The Last Voice on the Line

Some jobs stay with you for the rest of your life.

Part One: Routine

The phones didn’t ring much after 2:00 a.m. By then, even the strangest late night callers had either sobered up or fallen asleep. Beth liked that. The silence gave her time to think, to breathe.

Her desk sat near the far end of the floor, tucked into a corner where the overhead lights buzzed softly and the cleaning crew never bothered. She worked the night shift at Central Line Communications, handling customer escalations that the day staff didn’t want. Voicemail resets, payment arrangements, sometimes a real emergency; but mostly just people lonely enough to need a voice at the other end of the line.

Beth didn’t mind it. She preferred working when the world was asleep.

At 2:47 a.m., a call came through.

She didn’t recognize the number. That wasn’t unusual, though most inbound calls were scrambled through company switches. She clicked her headset on.

“This is Beth, Central Line Support. How can I help you?”

Silence.

Not dead air, there was something. A faint static, a breath maybe. The sort of thing that made her lean in just a little closer, listening too hard.

“Hello?” she asked again, checking the call log. No data showed up, no call origin, no user tag, nothing. That was odd.

Then came a voice.

Soft. Fragile, like it had traveled a long way to reach her.

“Do you remember me?”

Beth blinked. “I’m sorry. Who is this?”

The line crackled. The voice didn’t answer. And then the call dropped.

She stared at the screen. No number. No trace. Just a blank entry labeled “Unknown Source.”

For a second, Beth thought it might’ve been a prank. Maybe some tech playing games through the system. Still, there was something about the voice, a sadness in it, that stuck with her.

She shook it off and went back to scrolling through system tickets. The screen glowed blue in the dark. The hum of the machines filled the air.

By 3:30, she had nearly forgotten about it.

Until it rang again.

Part Two: Trace

The second call came at 3:31 a.m.

Same label. Unknown Source.

Beth hesitated for half a second, then tapped her headset. “Central Line Support, this is Beth.”

Silence again.

Only this time, she didn’t speak first. She waited.

Then, the voice returned. Soft. Almost like a whisper.

“You forgot me.”

Beth’s throat went dry.

“Who is this?”

“I thought you’d remember,” the voice said. Still calm, almost disappointed. “But maybe you never really listened.”

Beth’s finger hovered over the hang-up button. Something about the tone, it wasn’t threatening. It was hurt.

“Listen,” she said, keeping her voice steady, “I don’t know who this is, but I can’t help you if you won’t tell me.”

Click.

Gone again.

Beth stared at the screen, heart tapping out a nervous rhythm. She checked the system. Still nothing. She ran a manual trace command. The screen flashed Error: No Origin Detected.

She leaned back, slowly removing her headset. Was it some kind of patch error? Maybe a ghost log from an old call misrouted through the server? She scribbled the time on a sticky note. If it happened again, she’d log it officially. But something about it, it didn't feel like a system error.

It felt personal.

And it was starting to bother her more than she wanted to admit.

Part Three: Rewind

By the end of her shift at 6 a.m., she’d run through every explanation she could come up with.

It might’ve been a recording. Some kind of tech test. Maybe a former customer spoofing the line with a voice clip. Maybe someone from inside the company playing games. But if that was the case, why was it her they kept calling?

Beth packed her things slowly, pausing at the vending machine before leaving. Her apartment was ten minutes away, but mornings always hit her differently. Like stepping into someone else’s life. She passed by people headed into work, watching the way they walked; determined, sharp, full of caffeine. She envied them, in a strange way. Her life moved in reverse.

By 6:30, she was in bed, blinds shut tight. But she didn’t sleep.

The voice stuck in her head.

"You forgot me."

Part Four: History

Two nights passed. No call.

On the third, it came again.

3:47 a.m.

She didn’t even wait to say her greeting.

“It’s you again,” Beth said.

Silence.

“Why do you keep calling me?”

She listened, hoping for a clue. Anything familiar in the voice. An accent. A cadence. A memory. But when it spoke again, it cut through her like glass.

“You didn’t call me back.”

Beth froze.

