When Michael Calls

by Farris, John

But her escape had been in a totally different direction; less than a week after discovering that she'd had only a tenuous contact with reality for much too long, she found herself, unwillingly, in The Shades, a place she'd never heard of, found herself involved in trouble that demanded all her time and strength. The months that followed had been harrowing, but through plain neglect the one-and-only marriage had dwindled to a proper distance in her thoughts, and after that, falling in love had been easy and natural. First she fell in love with The Shades itself, and then, much later, with Ed Connelly.

  They were driving back from the post office in the village of The Shades when Peggy said, "Who's Michael, Mother?"

  Helen was used to questions out of nowhere but she was sure she looked a little surprised at this one because Peggy said patiently, "The boy who called you a little while ago."

  "Oh." Helen stopped at the state highway intersection, then continued on up White Church Road. "I don't really know who that was, Peggy; some little boy who should have better things to do than annoy people over the telephone."

  "But you said it was Michael. Michael who?"

  Helen hesitated, then explained with a smile, "Michael was your cousin Craig's brother, honey, but he died a long time ago. Before you were born. Cousin Craig was only eleven years old then."

  "What happened to Michael?"

  "He ran—ran away from home often, and the last time he ran away he got lost in a blizzard."

  "Didn't anybody ever find him?"

  "Yes, but it was weeks and weeks afterward." Helen pulled up in front of the house, parked her ranch wagon on the asphalt pavement which she'd provided for her customers and took the key out of the ignition. "So you see that wasn't Michael—my nephew Michael—on the telephone today. It was someone pretending to be." Helen was prepared for a thornier job of explaining but Peggy confounded her by dropping the subject.

  "If Fletcher Ames finds a skunk and if he gives me the skunk, can I keep him?"

  "No, I don't think so. Skunks aren't very good pets."

  "Could I have a kitten?"

  "I doubt if Satch would tolerate a rival around the place."

  "Oh, Satch," Peggy said disparagingly. "He's not a very good pet. And he runs away often."

  "That he does. Don't you run away. Brenda's going to have supper ready a little early this evening."

  On weekdays during the fall season it was unusual for more than a dozen people to stop and browse and, as a rule, Helen closed her shop after two o'clock. But on this afternoon she had a late appointment with an old customer who collected milk glass, and while Helen was entertaining her, a car from Illinois pulled up and several elderly tourists asked if they could look around. They stayed until past dark and bought nothing, which was no surprise. Meanwhile Helen received two long-distance telephone calls, one from a decorator in Kansas City who desperately needed a blue-and-white oval hooked rug; the other call was from an undertaker's assistant in Steeleville who told her that an old and almost penniless spinster had died that afternoon in the community, leaving a houseful of gorgeous antique pieces which more than likely would be auctioned off as soon as the heirs could arrange it.

  Helen hated this part of the business, but to stay in business at all she needed such informers. She questioned the mortician at length. He had been in the house, of course, and he was able to give her enough detail about the furniture to convince her that it was worthwhile making a bid for the lot. While the Illinois tourists wandered around complaining about high prices ("I can remember when them pitchers was so common you couldn't give 'em away!"), Helen did some hasty figuring in her small office just off the foyer. It was after banking hours in St. Louis, but she contacted a vice president of the Brentwood Bank with whom she was on friendly terms and found out how much she could borrow. Then she made one last call, to a lawyer in Salem, who would handle the transaction for her. The lawyer advised Helen that he knew the heirs, and he was morally certain that any of them Hustings would hunt wild pig with a hoe handle for the amount of money Helen was prepared to offer. So that was that. Helen made a note to send the mortician a money order for twenty dollars, washed her hands in the lavatory under the stairs and went happily to supper, which Brenda had been keeping hot for the past ten minutes.

  Peggy was making a mound of her turnips to one side of her plate and discussing the ramifications of her latest falling out with Rosalind, who was Peggy's best friend when she wasn't being such a terrible baby, when the telephone rang again. Helen went to answer, noticing that it seemed colder in the house, as if the temperature outside was plunging.

  "Hello?"

