When Michael Calls

by Farris, John

  WHEN MICHAEL CALLS

  By John Farris

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2012 / Penny Dreadful, LLC

  Cover design by: David Dodd

  Cover image courtesy of:

  http://fantasystock.deviantart.com/

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  John Lee Farris (born 1936) is an American writer, known largely for his work in the southern Gothic genre. He was born 1936 in Jefferson City, Missouri, to parents John Linder Farris (1909–1982) and Eleanor Carter Farris (1905–1984). Raised in Tennessee, he graduated from Central High School in Memphis and attended Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis . His first wife, Kathleen, was the mother of Julie Marie, John, and Jeff Farris; his second wife, Mary Ann Pasante, was the mother of Peter John ("P.J.") Farris.

  Apart from his vast body of fiction, his work on motion picture screenplays includes adaptations of his own books (i.e., The Fury), original scripts, and adaptations of the works of others (such as Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man). He wrote and directed the film Dear Dead Delilah in 1973. He has had several plays produced off-Broadway, and also paints and writes poetry. At various times he has made his home in New York, southern California and Puerto Rico; he now lives near Atlanta, Georgia.

  Author's Website – Furies & Fiends

  Other John Farris books currently available or coming soon from Crossroad Press:

  All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By

  Catacombs

  Dragonfly

  Fiends

  King Windom

  Minotaur

  Nightfall

  Phantom Nights

  Sacrifice

  Sharp Practice

  Shatter

  Solar Eclipse

  Son of the Endless Night

  Soon She Will Be Gone

  The Axeman Cometh

  The Captors

  The Fury

  The Fury and the Power

  The Fury and the Terror

  The Ransome Women

  Unearthly (formerly titled The Unwanted)

  When Michael Calls

  Wildwood

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  Chapter 1

  The yellow Shades County school bus dropped Peggy Connelly and two other second-graders off at the corner and Peggy walked the rest of the way atop the low stone wall that separated the Connelly property from the street, taking care not to scuff her good school shoes. A tall, young man was digging in the front yard and Peggy paused for a few moments near the white gate in the wall. Peggy didn't particularly like Randle and avoided him whenever possible, but she couldn't resist a freshly dug hole, so she hopped down and walked through the scattered leaves to where he was working.

  "What is that going to be?" Peggy asked.

  Without looking around, Harry Randle unloaded a shovelful of dirt very close to her new shoes, but Peggy was ready for that and she didn't flinch. Instead she looked up at him in her peculiarly rapt and courteous way, willing as always to respond to any indication of goodwill.

  Randle leaned his shovel against a wrought-iron signpost and wiped his perspiring forehead with the back of one hand. He smiled then, not really looking at her.

  "It's for your dead cat," he said.

  "I don't have a dead cat."

  "I wouldn't be that sure."

  "I'm sure; I don't. Do you mean Satch?"

  Harry Randle didn't reply. He wasn't much older than some of the high school boys, as far as Peggy could tell, but he was a lot meaner. His remarks about her cat, even though she knew better than to believe him, worried her, so she looked here and there in the yard, hoping to find Satch in the best of health. Then she glanced toward the street, where Dr. Britton's station wagon was parked. She saw two wrapped evergreen shrubs in the back.

  "That's what you're doing," Peggy said. "You're digging holes for the plants."

  Randle lifted his shovel and jabbed it casually into the ground a few times, still smiling. "Dead cat makes good plant food, makes 'em grow."

  "You're a faker. You wouldn't touch Satch."

  "Better make sure he doesn't come around me again," Randle said seriously. "I almost got him last time." He lashed out with his shovel, smacking the flat blade against the ground. "Ha!"

  Peggy edged closer to the hole, peered inside. Satisfied that it was empty, she started toward the house. Harry Randle was one of the doctor's regular hands on his farm, but he came over to the Connellys' once a week to do yard work and other chores Helen Connelly couldn't do herself. Peggy had long ago given up trying to be friends with Randle. Apparently he just didn't like little girls, something new in her experience.

  Near the porch Peggy became aware that Randle was quietly following her and she turned quickly, frowning, but he wasn't up to anything.

  "What are you jumping for?" he said, enjoying her discomfort. "As long as you're going inside, tell Dr. Britton I have to walk down to the Texaco station and pick up my car. I'll be back in a few minutes."

  "OK," Peggy said, and she walked on unhurriedly to the glassed-in front porch of the two-story frame house. Her mother kept a few items on the porch—unwieldy spinning wheels and cider presses and occasionally a full-size wood-burning stove—but the porch wasn't cluttered. Unlike a lot of the antique dealers in The Shades, Helen Connelly had a real shop, not just a junk emporium. She also had steady clients from St. Louis and Kansas City, and places as far west as Oklahoma. Some decorators came as often as six times a year looking for rare buys, and although good antiques were becoming scarce in that part of the country, Helen had excellent contacts and was usually able to satisfy requests.

