The ball sounded different when he threw it in the catcher’s glove, not like it sounded when other kids threw. When Bruce Yamada threw, it was like the sound of someone opening champagne.
Finney pitched well himself, giving up just a pair of runs, and those only because Jay McGinty dropped a big lazy fly to left that anyone else would’ve caught. After the game—Galesburg lost five to one—the teams formed into two lines and started to 5
20TH CENTURY GHOSTS
march past each other, slapping gloves. It was when Bruce and Finney met each other to touch gloves that they spoke to each other for the one and only time in Bruce’s life.
“You were dirty,” Bruce said.
Finney was flustered with happy surprise, opened his mouth to reply—but all that came out was, “good game,” same as he said to everyone. It was a thoughtless, automatic line, repeated twenty straight times, and it was said before he could help himself. Later, though, he wished he had come up with something as cool as You were dirty, something that really smoked.
He didn’t run into Bruce again the rest of the summer, and when he did finally happen to see him—coming out of the movies that fall—they didn’t speak, just nodded to each other. A few weeks later, Bruce strolled out of the Space Port arcade, told his friends he was walking home, and never got there. The dragnet turned up one of his sneakers in the gutter on Circus Street. It stunned Finney to think a boy he knew had been stolen away, yanked right out of his shoes, and was never coming back. Was already dead somewhere, with dirt in his face and bugs in his hair and his eyes open and staring at exactly nothing.
But then a year passed, and more, and no other kids disappeared, and Finney turned thirteen, a safe age—the person snatching children had never bothered with anyone older than twelve. People thought the Galesburg Grabber had moved away, or been arrested for some other crime, or died. Maybe Bruce Yamada killed him, Finney thought once, after hearing two adults wonder aloud whatever happened to the Grabber.
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