  "Auntie Helen?"

  Oh, God, she thought involuntarily, wincing, but she gained control of herself and said sharply, "I don't know why you think this is funny, but I'm not impressed and I want you to stop calling here. Do you understand?"

  "Auntie Helen, why didn't you pick me up?" the voice said plaintively.

  "Now, listen—"

  "It's dark, and I can't walk home. My mother's going to be mad—"

  "Who is this?"

  There was no reply, but Helen heard a kind of sighing on the line that caused the skin of her forearms to tighten until she tentatively identified the sound as wind. She glanced outside and saw leaves flying through the nimbus of light from the lantern outside her gate.

  "Please come," the boy said, and he sounded subdued, doleful. "What's wrong, Auntie Helen? Are you mad at me?"

  "I'm not—" she started to say, but the connection was broken suddenly, as it had been earlier that day. Helen rubbed her forehead with her index finger, listening as if she half expected to hear the voice again despite the steady and familiar signal on the line; she put the receiver down unnecessarily hard.

  "Now I'm getting mad," she said aloud, confirming it for herself, and Peggy called from the kitchen.

  "Who was that, Mother?"

  "A spook," Helen muttered, stopping to make an adjustment of the thermostat before she entered the kitchen. "Baby, are you warm enough in that sweater?"

  "Yes," Peggy said. "What spook?"

  Helen went to the stove to pour more coffee for herself. "That's just an expression. By spook I mean . . . a child who gets on people's nerves."

  "Like Rosalind."

  "Not like Rosalind. Rosalind's just— She doesn't mean to be a— Maybe we'd better skip it." Helen looked significantly at the pristine mound of turnips on Peggy's plate.

  "I guess I wasn't in the mood for turnips," Peggy said with an analytical frown. "Like Michael?"

  "What?"

  "Was the spook you were talking to like Michael?"

  "As a matter of fact it was. . . . The turnips tasted a little strong, didn't they?"

  Peggy nodded. "It wasn't Brenda's fault, though."

  "How about some blackberry cobbler?"

  "Yes!"

  "I'll dish up the cobbler while you carry your plate to the sink and wash it."

  "Do you want me to carry your plate too?" Helen looked at her unfinished dinner.

  "Might as well," she said glumly.

  Peggy got up, cleaned her plate at the sink, then returned and put an arm commiseratingly around her mother's shoulders. "Whoever that is calling," she said with great severity, "I just wish he'd stop!"

  "Oh, baby. It isn't anything, really. Don't you worry about it."

  Helen was aware, however, that she had already communicated a good part of her irritation with the young prankster, and so she tried hard during the next two hours to divert Peggy and keep her mind off the telephone calls, off "Michael"—if indeed Peggy was thinking about him at all. Helen didn't know and considered it unwise to ask.

  Twice before eight o'clock the telephone rang; each time she tightened up and struggled with feelings of dismay and anger before answering. But neither of the callers was "Michael."

  Peggy went to bed a little later than usual, and for an hour afterward she was restless because of the pane-rattling, frost-bringing wind that roared through the n
arrows of the valley and poured leaves upon their roof. Once her daughter had settled down for good, Helen holed up in the office nook which she had outfitted with a rolltop desk and gradually, over the years, crammed with all the treasures she had found it impossible to part with. There were three baroque lamps rewired for electricity, an assortment of candelabra, a wall of miniature paintings, bronze busts of children, inkwells, glass paperweights, many photographs of glassy-eyed Victorians, a petit-point footrest and a framed autograph of Franklin Pierce. There were also stacks of fragrant, crumbling leatherbound books. All the objects seemed to share a comfortable, if down-at-the-heels immortality, and Helen found this atmosphere soothing whenever she found herself in difficulty with the monthly accounts.

  About eleven the phone rang again, startling her. She had been absorbed in an expensive, beautifully photographed study of antebellum Louisiana mansions which a friend had loaned to her, and the wind had lulled her into a series of yawns. Helen sat up straight, and a dark bust of a child caught her eye.