It wasn’t the words that scared her. It was the echo of something real.

Years ago, back when her sister Olivia had been using again, Beth had ignored a voicemail. A late one. Olivia had left a quiet message. Not angry. Just sad.

“You didn’t call me back,” she’d said, before disappearing for nearly a year. Eventually, Olivia resurfaced. Clean and silent about the lost time, but the memory haunted Beth in ways she’d buried.

Beth sat up straighter.

“Olivia?” she whispered.

No answer.

But the line didn’t drop this time.

Beth waited. Her chest tightened. “If this is you, you need to tell me.”

“I’m not her,” the voice said.

Then a pause.

“But I remember you.”

Click.

This time, Beth didn’t just sit there.

She stood, pacing the tiny floor space beside her desk. Her hands shook. She couldn’t keep pretending it wasn’t affecting her. This was beyond strange. And yet no one else on staff had mentioned anything. No ghost tickets. No tech alerts. Just her.

She opened a secure log and typed a private note:

Incident 3 – repeated call from Unknown Source, tone familiar, emotionally triggering. Possible hallucination?

She hovered over the last part. Hallucination. That word stung.

She hadn’t been sleeping much. She’d been skipping meals, too, running mostly on coffee and muscle memory. Maybe her brain was finally cracking under the weight of the silence.

Or maybe someone knew more about her than they should.

Part Five: Trace Points

Beth barely noticed the other night staff when she walked in the next evening. She usually smiled or waved at Karla, the supervisor, or made small talk with the IT guy, Marcus, if he passed through. But tonight, her thoughts were too loud.

She logged into her terminal, skipping the usual system check, and pulled up the admin console instead.

Inbound call history.
Filter: Unknown Source.
Date range: last 30 days.

No results.

She stared at the screen. That couldn’t be right.

She tried again. Broadened the range. Still nothing. It was like the calls never happened—like they were erased the second they ended.

Beth bit the inside of her cheek, her fingers hovering over the keyboard. Then she opened a different tab and ran a trace on her own extension. She knew enough backend to look deeper than the standard dashboard.

There. At the very bottom of a junk log, buried under a dozen system reboots and filter tests—something labeled Unrouted Ping at 3:31 a.m., three nights ago. No metadata. No number. Just a digital ghost.

It made her stomach flip.

Beth copied the log line and pasted it into her own notes folder, then closed everything. She wasn’t supposed to poke around at that level—if she got caught, Karla would be on her in minutes. But she didn’t care. Something was happening, and she was the only one seeing it.

Part Six: The File

On her break, Beth took the elevator down to the server floor. It was technically off limits to non IT staff, but the badge reader hadn’t worked right in months, and nobody patrolled after midnight.

The room buzzed with the low drone of fans and machines breathing digital heat into the air. Beth made her way to the small monitoring terminal tucked behind Rack C.

She slid into the chair and pulled up the console.

Every call, every keystroke, every sound made on company lines; it all passed through this room. If the voice had called again, it would’ve left some trace here. Something raw. Something not yet filtered out.

She searched by time. Searched by audio fragments. Then, finally, she found it. A WAV file stored in a temporary cache, not yet overwritten.

The file name was nonsense: temp_993b7a_.wav
Timestamp: 03:47:09 a.m.
User ID: blank.
Extension: Beth’s.

She hit play.

Silence. Then static. Then that same breathy voice.

“You didn’t call me back.”

Beth paused the playback and leaned in. Her heart thudded in her chest.

It wasn’t Olivia. She knew that now. The pitch was too low, the cadence off. But it knew something, someone, from her life. Or it was built to sound like it did.

Was someone messing with her? Had they clipped old voicemails? Stitched them into something meant to trigger her?

She closed the window and sat there, staring at the screen, breathing through her nose.

Why her?

Part Seven: Karla Knows

Back upstairs, the office was still quiet.

Karla had returned from her break and was sipping lukewarm coffee at her station. Beth hesitated, then walked over.

“Hey,” Beth said, voice low. “Can I ask you something?”

Karla looked up. “Shoot.”

