the only way I can describe it. It’s not just the television, which sits in the corner of the living room like a grey, unblinking eye, hissing that white noise at a volume just low enough to be a vibration in your teeth rather than a sound in your ears. It’s the house itself. The air here hangs suspended, thick with the smell of menthol rub, dust that has settled since the nineties, and the distinct, sweet-rot scent of old paper decomposing in damp corners.
Moving back in wasn't a choice so much as a lack of options. My career had imploded in the city, a slow-motion car crash of layoffs and bad luck, and my father’s health had taken a nosedive that the neighbors couldn't ignore anymore. They called me after he was found wandering the lawn in his underwear, screaming at a squirrel that he claimed was transmitting government secrets. Dementia, the doctors said, mixed with a general shutting down of the systems. He was physically frail, a husk of the man who used to terrify me with his booming voice, but his mind was the real casualty. It had retreated into a fortress of confusion and silence, leaving only a shell that stared at the snowy screen of a television set that hadn't been connected to a cable box in a decade.
The house was a time capsule, but the kind you regret opening. Every surface was covered. Stacks of Reader’s Digest from 1988, towers of yellowing newspapers, ceramic figurines of shepherdesses with chipped noses, and boxes of unidentified rusted hardware. The clutter created narrow canyons through the living room and hallway, pathways you had to navigate sideways.
And then there was the phone.
He refused to have a cell phone in the house. He claimed the signals scrambled his thoughts, made the "buzzing" inside his head louder. I tried to argue with him during the first week, pulling my smartphone out of my pocket to show him it was harmless, but he went into such a violent fit of trembling and weeping that I eventually just turned it off and threw it in my suitcase. To communicate with the outside world—to order his prescriptions, to call the pharmacy, to maybe, eventually, find a job—we relied on the landline.
It was a rotary. A heavy, black Bakelite beast that sat on a dedicated table in the hallway, the centerpiece of a shrine made of phonebooks and message pads that hadn't been written on in years. It was connected to the wall by a curly, frayed cord that looked like a dried earthworm.
The first month was just the routine. I’d wake up, change his sheets, sponge-bathe him while he stared past me at some invisible horizon, and then park him in his armchair in front of the static. I’d spoon-feed him oatmeal that he barely swallowed. The isolation was absolute. The suburbs out here aren't the friendly kind where neighbors wave; they are vast, silent grids of dying lawns and closed blinds.
The calls started in the middle of the second month.
I am a light sleeper. The silence of the house usually kept me on edge, the settling of the foundation sounding like footsteps. But when the phone rang that first time, it shattered the night like a hammer through glass.
It was a physical sound, that mechanical bell.
Brrr-ing.
Brrr-ing.
I jolted up, heart hammering against my ribs, squinting at the glowing red numbers on my digital clock. 3:00 AM. Exactly.
I stumbled out of the spare room, navigating the hallway clutter by memory and the pale moonlight filtering through the grimy windows. The phone kept ringing, an insistent, angry sound. My father’s door was closed. He didn't stir. He slept like the dead, aided by a heavy dose of sedatives.
I picked up the receiver, the plastic cold and greasy against my ear.
"Hello?"
My voice was a croak, thick with sleep.
Static. A crackling, popping interference, like a radio tuned between stations during a thunderstorm.
"Hello? Is anyone there?"
I asked again, annoyance beginning to override the adrenaline.
"It’s dark,"
a voice whispered.
I froze. It was a child. A boy, maybe seven or eight years old. The voice was trembling so hard the words were barely coherent, wet with tears and snot.
"Who is this?"
I gripped the phone tighter.
"Where are your parents?"
"The Rabbit Man,"
the boy whimpered. The audio quality was terrible, fading in and out as if he were calling from the bottom of a well.
"He says I have to wait in the dark room. He says I was bad."
A cold prickle danced down the back of my neck.
"Listen to me,"
I said, trying to keep my voice steady.
"You need to hang up and call 911. Do you know how to do that?"
"My head hurts,"
the boy sobbed, his voice pitching up into a jagged whine.
"The Rabbit Man hit the wall. He dragged me. I want to go home. Please."
"Where are you? Tell me where you are."
"I don't know,"
he gasped.
"It smells like... like oil. And dirt. I can’t see my hands."
"Stay on the line,"
I said, looking around the dark hallway as if help might materialize from the shadows.
"I’m going to call for help on another line, okay? Just stay—"
The line clicked. Then, the hum of the dial tone.
