When Michael Calls

by Farris, John

  Inside, the telephone rang, but at first she didn't hear it because of the wind. When she did become aware of the telephone she started inside, changed her mind and yelled, "Craig!"

  He looked up as he was about to get into his car.

  "Telephone!" she said, pointing, and ran to answer.

  Craig hesitated, then shut the car door and hurried back to the house. But Helen had let the door close behind her. He tried the knob and found that the door was locked. Then he considered ringing the bell, and quickly thought better of it. He peered in through the narrow glass to the left of the door. The foyer was dark but he could see her, standing at the edge of light from the kitchen, one hand on the table, the other holding the receiver of the telephone to her ear.

  He rapped on the glass. "Helen!"

  She turned and put down the receiver and came. When she opened the door her face was chalk, her eyes blank.

  "That boy again?" he said, scowling.

  "Yes, it was Michael."

  "What? Now listen, Helen, you can't . . ." He took her arm and turned her from the doorway, entered the house himself. With the wind shut out, Craig could speak more quietly.

  "Aunt Helen, that's not Michael, my brother Michael, who's calling you. Don't let yourself get in the habit of—" He stopped because she was paying no attention to him. "What did he say this time?" He gripped her arm more tightly and she responded with a wince.

  "Oh, Craig, that hurts me!"

  "I'm sorry," he apologized, letting go. "But you looked—"

  "Don't worry, I'm really all right. This time he just—he said some things that—"

  "What, Helen?"

  "His voice was altogether different. So terribly cold. He— I think I want to sit down, if you don't mind." She went into the office and slumped in front of her desk while Craig filled the doorway.

  "He couldn't have had much to say. You were only on the phone about half a minute."

  Helen lifted her eyes. "All he said was, 'My mother's dead, isn't she? Why did you send her away to die, Auntie Helen?'"

  Craig was silent for half a minute, looking bleakly at her. He said finally, "This is one I'd like to write up, if we ever get hold of the lad who's making the calls. I suppose . . . I'd better notify the sheriff."

  "What good will that do?"

  "Well . . ." Craig shrugged, then admitted, "No good at all, I'm sure. I was hoping it might make you feel a little better."

  "Good Lord, Craig, I'm not that upset!" After a moment she smiled, her face softening. "And I didn't mean to jump on you. I think I could use a good night's sleep."

  "Before you go up, wrap the telephone in a thick towel and put it in the closet. If he's still in a talkative mood this late, let him wear his dialing finger out."

  Helen nodded. "I know you can't predict how long this boy will keep calling, Craig. But do you think he'll . . . limit himself to calls?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "What if he gets the urge to—to come around?"

  "I don't think that's likely, Helen."

  "You can't be sure, can you?"

  "Not without—"

  "He was angry with me, Craig. He sounded betrayed." Helen stared at him, unable to keep the concern she felt from her face.

  "Maybe . . . you and Peg should come up on the mountain with me for a few days if you don't feel safe here."

  "That would mean a lot of explaining to Peg. So far she's not disturbed by the calls, and not more than normally curious. If Mi— If the boy keeps calling, I should be able to . . . Well, I think I'm prepared for almost anything; I'll just have to handle him the best way I can."

  Craig said slowly, "I think there's a good chance you won't hear from him again. He more or less threatened you this last time, and accused you of doing away with his mother." Helen looked startled and dismayed, but Craig went on, eagerly. "That's good; it may have been the key to the fantasy which he constructed from elements of our lives. He's a boy whose mother died, or left him without explanation. Now he has an explanation, and he's fixed the blame. He doesn't need his fantasy anymore; no matter how long it took him to become 'Michael,' he can discard 'Michael' in an instant."

  Helen studied him rather dubiously. "You're the psychologist. Not just trying to cheer me up, are you?"

  Craig smiled guilelessly. "It's a reasonable theory. I'll go home and kick it around, unless you'd rather have me stay—"

  "No, go home, for heaven's sake. In another thirty seconds I'll be yawning in your face."

  "A dollar says you don't hear from him again."

