The Phone Call

Often times, I lie in bed on cold winter days until the later morning thinking with steady ease about no particular thing. If it’s not morning, my mind will easily find a way to wander into worry about other things that take up one’s life. But the morning is the time I allow my thoughts to wander as I stare at the brown trim in the walls of our bedroom, a semblance of wood, brown and faded, perpendicular to a shaggy layer of orange carpet. In the left-hand corner, my lamp stoops over my study like a green, alien eye next to a trashcan made of netted metal, full of crinkled up paper balls of yellow and white.

Outside, the streets are glazed with frost and ice, as is our brown, chipped, splintered patio. My wife is usually out of bed by nine and I’m left alone in this room while her footsteps creak and squeak all over the foundation of the house. Noise in the house is unavoidable. She always startles me awake no matter how quiet she claims she’s trying to be. on the opposite end of the spectrum, she never hears any of the noise I make. Not the muttering I do in my sleep, the bad-dream moans, nor the strange phone-calls that I answer in the wee hours of the morning.

The other night, the latter happened. I had my cell-phone turned off so that it would buzz quietly (although there’s no one I’d expect to call me in the middle of the night). This particular night, my sleep was void of dreams so that there was a constant little ring in my ear that seemed to rise and sink in pitch and volume all throughout the night. I was awakened by my phone vibrating. I pondered through a sleep-filtered, dream-logic that it was probably some large insect buzzing underneath the sheets.

I grabbed the flashing device and said, ‘Hello?’

The other line was quiet save steady, heavy, rhythmic breathing. There was something strangely malefic about the breathing, as though it were coming from some lustful, hungry beast. I was compelled to ask who it was before I looked down at the number on the screen. It was no number I recognized.

The caller hung up.

I tried not to think about it too much as I put my head back down and went to sleep. I toyed briefly with the significance (or obscurity) of heavy breathing in the phone and what it meant or didn’t mean. Had it been a tactic of intimidation? I heard of instances of people picking up the phone in the middle of the night only to hear heavy breathing, who were shortly murdered afterward.

Don’t think about it. Go to bed.

Just as I drifted off to sleep, the phone buzzed again. This time, I woke up and seized the phone violently, starring at the same alien number from before. I turned it on.

‘Who’s this?’ I asked politely. I didn’t have it in me to be demanding, not even at two in the morning.

There was a sudden stammer…the beginning of a hesitant word becoming the tail end of a sigh. A little whine of fear. It was a woman.

‘Hello? Are you all right?’ I asked, as though it was perhaps someone I knew. Perhaps the last call had not been heavy breathing, but the woman sobbing.
‘I…’ the voice began. ‘I…I don’t know where I am…’ The voice was afraid, gentle but subtly panicked.

‘Where are you at?’ I asked without thinking, laughing silently to myself afterward.
‘I…I don’t know where I am!’ the woman said quietly yet more desperate than before.
‘Um…do I know—’

My question was interrupted by another voice that suddenly spoke on the phone, one that sent a chill up my spine for no other reason than it happened so abruptly. ‘Why are you lost, honey?’ It was another woman’s voice. There was a long silence afterward. I hesitated to say anything. I found my lips trembling with words that wanted to form, but they were alive to themselves. I didn’t know what they wished to say. ‘Where are you at, honey?’ the other voice asked.

It took me a moment to realize with some terror that both voices were spoken by the same woman. There was a drastic change in persona with each voice, but they were both definitely from the same woman.

‘I don’t know!’ the other voice said again.

‘How are we supposed to find you if we don’t know where you are?’ the other voice said. It was higher and aggressive. I thought for a moment that maybe I’d been mistaken but it was indeed the same woman.

‘I need help. I’m lost…will you pray for me?’ the woman asked.
A chill went up my spine.

‘I can’t pray for you if I don’t know where you are,’ the woman’s other stern, motherly voice said.

I finally built up the courage to demand more harshly, ‘Who is this?’ I suddenly thought that it could be a prank (one doesn’t come to these conclusions very quickly this early in the morning).

