The click of cables, the faint crackle of static, and the rhythmic clatter of plugs against jacks: this was the music of Clara Varnell's world.
The switchboard room smelled of scorched dust and the faint copper tang of wire insulation. Fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead like impatient hornets. Clara sat perched on her high stool, her headset slightly askew, the cord brushing her shoulder every time she turned her head to glance at the wall clock. 11:47 p.m.
Third night in a row on graveyard shift.
She preferred it. Fewer eyes. Fewer questions. Fewer cheerful co-workers asking if she'd heard from her sister in Des Moines, or if she ever thought about getting into something "more suitable for a girl with good diction."
The night team was skeletal—just herself, Betty (who always brought peppermint Lifesavers and theories about movie stars being secretly married), and Miss Luntz, the supervisor who moved like a specter from desk to desk, clipboard in hand, expressionless as a funeral photograph.
Clara sipped cold coffee from a chipped thermos and jotted time stamps into her personal notebook, the one she kept in her lap under the official Bell ledger. Just numbers, mostly. Crossed wires. Repeat callers. A lonely war vet in Cicero who dialed 0 every hour just to say hello.
She'd learned how to listen without seeming to.
At 11:52, Line 4 lit up—a dim, amber glow.
She patched it in. "Operator," she said softly. No response.
Static.
She adjusted the cable. Still nothing. Then—
click
—a whisper of breath. A pause. Then a voice. Male. Sharp-edged, tightly metered, almost mechanical in its cadence.
> "Confirm echo entry. Line six, seven, four—pattern holds. Proceed to vector Hal."
She blinked. Her pencil stilled.
A second voice, lower, slower:
> "Received. Umbra node awake. Entry cleared. Package one?"
> "Not yours to know."
The line popped with soft feedback.
Clara frowned. Military? She recognized some of the clipped jargon from films, but this was... colder. Practiced.
Then: a sudden shuffle. A muffled expletive. And—
> "What the hell are you—?"
Scream.
Short. Male. Followed by a loud, wet thud.
Then—absolute silence.
Not a hang-up. Not a disconnect. Just silence. The kind that made your skin crawl.
Clara didn't move.
The headset cupped her ear like a shell, but there was no sound inside it anymore—not even static. Her breath held in her chest, waiting for something, anything. A voice. A second scream. Even a dial tone.
Nothing.
She finally reached for the line's toggle, clicked it off, then back on. Still silent. Another flick. Nothing.
With stiff fingers, she slid the plug from Jack 4 and replaced it in the terminal. Her pencil slipped to the floor.
"Everything alright, dear?" Miss Luntz's voice floated from behind her shoulder, dry as paper and twice as thin.
Clara startled, knocked her knee on the desk, and forced a neutral smile. "Crossed line, I think."
Luntz raised one penciled eyebrow, but didn't lean in. She never did. "Log it," she said flatly, and moved on.
Betty, from her station down the row, was chewing noisily and thumbing through a magazine, oblivious.
Clara reached under the Bell ledger, into her lap, and flipped open her small spiral notebook. She jotted the time—11:52 PM—and the words she could remember exactly:
> "Confirm echo entry. Vector Hal."
"Umbra node awake."
"Not yours to know."
[SCREAM]
[THUD]
She paused.
A part of her brain—the part shaped by routine, by protocol—begged her to let it go. Write it up as a misconnection. A sound effect. Radio bleed.
But the scream hadn't been performed. It hadn't had that showy shape of theater or prank. It was cut off. Truncated.
And the thud...
She adjusted her headset again, moving down the line to reroute the next incoming call, but her hands moved slower now. Her focus stuttered.
Then something else happened.
Jack 4, the same line she'd just disconnected, blinked again—twice—then stopped. Just one flicker of amber.
She hesitated.
Betty yawned behind her, tearing out a perfume sample from Ladies' Home Journal.
