The Intercom’s Last Ring

In the humid outskirts of Antipolo, I grew up under my grandparents’ stern love in a house that could have been mistaken for a forgotten Spanish garrison. The walls were thick, crumbling adobe, painted a faded ochre that seemed to drink the sunlight. Inside, the gloom was tempered by flickering fluorescent tubes and the ever-present scent of old wood and mothballs. Every surface was draped in doilies, every corner crowded with dark, carved furniture that had witnessed three generations of births and deaths. But the true soul of that house was its art: dozens of paintings, each one a mother cradling her child, their eyes rendered with unnerving precision. They hung in every room, in every hall, on every landing. No matter where you stood, at least one pair of eyes would be fixed on you, following your slightest movement with a terrible, silent patience.

My refuge from those painted gazes was the intercom. It was a dusty beige box in the upstairs hallway, connected by a thin wire to its twin in the kitchen below. When my grandparents were at their sari-sari store, the house would fall into a profound stillness, broken only by the ticking of the grandfather clock and the occasional creak of settling wood. I, a lonely seven-year-old, would press the Talk button and whisper, ‘Testing, testing, Lolo? Lola?’ The static would hiss back, and sometimes, just sometimes, I fancied I heard a faint, breathy response that was not my imagination. But one afternoon, I pressed the button and heard a woman’s voice, not my grandmother’s, not the maid’s. It was low and soothing, like a lullaby, and it said, ‘Don’t worry, child. She’s watching over you.’ I asked who she was, but the intercom gave only static and then a click. The hairs on my arm stood up, and I vowed to never use it again.

But the intercom had other plans. That evening, as the sun bled into the horizon, my grandparents returned from work. They flicked on the lights in the kitchen, and the moment they did, the intercom emitted a burst of crackling noise. My Lolo frowned and tapped the box. ‘Must be the wiring,’ he muttered. But then, a voice, clear as a bell, sang from the speaker: ‘Lolo, Lola, can you hear me?’ It was my own voice, but I was upstairs in my room. My blood turned to ice. My grandparents looked at each other, and my Lola’s face went pale. She grabbed the Talk button and said, ‘Neneng? Is that you?’ There was a pause, then a giggle that wasn’t mine. The intercom went dead. That night, I heard whispering from the hallway, but when I opened my door, the hallway was empty except for the eyes of the paintings, which seemed more alive than ever.

The next day, while my grandparents were at the store, the intercom spoke again. This time, it was a chorus of whispers, overlapping and urgent. ‘She’s coming,’ they said. ‘She’s tired of waiting.’ I ran to my grandmother’s room and hid under the bed, clutching my knees. But the whispers followed me, coming from the intercom in that room as well. I covered my ears, but the sound bypassed my hands, echoing inside my skull. When my grandparents came home, they found me curled in a corner, trembling. My Lolo’s face was stern, but his hands were shaking. He fetched a hammer and began prying the intercom from the wall. ‘No more,’ he said. ‘This house has enough ghosts without that thing.’ But when he pulled the wires from the wall, they were not copper and rubber. They were roots, dark and moist, with tiny white buds at the ends.

My Lola covered her mouth with a trembling hand. ‘When did you last go down to the basement?’ she asked my Lolo. He shook his head. ‘I didn’t know we had one.’ But we did. Behind the movable bookshelf in the study, a hidden staircase led down to a pitch-black cellar. My grandparents descended with a flashlight, and I peered from the top of the stairs. The light revealed a small, dusty room, and in its center, a cradle. The cradle was rocking, though there was no wind. As the light touched it, the rocking stopped. My Lola picked something up from the floor: a tattered, embroidered blanket with a name stitched in old script: ‘Isabel.’ She let out a strangled cry. ‘That’s your great-grandmother’s name,’ she whispered. ‘She died in this house. They said the mother and child paintings are her eyes.’

A deep, resonant click came from the walls, and the intercom in my hand—the one I had pulled from the kitchen—began to move on its own. The wires, now visible, were like veins, pulsing with a sickly green light. The voice from it spoke, no longer sweet, but ancient and enraged: ‘You took my child from me. Now I’ll take yours.’ The paintings began to detach from their frames one by one, their canvas curling like lips, revealing black, honeycomb-like voids behind them. The eyes in each painting shifted, looking at me, at my grandparents, at the hidden cradle. And the intercom sang a lullaby that I knew from my own childhood, taught to me by my Lola. It was the same lullaby her mother had sung, and her mother before her, passed down from Isabel herself.

We fled that house that night, leaving everything behind. We moved to a cramped apartment in Manila, and my grandparents never spoke of the old house again. But it didn’t matter. During the day, I could see the paintings in my dreams, always watching. And at night, if I pressed my ear to the wall, I could still hear the intercom crackling, even though it was five hundred miles away. Sometimes, in the dead of night, my phone will ring, and when I pick it up, there’s nothing but static. But then, through the white noise, a faint, breathy voice will whisper my name, and I know that Isabel has found a new way to call. And she’s patient. She’ll wait as long as she has to, for the house may be gone, but her eyes are still watching, and the intercom never really dies.