by Joe Hill
“Stop that,” he said to it.
It stopped.
He walked. He had to, to stay warm. The moon rose, and for a while it lit the black phone like a bone-colored spotlight. Finney’s face burned and his breath smoked, as if he were more demon than boy.
He couldn’t feel his feet. They were too cold. He stomped around, trying to bring the life back into them. He flexed his hands. His fingers were cold too, stiff and painful to move. He heard off-key singing and realized it was him. Time and thought were coming in leaps and pulses. He fell over something on the floor, then went back, feeling around with both hands, trying to figure out what had tripped him up, if it was something he could use as a weapon. He couldn’t find anything and finally had to admit to himself he had tripped over his own feet. He put his head on the cement and shut his eyes.
He woke to the sound of the phone ringing again. He sat up and looked across the room at it. The eastern-facing window was a pale, silvery shade of blue. He was trying to decide if it had really rung, or if he had only dreamed it ringing, when it rang once more, a loud, metallic clashing.
Finney rose, then waited for the floor to stop heaving underfoot; it was like standing on a waterbed. The phone rang a third time, the clapper clashing at the bells. The abrasive reality of the sound had the effect of sweeping his head clear, returning him to himself.
He picked up the receiver and put his ear to it.
“Hello?” he asked.
He heard the snowy hiss of static.
“John,” said the boy on the other end. The connection was so poor, the call might have been coming from the other side of the world. “Listen, John. It’s going to be today.”
“Who is this?”
“I don’t remember my name,” the boy said. “It’s the first thing you lose.”
“First thing you lose when?”
“You know when.”
But Finney thought he recognized the voice, even though they had only spoken to each other that one time.
“Bruce? Bruce Yamada?”
“Who knows?” the boy said. “Tell me if it matters.”
Finney lifted his eyes to the black wire traveling up the wall, stared at the spot where it ended in a spray of copper needles. He decided it didn’t matter.
“What’s going to be today?” Finney asked.
“I was calling to say he left you a way to fight him.”
“What way?”
“You’re holding it.”
Finney turned his head, looked at the receiver in his hand. From the earpiece, which was no longer against his ear, he heard the faraway hiss of static and the tinny sound of the dead boy saying something else.
“What?” Finney asked, putting the receiver to his ear once more.
“Sand,” Bruce Yamada told him. “Make it heavier. It isn’t heavy enough. Do you understand?”
“Did the phone ring for any of the other kids?”
“Ask not for whom the phone rings,” Bruce said, and there came soft, childish laughter. Then he said, “None of us heard it. It rang, but none of us heard. Just you. A person has to stay here a while, before you learn how to hear it. You’re the only one to last this long. He killed the other children before they recovered, but he can’t kill you, can’t even come downstairs. His brother sits up all night in the living room making phone calls. His brother is a coke-head who never sleeps. Albert hates it, but he can’t make him leave.”
“Bruce? Are you really there or am I losing my mind?”
“Albert hears the phone too,” Bruce replied, continuing as if Finney had said nothing. “Sometimes when he’s down in the basement we prank-call him.”
“I feel weak all the time and I don’t know if I can fight him the way I feel.”
“You will. You’ll be dirty. I’m glad it’s you. You know, she really found the balloons, John. Susannah did.”
“She did?”
“Ask her when you get home.”
There was a click. Finney waited for a dial tone, but there was none.
8.
A wheat-colored light had begun to puddle into the room when Finney heard the familiar slam of the bolt. His back was to the door, he was kneeling in the corner of the room, at the place where the cement had been shattered to show the sandy earth beneath. Finney still had the bitter taste of old copper in his mouth, a flavor like the bad aftertaste of grape soda. He turned his head but didn’t rise, shielding what was in his hands with his body.
He was so startled to see someone besides Albert, he cried out, sprang unsteadily to his feet. The man in the doorway was small, and although his face was round and plump, the rest of his body was too tiny for his clothes: a rumpled army jacket, a loose cable-knit sweater. His unkempt hair was retreating from the egg-shaped curve of his forehead. One corner of his mouth turned up in a wry, disbelieving smile.
