Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 08:39:19 -0600 From: Robyn Herrington Organization: University of Calgary Subject: [WRITERS] SUB:CONTEST: CALLING Ah, the first taste of Halloween blood... Here it is, entry number one! Please feel free to critique, but send the crits to ME at rmherrin@ucalgary.ca, and I'll pass them along to the author. In a nutshell: Halloween writing contest. One entry per person. Max 2,500 words. Must be spooky, ooky, icky, creepy... you know, in keeping with Halloween. Send TO ME rmherrin@ucalgary.ca by October 17th. I'll strip the names and post the stories so this is a blind contest. Robyn -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CALLING The telephone rang. She had stopped counting the rings. She knew from experience that it would keep ringing until she picked it up. She held her fingers in her ears, willing the noise to go away. It wouldn't. She knew it wouldn't. It never did. Ten rings. Fifteen rings. It could have been thirty. She couldn't stand the noise anymore. Tara took a deep breath and walked over to the desk. She picked up the phone. No sound. No voice, no breathing. Nothing. She put the receiver on its side, off the headset, and left the room. The ringing started again as soon as she was out of the room. She didn't even bother to look at the Caller ID she had had installed when this had all started. She knew that it wouldn't show any caller. How could it? The phone was unplugged. The phone had been unplugged. It still rang. She'd considered throwing the phone out altogether, but had shied away from that. What would she do when she heard the ringing then? She wouldn't even be able to pretend that it might be someone calling for her. Tara dropped to the couch in the other room, put her hands over the sides of her head, and rocked back and forth. She realized that she was rocking to the rhythm of the insistent ringing, but she didn't care. It took too much energy to resist it. Nobody could help. It wasn't as if she hadn't tried, she reminded herself. She could still see the expression on the face of the man from the phone company when she'd gone there with the record of the times of the calls. "Our records," he'd said slowly, articulating his words as if he thought she wouldn't understand him otherwise, "show no calls to that number at any of those times." And he looked at her, not afraid, not exactly, but wary, as if he didn't know what she might do if he contradicted her. She'd realized at the time that he looked at her the way he would look at a possibly demented person on the street. It was the same look, she thought now, that the police officer had given her, that time she had tried to report the person following her. That had been what? A week before? Two weeks before? She couldn't remember. She was losing track of time. She didn't sleep much anymore, and the days were starting to lose shape. She'd tried so hard to sound rational, educated. It shouldn't have been that difficult! She was rational, she had a Ph.D., for heaven's sake! She'd been employed, then, working at the Ulysses Think Tank. She'd been respected, listened to. She'd been a normal person then. It was before the phone calls. Before she'd started getting those instant messages on her computer. Then, she'd heard someone following her. No big deal, she'd thought at first, except that every time she would turn around, she would see no one. She'd changed her route to work, her route to the store, and it didn't matter how she went, which streets she used. There was always the sound of someone walking a few yards behind her, and there would never be anyone there when she turned to look. She wouldn't have gone to the police except that once, just once, she'd caught a glimpse of something, someone, out of the corner of her eye, when she'd turned around really quickly. The officer had taken the report, but she could see where that report was going. She could see his expression, the way he wrote so carefully, as if he thought it would placate her that he wrote it down at all. She hadn't lost her temper. She thought she hadn't, anyway. It was hard to remember, now. The way she recalled it, though, she had said it flat out. "I'm not crazy," she'd said. He'd smiled at her. "I'm sure," he'd replied. That smile. She'd gritted her teeth at it. She'd known what it meant. "I'm not crazy." She was pretty sure she'd still sounded rational, even calm. "This has been going on for weeks. I've had my hearing checked, and everything. I'm not crazy. I'm really perceiving this. What are you going to do about it?" "We'll look into it," he'd replied. She'd watched him put the report on his desk, and cap his pen. She'd known then that he wouldn't do anything, that none of them would do anything. She'd even been tempted to turn around quickly at the door, to see if he would throw the report out before she'd left the room. That's when she'd stopped going out. She could still work, from home. It wasn't that important to go outside. It had struck her as the only way to avoid that follower, the one she couldn't see, the one nobody believed in, the one she kept hearing. The messages had begun next. Yes, thought Tara. The phone continued ringing, but she thought that if she ignored it perhaps it would stop. At least she could keep her mind off it by running over the sequence, getting the details right. It was good exercise, too, a way of keeping her mind working properly. These days it was so hard to keep a train of thought straight. The phone was so distracting. Don't listen to it, she told herself. Think. Remember. She'd been working on a paper when she'd gotten the first message, and she'd thought it was a joke, or a glitch. She hadn't even installed any instant message software, so there was no reason she should be getting such a message. She'd had explanations, ideas, then. Something that came with her browser, she'd thought. Perhaps someone had sent it to her as an attachment, or perhaps it had been a virus. The little box had opened in the corner of her screen when she was online. It had said one thing. "Tara." It had known her name. Or whoever sent it knew her name. There had been no return address. She'd ignored it. Then it had come