  "Time for all good little boys to be asleep," she said, looking again at the pendulum clock on the wall opposite her desk to check the time. And she felt a little worried, not because it might be the same boy calling again, but because she was automatically assuming, whenever the telephone rang, that it was him.

  After all, he'd had his fun.

  Yes, but, she thought, and hurried across the foyer to lift the receiver before Peggy woke up.

  She heard someone crying.

  You've had your fun, Helen tried to say, but she couldn't; her mouth had dried up.

  He was weeping this time, heartbroken, and his sobs shocked her because it wasn't a child playacting; she was certain of that. He was terrified, helpless, alone.

  "Auntie Helen—"

  "Y-yes—"

  "I'm . . . home . . . and there's . . . nobody here."

  "Oh, my God," Helen said quickly and harshly, "don't keep this up. Whoever you are, please—"

  "There's . . . nobody here. Where's my mother?"

  The wind outside, to which she had paid little attention for the last hour, suddenly turned on the house and thumped at the door. Helen fell back against the table, trembling.

  "Where's Craig? Where's my brother?"

  "Please," Helen whispered. "What are you trying to do?"

  He was weeping again. She put the receiver down on the table and ran from it, into the kitchen. But the blackness outside the windows was too forbidding; she couldn't stay there. And it seemed she hadn't escaped him after all; she was still trembling, still vulnerable, and pathetically frightened for a mature woman who was sure that she knew a great deal about the foibles of children.

  Yes, real children. But this one is a sadistic, depressing ogre.

  When Helen felt she could breathe normally, she returned to the foyer and picked up the receiver of the telephone. She heard nothing this time except the sighing, the tricky fade and rise of the wind, somewhere.

  I'm going to be rid of you, she thought. I'm going to stop you if it takes— "Hello," she said, and paused. "You wanted to talk to me. That's a good idea. I certainly want to talk to you." Again Helen paused. "I know you're still there, so why don't you say something? How long do you think—"

  He screamed then, not in her ear but seemingly from a distance, and Helen cringed.

  "Michael!" she said, not meaning to. "Mi—"

  "I'm dead, aren't I? I'm dead, I'm dead!"

  She hung up instantly, and seconds later tears formed in her eyes.

  "Mother?" Peggy called from her room.

  "Wha—what is it, Peg?"

  "Who are you talking to?"

  "I'm sorry if I woke you up. Please go back to sleep. It was only . . . Reverend Bartlett. I was talking to him on the phone."

  "You sounded loud."

  "Yes. I'm sorry, baby. Good night."

  "Good night."

  Loud enough to wake Peggy, she thought, despairingly. Her heart still felt flogged and sore. This thing is really getting to me, and I'm going to have to— It wasn't Michael.

  She looked up, startled by the denial that had so abruptly crossed her mind.

  Of course it wasn't Michael, and I'm not haunted.

  But I could use someone to talk to, Helen admitted bleakly, and reached for a brass box of cigarettes on the table beside the telephone.

  While she was dialing she felt as if she might be surrendering something valuable of herself, surrendering self-reliance perhaps. She and Peggy had lived in their house, alone, since the death of Ed Connelly, and not once during those years had she given in to the need to call someone during a particularly lonely and difficult evening, to invite company. But this time—

  Morning seemed a long way off, and she was too disturbed by the calls from "Michael" to wait that long to discuss them with a friend.

  "Craig? I hate to bother you this time of night, but . . . You're not? Good. I'm afraid I have a—an odd sort of thing has happened here tonight and . . . Could you? Oh, I'd appreciate . . . No, don't come barreling down that road; it's not all that urgent."

  Helen was surprised to feel considerably relieved after saying good-bye to her nephew. To hell with all that self-reliance, she thought cheerfully, and went into the kitchen to make coffee.

