Eerie, Indiana fanfiction: Phonebooths
There was a row of phone-booths near the entrance to Deadwood Park. Some of them were missing receivers, or the most popular sections from their copy of the Yellow Pages, or the overhead bulb. One of them, third from the left, was sealed shut with zip ties, hundreds of them, cocooning the glass box in thin strips of black plastic.
The lights in the booths were supposed to be motion activated, but the grimy fluorescent tube in Unit 3 blinked and flickered on and off at random, it's dusty grey-green glow illuminating the empty stall with erratic flashes of light. In the daytime, it was possible to pass off the strobing lights as the reflected gleam of sunshine on passing cars. At night, the booth pulsed like a beacon, calling all those who passed to bear witness.
Marshall Teller produced a pair of his father's garden shears and began to cut away the thick layer of zip ties. They came away with a little snap of released pressure and dropped to the ground, where they lay stiff and spiky at his feet. In the sodium-orange glare of the street lights, they looked like long, slim slivers of broken black glass surrounding him.
Simon kept the little handheld camera trained on the phone booth as Marshall worked. He was wearing his protective baseball cap and false moustache, and he chewed nervously at the artificial hair of his disguise.
"Mars?" he said quietly. Marshall made a preoccupied "hmm" sound. More zip ties parted and fell away before the shears. The image on the video screen went white for a moment, the cheap camera struggling to adjust to the sudden surge of light inside the booth.
"Marshall," Simon tried again. "Don't you think we should do this during the day?" Or not at all, he added in the privacy of his own mind.
Mars looked back at him, shaking his head both in negation and to clear his fringe from his eyes. It was getting long again. His mother had been bugging him about a haircut, but until he could identify a barbershop in Eerie that didn't have a single practitioner of sympathetic magic on staff, he'd keep doing it himself and hope it grew out okay.
"Mister Dagenfort already chased me out of here once," he said. "Waving his walking stick and screaming about supernatural tomfoolery and darn kids not knowing when to leave well enough alone. He actually said that, 'darn kids'. He threatened to call the cops if he caught me at it again. It has to be at night, when that nosy old man isn't around."
"I know," said Simon. "It's just... we poured rock salt all over that Dracula's lawn, and he's bound to be mad and come looking for us..."
"Nah," said Mars. "That was twenty kilos of salt, it'll take weeks for him to count up all the grains."
Simon made a sceptical face. It must have showed even in the bad lighting, as Marshall glanced at him before adding:
"We'll go by his lair after school and throw poppy seeds and lavender grains at his windows. My grandma's making a bunch of these scented drawer charms to sell at the Eerie Craft Fair and she won't mind if we take some."
The last zip tie came away. The fluorescent tube inside the newly-freed phone-booth flickered and a tendril of grey-green light wormed across the dirty inner surface of the glass. Marshall stepped back, removed a dinosaur-headed plastic grabbing arm from his backpack and gently pulled the door open.
The phone began to ring.
The boys exchanged a glance heavy with trepidation. Simon shook his head, a minute movement that made the peak of his baseball cap send shadows swaying across his face. Marshall's expression showed uncertainty for the briefest moment, before hardening into determination.
He used the toe of one foot to keep the heavy safety-glass door from swinging shut and reached inside with the grabber, carefully manoeuvring the t-rex's gaping plastic jaws around the black handled receiver. He took a deep breath, nodded at Simon, and lifted the handset.
The force of the phone-booth exploding knocked him backwards. There was a flash of light in searing colours that shouldn't exist in this reality, a sound like a paper bag the size of a planet bursting, and a gurgle like a man's sanity trickling down the drains of eternity. The bright colours dazzled and blinded him, the noise was disorientating and deafening, and the ground tilted beneath him, became soft and yielding so that he lost his balance and tumbled forever in the white blindness and the terrible rushing wind of the void.
When he came back to himself he was sitting in the middle of the dirt road outside Deadwood Park, surrounded by chunks of melted glass and twisted metal. The handle of the novelty grabber dangled from his wrist, but the garishly-painted tyrannosaur was gone, reduced to a shapeless blob of plastic that smoked and stank. The phone booth was a square of charred and blasted concrete surrounded by the debris. The receiver itself, miraculously intact though no longer connected to anything, lay a few feet away. From the earpiece came a low staticky cadence that rose and fell in a pattern that almost, though not quite, resembled speech.
Simon dropped a lead-lined blanket over the handset, and the sound stopped. Marshall gave him a shaky thumbs up.
They slept late the following day, so it was mid-afternoon when they eventually made their way downstairs and sat yawning over their cereal bowls. Syndi was at the counter, flipping through the weekend edition of the Eerie Examiner. Marshall wondered guiltily if she had picked up his route that morning, inventing some excuse that would allow him to keep his job after yet another no-show.
"It looks like the Eerie Multiplex is getting a new mascot," she said. "That giant animatronic popcorn monster's not in the lobby anymore." She shuddered. "Thank God. It gave me this horrible creeping feeling of cosmic insignificance every time I walked past it."
"Do you think...?" said Simon, pitching his voice low.
Marshall wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his Giants sweatshirt. Even after bathing them in holy water and using his grandmother's hypoallergenic silver eye mask to sleep in, they still burned.
"Do I think an eldritch popcorn abomination sealed off the one telephone in Eerie capable of contacting dimensions outside of time and space just so he could avoid calls from his home pantheon, and we just unsealed it and took away his ability to use "oh sorry Mom, there must be a bad signal in the human realm" as an excuse for not calling his parents, and when he gets back he's going to be mega-level angry because we blew his cover?" He sighed. "Yes, Simon, probably."
"Oh," said Simon. "Well, maybe his parents are nice."
"Yeah, maybe," replied Mars. "In the meantime, let's go get tickets for Curse of the Corn Critters: the Crittening before an angry and embarrassed elder god comes back and destroys reality."
Trusted Associates, Inc.
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