“Holy shit,” said Albert’s brother. “I knew he had something he didn’t want me to see in the basement but I mean holy shit.”
Finney staggered toward him, and words came spilling out in an incoherent, desperate jumble, like people who have been stuck for a night in an elevator, finally set free. “Please—my mom—help—call help—call my sister—”
“Don’t worry. He’s gone. He had to run into work,” said the brother. “I’m Frank. Hey, calm down. Now I know why he was freaking out about getting called in. He was worried I’d find you while he’s out.”
Albert stepped into the light behind Frank with a hatchet, and lifted it up, cocked it like a baseball bat over one shoulder. Albert’s brother went on, “Hey, do you want to know the story how I found you?”
“No,” Finney said. “No, no, no.”
Frank made a face. “Sure. Whatever. I’ll tell you some other time. Everything’s okay now.”
Albert brought the hatchet down into the back of his younger brother’s skull with a hard, wet clunk. The force of the impact threw blood into Al’s face. Frank toppled forward. The ax stayed in his head, and Albert’s hands stayed on the handle. As Frank fell, he pulled Al over with him.
Albert hit the basement floor on his knees, drew a sharp breath through clenched teeth. The ax-handle slipped out of his hands and his brother fell onto his face with a heavy boneless thump. Albert grimaced, then let out a strangled cry, staring at his brother with the ax in him.
Finney stood a yard away, breathing shallowly, holding the receiver to his chest in one hand. In the other hand was a coil of black wire, the wire that had connected the receiver to the black phone. It had been necessary to chew through it to pull it off. The wire itself was straight, not curly, like on a modern phone. He had the line wrapped three times around his right hand.
“You see this,” Albert said, his voice choked, uneven. He looked up. “You see what you made me do?” Then he saw what Finney was holding, and his brow knotted with confusion. “What the fuck you do to the phone?”
Finney stepped toward him and snapped the receiver into his face, across Al’s nose. He had unscrewed the mouthpiece and filled the mostly hollow receiver with sand, and screwed the mouthpiece back in to hold it all in place. It hit Albert’s nose with a brittle snap like plastic breaking, only it wasn’t plastic breaking. The fat man made a sound, a choked cry, and blood blurted from his nostrils. He lifted a hand. Finney smashed the receiver down and crushed his fingers.
Albert dropped his shattered hand and looked up, an animal sound rising in his throat. Finney hit him again to shut him up, clubbed the receiver against the bare curve of his skull. It hit with a satisfying knocking sound, and a spray of glittering sand leaped into the sunlight. Screaming, the fat man propelled himself off the floor, staggering forward, but Finney skipped back—so much faster than Albert—striking him across the mouth, hard enough to turn his head halfway around, then in the knee to drop him, to make him stop.
Al fell, throwing his arms out, caught Finney at the waist and slammed him to the floor. He came down on top of Finney’s legs. Finney struggled to pull hims
elf out from under. The fat man lifted his head, blood drizzling from his mouth, a furious moan rising from somewhere deep in his chest. Finney still held the receiver in one hand, and three loops of black wire in the other. He sat up, meant to club Albert with the receiver again, but then his hands did something else instead. He put the wire around the fat man’s throat and pulled tight, crossing his wrists behind Al’s neck. Albert got a hand on his face and scratched him, flaying Finney’s right cheek. Finney pulled the wire a notch tighter and Al’s tongue popped out of his mouth.
Across the room, the black phone rang. The fat man choked. He stopped scratching at Finney’s face and set his fingers under the wire around his throat. He could only use his left hand, because the fingers of his right were shattered, bent in unlikely directions. The phone rang again. The fat man’s gaze flicked toward it, then back to Finney’s face. Albert’s pupils were very wide, so wide the golden ring of his irises had shrunk to almost nothing. His pupils were a pair of black balloons, obscuring twin suns. The phone rang and rang. Finney pulled at the wire. On Albert’s dark, bruise-colored face was a horrified question.
