Most of the other kids my age drive, I don’t. Out here in the suburbs it’s the best way to get around. When I was practising for my full licence I backed over my neighbour’s cat in our driveway. The cat lived, but I cried for a week and swore to never touch a set of car keys again.
So we walk. Me, my boyfriend Sid, and my seven year old brother, Tim. Tim usually trails ten metres behind us, off in his own world, giving Sid and I space as we walk ahead, hand in hand.
It was already dark that winter evening when we walked home from our school’s basketball game. I asked my little bro if he could walk the last few blocks alone.
“Tell mom I’ll be home late,” I said.
“I’ll tell her you guys went to the park to kiss.”
Sid cut in, “Tell your mom she raised a little snitch.”
Tim crossed his forearms and slammed them against his crotch to gesture “suck-it” before running off towards home.
Sid and I did indeed have plans in the park. Sid had recently bought a very cheap, fake ID and he wanted to test it out at the local liquor store. To my surprise, it actually worked.
We sat for hours in the empty park, drinking a $8 bottle of wine and smoking cigarettes. We shared a pair of earbuds, listening to Sid’s most romantic Bolt Thrower mix. I always struggled to get into death metal but his enthusiasm was contagious.
When the wine was long gone and our lips were stained a deep purple, Sid offered to walk me home. By then, there was a cold chill in the air, so we decided to take the shortcut, through an undeveloped and forested strip of trees that bordered the old Texaco gas station.
The gas station had shut down years ago, the windows were boarded up and a metal fence surrounded it, probably to keep out people like us. Inside the fence, on the forecourt, stood a lone phone booth. The only pay phone left in our small suburb. Its neon bulb constantly flickering, on the verge of giving up for good.
I checked the time on my phone, it was 1:00am on the dot, I performed a little bow and gestured towards the phone booth. My timing was a few seconds off but just as it struck 1:01, the payphone rang.
Sid was stunned, “How the hell ya’ do that?”
“Magic.” I replied
Sid wasn’t buying it…
I explained, “Come on, really you don’t know? It always rings, every night at this time.”
Sid hopped up on the metal fence. I tried to grab his leg.
“What are you doing?”
“Answering it” he said, as he dropped down on the other side.
“No! Don’t!”
I was afraid, I didn’t know why, but my mother had always warned me: Do not go near that gas station, and no matter what, do not touch that phone. It was too late. Sid had picked up the phone.
Sid said “howdy” into the phone but I watched as his smile slowly faded. He stood stiff listening for a moment and then hung up, all the colour had left his face.
Sid walked me the rest of the way home but his mood had darkened. When I asked him what he heard on the phone, he said it was a collect call, and that he accepted the charges. After that, it was just the sound of someone breathing on the other end. I said that made no sense, and that he didn’t pay anything, but Sid just gave me a confused look and said, “I guess not.”
That weekend, Sid pretty much stopped talking to me, he wouldn’t answer my calls or texts. At first, it hurt, was this an immature way of dumping me? By Sunday evening I couldn’t bear it any longer and I called his home phone. His dad answered and told me Sid wasn’t feeling well, and that he hadn’t slept for two whole nights. A bad case of the “heebie-jeebies” he said. He quickly hung up on me before I could find out more.
It was in Monday’s science class that I realised something was truly wrong with him. At first I was glad that he showed up at all, but he was extremely withdrawn, his eyes dark as if he hadn’t slept, his hair greasy and unwashed. Sid was in no way the most handsome boy in my grade, but his personal hygiene was always a step above the rest. That was no longer the case. I had to breathe through my mouth to avoid the stinging waves of B.O.
We stood paired at the lab table. It was biology and we were dissecting sheep eyes. The class was buzzing with excitement and disgust, the teacher battled to keep us under control. I started to follow the instructions, cutting through the sclera, the fluid oozing out onto my tray until I managed to hack my way to the lens.
