Landline

The phone was an old rotary model, olive green in color. It had been left on a small side table in the corner of Harley's bedroom, the only furnishings present when she and Darren had moved into the little house on Pine Street. Darren had enthused endlessly about it, saying he thought he could fix it up, get it working again, and Harley had agreed that would be cool, so they'd left it there, its four-pronged plug wrapped around it, as they went about the other repairs and maintainances the place needed. There were quite a few- the last owners had left in '94 and the place had nearly been condemned at two different points before the town sold it on auction for a cash price the young couple had jumped on. The place had good bones, but their love of DIY was definitely a must. Anyhow, they'd been so busy with all of that that Harley had completely forgotten about the phone- until it rang.

It was a Sunday evening, and Darren was working a shift at the Veggie Patch restaurant he managed the next town over. Harley was painting the walls of the den a rosy blush color that reminded her of the dawn when the sound split through the silence, shrill and insistent. Under the big picture window, Winnie kicked in her cage, the clang of metal reverbrating under her powerful hind legs as she stood at attention, ears up, nose quivering.

"...huh?" Harley muttered, taking one of the earbuds out of her ears and looking at the rabbit. "You heard that too?" As if in response, the ringing sounded again. Harley stepped down the ladder and ran to the bedroom. Sure enough, the phone was unmistakably the source, the clappers pinging against the bells in its base. She stared for a moment at the useless cord wrapped around the thing, registering the sheer impossibility of it all, before doing the next natural thing that occurred to her. Harley picked it up.

"Hello?" she asked into the sudden silence.

There was a strange kind of static emanating from the receiver. Harley heard what sounded like a small giggle. "Hiii..." a child's voice said softly, before the line went dead.

"Hello?" Harley said again into the phone, knowing she wouldn't get a response. She couldn't get a response. It was impossible; the damn thing was unplugged. She dropped the receiver back on its cradle and stepped back to sit on the bed nearby.

"What...the...fuck," she whispered to herself. The sudden tears she felt threatening behind her eyes were unwanted, and she pushed them back.

Harley intended to tell Darren about the incident when he got home, maybe laugh about it (guess we've got a haunting! No wonder the house was such a good deal- typical horror movie shit, right? All tongue-in-cheek, of course) but when he came back that evening, she said nothing. Every time her brain sent the signal to her tongue, her teeth clamped down tight. Because she could picture how it would go.

What did it sound like? He'd ask, laughing at first. Then, A child? Then... Babe, you don't think...don't get mad, but couldn't this be...?

And she'd resent it, him bringing it back to the miscarriage. To the psychosomatic symptoms she'd had a couple months back, in the worst summer of her life: the crying she'd wake thinking she heard, the phantom kicks deep in her belly. The unhinged, feral way she'd cried when she and Darren had called their families and told them the news, revoked their prior announcement. 21 weeks was supposed to be safe. In the clear (safe to begin dreaming). She knew his bringing it up would be well-intentioned, that he'd only be worried for her, and that made it worse. The buying of this house, the ambitious plans of fixing it up had served as a project to distract them, and it had been working. She wouldn't let all that progress constrict and condense in on her again, all because of a phone call she couldn't have even received.

Instead, when Darren got home, they ate the meal he'd cooked special at the Veggie Patch (they were testing the revamped menu plans day by day) and then looked at some paint samples for the bathroom. They drank a little too much wine and had unorthodox sex on the couch (a 'christening' of the home, Darren joked, making her realize how long it had been).She felt fine, good even, as if the whole incident earlier had been some kind of big misunderstanding. Yet when she laid in bed that night, Darren's snores shaking the foundations beside her, she found sleeping hard. She kept waking up, checking the clock to find only a half hour had passed, then tossing and turning again to get comfortable, staring at the silent phone on the little side table, surrounded by boxes and half-finished projects.

