Phone Call

Photo by Sebastiano Corti on Unsplash

“Are you sure we’re not lost, Jason?”

I took a gander at my pregnant wife, Marissa, before turning right for the third time. Unlike many of our peers who married young and became pregnant before they hit their thirties, Marissa and I met one another late in life and married in our thirties.

Doctors and friends alike told us we wouldn’t be able to get pregnant and that we should settle for an adoption. After trying for five years without any results, we gave up all hope and prepared the paperwork to adopt a toddler.

When Marissa became with child, the last thing I expected was this growing trepidation in the pit of my stomach. I never considered how attached I would become to our unborn child. With each passing day, I learnt something new about myself and understood with what heart my single mother raised me in the ghetto.

But the blessing didn’t last for long.

A phone call came through in the dead of night. Jordan, my big brother, said Mum had taken ill and probably wouldn’t make it through the night. Marissa insisted on coming along seeing the distraught state I was in.

We were halfway through the countryside and what should’ve been only a one-hour drive to the southeast. But when we passed the two-hour mark, both of us knew that something was amiss.

I knew this route like the back of my hand. I grew up in the countryside and knew my way around these parts of the country better than anyone. But that night, something or someone hindered me from finding my way out of the vicious loop.

“What does the GPS say?” I said.  

“I’m not sure…”

“Put in the address again.”

“Like this?”

I briefly peeked at the phone screen. Since this was the countryside and we were in the middle of a single-lane road through the meadows, our surroundings were pitch-black.

“Delete the ‘e’. No, keep the ‘s’, just—hold on.”

When she typed it wrong again, I seized the phone without letting my eyes off the windshield. As I typed the last letter, something in the middle of the road caught my attention and I hit the brakes.

Lurching forwards, I looked up to take another look at what I could only describe as a huge tree blocking off the route ahead.

Catching her breath, Marissa, “Why’d you stop? Jason?”

“Stay here.”

The first thing that arrested me was the clean cut. Someone barricaded the roadway on purpose. As soon as this thought crossed my mind, I looked around myself in the shadowy depths and tried to locate anything out of the ordinary in the wooded vicinity.

“What’s going—”

“No, stay there!” I said without looking at her. “Lock the doors and stay put.”

I saw nothing that could explain the angst taking hold of every fibre of my being. The only thing I could tell for sure at the time was that I needed to protect my family.

Something was in the offing.

Typing in 911, unsure of what to say to the operator, something moved past me and disappeared into the wilted thickets. I paused and held my breath.

A maniacal laughter reverberated throughout the vicinity. I spun around in place, trying to locate the source of the strange laughter. How many were they?

I stumbled backwards as I pressed the ‘call’ button, careful not to make any sounds and make it back to the car in one piece.

“This is 911. What’s the address of your emergency?”

“I- I don’t know, I’m not sure. We passed the highway an hour ago, I think.”

“Where were you headed, Jason?”

“We were—I’m sorry?”

“Isn’t this Jason speaking?”

“What’s—”

The woman’s voice morphed into a deep, slow tone.

“What have you done, Jason?”

“W- what is this? Some kind of nationwide joke?”

“What… have… you… done… Ja-son?”

I glanced at the phone screen. What the heck? The phone number on the screen was a jumbled mess of random letters and symbols.

“Hello? Who’s this?”

The deep voice now turned shrill, like a disturbing cross between a moan and a scream.

“Ja-son, Ja-son, Ja-son…”

The phone slipped through my grasp, but the voice continued to ring in my ears. Blood gushed out of my mouth and seeped out through the corners of my lips.

I bled from every hole and pore. The crimson liquid, sticky and warm to the touch, soaked me wet at an unprecedented speed.

I gasped. The voices faded away. Buzzing, another phone call came through from an unknown caller. I picked up the phone and observed it ring for a few seconds.

“Hel…lo?”

“Where have you been—Jason? What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

I looked over my shoulder upon hearing her voice on the other end of the line.

My legs gave way under me and I fell with the phone clutched tight in my hand.

The disfigured body, cold and stiff, stared right back at me. She held her belly. The look in her hollow eyes was that of a woman in great distress through the windshield.

“Jason? Are you there?”

As I placed the phone in my ear, the skeletal figure gasped to life and spotted me.

“Ma… rissa?”

“Is everything okay? You’ve been acting so strange lately. Did something happen between you and Jordan?”

The living dead crawled out of the car.

“W- what do you mean?”

“You stormed out in the middle of the night and didn’t return for weeks. Something’s different about you, I can tell…”

“Different?”

“You keep talking to yourself and…”

The cadaver drew closer. It was bleeding from its legs.

“And?”

The voice on the other end of the line faded away.

“Marissa? Hello—”

The deep voice, which sounded muffled and as if underwater, returned.

“What have you done, Ja-son? What have you done to our ba-by?”

I looked up as a shadow fell over me and shrouded everything in shadows. The creature’s belly ripped apart from within. Something pierced through my throat – something that lurked inside its bleeding womb.

As I collapsed into the pool of blood and convulsed, the voice on the phone kept growing louder and shriller, purposely trying to jog my memory and make me remember what I had no recollection of.  

When I took my last breath, everything returned to normal.

The phone call ended.

The whispers faded away.

And… the beat of my wretched heart picked up.

Coming back to life a second time, I stirred awake with a gasp and glanced at the clock. It read four past one o’clock in the witching hour. When a minute passed, a phone call came through and made my chest rise and fall in an unnatural rhythm.

It was Jordan.

I didn’t answer the phone.

When it finally stopped ringing, I shifted my gaze to Marissa, who slept soundly beside me. I snug close to her and wrapped my arms around her, placing kisses on her delicate shoulder.

I missed my mother’s last moments. She apparently told Jordan not to call me for some reason, although he ended up calling that one failed time after she fell asleep.

When we met up at the maternity ward two months later, my brother told me something that would forever stay with me.

Quote, Mum kept telling me to not call you. When I asked why, she said you’d know the reason, end quote.

Was this a mother’s intuition at play?

As I held my son and he wrapped his tiny hands around my thumb, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of ache within my soul.

That night, when I picked up that phone call, did Mum know that something wicked had set its eyes on me and my family?