There are few things as startling and, thereafter, as unsettling as a ringing telephone in the dead of night.
It repeatedly stabs the air, then the ear, then the psyche, driving deeper and deeper, until finally it reaches and awakens the conscious mind. It pulls the innocent from the blissful peace of sleep into a dark cold world of reality in which someone wants something from them, or needs to deliver life-altering news to them, or is compelled to level a shock from which they might never recover. Even if the call rescues them from the throes of a fitful sleep, or the bizarre terrors of a nightmare, it hardly feels the rescuer. For, until it is picked up, the ringing phone is a harbinger of the unknown.
What is more frightening than the unknown? How many phone calls bring good news in
