The Switchboard Girl

*This story was born from a weird thought: what if the haunted house was just a bad apartment with thin walls and a horny ghost who misunderstood the word 'operator'? Hope it makes you laugh and squirm in equal measure. Thanks for reading something that treats the monster like an awkward roommate instead of a predator.*

The knock came at twenty to midnight on a Tuesday night. Three hard pounds, then silence, then three more.

Dani froze with her mouth still open. She had been mid-sentence, something about connecting you to your party, please hold, and Lewis had been under the blanket doing something that made the sentence hard to finish.

"You can't be that loud," Lewis whispered, sliding out from under the blanket. He was thirty and had the reflexes of a man who had spent three years dating a woman who got carried away. "It's a Tuesday. People work tomorrow."

"It's Old Town. Nobody works tomorrow."

The knock came again. Harder. Rhythmic, like a fist that had done this before and resented it.

"That's Alexander," Lewis said. He was already pulling on sweatpants. "That's his I've-been-patient knock."

Dani, twenty-eight, operator at the Meridian Hotel switchboard by day, burrowed into the couch cushions and pulled the blanket to her chin. She could hear Lewis's feet on the hardwood, hear the chain, hear the door open.

"Mr. Levy. Hey."

"Mr. Mann. It is twenty to midnight."

Dani knew Alexander Levy's voice well by now. He was thirty-five, had managed the building for five years, and had never in those five years knocked on any door at night until she and Lewis moved into 3B. He had a way of speaking that suggested he had rehearsed this conversation in the stairwell and still hated it.

"I understand it is Tuesday," Alexander went on. "I understand you work from home and cannot be evicted for being tired. But the woman in 4C has a newborn. The man in 2A is a nurse. And I, Mr. Mann, have an apartment directly below yours."

"Was it, uh. How loud was it?"

"There is a diner across the street, Mr. Mann. Their sign has been buzzing since the eighties. I know exactly how loud it is in that bedroom. I have a very good ear. Tonight you were louder than the sign."

Dani pulled the blanket over her face. The neon from the BURGER DELUXE sign came through the bedroom curtains even now, washing the ceiling pink. She had always liked it. It felt like the city was keeping watch.

Lewis came back with a written warning, because of course there was paperwork. The first one. He set it on the counter and stood there reading it like it might contain a different outcome if he read it enough times.

"Eviction," he said finally. "He wrote 'eviction' with a period after it."

"He's kind of a formal guy."

"He's threatening us, Dani. Formally. With a period."

She untangled herself and padded over, still wearing the operator headset she liked to wear around the apartment, the big clunky seventies kind she'd bought at an estate sale for the roleplay. The cord dragged on the floor. She hooked a finger in the waistband of his sweatpants.

"Okay. So we get quieter."

"There's no quieter. There's normal, and then there's what you do." He wasn't mad. That was the funny part. He looked more worried, like the noise was her pulse and he'd been told it was irregular. "You get into it. You're connecting calls. You're transferring me to extensions. Last week I had to be Extension 44 and I still don't know who Extension 44 is."

"The mayor."

"Of what?"

"Of the hotel, obviously."

He laughed, sort of. Then he reread the notice. Then he looked at her, and the worry was back.

"That's one, Dani. He said the third goes to the owner."

* * *

The recordings started that weekend.

It had been her own idea, and she was proud of it. If the problem was her professional voice leaking into the bedroom, then she would study the professional voice like an athlete studies tape. She borrowed a cassette recorder from the hotel's lost and found, plugged a cheap mic into the switchboard console, and started taping her shifts.

Monday's tape was normal. Reservations, a wrong number, a man asking for the pool hours twice. Her voice sounded fine. Crisp, even. A little breathy at the end of "Meridian Hotel, how may I connect you," but fine.

Tuesday's tape was not normal.

She was lying on the couch with headphones on, the recorder on her stomach, going through the shift hour by hour, when she heard it. A click. Then another click, slightly offbeat, like someone tapping a pencil on a desk two rooms away. Then, underneath the click, something soft and rhythmic that she at first took for tape hiss.

It was breathing.

Not hers. On the tape you could hear her own breath, small and shallow, between phrases. This was different. Slower. Deeper. It came in around the pauses, filling them, like the silence itself had lungs.

She rewound. Listened again. Rewound.

"Okay," she said out loud, to nobody. "Okay, that's the vent."

The vent did not breathe in rhythm. The vent did not speed up when her voice sped up on the tape. She sat very still on the couch and listened to the whole four hours of Tuesday, and the breathing came and went, and every time it came, there were the clicks first. Tap tap. Tap. Like someone picking up a phone very gently in another room, not quite placing it all the way down.

She told herself the recorder was old. Lost and found, after all. She told herself that on Wednesday too, when the clicks showed up again, and the breathing with them, patient and warm, keeping time with her.

The part she did not tell Lewis was that on Wednesday's tape, at fourteen past two in the afternoon, right after she'd said "one moment please," the breathing got close. Close like a mouth near a mic. And underneath it, almost lost in the hiss, was a word. She played it maybe forty times.

It sounded like "again."

* * *

Friday was the problem.

Alexander had come by Thursday with a second notice, because apparently Wednesday's regularity deserved its own paperwork, and Lewis had spent the whole day designing a brochure with the tight jaw he got when he was doing math about their savings. Dani had spent the whole day thinking about a word on a tape.

