The speaker wakes in the dark to an impatient voice calling “Hallo, hallo!” and answers sleepily, as though picking up a telephone. For a moment, he is sure the voice is coming through the wire; his nerves are alert, listening. But when he reaches out, his hand finds nothing. Lighting a candle reveals a bare, unfamiliar room, and he realizes the caller is someone long-forgotten, perhaps dead. The voice does not vanish, though. It lingers as a million thin, trembling echoes filling the silence: “Hallo—hallo—Hallo!”
This brief, ghostly moment sits between sleep and waking, memory and imagination. The speaker feels startled and a little unsettled, caught by the familiar sound of a voice that has no source. The mood is eerie, lonely, and strangely intimate, as if a lost voice has surfaced for just an instant and then dissolved into echoes.