20th Century Ghosts

by Joe Hill

  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.

  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 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.”

  “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 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.

  Finney studied one of the windows for a long time, then ran at the wall, didn’t give himself time to think how drained and sick he was, planted a foot against the plaster and leaped. For one moment he grabbed the grille, but the steel links were too close together to squeeze a finger in, and he dropped back to his heels, then fell on his rear, shivering violently. Still. He had been up there long enough to get a glimpse through the filth-obscured glass. It was a double window, ground-level, almost completely hidden behind strangling brush. If he could break it, someone might hear him shouting.

  They all thought of that, he thought. And you see how far it got them.

  He went around the room again, and found himself standing before the phone once more. Studying it. His gaze tracked a slender black wire, stapled to the plaster above it. It climbed the wall for about a foot, then ended in a spray of frayed copper filaments. Finney discovered he was holding the receiver again, had picked it up without knowing he was doing it, was even holding it to his ear…an unconscious act of such hopeless, awful want, it made him shrink into himself a little. Why would anyone put a phone in their basement? But then there was the toil
et, too. Maybe, probably—awful thought—someone had once lived in this room.

  Then he was on the mattress, staring through the jade murk at the ceiling. He noted, for the first time, that he hadn’t cried, and didn’t feel like he was going to. He was very intentionally resting, building up his energy for the next round of exploration and thought. Would be circling the room, looking for an advantage, something he could use, until Al came back. Finney could hurt him if he had anything, anything at all, to use as a weapon. A piece of broken glass, a rusted spring. Were there springs in the mattress? When he had the energy to move again he’d try to figure out.

  By now his parents had to know something had happened to him. They had to be frantic. But when he tried to picture the search, he didn’t visualize his weeping mother answering a detective’s questions in her kitchen, and he didn’t see his father, out in front of Poole’s Hardware, turning away from the sight of a policeman carrying an empty bottle of grape soda in an evidence bag.

  Instead he imagined Susannah, standing on the pedals of her ten-speed and gliding down the center of one wide residential avenue after another, the collar of her denim jacket turned up, grimacing into the icy sheer of the wind. Susannah was three years older than Finney, but they had both been born on the same day, June 21, a fact she held to be of mystical importance. Susannah had a lot of occultish ideas, owned a deck of Tarot cards, read books about the connection between Stonehenge and aliens. When they were younger, Susannah had a toy stethoscope, which she would press to his head, in an attempt to listen in on his thoughts. He had once drawn five cards out of a deck at random and she had guessed all of them, one after another, holding the end of the stethoscope to the center of his forehead—five of spades, six of clubs, ten and jack of diamonds, ace of hearts—but she had never been able to repeat the trick.

  Finney saw his older sister searching for him down streets that were, in his imagination, free of pedestrians or traffic. The wind was in the trees, flinging the bare branches back and forth so they appeared to rake futilely at the low sky. Sometimes Susannah half-closed her eyes, as if to better concentrate on some distant sound calling to her. She was listening for him, for his unspoken cry, hoping to be guided to him by some trick of telepathy.

  She made a left, then a right, moving automatically, and discovered a street she had never seen before, a dead end road. On either side of it were disused-looking ranches with unraked front lawns, children’s toys left out in driveways. At the sight of this street, her blood quickened. She felt strongly that Finney’s kidnapper lived somewhere on this road. She biked more slowly, turning her head from side to side, making an uneasy inspection of each house as she went by. The whole road seemed set in a state of improbable silence, as if every person on it had been evacuated weeks ago, taking their pets with them, locking all the doors, turning out all the lights. Not this one, she thought. Not that one. And on and on, to the dead end of the street, and the last of the houses.

  She put a foot down, stood in place with her bike under her. She hadn’t felt hopeless yet, but standing there, chewing her lip and looking around, the thought began to form that she wasn’t going to find her brother, that no one was going to find him. It was an awful street, and the wind was cold. She imagined she could feel that cold inside her, a ticklish chill behind the breastbone.

  In the next moment she heard a sound, a tinny twanging, which echoed strangely. She glanced around, trying to place it, lifted her gaze to the last telephone pole on the street. A mass of black balloons were caught there, snarled in the lines. The wind was wrestling to wrench them free, and they bobbled and weaved, pulling hard to escape. The wires held the balloons implacably where they were. She recoiled at the sight of them. They were dreadful—somehow they were dreadful—a dead spot in the sky. The wind plucked at the wires and made them ring.

  When the phone rang Finney opened his eyes. The vivid little story he had been telling himself about Susannah fleeted away. Only a story, not a vision; a ghost story, and he was the ghost, or would be soon. He lifted his head from the mattress, startled to find it almost dark…and his gaze fell upon the black phone. It seemed to him that the air was still faintly vibrating, from the brash firehouse clang of the steel clapper on the rusty bells.

