The Phantom Dial Tone

In the autumn of 2015, I bought a sleek, glass-and-metal smartphone from a secondhand electronics stall in the sprawling Nagpur market. The vendor, a twitchy man with hollow eyes, sold it to me for a suspiciously low price. I was thrilled—it was a flagship model, barely used. My mother, a devout woman who believed in the old ways, frowned at the phone but said nothing.

That night, I slept with the phone charging on my bedside table. At 3:00 AM, I jolted awake from a nightmare of drowning in a sea of static, my lungs filling with buzzing fragments of voices. The phone’s screen was glowing in the dark, displaying a number I didn’t recognize. A message was being typed by invisible fingers: ‘You will listen.’ I deleted it, but my hands trembled.

The next morning, I couldn’t bear to touch the phone. I left it on the table, but it vibrated constantly, syncing to my every thought. When I thought about calling my sister, the phone dialed her number on its own. When I mentally cursed my boss, the phone sent him a string of emojis and gibberish. My mother grew uneasy. She said the house felt ‘heavy,’ especially in the corners where shadows clung longer than they should.

That week, I tried to dispose of the phone. I threw it into a garbage bin on the street, watching it tumble into the muck. The next morning, I found it on my pillow, clean and dry, with a single new message: ‘Did you think that would work?’ I screamed, hurled it against the wall, but it didn’t break. Instead, the screen displayed a live feed of my own face, my eyes wide with terror, and then the feed shifted to show my mother praying in the kitchen, unaware.

I became paranoid. I wrapped the phone in cloth, buried it in a box, and hid it in the attic. But every night, I heard whispers in the hall—though no one was there. When I crept out, the whispers coalesced into a low hum that seemed to emanate from the phone, which had slid out from under the box and was now lying on the floor, glowing. It had written a list on its screen: things I had lost and found again—my grandmother’s locket, my father’s watch, a childhood photograph. All had reappeared in odd places, as if the phone were toying with me.

One evening, my mother fell ill. Her fever spiked, and she started muttering in a language I’d never heard. The house grew cold. The phone’s screen flickered with static, and in the static, I saw a shape—a tall, gaunt figure with no face, but with a mouth that opened like a wound. It spoke through the phone’s speakers in a voice that was both my mother’s and not: ‘You are listening now.’

In desperation, I decided to destroy it completely. I took the phone to a lake and threw it into the water. I watched it sink, and for a moment, I felt relief. But that night, I found it in my bathtub, water dripping from its speaker. And this time, it wasn’t just the phone. Across my bedroom wall, in black, scorch-like marks, was written: ‘I will never stop. You are my vessel.’

I haven’t slept in three days. I tried to tell my mother, but she only stared at me with eyes that weren’t hers. She now carries the phone with her, humming a tune I used to sing as a child. And tonight, the phone just vibrated with a message from an unknown number: ‘Tell your mother I’m waiting.’ I’m afraid to look at it. I’m afraid to move. But I know I have to answer, because the phone is no longer a phone—it’s a gateway, and something is about to step through.