"Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen" (1953)

In a way this story by Robert Aickman is dated now because it relies so much on telephone technology without features we take for granted today, such as caller ID, which alone may have destroyed hundreds of horror story premises not to mention criminal stalking activities. On the other hand Aickman's story is a nice reminder of how mysterious this connection to the outside world could feel, exploited so well in the 1948 picture Sorry, Wrong Number. And exploited so well here too. It's probably a ghost story but also reminds me in key ways of Hanns Heinz Evers's story "The Spider." Edmund St. Jude is housesitting for his girlfriend while she recuperates from TB. Already this is "strange," the term Aickman preferred for his stories. What is he doing with his place in the meanwhile? Her apartment has a telephone, which is common by 1953, but not so common that it wouldn't be unusual not to have one. Edmund here would prefer not to have one, but it's a lot of trouble to remove so he lives with it. Is it haunted or is it glitchy? First it rings a lot and won't stop until he answers it. Then the caller waits for him to say "Hello?" three times and hangs up. There's not much to be done about it. He has more strange adventures with the phone when he tries to call out. Eventually he wanders into strange conversations at the other end of the line with a woman he doesn't know. He is strangely drawn to her and soon they are declaring their love for one another. But she won't give him a number to call. He can only wait for her to call. She says he can't see her but she won't say why. It briefly enters into the early internet / late landline period when people spent hours on the phone with strangers in phone-based relationships. If this story is dated in one way, it's prescient in another. Meanwhile Edmund is so preoccupied he's letting his life go to hell. He makes a living as a translator but loses interest in his work and starts to get fired from jobs. Then he starts to get wrong-number calls for an extension 281 at a "Chromium Supergloss Corporation." He's also ignoring letters from his girlfriend now, letting them pile up. "Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen" (which words never occur in the story by the way) is a meditation on all the spaces a ghost might occupy in telephone technology. The woman on the phone is more or less a ghost in this story, but not exactly, much as the woman across the way in "The Spider" is a vampire, but not exactly. "Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen" is sadder but it has a cold core—maybe that's the point of the title. Looking it up, it appears to have something to do with the opera La boheme. Strange stuff indeed from early in the career of one of the best story writers of his time.

Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea
Story not available online.