Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (19 page)

But there’s only silence. Just silence.

Doug hangs up and dials again. There’s a noise after the second ring, a click, as though someone is answering, but it’s only the familiar automated voice from years past: “We’re sorry, but the number you have dialed is no longer in service . . .”

Doug slams the receiver back into place.

He sits on the edge of his bed, phone on his knee, shaking. He’s cold, too. Freezing. He plays the last phone call over in his head and then plays it again, his uncle yelling, “You want to talk to him? Hunh? You want to talk to him?”

On a hunch, Doug lifts the phone into the air, holding the receiver to keep it secure in its place, and then flips the entire phone upside down. The bottom is black metal with perforations, four thick rubber washers for legs, stickers with numbers printed across them, a dial for turning the ringer up, and several screws. Doug feels it before he sees it. The tip of his finger hits a series of rough patches on the metal surface. Holding it close to the light, Doug can see it now: dried blood. He confirms it by chipping some away with his fingernail. It’s been here all along, traveling with him from apartment to apartment, always next to him as he sleeps. Doug chips away more dried blood until his hands are covered with brown flecks and his fingertip is bleeding from scratching at the phone.

It’s his mother’s blood. It’s his mother’s blood, and Doug is holding the murder weapon.

Doug drops the phone onto his bed and walks to his kitchen, flipping on the light. He picks up the phone bill and studies it up and down, searching for an address. On the back of the last page is print so small, he isn’t even sure in what language it’s written. He pulls from his desk drawer a magnifying glass his mother had given to him when he was a child. It has a hand-carved ivory handle and sterling silver frame, and it had once belonged to her grandfather. Before handing it over, his mother had made Doug promise to be careful with it. Doug is depressed now to think he’s kept it not on a mantel or wrapped in velvet but in a drawer littered with matchbooks, old IDs, orphaned keys, a furtive golf ball, and worthless wristwatches that died long ago.

He holds the magnifying glass up to his eye, moving it close to the text on the bill and then back up to his face, until the words come into focus. In the tiniest print, he sees a street address for customer complaints. The company is local, and their offices are located in a building downtown that he knows well: the Belvedere.

Doug leaves his apartment, the phone bill clutched in his fist. He’s never been downtown this time of night, after the bars have closed. The stoplights are all blinking yellow for caution. There are, however, a surprising number of cars parked along the side streets. Doug takes the first space he sees, even though it’s several blocks from the Belvedere.

Doug had lived with his Uncle Bob until he graduated high school and went away to college. During those two years after his mother’s murder, Uncle Bob had taken surprisingly good care of Doug. In fact, he was kinder to Doug after his mother’s death than he’d ever been when she was alive. It wasn’t that any violence ever had been visited upon Doug, nor did he ever see his uncle do anything to his mother. It was more of a mood that Doug was keenly aware of when his uncle was around, the way a rainy day might become eerily sunny and airless before a tornado. It was intangible. But all of that stopped once his mother was gone.

One evening, when Doug was nineteen and home for Christmas break, he walked upstairs to ask his uncle what he wanted for dinner. When he opened his uncle’s bedroom door—his
mother’s
bedroom door—he saw his uncle lying perfectly motionless on the bed, on his back, a white sheet pulled up to his neck, his skin already as gray as a midwestern sky in late November. Doug’s first impulse was to call 911, but at the phone he paused.
It’s too late,
he thought.
There’s nothing to be done.
He sat on the side of the bed and spent time with the dead man before making the call.

It’s cold out tonight, and Doug can’t stop shivering. It’s as though the convulsions are now part of his nervous system, utterly beyond his control, so he tightens his grip on the phone bill so as not to lose it when he trembles.

He rounds a corner, where the tall, slim Belvedere stands like a soldier among kneeling prisoners. He starts picking up his pace to reach the revolving door when he realizes that the building’s plaza, with its manicured trees and freshly painted garbage cans, is crowded with dozens of people. He recognizes Mary Beemis, whose daughter disappeared one winter afternoon after school, never to be seen again. He sees across the way Mr. Simon, whose Alzheimer’s-riddled father wandered away one night in the freezing cold—gone forever. In front of him stand the Garcia twins, now in their twenties, whose parents were killed in an unsolved hit-and-run. These are the city’s grievers, its mourners, and they are all peering up at the Belvedere and whispering, as though praying to a temple of their own lost souls.

The phone bill slips from Doug’s fingers, kisses the concrete, and then skitters down the paper-strewn street. He had thought he’d come here looking for answers, but he sees now that there are no answers. He is here for the same reason so many others are here—to let the past go, to move on. Out of breath, still trembling, Doug slowly crosses the street, where in the cold predawn he joins ranks with his tribe of the bereaved, more than a hundred others standing together, shoulder to shoulder, but utterly and forever alone.

