legends · 4 min read ·
Fault 40-217
A telephone engineer follows a fault down a cable that does not appear on any plan, to a churchyard microphone.
**Northline Networks — Fault Ticket 40-217**
**Reported:** 2 October · **Customer:** 17 Drover's Lane (business line, fax/data) · **Fault:** Crackle and low-level voices on line, intermittent
**Engineer:** M. Calloway · **Priority:** routine
· · ·
**Engineer's log, 3 October**
Tested the line at the customer premises. No fault at the master socket. Tested back to the cabinet in Drover's Lane. Line clean at the cabinet. Tested the cable from the cabinet to the exchange.
At 2.1 km from the cabinet, the TDR trace shows a branch. A tee in the cable, where no tee is recorded. The branch runs west at right angles to the line of the road. Length of the branch: 840 m. At the end of the branch, an open circuit.
No such branch appears on any of our plans.
· · ·
**Engineer's log, 4 October**
Walked the route of the branch with a locator. The signal leads into the churchyard of St. Cuthbert's, west of the road, and stops at the north wall. I could not follow it further. The signal is strong and clean. I detected a conductor at a depth of about 1.2 m, running between graves.
I rang the exchange to ask if we had ever laid a cable in the churchyard. The answer was no. I asked if the signal could be a stray. They said a stray would not stop at a wall.
· · ·
**Test results — branch cable, 5 October**
I attached a test set to the line at the cabinet and listened. The branch carries a voice. Not crosstalk from another line. It is a continuous conversation, two voices, between a man and a woman, in low tones, as if at a kitchen table late at night. The words are not clear. The conversation is slow and domestic. Every few minutes there is a gap of several seconds, and then one of them says something and the other answers.
I recorded one hour. At the end, I played it back and listened for the first time without the line noise. They were not talking about anything. They were reading a list of names. First name, second name, a year. The man read each one and the woman said "yes."
· · ·
**Engineer's log, 8 October**
The year on each name is in the past. The earliest I could hear was 1812. The latest was 2019. The names read at 2 am last night were all from this year. I counted nine of them. I recognised three. One was the customer at 17 Drover's Lane.
I rang her. She said she was fine, and that it was only a bad line. I asked how she had been sleeping. She said she'd had a week of dreams about a church.
· · ·
**Customer call (17 Drover's Lane, 9 October)**
*"Hello? I've just heard something on the line. They said my name. Do you know, I think it's my own voice, only older? They said 'Margaret Ellis, 2026,' and then the woman said 'yes' in a voice that was not quite mine."*
· · ·
**Field report (M. Calloway, 12 October)**
I took the branch cable's open end as an object of professional interest. I dug it up. It took me and a labourer three hours, by hand, at the north wall of the churchyard. The cable is old, lead-sheathed, with paper insulation. Laid before the telephone existed.
At the end of the cable there is a brass cylinder the size of a tin of tobacco. It contains a coil, a small iron diaphragm, and a mouthpiece. The mouthpiece is pointing up, towards the ground. It is a telephone transmitter of a pattern used in the 1890s.
It is connected to the line. It is live. It has no power source I could find. It has been transmitting through the earth into the cable for as long as there has been a cable. It is listening to what is said in the churchyard.
· · ·
**Fault ticket 40-217 — closed**
Resolution: branch cable removed at tee. Line tested clear. Customer informed.
Engineer's note: I did not tell the customer the full story. The line is clear. The line is silent. But I took my recording of the hour on the fifth to the exchange engineer, who put it on a spectrum analyser. There is a second recording on the same file, beneath the first, very faint, from a time before I put the test set on the line.
It is my own voice. It is saying my own name, and a year. It is a year I have not reached yet, and the woman, in the voice I have been listening to for a week, is answering "yes."