The phone ringing in

The phone ringing in the night is a demon screaming.

As a kid, my parents drilled into me that people don't call in the middle of the night unless its bad news. I don't think that we ever had one of those calls when I was a kid--news of a death in the family, or a similar tragedy--but the tenet was still in effect.

So now when the phone rings at an odd hour I expect the worst. So far, it's always been a night-owl friend calling to say hello or someone miscalculating the time difference. "Oh, it's 3 am there? I thought it was 9...sorry!"

But this morning at 5:40 the phone rang and I didn't get to it in time. Our current configuration of phones is such that our answering machine isn't working anymore. So I don't know who it was or what it was about.

My morbid imagination has played through all of the scenarios. But the demon's still screaming in my head, taunting me.