About “The Phone Call”

In 1989, one year after my mother died of cancer, I woke up in the middle of the night, walked to my typewriter, and hammered out a short story in one sitting. I even gave it a title: “The Phone Call.” It was the story of a son, who, through mysterious means, tries to save his mother’s life, even though she is already dead. Writing the story was a necessary exercise in catharsis, an apology to my own mother for not having done more to save her from dying—not that there was anything I realistically could have done. I printed up a copy of the story to work on later, but then an odd thing happened. I lost it. For years afterward, I considered rewriting the story from memory. I occasionally jotted down notes. When I began writing screenplays, I outlined a movie version of the story. About ten years ago I found the story again. The paper had yellowed, and the ink from the dot-matrix printer had faded, but there it was—the lost story! I read the first page before deciding not to read any more of it. I didn’t want to be influenced by the original version should I ever decide to rework it, so I set it aside. I haven’t seen it since. I recently tried finding it but didn’t have any luck. Once again, the original version is lost.

When I was contacted about contributing a story to this anthology, I knew right away that I was (finally!) going to write “The Phone Call,” and when I sat down to work on it, the pages came quickly. The story, after all, had been gestating for more than twenty years. That’s not to say that the story didn’t surprise me or take me in new directions. It did. And I’m grateful for that. But the original story’s DNA is fundamentally intact in this version.

Like many writers, I was inspired to become a fiction writer because of Ray Bradbury. I read
The Illustrated Man
in grade school, highlighting the titles of stories that I liked best. The power of those stories, the originality, their distinctive voices—all of these things lingered with me for decades. If the Russian Realists came out from under Gogol’s overcoat, then contemporary speculative writers have followed Ray Bradbury off his flying saucer. But speculation in a Bradbury story is always subterfuge for something much larger and deeper, and there’s a damn good reason why his work has endured: His stories are, first and foremost, about people in crisis—people we care about . . . people
Ray
cares about. “The Phone Call” owes a debt to this great writer, who taught me that the core of any good story, whatever its fantastical premise, is always the liabilities of the human heart.

—John McNally

YOUNG PILGRIMS

Joe Meno

B
ut the outpost colony of that otherwise uninhabited planet was known to be Christian, said to have been settled by members of two devout families. Both of these families had—like other believers before them—crossed inconceivable distances, rebuked the trappings of a civilization gone without God, and marshaled all they could against the ignominy of doubt to begin again, to build the world anew. This was the explanation most often given for the colonists’ insistence on isolation and their curious fortitude: It was thought that no one but a religious settlement would have been able to make anything out of a land so bleak. The unnamed planet on which the colony had been built was inconsiderable, closer in size to Phobos, the Martian moon, its one hemisphere covered in a perpetual half-gray darkness. Other than the silver boundaries of the colony itself, which consisted of three glass domes—used for shelter and various farming developments, surrounded by oddments of tunnels, barracks, and air locks—there was nothing: only the arid patchwork of hundreds of low hills covered in red dust and then, above those, the unappealing immaculacy of outer space.

T
here it is, up ahead,” Quinn said, pointing to a red rise in the distance. The boy nodded to himself, having almost given up hope a few paces back. But there it was now: the low, pyramidal hill, and beside it the path he had made a week earlier.

With his left hand he took hold of the girl Lana’s heavy silver glove, his breath—coming faster as they climbed along the incline—fogging up the inside of his convex helmet. Lana slipped a little in the dirt, and Quinn had to hold on to her with both hands. Once they stumbled to the peak, they both rested, Quinn leaning over, his breath appearing and then disappearing along the seamless inside of the helmet, Lana sitting down in the dust, holding her heavy helmet up with both hands.

“If I had known it was going to be so far . . . ,” she said, but did not bother to finish her sentence.

Beneath the rounded helmet, Quinn could see that the girl’s cheeks were flushed. It looked more than lovely. There was an odd strand of blond hair plastered along her forehead, which was dappled by a few nearly indistinguishable dots of sweat. She looked like a child sitting there, pouting a little, her eyes closed as she tried to catch her breath. She was fourteen, one year older than Quinn. Both of them had been born somewhere on the voyage from There to Here, a single point on a starry map no one could trace or be sure of anymore, as everything that was the Past, including the ship used for their passage, had been disposed of, dismantled, or buried a long time ago. There was a joke Quinn’s mother used to tell him when he was younger, as she tucked him into bed, something about being born in space, “her child, created out of the dust of stars,” which he never understood and which he could no longer quite remember. He looked down at Lana, watched her cheeks cool to a softer white, and then asked, “Are you ready?”