  "I'll believe you're the greatest psychologist in the world. I'll believe you can cast spells."

  "Be around tomorrow night to collect my dollar," Craig warned her, heading for the door.

  "Fine, and be prepared to stay for supper, or Peg will lose faith in all cousins."

  He bent to kiss her forehead, then walked into the wind, chin down. Helen ducked back inside, letting go the yawn she had threatened him with. She stayed downstairs just long enough to put out the lights, thinking about Craig's moustache and wondering how long it would be before Amy got him to shave it off; thinking about the dollar bet. All that Craig had surmised about the telephoning boy sounded logical. She was content to believe he was right, as she started up the stairs.

  And the telephone rang.

  Damn you!

  Her jaw set, Helen snatched up the receiver.

  "Hey, Bertram! Hey, old buddy!"

  "Friend," Helen said, "thank you for having the wrong number.'

  Chapter 3

  The Greenleaf School was located a couple of miles from the village center in an area which old settlers still referred to as Eveningshade: a hollow about half a mile long hemmed in by sometimes-vertical ridges four hundred to a thousand feet high. The floor of the hollow had been cleared and planted in grass for athletic fields and the school buildings formed a rough quadrangle atop the southernmost ridge overlooking the fields. They were expensive fieldstone buildings, approximately twenty years old. There was a wall around the quadrangle, a low wall which served to enhance the campus rather than to keep people at a distance, or to restrict the students, most of whom came from well-to-do families. As a rule it took a great deal of money to send a boy to the Greenleaf School for a year, but most of the parents who had sons at Greenleaf were sufficiently desperate not to care what it cost. In addition to topflight teachers experienced in dealing with bright but undisciplined children, there were also two psychiatrists and two clinical psychologists on the staff. Both psychiatrists commuted once a week from St. Louis, which was 140 miles away. Consequently Craig Young and his assistant, Amy Lawlor, did most of the work with the two dozen boys who required regular therapy.

  They were having a late lunch in the faculty dining room when Craig mentioned the telephone calls his aunt had received the day before. Amy was immediately intrigued and pressed him for details.

  "One of our gentlemen?" she suggested, when Craig had told her all he knew.

  He packed his pipe with tobacco and lighted it, talking between puffs. "Helen thought so, but I couldn't go along with her. We've got missing-parent syndromes, all right. But I can't believe any of our boys have ever heard of my brother Michael. After all, that was sixteen years ago. Who still talks about him? I don't; I hardly think about Michael. I doubt if any of the locals remember him well; the story's not all that interesting."

  "The boy who called Helen certainly knew a lot about Michael, and his fantasy was beautifully organized. Morbid too. If I were Helen I'd have climbed the walls."

  Craig said cheerfully, "He hasn't called today, though; I was talking to Helen just before I came down to eat. So the hunch I had last night might be accurate: the boy doesn't need 'Michael' anymore, and he's dropped him."

  Amy poured half a glass of iced tea for herself. She was a year younger than Craig, a tall, blonde girl with a good figure and a quiet-seeming face made extraordinary by the kind of wicked downy eyes so many Hollywood starlets h
ave. She'd been a starlet herself, briefly, before discovering that she didn't have quite enough talent to justify the grueling process of becoming an actress.

  "That's probably the answer," Amy said after thinking it over, "but your aunt was convinced that Michael was real."

  "She didn't know what to think."

  "Craig . . . you don't believe in spirits, but—"

  "Damn right I don't."

  "But," Amy said firmly, "I do."

  Craig groaned, then smiled at her. "Nothing supernatural about this at all."

  "Oh, no? I think we could build a strong case for the supernatural."

  "Go ahead, build a case. Are you going to finish your pie?"

  "Help yourself. Craig, you've assumed that the caller is a boy who has so familiarized himself with the story of your brother that he has actually come to believe he is Michael. But on the other hand you admit it's improbable that a boy who is, say, ten years of age could learn that much about another boy, dead for sixteen years."

  "Improbable; not impossible."

