The Caller

by Chris Carter

  She hadn’t dated anyone in nearly two years, and she had almost forgotten how exciting it could be. How a single kiss could make a person feel. And right then, she felt good. So good that the note and bracelet incident had completely slipped her mind. So good that for an instant, she kept the lights switched off, leaned back against her front door, closed her eyes and savored the moment. So good that she failed to notice the dark shadow now standing just outside her window, his eyes staring straight at her.

  Seventy

  Erica Barnes placed the popcorn bag inside the microwave, set the time to two and a half minutes and hit the start button. While waiting for the ‘pops’ to begin, she poured herself a large glass of wine.

  Popcorn and red wine, that was how Erica fought off her Sunday night blues. Not that she suffered badly from it. She didn’t hate her job and the people she worked with were . . . well . . . ‘bearable’ would be the word she’d use. She also didn’t fear Monday mornings. She never had a problem getting up early, and she rarely started her week in a ‘grumpy’ mood, but still, there was just something about Sunday evenings that always made her feel a little sad.

  Sunday nights were also poker nights, the nights when Trevor, her boyfriend of two years and who Erica shared her small one-bedroom apartment with, would usually lose one hundred and fifty dollars (maximum stakes allowed) to his friends. True, every now and then he would win a little, but those Sunday nights were rare, to say the least.

  But there was one thing about this particular Sunday evening that did excite Erica. Her sister, Dr. Gwen Barnes, was going out on a date. That thought alone brought a smile to Erica’s lips. Gwen hadn’t dated anyone in a very long time and, in Erica’s view, it was about time her sister got back in the game.

  They had spoken briefly on the phone earlier in the day. In the conversation, Gwen mentioned that she’d met someone . . . someone who seemed to be a nice person. She also mentioned that they were supposed to go out for coffee later today. Erica’s immediate reaction was to shower her sister with questions: ‘Who is he? Where did you meet? How did you meet?’ But Gwen smoothly dodged the questions by telling her that she was running late for something and that she would call Erica again later, after the date.

  Erica heard the first popcorn pop after thirty-three seconds. She placed her wine glass on the counter and leaned forward, getting closer to the microwave. The instructions on the packet said two and a half minutes but, just like most people, she preferred to listen to the time gap between pops. As soon as it got to any longer than two seconds, it was time to stop it.

  Erica poured the popcorn into a large bowl, grabbed her wine glass and walked over to her living room. There, she switched on the TV, and dumped herself on to the sofa.

  ‘OK,’ she said, in conversation with the popcorn. ‘Let’s find something to watch, shall we?’

  Before she began flicking through the channels, she reached for her cellphone, took a picture of her wine glass and the popcorn bowl, and quickly uploaded it to her social media page. That done, she swopped the phone for the TV remote.

  Flick – Rerun on and old show. Flick – Rerun on and old show. Flick – Rerun on and old show.

  ‘Are you kidding me?’

  Flick – The Real Wives of Somewhere. Flick – The Real Husbands of Somewhere. Flick – Big Brother.

  ‘No way. This crap is still going on? Do people still watch this?’

  Flick – some romantic comedy was just starting.

  ‘I guess this will do.’

  Erica placed the remote down next to her and had a sip of her wine followed by a mouthful of the friends she was just talking to. She had just gotten comfortable, with the popcorn bowl resting on top of her crossed legs, when her cellphone rang.

  ‘Typical,’ she whispered, reaching for it.

  A video-call from her sister.

  ‘That’s weird,’ she thought. Erica and Gwen didn’t video-call that often. Erica checked her watch: 10:12 p.m. She accepted the call.

  ‘Hey, Sis,’ she said as the image began materializing on her screen. ‘That was a quick date. Did everything go OK?’

  All Erica could see were her sister’s eyes.

  ‘Sis, you’re too close to the phone. What are you doing? Have you gone blind? Move back a bit.’ She stuffed another handful of popcorn into her mouth.

  ‘Hello, Erica.’

  The voice Erica heard from her phone speakers was scarily deep and time-delayed. Immediately, she frowned at her screen.