  Craig Young was twenty-eight, which is not extremely youthful for a practicing psychologist, and many men have begun to mature strikingly near thirty, but to Craig's occasional chagrin he still looked very much like a college freshman. He was quite tall, over six feet four inches tall, and well-knit—in fact, he'd played excellent college basketball—but because he was mostly lengths and angles, he looked at a glance to be badly constructed, and therefore seemed ungraceful. Except for fuzz, most of the hair was gone from the front of his head, but a good many college boys these days are going bald. He had cultivated a moustache, which was sandy and incongruous. He smoked a pipe and was uncomfortable with it. Perhaps this mild self-consciousness had prompted him to accept a position at the nearby Greenleaf School, a semi-institution for difficult boys up to twelve years of age, instead of at a hospital or a university. Or perhaps, having grown up in The Shades, he loved the area too much to stay away for long.

  "Whoever the boy is," Craig said, after pouring his third cup of coffee, "it's obvious that he knows a lot about Michael, and about us."

  "Too much."

  "I suppose some of the people around here still talk about my mother, and Michael. Any impressionable kid has fantasies of running away and dying in a—well, in a romantic way far from home, so it's reasonable to assume your caller has let the whole story of the Youngs get the best of him."

  "He's more than just an ordinary impressionable boy. He's fantastic, Craig."

  "How do you mean?"

  "He's convinced that he is Michael. Because what I heard over the telephone wasn't make-believe. He wasn't acting. Everything he said was pathetically real. And the way he sobbed!" Helen shook her head. "I wish I could remember the quality of Michael's voice . . ."

  Craig tilted his chair back and smiled skeptically. "All ten-year-old boys tend to sound alike on the telephone. You're not hinting we have a ghost on our hands, are you?"

  "He called me Auntie Helen," she replied, looking no less troubled than when Craig had walked in.

  "So did I, while I was growing up."

  "Oh, no," Helen said quickly. "You didn't. That was Michael. Only Michael. I'll have to admit our pretender has frightened me, but disregarding his ability and his motives for the moment, how could he possibly know to call me Auntie Helen?"

  Craig thought about it, then spread his hands and grinned broadly. "All right, I'm stumped. But there is an explanation."

  "Hmm," she said, unconsoled.

  "I deal with troubled children; they've been my major interest in life for going on six years now. You're bewildered by this impostor who keeps calling you up and scaring the— And I don't blame you, but, bear in mind he is an impostor, and he'll get tired of his game,
and take up something else. Sex, I hope."

  "When will he get tired?"

  "I don't know. I'm sorry to say, the more absorbed they are in their game, the more persistent they can be; speaking professionally, it sometimes takes months, or years, to separate a disturbed child from his fantasies and delusions."

  Helen put her hands over her face, and groaned.

  "Change your number, and don't give the new number to anyone but a few friends," Craig suggested.

  "I happen to be in the antique business, and from time to time people do need to get in touch with me. Besides, it would be days before a new telephone could be installed." She lighted a fresh cigarette. "Who could it be? I think I know just about every boy and girl in The Shades, and I can't imagine any of them— Craig, do you suppose one of the boys at your school is making the calls?"

  "Several of them have the depth of imagination and emotional instability necessary for such a fantasy to evolve, but none have access to a telephone, particularly at eleven o'clock at night."

  "Don't they ever sneak out after dark?"

  "Sure. Once or twice, until we get on to them and put a stop to it."

  "He could have sneaked away from the school then, and—"

  "Pinning it on one of our kids, eh?"

  Helen sighed. "Just trying to come up with something halfway reasonable."

  Craig stretched and got up to put his saucer and cup in the sink. "Want me to stick around tonight?"

  "What? Oh, that's not necessary." Her eyes went to the stove clock and she stood up hurriedly. "I'm sorry, Craig. Twenty minutes to one—why didn't you shut me up half an hour ago?"

  "Enjoyed it. Haven't been over for quite a while."

  "How's Amy?"

  "She's been away visiting her folks. I think she got back tonight."

  "We're going to have an evening real soon," Helen promised, walking him to the front door.

  Craig picked up his shearling coat on the way and put it on, yawning. "That wind's not going to quit till morning. Sometimes I think it'll blow me right off Ben Lomond. Tell Peg I'm sorry I didn't get to see her."

  Helen went as far as the front porch with him, and waited outside, shivering, as he walked to the gate.