  "I'll concede that point. But this boy called Helen 'Auntie Helen,' and she swears no one but Michael Young ever called her that."

  "Probably not less than a hundred people heard Mike say 'Auntie Helen' when he was alive."

  "I won't concede there. It's not the sort of . . . verbal idiosyncrasy that's likely to be remembered."

  Craig forked in the last of the cherry pie and looked at her indulgently. "What's your solution?"

  "It could be that the spirit of your brother Michael—"

  "Picked up the telephone and called Helen a few times. What telephone? Where? In that astral waiting room the occultists are always talking about?"

  "If you just want to have a good laugh—"

  "No, no, I'm sorry. I'm listening. Please tell me."

  Amy sighed and decided she wasn't very angry, and smiled slightly, but she was completely serious as she continued. "The spirit of your brother might be possessing another, outwardly normal boy here in The Shades. A boy with latent psychic-sensitive qualities."

  "Demonic possession? If there was such a boy, it wouldn't be any secret. His parents would have brought him to us in a bag to have his demon exorcised, or whatever you do with demons."

  "No. The boy I'm thinking of might be puzzling his parents by acting . . . differently; but it wouldn't be cause for alarm unless Michael, the spirit Michael, greatly upset his host, or made him do wild things. That's not what Michael wants, however. He just wants to be in touch with his aunt."

  "Good Lord, Amy, where'd you pick up all that witchcraft?"

  "A friend of mine at UCLA was a spiritualist-medium. He was also a cracking good psychiatrist. He doesn't doubt that some forms of mental illness are caused by demons, and neither do I."

  "Run across any demons lately?"

  Amy gestured lightly toward the campus. "About one hundred thirty of them."

  "Otherwise."

  "I've never met any demons, I'm happy to say, and I've never seen a ghost. But I've heard plenty of spirits speaking their minds at séances." Craig had his scoffing look again, and Amy smoothed hair over one ear with the palm of her hand. "Now you have another theory of the telephone calls, and I believe my theory might be worth following up."

  "Do you feel like a drive?"

  "Sure. You mean you are taking me seriously?"

  "I'm greatly interested."

  "That's something," Amy murmured.

  "In getting away for an hour with my girl," Craig said, grinning.

  Once they were in his Chevelle and on the road to town—a narrow rumpled band of blacktop through heavy woods which Craig called "blind alley"—he had a couple more questions about Amy's preoccupation.

  "If it is Michael's ghost, where has he been for sixteen years?"

  "Can't tell you, because I don't know that much about the spirit world."

  "Could he have been right here, in The Shades?"

  "You'd like for me to say that's farfetched, but there are well-documented cases of spirits remaining quite near the place where the physical body died."

  "So he could be around, but, being a spirit, he's invisible."

  "Not necessarily. If he came into the presence of a psychic-sensitive, that person would know immediately. He might even be able to see the spirit as plainly as I see you now."

  "Do you know any medium?"

  "Not locally. Why?"

  "Just curiosity. I've never been to a séance." She grinned. "An honest medium might make a believer of you in a hurry."

  "Don't bet on it. Where are we going; do you have your druthers?"

  "Why don't we drive up Big Enoch to the Military Park?"

  After the freeze of the night before the afternoon had a pleasant warmth and the sky was clear, almost iridescent blue. Craig drove with the top down and after they passed through the village he doubled his speed. Amy's long hair whipped like a pennant behind her and she smiled delightedly as they blazed through shadowy hollows red with sumac and darted around steep cliffs flawed by huge limestone outcroppings. They passed a timber dam and an old iron bridge below which the clear water ran four feet deep and clean enough to drink. Craig was saying something to her but Amy couldn't hear, and she waved for him to slow down.

  "We used to live near here," he shouted. "Up that ridge. House is still mostly standing. Want to have a look?"

  Craig never had had much to say concerning his boyhood; the talk at lunch about Michael and Michael's fate had greatly increased Amy's curiosity about the unhappy and tragic Young family. She was pleased but a little surprised that Craig was opening up this way, volunteering at last to share what had been a very private part of his life.