I looked over at Sid’s tray to see how he was doing. What I saw made me scream. Sid had used his scalpel to slice around the entirety of his own thumbnail. He was now using forceps to remove the nail from his thumb. The rest of the nails on his hand had already been removed, leaving horrifying patches of torn flesh and blood on each finger.
The teacher ran over and snatched the tools away from him. She raised her clipboard to her own mouth to block what could only be a throat full of rising vomit. I yelled at Sid, clinging to his arm. No matter what I did he was totally impassive to my screams and the rest of the class freaking out around us.
Sid was not at school for the rest of the week. The rumours around what had happened spread wildly through the halls.
Our relationship was no secret, so I wasn’t surprised when a couple days later, my counsellor brought me in for a talk in his little office. He asked me if Sid had been acting strange at all and if he had been taking any drugs. I told him about the phone booth, and how it rings every night. He seemed a little confused and I could tell he was sceptical. I told him about my mother’s warning, but again he passed it off as her not wanting us to mess around on private property.
After taking my brother home from school that day, I walked over to Sid’s house to see if he was making a recovery. Sid’s parents were private people, who lived in a small bungalow on a street with no other occupied houses. The lawn was overgrown and the paint left peeling on the old blue wood cladding.
I had to knock a few times before someone finally answered. It was an older man who must have been Sid’s father, but he looked bad. He had a week’s worth of stubble and unkempt hair that fell over his eyes in messy strands. It was actually my first time meeting Sid’s father and I was a little taken aback by his appearance.
“Yes?” he said.
“Hi, I’m a friend of Sid’s, I just wanted to see -“
“He’s not well”
Sid’s father tried to close the door on me but I braced it with my foot.
“Please, Sid and I are very close, I just wanted to-“
I heard a groan from within the house, I poked my head around the man blocking me to see into the darkness of the hallway.
At the end of the hall sat Sid. His hand was bandaged and his wrists were bound to the arms of the chair with cable ties. He was rocking rhythmically back and forth in his restraints.
“Sid?” I yelled out in fear.
Sid’s father pushed me away from the door.
“You need to go. It’s for his own good. He needs to sleep.”
“He still hasn’t slept? He should be in bed! A hospital bed!” I said, outraged.
“We don’t have insurance.”
The door slammed shut in my face.
The counsellor had obviously called my mom, because that night at dinner, she said she was sorry to hear about Sid and tried to casually have a conversation about drugs.
We sat around a big dish of mac-and-cheese with a crispy bread crumb topping, which my mom knows is my favourite. I secretly fed our collie Shep under the table. I barely had an appetite of my own and poked around at the food on my plate, thinking of Sid strapped to that chair.
“If you wanted to try marijuana” she began… “I wouldn’t be against that, I just want to know what you’re doing and that you’re staying away from the chemical stuff.”
I turned red, I did not want to be talking to my mom about weed or anything else.
“I don’t do hard drugs, neither does Sid, ok?”
My brother interrupted, “Dad says that drugs bring the fucking demons out in us.”
My mom and I were both shocked.
“Timothy! where did you hear that word?” my mom turned an accusing look to me.
“Dad said it,” Timothy said.
“Timothy… you’ve never spoken to your father.
“I spoke to him on the phone.”
“Timothy, enough! You know your father is dead.”
And then her eyes turned cold as she came to realise. “Which phone?” she said. She grabbed my brother’s arm, he dropped his fork.
“Which phone did you speak to him on?”
“The one by the gas station.”
All the colour drained from my mother’s face. “Haven’t I told you never to go near that phone! Haven’t I?”
“But mom,” Timothy’s eyes welled up.
My mother’s hand was squeezing my brother’s arm, her nails digging into his skin.
“A hundred times I’ve told you both. Don’t you know how stupid-”
“You’re hurting him!” I said.
She saw what she was doing and let go. Timothy ran upstairs and we heard his door slam.