  The foyer, living room and what had been a sun porch on the north side of the house were now filled with antiques. Peggy walked through the foyer—passing two display cases containing irresistible pieces of jewelry which she sometimes was allowed to touch, under supervision—dropped her school things on the stairway and entered the kitchen, which took up most of the rear of the first floor. Her mother was there, having coffee with Elsa and Andrew Britton.

  "I hope it's going to turn cold tonight," Peggy said. "I'm tired of this hot weather." She began rummaging in the breadbox.

  "I'm frying doughnuts here, 'less you're too impatient," said Brenda, the cook.

  "I thought you had some fried already."

  "A little cool weather and we won't be able to stir the tourists with a stick," Elsa Britton remarked sadly.

  "We need a big fall tourist season," Dr. Britton said. "The rain this summer hurt more people than I can think of offhand."

  Helen sugared her coffee and watched as Peggy stood on tiptoe to reach a carton of milk in the refrigerator. "Andy, have you heard any more about that plan to put a ski lift on Ben Lomond Mountain?"

  "Ski lift!" old Elsa snorted. "What are they going to ski on? We don't have that much snow around here."

  "Supposedly the people who build the ski lift will use a snow-making machine to keep the slopes covered."

  "I know it's mostly St. Louis money," Andrew Britton said thoughtfully. "Same people
who own that big resort on the Lake of the Ozarks. Hardly any hills at all up that way, and they've got a ski lift now."

  "Well, they'll ruin the mountain," Elsa said, with a shake of her head. "Like that real estate outfit which got hold of Blue Eye Knob ruined it."

  "I don't know," Helen murmured. "Most of the people who live up there are year-around, and that's fine for the town."

  "The Shades was doing all right twenty years ago," Elsa replied, more pointedly than necessary.

  "Before all the year-arounders moved in. Next thing, we'll have trailer parks and bowling alleys and teenage gangs running wild just like over at Table Rock two summers ago." She glared at her husband. "Somebody has to draw the line, or that's exactly what will happen. Ski lift! We've already got too many so-called artists around. Folk singers!"

  "Them doughnuts is still hot, Peggy; don't cry to me when you burn your mouth."

  "I don't think we're going to grow too fast," Dr. Britton objected. "Actually, with all we've got to offer here it's a wonder we haven't been overrun." He stretched and moved his chair around to be in the sun that came through the open back door. He was a short, muscular man of sixty-five who had lived in The Shades since the late nineteen twenties, a time when the valley and the surrounding mountains and ridges were almost inaccessible to all but the most dedicated sportsmen—and alcohol tax agents. "Long as people hold on to their property and don't let themselves get tempted by get-rich-quick promoters, we'll be all right. As for the artists, they're even more particular than the rest of us. They came here for the privacy and the natural beauty of the place, and they don't want to see it change either."

  "Peggy, don't eat standing up," Helen said to her daughter.

  "Dr. Britton, do you have any bees in your car?"

  The doctor smiled. "Matter of fact, I picked up a shipment of bees, with queen, at the post office this afternoon—"

  "How many?"

  "I'd say there should be about fifteen thousand in the hive this time of the year."

  Peggy sat down beside her mother and looked at him, enraptured. "What are you going to do with so many bees?"

  "I'm going to train some of them."

  Peggy was puzzled by the concept of trained bees. "Can I watch?"

  "Sure, come over any time."

  "Bees, Andy?" Helen said doubtfully.

  "Perfectly safe," he assured her.

  "What about that boy in Springfield who died from a bee sting this summer?"

  "He was probably hypoallergic."

  Peggy nodded thoughtfully. "Did you ever get stung?"

  "Plenty of times."

  "You'd better train the new bees not to bite, then," she advised him.

  The telephone in the hall rang.

  "That's Rosalind!" Peggy said.

  "What'll I tell her?" Helen asked over one shoulder as she left the kitchen to answer the phone.

  "Oh, tell her I'll be delayed."

  "Right," Helen said. She frowned at the school things piled on the stairs and picked up the receiver of the telephone, which was sitting on a meticulously refinished Sheraton table at the entrance to the living room.

  "Auntie Helen?"

  She was looking through the glass to the right of the door, looking beyond the porch at the yard, where Randle had left his shovel leaning against the sign that read "HELEN CONNELLY—ANTIQUES," and at first she wasn't certain just what she'd heard.

  "Yes . . . hello? Is that you, Rosalind?"

  "Auntie Helen . . ." She frowned; not a girl's voice. "Auntie Helen, I missed the school bus. Will you come get me?"

  Wrong number, she thought. "Who is this?"

  "It's Michael, Auntie Helen."

  "What?"

  "It's Michael."

  Helen said nothing at all.

  "Are you coming?"

  "Just . . . a minute. Now, who is this?" But the connection was broken before she finished.

  For several moments she continued to hold the receiver, her eyes fixed on the yard, on the street. A couple of kids went by on bicycles. Far away the ridges were a mass of yellow leaves, ripe for a stunning autumn show. The sky was blue and filled with lumbering clouds, and the sun blazed long shadows everywhere.

  "OK," she said, half to herself, then replaced the receiver and went back to the kitchen.