I stood there for a long time, the receiver still pressed to my ear, listening to the drone of the disconnected line. I eventually hung up and dialed *69, hoping to trace the last call.
“The service you are attempting to use is not available from this line,” a robotic female voice informed me.
Of course. The landline package was probably the bare minimum, untouched since the eighties. I sat on the floor beside the phone table, hugging my knees. It had to be a prank. Kids these days, with their apps and their boredom. They probably found a list of active landlines and were seeing who they could scare. It was a script. "The Rabbit Man." It sounded like something from an internet creepypasta.
But the fear in that voice... it stuck with me. It was the wet, gasping quality of the breathing. The sheer exhaustion in the terror.
The next day, the house felt heavier. The dust seemed to hang lower in the air. My father was particularly difficult, refusing to open his mouth for his medication. He kept turning his head toward the hallway, his milky eyes widening, but when I asked him what he wanted, he just mumbled nonsense words. "Soft," he said once. "Soft ears."
I ignored it. He said a lot of things.
That night, I didn't sleep. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting.
3:00 AM.
Brrr-ing.
I was at the phone before the second ring finished.
"Hello?"
"I’m thirsty."
The same voice. Weaker this time.
"It’s so hot in here."
"Who are you calling?"
I demanded, skipping the pleasantries.
"Is this a game?"
"I missed the fireworks,"
the boy whispered, ignoring me completely. He sounded delirious.
"Mom said we could watch the fireworks after the rides. At the Millennium Fair. I wanted to see the big wheel."
My stomach dropped.
"The Millennium Fair?"
I asked, my voice was a whisper.
"The Rabbit Man gave me a balloon,"
the boy continued, his words slurring.
"He said... he said he had a surprise. Under the stage. But we went down. We went down so far."
"Kid, listen to me. The Millennium Fair... that isn't happening now."
"I want my mom,"
he cried, a sudden, piercing shriek that made me pull the phone away from my ear.
"It’s too tight! The walls are too tight!"
Click. Hum.
I stood in the hallway, shivering despite the summer heat trapped in the house. The Millennium Fair. I remembered it. Everyone in the county remembered it. It was a massive traveling carnival that had come through the state capital to celebrate the turn of the century. New Year's Eve, 1999.
I was in high school then. I remembered the lights, the sheer scale of it. But that was 26 years ago.
If this was a prank, it was incredibly specific and incredibly cruel. Why reference a fair that happened a 26 years ago? Was the kid reading a script? Or was it a recording?
I went to the kitchen and made coffee, my hands shaking as I poured the water. I spent the hours until dawn sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the phone in the hallway. I tried to rationalize it. A recording made more sense. Someone playing an old tape over the line? But the boy had responded to the flow of conversation, even if he didn't answer my questions directly.
When the sun came up, I drove to the library in the next town over—the only place with decent Wi-Fi. I needed to verify my memory.
I searched "Millennium Fair kidnapping."
The results were sparse. It had been a chaotic event. Too many people, too much alcohol, Y2K panic mixed with celebration. There were reports of fights, a few drug arrests, lost children who were found within hours.
But there was one cold case.
Michael Miller, age 7. Last seen near the exit of the fairgrounds, wearing a blue windbreaker and holding a red balloon. Witnesses reported seeing him walking with a costumed character, though no mascots were scheduled for that area of the park.
I stared at the grainy photo of the boy on the screen. He had a gap-toothed smile and messy hair.
Seven years old.
The boy on the phone sounded seven.
I went back to the house with a knot of dread in my gut so tight it made it hard to breathe. The house smelled worse today—a sharp, acrid tang of ammonia cutting through the dust. My father was sitting exactly where I’d left him, bathed in the static glow.
"Dad?"
I asked, walking into the living room.
He didn't blink.
"Dad, did you ever hear about a boy going missing? Years ago? At a fair?"
Slowly, agonizingly, his head turned. His neck crunched, a dry, brittle sound. He looked at me, and for a second, the fog in his eyes seemed to clear, replaced by a sharp, predatory lucidness that I hadn't seen in years.
"Everyone goes missing eventually,"
he rasped. Then he turned back to the TV and let out a long, wheezing laugh that turned into a cough.
I decided then that I wouldn't answer the phone again. It was doing something to me. It was making the shadows in the corners of the room look like crouching figures. It was making the silence of the house sound like held breath. If it was a prank, I was feeding it. If it was... something else... I didn't want to let it in.
For the next three nights, the phone rang at 3:00 AM.
Brrr-ing.
Brrr-ing.