That night, when I came out of the shower I could hear my mother crying in her room. I texted Sid again, no longer expecting a response, but simply because I had no one else to talk to:
<how are you doing? i miss you. i’m scared>
He did not respond, but I could see that the message had been read.
It was about 12:30am and I was still awake staring at a spider on the ceiling. I heard a car door close outside and got up to look out the window. My mom was backing out of the driveway. Where could she be going at this time? I thought.
It was 3AM when I was awakened by another sound. My mom was pulling back into the driveway, the headlights were off. I watched through the blinds from my bedroom window. She got out and looked around the empty street as if she was being followed. She opened the trunk and took out Tim’s aluminium little-league bat, then she locked the car.
The next day at school I was in the gymnasium for Phys Ed. We were doing square dancing which we only do about once a year. I always found it stupid but today I was almost enjoying the distraction. As the boombox told us to “swing your partner, promenade home”, the principal came over the loudspeaker calling me to his office.
Waiting in the office was my councillor, a man in a suit and two uniformed police officers. I stood there in my P.E. kit, having no idea what was going on. The man in the suit jacket introduced himself as a detective and asked the councillor if there was somewhere private he could talk to me. So we sat again in my councillor’s office, with the cops and counsellor waiting outside.
The detective’s chubby face was sombre. He started by asking me about our relationship and when was the last time I saw Sid Brown. His sour, whiskey laced, coffee breath filled the tiny office. It seems stupid, but I thought Sid was in trouble for having a fake ID.
I said I had tried to visit him at home but his dad wouldn’t let me. The detective made a note and then he placed a paper printout in front of me. It was a screenshot of my text to Sid the night before.
“Did you send this message?” he asked.
“Yes. what has he done?”
“Well miss, I’m sorry to inform you but Sid Brown’s body has been found… well…. he’s dead.” The detective watched me carefully, registering my shock before continuing.
“According to his parents, he ran away from their home just after midnight. We thought he might have left to see you?”
I covered my mouth as the tears welled up in my eyes, trying to hold it together.
“I’m sorry miss, did you, or did you not see Sid Brown last night? He was… deceased… shortly after you sent this message.”
I told him I was home in bed and had not seen Sid. I asked the detective how Sid had died. He was hesitant to tell me. He asked if I knew of anyone that would want to hurt Sid, or if Sid had done anything to hurt me. I said no and that’s when he let slip, Sid had suffered multiple strikes to the head area, he had been beaten to death with a blunt object, potentially a baseball bat.
He watched me very carefully at this moment looking for any sort of reaction. I sensed in his hands he was holding photos of the body, but he refrained from showing me these and of that I’m glad. Did he think I was somehow involved? My emotions took full control of me now and the detective didn’t get out another useful word.
They called my mother to pick me up and I cried hysterically all the way home. I was unable to look at my mother, terrified to look at her, could it be her? I couldn’t bear the thought.
When we got back I ran to my room and locked the door. I cried myself to sleep and didn’t wake up until the next morning. As the bleak winter sun rose, I lay in bed, reading through the old texts between me and Sid. The more I missed him the more my anger grew.
I was at boiling point when I finally went downstairs to confront my mother. Timothy was eating lucky charms and watching Dragon Ball in the living room. When my mother saw me she turned the volume up on the TV. She then made a b-line for the kitchen and put the kettle on.
“Tea?” she said.
“You fucking. Evil. Bitch” I yelled in her face.
She was furious, I had never spoken to her like this before. In the other room, Timothy turned around on the couch to see what was going on, my mother gave him a fake smile and he turned back to the TV.
“I saw you last night, I saw you come home, I saw the fucking bat!” I said, the tears coming back.
Her fury subsided and shifted into guilt.
“He made a deal! Ok!” she burst out “He made a deal with the Caller and nothing can change that.”
“The Caller? what the fuck are you talking about?” She tried to grab my hand. I pulled it away.