“Have you ever gotten a weird call here? Like one with no data? No ID? Just shows up out of nowhere?”

Karla frowned. “What do you mean? Like a prank?”

Beth shook her head. “More like the system doesn’t record it. The call comes in, but there’s no trace. No number, no location.”

Karla stared at her a moment longer than she liked.

Then, in a tone too casual, Karla said, “You been getting enough sleep?”

Beth didn’t answer.

Karla sighed and rubbed her temple. “Look, Beth. Working nights messes with your brain. You sit in silence for hours, your mind starts creating noise to fill it. You’re not the first one this has happened to.”

Beth blinked. “What do you mean, this?”

Karla leaned in slightly. “Sometimes, people hear voices. They think the system’s haunted or whatever. A call comes in, and there’s nobody there, but they swear someone spoke. Management usually brushes it off as burnout. They don’t track those reports. Too much hassle.”

Beth’s skin prickled.

“Has it ever happened to you?”

Karla looked at her for a long time. Then she just said, “Go back to your desk.”

Beth walked away, shaken.

Whatever this was it wasn’t new.

Part Eight: The Others

Beth didn’t return to her desk right away. Instead, she went back to the breakroom and sat at the small table in the corner, the one under the humming soda machine that never quite cooled anything. She tapped her fingers on the table in time with her racing thoughts.

Karla knew something. Not just vague stories. She recognized what Beth was going through. That pause, that measured answer, it wasn’t denial. It was deflection.

Beth opened her phone and searched the old employee logs. She remembered a woman who used to work nights a few years back - Angela something. Angela had left suddenly, no notice, no exit interview. It wasn’t unusual. People came and went. But Beth remembered her because she’d once found Angela crying in the stairwell. When Beth asked what was wrong, Angela just said, “I thought I heard my brother. He’s been gone twelve years.” Then she left the company the next week.

Beth found her on Facebook. It was a long shot, but she messaged her anyway.

Hi Angela. You don’t know me well, but we worked the same shift at MetroTel a few years ago. I think I’m hearing the same calls you did.

She stared at the message, thumb hovering. Then she hit send.

It felt ridiculous. Like chasing a ghost with a walkie talkie.

Part Nine: The Needle in the Thread

Back at her desk, Beth found her inbox had a new message. From IT. Auto-generated.

RE: Internal Security Query

We noticed unusual trace activity linked to your user account at 03:59:08. Please refrain from attempting unauthorized access to backend systems. This is a formal warning. Future incidents may result in disciplinary action.

They knew. Someone had flagged her trace attempt. And yet no one had come to stop her. No one had spoken to her face to face.

That scared her more than a reprimand.

The systems wanted to keep her out.

That night, the call didn’t come at 3:00. Or 3:30. Beth sat quietly, headset on, phone lines open, heart clenched.

At 4:12 a.m., the light blinked.

Unknown Line. Extension: 0.

She answered slowly, almost reluctantly.

“MetroTel Services. You’ve reached the night desk.”

Silence.

Then a sound like something moving underwater.

Then the voice. Hers. But older. Slower. Broken.

“You’re asking the wrong questions, Beth.”

She gripped the phone so hard her knuckles turned white. “What do you mean?”

“You think I’m someone else. I’m not. I’m you.”

Static buzzed in her ear. A high pitch followed, like feedback from a microphone placed too close to a speaker.

Beth hung up.

She sat there shaking, staring at her hands like she expected them to vanish. The room didn’t feel real. It felt like she was watching it from behind a pane of glass.

Part Ten: Angela Replies

Just before her shift ended, her phone buzzed. A message.

Angela:
I didn’t think anyone else would ever ask about that.
When it started for me, I thought it was a prank. Then I thought I was losing it.
But the voice knew things. Things no one else could know. It got worse when I ignored it.
I moved. Changed numbers. It still found me, even without the phone. It used other things after that: TVs, radios, my dreams.
You need to stop chasing it. Don’t ask it questions. Don’t invite it in.
If it knows your name, it already has a way in.

Beth didn’t even realize she’d stopped breathing until she nearly coughed.

