Payphone

Patrick Levine had a good life: a wife, a daughter in the back seat, and another child on the way. On the day after Valentine's Day, he leaves his in-laws' house in a new Durango and takes the country roads home through Delaware snow and black ice.

The road leads to a T-intersection by the burned-out remains of a dead town. Patrick has seen the place before. What he remembers most is the payphone standing alone at the corner, its sign marked only PAYPHONE, the kind of thing people notice and then wish they had not.

When an animal bolts into the road, the Durango slides into a ditch and breaks an axle. There is no cell service. Heather and Jessie wait in the car with the heat running while Patrick walks through the snow to the only phone for miles, lifts the receiver, and hears a dial tone.

A demonic horror short story by Kristopher Mallory, first published on Stealth Fiction in 2008.