The first time it happened was on Monday night, when I was in deep sleep. I woke up to the cacophony of footsteps outside my home and my phone ringing loudly right beside my face, where the bedside table was.
The phone was buzzing right off the table, about the fall. I caught it just in time and put to the phone to my ear, not even bothering to look at the number. My head pounded and my throat felt dry.
“Hello?”
“911, we have an emergency,” said a shaky female voice.
“Sorry?”
“911, we have an emergency.”
“Um,” I took a look at the number, and sure enough, it was 911. My head pounded even harder and I frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“We have an emergency. Please, we need your help.”
“You need my help?” I asked, incredulous. In my sleepy state, nothing made sense, and whatever she was saying sounded like gibberish to me. “I’m not a police officer.”
“We need your help,” her voice became more desperate, more demanding. “Please.”
Her tone had dropped abruptly, and I heard the woman’s trembling cry. It send a shiver up my spine, and I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes. “Hello?”
She whispered frantically into the phone, “Please. He’s coming. He’s here. I can’t-“
There was a loud crack from her side, followed by a scary scream. I never even realized a human could make such sounds.
My stomach sank and I removed the phone from my ear, staring at the number. My breath quickened and the call dropped. I wondered what I should do. For a second, I thought of calling the police, but then it dawned on me.
Who do you call when the police calls you for help?
…
The second time happened when I was cooking dinner. Previously, I had brushed off the phone call as some prank from the neighborhood’s troublemakers, though how they managed to call from the 911 hotline, I don’t know.
As I was chopping some tomatoes and onions, a shrill ring echoed downstairs. I sighed, dropped the knife, and leapt up the stairs to grab my phone. When I noticed that the call was, again, coming from 911, my heart dropped.
Neighborhood pranksters, maybe? A second time?
I wiped my hands on my apron and grabbed the humming phone. I put it to my ear slowly. A despairing male voice screamed, “No! Stop!”
“Hello?” It came out as a hoarse whisper.
“Help me!” the man yelled into the phone, his voice full of anguish. “They’re eating me!”
“What?”
“Please help me,” his cries were wretched and pained, and I couldn’t help but release the phone from my trembling hands. The phone fell to the floor. The man let out a high pitched scream and the call ended once again.
I didn’t bother picking up the phone. I just went downstairs and finished cooking.
…
I didn’t tell anyone about these continuous, strange calls. Part of the reason is that I had no one to tell. My family would for sure brush it off as me being a “silly kid.” My friends would not even believe me.
Sometimes I laid in bed and thought of what happened to the people that had called me. Sometimes I wondered what would happen if I were to call 911. Sometimes I asked myself, When will be the next call?
The next call was exactly a week later. A ring woke me up from my daydream. I’d been sitting at my desk trying to study, but the words were swimming on the page and my eyelids felt ridiculously heavy, and soon enough, I had drifted off to sleep.
Until the shrill ringing of my phone. I opened my eyes, and slowly, reached for my phone, horrified of what would be on the screen. Of course, it was 911 again. The past week, I hadn’t gotten any other calls.
I debated for a moment whether I should pick up or not. I was convinced now that it wasn’t the neighborhood kids. No one can fake such real, anguished cries and screams.
And although I had the perfect reason to just decline the call and go back to sleep, another terrifying part of me was curious, and slowly I dragged my finger across the screen, pressing the green button.
“Hello.”
I was greeted by nothing but a piercing, blood curdling scream from the other side. It was so loud and ear-splitting that I physically jerked in my seat.
“God save me!” a child cried on the line. She sounded about 8 or 9, and I felt my throat compressing, my stomach tying itself to knots.
“God, save me, please!” I heard her pleads, followed by a very loud sound of slicing. Something wet and sticky leaking across the floor. A dark part of me already knew that it was blood.
For a moment I listened in silence to the other side. The girl was gone. I heard heavy, raspy breathing. Then, the call ended abruptly.
I opened up the back of my phone, removed my number card, and buried my phone deep under my clothes in the wardrobe. I told myself that no matter what, I was not going to pick up next time.
My mind was always cloudy and busy, and I felt the effects of the stress a week later. No sleep, no focus, no appetite. But at least no one was calling.
One day, I decided that more than anything, I needed a chilly, fresh morning run. So, as the clock ticked 5 am, I got into my workout clothes and filled up my water bottle.
I stepped outside into the coldness and took a deep breath. I was determined to forget about the awful calls and give myself a break. I began with a slow jog, then began running.
It felt good. The crisp air biting at my skin, my feet making contact with the earth, my body moving. I stopped after a while, breathless, to take a sip of water. As I was drinking, I noticed a very tall man at the corner of the street, by the café.
He was taller than an average man, maybe by 5 or 6 inches. He was lanky and seemed to be woozy, by the look of him. I couldn’t see his face clearly, but something about him gave me the creeps. I turned to go in the other direction when I heard his deep, wobbly voice call, “Hey. Excuse me.”
I began walking quickly, ready to take off running was he to approach me any closer. I looked around. No one was out at such a time. I felt uneasy and began jogging away from the man.
I made the mistake of looking behind myself a few minutes into the race. The man was following me, running quiet fast. His arms were sat awkwardly by his sides and the earth seemed to shake every time he took a step. My heart racing, I began running, turning the corner in an attempt to confuse him. My bottle fell out of my hand and clunked to the floor.
He began running too, the ground shaking thunderously under his feet. His face was even more chilling, I realized, to my horror. He had facial features - just abnormal ones. Skin a little too pale, eyes a little too gaunt, mouth a little too stretched. It made everything a hundred times worse, because not only was I being followed by a man twice my size, but the man also looked like he stepped out of a disturbing, scary movie.
I decided it wasn’t best to go home and lock the doors. God knows how much strength that man possessed, and how much my locks can really take. Plus, it isn’t very smart to have him know my exact address, and so I turned in the other direction, leading him away from my safety.
The closest police station was a mile away, and I didn’t have my phone to call anybody. I tried a few stores - looking behind myself in a hurry to find the man still behind me - but no luck. All doors were locked, all windows closed, all lights off.
Every store, every café, every house. No one answered their doors, and I didn’t see anyone outside. Very unusual, because normally at this time people would be out walking their dogs, hurrying to bus stops, or going for morning runs. It made my stomach turn, as if everyone was in on some horrible joke that I didn’t know about.
After a while I began feeling seriously afraid. The man was still on my tails, and yet he wouldn’t give up. Every few minutes he was bellow in his unbalanced voice, “Hey! Excuse me!” Even the sound of his shrill voice scared me.
I stopped for a moment to catch my breath. We’d been running for what seemed like hours now. I wondered what he’d do if he reached me, and that kicked in the adrenaline, and I began running again. I cursed myself for leaving my phone at home and even worse, taking out the number card.
Soon, I spotted a KX telephone box by the side of the road, near what seemed to be an empty restaurant. Not daring to look over my shoulder, I ducked into the tiny space just as the man reached me. I locked the door and he began pounding aggressively, his face skeletal and monstrous-looking.
My heart pounded at the sight of him. I grabbed the telephone, dialed 911, and put the phone to my ear, praying. The man was pounding on the glass so hard that I thought it’d shatter right then and there.
I took a deep breath as someone picked up on the second ring.
“Hi? Who’s this?”