  Amy nodded, and he slowed almost to a stop before turning at a point where a runneled gravel road came down to meet the county hard road.

  There were three mailboxes beside the blacktop and as they went by, Amy glanced at them. The last of the mailboxes was virtually rusted-out but there was a hint of a name still visible on the uphill, weather-protected side of the box. YOUNG.

  The road was quite steep and Craig had to use care in getting the car through the ruts and over the sizable rocks jutting out of the hard earth. On the left side of the road the woods had been selectively logged nearly to the top of the ridge and the remaining trees were big and widely spaced, with sun on the cleared ground between them. To the right the woods were almost impenetrable; they seemed cold despite the orange and scarlet tones of the leaves.

  "Don't know who lives there," Craig said, pointing out an unpainted board house as they went by. "Summer people, I suppose. And the Crofutts live down at the end of that road, or they did the last time I was up this way."

  "When was that?"

  "I don't know," he replied, looking inexplicably glum. "Months, or years."

  He drove another five hundred feet over the steadily worsening road and then turned cautiously and proceeded through underbrush almost as dense as a hedge which choked off the last ruts; they reached a stony clearing at the very top of the ridge. Looking back, Amy could just make out the highway below, and in front of her, through the mile-long break in a succession of razorback ridges known as Clark's Gap, she was able to see nearly all of the valley of The Shades—ten, perhaps twenty square miles, blocks of yellowed pasture alternating with fiery autumn woodland.

  "Beautiful," she murmured. "What a wonderful place to live."

  "I always thought so." Craig got out of the car, slipped his sunglasses into his shirt pocket and walked toward the abandoned cottage. Halfway there he turned his head quizzically. "You coming? Not much to look at, actually."

  She joined him and they stood in front of the east-facing cottage. The roof was half gone, and so was part of one wall; blackened stones were scattered over a large area. Dried moss was thick everywhere, even on the exposed timbers. There were black shards of glass in a few windows. A tall oak which had partly burned along with the cottage still hung protectively, but in a crippled way
, over the remains.

  Amy stared at the cottage until a squirrel scampered fatly along the roof line. Then she looked up at Craig, who had not taken his eyes from her face.

  "As you can see, it burned," he said.

  "What happened?"

  "Mother. She wasn't the most competent person under ordinary circumstances, but when she drank she was a disaster. We only had the fireplace for heat up here—enough on even the worst winter nights, you understand. But fires need tending, and Mother had the habit of heaping too much wood on the embers and then falling asleep on the sofa. The night the house burned some sparks popped out on the floor. It was lucky she woke up at all, but she did, and got us out through the back door. There's nothing to show you inside; it's just a shell. Melting snow from the roof put the fire out, or I'm sure there wouldn't be a trace of the house today."

  Amy looked toward the other side of the clearing and saw a certain amount of litter: paper and tin cans. "Looks like a popular picnic spot. Who owns the property now, Craig?"

  "I do. I inherited it at twenty-one."

  Amy walked closer to the house. "This is where Michael said he was when he called your aunt late last night. I wonder—"

  "For God's sake, Amy," he said dourly. "Let's go. I don't want to hear any more about ghosts."

  Amy caught up with him before he reached the car. "I was being thoughtless," she apologized. "I know you didn't have a very happy time in this place."

  He looked steadily at her, his eyes expressionless. "You're wrong, Amy. Michael and I were happy. Very happy, I'd say." He leaned back against the Chevelle and took out his pipe, gazing at The Shades through Clark's Gap. "We more or less ran wild in the woods, and we got along fine with Mother—treated her like an older sister. I know a lot more about her today than I did then, of course, and I can see her faults. She drank, and she . . . had no judgment when it came to men, and she neglected us half the time, but we didn't consider her absences neglect. We always knew if she wasn't here one day she'd be here the next, cooking, washing our clothes, trying to get us to wash, taking a fond interest in whatever we happened to be interested in. Seems to me even now that she was very happy, too, although I know better."