LONG DISTANCE CALL
Just before the telephone rang, storm winds toppled the tree outside her window and jolted Miss Keene from dreaming sleep. She flung herself up with a gasp, her frail hands crumpling twists of sheet in either palm. Beneath her fleshless chest the heart jerked taut, the sluggish blood spurted. She sat in rigid muteness, her eyes staring at the night.
In another second, the telephone rang.
Who on earth? The question shaped unwittingly in her brain. Her thin hand faltered in the darkness, the fingers searching a moment and then Miss Elva Keene drew the cool receiver to her ear.
“Hello,” she said.
Outside a cannon of thunder shook the night, twitching Miss Keene’s crippled legs. I’ve missed the voice, she thought, the thunder has blotted out the voice.
“Hello,” she said again.
There was no sound. Miss Keene waited in expectant lethargy. Then she repeated. “Hel-lo,” in a cracking voice. Outside the thunder crashed again.
Still no voice spoke, not even the sound of a phone being disconnected met her ears. Her wavering hand reached out and thumped down the receiver with an angry motion.
“Inconsideration,” she muttered, thudding back on her pillow. Already her infirm back ached from the effort of sitting.
She forced out a weary breath. Now she’d have to suffer through the whole tormenting process of going to sleep again—the composing of jaded muscles, the ignoring of abrasive pain in her legs, the endless, frustrating struggle to turn off the faucet in her brain and keep unwanted thoughts from dripping. Oh, well, it had to be done; Nurse Phillips insisted on proper rest. Elva Keene breathed slowly and deeply, drew the covers to her chin and labored hopefully for sleep.
In vain.
Her eyes opened and, turning her face to the window, she watched the storm move off on lightning legs. Why can’t I sleep, she fretted, why must I always lie here awake like this?
She knew the answer without effort. When a life was dull, the smallest element added seemed unnaturally intriguing. And life for Miss Keene was the sorry pattern of lying flat or being propped on pillows, reading books which Nurse Phillips brought from the town library, getting nourishment, rest, medication, listening to her tiny radio—and waiting, waiting for something different to happen.
Like the telephone call that wasn’t a call.
There hadn’t even been the sound of a receiver replaced in its cradle. Miss Keene didn’t understand that. Why would anyone call her exchange and then listen silently while she said, “Hello,” over and over again? Had it actually been anyone calling?
What she should have done, she realized then, was to keep listening until the other person tired of the joke and put down the receiver. What she should have done was to speak out forcefully about the inconsideration of a prankish call to a crippled maiden lady in the middle of a stormy night. Then, if there had been someone listening, whoever it was would have been properly chastened by her angry words and . . .
“Well, of course.”
She said it aloud in the darkness, punctuating the sentence with a cluck of somewhat relieved disgust. Of course, the telephone was out of order. Someone had tried to contact her, perhaps Nurse Phillips to see if she was all right. But the other end of the line had broken down in some way, allowing her phone to ring but no verbal communication to be made. Well, of course, that was the case.
Miss Keene nodded once and closed her eyes gently. Now to sleep, she thought. Far away, beyond the county, the storm cleared its murky throat. I hope no one is worrying, Elva Keene thought, that would be too bad.
She was thinking that when the telephone rang again.
There, she thought, they are trying to reach me again. She reached out hurriedly in the darkness, fumbled until she felt the receiver, then pulled it to her ear.
“Hello,” said Miss Keene.
Silence.
Her throat contracted. She knew what was wrong, of course, but she didn’t like it, no, not at all.
“Hello?” she said tentatively, not yet certain that she was wasting breath.
There was no reply. She waited a moment, then spoke a third time, a little impatiently now, loudly, her shrill voice ringing in the dark bedroom. “Hello!”
Nothing. Miss Keene had the sudden urge to fling the receiver away. She forced down that curious instinct—no, she must wait; wait and listen to hear if anyone hung up the phone on the other end of the line.