“It’s for you,” Finney told him.
IN THE RUNDOWN
Kensington came to work Thursday afternoon with a piercing. Wyatt noticed because she kept lowering her head and pressing a wadded-up Kleenex to her open mouth. In a short time, the little knot of tissue paper was stained a bright red. He positioned himself at the computer terminal to her left, and watched her from the corners of his eyes, while he busied himself with a stack of returned videos, bleeping them back into the inventory with the scanner. The next time she lifted the Kleenex to her mouth, he caught a direct glimpse of the stainless steel pin stuck through her blood-stained tongue. It was an interesting development in the Sarah Kensington story.
She was going punk, a little at a time. When he first started working at Best Video, she was chunky and plain, with short-cropped brown hair, and small, close-set eyes; she went around with the brusque, standoffish attitude of a person who is used to not being liked. Wyatt had a streak of that himself, and had imagined they might get along, but it was nothing doing. She never looked at him if she could help it, and often pretended not to hear him when he spoke to her. In time he came to feel that getting to know her was too much effort. It was easier to loathe and shun her.
One day, an old guy had come into the store, a forty-year-old carnival freak with a shaved head and a dog collar cinched around his neck, a leash dangling from it. He wanted a copy of Sid & Nancy. He asked Kensington to help him find it and they chatted a while. Kensington laughed at everything he said, and when it was her turn to speak, the words came falling out of her mouth in a noisy, excited rush. It was a hell of a thing, watching her turn herself inside out like that over someone. Then when Wyatt showed up at work the next afternoon, the two of them were around the side of the store that couldn’t be seen from the street. The circus gimp had her flattened against the wall. They were holding hands, their fingers entwined together, while she poked her tongue desperately into cue-ball’s mouth. Now, a few months later, Kensington’s hair was an alien shade of bright copper, and she wore biker boots and haunted-house eye shadow. The stud in her tongue, though, that was all-new.
“Why’s it bleeding?” he asked her.
“Because I just got it,” she said, without looking up. She said it bitchy too. Love had not made her warm and expressive; she still sulked and glared when Wyatt spoke to her, avoiding him as if the air around him was poisonous, abhorring him as she always had, for reasons that had not and never would be defined.
“I figured maybe you got it stuck in a zipper or something,” he said. Then he added, “I guess that’s one way to keep him interested in you. He isn’t going to hang around for your good looks.”
Kensington was a pretty hard case and her reaction caught him off guard. She glanced up at him, with startled, miserable eyes, her chin quivering. In a voice he hardly recognized, she said, “Leave me alone.”
Wyatt didn’t like suddenly feeling bad for her. He wished he hadn’t said anything at all, and never mind that he had been provoked. She turned away from him, and he started to reach out, thought he would snag her sleeve, keep her there until he could figure out some way to apologize, without actually saying he was sorry. But then she spun back and glared at him through her watery eyes. She muttered something, he only caught part of it—she said retard, and then something about knowing how to read—but what he heard was more than enough. He felt a sudden, almost painful coldness spreading across his chest.
“Open your mouth one more time and I’ll yank that pin right out of your tongue, you little bitch.”
Kensington’s eyes dulled with fury. There was the Kensington he was used to. Then she was moving, her short thick legs carrying her around the counter, and along the far wall towards the back of the store. A sour-sick feeling came over him, mingled with a sudden irritability. She was headed for the office, and Mrs. Badia; running to tell on him.
He decided he was going on break, grabbed his army jacket and shoved through the Plexiglas doors. He lit an American Spirit, and stood against the stucco wall outside, shoulders hunched. He smoked and shivered, glaring across the street in the direction of Miller’s Hardware.
