My husband, David, died exactly three weeks after Susie was born. He never got to see her crawl, never heard her first word, and never walked her to her first day of kindergarten. For eighteen years, it had just been the two of her and me—a quiet, comfortable duo living in a house filled with framed memories of a man she knew only through my stories.
Susie was a grounded girl, or so I thought. She wasn’t prone to flights of fancy or imaginary friends. But as her eighteenth birthday passed, a strange shadow seemed to settle over her. She became secretive, spending long hours in the kitchen near our old, dusty landline—a relic I kept only because the number was the same one David and I had registered when we first moved in.
One Tuesday evening, the house was particularly still. I was heading to the linen closet when I heard it—the soft, rhythmic clicking of the rotary dial, followed by a silence so heavy it felt like a physical weight.
I paused by the hallway archway. Susie was hunched over the receiver, her knuckles white. Her voice was a mere thread of sound, but in the silence of the house, it rang like a bell.
“Okay, Dad,” she whispered, her voice trembling with a mix of affection and fear. “I miss you too.”
My heart didn’t just skip a beat; it stopped cold. I felt a rush of ice water through my veins. David had been buried in the Oakwood Cemetery for nearly two decades. I stepped into the light of the kitchen, my floorboard creaking under my weight.
Susie bolted upright, her face turning a ghostly shade of grey. She slammed the receiver down so hard the bell inside gave a faint, mournful chime.
“Who were you talking to?” I managed to choke out.
She wouldn’t look at me. Her eyes darted toward the window. “No one. Wrong number,” she said, her voice brittle. She brushed past me without another word, locking herself in her bedroom.
Curiosity didn’t just eat at me; it devoured me. I sat in the dark kitchen for hours, staring at the phone. It was a landline; it didn’t have a digital display, but we had a modern base unit in the basement that logged outgoing calls for billing purposes.
At midnight, I went down to the cellar. My hands shook as I scrolled through the tiny LCD screen on the service box. There it was. A call placed at 8:14 PM.
The number wasn’t familiar. It didn’t have a local area code. In fact, it had too many digits to be a standard number, yet the system had registered it as a completed ten-minute call.
Against every instinct of self-preservation, I picked up the basement extension and dialed the digits.
The rings were different—long, hollow sounds that seemed to echo as if the line were passing through a vast, empty canyon.
Ring… Ring… Ring…
Then, a click. No “hello.” No automated greeting. Just the sound of heavy, rhythmic breathing. It sounded wet and labored, like someone struggling for air through a thick fog.
I opened my mouth to speak, to scream, to demand who was harassing my daughter, but the words died in my throat. Before I could make a sound, a voice came through the receiver. It was raspy, distorted by static, but it carried a cadence I hadn’t heard in eighteen years—the specific, melodic lilt of my late husband’s voice.
“Susie,” the voice groaned, the name sounding like it was being dragged through gravel. “Is that you? Did you forget something?”
My stomach twisted into a violent knot. The room felt like it was spinning. I looked up at the basement stairs and saw Susie standing there in her nightgown, her eyes wide and filled with tears.
“Mom,” she whispered, “don’t talk to him. He’s not the same as he was in your stories.”
The basement air grew impossibly cold. Susie stood on the third step from the top, her silhouette shivering against the dim hallway light. I held the receiver away from my ear as if it were a coiled snake, yet the heavy, rhythmic breathing still leaked out of the earpiece, filling the small room.
“Susie,” I whispered, my voice cracking. “What is this? How is this possible?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she walked down the remaining steps, took the phone from my numb hand, and hung it up. The silence that followed was worse than the breathing.
“It started on my birthday,” Susie said, her voice hollow. “I found an old notebook of Dad’s in the attic. Tucked in the back was a sequence of numbers—not a phone number, but a frequency. He’d written a note next to it: ‘In case I don’t make it back to see her.’“
My mind raced. David had been a radio technician for the local coast guard, always obsessed with the way waves moved through the air. I had always assumed his death—a sudden, violent car accident on a rainy night—was just a cruel twist of fate.
“I tried it on the landline just to feel close to him,” she continued, tears finally spilling over. “But Mom, he isn’t… he isn’t in a good place. He says it’s dark. He says he’s been waiting in the static for eighteen years.”
I pushed past the fear. I needed to know. I grabbed the notebook Susie had retrieved and looked at the numbers. It wasn’t just a phone number; it was a set of coordinates mixed with a radio shorthand.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. I waited until Susie’s breathing evened out in the next room, then I went back to the kitchen. I dialed the number again. I had to know if it was really him, or if something was wearing my dead husband’s voice like a mask.
The ringing stopped after half a tone.
“Ellen?” the voice rasped. My name. He hadn’t said my name in nearly two decades. The sound of it sent a jolt of grief so sharp through my chest I nearly fell. “Ellen, you shouldn’t have called. The line… it only works one way for long. He’s coming for the bridge.”
“Who’s coming, David? Where are you?” I cried into the plastic mouthpiece.
“The one who kept me here,” the voice whispered, now sounding terrified. “I traded my silence for her voice. But now that you’ve heard me, the debt is transferred. Look at the windows, Ellen. Look at the windows.”
I turned slowly toward the kitchen window that looked out into the backyard. In the reflection of the glass, I saw myself. But behind my reflection, standing in the middle of the kitchen where there should have been nothing but empty air, was a tall, distorted shape.
It looked like David, but his skin was the color of a television screen without a signal—flickering, grey, and grainy. He wasn’t holding a phone. He was holding the copper wiring that ran from the wall into the back of our landline.
“The connection is established,” the figure said, its mouth moving out of sync with the words coming from the phone in my hand.
Susie appeared in the doorway, but she didn’t scream. She looked at the flickering specter of her father with a terrifyingly calm expression.
“It’s okay, Mom,” she said, her voice devoid of emotion. “He just wants to come home. He just needs a place to stay.”
She stepped toward the figure, and as they touched, the lights in the house began to hum with a deafening, 60-hertz vibration. The landline in my hand began to melt, the plastic bubbling as it fused to my palm.