So she waited.
The bedroom was very quiet now, but Elva Keene kept straining to hear; either the sound of a receiver going down or the buzz which usually follows. Her chest rose and fell in delicate lurches, she closed her eyes in concentration, then opened them again and blinked at the darkness. There was no sound from the telephone; not a click, not a buzz, not a sound of someone putting down a receiver.
“Hello!” she cried suddenly, then pushed away the receiver.
She missed her target. The receiver dropped and thumped once on the rug. Miss Keene nervously clicked on the lamp, wincing as the leprous bulb light filled her eyes. Quickly, she lay on her side and tried to reach the silent, voiceless telephone.
But she couldn’t stretch far enough and crippled legs prevented her from rising. Her throat tightened. My God, must she leave it there all night, silent and mystifying?
Remembering then, she reached out abruptly and pressed the cradle arm. On the floor, the receiver clicked, then began to buzz normally. Elva Keene swallowed and drew in a shaking breath as she slumped back on her pillow.
She threw out hooks of reason then and pulled herself back from panic. This is ridiculous, she thought, getting upset over such a trivial and easily explained incident. It was the storm, the night, the way in which I’d been shocked from sleep. (What was it that had awakened me?) All these things piled on the mountain of teeth-grinding monotony that’s my life. Yes, it was bad, very bad. But it wasn’t the incident that was bad. It was her reaction to it.
Miss Elva Keene numbed herself to further premonitions. I shall sleep now, she ordered her body with a petulant shake. She lay very still and relaxed. From the floor she could hear the telephone buzzing like the drone of far-off bees. She ignored it.
Early the next morning, after Nurse Phillips had taken away the breakfast dishes, Elva Keene called the telephone company.
“This is Miss Elva,” she told the operator.
“Oh, yes, Miss Elva,” said the operator, a Miss Finch. “Can I help you?”
“Last night my telephone rang twice,” said Elva Keene. “But when I answered it, no one spoke. And I didn’t hear any receiver drop. I didn’t even hear a dial tone—just silence.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Miss Elva,” said the cheery voice of Miss Finch, “that storm last night just about ruined half our service. We’re being flooded with calls about knocked down lines and bad connections. I’d say you’re pretty lucky your phone is working at all.”
“Then you think it was probably a bad connection,” prompted Miss Keene, “caused by the storm?”
“Oh yes, Miss Elva, that’s all.”
“Do you think it will happen again?”
“Oh, it may,” said Miss Finch. “It may. I really couldn’t tell you, Miss Elva. But if it does happen again, you just call me and then I’ll have one of our men check on it.”
“All right,” said Miss Elva. “Thank you, dear.”
She lay on her pillows all morning in a relaxed torpor. It gives one a satisfied feeling, she thought, to solve a mystery, slight as it is. It had been a terrible storm that caused the bad connection. And no wonder when it had even knocked down the ancient oak tree beside the house. That was the noise that had awakened me of course, and a pity it was that the dear tree had fallen. How it shaded the house in hot summer months. Oh, well, I suppose I should be grateful, she thought, that the tree fell across the road and not across the house.
The day passed uneventfully, an amalgam of eating, reading Angela Thirkell and the mail (two throw-away advertisements and the light bill), plus brief chats with Nurse Phillips. Indeed, routine had set in so properly that when the telephone rang early that evening, she picked it up without even thinking.
“Hello,” she said.
Silence.
It brought her back for a second. Then she called Nurse Phillips.
“What is it?” asked the portly woman as she trudged across the bedroom rug.
“This is what I was telling you about,” said Elva Keene, holding out the receiver. “Listen.”
Nurse Phillips took the receiver in her hand and pushed back gray locks with the earpiece. Her placid face remained placid. “There’s nobody there,” she observed.
“That’s right,” said Miss Keene. “That’s right. Now you just listen and see if you can hear a receiver being put down. I’m sure you won’t.”