Clara turned back to Jack 4. Its bulb was now dead. No signal. No sound. But her ears buzzed.
She touched the jack with two fingers—then quickly pulled her hand back.
It was warm.
Clara wiped her fingers on her skirt, suddenly aware of how loud her breathing sounded in the hush of the switchboard room.
She counted to ten in her head. Then twenty. Nothing.
Jack 4 stayed dead.
She rose quietly from her stool, her knees aching slightly, and walked the narrow corridor between desks toward the supervisor's booth. Miss Luntz sat behind a glass panel smeared with fingerprint smudges, jotting figures onto a green ledger without looking up.
Clara stood there for a moment. Then knocked—once.
Miss Luntz didn't jump, just finished her line and slowly raised her eyes. "Yes?"
"There was a call," Clara said. She kept her voice low, aware that Betty's humming had stopped behind her. "On Line 4. Two male voices. I think one of them might've... I heard—"
"A scream?" Luntz offered.
Clara blinked. "Yes."
Luntz reached for a form, placed it squarely in front of her, and began filling in the blanks. "Probably a radio bleed-in. Happens now and then after thunderstorms. Something about frequency spillover. Jack 4's wiring's old. We've had quirks on that terminal before."
"It didn't sound like a bleed," Clara said. "It sounded—human. Real. Like... it wasn't a show."
Luntz didn't react. She wrote in tight, efficient strokes.
"Did you disconnect the line?"
"Yes."
"Good."
She tore the form from its pad, folded it crisply, and placed it in the thin inbox labeled ANOMALIES – FILE. Then she turned back to Clara and offered a pinched smile. "If there was anything real, dear, it wouldn't be on our line."
Clara opened her mouth, then closed it.
"I suggest you finish out your shift, log it as interference, and get some sleep tomorrow. You've been pulling doubles. Exhaustion plays tricks."
Clara stood still, rooted. Luntz picked up her pen again.
Dismissed.
She turned and walked back toward her console, passing Betty, who offered a lazy smile and asked, "Was it a dirty call?"
Clara didn't answer.
She returned to her seat, slid on her headset again, and glanced down at her notebook. Her handwriting looked neater than it felt.
She boxed the name HAL in pencil. Then circled it.
The shift dragged.
The rest of the calls were routine. Someone trying to reach a dentist after hours. A weeping woman asking to be connected to a number in Kansas that didn't exist. A man whispering sweet nothings to someone who never answered.
Clara took the calls, made the connections, jotted the logs. But she barely heard any of it.
Her body moved with practiced rhythm. But her mind stayed curled around Jack 4.
By the time the shift ended and Betty was chirping about a matinee she wanted to catch on Thursday, Clara's head throbbed like she'd been listening to piano wire all night.
The city outside was still dark, though the eastern sky was beginning to smudge with thin gray. Wind rushed in cold bursts between the buildings, and her shoes clicked too loud on the sidewalk.
She kept her eyes forward, hands in her coat pockets.
Her apartment building was a narrow red-brick walk-up near Jackson, second floor. The stairwell always smelled faintly of onions and pipe smoke, the wallpaper curling at the seams.
She climbed slowly, paused at the landing, and fumbled her key at the front door.
It was only after she'd stepped inside, coat still on, that something made her pause.
A feeling.
She turned toward the front window, the one with the crooked shade.
From the shadows of her small kitchenette, she peeked between the slats.
Across the street, just beyond the reach of the streetlamp, sat a car.
Dark.
Unmoving.
No engine sound. No cabin lights. Just a shape—like something left behind on purpose.
The windshield was impossible to see through. The driver's seat was a silhouette. Maybe empty. Maybe not.
Clara didn't move.
She waited. Counted. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three—
Nothing.
Then, with a slow hand, she reached for the cord, pulled the blind down in one smooth motion, and backed away from the window.
Only then did she take off her coat.
She didn't turn on the lights.
And she didn't sleep.