She looked around the call floor. Empty cubicles. A vending machine humming. A soft mechanical rhythm to the servers.

And then she noticed the call monitor.

Line 12 – Live.

But no one was logged into it. Line 12 hadn’t been used in months. The seat was empty. The headset unplugged. Yet the line was active.

And in the dead center of the monitor, the system was transcribing incoming audio in real time.

“Don’t listen to her. She never finished the call.”

Beth walked over to the station slowly. The monitor glitched once, flickered, then the transcription vanished.

Part Eleven: Ghosts in the Wires
Beth didn’t sleep the next day. She lay on the couch in her apartment, shoes still on, staring at the ceiling fan as it spun slowly overhead. It didn’t matter if she turned on the TV, ran the dishwasher, or opened all the windows to let the street noise in. The silence still crawled into the room.

Angela’s message wouldn’t leave her head.

“Don’t invite it in. If it knows your name, it already has a way in.”

Beth thought about every time she’d picked up that line. Every time she’d said, “This is Beth from MetroTel.”
She’d practically handed it over.

At 6:00 p.m., her phone buzzed again.

Another message from Angela.

Do not go back there tonight.

Beth stared at the screen. For a long second, she almost agreed. But then her eye caught something odd.

The app she used to listen back on recorded calls had a notification. It shouldn't have. That program only lit up when calls came from her own headset—and she hadn't logged into it since last night.

She opened it.

And there it was.

A recording. Timestamp: 3:16 a.m.
Caller: Unknown
Location: Untraceable

Beth clicked play. The voice that came through wasn’t static filled this time. It was clear. Crisp. Right in her ear like someone whispering from behind the couch.

“You’re already here, Beth.”

She slammed her laptop shut. Her body reacted before her brain did, knocking her chair back as she stood too fast. She felt a rush of nausea and grabbed the counter to steady herself.

You’re already here.
The call hadn’t happened at work. It had come to her home.

Part Twelve: Answers That Aren’t

Her return to MetroTel that night felt different. It was too quiet. The night janitor was gone early. The lights in the hall were dimmer than usual. Or maybe her eyes were just tired.

She went directly to Line 12.

The headset was still unplugged. But now, something was written on a post it note stuck to the screen:

“CALL BACK.”

No handwriting. Just typed. All caps.

Beth checked the call log. No call-in. But a callback number had been auto generated from the system at 3:20 a.m.; a number with too many digits to be real.

She dialed it anyway.

The line didn’t ring. It simply picked up.

A man’s voice answered. Calm. Measured. Like a therapist who already knew you were lying.

“You’re still trying to prove this is about phones. That this is a technical error. But this place runs deeper than that.”

Beth didn’t speak.

“You work the night shift because no one else wants it. But you ever wonder why no one stays? People burn out. People leave. Not because of the hours. Because of us. We don’t want you to leave. We’re tired of losing people.”

Beth finally found her voice. “Who are you?”

The voice didn’t change tone.

“I’m whoever’s left. When the last shift ends. When the phone doesn’t get hung up.”

Then the line clicked.

Disconnected.

Part Thirteen: The Recordings

Beth stayed past her shift. Into daylight. Her supervisor didn’t show up, and she didn’t care. She dug through archived recordings, long ignored logs, flagged accounts that no one followed up on. And slowly, a pattern began to take shape.

There were others. Not many, and all gone. Angela. A guy named Mark Chan. A woman named Riley North. All worked nights. All flagged weird calls, strange recordings, open ended tickets. All left within a month.

She searched Mark’s name and found an old blog post under an alias, archived by the Wayback Machine.

“Don’t answer the 0 line. Don’t talk to it. Don’t even listen. It speaks in your voice because it needs your permission to stay.”

She blinked.

“It lives in the quiet. Not the wires. Not the systems. The space between signals. The static is the message.”

Beth felt a cold sweat spread down her neck.

In the end, Riley’s name was the last one she looked up.

Riley had died.

The obituary was short and vague. Died in her apartment. No foul play suspected.

But one detail stuck with her.

Riley had died of cardiac arrest, alone, on a night she hadn’t shown up for her shift.

