-closed her eyes, as if to better concentrate on some distant sound calling to her. She was listening for him, for his unspoken cry, hoping to be guided to him by some trick of telepathy.
She made a left, then a right, moving automatically, and discovered a street she had never seen before, a dead end road.
On either side of it were disused-looking ranches with unraked front lawns, children’s toys left out in driveways. At the sight of this street, her blood quickened. She felt strongly that Finney’s 11
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kidnapper lived somewhere on this road. She biked more slowly, turning her head from side to side, making an uneasy inspection of each house as she went by. The whole road seemed set in a state of improbable silence, as if every person on it had been evacuated weeks ago, taking their pets with them, locking all the doors, turning out all the lights. Not this one, she thought.
Not that one. And on and on, to the dead end of the street, and the last of the houses.
She put a foot down, stood in place with her bike under her.
She hadn’t felt hopeless yet, but standing there, chewing her lip and looking around, the thought began to form that she wasn’t going to find her brother, that no one was going to find him.