The Morning Caller

I work for a small mental health clinic in the outskirts of Mérida, where we provide therapy for children with autism. The building we occupy is an old, converted house, its walls thick with decades of silence. My colleague, Elena, and I would arrive at 7:30 AM, before the children, to power up our computers and wrestle with the temperamental air conditioner. The routine was as predictable as the Yucatán heat, until the day the stillness was broken.

It was a Tuesday. I was in the main office, checking my emails, when I heard Elena’s voice, clear and close, from the hallway: ‘Elena, come see this.’ I froze. That was my voice, but I hadn’t spoken. I walked to the lunch room, where she was pouring coffee. She looked up, puzzled. ‘Did you need me? You called me.’ We laughed it off, blaming the creaking floorboards or the neighbors next door – a dental office that wasn’t open yet. But it happened again the next day, and the next. Sometimes it was me hearing her call, sometimes her hearing me. We decided to confront the neighbors, only to find their office still dark, their opening time posted as 8 AM. They had been late every day, which we assumed was just their habit.

Then the calls stopped, but our mornings took a more sinister turn. Every day, without fail, we would find the ceiling fan in the lunch room spinning wildly, even though we had turned it off the previous evening. The first time, Elena shrugged. ‘Maybe we forgot.’ But we both knew we hadn’t. We made a point of switching it off and watching it stop, only to arrive the next morning to find it whirring, its blades slicing the stale air. We took to unplugging it, yet it still spun, as if possessed by a current we couldn’t see. The children began to notice, pointing at the ceiling with wide, silent eyes. One little boy, Diego, who rarely spoke, whispered to me one morning, ‘She’s watching the fan.’ When I asked who, he just pointed to a corner of the room where the light pooled strangely, and said, ‘The lady in the white dress.’

Then the notes began. Small, folded scraps of paper, appearing on our desks, written in a shaky, childlike script. The first said, ‘Don’t play here.’ The second, ‘He wants to come.’ The third, ‘The door is open.’ We thought it was a prank, but no one else had keys. We called the owner of the building, a gruff old man named Don Miguel, who insisted the house had been empty for years before us. He said, ‘Sometimes the house remembers its family.’ When we pressed him, he reluctantly told us that a woman had lived here in the 1970s, who had drowned her daughter in the old well in the backyard – now sealed under the concrete patio – and then hung herself from the fan in the lunch room. He said the house had been sold cheap because of ‘bad energy.’ The police had ruled it a murder-suicide.

Elena and I looked at each other, our skin prickling. That afternoon, we found the well. It was hidden under a loose slab behind the storage closet, its depth swallowing our flashlight beams. Inside, we saw something glimmer – a child’s bracelet, crusted with dirt. ‘We need to leave,’ Elena said, her voice trembling. We grabbed our bags, but as we reached the front door, it slammed shut. The fan in the lunch room started spinning with a loud hum, and from the hallway, we heard a little girl’s laugh, sweet and hollow. Then, a voice, soft as a moth’s wing, called out, ‘Mama, are you coming?’ We turned to see a figure – a woman in a white dress – standing at the end of the hall, her face shadowed, her hand raised as if in a wave. The fan’s hum grew into a roar, and the lights flickered. We huddled together, praying, until the fan slowed and the laughter faded.

We fled the clinic that day and never returned. The last we heard, a new tenant had moved in, but they only lasted a week. They reported the same strange events, and then the calls stopped. But sometimes, when I’m alone in my apartment, I hear my name whispered in the air conditioning vents. And I know, in my bones, that the morning caller is still waiting for me, just beyond the threshold of that old house, forever calling out for the one who never comes.