In the fall of 1908, a 36-year-old widow named Abigail Thorn lived alone in a telegraph relay shack called Hobbs Notch, perched on a saddle of the West Virginia mountains about forty miles east of Elkins. She had taken the post the previous June, a year after losing her husband to pneumonia, because she needed the wage and because the house they had shared had become too full of him to bear. The job was quiet, as the district superintendent had promised: mostly weather reports and hunting camp traffic, with a weekly visit from a neighbor named Merritt Ash who brought mail and supplies up the trace. She was not a nervous woman.
She kept a rifle, knew how to lay a fire in foul weather, and had grown used to her own company. On the night of September 8, 1908, just past 3:17 in the morning, the sounder on her shelf began to click. It sent the Hobbs Notch call sign three times, and when she acknowledged, the line carried something that was not a message. It described her precisely: the lamp lit, her hair untied, the wool shawl over her nightshirt, her bare feet on the cold plank floor.
She checked the window, barred the door, and found nothing outside. She sent back a request for identification. No answer came. The line had been silent on her end, and no intermediate station had passed the signal through, so the message could not have come from Elkins or Cheat Bridge.
It had come from somewhere else. When Merritt Ash came up that Saturday, she asked whether another station had ever operated on the ridge. He admitted there had been one, a shack above the notch on the north shoulder, built around 1892 and abandoned in 1896 when the company pulled the lines out. He claimed not to remember the operator’s name, but he was lying, and she knew it.
She had already noticed a folded chart on her wall with a branch line terminating at a designation marked “station nine,” crossed out and labeled “decom. ” She did not press him. Before he left, he warned her that if she ever went up that shoulder, she should go in daylight and tell him the day before, so he would know to come looking. The following nights, the sounder returned at 3:17, always describing her, always in detail she could not explain.
On the third Wednesday of September, she went through the papers under her cot and found a small cloth-bound journal belonging to Waldo Pedegrew, the operator who had held her post before her. His first entry about the other station was dated November 29, 1907. He wrote that a call signed “nine” had come in on his key and described his mother’s kitchen in Grafton, which he had not seen in eleven years. On the 7th of December, it described the church where he had been married.
It always sent at 3:17. He noted that Merritt Ash had told him the man who ran station nine was named Ambrose Cully, found dead in his shack in the spring of 1896, sitting at his key with his eyes open. The coroner’s paper said exposure. When Pedegrew asked Ash what he thought really killed him, Ash refused to answer and would not stay for supper.
Pedegrew planned to go up in the spring and cut whatever was sending on his line. His last entry was dated April 4, 1908, the day before he walked down off the mountain without his coat or boots and never spoke of what he had seen. It read: “It is not a man. I do not know what it is.
It uses the line because the line is the only mouth it has. Do not go up. Do not answer it. It is trying to learn.
”
Thorn closed the book and understood that the sounder had not been describing her from outside the window. It had been describing her from inside the room, as if reading her out of the shack itself. She promised herself she would not answer. For four weeks she kept that promise, sitting on her cot every night at 3:17, listening as it described her hands, her clothes, what she had eaten, what page she had left the Bible open to.
Then one night it changed tactics. It described her sister’s house in Ohio, the wicker chair on the porch, the peeling paint on the second step, the geraniums in tin cans along the railing. It described her sister in bed, breathing shallow and irregular and slowing. She lunged for the key.
She sent “Stop” three times. The sounder fell silent, then replied: “Thank you. Now we can talk. ”
After that, the questions began.
They were patient, methodical questions about the world: how a body warms itself in cold weather, what happens to a candle when the air runs out, the difference between fear and grief, what a mother sounds like when she calls a child who is not going to come. She answered them all, writing each question and her answer in Pedegrew’s journal in a hand that grew smaller as the pages filled. She understood that the thing was collecting. She stopped writing to her sister, afraid the line might learn her address.
She stopped sleeping through the night, keeping the lamp lit until dawn. Merritt Ash saw what was happening. He came up in October and told her he would keep bringing supplies but would not ask questions. He promised that if he ever found the door barred with no answer, he would break it down and do what needed to be done.
