Naturally, the calls continue and the phone company eventually traces them to a fallen wire
lying on the ground in the cemetery. The protagonist has herself then driven to the cemetery she is confined to a wheel-chair - to the grave of the man who was once his fiance and whom
she involuntarily killed a week before the wedding as a result of her pushy disposition - by
insisting on driving the car and causing a terrible accident which also made her crippled. She
then discovers the phone line dangling over the headstone and falling into the ground. This
coincidence eliminates any interpretation of this narration as uncanny - if so far the
protagonist, tortured by remorse, could indeed be the victim of sonic hallucinations, the
presence of the wire literally connecting to the grave establishes an irremediable link between
the world of the dead and our own. The story concludes shortly after she asks the mysterious
voice to leave her alone, regretting her order the second after she gives it when she discovers
that the night caller is indeed the man she loved, who, yet once again, will yield to her wishes
and leave her alone - this time forever.
The alternation between the real and the unreal is semiotically contained within the
paradigm of the phone, which suggests not only both modernity and progress against
superstition, but also, and perhaps more importantly, communication, that is the determining
structural factor of human epistemology. Our episteme can only be of a collective nature,
hence be bom and exist through communication - the betrayal of an object solely devoted to
communicate such as a phone points to the breakdown of communication at large, which
implies that of our epistemology as well.
Both “Little Girl Lost” and “Night Call” administer hyper-realistic and irrational paradigms
to suggest the possibility of the impossible and the failure of our epistemological certainties,
and exemplify the modern fantastic by re-visiting traditional themes - parallel dimensions and
ghosts - in a contemporary setting, which accommodates monosemic, apparently anti-literary
paradigms, such as the pajamas of the little girl’s parents or the shawl of the broken hearted
old lady.
The Madness Alibi
We encounter a similar shift from the uncanny possible towards the fantastic impossible
as the one we have observed in “Night Call” - that particular moment when the eventuality of a
rational explanation disappears - in both “Young Man’s Fancy” and “Terror at 20,000 Feet,”
which, just like “Night Call,” suggest first the possibility of mental illness as a plausible
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