Lana nodded slightly but did not move at first. Instead, she looked up at him, staring seriously into his eyes. “If my father ever finds out we’re all the way out here . . . ,” and again did not finish her sentence, not because she couldn’t but because, this time, there was no need.

Lana’s father, Forrest Blau, was a man of rigid temperament with a wide face and striking gray beard. He had personally funded the Great Journey. On Earth, he had been the owner of a large factory farm. Now, as minister of this meager colony, he led prayer services and, in private, heard Quinn’s confession. His face was the face of God as Quinn could, at the moment, imagine it—harsh, immovable, a little like the gray features of the planet itself. There was also his long white switch—whittled to a sharp point, waxed to a gleaming shine, cut from a branch of the birch tree, the first living thing that had flourished here and which now filled most of Dome Three with its eager, ancient-looking branches. Forrest kept the white switch beside his place at the dining room table. He would sometimes use it during his sermons, pointing from family member to family member asking, “Who here among us is without sin?” and Quinn would always bow his head and look away. More than once the boy had felt the white switch cut across his hands or along his backside as he willed himself not to cry. Forrest, at these times, would seem displeased, deeply distraught, divinely eager for the boy to make amends. It was as though it hurt Forrest more to inflict punishment than it did for the condemned to receive it. Then the switch would fly back again and come down hard against Quinn’s knuckles, and whatever Forrest Blau was feeling would flee from the boy’s mind as the pain erupted along his hands, his knuckles. Then once more the switch would fly back. Then again.

There was also Forrest Blau’s bolt-action rifle—an ancient M1903 Springfield in perfect working order—which hung loaded, above the air lock leading from the colony to the outside world. Quinn had never seen it used before, had never even seen anyone hold it, except once a week, when Forrest would take it down for cleaning. This, too, was a religious act for the minister. There was a sense of sanctity as the gray-bearded man oiled the pins and checked the bore. Once the rifle was reassembled, Forrest would lift his wrinkled face skyward and close his eyes, saying a mysteriously short prayer, looking both penitent and elegantly severe.

Lana Blau was nothing like her father; Quinn often thought of her as a moss rose, the kind that flourished under Dome Two, unpredictable though beautiful, growing a little wilder each year, grappling its way amongst the angles and divides of the planet’s craggy rocks. Or maybe she was like one of those pink cherry trees, growing taller than anyone thought was possible from soil with remarkable levels of carbon dioxide. There was something about the dirt of this place, Quinn’s father, William, often said. William, on Earth, had worked for Forrest Blau’s food-manufacturing firm as a food geneticist. William claimed that there was something about the preponderance of unbreathable carbon dioxide that made everything grow and bloom in ways no one could have guessed. It was the reason the colonists had to wear the tank suits and helmets anywhere outside of the three-domed colony and why hiking so far from the compound was forbidden. Once the air in their air tanks was gone, or God forbid, if there ever was an accident . . . But nothing like that had ever happened, and this lone excursion, traversing the rises and hills with Lana, was the only way Quinn could devise to be alone with her. And even though he was still a boy and she was still a girl, Quinn had begun to catch himself staring at her forehead, at her neck, at her mouth, wondering what she was thinking. Did she have any idea what he was thinking? What if, on this hike, they should spot something like a long-tailed rodent, or some other animal, some small creature no one else had ever seen, and she was to jump back in fright and Quinn was to catch her? Then would she begin to understand some of the feelings he had been having?

“We better get moving,” Lana said, standing up. “If we want to make it back before prayers.”

Quinn nodded and off they went, scrambling over the loose red rocks again, their long, lithe shadows playing upon each other at the ends of their flat, dusty boots.

T
here was a beautiful pink tree, made of something like glimmering crystals, that Quinn had discovered while hiking alone a few weeks earlier. This was what he wanted Lana to see; this was what he thought might help begin to approximate the shape and depth of his feelings for her. Or not. Or, more likely, she would look at it and smile, and then shrug, and the two of them would walk back to the colony unspeaking, their breath going faster and faster as they struggled to return to Dome One by curfew, this breathlessness their only meaningful exchange.

But there was nothing else like it on the planet, the pink tree, nothing Mr. Blau or Quinn’s father had ever mentioned, and the way it grew there in sharp angles, glistening like it was covered in white and pink crystals, it was something Lana just had to see for herself. And it was a few more meters, just over the next low hill. Quinn saw Lana struggle as she climbed, and so placed his hand under her arm, helping her over a loose rise of gray gravel, his fingers lingering half a moment too long in the space between her underarm and her side. The girl paused just then, looking down at him suspiciously. She glared at his hand on her underarm, and he nodded, quickly withdrawing it. It was about as intimate a touch as the two had ever shared, and their space suits—with their layers of fabric, Mylar, and padding—did little to occlude the strange electrical charge Quinn felt throbbing in his fingers. His cheeks quickly flamed red. He let Lana walk on ahead, watching her stumble slightly once more, before she recovered her balance. She looked back to see if Quinn had noticed, and then she smiled the smile of someone who did not care whether anyone had noticed or not. It was confusing, and also exciting, to see how one moment Lana could seem like her old self, just like a child, and in another moment there would be some other gesture, the way she tilted her head, the softness in her eyes, that seemed like she was someone new, someone much older. It was hard to know which person the boy had been falling for.

