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
20TH CENTURY GHOSTS
Finney thought of resisting. They were distant, abstract thoughts. He heard a bolt turn, and he was pulled through a last door, across cement, and finally to a mattress. Al flipped him onto it. The world did a slow, nauseating roll. Finney sprawled on his back and waited for the feeling of motion sickness to pass.
Al sat down beside him, panting for breath.
“Jesus, I’m covered in blood. Like I killed someone. Look at this arm,” he said. Then he laughed, husky, disbelieving laughter. “Not that you can see anything.”
Neither of them spoke, and an awful silence settled upon the room. Finney shook continuously, had been shivering steadily, more or less since regaining consciousness.
At last Al spoke. “I know you’re scared of me, but I won’t hurt you anymore. What I said about I ought to snap your neck, I was just angry. You did a number on my arm, but I won’t hold it against you. I guess it makes us even. You don’t need to be scared because nothing bad is going to happen to you here. You got my word, Johnny.”
At the mention of his name, Finney went perfectly still, abruptly stopped trembling. It wasn’t just that the fat man knew his name. It was the way he said it . . . his breath a little trill of excitement. Johnny. Finney felt a ticklish sensation crawling across his scalp, and realized Al was playing with his hair.
“You want a soda? Tell you what, I’ll bring you a soda and then—wait! Did you hear the phone?” Al’s voice suddenly wavered a little. “Did you hear a phone ringing somewhere?”
From an unguessable distance, Finney heard the soft burr of a telephone.
“Oh, shit,” Al said. He exhaled unsteadily. “That’s just the phone in the kitchen. Of course it’s just the phone in—okay. I’ll go see who it is and get you that soda and come right back and then I’ll explain everything.”
Finney heard him come up off the mattress with a labored sigh, followed the scuffle of his boots as he moved away. A door thumped shut. A bolt slammed. If the phone upstairs rang again, Finney didn’t hear it.
4
THE BLACK PHONE
3.
He didn’t know what Al was going to say when he came back, but he didn’t need to explain anything. Finney already knew all about it.
The first child to disappear had been taken two years ago, just after the last of the winter’s snow melted. The hill behind St. Luke’s was a lumpy slope of greasy mud, so slippery that kids were going down it on sleds, cracking each other up when they crashed at the bottom. A nine-year-old named Loren ran into the brush on the far side of Mission Road to take a whiz, and never came back. Another boy went missing two months later, on the first of June. The papers named the kidnapper The Galesburg Grabber, a name Finney felt lacked something on Jack the Ripper. He took a third boy on the first of October, when the air was aromatic with the smell of dead leaves crunching underfoot.
That night John and his older sister Susannah sat at the top of the stairs and listened to their parents arguing in the kitchen.
Their mother wanted to sell the house, move away, and their father said he hated when she got hysterical. Something fell over or was thrown. Their mother said she couldn’t stand him anymore, was going crazy living with him. Their father said so don’t and turned on the TV.
Eight weeks later, at the very end of November, the Galesburg Grabber took Bruce Yamada.
Finney wasn’t friends with Bruce Yamada, had never even had a conversation with him—but he had known him. They had pitched against each other, the summer before Bruce disappeared. Bruce Yamada was maybe the best pitcher the Galesburg Cardinals had ever faced; certainly the hardest thrower.