Beth shut her computer and sat back.

She was next.

Not in a paranoid way just a steady, settled truth in her stomach. The calls weren’t random. The voices weren’t pulling names out of a hat.

They were working their way in. And she’d left the door cracked open.

Part Fourteen: Breaking the Pattern

Beth didn’t go home after her shift.

She walked instead to an all night diner on North Carson Street. She ordered coffee and sat in the corner booth with her laptop, one eye on the door. A couple of drunk college kids wandered in around 6 a.m., and she flinched like they might whisper her name.

She didn’t know what the rules were anymore.

Angela’s messages had stopped. No more texts, no more cryptic warnings. It was like Angela had vanished the moment Beth decided to dig deeper. She thought about calling again but remembered how the line rang until her phone got hot in her hand.

Whoever or whatever had taken over that number wasn’t Angela anymore.

Beth opened her laptop.

She pulled up every tool she could: softphone emulators, admin-level access codes she wasn’t supposed to know, everything she’d taken home over months of boredom and too much curiosity. She started building a copy, a digital clone of the Line 12 routing path. The idea was simple: mirror the inbound signal, bounce it through a virtual server, and reroute the call before it ever reached her headset.

Trap it. Trace it. Understand it.

She didn’t know what she was looking for exactly.

But if it wanted her attention so badly, maybe it was time it had hers.

Part Fifteen: A Signal Too Clear

By 9 p.m. that night, Beth was back at MetroTel.

She didn’t even bother clocking in. She sat down at Line 12, connected her own mirrored signal, and waited.

The headset stayed quiet for an hour. Then two.

She drank stale coffee, twirled a pen between her fingers, and tapped her foot. Part of her hoped the plan had worked. Another part was terrified it had. Because if this thing could be drawn out, what would it look like on the other side?

At 12:16 a.m., the line lit up.

But not Line 12.

Her mirrored line did.

Beth blinked. The softphone interface started to flicker. Not glitching, just reacting. The caller ID field filled with blank space. Not zeroes. Not dashes.

Just nothing.

She clicked to answer.

This time, she said nothing.

The silence on the other end was electric.

Then her own voice came through the line.

“Beth.”

Not a recording. Not delayed playback.

She could hear herself breathing.

Beth reached for the mute, but her finger stopped just above the button.

And then a second voice spoke.

“You finally made a door.”

Beth leaned back. “Who are you?”

The voice didn’t answer. It didn’t need to. There was something different about this call. Something denser. The air in the room felt heavier. She noticed a shadow shift in the corner of the break room through the glass.

“We all came through doors, Beth. You just made yours bigger.”

Then static. But this time, the static wasn’t random.

It was pulsing.

Three short bursts. Two long. One short.

Beth sat up straight.

It wasn’t static. It was Morse code.

She scribbled it down and translated:

S-L-V-R-R-M

She typed it out again, slower.

SLVRRM.

She searched the word. Nothing.

Then she split it: SLV-RRM.

Still nothing.

But she remembered a floor plan she’d seen once, a backup office blueprint in case of renovations. There had been a storage room tucked behind the main switchboard on the lower level.

Room name: Server Room SLV-RRM.

Nobody used that floor anymore.

Part Sixteen: Below Ground

Beth stood at the top of the basement stairwell, badge in hand. The floor hadn’t been accessed in months, maybe longer. A thick layer of dust blanketed the fire door at the bottom.

Her keycard didn’t work.

But when she reached for the handle it was already unlocked.

She paused.

Everything inside her screamed to turn back.

But she opened the door.

The stairwell smelled like ozone and bleach. The kind of sharp, sterile scent that stuck in your nostrils. She flicked on her phone flashlight and moved slowly.

At the bottom, the door to SLV-RRM stood half open.

Inside, nothing looked like a modern server room. No blinking lights. No humming racks. Just a single desk. A headset. An old rotary phone.

It was coated in dust, untouched for years.

Until Beth walked in.

The phone rang.

Beth froze.

It didn’t even sound like a normal ring. The tone was low, stretched out. It rattled in the metal casing like something alive was shaking it from inside.

