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By Root 320 0

a good seat on the gravy train when they saw one. Keeping the boss man happy kept their hands in the cookie jar, so several of them spent their entire days trying to think of a way to curry favor with the king. Years ago, one suck-up thought it might be clever to honor Raymond and his Don’t Hang Up legacy with an old-fashioned telephone. He presented Raymond with a sleek, gleaming beauty with a rotary dial; it was as big as a boulder. Raymond loved it and rewarded the fellow with a promotion and a fat raise, so that started a tradition of who could find the boss other swell telephones. These eggs scoured flea markets and antiques shops across the globe coming up with every kind of ringer you could imagine—foreign jobs, spy phones, phone relics, the phones that belonged to gangsters and movie stars and stupid phones shaped like windmills and wiener dogs. Raymond loved them all and created a special room in his mansion for his collection. It was in that room that I would pay my own call to Raymond Hall.

None of the telephones were wired, but that’s not a problem for an elf with a little magic up his sleeve. I slipped into Raymond’s house about midnight and ambled into the phone room. Not a creature was stirring. The Halls were nestled all snug in their beds while visions that I didn’t give a flip about danced in their heads.

Each phone stood like a statue in its own pool of light, and there must have been about fifty or sixty phones on shelves lining the walls. That made the middle of the room as dark as the inside of a cow, so that’s where I took a chair and decided which telephone was going to ring first.

Raymond didn’t exactly wake with a clatter. There was a cuckoo-clock phone on one of the higher shelves, so I threw a little elf spell its way. The bell was just barely a chirp, but then a little bird popped out. “Cuckoo-Cuckoo,” it sang after each ring in a pitch not quite meant for any ear. In most of the homes in your world, I’m pretty sure this phone would have been the last noise someone heard before they started a killing spree with a dull ax. Next, I sent some hocus-pocus to a telephone that was as round as a stump with a ring like Judgment Day. It would rattle the teeth out of your head. Because something still seemed to be missing, and because I am a bitter stalk of rhubarb, I also got one more telephone going. This one replaced the ring with yodeling.

The room sounded like Lucifer’s switchboard.

Raymond Hall entered the room half-asleep. The half that was awake had a “what the?” look that was taxing Raymond’s medulla oblongata beyond its normal calculations. He turned his head between the different sounds as if they were trying to tell him something, but he didn’t speak their lingo.

Ring-Cuckoo, Ring-Cuckoo!

RINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!

Odeleh-Hee-Whooo!

Standing there in his King Kong boxer shorts, cocking his head back and forth, Raymond looked like he had just escaped his rubber room. Finally, Raymond got his wits and decided he was mad at the stump telephone. Inspired by his underwear, Raymond took his mighty paw and swiped the contraption into the floor. The crash sounded like an accident at a munitions factory. Then, with the typical Raymond Hall temper, he grabbed the poker from the fireplace and started to beat the stump telephone like it had just soiled the rug.

I let Raymond think he killed the thing and stopped the ringer.

Ring-Cuckoo, Ring-Cuckoo!

Raymond threw the poker like a spear in the Bavarian phone’s general direction, and, again, I shushed the bell.

Odeleh-Hee-Whooo!

“I hate yodeling!” Raymond screamed and threw the nearest knickknack at the telephone. There was a crash and then quiet except for Raymond’s panting. Big boy needed to hit the gym.

“Knock knock,” I said. I was still invisible.

Raymond jumped a mile. All the color drained from his face and his eyes were as big as canned hams. He searched the dark room in a panic, but he was too scared to move, a statue in King Kong bloomers.

“Knock knock,” I said with a little bit of a growl.

“Who’s there?” Raymond said. He wasn’t playing