The Call from Nowhere

I've heard the stories about cursed phone calls. Urban legends, people said. Ghost lines that connect to something that shouldn't be there. I never believed it. Until it happened to me.It started as a dare between me and my friend—we were both bored one night, hanging out, and somehow the conversation drifted to those viral videos. You know the ones. People calling supposedly haunted numbers, recorded EVP sessions, the usual. We laughed about it. Said it was all fake. So we decided to prove it.We found a list online. Some forum post with a bunch of numbers people claimed were hotlines to the other side. We called a few. Most went nowhere. A couple actually connected to something—a wrong number, a confused voice, one that just breathed. We laughed it off. Posted a couple of videos for clout. Then we moved on.A month passed.October 4th, 2020. I remember the date because my phone showed it in bright, ordinary letters. I was at boarding school—ninth grade, private institution, no phones allowed during term. I was flipping through my call log out of pure boredom when I saw it.International prefix. United States.Not a missed call. An answered call.I stared at it for a long time. My thumb hovered over the details. I didn't remember making this call. I didn't remember anyone calling me. And yet there it was, logged at 6:47 PM on a Tuesday afternoon—one week before I discovered it.My hands started shaking as I opened the recording.My voice. That was definitely my voice. Just one word:"Hello?"Then static. And something else. A voice—not quite a voice. Too distorted, too layered, like someone speaking through water or decades of interference."Please... protect yourself. I'm not... bad. Please listen to what I have to say. Why... why won't you let me... finish? Please. Protect... yourself. I'm afraid I'll... lose control."That's when the recording ended. Except it didn't end normally.At the fifteen-second mark, the audio corrupted. No matter what I tried—replaying, downloading, transferring—every player reset to the beginning. As if something on that recording didn't want me to hear the rest.I should have deleted it. I should have blocked the number and forgotten about it. But I couldn't.Because every night after that, I had the same dream.A woman. Always a woman. Standing on top of a building, face obscured by distance and dark. She was screaming at me—mouth open wide, arms reaching—but I couldn't hear the words. Then she would jump. Fall toward me. And I would wake up gasping, heart pounding, always—always—at exactly 3:00 AM.Every single night. 3 AM. Sharp.This went on for a week. Seven nights of the same woman, the same fall, the same moment of terror. I was exhausted. Running on fumes. I barely remembered my classes. I couldn't eat. I started planning to call my parents, tell them something was wrong.Then, on my way to class, I fell.I wasn't doing anything reckless. Just walking up the stairs like I did every day. One step, then another, then nothing. My legs simply gave out beneath me. Not tripped, not slipped. Just... collapsed. I tumbled all the way down, my knee crushing against the sharp edge of the landing.The school called my parents. The doctor said I had damaged my kneecap badly—torn something that would take weeks to heal, maybe longer.That's when I told them everything. Not about the prank calls—that felt too stupid to mention. Just about the phone. The recording. The dreams.My parents didn't dismiss it. That surprised me. Instead, my mother exchanged a look with my father, and the next day we drove to see someone—a woman in our hometown. People called her the Reader. Not a therapist. Not a doctor. Someone who saw things the rest of us couldn't.She listened to the recording. Her face went pale."Your phone reached somewhere it shouldn't have. Something heard you. Something... followed you back."She didn't explain the details. Just said it was an entity that fed on fear, and it had made a kind of connection with me through that call. The dreams weren't dreams. They were intrusions. And the fall—well, some things don't want you getting away.She gave me a small talisman to wear against my skin. A folded piece of paper, covered in characters I couldn't read, sealed in cloth. She said to keep it on me at all times and never to speak of what I'd done.I wore it.The dreams stopped that night.I still have the phone. I haven't turned it on in months. It's in a drawer in my room, wrapped in the talisman's cloth, buried under clothes. I don't know what's on the other end of that number. I don't know what I almost invited into my life.But I know this:Don't dial the dead. Some lines, once connected, never really hang up.<hr/>Have you ever received a call you shouldn't have? Share your experience in the comments.