Wyatt watched Mrs. Prezar swing her station wagon into Miller’s parking lot, her two boys in the car with her. Mrs. Prezar lived at the end of his street in a house the color of a strawberry milk shake. He had mowed her lawn—not anytime recently, but a few years ago, back when he mowed people’s lawns.
Mrs. Prezar got out and moved briskly towards the doors of the Hardware. She left the car running. Her face was thick and heavily made up, but not bad-looking. There was something about her mouth—she had a plump, sexy underlip—that Wyatt had always liked. Her expression, as she went inside, was a robotic blank.
She left a boy in the front seat and another in back, strapped into a baby seat. The boy in front—his name was Baxter, Wyatt didn’t know why he remembered that—was skinny and long, had a delicate build that must’ve come to him by way of his father. From where Wyatt was standing, he couldn’t see much of the one in the baby seat, just a thatch of dark hair and a pair of chubby waving hands.
As soon as Mrs. Prezar slipped into the store, the older boy, Baxter, screwed himself around to look into the back. He had a Twizzler in one hand and he held it out for his baby brother. When his brother reached for it, though, Baxter jerked it out of reach. Then he held it out again. When his brother refused to be goaded into making a second grab, Baxter swatted him with it. The game continued along these lines for a while, until Baxter stopped to unwrap the Twizzler and pop one end into his mouth for a lazy taste. He had on a Twin City Pizza cap—Wyatt’s old team. Wyatt tried to figure if Baxter could be old enough to play in Little League. It didn’t seem it, but maybe they let them in younger now.
Wyatt had good memories of Little League. In Wyatt’s last year with Twin City, he almost set a league record for stolen bases. It was one of the few moments in his life when he had known for sure that he was better at something than anyone else his age. By the end of the season he had nine steals total, and had only been caught once. A doughy-faced left-handed pitcher got him leading off first, before Wyatt had a chance to get his feet under him, and all at once he was racing back and forth in the middle of a rundown, while the first baseman and second baseman closed in from either side, softly lobbing the ball back and forth between them. Wyatt had tried, at the end, to burst for second, hoping to drop and slide in under the tag…but almost as soon as he made his decision he knew it was the wrong one, and a feeling of hopelessness, of racing towards the inescapable, had come over him. The second baseman—a kid Wyatt knew, Treat Rendell, the star of the other team—was planted right in the way, waiting for him with his feet spread apart, and for the first time Wyatt could ever remember, it seemed that no matter how fast he ran he was getting no closer to where he was headed. He didn’t actually remember being
called out, only running, and the way Treat Rendell had been there in his path, waiting with his eyes narrowed to slits.
That was almost the end of the season, and Wyatt was hitless his last two games, missed the record by two stolen bases. He never got a chance to find out what he could do in high school. He didn’t play in a single game, was always on academic or disciplinary probation. Midway through his junior year he was diagnosed with a reading disability—Wyatt had trouble connecting things all together when a sentence got more than four or five words long, had for years found it a struggle to interpret anything longer than a movie title—and was dropped into a remedial program with a bunch of mental deficients. The program was called Super-Tools, but was known around school by a variety of other monikers: Stupid-Drools, Super-Fools. Wyatt had come across some graffiti in the men’s room once that read I em in Sooper Tules & I em reel prowd.
He spent his senior year on the fringe, didn’t look at people when he walked by them in the hall, didn’t try out for baseball. Treat Rendell, on the other hand, made varsity as a sophomore, hit everything in sight, and led the team to two regional championships. Now he was a state trooper, drove a souped-up Crown Victoria, and was married to Ellen Martin, an ice-white blonde, and undoubtedly the best looking of all the cheerleaders Treat was rumored to have banged.
Mrs. Prezar came out. She had only been inside a minute and hadn’t bought anything. She was holding her jacket tightly shut with one hand, perhaps against the gusting wind. Her eyes passed right over him a second time, no sign she recognized him or even noticed he was there. She dropped into the front seat, and banged the door shut, backed out so fast she squealed the tires a little.