  ‘Sis, you’re too close to the phone. Your voice is distorting. Move back, woman. What’s wrong with you?’

  Only then did Erica notice how red her sister’s eyes were. It looked like she’d been crying.

  ‘Gwen, is everything all right?’ Erica’s tone of voice became ominously serious. ‘What’s going on? What’s wrong?’

  Her sister blinked, but there was no reply.

  ‘Gwen, what the hell? You’re starting to scare me now. Will you say something, please?’

  Finally, the image began panning out, but strangely enough it stopped before Gwen’s face came into full view. Erica frowned. She couldn’t see her sister’s ears. In fact, she couldn’t see past the outside edge of her eyes. She was now certain that her sister had been crying.

  ‘Gwen? What the fuck is going on? Why were you crying? And why is the sound all fucked up?’

  . . .

  ‘Talk to me, Sis.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with the sound,’ the distorted voice came again. To Erica, it sounded like some sort of B-horror film demon’s voice. ‘And your sister can’t answer you because she’s not allowed to speak,’ it continued. ‘If she does, she dies.’

  Gwen had an unusual sense of humor. Erica knew that well, but this wasn’t it. She was a psychiatrist, and one thing that she would never do was play with people’s emotions in this sort of way.

  ‘What?’ Erica’s voice wavered. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘I’m nobody. But you can be somebody. You can be a hero for your sister. All you have to do is give me two correct answers and all this is over.’

  Erica shook her head. ‘What? What questions? What are you talking about?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  ‘No, I won’t.’ Erica sounded angry. ‘What I’m doing is calling the cops.’

  ‘Do you really think that the cops can get to your sister’s house before I slice her up?’ the demon asked.

  Suddenly, a gloved hand appeared on the screen, holding a kitchen knife, its tip just millimeters away from Dr. Barnes’ left eye.

  ‘I’ll start by gouging her eyes out,’ the demon continued. ‘Then I’ll slice her nose off.’ The tip of the knife moved to it. ‘Then I’ll rip the sides of her mouth open all the way to her ears and leave her here, bleeding to death for the cops to find her. How would you like that, Erica?’

  Dr. Barnes’ eyes were filled with desperate panic, as they tried to focus on the knife. Her mouth opened, readying a scream, but fear silenced her voice.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ Erica’s heart began crawling up to her throat. Tears welled up in her eyes. ‘Gwen.’

  ‘You better listen carefully, Erica, because I’m only going to explain this once. Are you ready?’ Without waiting for a reply the demon explained the rules to his game. ‘That’s it,’ he said when he was done. ‘Simple, isn’t it? All you have to do is answer me. So . . . shall we begin?’

  Erica was shaking so much she had to hold the phone with both hands.

  ‘Here we go. First question.’ To heighten the suspense, the demon added a long, stagnant pause. When he spoke again, his words came out slowly and syncopated. ‘What was the last post you uploaded to your social media page?’

  Instinctively, Erica’s head moved back a couple of inches. She doubted her ears.

  ‘What? My last post? What is this? Are you serious?’

  On the screen, Gwen’s lips began trembling.

  ‘Yes,’ the demon replied. ‘I’m very serious. You
update your page several times a day with the kind of needless information about your life that no one really cares to know, don’t you, Erica?’

  Erica looked lost.

  ‘So I want to know what your last totally unnecessary post was about. That was less than five minutes ago, remember? You added a picture to it.’ Another pause, this time a lot shorter than the previous one. ‘You have five seconds.’

  Erica blinked once. Twice. Three times. To her, this made absolutely no sense.

  ‘Four . . . three . . .’

  ‘Umm . . . I posted a picture of my popcorn and my wine, saying that I was just getting comfortable to watch some Sunday night TV.’

  The demon stopped counting.

  Silence.

  Erica waited.

  Still silence.

  For a moment, Erica doubted her answer. ‘Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.’ The demon laughed such a guttural laugh, Erica felt her blood run cold inside her veins. ‘Yes.’ He finally accepted it. ‘Of course it is, but you doubted yourself for a second there, didn’t you?’

  Erica felt so relieved, she almost wet herself.