“Darling… I’m so so sorry about your boyfriend. I know it’s terrible and so hard… but he was already gone. He answered that phone… Your father…” and now it was her turn to tear up, “your brother… I had to pay the Caller.”
Timothy interrupted us with his bowl of milk, “Mommy can I have more marshmallows?” She smiled and poured him some more charms. He sat on the stool at the counter. I saw now how dark the bags were under my brother’s eyes. Was he sleeping at all?
“Are you guys fighting?”
“No honey. but hurry up, you’ll be late for school.”
I stayed home that day. My mother drove Tim to school and would be at work until evening. The thought of calling the police and turning her in ran through my mind. But her and my brother were all I had. Did I believe her? I knew she was right about Sid, after he picked up that phone, he wasn’t himself again. Just an empty shell. But she had killed him! And so violently. I could barely stomach it, but she did it to save Tim. If it’s true, could I blame her?
By evening I decided I needed to know for myself, if my mother was telling the truth I could one day forgive her. I needed to go to the phone booth. I wouldn’t answer it. I just needed to go.
I waited until after midnight. Finally the light under the door of my mother’s room had been switched off. I crept downstairs and silently exited through the back door. It was cold, and a mist hung in the air and trailed off into darkness. My brother’s bicycle lay on the frosty grass in the yard. My own bike had been rusting for months with a flat tire.
The cheap plastic training-wheels on my brother’s bike sounded like a shopping cart clamouring through a cobbled street. My brother could surely ride without them. About a block from my house I dismounted and bent the cheap metal brackets back and forth until the training-wheels broke off.
I felt silly on a seven year old’s bicycle, cursing my fear of driving a car. I cut through a couple empty lots and took the shortcut through the strip of trees. I was back at the gas station in a matter of minutes. I was early, ten minutes early.
Instead of climbing over the fence there was a gap between two sections that I could squeeze through.
I was having doubts, thoughts that anything sinister about this phone was purely a fabrication for my mother’s benefit. But as I approached I felt a chill, a coldness that crawled over my skin. The booth was dusty inside. On the glass someone had written in the dust with a finger U NVR CALL :(
On the floor of the booth was a phone book of the past, now rotting from the damp. I opened it, many of the pages stuck together but I managed to read a few names. I looked up my own family, we were in there, address and all, but the phone number had been crudely altered with a pen, all the numbers had been changed to sixes. I looked up Sid’s family, it was the same, all sixes
I got lost in the book, finding more and more numbers that had been changed. And then it rang… A piercing ring that silenced the rest of the world around me. The sound made every hair on my body prickle. I raised my hand towards the phone handle, a shaking, conflicted hand which seemed to do everything my mind told it not to.
As my fingers closed around the receiver I saw it. Blood, a wave of blood inside the booth, crashing against the glass. And the ringing turned to screaming, screams from Sid, I saw Sid’s face, a mask like face, he was holding the phone as a bat came crashing into the back of his skull from behind. The force of the strike sent his face into the metal casing of the phone, his nose crumpled in an explosion of blood. The bat came again and again, his limp body propped against the wall of the booth, shuddering with each blow.
I heard a scream from my Father. I saw my father’s face, mouth agape in agony. The agonised face aged and the flesh rotted away, until all that was left was a skull wrapped in a thin layer of tight grey skin.
And last was Tim’s face. His little seven year old face, pale, fresh, innocent wide eyes, with a stream of blood trickling from a wound on his forehead.
I jumped back from the booth without answering the phone. Sweat was pouring down my face and chest. But the visions stopped and the phone had ceased to ring.
I squeezed back through the gap in the fence, trying to get away from the booth. The experience had drained me. I sat down on a curb, hyperventilating, catching my breath. But something else was wrong. I could feel it. Was someone watching me?
I looked back at the empty booth and at the station with its boarded windows. I peered into the darkness all around me. Into the pitch black trees across the street. A pair of eyes were there. Their face concealed by shadow. As my eyes turned to meet theirs, the figure scuttled off into the woods.
