Nightmare at 20,000 Feet

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?) AH 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 Keen 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 Keen 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 grey 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 down. ‘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 and Faith Baldwin.

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 tele-phone 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 hypnotised. 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 screeched. ‘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,’