While we’re looking for longer fiction, we reserve the right to share a keen piece of flash with you when we find it. Friend of the blog and Alasdair Stuart sent us this tidbit and we’re eager to share it with you. Enjoy it and look for more fiction coming soon!
I was having dinner with an old friend earlier tonight. Lucy and I have known one another for years, and have the rock solid bond of people who survived puberty together. She was my first true love and whilst I wasn’t hers, we stayed close. She views me as a brother and I view her as a goddess and somehow we muddle through. The arrangement is simple; every six months we go out for dinner and catch up on who’s married, who’s divorced, who’s fat, who’s bald and who’s gay.
Lucy was great company, as usual. She’s witty, self-deprecating and frighteningly intelligent. She was also wildly eccentric and had been prone, in our younger years, to near criminal acts in order to relieve her boredom. It was Lucy who was chased over the roof of our school by the headmaster when, in the summer holidays, she decided to go climbing. It was Lucy who to this day has a straight, two inch scar running down the centre of her forehead from when she fell through a window doing the same thing later that year. And it was Lucy who had once stood up to a school bully by keying his dad’s car. Thirteen times.
Which is why it was so odd when she jumped at my mobile phone. Not just in that surprised way either, but she went white as a sheet and looked at it for a second with absolute terror. This woman, this beautiful, wild young woman whom I’d spent much of my life lusting after from afar was scared of my Nokia 2310.
Of course, she tried to laugh it off at first, but I was persistent. There was a brittle look to her eyes, and she refused to meet my gaze until I asked her outright why the hell she was scared of my phone. She looked me straight in the eyes and I swear if she hadn’t looked so frightened I would have laughed.
“I thought it was for me.”
It came spilling out after that. It seems that a few months prior to us meeting up again, Lucy and a couple of friends had been text freaks. They messaged one another everywhere they went, kept up to date on the latest phones and competed to see who could get the best mobile, the most free minutes. I told her that the Japanese have a term, ‘Oya Yubi Sedai’, for people who loved their phones that much. She told me I needed to get out more and laughed, the sound a little too hollow and a little too high.
As it turns out, they got talking one night and began to wonder idly about who had the next number “up.” If Lucy’s number was 769594 then who had 595? Or 593 for that matter? They were drunk and bored and so they started ringing their nearly numbers.
Most of course, were either not in use or had their voice mails on. They left pleasant, drunk messages about how they were “exploring” the phone lines. This carried on for quite a while, until they hit a number that Lucy couldn’t quite remember. They rung it and a recorded voice on the other end said:
“You are forbidden to use this number. Please disconnect immediately.”
Lucy being Lucy, this was like a red rag to a bull. She put the number on redial and sat there for at least an hour, screaming with vodka fuelled laughter as the number rang over and over and over again. She went home and thought nothing more of it.
On the way to work that morning, every phone box rang as she passed.
At work, her office phone rang once an hour, every hour for precisely thirty seconds. There was the sound of her own laughter from the previous night, recorded on the other end.
Her mobile no longer needed recharging, and there were ten text messages waiting for her. When she opened them, they all said the same thing.
WHO’S LAUGHING NOW?
She changed her number, contacted the authorities and was politely but firmly told that there was no record of any of the phone calls, she received, anywhere in the system. She’d thrown away the first mobile by this point and couldn’t remember the number she’d called. Reluctantly, the police agreed to put a monitor on the line and a week later, when no calls had been received, they took it away again.
The calls started again, the next day. She changed phones again, moved and stopped talking to her phone friends. They, she said, had the same look she did. The look of someone being toyed with. Someone being hunted.
After two months, the calls stopped. By this time Lucy had used all her sick time from work and was on a final written warning for her behaviour. Despite this, she refused to be defeated and set about rebuilding her life. She’d almost managed it when, four months later, she met me and my phone.
I asked her who she thought the number was and she said that a friend of hers had some suspicions. He thought it could be a government number, the sort of thing that only a few people in the country should ever ring. Alternately, it was a phone company employee who happened to be a psycho. Or, and she smiled despite herself at this, it was a haunted line. We laughed, and I paid the bill and went home, alone. As I always did with Lucy.
When I got there, there was a text message on my mobile. It was the call that had sparked the conversation in the first place, the one I’d ignored when Lucy had looked so terrified.
The message is simple and very short, but I’ve been reading it over and over for the last twenty minutes.
STAY AWAY FROM HER.
The caller withheld their number
picture by http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisdlugosz/
