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.
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
20TH CENTURY GHOSTS
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.