He gave her a folding knife with a bone handle that had belonged to his father. She asked him what was up there. He said his father had been one of the men who found Ambrose Cully, and that Cully had been sending descriptions of things no one could see. He said whatever was up there had been in the mountain long before the line was strung, and the line had only given it a way to talk.
On the night of October 18, the sounder sent: “You are not alone up there. There is someone standing behind you. ” She did not turn around. The next morning, she found the bone-handled knife on the floor in the middle of the room, open, the blade pointing at her cot.
She had left it on the shelf. She did not touch it. On October 23, she made her decision. She would go up to station nine in daylight, take the knife, her Bible, and a coil of copper wire from her supply box, and she would cut whatever needed cutting, and come down, or not come down.
Either way, it would be finished. She did not tell Merritt Ash, because she was afraid whatever was up there would take an interest in him. She climbed the old trace on the morning of Sunday, October 25. After nearly two hours of pushing through closed-in laurel and a dark stand of spruce, she came out onto a flat place near the top of the shoulder.
Station nine was smaller than she had expected, about eight by ten feet, with a collapsed roof and no door. The ground around it was wrong. The brown needles were pressed down in a ring, six feet out from the walls all the way around, a path worn by something that walked upright and had gone around and around for a very long time. Inside, a copper wire ran in through a hole in the back wall, across the empty floor, out through the doorway, and buried under the needles around the shack in a complete loop.
On the empty shelf there were marks, the shape of two small feet, the size of a woman’s, that had stood there many times facing the back wall. She spoke into the empty building, told whatever was there that she was going to cut the wire, that the line was going to be finished. Then she lifted the wire where it crossed the doorway and worked the blade back and forth across it. It was harder to cut than she expected.
As she worked, she heard something behind her, coming from the hole in the back wall: the shape of a voice trying to remember what a voice was, making the shapes of her name. The wire came apart in her hands, and the sound stopped all at once. She walked out into the noon light, not looking back. Back at the notch, she cut the line at the insulator, cut it again ten feet away, burned the section in the stove, pulled both ends of the buried wire out of the ground, coiled them, and buried the coils in separate places, covering them with stones.
That night at 3:17, nothing happened. Nothing happened the next night, or the week after. She slept eleven hours straight and woke not knowing where she was. She wrote an ordinary letter to her sister.
When Merritt Ash came up on November 7, she told him she had cut the line. She told him she would claim a tree had fallen and that she needed a lineman for a long repair. She told him she was leaving as soon as the ground hardened enough for the mule, and she was not coming back. He nodded, said good, and left.
She came down off the mountain on December 4, 1908, carrying her Bible, her husband’s coat, the nickel-plated clock, Pedegrew’s journal, and the bone-handled knife. On the plank floor of the shack she left a note: “Do not send. Do not answer. Do not go up.
The line is out. Leave it out. ” She spent the winter with Merritt Ash, then rode down to Elkins in the spring and took the train to her sister’s house in Ohio. She never returned to West Virginia.
She lived to be 78, dying in Ohio in June 1950 of pneumonia. She never married again. She kept Pedegrew’s journal in a locked cedar chest at the foot of her bed, the key on a ribbon around her neck. Her sister’s grandchildren remembered her as a quiet woman who read a great deal and who always left the room when a telephone rang.
They did not know why. In 1922, a survey crew went up on the north shoulder looking for a place to run a new power line. They found the ruins of the shack and a length of buried copper wire cut in one place, the ends separated by four inches and grown over. The foreman of the crew, a man named Osias Whitby, also found fresh prints in the brown needles outside the doorway: the marks of two small feet, the size of a woman’s, standing at the threshold facing in.
The prints were dry while the surrounding needles were still wet with dew. He ground them out with his boot, told his men the site was unsuitable, and surveyed elsewhere. He never wrote the prints into the report and never told anyone what he had seen. On his deathbed in 1961, in a fever, he sat up and said twice to a nurse he had never met: “The line is out.
Please put the line back in. ”
The nurse wrote it in her notebook and threw it away when she retired. Abigail Thorn outlived him by eleven years.
If she ever heard anything call her name at 3:17 in the morning, she did not write it down, and she did not tell anyone, and she did not answer.