Nurse Phillips listened for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t hear anything,” she said and hung up.
“Oh, wait!” Miss Keene said hurriedly. “Oh, well, it doesn’t matter,” she added, seeing it was already done. “If it happens too often, I’ll just call Miss Finch and they’ll have a repairman check on it.”
“I see,” Nurse Phillips said and went back to the living room.
Nurse Phillips left the house at eight, leaving on the bedside table, as usual, an apple, a cookie, a glass of water and the bottle of pills. She puffed up the pillows behind Miss Keene’s fragile back, moved the radio and telephone a little closer to the bed, looked around complacently, then turned for the door, saying, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
It was fifteen minutes later when the telephone rang. Miss Keene picked up the receiver quickly. She didn’t bother saying hello this time—she just listened.
At first it was the same—an absolute silence. She listened a moment more, impatiently. Then, on the verge of replacing the receiver, she heard the sound. Her cheek twitched, she jerked the telephone back to her ear.
“Hello?” she asked tensely.
A murmuring, a dull humming, a rustling sound—what was it? Miss Keene shut her eyes tightly, listening hard, but she couldn’t identify the sound; it was too soft, too undefined. It deviated from a sort of whining vibration . . . to an escape of air . . . to a bubbling sibilance. It must be the sound of the connection, she thought, it must be the telephone itself making the noise. Perhaps a wire blowing in the wind somewhere, perhaps . . .
She stopped thinking then. She stopped breathing. The sound had ceased. Once more, silence rang in her ears. She could feel the heartbeats stumbling in her chest again, the walls of her throat closing in. Oh, this is ridiculous, she told herself. I’ve already been through this—it was the storm, the storm!
She lay back on her pillows, the receiver pressed to her ear, nervous breaths faltering from her nostrils. She could feel unreasoning dread rise like a tide within her, despite all attempts at sane deduction. Her mind kept slipping off the glassy perch of reason; she kept falling deeper and deeper.
Now she shuddered violently as the sounds began again. They couldn’t possibly be human sounds, she knew, and yet there was something about them, some inflection, some almost identifiable arrangement of . . .
Her lips shook and a whine began to hover in her throat. But she couldn’t put down the telephone, she simply couldn’t. The sounds held her hypnotized. Whether they were the rise and fall of the wind or the muttering of faulty mechanisms, she didn’t know, but they would not let her go.
“Hello?” she murmured, shakily.
The sounds rose in volume. They rattled and shook in her brain.
“Hello!” she screamed.
“H-e-l-l-o,” answered a voice on the telephone. Then Miss Keene fainted dead away.
“Are you certain it was someone saying hello?” Miss Finch asked Miss Elva over the telephone. “It might have been the connection, you know.”
“I tell you it was a man!” a shaking Elva Keene cried. “It was the same man who kept listening to me say hello over and over and over again without answering me back. The same one who made terrible noises over the telephone!”
Miss Finch cleared her throat politely. “Well, I’ll have a man check your line, Miss Elva, as soon as he can. Of course, the men are very busy now with all the repairs on storm wreckage, but as soon as it’s possible . . .”
“And what am I going to do if this—this person calls again?”
“You just hang up on him, Miss Elva.”
“But he keeps calling!”
“Well.” Miss Finch’s affability wavered. “Why don’t you find out who he is, Miss Elva? If you can do that, why, we can take immediate action, you see and . . .”
After she’d hung up, Miss Keene lay against the pillows tensely, listening to Nurse Phillips sing husky love songs over the breakfast dishes. Miss Finch didn’t believe her story, that was apparent. Miss Finch thought she was a nervous old woman falling prey to imagination. Well, Miss Finch would find out differently.
“I’ll just keep calling her and calling her until she does,” she said irritably to Nurse Phillips just before afternoon nap.
“You just do that,” said Nurse Phillips. “Now take your pill and lie down.”