By ten that night they were on the couch, which was as far from the bedroom as the apartment allowed, lights off, TV on low with some home renovation show for cover. It had been Lewis's idea and she'd agreed fast enough to embarrass them both.

"Quiet," he murmured against her neck. "Like actually quiet. No extensions. No connecting anyone. Nothing."

"Nothing," she agreed.

He was thirty and good with his hands and he knew her well enough that quiet was not actually hard at first. His fingers, slow. Her hand over her own mouth, which she'd promised not to need and needed immediately. The TV murmured about something structural, she wasn't listening, she was breathing through her nose like a woman in a windstorm, and it was working, it was genuinely working.

Then she put her palm flat on the couch arm to brace, and the couch arm was hot.

Not warm. Hot. Warm as a coffee cup, and pulsing, a slow beat under the old upholstery. She moved her hand. The heat followed her to the armrest. She pressed two fingers against the wall behind the couch and the plaster hummed, faint, steady, like a wire carrying too much.

"Lewis."

"Mm."

"The wall is buzzing."

"Lots of walls buzz. It's Old Town. Everything's on its way out."

She sat up. The neon through the curtains had gone from pink to a hard, urgent flicker, buzzing in a rhythm she recognized, because it was the rhythm of her own breath from the tape, the one she'd listened to forty times. Tap tap. Tap.

"Lewis, look at the sign."

He looked. The BURGER DELUXE sign was pulsing. Not flickering the way it always did, with its little dead L. Pulsing, on and off, steady, like a metronome. Like someone breathing.

"That's not the ballast," Lewis said. He sat up too. "I've looked at that sign a hundred times. The L is dead, the rest is steady. That's not..." He trailed off, staring.

Dani stood, pulling her shirt down, and walked to the lamp. She touched the switch. The metal was warm. Every light fixture she could reach was warm. The outlet by the kitchen hummed, low and patient, and she got the distinct and absurd impression that it was listening.

"Okay," she said. "So. Hear me out."

"I really don't want to."

"The tapes. There's breathing on the tapes. There's clicks, like somebody picking up a phone. And now the whole building is..." She waved a hand at the pulsing neon. "Doing that."

"Dani."

"It's in the wiring, I think. The walls. There's something in the electricity and I think it's been, I don't know, listening. To the bedroom. To my voice. Maybe to the switchboard too, I don't know how far it goes."

Lewis was quiet for a moment. Then, in the tone of a man trying very hard to be the reasonable one: "You want to tell Alexander the building is haunted by our sex noises."

"I want to tell him the wiring is bad."

"The wiring is pulsing in time with your breathing, Dani. I can see it from here. That's not an electrician."

She looked at the wall between their bedroom and the vacant unit next door, 3C, empty for months. Alexander had shown it to prospective tenants twice and both times it had smelled like old carpet and takeout, just like theirs, and both times nobody took it. She put her hand on that wall now. Hot. Pulsing. Tap tap. Tap.

"It's coming through there," she said. "Through the whole system. It's not dangerous, look at it, it's just..."

She stopped, because she did not have a word, and the outlet by the kitchen hummed a little louder, almost eager, and the neon across the street pulsed once, hard, like a nod.

"It's just lonely," she finished.

She took her hand off the wall. The neon settled back to its usual broken flicker, the dead L dark, everything normal again, or as normal as Old Town got.

"Okay," Lewis said. "Bed. We'll figure it out Saturday. I'm not doing math about ghosts and eviction on a Friday."

"Fair."

They went to bed. The bedroom wall stayed warm all night, like a sleeping animal. Dani lay there for a while listening to it, and fell asleep somewhere around the second time the Burger Deluxe sign pulsed in what she swore was a rhythm.

* * *

Saturday she found out how far it went.

Lewis had gone out for groceries, which meant she had the apartment alone, which meant she did what any reasonable person would do. She put on the 1970s operator headset, the big clunky one from the estate sale, and sat on the bedroom floor with the cassette recorder and dialed the apartment's intercom system, because she wanted to hear what her voice did to the wiring.

The intercom was this old butter-yellow panel by the front door, a row of buttons for each unit. She'd never touched it. Nobody touched it. She pressed the button for 3C, the vacant unit, mostly because it was empty and she wouldn't bother anybody.

A click. Then her own voice came back at her, tinny, from the speaker in 3C. Except it wasn't just her voice. It was layered. Under her "testing, testing" there was a breath, close, familiar, the exact breath from the Wednesday tape. And under that, fainter, something that sounded almost like a word.

"...gain."

Her skin went cold and hot at the same time. She pressed the 3C button again.

"Hello?" she said. "Can you hear me?"

The speaker crackled. Static. Then, clear as a phone connection, in a voice made of hum and voltage and something else underneath: "One moment, please."

Dani sat down hard on the bedroom floor.

"Okay," she said to the intercom, to the wires inside the walls, to whatever was curled up in the building's electrical system like a cat in a sunbeam. "Okay. That's new. That's a new thing that you learned."

The lights in the bedroom flushed brighter for a second. Delighted. There was no other word for it.

"You've been listening to me," she said. "From the switchboard. And from. Um. Other things."

The wall pulsed, tap tap tap, and she got the feeling of a question.