  On the screen, Gwen’s terrified eyes moved right and stayed there for several seconds. A couple of tears rolled out of them, but Erica was so confused, so lost, she failed to notice something very odd. The tears didn’t roll down her cheeks. They rolled to the side of her face.

  ‘Question two. Answer this one right, and this exercise is over. You and your sister win. Answer it wrong and . . .’ The demon didn’t finish his sentence.

  Erica sucked in a difficult breath of air.

  ‘Your mother’s death anniversary, Erica, when is it?’

  ‘What?’ Fear exploded inside Erica’s mind and heart. ‘My mother’s?’

  This time the demon gave no explanation. He didn’t repeat the question. He simply began counting down. ‘Five . . . four . . .’

  Dr. Barnes’ trembling shifted from her lips to her entire face. A second later, she began sobbing violently.

  Every year, on the anniversary of their mother’s death, Gwen would take flowers to their mother’s grave. Erica had tried joining her on her very first visit. At the time, Gwen was fourteen years old and Erica thirteen, but Erica never made it. At the entrance to the Home of Peace Memorial Park, on Whittier Boulevard, Erica froze.

  ‘C’mon, Erica,’ Gwen had said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Erica couldn’t speak. All she could do was shake her head.

  ‘Erica, c’mon.’ Gwen had reached for her arm to lead her sister in with her, but Erica was as rigid as a statue. Her muscles had literally stiffened in place. That was when Gwen noticed how much her sister was shaking, and how sweaty and clammy her face was. Seconds later, she had started hyperventilating.

  ‘Erica, what’s wrong?’

  Still, Erica couldn’t speak. Her eyes had started moving from left to right frantically, focusing on nothing at all, as if she was about to have a seizure.

  Erica never made it through the gates. She had to wait on the other side of the road while Gwen said a couple of prayers and placed the flowers they had brought with them on their mother’s grave. It was only much later that they found out that their mother’s funeral had been such a traumatic experience for Erica that she had developed coimetrophobia – fear of cemeteries. She remembered her mother, but her condition had caused her to push everything related to her death to the absolute edge of her mind.

  ‘Three . . .’

  Erica’s breathing became labored.

  ‘Two . . .’

  She tried to think.

  ‘One . . .’

  Nothing.

  ‘Time’s up, Erica.’

  ‘No . . . please . . . I . . . I don’t know the answer. I have this condition . . .’

  ‘I told you the rules,’ the demon cut her short. ‘No answer – your sister gets punished.’

  ‘No . . . please . . .’

  ‘And remember, if you look away, she gets punished again. You have to watch it. Now let’s have fun.’

  Finally, the image on Erica’s smartphone widened horizontally, allowing her to see past the edge of her sister’s eyes . . .

  . . . And what she saw filled her heart with horrifying fear and panic.

  Seventy-One

  As Hunter parked in front of his six-story apartment block in Huntington Park, he peeked at his watch – it was coming up to 11:00 p.m. He leaned his head back on to the seat’s headrest and looked up at the aging building for a moment. By one of the windows on the second floor, an old man sat chain-smoking cigarettes. With every third drag he had, he would cough two or three times before spitting down on to the sidewalk below. On the fourth floor, Margaret Dixon, a very sweet lady in her early fifties, was staring out the window of apartment 416, teary-eyed. Every night, without fail, she would stare out of her window at the road below for several long hours, waiting for her husband to come back from his night shift. Her husband, Philip, had been involved in a work-related accident several years ago. He had died that same night.

  A far-away siren dragged Hunter’s attention away from the building and he wondered if going home right now was really the best idea. Sleep, if it came at all, wouldn’t be until the very early hours of the morning. His brain was still wide awake and he wasn’t looking forward to another night either tossing and turning in bed, or pacing the length of his small apartment.

  He began contemplating taking a drive down to Santa Monica or Venice Beach when a completely new idea entered his mind. He considered it for just a few seconds.

  ‘Oh, what the hell. Why not?’ he said, staring into his own eyes in the rearview mirror. He shrugged and reached for his cellphone.

  ‘Hello,’ a female voice replied.

  ‘Hi, is this Tracy?’