I lay in bed, pillow wrapped around my head, counting the rings. It always rang exactly ten times. Then silence.
But the silence was worse. Because in the silence, I started hearing other things. Sounds coming from inside the house.
A soft scraping sound. Like fabric dragging over wood.
It seemed to come from the ceiling.
By the fourth day of ignoring the calls, the atmosphere in the house had become unbearable. The air felt pressurized. My father was agitated, rocking back and forth in his chair, muttering about "leaks" and "patches."
I needed to do something productive. I needed to exert some control over this rotting environment. I decided to tackle the attic.
The attic hatch was in the hallway, right above the phone table. I hadn't been up there since I was a child. It was a forbidden zone, the place where my father stored his "projects." He was a handyman by trade, a tinkerer. He fixed things—toasters, radios, lawnmowers.
I pulled the cord, and the folding ladder creaked down, releasing a shower of dust and dead flies. I climbed up, coughing, clicking on the single bare bulb that hung from the rafters.
The attic was stiflingly hot, smelling of baked pine and fiberglass insulation. It was crammed with boxes, just like the rest of the house, but these were older. Wooden crates, metal footlockers.
I started moving things around, looking for space, looking for anything that could be thrown away. I found boxes of old tubes for radios, jars of rusted nails, a collection of license plates from the seventies.
And then I found the trunk.
It was pushed all the way into the eaves, hidden behind a stack of water-damaged insulation rolls. It was an old steamer trunk, heavy and bound in leather that had cracked like a dry riverbed.
I shouldn't have opened it. I knew that the moment my hand touched the latch. The metal was cold, unnaturally so for how hot the attic was.
I popped the latches. They groaned in protest. I threw the lid back.
The smell hit me first. It was the smell of the garage—motor oil, grease, gasoline—mixed with something biological. Sweat. Dried saliva. Unwashed hair.
Lying inside the trunk, folded haphazardly, was a suit.
It was made of a coarse, grey synthetic fur that had matted and clumped with age and grime. There were dark stains on the chest and stomach, stiff and crusty.
I reached out, my fingers trembling, and pulled it up.
It was a rabbit suit. But not a cute Easter bunny. This was something homemade, something stitched together with fishing line and desperation. The headpiece was heavy, made of papier-mâché covered in that same matted fur. The ears were long and asymmetrical, one bent sharply in the middle as if broken. The eyes were empty sockets, rimmed with red felt. The mouth was a fixed, jagged grin cut into the mask, revealing a mesh screen behind it that was clogged with... something dark.
I dropped it. I dropped it like it was burning.
"The Rabbit Man."
The boy’s voice echoed in my head.
I backed away, scrambling over the boxes, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I couldn't breathe. The air in the attic was suddenly sucked out, replaced by the vacuum of realization.
My father.
My father, the handyman. The man who could fix anything.
I scrambled down the ladder, nearly falling the last few feet. I hit the hallway floor and looked at the phone. It sat there, silent, accusing.
I ran into the living room. My father was there, bathed in the static.
"Dad,"
I said, my voice shaking so hard it distorted the word.
He didn't move.
"Dad, what is in the attic?"
I shouted.
"What is that suit?"
He stopped rocking. The static hissed. Shhhhhhh.
He slowly turned his chair. He didn't use his feet; he just shifted his weight, the old wood of the chair groaning. He faced me. His eyes were clear again. Lucid. Horribly, terrifyingly lucid.
He looked at me with a mixture of pity and annoyance, like I was a child interrupting an important meeting.
"I had to hide this part of me,"
he said. His voice was strong, devoid of the tremulous wheeze of the last few months.
"He was broken."
I stared at him, my blood running cold.
"Who? Who was broken?"
"The boy,"
my father said.
"He wouldn't stop crying. I tried to fix him. I tried to make him quiet. But he was broken inside."
He smiled. It wasn't a fatherly smile. It was a baring of teeth, yellow and long.
"So I put him where the noise wouldn't bother me. "
I stumbled back, bile rising in my throat.
"You... you killed him?"
"I fixed the problem,"
he said, turning back to the TV.
"Now, be quiet. The show is starting."
He dissolved back into the slump, the clarity vanishing as quickly as it had come.
I ran to the kitchen. I needed to call the police. I grabbed my cell phone from my bag—dead battery. Of course. I hadn't charged it in weeks.
I looked at the hallway. The rotary phone.
I couldn't touch it. I couldn't go near it. But I had to. I had to call 911.
I approached the phone like it was a bomb. I lifted the receiver.