Miss Keene lay in grumpy silence, her vein-rutted hands knotted at her sides. It was ten after two and, except for the bubbling of Nurse Phillips’s front-room snores, the house was silent in the October afternoon. It makes me angry, thought Elva Keene, that no one will take this seriously. Well—her thin lips pressed together—the next time the telephone rings I’ll make sure that Nurse Phillips listens until she does hear something.
Exactly then the phone rang.
Miss Keene felt a cold tremor lace down her body. Even in the daylight with sunbeams speckling her flowered coverlet, the strident ringing frightened her. She dug porcelain teeth into her lower lip to steady it. Shall I answer it? the question came and then, before she could even think to answer, her hand picked up the receiver. A deep ragged breath; she drew the phone slowly to her ear. She said, “Hello?”
The voice answered back, “Hello?”—hollow and inanimate.
“Who is this?” Miss Keene asked, trying to keep her throat clear.
“Hello?”
“Who’s calling, please?”
“Hello?”
“Is anyone there!”
“Hello?”
“Please . . . !”
“Hello?”
Miss Keene jammed down the receiver and lay on her bed trembling violently, unable to catch her breath. What is it, begged her mind, what in God’s name is it?
“Margaret!” she cried. “Margaret!”
In the front room she heard Nurse Phillips grunt abruptly and then start coughing.
“Margaret, please . . . !”
Elva Keene heard the large-bodied woman rise to her feet and trudge across the living room floor. I must compose myself, she told herself, fluttering hands to her fevered cheeks. I must tell her exactly what happened, exactly.
“What is it?” grumbled the nurse. “Does your stomach ache?”
Miss Keene’s throat drew in tautly as she swallowed. “He just called again,” she whispered.
“Who?”
“That man!”
“What man?”
“The one who keeps calling!” Miss Keene cried. “He keeps saying hello over and over again. That’s all he says—hello, hello, hel . . .”
“Now stop this,” Nurse Phillips scolded stolidly. “Lie back and . . .”
“I don’t want to lie back!” she said frenziedly. “I want to know who this terrible person is who keeps frightening me!”
“Now don’t work yourself into a state,” warned Nurse Phillips. “You know how upset your stomach gets.”
Miss Keene began to sob bitterly. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid of him. Why does he keep calling me?”
Nurse Phillips stood by the bed looking down in bovine inertia. “Now, what did Miss Finch tell you?” she said softly.
Miss Keene’s shaking lips could not frame the answer.
“Did she tell you it was the connection?” the nurse soothed. “Did she?”
“But it isn’t! It’s a man, a man!”
Nurse Phillips expelled a patient breath. “If it’s a man,” she said, “then just hang up. You don’t have to talk to him. Just hang up. Is that so hard to do?”
Miss Keene shut tear-bright eyes and forced her lips into a twitching line. In her mind the man’s subdued and listless voice kept echoing. Over and over, the inflection never altering, the question never deferring to her replies—just repeating itself endlessly in doleful apathy. Hello? Hello? Making her shudder to the heart.
“Look,” Nurse Phillips spoke.
She opened her eyes and saw the blurred image of the nurse putting the receiver down on the table.
“There,” Nurse Phillips said, “nobody can call you now. You leave it that way. If you need anything all you have to do is dial. Now isn’t that all right? Isn’t it?”
Miss Keene looked bleakly at her nurse. Then, after a moment, she nodded once. Grudgingly.
She lay in the dark bedroom, the sound of the dial tone humming in her ear; keeping her awake. Or am I just telling myself that? she thought. Is it really keeping me awake? Didn’t I sleep that first night with the receiver off the hook? No, it wasn’t the sound, it was something else.
She closed her eyes obdurately. I won’t listen, she told herself, I just won’t listen to it. She drew in trembling breaths of the night. But the darkness would not fill her brain and blot away the sound.