She stared at it.

And answered.

On the other end, a child’s voice whispered.

“You’re the last one. Stay on the line.”

And then the door slammed shut behind her.

Part Seventeen: Stay on the Line

Beth didn’t breathe.

The rotary phone pressed cold against her ear. Her hand trembled slightly. Less from fear now, more from the sensation that something irreversible had just happened.

She looked back at the door. No handle on this side.

She was sealed in.

“You’re the last one,” the voice said again. “Stay on the line.”

The voice wasn’t menacing. Not like the others. It was soft, childlike, careful.

But Beth couldn’t help asking, “Last what?”

There was a pause. She heard the faint sound of paper rustling on the other end. Then the voice repeated something like a name:

“Angela wasn’t strong enough. She let it in.”

Beth swallowed.

This was connected to Angela. But the voice sounded too young, too disconnected from the fear that had haunted Angela’s messages.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“I’m what’s left.”

The light in the server room buzzed faintly overhead. A flickering, aging bulb, the kind no one bothers to replace. It was the only light source. And it cast Beth’s shadow long and crooked across the floor.

“This was the first switchboard. Before the merge. Before the company changed hands.”

Beth stayed silent.

“They used to route calls here before they realized what was bleeding through.”

The child’s voice became thinner, as if speaking through layers of static.

“Beth, it’s not a ghost. It’s not a person. It’s a pattern. It learns voices. It climbs through wires. It rewrites memories to keep people picking up.”

Beth backed away from the phone instinctively, as if pulling the cord would break the connection. But the voice snapped sharp.

“Don’t hang up!”

She froze. The bulb above her gave a loud pop. Then dimmed to half power.

“You already made the path. If you leave now, it’ll find you anywhere. It knows your frequency.”

Beth stared at the old desk. Beneath the rotary phone was a folder. Just one.

She opened it with one hand while still holding the receiver.

Inside were forms. Dozens of them.

Internal MetroTel memos. All dated between 1998 and 2001.

The top one was stamped: Employee Termination – Noncompliant Operator Behavior.

Name listed: Angela Ruiz.

Beth felt her stomach twist.

Below it, more names. More terminations. All from the same call center. All tied to Line 12.

All of them had red ink scrawled across the top:

“Unreliable. Refused transfer. Emotional instability.”

Each report came with a recommendation: “Clear headset logs. Archive call data. Terminate contact.”

Beth whispered into the phone, “This was a cover up.”

The child’s voice softened again.

“It eats through repetition. If you pick up enough times, you forget what’s real.”

“You start repeating yourself. Like a loop.”

Beth remembered the calls. The ones with no beginning, no context. The voices begging for help, or worse, whispering her name like they knew her.

She looked at the cord running from the rotary phone across the floor.

It wasn’t connected to anything.

No jack. No modem. No power.

Nothing.

It was calling through her.

“You’re the last one, Beth,” the voice said again. “But if you don’t feed it, it starves. Stay long enough, and it can’t move.”

Beth set the receiver down gently. Not hung up. Just rested.

The light buzzed above her, dim but steady.

She sat.

She waited.

And for the first time since that strange night shift, the line stayed quiet.

Part Eighteen: Loopback

Beth didn’t know how long she sat there.

The server room stayed still, the air heavy and quiet except for the hum of old, unseen machines. The rotary phone lay on the desk, receiver resting beside it, silent now. Her legs had gone numb. Her hands, finally steady, rested in her lap.

She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for.

Maybe for the voice to come back.
Maybe for someone to open the door.
Maybe for something worse.

What unnerved her most wasn’t the fear. It was how quickly it had become normal.

Ten days ago, she was another night shift drone. Quiet cubicle, late coffee, harmless gossip with Luis and Sherry. Now? Now she was sitting in an old sealed room, staring at a phone that wasn’t plugged into anything, having conversations with a voice that spoke in riddles and names of the dead.

She stood slowly. Her back popped. The bulb above her sputtered again, but didn’t go out.

Then the phone rang.

Once.

Just once.

Beth froze.

