*
Time passed in a slow drag of minutes. How long she couldn’t say. She eyed the phone like a bottle of poison, backed away from the counter and trailed over to the kitchen table. Sat down. Put her head in her hands. “Crazy,” she said. “I’m fucking crazy.” The statement served to root her to reality. She raised her head and looked out the kitchen door through the glass pane of the screen door which distorted the world outside, but she could still see no signs of life. She might as well be the last, living person on earth.
The telephone rang. The sudden noise in the stillness of the room drove a sickening blade panic through her mind. Then it rang again, akin now to animal’s scream. She stood up from the table and moved a step closer. Her hand, rising from her side like a traitor. Another step. Another couple and she’d be close enough to grab it. Four, five rings. She wanted it to stop but knew instinctively it wouldn’t.
She had to answer.
She picked it up like a hot thing from coals and drove it to her ear. “Hello?” she said to nothing but the deep, forbidding drone of space. “Hello,” she said again. She heard another drag of weight above her head and jerked her eyes up, the phone still to her ear. And the soft, tittering laughter began, not from above her head but from the phone itself. Like a child’s prank. “Who is this?” she whispered, afraid for the answer. Something clunked up there and the laughter ceased. Then, ever so faintly, at the very verge of her range of hearing, “Momma?”
Everything stopped. Her blood ran cold. “Terri?” she said, her voice rising to a shrillness on the last syllable she did not like. The sound in the attic was forgotten. Again, she thought she heard something on the other end but couldn’t make it out. She began to scream into the phone then, but no one in the neighborhood heard, or even if they did, felt inclined to help.