My daughter called me at night and begged, “Mom, please open the door, I’m so cold.” I was horrified to hear this, because my daughter had died four years ago 😨😱
Looking out into the yard, I saw something strange on the porch.
The phone rang at one o’clock in the morning, when the house had long since fallen silent. My mother lay in the darkness, listening to the old brass pendulum clock, which she’d inherited from her mother, chime once dully. Almost immediately after, the phone rang in the living room.
She slowly sat up in bed and listened. Every sound in this house was familiar to her: the creak of a floorboard near the threshold, the quiet sigh of a radiator, the barely perceptible rustle of the wind outside. Her legs were wobbly, especially at night, but she finally found her slippers, threw on her robe, and walked down the dark hallway to the phone.
The receiver was warm. Mother pressed it to her ear, bracing herself for anything but what came next.
“Mom, please open the door. I’m very cold.”
The voice was painfully familiar. The intonation with which the vowels dragged at the end of the sentence, the quiet manner of speaking, as if apologizing for disturbing. That’s how Anna spoke. That’s how she always spoke.
Mother felt a tightening inside. Her mind immediately reminded her that Anna had been dead for four years, after a terrible accident. Mother closed the coffin lid herself and went to the cemetery every week.
And now she was calling, but how?
“I’m on the porch,” the voice continued. “Please open the door.”
Mother herself didn’t understand how she ended up at the front door. She turned on the porch light and pressed her eye to the peephole. She saw something in front of the door that terrified her. 🫣😱 Continued in the first comment 👇👇
The courtyard was empty. Wet asphalt lay beneath the streetlamp, an old bench loomed dark against the wall, and no one else was there.
“Anna, are you sure it’s you?” she asked in a trembling voice, still staring at the peephole.
There was a pause on the other end of the line for a few seconds, and then came a strange, awkward laugh.
“No… I’m sorry. I’m not Anna. My name is Emma. I think I dialed the wrong number. I had a few drinks and got confused… Please forgive me.”
The mother slowly hung up and stood by the door for a long time, staring into the void beyond the peephole, realizing that the most terrifying thing about that night wasn’t the ringing phone, but how easily her heart had believed.
