Plot
An elderly woman, Elva Keene, receives strange anonymous phone calls. During the first calls she hears only static. Later she hears a man moaning and she repeatedly demands to know who is calling. Finally he says "Hello? Where are you? I want to talk to you." Elva, terrified, screams at the man to leave her alone.
The phone company traces the cause to a telephone line that has fallen in a cemetery.
Elva and her housekeeper visit the cemetery where she finds that the line is resting on the grave of her long-deceased fiancé, Brian Douglas. Elva says that she always insisted on having her own way, and Brian always did what she said. A week before they were to be married, she insisted on driving and lost control of the car. The accident killed Brian and crippled her.
Now that she can talk to him again she won't have to be alone. At home she picks up the phone and calls out to Brian, pleading with him to answer. He replies that she told him to leave her alone and that he always does what she says. Then the line goes dead, leaving Elva alone and crying in her bed.
Read more about this topic: Night Call
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)