The sound didn’t echo like it should’ve in a room that size. It felt contained. Like the noise hadn’t passed through the air so much as passed through her.

She reached out and picked it up, hand slow, deliberate.

She didn’t speak.

Not at first.

Then, just above a whisper: “I’m still here.”

There was no reply.

Static buzzed faintly at the edge. Then something new: breathing. Barely audible. Then a second voice, not the child’s.

This one was male.

Older. Calmer.

“How long did you stay on the line?”

Beth stiffened. “Who is this?”

“You stayed long enough. That means you heard it.”

The man’s voice sounded exhausted, dry and distant like it hadn’t been used in years.

“They’ll be looking for you soon. You should leave now.”

Beth shook her head. “The door’s sealed.”

“Not anymore.”

She turned.

He was right.

The latch hung loose. The deadbolt, originally rusted tight, was now angled open, like it had been forced from the outside.

But no one had come in.

“They don’t like when people know about the loop,” the man said. “That’s why they built the system over it. Call centers. Switchboards. Digital exchanges. Every time something bled through, they buried it deeper.”

Beth’s pulse rose. “Who are they?”

“Doesn’t matter. Not anymore.”

“What matters is that you don’t call it again. That’s the only way it dies.”

Beth’s fingers gripped the receiver tighter. “Then why are you still here?”

Long pause.

“Because I didn’t stop.”

The line clicked. Then silence.

Beth put the receiver down again, but this time, it rang before she could pull her hand away.

A single ring. Shrill. Clear.

She didn’t pick it up.

She backed away from the desk, heart racing, and left the room.

Out in the hallway, everything felt untouched. Clean. Ordinary. The buzz of fluorescent lights, the faint sound of an AC vent cycling. All the chaos of the night, Angela’s message, the system crash, the impossible transfer. It all felt unreal now.

She passed by her desk, grabbed her bag, and headed for the exit.

She didn’t clock out.

The moment she stepped into the parking lot, the air felt different. Cool. Still.

Her car sat under the flickering lamplight.

She climbed in, turned the key, and sat in silence for a full minute before the engine kicked over.

The phone in her glovebox, the one she’d turned off, lit up suddenly.

No ringtone. Just the screen.

Unknown Number.

Beth stared at it.

It didn’t ring. It just waited.

She didn’t touch it.

She put the car in gear, pulled out of the lot, and didn’t look back.

Part Nineteen: Disconnect

Beth didn’t sleep that night.

She sat on the edge of her bathtub, staring at the shower tile, the silence pressing in too tight. She’d tossed the phone into the kitchen drawer, powered down, face down. Still, she swore she heard it humming. Not ringing. Humming. Like something coiled inside it was waiting for her to blink.

At 4:12 a.m., she got in her car and drove.

Not anywhere specific. Just away.

She ended up in an empty lot outside a 24 hour diner on Route 6, watching the neon “Open” sign flicker against the early morning dark. A waitress was setting out salt shakers inside. A delivery guy was stacking crates near the back. Regular life, still moving.

Beth couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d slipped outside of it.

Like she’d taken a wrong turn in a place no one knew had roads.

She sipped burnt coffee and watched people come and go.

Nothing strange. No voices. No unknown numbers. Just silence. Human silence.

But she felt it.

A pull.

Not like curiosity. Like compulsion.

Like her brain had been tuned.

That’s when she made the call.

She used the payphone outside the diner. She didn’t want to risk her own line.

Angela’s mother answered. Soft voice. Suspicious at first, but polite.

Beth explained who she was, what she’d heard, what she’d found. She expected denial, confusion, maybe even anger.

Instead, the woman said quietly, “I always wondered if someone else would hear it.”

Beth stopped cold. “You mean?”

“Angela called me the night before she, before it happened. Said someone was calling her from inside the system. Kept leaving messages she didn’t remember recording.”

The voice on the other end paused.

“She used to work nights. Said she’d stay late sometimes, just to listen. Said it was like the line was waiting for her.”

Beth’s fingers tightened on the receiver.

“I still have one of the messages,” Angela’s mother added. “She left it on the house phone. You want me to play it for you?”