Finally, she got up, slipping from under the sheets, and padded over to it, scooping it up in her hands and carrying it out of the room to the extra bedroom down the hall. Harley half-expected it to ring in her arms, but it was innocently mute the whole way. Ignoring the thought that this room wouldn't have been extra, would have served a purpose in an alternate timeline, Harley grabbed a paint-streaked dropcloth from the ground and wrapped the phone in it, before sliding it onto the top shelf of the closet, back behind the wall. Satisfied, she went back to bed, sliding in next to Darren's prone form. She expected to struggle still, to strain to listen for the sound, even muted beneath wads of fabric, but Harley fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.

The weekend passed in a blur of activity. The couple went to some eateries in town (Harley had the idea that Darren was inwardly sizing most of them up for competition, and didn't hesitate to tease him about it), unpacked the bulk of their boxes, and finished painting the rooms that needed it. The whole time Darren painted the walls of the extra bedroom, Harley waited, almost urging the old phone to squall from its hiding place, but all was quiet on the western front, as her father would have said. When Darren caught her staring at him in the doorway, he smirked at her, turning on his ladder. "Stop staring at my ass, pervert," he said, and she laughed, went to take Winnie for a walk on the driveway. The rabbit acted strange, backing up and avoiding her hands, but finally she brought her out. Perhaps, she thought as she followed the rabbit as she hopped around on her lead, she'd been mistaken. How was still a prominent question, but out here in the sun-dappled, crisp autumn afternoon, she found it easier to simply dismiss.

Monday, Darren went into the restaurant and Harley, who'd quit her own regular job a while back now due to certain circumstances being what they were, was organizing the kitchen when she heard it: a soft, plaintive sound that grew louder, burrowing into her brain like a parasite as she ran the water. Apruptly, Harley shut it off and stood, stricken. A baby was crying somewhere upstairs. She crept to the door to the living room and saw that Winnie had frozen in her enclosure, nose twitching.

"You hear it too?" she asked. The rabbit stared at her with her distinctive blue eyes, then slowly stamped her foot. God, I'm going crazy, Harley thought, and no sooner had she had the thought than the sound resolved into something else, the thing it had likely been all along: ringing. Ringing. Ringing.

Harley ran upstairs, heart pounding. The sound became louder as she went down the hall, towards the spare bedroom, then suddenly stopped when she reached the door of her and Darren's room. She stood in the sudden silence, turning around when she saw out of the corner of her eye something in their bed. Harley's heart had jumped into her throat before she looked closer and saw it was only stuffed animals.

The stuffed animals she hadn't bothered to unpack. The ones she'd bought when a nursery was still a dream on the table; the ones she'd buried at the very bottom of one of the boxes they'd stowed in the attic. They were arranged in a circle on the bedspread, facing inward. A teddy bear next to a floppy bunny rabbit next to a giraffe and a monkey.

"What...the..." Harley breathed. She fumbled for her cell phone. It took a couple of tries to get Darren to pick up.

"You okay, babe?" he asked immediately, like he could feel the agitation in that second ring.

"Yes. I mean. Darren, did you take out the stuffies from the baby bag? Before you left?"

The puzzled silence was all she needed to hear. "Didn't we put that in the attic?"

Harley closed her eyes. "Yes. You know what, never mind." Before he could object (why, what happened? do you want me to come home?) she pressed end and stood looking at the impossibility before her, the silence sawing through her head.

I think my house might be haunted.

Harley typed the words into Google and then deleted them, watching the line of black letters disappear back into her blinking cursor. The library was busy today, an inordinate number of parents with young children rooting around for books or clustered in one corner for story hour. She felt weirdly self-conscious about the possibility of anyone walking behind her and reading what might become a lengthy, embarrassing chat with AI. Harley wasn't the kind of person to immediately jump to supernatural explanations, anyway (she thought this as if to remind herself of the fact).

She was only here in the first place because she found it impossible to concentrate on anything that needed doing while she inwardly braced for that shrill, muffled ringing. Before leaving, she'd taken the phone from its hiding place and stood for minutes in the center of the spare room. Its weight seemed to grow more and more pronounced in her arms, and despite her intentions (throw the damn thing out) she'd, for reasons she couldn't fully parse, ultimately put it back. Now she sat at one of the public library's computers, trying to figure how to while away the time until Darren got back. She planned on timing it so she got home just before him- she didn't particularly care for him asking what she'd been up to, especially after the morning's embarrassing phone call that she was avoiding the house after.