He hurried up the incline, trying to ignore these new thoughts, and as he did, there was a landslide of red-gray gravel from above, and then Quinn was sliding backward, fumbling on his face, tumbling headlong down the rise. It took him longer than he would have thought to get back on his feet, and by that time Lana had disappeared. She was gone. There was only an enormous pile of loose red rocks, tilting and spilling everywhere, rising as high as his feet, and the unforgiving pale blue lights of the colony flashing back at him, somewhere from the hazy distance. Something terrible had happened. Lana was missing.

Q
uinn had never run as hard in his life, and still the three glass domes seemed so far away. He tripped once, pulling himself up, then again, and this time lay there in the dust, his forehead resting against the cold, inner contours of his glass helmet. What had he done? Where had Lana gone? What would happen when Forrest found out? How, if ever, would he be forgiven?

He had thought he was becoming a man. And here he was something so far from it. He had left Lana, had run off like a frightened child. How would he ever be able to look his mother, his father, Forrest Blau, in the face and tell them what had happened? And what would happen to him once he did?

The boy struggled back to his feet, thinking of Forrest Blau’s stern features, of the white switch lying beside the table, of the well-oiled rifle hanging above the air lock. He turned then, facing the way he had just come, his footprints still directing small cloud after small cloud of fine red dust in the air. He made a decision then, and checking to be sure there was still enough air in the tank, he sprinted back along the trail he had just made. The sound of his nervous heartbeat reverberating in his ears, of his feet clomping through the heavy dust, of his breath as it fogged up the front of his helmet, firmly carried him back up the incline of the rough, red rocks to where Lana had, only moments before, disappeared.

T
he rock slide had left a slanting hill where Lana had been standing. Besides that, there was nothing, only a set of her footprints, which were surprisingly larger than his. He lifted a small red boulder, then another, then a third, hoping to see a flash of her silver suit, the tread of her black boots, the glassy enclosure of her rounded helmet. But there was only more dust, only more red dirt. He tossed rock after rock aside, and as he did, he began to cry. He pounded on the sides of his helmet. His face—drenched in sweat—twisted itself into a rictus of dismay. With the helmet on he was unable to wipe the salty tears from his eyes, and so it felt as if he was drowning. He doubled over, feeling like he might begin to vomit. And as he leaned there, bile rising up in his throat, he saw something move.

Something.

The smallest of movements.

A light.

A soft pink light, emanating from between the piles of triangular rocks.

Quinn fell to his knees and began to hurl the pieces of stone aside with his heavy gloves, clawing at the upturned angles, digging his fingers into the sediment, until a ray of soft pink light poured out—the light the same color as the mysterious crystal tree he had discovered a few weeks before—and then, as he scuttled more of the gravel aside, the light struck against the curved exterior of his helmet, refracting, pouring against his eyelids, his nose, his mouth. For a moment he thought he was going blind, the light shifting from pink to white, his eyes struggling to make sense of the shape before it. But then, only a few moments later, he saw it was a hole. It was large and light-filled, just about as wide as his shoulders. He lowered his right arm inside, his hand momentarily disappearing into the uncanny brightness. There was a sound rising out of it, something familiar yet oddly affecting, like a swell of singing voices. It was like the music Forrest Blau would sometimes play at the beginning of prayer service, a chorus of vibrant, joyful noise. The boy felt his arm quivering with heat, the white light filling the space between his flesh and joints with a decided ferromagnetism. And then, forsaking all common sense, wisdom, and the world he had always known, Quinn crawled inside, forcing his entire body into the hole. Falling—the feeling of losing the fight with gravity—was all he remembered before the seething whiteness filled his eyes.

F
or a moment he was certain he was sleeping, or maybe, he began to wonder, he had died. But no; he sat up stiffly, placing his hand against the side of his helmet. He had been lying on his back, and the colors around him now shifted from a pulsing white to a faded pink and then a terminal blue. All around him there were other colors, too, yellows and greens and vibrant reds, and as he got himself up, his back sore from the fall, he saw something moving before him, something he had only ever seen in books, or in the videos in the library: a lean, nimble-footed deer sipping at a brook.