  "Did you tell Rosalind?"

  "It wasn't Rosalind, sweetie." She sat down and stared at her half-empty coffee cup, then out the back door.

  "You don't look too happy, Helen," Dr. Britton said.

  "I just had a—" Her expression froze and she glanced quickly at her daughter, who apparently wasn't listening, but she went on in a more cautious tone of voice. "You know, one of those calls."

  "Crank call?"

  "Ah!" Elsa said, darkly, as if she were still thinking of artists and folk singers.

  "No— I mean, that's not it exactly, Andy. I suppose it was just some sort of juvenile prank. It was a boy—about ten years old, I guess."

  "What did he say to you?" Elsa demanded.

  "He said—" Helen's mouth twisted in a bemused, half-sheepish way. "He said he wanted to be picked up. He was down at the school and he'd missed his bus, and he wanted me—"

  "Is that all?" Elsa seemed disappointed. "You looked snakebit."

  "In a way it was . . . cruel, because he, whoever that was, said he was Michael."

  "Michael?" Dr. Britton repeated, and Brenda looked up from the stove.

  "Michael."

  Peggy finished her doughnut in the silence that followed, and glanced inquiringly at their faces. Dr. Britton smiled.

  "Show you those bees now, honey?"

  "I have to change my clothes," Peggy said, with a side glance at her mother, who nodded.

  "Sugar on the mouth, Peg," she said absently.

  Peggy swiped at her face with a napkin and took off, then remembered not to run and continued up the stairs two high steps at a time.

  "Kind of an unlikely thing for a kid to do," Dr. Britton said when Peggy was out of hearing. "Calling up, pretending to be Michael. How many nine-or ten-year-old kids have heard of Michael Young?"

  "I don't know," Helen said, and lighted a cigarette for herself.

  "Well . . ." Elsa drawled, dismissing the matter. "Now that he's had his fun, no sense for you to be worried."

  "I'm not worried." She smiled quickly, showing a dimple that in another woman of forty-five might have seemed frivolous. "But the strange thing— I just can't get it out of my mind—he called me 'Auntie Helen.' Nobody's ever called me that. Except Michael Young." She looked at them, perplexed. "Don't you think that's awfully strange?"

  "Oh, now," Elsa said.

  "I wonder why he did that?"

  "Ask him when he calls again," Dr. Britton suggested, and fat Brenda, busy at her stove, cackled like a fiend.

  Chapter 2

  Like ninety percent of the people who lived in The Shades, Helen Connelly was not a native of the area. Neither was she a "year-arounder," which was Elsa Britton's term for all recent settlers who were attracted by the carefully preserved wilderness and by the lively artists' colony. Helen had been a Chicagoan and a debutante, and at twenty she'd had a West Point chapel wedding. Not quite a year later, her husband, who was the number-three man in his class, died aboard a torpedoed troop ship bound for North Africa.

  She had spent the wartime years in Washington and the years immediately following in New York, working at a succession of "interesting" and "challenging" jobs and it was a puzzle to her family and friends why she didn't remarry. To her earnest suitors she gave the easy and the obvious answer. One of them, however, saw her emotional situation a little more clearly, and presumed to discuss it with her.

  "You had it good with Ben and that was a damned lucky thing, because at that age it usually doesn't work for more than a few months, if at all—and believe me, I know, I was married myself then. It was, let's say, a perfect marriage, which is another way of saying a perfect mating; good sex keeps otherwise hor
rible marriages going longer than they have any right to. And fortunately—or was it so fortunate?—the marriage never suffered for any of the usual reasons, because it didn't last long enough. The day he died you loved him as much or more than when you married him. So now you're getting close to thirty and there's not another Ben in sight and never will be, and any marriage you might make is going to be subject to the usual stresses and discomforts: it will take a certain amount of work to make a new marriage livable no matter how good a guy you choose. And you can't face that. You can't face the prospect of years, and inevitable disappointments. You're in a fix, Helen, and I'm sorry for you."

  And she had said simply, "I can't face not being in love the only way I know how to be," and that had sounded right to her. Months had passed before she began to doubt her reasoning, to attack her complacency and the carefully wrought illusions that had kept her alive and functioning for so long. In her mind she had preserved the precious, irreplaceable marriage in infinite detail, as if he might return at any moment. Was it wrong to cling to that beautiful year, was it cowardly? He will not come back, she told herself boldly. But she knew that, she knew it . . . and quite abruptly one winter afternoon she realized the truth, with a feeling of suffocation, of horror.

  The phantom marriage she had preserved innocently, with devotion, was close to destroying her. It had become all the reality she needed to live on. There were moments when it seemed that if she concentrated long enough, then the year of her marriage would become a living thing, and all the years she had endured with bravery and dedication since Ben's death would fall from the galaxy of time; they would no longer exist.

  She knew that this dislocation was the beginning of a severe nervous breakdown, perhaps a permanent breakdown, and she had no will to resist it. At least it would be a sweet form of insanity, a through-the-looking-glass escape from the inevitability of a wretched old age.