She draws another breath and begins to search the hamper, pulling out sheets one at a time, shaking them. There are sheets recently peed on, all right, but no Dolly.
“I think I have what you’re looking for,” he says. Lorraine turns with a jolt that has her skin sparking.
“Who’s there?”
She hears a phlegmy chuckle, then the quavering voice again. “It’s only me. Did I scare you?”
“Did you—? Hell, yes,” Lorraine says, shaking her head in annoyance. She is unable to tell where his voice is coming from. Next she hears a dry reedy sucking sound, like someone pulling on a straw to get the last drops from a container of soda or fruit juice. That gets on her nerves fast. “Who are you?”
“Oh—I work nights around here. Just washed my old sneakers, now I’m waiting for them to come out of the dryer.”
“What did you mean, you have what I’m looking for? How would you know why—”
She sees him then, shadowy, as he rises from a stool behind a long sorting table; his head, in silhouette against the glass of the office door, looks shaggy. “I believe you come down here for her doll. Throwed out by mistake, was it?”
“Yes. But—”
“Come and get it, then,” he says, chuckling, his amusement causing him to wheeze at the end.
“No. Bring it to me,” Lorraine says. And adds, “Please.”
“All right. All right.” Sounding a little cross. The stool legs scrape on the concrete floor. He comes toward Lorraine, slowly, soundlessly. His sneakers clunking around in the dryer. “How’s little Missy doing? She calm down some from her bad dreams?”
“Were you upstairs earlier? In the children’s wing?”
“That I was. That I was.”
“I see. But how did you know Alison’s doll was missing?”
“Oh, I know things. I know lots of things. Been here almost all my life.”
“Do I know you? What’s your name?”
At the instant she asks, the fluorescent lighting flares overhead with the violence of lightning, the laundry is garishly illuminated, and he is closer than she thought, white-haired, stooped, unkempt head thrust forward of his shoulders as he shuffles toward her. Alison’s Dolly offered in his right hand. Chuckling fit to kill, is Walter Banks. The thumping of old sneakers round and round the dryer tub is like an echo of the accelerated tempo of Lorraine’s heart. She stares in hammering fright at the missing finger on the veiny hand that grips the doll.
“Oh Jesus—!”
The door is only a few feet away. He is old now, and slow and obviously not strong, she can get away easily; Lorraine turns but—
There is no room for her to run.
Because Alison is standing in the doorway in her nightie, arms folded, looking up at her, rigid in her purpose, baleful.
“Oh Alison! But—you can’t do this!”
Alison shakes her head slowly, unyielding. Then Lorraine feels the hand with the missing digit on her shoulder. She glances at it. Not an old man’s juiceless spidery spotted claw—the skin is smooth, unblemished, his hand large, strong; strong enough to grind her bones. Even with a finger gone.
“Alison—God—it’s wrong—listen to me!”
Alison in a quiet kind of huff shuts the door in her face and is gone.
Big Boy bears down and Lorraine screams. He pulls her slowly around to face him. He smiles fondly at Lorraine.
“You don’t want to go yet,” he says. “It’s story time.”)
Answering the Call
BRIAN FREEMAN
Brian Freeman originally sent us a story that was not quite right; but he was willing to take it through three revisions. When it still wasn’t quite right we felt compelled to ask for a fourth draft. He complied by sending us a completely different story, which was so original and creepy, it hit the mark on its first attempt. There’s probably a lesson here, but we’re not sure what it is.
T
he young man must be lonely.
There is something unflinchingly terrible about the look in his eyes, about the way his body slumps over the heavy, black answering machine that is perched on his lap. He sits on a barstool in the middle of a nearly empty room, naked except for his white underwear and a gold watch. He’s sweating profusely from every pore. A single tear hovers on the edge of his pale, trembling lips. He has dark hair and narrow fingers with fingernails chewed to the quick.
The dark wood floor groans when he shifts his weight. The walls are white. There are no windows, only a door to the hallway and a door to the walk-in closet. The ceiling is white with crown molding. A single lamp next to the barstool glows with a yellowed light, but the corners of the room remain dark. An extension cord snakes across the floor, powering the lamp and the old, boxy answering machine.