Miss Keene felt around the bed until she found her jacket. She draped it over the receiver, swathing its black smoothness in woolly turns. Then she sank back again, stern breathed and taut. I will sleep, she demanded, I will sleep.
She heard it still.
Her body grew rigid and, abruptly, she unfolded the receiver from its thick wrappings and slammed it down angrily on the cradle. Silence filled the room with a delicious peace. Miss Keene fell back on the pillow with a feeble groan. Now to sleep, she thought.
The telephone rang.
Her breath snuffed off. The ringing seemed to permeate the darkness, surrounding her in a cloud of ear-lancing vibration. She reached out to put the receiver on the table again, then jerked her hand back with a gasp, realizing she would hear the man’s voice again.
Her throat pulsed nervously. What I’ll do, she planned, what I’ll do is take off the receiver very quickly—very quickly—and put it down, then push down on the arm and cut off the line. Yes, that’s what I’ll do!
She tensed herself and spread her hand out cautiously until the ringing phone was under it. Then, breath held, she followed her plan, slashed off the ring, reached quickly for the cradle arm . . .
And stopped, frozen, as the man’s voice reached out through darkness to her ears. “Where are you?” he asked. “I want to talk to you.”
Claws of ice clamped down on Miss Keene’s shuddering chest. She lay petrified, unable to cut off the sound of the man’s dull, expressionless voice, asking, “Where are you? I want to talk to you.”
A sound from Miss Keene’s throat, thin and fluttering.
And the man said, “Where are you? I want to talk to you.”
“No, no,” sobbed Miss Keene.
“Where are you? I want . . .”
She pressed the cradle arm with taut white fingers. She held it down for five minutes before letting it go.
“I tell you I won’t have it!”
Miss Keene’s voice was a frayed ribbon of sound. She sat inflexibly on the bed, straining her frightened anger through the mouthpiece vents.
“You say you hang up on this man and he still calls?” Miss Finch inquired.
“I’ve explained all that!” Elva Keene burst out. “I had to leave the receiver off the phone all night so he wouldn’t call. And the buzzing kept me awake. I didn’t get a wink of sleep! Now, I want this line checked, do you hear me? I want you to stop this terrible thing!”
Her eyes were like hard, dark beads. The phone almost slipped from her palsied fingers.
“All right, Miss Elva,” said the operator. “I’ll send a man out today.”
“Thank you, dear, thank you,” Miss Keene said. “Will you call me when . . .”
Her voice stopped abruptly as a clicking sound started on the telephone.
“The line is busy,” she announced.
The clicking stopped and she went on. “To repeat, will you let me know when you find out who this terrible person is?”
“Surely, Miss Elva, surely. And I’ll have a man check your telephone this afternoon. You’re at 127 Mill Lane, aren’t you?”
“That’s right, dear. You will see to it, won’t you?”
“I promise faithfully, Miss Elva. First thing today.”
“Thank you, dear,” Miss Keene said, drawing in relieved breath.
There were no calls from the man all that morning, none that afternoon. Her tightness slowly began to loosen. She played a game of cribbage with Nurse Phillips and even managed a little laughter. It was comforting to know that the telephone company was working on it now. They’d soon catch that awful man and bring back her peace of mind.
But when two o’clock came, then three o’clock—and still no repairman at her house—Miss Keene began worrying again.
“What’s the matter with that girl?” she said pettishly. “She promised me faithfully that a man would come this afternoon.”
“He’ll be here,” Nurse Phillips said. “Be patient.”
Four o’clock arrived and no man. Miss Keene would not play cribbage, read her book or listen to her radio. What had begun to loosen was tightening again, increasing minute by minute until five o’clock, when the telephone rang, her hand spurted out rigidly from the flaring sleeve of her bed jacket and clamped down like a claw on the receiver. If the man speaks, raced her mind, if he speaks I’ll scream until my heart stops.
She pulled the receiver to her ear. “Hello?”
“Miss Elva, this is Miss Finch.”