Silence. No dial tone.
I tapped the hook. Nothing. Dead air.
I checked the wall jack. The plastic clip was snapped in, tight.
"Come on,"
I whispered, panic rising.
"Come on."
I followed the cord. It wound from the back of the phone, coiled across the table, and dropped behind it.
I pulled the table away from the wall.
The cord didn't go into the wall jack.
The jack on the wall was empty. Painted over. This was new, when did this happened ?
The cord from the phone went down. It went through a crudely drilled hole in the floorboards, right next to the baseboard.
My mind couldn't process it. I had been getting calls. I had heard the ringing. I had spoken to the boy.
I fell to my knees. I grabbed the cord and pulled. It was taut. Anchored to something below.
I needed to see. I didn't want to, but the compulsion was a physical force, a hook in my navel pulling me forward.
I ran to the garage and grabbed a pry bar. I came back, the sound of my breathing loud and ragged in the silent house. My father was humming in the living room, a low, discordant tune.
I jammed the pry bar into the gap between the floorboards where the wire disappeared. The wood was old, but the nails screamed as they gave way.
Craaaack.
I levered up one board. Then another. The smell rushed up at me.
There was a space between the floor joists. But it wasn't just a crawlspace. It had been modified. Lined.
Egg cartons. layers and layers of them, glued to the joists and the subfloor. And acoustic foam. And old carpet scraps.
It was a soundproof box. A coffin buried in the architecture of the house.
I shone the flashlight from the hallway down into the hole.
The space was small. cramped. Maybe three feet deep and four feet long.
In the center of the nest, lying on a bed of filthy rags, was a skeleton.
It was small. The bones were yellowed, delicate. It was wearing the tattered remains of a blue windbreaker.
And in its skeletal hand, gripped tight, was the other end of the phone cord.
It wasn't plugged into anything. The wires were stripped, wrapped around the finger bones of the skeleton's hand, rusted and fused to the calcium.
The receiver of a toy phone—a Fisher-Price plastic thing, red and blue—lay near the skull. But the cord... the cord connected the real phone in the hallway to the boy’s hand.
I stared at it. The physics of it. The impossibility of it.
And then, the phone in the hallway, the phone that was currently disconnected from the wall, the phone whose wire ended in the grip of a 26 years old corpse...
It rang.
Brrr-ing.
The sound vibrated through the floorboards, through my knees, into my teeth.
Brrr-ing.
I looked down into the hole. The jaw of the skull was open, fixed in an eternal scream.
Brrr-ing.
I didn't answer it. I couldn't.
I backed away, scrambling on my hands and feet, crab-walking away from the hole, away from the hallway.
I scrambled into the living room. My father was standing now. He wasn't looking at the TV. He was looking at the hallway.
He looked at me, and his face was full of a terrible, childlike confusion.
"Do you hear that?"
he whispered.
The ringing didn't stop. It got louder.
"He's loud today,"
my father said, covering his ears.
"He's so loud. I thought I fixed it. I thought I made the room quiet."
The ringing wasn't coming from the phone anymore.
It was coming from under the floor. It was coming from the walls. It was coming from the attic.
"I tried to tell you,"
The kids voice suddenly whispered. but from the static on the TV.
I spun around. The screen was no longer just snow. Shapes were forming in the black and white chaos. A figure. Tall. Wearing long ears.
"I tried to tell you,"
the TV hissed, the volume rising, screaming the words. "IT'S DARK."
My father started to scream. A high, thin wail that matched the pitch of the static.
I ran. I didn't grab my keys. I didn't grab my bag. I smashed through the front door, stumbling out into the humid night air of the suburbs. I ran until my lungs burned, until I was three streets away, standing under the buzzing sodium light of a streetlamp.
I looked back toward the house. It sat there, dark and silent against the night sky.
But even from here, three blocks away, I could feel it. A vibration in the ground. A rhythmic, mechanical pulse.
Brrr-ing.
Brrr-ing.
I’m in a motel now. I walked until I found a gas station and called a cab. I haven't called the police yet. I don't know what to say. "My father is a killer"? "The phone line is connected to a ghost"?
I’m sitting on the edge of the motel bed. There’s a phone on the nightstand. A modern one. A generic beige block with buttons.
I unplugged it as soon as I walked in. I pulled the cord right out of the wall.
But I’m staring at it.
Because five minutes ago, the red message light started blinking.
And I can hear it. Faintly. Coming from the earpiece sitting in its cradle.
Static.
And a whisper.
"I found a new wire."