He pushes the large button that was once marked ANNOUNCEMENT but now only says OUNCE. The tape crackles, there is a beep, and a woman’s voice speaks: “You’ve reached the Smith Family, we can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave a message, we’ll get right back to you.”
This is the voice of the dead. The sound has deteriorated a bit with age, but when the young man plays this tape, the dead woman lives on, just for a moment. The recording crackles, there is a second beep, and the woman is dead once again.
The young man plays the tape one last time, then checks his watch and sighs. He pushes himself off the barstool and puts the answering machine in the closet. He must get dressed. He wouldn’t want to be late for work.
And the dead woman will still be here when he returns.
T
his is a nice enough neighborhood, and the young man feels immediately at home. The day is cold and blustery. Fallen leaves are blown about in the wind, thrown from yard to yard, into the air, and out onto the black pavement of the road. There are dozens of tall trees lining this street, and the houses are old, refined, made of stone, surrounded by large multi-acre properties. The young man parks his van a block away from 1804 Equess Court. He puts on his black gloves, removes the key from the ignition, and steps out into the street. There are still several cars along the curb in front of his destination, and he walks slowly.
An icy fall breeze cuts into the young man, yet he refuses to shiver. He blinks the cold away, determined to take the day one step at a time—the same way he handles every day. One step at a time. Hedges and cast iron fences line the properties in this neighborhood, but the gate to 1804 is open. He walks to the front door, which is large and made of heavy wood painted white. He hammers the golden knocker with a quick, heavy slap.
“Hello, ma’am, I’m Mr. Smith. I’m from the Funeral Home,” he tells the older woman who answers the door. She wears a black dress, the darkness a stark contrast to her weathered skin. She has been crying. Of course. They usually cry.
“Oh, yes, they said you’d be here,” she replies, her voice distant, as if she doesn’t even really understand what she’s saying. The young man suspects that just might be the case. She carefully opens the door the rest of the way, allowing her visitor to come inside. “Do you need anything?”
“No ma’am,” he replies. “I’m here to help you. Please know that you have my most sincere sympathy for your loss.”
She only nods.
T
wenty minutes later, the woman and her family have left for the funeral.
The young man sits in the large kitchen on a high stool at the marble island in the center of the room. He sits with the telephone.
His job is to answer any calls the family or even the deceased—it’s amazing how many calls people make to the dead without realizing the person is gone from this world—might receive during the funeral, and his presence is meant to deter thieves who might have seen the obituary in the newspaper and decided this would be a good time for a break-in.
It’s a more common occurrence than you would expect.
So the Funeral Home hires people to housesit, and one of the responsibilities of the job is to answer the phone and the door, accepting flowers, condolences, and generally letting the world know someone is watching the place.
But the phone is not ringing.
The young man thinks,
Maybe this isn’t going to be one of the bad ones.
His job is not fun. Often someone will call for the Deceased, and he has the unpleasant responsibility to tell them that their friend or associate is dead. Sometimes angry callers are thrilled to discover the Deceased is gone and they feel the need to tell someone. Those often get nasty. Sometimes distraught relatives who couldn’t make the funeral need someone to talk to, and the young man becomes a grief counselor. Every now and then he’ll get a hang-up, which could be any of the above, or possibly a crook checking to see if anyone’s home.
And all too often, the dead call, and he has to handle them. That’s the most important part of his job.
Someone rings the doorbell at the front door, and the young man makes his way to the three story foyer with the marble floor, crystal chandelier, vases on pedestals, and dozens of recently delivered flower arrangements. The house is very beautiful and very cold.
He answers the door and accepts more flowers from a teenager whose flesh is bursting with pimples. As the delivery boy walks back to his van, the housesitter scours the neighborhood to make sure there isn’t anyone watching the house who shouldn’t be. He sees no one.
After he closes the front door and bolts it, the young man carefully proceeds up the curved staircase. It’s time to do what he really came here to do. His real job.