Her eyes closed and breath fluttered through her lips. “Yes?” she said.
“About those calls you say you’ve been receiving.”
“Yes?” In her mind, Miss Finch’s words cutting—“those calls you say you’ve been receiving.”
“We sent a man out to trace them,” continued Miss Finch. “I have his report here.”
Miss Keene caught her breath. “Yes?”
“He couldn’t find anything.”
Elva Keene didn’t speak. Her gray head lay motionless on the pillow, the receiver pressed to her ear.
“He says he traced the—the difficulty to a fallen wire on the edge of town.”
“Fallen—wire?”
“Yes, Miss Elva.” Miss Finch did not sound happy.
“You’re telling me I didn’t hear anything?”
Miss Finch’s voice was firm. “There’s no way anyone could have phoned you from that location,” she said.
“I tell you a man called me!”
Miss Finch was silent and Miss Keene’s fingers tightened convulsively on the receiver.
“There must be a phone there,” she insisted. “There must be some way that man was able to call me!”
“Miss Elva, there’s no one out there.”
“Out where, where?”
The operator said, “Miss Elva, it’s the cemetery.”
In the black silence of her bedroom, a crippled maiden lady lay waiting. Her nurse would not remain for the night; her nurse had patted her and scolded her and ignored her.
She was waiting for a telephone call.
She could have disconnected the phone, but she had not the will. She lay there waiting, waiting, thinking.
Of the silence—of ears that had not heard, seeking to hear again. Of sounds bubbling and muttering—the first stumbling attempts at speech by one who had not spoken—how long? Of—hello? hello?—first greeting by one long silent. Of—where are you? Of (that which made her lie so rigidly) the clicking and the operator speaking her address. Of—
The telephone ringing.
A pause. Ringing. The rustle of a nightgown in the dark.
The ringing stopped.
Listening.
And the telephone slipping from white fingers, the eyes staring, the thin heartbeats slowly pulsing.
Outside, the cricket-rattling night.
Inside, the words still sounding in her brain—giving terrible meaning to the heavy, choking silence.
“Hello, Miss Elva. I’ll be right over.”
CHARLES BEAUMONT
Charles Beaumont—the pseudonym, and later the legally adopted name, of Charles Leroy Nutt—was born in Chicago in 1929. A high-school dropout, he served briefly in the U.S. Army before taking up a career in writing in the early 1950s. It was just at this time that the pulp magazines were dying out, and supernatural fiction—often disguised as mystery or suspense fiction—had to appear in the science fiction digest magazines or in mainstream magazines. Beaumont published widely in such digests as Infinity Science Fiction and such men’s magazines as Playboy and Rogue. His first story collection, The Hunger and Other Stories, appeared in 1957, and several others—Yonder: Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1958), Night Ride and Other Journeys (1960), The Magic Man (1965), and The Edge (1966)—appeared in rapid succession. Many of Beaumont’s stories present a fusion of science fiction, fantasy, mystery, suspense, and the supernatural, so that genre classification of his work becomes difficult. Of his two novels, Run from the Hunter (1957; with John E. Tomerlin) is a crime thriller, and The Intruder (1959) is a mainstream novel of race relations in the South. Some of his best-known horror tales are “The Howling Man,” a brilliant tale of the Devil, and “Black Country,” which ingeniously fuses the supernatural with blues music.
Beaumont did much work in film and television, writing the screenplay (with Ben Hecht) to the film Queen of Outer Space and writing many scripts for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. These have now been collected in The Twilight Zone Scripts of Charles Beaumont, Volume I (2004), with more volumes to follow. Beaumont, afflicted with an extremely advanced case of Alzheimer’s disease, died in 1967. His Selected Stories appeared in 1988.
“The Vanishing American” (first published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1955, and collected in The Hunger and Other Stories) exhibits Beaumont’s use of the supernatural as a metaphor for social and psychological trauma in the literal vanishment of a dispirited office worker.