[Spoken Word] Good evening I'm afraid you've reached the wrong number Or perhaps The right one I worked nights at St Bartholomew's mortuary in 1923 My wife had died The previous spring There was a telephone in the embalming room Its line had been disconnected twenty years before I arrived And still One night It rang I answered A woman whispered through the static I'm so cold It was my wife's voice For four nights The same call came The same three words On the fifth night She said something different Don't go home tomorrow I obeyed The next evening my house burned down On the sixth night She warned me away from the mortuary's east staircase It collapsed before dawn I began to believe my dead wife was protecting me On the seventh night The voice said Tomorrow You will answer the last call The following night The dead telephone rang once I lifted the receiver And heard my own voice I'm so cold They found me dead at my desk the next morning Now I understand The thing on that line It borrowed my wife's voice It kept me alive Oun until it was ready to take mine That telephone does not connect the living to the dead It keeps the final voices of the dying And sometimes Before their owners have died Sometimes a child gives a name And a date of birth Still fifty years away Then the line goes quiet Until their last call You have been listening to me For some time now But when this call ends Whose voice Do you think it will keep