  ‘This is she, yes.’

  ‘Hi, Tracy. It’s Robert. Robert Hunter?’ He thought that he would have to help her out with a little bit more information than just his name, but he was pleasantly proven wrong.

  ‘Oh, the mysterious detective. What a surprise.’

  Hunter took that as a good sign.

  ‘Is this a bad time?’ Out of habit, he consulted his watch again.

  ‘No. Not at all. I was just about to . . . do nothing, really.’

  Hunter smiled. ‘Funny, me too. Listen, I know it’s quite late on a Sunday night, not really the best night for going out, and you probably have lectures in the morning, but I was wondering if you would like to go grab a coffee somewhere.’

  ‘You mean . . . somewhere that’s not the UCLA library?’

  ‘Preferably not.’

  Hunter heard Tracy laugh. The laugh was followed by a short pause.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ she replied at last, ‘I have a better idea. Why don’t we go somewhere where they serve something a little stronger than coffee? There’s a great bar not that far from me. How long will it take you to get to West Hollywood?’

  ‘At this time . . . about an hour.’

  ‘OK, so how about I meet you there in an hour?’

  ‘That sounds great.’

  Seventy-Two

  ‘Oh, my God, Gwen, what’s happening?’ Erica Barnes cried out in a voice choking with emotion. ‘I . . . don’t understand.’

  The image on her cellphone screen had stopped zooming out and, though her eyes could now see a more complete picture, her fragile brain struggled to make any sense of it.

  Her sister seemed to be lying down on some sort of wooden surface. It was hard to tell because in width, the picture on Erica’s cellphone screen didn’t show past her sister’s shoulders. In length, it didn’t show past her breasts, which were fully exposed, and that was where Erica’s confusion began. Her sister’s phone, the one broadcasting the images, didn’t seem to be positioned in front of her. It looked like it had been positioned above her, as if it was somehow hanging from the ceiling, but what really made the scene look absurd was the fact that Gwen’s face lay between two hug
e, serrated iron jaws. That was why, at first, the image didn’t pan any wider than the edge of her eyes. The demon didn’t want to reveal his murderous device too soon.

  ‘Do you know what this is, Erica?’ the demonic voice asked, referring to the strange device.

  Erica didn’t speak, didn’t blink, didn’t move. Never in her whole life, not even on the day that her muscles froze at the entrance to the cemetery, had she experienced fear like that before. It was like her brain had disconnected from the rest of her body.

  ‘This is something I created myself,’ the demon continued. ‘And I decided to call it . . . The Skull Crusher. Good name, don’t you think?’ He laughed the same sickening, throaty laugh from moments ago. ‘I guess it can be compared to . . . an industrial-size vise, only better.’

  ‘Please . . . please . . . please . . .’

  This time, the desperate cries came from Gwen herself. Her sobbing was so intense, Erica could see her entire body shake from the effort.

  ‘Why are you doing this to me? Why?’

  ‘Shush . . .’ A gloved finger was pressed against Dr. Barnes’ lips. ‘You’re not supposed to speak, remember?’

  Dr. Barnes was struggling to breathe, which was something that she could now only do through her mouth. Her nose had completely clogged up.

  ‘Apparently,’ the demon said, once again addressing Erica, ‘an average human skull can withstand anywhere up to twenty-one hundred pounds of pressure, did you know that, Erica?’

  ‘Please . . . don’t do this.’ Tears and fear had caused Erica’s voice to go up almost a whole octave.

  ‘But I must add,’ the demon continued, disregarding her pleas. ‘I did find that information on the Internet, so there’s a chance that it could all be just bullshit.’ He paused for effect. ‘But let me tell you what’s not bullshit, Erica. Every full turn of the crank on this device adds about five hundred pounds of pressure to the jaws. Isn’t that beautiful? Can you imagine what these serrated jaws would do to somebody’s face?’

  In hearing those words, panic, in a way she never knew it could exist, exploded inside Dr. Barnes, spreading like lightning to every atom of her body. As a result, she summoned all the strength she had left in her and tried to free her head from between the jaws, but the demon held her back by powerfully placing the palm of his hand against her forehead.