  He pushed himself up. He knew the phone couldn’t really ring—that hearing it had just been a trick of his sleeping mind—yet he half-expected it to ring again. It had been stupid to lie there, dreaming the daylight away. He needed an advantage, a bent nail, a stone to throw. In a short time it would be dark, and he couldn’t search the room if he couldn’t see. He stood. He felt spacey, empty-headed and cold; it was cold in the basement. He walked to the phone, put the receiver to his ear.

  “Hello?” he asked.

  He heard the wind sing, outside the windows. He listened to the dead line. As he was about to hang up, he thought he heard a click on the other end.

  “Hello?” he asked.

  6.

  When the darkness gathered itself up and fell upon him, he curled himself on the mattress, with his knees close to his chest. He didn’t sleep. He hardly blinked. He waited for the door to open and the fat man to come in and shut it behind him, for the two of them to be alone in the dark together, but Al didn’t come. Finney was empty of thought, all his concentration bent to the dry rap of his pulse and the distant rush of the wind beyond the high windows. He was not afraid. What he felt was something larger than fear, a narcotic terror that numbed him completely, made it impossible to imagine moving.

  He did not sleep, he was not awake. Minutes did not pass, collecting into hours. There was no point in thinking about time in the old way. There was only one moment and then another moment, in a string of moments that went on in a quiet, deadly procession. He was roused from his dreamless paralysis only when one of the windows began to show, a rectangle of watery gray floating high in the darkness. He knew, without knowing at first how he could know, that he wasn’t meant to live to see the window painted with dawn. The thought didn’t inspire hope exactly, but it did inspire movement, and with great effort he sat up.

  His eyes were better. When he stared at the glowing window, he saw twinkling, prismatic lights at the edge of his vision…but he was seeing the window clearly, nonetheless. His stomach cramped from emptiness.

  Finney forced himself to stand and he began to patrol the room again, looking for his advantage. In a back corner of the room, he found a place where a patch of cement floor had crumbled into granular, popcorn-size chunks, with a layer of sandy earth beneath. He was putting a handful of carefully selected nuggets into his pocket when he heard the thump of the bolt turning.

  The fat man stood in the doorway. They regarded each other across a distance of five yards. Al wore striped boxers and a white undershirt, stained down the front with old sweat. His fat legs were shocking in their paleness.

  “I want breakfast,” Finney said. “I’m hungry.”

  “How’s your eyes?”

  Finney didn’t reply.

  “What are you doing over there?”

  Finney squatted in the corner, glaring.

  Al said, “I can’t bring you anything to eat. You’ll have to wait.”

  “Why? Is there someone upstairs who would see you taking me food?”

  Again, Al’s face darkened, his hands squeezed into fists. When he replied, however, his tone was not angry, but glum and defeated. “Never mind.” Finney took that to mean yes.

  “If you aren’t going to feed me why did you even come down here?” Finney asked him.

  Al shook his head, staring at Finney with a kind of morose resentment, as if this was another unfair question he couldn’t possibly be expected to answer. But then he shrugged and said, “Just to look at you. I just wanted to look at you.” Finney’s upper lip drew back from his teeth in an unreasoned expression of disgust, and Al visibly wilted. “I’ll go.”

  When he opened the door, Finney sprang to his feet and began to scream help. Al stumbled over the
doorjamb in his haste to back out and almost fell, then slammed the door.

  Finney stood in the center of the room, sides heaving for breath. He had never really imagined he could get past Al and out the door—it was too far away—had only wanted to test his reaction time. Fatty was even slower than he thought. He was slow, and there was someone else in the house, someone upstairs. Almost against his will, Finney felt a building sense of charge, a nervous excitement that was almost like hope.

  For the rest of the day, and all that night, Finney was alone.

  7.

  When the cramps came again, late on his third day in the basement, he had to sit down on the striped mattress to wait for them to pass. It was like someone had thrust a spit through his side and was turning it slowly. He ground his back teeth until he tasted blood.

  Later, Finney drank out of the tank on the back of the toilet, and then stayed there, on his knees, to investigate the bolts and the pipes. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of the toilet before. He worked until his hands were raw and abraded, trying to unscrew a thick iron nut, three inches in diameter, but it was caked with rust, and he couldn’t budge it.

  He lurched awake, the light coming through the window on the west side of the room, falling in a beam of bright yellow sunshine filled with scintillating mica-flecks of dust. It alarmed him that he couldn’t remember lying down on the mattress to nap. It was hard to piece thoughts together, to reason things through. Even after he had been awake for ten minutes, he felt as if he had only just come awake, empty-headed and disorientated.

  For a long time he was unable to rise, and sat with his arms wound around his chest, while the last of the light fled, and the shadows rose around him. Sometimes a fit of shivering would come over him, so fierce his teeth chattered. As cold as it was, it would be worse after dark. He didn’t think he could wait out another night as cold as the last one. That was Al’s plan maybe. To starve and freeze the fight out of him. Or maybe there was no plan, maybe the fat man had keeled over of a heart attack, and this was just how Finney was going to die, one cold minute at a time. The phone was breathing again. Finney stared at it, watching as the sides inflated, withdrew, and inflated again.