THE SILENT CALL SENSATION

As far as any of us can remember, it all started with Alice Bennett. She hadn’t been to school in weeks – one day just stopped coming, vanished – and none of us seemed to know a thing. She was an empty desk, a blank space previously occupied. We wondered where she was, what had happened. We were concerned and we were curious and we needed to know.

Those of us sat in first period English that Monday in early October heard the story first. We heard it from Hannah Sharp, her closest friend. She’d been reluctant to tell us anything, but on that morning she gave in and we listened eagerly.

She told us that the reason Alice had stopped coming was because of the phone calls. For weeks she had been getting them, two sometimes three a night, and on the line the same thing – silence and then the faint sound of breathing, slowly getting closer. Alice had told her that she could picture the calls coming from somewhere dark, somewhere hidden, and after every one of them she felt strange. She felt dispirited, heavy, depressed. It was like something from the phone had got inside her, had infected her somehow. She unplugged her phone but the calls seemed to follow her – she’d be at a friend’s house and she’d get a call. At the supermarket a voice would come over the speakers asking her to come to the front desk. At school a teacher would come to her class and motion for her to follow. And always that breathing getting closer. And always that feeling of hopelessness, of growing distant, of feeling that she was somehow disappearing inside the folds of the world, until she