The Tell-tale Ring

It is an unhospitable hour, one that begs the question of your better judgment. You find yourself standing alone inside a medieval library—a cathedral of shadow and story. Gothic archways line the walls like sentinels, concealing leather-scented alcoves and the trailing tendrils of whispers. Stone tracery on the windows glistens in the candlelight, making intricate patterns that split the glass into jewels. The ribbed vaults evoke the golden laces of gladiator sandals, a trend your body remembers with a shudder.

“Hello?”

You say it like a question. Your voice echoes. Nothing stirs.

Faintly, in the distance, a phone is ringing. The ringing goes on and on, and even though it’s faint, it turns your anxiety up to eleven.

“Hello?” you say again, louder this time. Surely someone hears the phone, someone whose job it is to answer phones. That person is decidedly not you; you hate phones.

You remember your first phone in High School, the one with the cord you stretched beyond its physical limits because sometimes you needed to move around during a marathon call, back when everything of import in your life was mainlined in gossip and Slurpees. When life hadn’t started demanding sacrifices from you yet—your time, your peace of mind and the imperative to tolerate bullshit among the most painful.

Now you can’t stand phones. In idea or in practice. You see an unscheduled phone call as a crime against humanity.

“Do you think I’m an animal?” you want to demand of the caller. “Lolling about, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for you to call? The kind of person with a completely empty calendar and a life devoid of meaning, unless people like you fill it up with arbitrary mid-day phone calls? Calls that—quelle horreur!— might last 40 seconds or two hours? And somehow you think this is a respectable way for humans to conduct themselves?”

That’s why you refuse.

You’re not going to answer that phone, even though the rings are louder now and starting to sound shrill as a toddler’s shriek. Your right eye has begun to twitch, but you don’t answer because it might be him. The one who ingratiates himself with talk about nothing and “remember whens,” and then shapeshifts into melancholy with the stealth of a fox. The one who scents your desire to wrap things up and digs his claws in deeper. And then it’s three hours later, and you’re trapped in the polite purgatory of the unscheduled phone call, effervescing with self-loathing about not having boundaries.

Or maybe it will be the other one. The paranoid one, who wants options but not these options. The one who’s fluent in both helplessness and how to work the system, and is so relieved to have you as a sounding board because you understand him. You murmur “Mmhmm” and “Okay” at the conspiracy theories, and you feel as if you are pouring the sweet nectar of your soul into a vast empty vessel that is impossible to fill.

“Somebody, please!” you cry out to no one in particular, as you break into a run, trying to put space between you and the ringing phone before the bulging vein in your temple explodes. Suddenly, your phone dings. You pull up short and fish around in your bag, turning it face-up to reveal a text.

Your breath catches. Every tiny hair stands at attention. Your blood feels as if it’s freezing in your veins, like an unrelenting cold front sweeping across the landscape of your organs.

This can’t be. This is the worst-case scenario.

Your heart is hammering like it’s trying to escape your chest. Your fingers tighten around the phone. The words on the screen burn like a curse:

Call me.

Panic rises in your chest, threatening your ability to suck in air, which you suddenly seem to require in increasing amounts. You must ignore this insane request and the cascade of questions it raises:

About what? Do I need to prep? Is it important? Like, life-and-death important? Could this call actually just be a text?

The swirl of your thoughts and the maddening racket are building to an operatic crescendo. You hurl your phone back into your bag and run, pumping your legs like an Olympian, leaving clouds of dust motes in your wake. The library looms in front of you, seeming to grow in length the closer you get to the exit. Over the cacophony, you hear your cell phone start to ring. At first, you try to ignore it, but it’s perfectly interspersed with the ring of the library’s landline, so that now there is no pause between rings. The sound is simply one long note stretched into a tinny, keening alarm.

“No, no, NO!” you shout, stopping once again to extract the phone from your bag. As you withdraw it, you see the call going to voicemail. You wait for the summary message to show on your screen. 10 seconds… thirty… one minute… before you realize with a wave of revulsion that… they didn’t leave a message.

You stare at the blank screen and feel your face pull into something feral. They didn’t leave a message! They just called and hung up. And now they wait, like a hungry vampire, for you to call them back.

Your phone begins to ring again.

You let out a strangled scream and hurl it into the nearest chair, where it continues to trill like a tired old music box, drooping and distorting, curdling the lullaby into something rotten. The sound vibrates the marrow of your bones. You clamp your hands over your ears, but the ring is inside you now, reverberating in your jaw, your teeth, your blood.

And then…

A knock.

Clipped. Deliberate. Real.

You freeze, doubting your ears amidst the din.

Another knock.

You run toward it, heels drumming the stone in a desperate rhythm, lungs full of fire and hope. Someone is here. Someone is finally here. They’ve come to put an end to this madness.

You reach the door and grasp for the handle just as the voice purrs through the keyhole, saccharine and uninvited:

“Darling…

I was in the neighborhood…

Just thought I’d drop in and see what you were up to.”