My sentence was disregarded and stopped short by another voice that rose like a wind from the bottom of a hill in a distant meadow, or a great tentacle from a calm body of water. It was clownishly humorous, yet somehow menacing and cruel…wicked and molesting. It was obviously the same woman, but she said teasingly and softly, ‘We’ll find you…’ I waited for the longest moment.

By this time, I’d been breathing heavily like the girl had been. Suddenly, a great peel of laughter, more awful than the cackle of a hyena, more terrible than an oceanic chirp removed from the sunlight and placed in the darkness…something more akin to ghostliness and ghastliness, issued from the phone. I sunk into the covers before the call ended. I looked at the screen that read 2:45 indicating the call time-length.

I sat thinking of nothing for a moment. I looked over at my wife who was fast asleep, facing me, her hair covering most of her face, her lips parted in front of a little wet spot on the sheet.

All sorts of thoughts ran through my mind…the nature of the shadows dancing within the room as though the darkness could suddenly come alive. I imagined silly things that scared me no les than terrible things: images of snowballs randomly hitting the sliding glass door in our room. Images of faces appearing across the windows and disappearing. Images of ghastly women standing in the hall, smiling when the light flips on.

It didn’t become bright until about six hours later. I’d slept a little bit, dreaming of similar phone calls, only stirring to question which were real and which weren’t. I sat there in bed, awake that morning, hearing the sounds of my wife's footsteps creaking about all over the house. I had a strange urge to stay near her, to wrap her up in my arms and smother her with kisses…so as to avoid harm by unseen forces, or maybe to avoid harm myself.
I meant to tell my wife but forgot by the time I came back from work. I only remembered later that night and told her just as we were both lying under the sheets again.

‘Maybe you have an admirer,’ she said with a smile, the way one does when they miss the entire point of your anecdote, dream, or terrifying story.

A few hours later, we’d both drifted off into sleep again. I’d been dreaming of unrelated things when the phone buzzed again. Believe it or not, by this hour, I’d forgotten about the events of the previous night and simply answered it with a quick, ‘Hello?’

‘But I don’t know where you are!’ the same stern, motherly voice from the night before said. I hung up instantly.

The voice had sent me out of bed. I was standing up next to the nightstand. I still held the phone to my head but the call had ended.

On an impulse void of thought or reason, I had a sudden urge to go into the kitchen and get some milk. Not just milk; warm milk. I put it in the microwave and began to heat it up. I almost laughed at the thought of the phone-call and what it could have possibly meant. It most likely meant nothing. More than likely, it was some pour girl with MPD who’d gotten a hold of a telephone and couldn’t fall asleep.

When my warm milk was finished, I walked into the living-room without turning the lights on. Most of the time, I feel more comfortable and safe in the dark. The contradictory reason will make you laugh: the light always creates shadows. In my house, there are big, open windows in the living room (which is on the second floor) that peers out onto the silver, icy street at night. I can better see outside when the lights are off. When the lights are on, the house is nothing but a shell to a black, invisible world outside (I’m still afraid of the dark…if that makes any sense, with me liking the lights off). Those creatures out there in the dark can see straight in to where I am when the light’s on without me seeing them…

There I stood in the living room, sipping my warm milk and starring out onto the path in the night, its ice made gray from the white streetlight and the moon’s blue torrents. Somewhere just beyond the streetlight, where a wall of darkness swallowed the world beyond this backdrop-like neighborhood of magic winter, there was an interruption in the brightness that came with the layer of snow. There was a long shadow.

I took a look closer, leaning over the couch. There was someone standing out there. I had to squint. It was a frail figure, gray from where I stood. It was a woman. She had blonde, uncombed, stringy hair that came down and covered most of her face. She stood rigid with her neck hunched over just a bit. She was facing the direction of my house. I couldn’t see her face, but from where I stood in the darkness of that cold living room—thinking until that point that I’d been invisible—it was as though she’d been standing there the whole time, waiting for me to arrive to find her from where I stood at the window. I watched her. She stood watching me…motionless…