again. Her name again, and nothing more. She had known that her nerves were a little on edge (the phone! The phone kept ringing!) from the unseen follower, so she'd tried to put this in perspective. She hadn't wanted to overreact. She had known, or assumed, that no one would take this seriously. After all, what did she have to complain about? The message had just consisted of her name. At first. After some time, and now Tara couldn't quite remember how much time (a day? a week? Would the phone never stop ringing?), the message had changed. "I have been watching you," it said. No name, no return address. She'd played the game. She'd contacted her service provider, the manufacturers of all her software and hardware. She'd spoken to all her coworkers, all her friends, everybody she could think of who might be playing such a stupid prank on her. No one had admitted to it. The service provider claimed to have done a thorough investigation, and hadn't been able to find any source for such messages. She'd replaced everything on her computer. Yes. That might have been when she'd begun to lose perspective, when she did that. But it had felt necessary at the time. Not that it had helped. When she'd booted her new computer for the first time, even before she went online, the little box appeared in the corner of her screen. "I have been watching you." The next one, the next one - Tara tried to remember what the next message had been, but now she couldn't think because of the sound of the ringing. She stormed into the other room, yanked the headset to her head and shouted, "Leave me alone!" The ringing stopped, but there was no one on the other end of the line. She checked again, and the phone was still unplugged. She dropped the receiver. It bounced once on the desk. She heard it ringing when she left the room again. The next message had been the one that scared her. Or rather, it had scared her more than she'd already been scared. "I am near," it had said. Three words. She wouldn't have thought that three simple words could cause her such panic, but she remembered staring at the screen, her heart pounding, and she had been so frightened she couldn't even move, couldn't even force herself to breathe for what had seemed a long moment. She remembered what she had done then. She'd turned off the computer, yanked its plug, its modem connection. She'd gone through her entire apartment, looking under everything, behind everything, out every window, out the door. She hadn't expected to see anything or anyone, and she hadn't seen anyone or anything. Then the phone had rung. That had been the first time. She'd been afraid to answer it because, back then (only a week ago? Or longer? How many days? She couldn't remember), she'd thought the person who was doing this to her would answer, would talk to her, and she'd thought she couldn't bear it. How little she had known. That first time - now all the times were merging, flowing together as if the phone had been ringing nonstop for days, for weeks - the first time, though, she thought she had probably picked up the phone after ten rings or so. There had been no one on the other end. She'd listened for breathing, even, and there had been nothing. She wouldn't have called the phone company for just one such call. She'd contacted them after the twentieth. Or had it been the thirtieth? She couldn't remember, couldn't think. The ringing was boring through her brain. They'd told her what to do. She'd followed their instructions to the letter. She'd filled an entire notebook with the times of the calls, and then she had taken the notebook to the nearest office. Tara had heard her follower on the way to the office, and now, after the messages and the phone calls, she had been afraid to turn around, even if she didn't see who the follower was, or what the follower was. She had tried to focus on what she was doing, to concentrate on the telephone business, and not to remember the other things. Not that it had helped. She could still see his face, the way he had articulated his words so carefully, as if she were crazy. Right now, Tara thought she must be crazy. There must be something wrong with her, that she was feeling this persecuted. Maybe there really weren't any rings, even though she could feel them jangling through her nerves, tearing at the insides of her bones. Maybe there had never been any follower, any instant messages. Maybe she needed to see a psychiatrist. Maybe she needed to be locked up somewhere. Yes. Somewhere where there weren't any phones, any computers. Somewhere no one could reach her. Yes. The more she thought about it, the more she thought it was a good idea. An excellent idea. Yes. She would do that. Tara stood up from the couch, her legs shaky from the cramped way she had been holding them. She noticed that the phone had stopped ringing. Undoubtedly that was a sign that she was making the right move, that all of this had been in her head all along. She walked through the living room. She had almost reached the door when the bell rang. Not the telephone, not this time. She wondered, for a second, who could be ringing her doorbell. She hadn't been expecting callers. Perhaps it was one of her friends, or coworkers. Perhaps it was one of her neighbors. Perhaps someone had come to check up on her, see if she was all right. I am all right, she thought. I have made up my mind, and I will be all right from now on. She opened the door. There was no hallway, nothing outside the door but darkness, darker than rural night, darker than anything she had ever seen in nightmares. It poured around the outside of the door, an emptiness, a void, a huge nothingness that caught her by all parts of her body at once and pulled her to it, to the sound of ringing, like telephones, like doorbells. THE END -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Robyn Herrington New Currents in Teaching and Learning / InfoServe Phone: 220-2561 Email: rmherrin@ucalgary.ca Story ideas are like rabbits that have ventured unwittingly into view. The slightest noise or movement can spook them and they bolt off into the dark undergrowth never to be seen again. -- Adrian Bedford ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~