I rode home as fast as I could. Wanting to get away from the booth and the horrible visions that I couldn’t shake from my mind. My eyes streaming with tears, what I had seen was so real and so terrifying.
Back inside the house I thirstily drank a glass of water. Shep, our dog sniffed me and wagged his tail. I wasn’t ready to go to bed, so I lay on the couch watching TV with the sound off. Shep lay across my feet.
I was only home for a few minutes when a sound alerted Shep, causing him to jump off the couch. It was the sound of the dog door. I jumped up, thinking it was a raccoon, but it was my brother on his hands and knees by the back door.
He was in his PJ’s but his bare-feet were filthy, scratched and bleeding.
“Timmy! What the fuck!”
I must have said this louder than intended as I heard my mother get out of bed in the room above.
“Tim, where have you been?”
“I wanted to talk to daddy,” he said.
“Mom told you to never go there again!”
‘Dad told me, if I don’t go, he will hurt mommy.”
My mother hurried down the stairs in her robe.
“Mom! He went there again,” I said.
My mother just stared at us for a minute. Her face full of sadness.
“Get to bed,” she said… “Now.”
Tim and I shuffled past her and up the stairs. I saw her take her car keys off the hook. I took Tim upstairs and then waited until my mother had gone out the front door. As I left, Tim turned and said.
“Dad wants to talk to you too.”
I rushed back down the stairs and out the back door. I had to get there before she did.
I cycled like crazy. My long legs on the little pedals.
Through the empty lots - through the strip of woods - onto the derelict road.
I dropped the bike near the tree line and ran towards the station. After slipping through the fence I hid behind a rusting gas pump.
My mom’s SUV appeared and parked up a few seconds later. I stayed out of sight just listening. I heard the car door open and a few seconds later the sound of the fence rattling as she scaled it.
When she was inside the booth I braved a peek. She dropped a quarter into the phone, picked up the receiver and dialled. I couldn’t see the number she pressed but it was a series of all the same number, probably sixes.
“Hello?” she said. She then stated her full name and address, she stated that she was the mother of my brother and I, and the widowed wife of my deceased father.
And then she started to plead. I couldn’t catch every word through her tears but I heard “Spare my child - - - I paid his fee. I beg you - - - he’s too young. Please! How much more do we need to PAY?” She yelled this last word, before a pause, and then she returned the phone to its cradle.
What happened in the following days, was for me the most heartbreaking experience since all this began. My mother started to get her affairs in order. She tried to hide this from me but it was obvious. She had long calls with my grandparents, explaining to them what foods we disliked, who our doctors were, what subjects we needed help with in school.
I found a draft of her will on her desk, detailing how her assets would be distributed in the case of her death and an outline of her funeral wishes.
She spent hours going over our family photo albums. Spent more time with us, never yelled and was extra patient with my brother and I. She told us about our father, who I had only vague memories of. She told us how they met, what he was like. She stopped going to work, cooked our favourite meals, and would watch cartoons with my brother after school, late into the night until she fell asleep.
And I couldn’t bear it. It was like losing her in slow motion without knowing when or how it would happen. And yet I pretended I didn’t know what she was doing, and I tried as hard as I could to enjoy the remaining days.
We lived like this for a week. It was both the best and the worst week of my life. One night, when mom was downstairs doing the dishes, I was in Tim’s room. He was showing me a poster sized collage he had made with images cut from our old National Geographic magazines, weapons of war, child soldiers and nude tribal people. I asked him when he had time to make these, he said he had been staying up at night making them. Then he showed me under his bed, there were a dozen more collages that must have taken hours to make.
“Will you look after me if mom leaves?” he asked.
“Mom would never leave,” I said.
“But she didn’t pay, she helped Sid pay, now she needs to pay for me.”