The carpet on the stairs is plush. The chandelier is even more beautiful as he gets closer to it.
He continues to the third floor where there is a long hallway. It’s nice here. Paintings line the walls. European art. Probably old. Probably original.
At the end of the hallway is an oak door that looks nothing like the other doors in the house.
The young man picks the lock and steps inside.
A chill rips into his spine. Something is wrong here. That’s his first reaction. The chill is from a gut instinct, and maybe also because the room is very, very cold, as if the A/C has been running non-stop for days. The floors are polished wood, there is a wide mahogany desk across from the door, and the walls are lined with bookshelves covered in leather-bound books.
There are no windows.
This isn’t right,
the young man thinks. He’s done this many times, dealt with the worst of the worst, and he’s never felt this way before.
He wants to flee the house, leaving the family to deal with their own dirty laundry, but he can’t. He has a job to do.
He’s sweating.
Even with the coldness of the air, he can feel the perspiration forming on his brow.
There’s an enormous chair behind the desk, and the young man goes to sit, just as he always does. This is where he’ll wait for any calls. The desk is neatly organized, with stacks of papers sorted into bins, a calendar, and a phone with a built-in answering machine and multiple lines.
Just as the young man sits in the chair, he realizes this was a mistake. Coming here is going to cost him his life. The owner of this leather chair was almost certainly the most evil person the young man has ever encountered. He’s dealt with people who committed terrible acts before, done terrible deeds, but nothing like this.
Invisible arms shove him back into the chair when he tries to stand, and the coldness that started in his spine spreads to his arms and legs, chilling his blood. His brain begins to throb. He feels a dagger shoving its way through his skull and into his brain ever so slowly. The pain is simple and precise and extraordinary.
He wants to run from the office, to run all the way home, but he realizes he had his chance and let it slip away.
A horrible screaming pierces his mind, making him throw his head back, open his mouth wide and scream, too.
The phone begins to ring.
Not any of the family’s lines, but the private line to the office. This is the call he’s been waiting for.
His arms are paralyzed, but he must answer the phone. If he doesn’t, he’ll probably die, and the family who lives here will never be safe. No one will ever be safe in this place.
With a burst of strength from deep within, he breaks free and grabs the phone. The invisible hands fight for control of it. His gloves and sleeves shred instantly, like the seams have been yanked in a million directions. He can see the blueness on his pale flesh where fingers are wrapping around his bony arm, trying to stop him from answering the call. The gold watch on his wrist is ripped away—sent flying across the room.
He screams, focuses all of his energy and talent and knowledge, and he breaks free yet again. He gets the phone to his ear and pushes the RECORD ANNOUNCEMENT button on the base at the same time.
There is a roar like a thundering train in a tunnel as images rocket past the young man’s eyes and sear into the soft tissues of his brain, where the cold ice pick sensation only grows worse.
He sees: a woman in 1930s attire being tied to a bed and raped, a woman he knows is the mother of the Deceased; children being rounded up in a grey and ugly WWII concentration camp, those children as they are lead into a room where they are told their parents are waiting, those children as they suffocate when the poison gas collapses their lungs; a little girl in Argentina in the 1950s sitting on the lap of the Deceased, smiling and laughing and playing with a yellow flower, the little girl laying bloody and dead and raped in an alley; a group of hippies hanging by their necks in a barn in Iowa in the 1960s; a security guard and three bank tellers dead in a vault with bullets between their eyes in Chicago in the 1970s; the Deceased and his young bride in Hollywood in the 1980s on their wedding night, when he ties her to a bed and reenacts what he did to his mother fifty years earlier, the young bride’s “accidental” slip and fall in the shower later on; the Deceased’s rise as respectable businessman and high price consultant in Silicon Valley in the 1990s; finally the Deceased’s discovery of a woman named Marge, a woman who he loved and who knew his dozens of terrible secrets and didn’t care, the woman who answered the door, the woman who the Deceased now wants to finish off, the reason he’s calling today.