The Hollow Wire

The old house sat at the edge of a hayfield, its tin roof peeling like sunburned skin. We called it Aunt Helena’s place, but she’d been dead for eight years, and now my uncle rented it to tenant farmers who never stayed long. This was the first time my cousins and I had been allowed to drive out alone, and we were thrilled, mostly because my parents had said we could camp in the back forty overnight.

We arrived at dusk. The air smelled of dry grass and diesel from the tractor shed. My cousin Mara, who was nineteen like me, pointed at a line of telephone poles that marched across the field, their wires sagging so low they brushed the tops of the wheat. ‘Those are dead,’ she said. ‘No houses out there for miles. Just our land and the woods.’ We laughed, but I noticed she kept glancing at the poles as we set up our tents.

That night we built a fire in an old oil drum and sat on overturned buckets. My cousin Leon, who always tried to be tougher than he was, started telling a story about a drifter who’d been found hanging from one of those poles back in the seventies. ‘They say his voice still comes down the wire at night, crying for his mother.’ I felt the story settle into my bones like cold water. Just then, I heard it—a low, undulating howl that seemed to come from the direction of the far field, where the lines disappeared into darkness.

I cut Leon off. ‘Did you hear that?’ Everyone went silent. Mara shook her head. I listened harder. Nothing but the crackle of the fire. I shrugged, but I kept scanning the horizon. The howl came again, closer this time, and it wasn’t an animal. It had a rhythm, almost like a voice trying to form words. I stood up. ‘That’s not a coyote.’ Leon laughed, but I saw him reach for a stick.

The howls grew more frequent, and they seemed to be moving along the telephone lines. I saw one of the wires twitch, as if something had brushed against it. Then another, and another, until all the lines were trembling. My cousins claimed they couldn’t hear anything, but I could see their faces in the firelight—pale, tense. Mara whispered, ‘Maybe we should go inside.’ But I was rooted to the spot. The howl became a word: ‘Helen… a.’

I turned to ask if anyone else heard that, but they were all staring at me, not at the field. Leon said, ‘You’re turning white as a ghost. Sit down, you’re freaking us out.’ I realized then that they heard nothing at all. The voice was only for me—or for whoever had inherited Aunt Helena’s blood,
and I was the only one with her name.

I forced myself back to the fire, but the voice kept whispering, tugging at me like a fish hook in my ear. It said, ‘Come see what I left under the pole.’ Something in me snapped, and I walked away from the fire, not feeling my feet move. My cousins shouted after me, but their voices were swallowed by the drone of the wires. I reached the nearest pole, its wood splintered and blackened at the base. The earth was dug up, as if something had been buried there recently, but the ground was packed hard.

I knelt and put my ear to the soil. I heard a hum, low and regular, like a heartbeat. I started digging with my bare hands. My nails filled with dirt. After a few minutes, my fingers struck something cold and smooth—a metal box, rusted, the size of a lunchbox. I pried it open. Inside was a coil of wire, exactly the kind used on telephone poles, but it was bright copper, unweathered, and it was still humming. On the underside of the lid was scratched: ‘Do not let it touch the ground, or it will call.’

I looked up. The line from this pole sagged into the darkness, and I saw a silhouette at the very end, where the last pole stood before the woods. It was tall, thin, and it was swaying, as if buffeted by a wind I couldn’t feel. It raised one arm and pointed at me. That’s when I heard the howl again, but this time it was inside my own throat.

I stumbled back to the camp, threw the box into the fire, and watched the copper coil writhe like a snake before it blackened. The howling stopped, but the silence that followed was worse. My cousins thought I’d gone crazy. They drove home that night, leaving me alone with a story I couldn’t tell. Now, whenever a storm knocks out the phones, I still feel something tugging at the base of my skull, and I know that somewhere out there, a wire is waiting to be reconnected.