The house. She looked at the blank text box and then typed out the address. 76 Pine Street, Islington, ME. The results took a moment to load, but when they did, she found herself staring at more than just an expired listing. Tragedy Rocks Small Maine Town one headline proclaimed and, the palms of her hands moister than they'd been previous, Harley clicked on the link. Sleepy Islington made news the other day for all the wrong reasons when 26-year-old Mark Huberg called emergency operators to report his wife and four-year-old daughter deceased. Alicia Huberg presumably drowned her young daughter in the bathtub before shooting herself.

Harley skimmed the rest of the article, a faint metallic ringing that sounded oddly like that of the old-fashioned phone in her closet in her ears. When she was finished, she went back to the search and typed in 'Alicia Huberg, Islington ME'.

Most of the results seemed unrelated, but she found one that took her to a crime forum. The topic on the page in question was 'was Alicia Huberg really crazy or did she just straight up murder that kid?' It was immediately clear from the wording that whoever the original poster had been, they were already putting all their eggs in the second basket, and the few interactions they had subsequently in the replies were terse and sarcastic.

Her husband literally said she was hearing things. And she'd told him all that stuff about how the kid wasn't the kid, one reply said. And the response: you don't for one second think he could be lying to protect her then? (a rebuttal from a third person read why would he want to protect the person who killed his kid? wtf is this take, OP) Heart pounding, Harley skimmed the rest of the page, from which she gathered that Alicia Huberg had been experiencing (reportedly) something akin to psychosis, that her husband Mark claimed she hadn't been herself for a few days before the incident. 'I should have done something,' a clearly guilt-ridden Mark said in an old linked local article, 'but it happened so fast. She kept saying Rose wasn't Rose anymore. That she'd answered a call. That she'd let something inside.'

Harley xed out of the window and sat back heavily in her chair, staring blankly at the library's generic background. Answered a call?

Let something inside? She felt something wriggling in the pit of her stomach. Now I know why the house was so cheap, she thought numbly. No one ever wants to live in a murder house. A murder-suicide house? Forget it. Probably ten times worse. Hearing things, she thought, remembering the shrill sound of the phone, and the fact that Darren had never heard it, only her. Am I going crazy, just like her? Answered a call. The phrase could mean anything; it didn't have to be literal. Harley had answered a call, hadn't she? Heard that small voice on the other end of the line, that breathless giggle. Was it the ghost of Rose Huberg she was hearing? Or something else? Something that only pretended at being a small child?

Because Alicia Huberg might have been a murderer, or she might have been crazy, but there was a third option, wasn't there?

Maybe she was right.

The next day was Darren's soft opening at the restaurant, so Harley was annoyed when she woke up feeling like shit. She was dizzy and a little nauseous and she stood looking at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, wondering if she was coming down with something.

It turned out that the medicine cabinet was packed up in the one box they'd neglected to open, and as Harley went through it looking for an antacid, she came upon something that made her frown. A single pregnancy test was mixed in among the boxes and bottles of pills. She didn't know what made her do it, whether she'd set out just to torture herself, but moments later, Harley was sitting on the closed toilet seat watching a second, faint line bloom into appearance on the stick.

Harley's hand shook, tears stinging her eyes. She didn't know if it was grief or joy. She didn't know if it mattered. She imagined telling Darren the news, on this already fortuitous day. Imagined him throwing his arms around her. Imagined getting, after all, to have everything she'd ever wanted and everything she'd felt she'd lost forever once again, a resurrection of dreams.

As she put her hands over her flat stomach and felt - she swore for one moment- something turn over, something kick. But that was impossible, wasn't it? As she waited for Darren to come pick her up, one line came back to haunt her, tugging at her subconscious.

Let something inside.