I couldn’t say any more as the tears choked me and I had to excuse myself for fear of scaring him. But just then, an idea started to seed in my brain, an idea to help my mother, to save her. It was nothing clever, I had no idea of knowing if it would work. But I had to try.
It was stormy the night I decided to put my plan into action. My plan, to destroy the phone booth and all the evil along with it.
By half past midnight I was pretty certain my mother was asleep upstairs. I was in the living room laying in the dark on the couch, listening to the storm outside.
It was so windy the air whistled as it blew past our house, tree branches knocked against the windows like great skeletons wanting to be let in. I listened to the dog door blowing open and closed while Shep whimpered under the coffee table.
Twenty minutes later I was in the car on the driveway, the rain beating down against the windshield. The keys were in the ignition, all I had to do was turn them but I was petrified. I checked and triple checked the rearview and side mirrors of the large SUV. I started the car and dropped the lever into reverse, my hands slippery with sweat. I’m not sure but I may have closed my eyes as I backed out of the driveway.
I was driving so slowly down the street that I could have walked faster. I needed to find some courage. I pulled over in the same spot where I discarded the training-wheels. I connected my phone to the stereo and found Sid’s Bolt Thrower mix. Instantly the car speakers were blasting a death metal guitar riff with drums so loud and fast they sounded like machine guns. A couple bedroom lights turned on in time to see me peel out, fish-tailing on the wet concrete.
Minutes later I was turning onto the derelict, forest lined street, that led to the gas station. When the station started to become visible around the bend, I turned the volume to full and gripped the wheel hard enough to turn my knuckles white. My foot pressed down on the accelerator as I flew towards the phone booth at the fastest speed I’d ever driven.
Before I knew it I was just seconds from collision, I didn’t know if there would be pain, I didn’t know if the booth would come through the windscreen and decapitate me. I looked at the clock as it turned 1:01. The sound was terrible as the car crashed through the metal fence and directly into the phone booth. Bits of glass and metal span off in every direction, the phone booth ripped from its concrete base and electrical wiring, to come to land on its side in a shower of sparks.
There was ringing in my ears, was I concussed? I pushed the inflated airbag down to see out through the cracked windscreen. The phone booth was illuminated by a single car headlight. Despite the shattered glass and cracked plastic it was mostly intact.
The engine and music had stopped.The ringing in my ears gave way to another kind - the sound of the payphone clanging.That shrill, agonising ring.
I was overcome by dizziness, so I crawled out of the car, along the wet concrete and towards the booth. Dark red blood pooled around the booth, the puddle growing larger and larger. I had to silence that phone. As I got close I picked out a shape inside, a small shape, and when I realised what it was it destroyed me. Inside the booth, lay Timothy, a stream of blood pulsing from the deep wound in his forehead. His skull all but cracked in two, his eyes stared back at me, lifeless.
I don’t know how long I crouched there in the rain and wind, clutching Tim’s body. Everything my mother had done, all for nothing. All for me to go and… do this. I don’t know how long I was holding Tim, my hands wet with his blood, but at some point, I remember getting up to leave. I reversed out of the forecourt in the battered SUV. I saw Tim’s bike leaning there near the gap in the fence.
That was three days ago, I drove North, I drove through the night until I reached the next city. I left it parked under an overpass and continued on foot, not knowing where I was going, just going. I slept in lobbies and stairwells of rundown apartment buildings.
I had discarded my sim card so that no one could track or call me. I am writing to you now from a bus station that has wifi. I don’t know where I’m headed, but I know I can’t face my mother, I can’t look her in the eye again. I can’t fathom the pain that she’s feeling.
Outside, across the street from the bus station, sits another relic of a pay phone. It is lit by a single street light. The door is open, inviting me in. I want so badly to call her, to let her know how sorry I am. To let her know I’m alive. But no matter how much I miss her, how much I want to hear her voice, how much I know she wants to hear from me, I know that I will never go near a pay phone again.
Mother, if you’re reading this. I’m sorry.
Love, Mel