The Unanswered Exchange

As a graduate student at Hartfield University, I often relied on the 9:15 PM bus to get me back to my cramped apartment across town. But that evening, my project on migratory patterns of spectral moths kept me late in the biology lab. When I finally rushed to the bus stop, I watched the taillights of the last bus disappear around the corner.

Cursing under my breath, I fumbled for my phone to call my brother, Daniel. But as I pressed the call button, a recorded voice informed me I had no credit. Panic began to set in. My friend, Maya, who had stayed to finish her own work, offered me her smartphone. I took it gratefully and dialed Daniel’s number.

I expected the usual dial tone, but instead, I heard a faint, muffled sound. It was like someone crying, but distorted, as if from a great distance. The sound sent a chill down my spine. In confusion and fear, I whispered, ‘Hello?’

There was no response, just the eerie wailing. I pulled the phone away from my ear, my hand trembling. I double-checked the number: yes, it was Daniel’s. Confused, I pressed the phone to my ear again. This time, I heard the normal dial tone, steady and monotonous. Daniel’s voicemail picked up, and I left a message asking him to come pick me up.

I handed the phone back to Maya, who looked at me with concern. ‘Are you alright? You look pale.’ I brushed it off, saying the signal was bad. But inside, I was shaken. I sent Daniel a text from my own phone, hoping he would see it.

About twenty minutes later, Daniel’s car pulled up. He rolled down the window, his face a mask of worry. ‘Sorry, I was in a meeting. You okay?’ I nodded and got in, trying to dismiss the strange phone incident as a technical glitch. But as we drove through the quiet streets, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was deeply wrong.

Later that night, as I lay in bed, my mind replayed the disembodied cries. I decided to check my call log to see if the incident had left any trace. To my horror, I found a call to Daniel’s number at 9:15 PM, the exact time I had been at the bus stop. But I hadn’t made that call. My phone had been in my pocket, unused. The call lasted for 10 seconds, and there was a recording icon next to it.

I pressed the play button, expecting to hear my own voice on voicemail. Instead, I heard the same muffled crying, but this time clearer. And underlying it was a voice, barely discernible, whispering my name. ‘Elara… Elara…’ I snapped the phone shut, my heart pounding.

For the next week, I tried to rationalize it. I convinced myself it was a prank or a network error. But at night, I would lie awake, listening for that whisper. One evening, Daniel called me, his voice strained. ‘Elara, I need to tell you something. Remember that night we picked you up? A few days before, I received a strange call from your number. But you weren’t on the other end. It was just crying and then a whisper… saying my name. I thought it was a prank, but then I got a voicemail from that same call. It’s the same recording you described. I don’t know who sent it.’

I felt a cold dread wash over me. We both had received the same creepy call from our own numbers. Determined to get to the bottom of it, we decided to trace the source. We contacted our service provider, but they said there was no record of the calls on their network. The calls had been made, but not through any tower they could trace.

Frustrated, we visited a local electronics expert, an old friend of our family named Professor Hartley. He examined our phones and found a strange app installed on both, something we had never downloaded. It was called ‘Nocturne.’ When he tried to open it, the screen flickered and displayed a map of the city with a pulsing red dot at an address outside town.

Terrified but driven, we drove to the location, an abandoned church on the edge of the woods. The doors creaked open, revealing a dusty interior. On the altar sat an old rotary phone. As we approached, it started to ring. The ring was distorted, like the crying we had heard. I reached out to answer it, but Daniel grabbed my hand. ‘Don’t.’ But it was too late; the phone lifted to my ear.

A voice spoke, not from the phone but from all around us, echoing in the hollow space. ‘You found the exchange. Now you must pay the toll.’ I dropped the phone, and the ground shook. Shadows began to coalesce into a figure with no face, its mouth open in a silent scream. The figure pointed at us, and we felt an icy grip on our hearts.

We ran out of the church, back to the car, and drove away without looking back. But as we sped into the night, I saw in the rearview mirror the figure standing on the road, watching us. The app ‘Nocturne’ had vanished from our phones, but I knew this was not the end.

Weeks passed, and we tried to forget. But every night at 9:15, my phone would ring. When I answered, there was nothing but the faint sound of crying and a whisper of a name. And I knew that somewhere, the exchange was waiting for its next call.