Beth hesitated, every instinct screaming no.

But her mouth said, “Yes.”

The woman fumbled a moment. Then a beep.

Silence.

Then, Angela’s voice. But distorted.

“If you're listening to this I’m sorry. I stayed too long. I thought I could map it. But it changed every time. It knew names. It knows grief. It uses it. Don’t answer line twelve. Don’t let it hear you remember.”

Click.

The message ended.

Beth’s mouth was dry. She felt like she’d just heard her own thoughts played back.

She thanked Angela’s mom and hung up.

She stood there a long time, staring at the payphone like it might grow teeth.

Back home, she took the old headset from her locker and tossed it into the trash. She filed her resignation the next day. No calls. No explanation. Just a typed letter and her badge on the desk.

She changed her number. Got a job shelving books at a university library two towns over. It was quiet there. Peaceful.

Sometimes at night, she still heard the ring in her dreams.

Just once. A single tone.

But she never answered it.

And the line stayed dead.

Part Twenty: The Line Goes Quiet

The apartment was smaller now. Not physically. It just felt that way.

Beth had rearranged the furniture. Cleared out every piece of tech that could carry sound; bluetooth speakers, smart clocks, the voice activated coffee maker. She unplugged her television. The only phone she kept was a basic flip model with no internet access. Even that she left off unless absolutely necessary.

She lived quieter.

Walked to work. Read real books. Ate plain food. She kept herself rooted in the tactile, the physical. Anything she could touch. Anything with edges.

Because it helped her remember that this was real.

Not the voice. Not the static. Not the room or the impossible calls.

Here.

Now.

But the effects of those nights never really left. The dreams came in waves; less often, maybe, but sharper. Always the same sequence: the rotary phone, the sealed room, the click of a call connecting just before she woke.

She didn’t tell anyone.

Not because she thought they’d think she was crazy. Because she wasn’t sure herself anymore where the line between crazy and correct really sat.

At work, she shelved history books and sometimes snuck off to scan the old telecom sections. Ma Bell. Switchboards. Network infrastructure diagrams. There was never anything strange in them. Nothing about hidden frequencies or impossible voices.

But occasionally, she’d find a passage, just one line or one odd footnote, that made her heart stall.

Things like:

“Line Twelve was deprecated due to unpredictable signal behavior in low traffic exchanges.”

Or:

“Anecdotal evidence from early switchboard operators described a ‘phantom’ ring tone that couldn’t be traced to any registered circuit.”

It wasn’t proof.

But it wasn’t nothing either.

One rainy afternoon, months after she left the phone company, she passed by a utility crew on the side of the road. They were digging up old copper lines, cutting out a rusted switchboard. Beth slowed as she walked past. The foreman, a woman around Beth’s age, caught her eye and smiled.

Beth gave a small nod.

Then the woman paused, looked down at the equipment on the ground, and called out to her crew.

“Hey, look at this. This panel still has a line twelve marked on it.”

Beth froze.

The crew laughed it off, made jokes about haunted phones and ghost calls. The foreman chuckled and moved on.

Beth didn’t.

She walked home with rain in her hair and the sound of that single ring tone pulsing in the back of her skull like muscle memory.

That night, she sat on the floor in the dark, legs crossed, and stared at her unplugged flip phone. Not ringing. Not glowing. Just there.

She let herself think about it, for real, for the first time in weeks.

What it meant to hear something no one else believed in.
What it meant to walk away from it.
And what it would mean to go back.

She reached forward. Opened the phone. Pressed one button.

No signal.

She powered it off again.

Then she walked to the kitchen, opened the drawer, and took out the sealed envelope she’d been saving.

Inside it: a page torn from Angela’s logbook, the one that had her name scribbled at the bottom.

BETH.
DON’T STAY ON THE LINE.
IT LISTENS.

She burned it in the sink.

Then she went to bed.

And for the first time in a long time, she slept straight through the night.

No rings.
No voices.
No loops.

Just silence.

The good kind.

The real kind.

The kind that means you’re finally alone.

And finally free.