The Mossy Spool

The summer I turned eleven, my family moved into a house on the edge of a dried-up reservoir in the Missouri Ozarks. The land had been bought cheap, and the house was a prefab thing that sat on a concrete slab, surrounded by acres of scrub oak and poison ivy. I was a lonely kid, and those woods became my kingdom. I’d wander for hours, kicking up rusted tin cans and shards of old bottles, always feeling like I was walking through someone else’s memory.

One afternoon, I found a spool of thick, greenish wire half-buried in the moss by a fallen oak. It was heavy, and the wire was coated in a strange, oily residue that made my fingers tingle. I yanked it free and dragged it back to the house, thinking I could use it for a fort or a trap. That night, I had a dream I was standing in a dark room, and a voice like gravel and rust told me to wind the wire around my bedpost. I woke with a jolt, and the wire was coiled neatly at the foot of my mattress.

I didn’t tell my parents, of course. They were too busy arguing about money and the well that kept pumping brown water. I tried to toss the wire back into the woods, but every time I threw it, it would reappear on my windowsill by morning, like a patient dog waiting to be let in. My hands started to itch, and I caught myself staring at the spool for hours, counting the rotations of the wire as if it were a clock.

Then the phone calls started. No one was on the other end, just a sound like a tape reel spinning, getting faster and faster until it cut to silence. My mother blamed the old landlines, but I knew. I’d dug up an old map at the county library, and under the reservoir, there was a town called Moresby, flooded in the sixties. The spool had come from a telephone exchange building in that town, and the wire was a line that had never been disconnected.

One night, I wound the wire around my wrist, just to see, and the spinning sound filled my head. I saw a man in a water-stained suit, sitting at a switchboard, plugging and unplugging cords with frantic precision. He turned to me, his face a blur of static, and said, ‘You’re through to the dead zone. Please hold.’ Then I was falling through black water, and the wire was a lifeline, but it was pulling me down, not up.

I cut it off with my father’s pocketknife, but the marks remained, thin red rings around my skin that never faded. I buried the spool at the bottom of a dry creek bed, piling rocks on top until my back ached. That night, I heard the ringing again, but this time from the creek. When I went out with a flashlight, the rocks were scattered, and the spool was gone. But the wire was still in my room, coiled under my pillow, and the voice on the phone said, ‘Line’s open. We’re still transmitting.’

I’m forty now, and I’ve moved across the country twice, but I still find that wire in my belongings. It’s shorter now, just a few feet, but it hums in the dead of night, and if I put it to my ear, I can hear the echo of a town that drowned, and the operator patiently waiting to connect me to a party that will never answer.