A Box That Should Not Ring
Cwm Bach was a small village on the north coast of Wales. It had eighty-four houses, one shop, one chapel, no school anymore, and — at the very edge of the village, by a small bus shelter — one disused red phone box.
The phone box had been disconnected, the post office said, in 2008. The line had been cut. The phone inside had been left because nobody had thought to remove it. The whole box was technically owned, after a 2014 transfer of village heritage assets, by the village council. The council had repainted it in 2019. They had put a small plaque on it that read *Phone Box, in memory*. They had not, ever, reconnected it.
The phone box, by every official account, could not work.
The phone box, however, occasionally rang.
This was — Esme had been told by her grandmother on her first day in Cwm Bach — *one of those things*. Most villagers had heard the phone ring at some point. Most villagers had ignored it. Some — usually older villagers, usually a little drunk after a Saturday at the pub — had answered it. The reports of what they had heard varied. Some said static. Some said a voice that had said nothing and then hung up. One said a woman who had been calling for somebody called Tomos. One said a small child who had laughed and then gone quiet.
Esme's grandmother said: "Most of the village thinks it's a ghost. Most of the village is, at the same time, also half-joking.