If you know me at all, you know that I could be described as “morbidly curious”. My friend Jacquelyn calls it the “dark and twisties”, which is apparently something someone said on Grey’s Anatomy. I wouldn’t know because that’s not a show about Jack the Ripper or ebola outbreaks so I’ve never watched it. The last four books I read were written by Stephen King, 75% of the DVDs I own are horror movies, and I spend a pretty significant amount of time thinking about what I would do during a zombie apocalypse. Needless to say, it takes a lot to scare me.
Now that you know a little more about me, let me tell you about the time my mom and I got a voicemail from the Prince of Darkness......
The other day, I was at a job interview taking some aptitude tests. I was alone in a little room trying to fumble my way through a billion questions about Microsoft Excel when my emergency work phone rang. I didn't answer- mostly because I was afraid they were watching me on a secret camera and it wouldn’t look good if I answered in the middle of my test. After the interview, I checked the work phone and the call had come from a 901 area code, which I did not recognize. I don’t have any clients whose family comes from a 901 area code. They left no message and when I called the number back, it simply said “this voice mailbox is full.” I didn’t think another thing of it. Until that night…….
Cody was out of town on business, so I had my sister and her fiancé over for dinner. In the middle of dinner, we both got a text from our mother saying that she just got a terrifying voicemail message. I called her up, figuring she was the victim of a prank. She informed me that she didn’t recognize the number it came from and that it had scared the living daylights out of her. It was too horrible to talk about, she said. I asked her to give me the number, intending to call the bastard who left the voicemail and rip them a new one. Then she gave me the number. Which had a 901 area code………
A little red flag went up in my mind. 901, 901......Why was that familiar? A light went on. I checked my work phone- my unlisted, unpublished, emergency work phone. Only a small handful of clients have access to that number and it is not on my business cards or our web site. It’s nowhere. It’s a ghost number. And the missed call from earlier that day had been from the exact same number that had just called my mom. I immediately called her back and insisted she forward me the voicemail. She refused. No way was she listening to it again, she said. It was that terrifying. I explained how to forward it without listening to it and she sent it to me.
What I heard can only be described as the rantings of some other-worldly beast. It started out with heavy breathing and throaty, raspy growling. After a few seconds of breathing into the phone, a bone-chilling voice said:
“You…[growl]…….will DIE someday…[growl]…and then you will be my servant…FOREVER…”
I froze.
My mom and I had both missed a call from the underworld.
Ever the brainiacs, Kenna and Ken began to do research on the internet, trying to determine where the number was from because surely there must be a logical explanation. But it was a Memphis area code and it was untraceable. While they debated what sort of living, breathing, garden variety psycho could be harassing our family, my mind raced with possibilities- none of them logical and most of them having to do with voodoo curses and sinister beings concocted by Stephen King. Long after they went home, leaving me alone in the house, I paced back and forth, desperately trying to figure out who we had pissed off and how much longer we had to live. I thought of Richard Gere in The Mothman Prophecies, trapped in a podunk West Virginia town by a demonic moth-creature of doom. Richard Gere got all kinds of sinister calls from this mothman, whose voice was almost as terrifying as the one now lurking in my voicemail box. Surely it had been the mothman.Or maybe it wasn't the mothman. Maybe it was the devil. Why would the devil be calling us? Was I a reincarnated axe murderer? Was this karma coming back to take revenge for the dozens of innocents I'd slain in a previous life? Or had my mom become possessed by an evil spirit and then transferred it to me through the telephone? It was like The Ring only instead of a video, it was a phone message. You get the call and 7 days later, you die- all dried up and horrifying with your phone burned to your earlobe. As it got later and later, I went through the motions of getting ready for bed, silently wondering why Beelzebub couldn't have called when Cody WASN'T in San Francisco. I decided to go to bed, but the bed looked an acre wide and desolately empty. It had finally happened. A decade of assaulting my brain with the world's most terrifying shit had come back to bite me in the ass.
No sleeping occurred that night. I gave up trying to explain it to myself using logic or reason. Like a six year old kid afraid of the boogeyman, I sat awake, covers pulled up to my eyeballs, waiting for a legion of demon spawn to march out of the closet and melt my eyeballs or impregnate me with an unwanted Damien child or make me rip my hair out like the tormented Emily Rose. I imagined my mom back in Idaho Falls, possessed by a fiendish imp, smiling menacingly as she drowned all the neighborhood children in her bathtub. My imagination turned against me, spinning a horrifying web of possibilities. I jumped at the slightest noise. The cats sat at the foot of the bed, eyeballing me curiously as I desperately tried to calm myself enough for sleep to come. Finally, around 4am, I fell into a light doze, but I woke again long before my alarm and got ready for work in a sleep-deprived trance. On the way to work, I saw zombies at every bus stop and monsters behind the wheels of cars. My lack of sleep had taken me off the deep end.
I was drowsing at my desk later that morning when my phone rang. My eyes flew open. I froze. It was the Prince of Darkness. I knew it. I picked up the phone, ready for my blood to curdle and my ears to bleed.....
It was my mom.
She had discovered the culprit. The voicemail had not, in fact, come from Lucifer, but from my little brother’s friend M.J. He had attempted to invite my brother over to play, but when he got no answer, he left the message just to be a dumbass. The missed call from the 901 area code had been unrelated- a telemarketer trying to scam people out of their credit card information. After doing some investigating, we discovered that the same number had also called a few of my co-workers and several of my friends the same day.
I was furious. I felt foolish. I had been bested by an 8-year-old sociopath. I, a 25 year old woman, had stayed up all night- reduced to a whimpering and paranoid buffoon, because of a small child. How could this have happened? This child had truly frightened me, something not even the great writings of Edgar Allen Poe or the twisted film making of M. Night Shyamalan could accomplish ( Not M. Night Shyamalan circa "Lady in the Water" ..... earlier M. Night Shyamalan circa "Sixth Sense". "Lady in the Water" was just ridiculous. I mean, WTF kind of piece of crap was that? What the hell, M. Night Shyamalan?).
What kind of a sick twisted little kid could even make himself sound so deliciously mortifying? I was almost jealous. I swore I would seek justice. If this child ever encountered me, he would be met with a fury like hell hath no. He would spend the remainder of his childhood sipping creamed corn through a straw.
Watch out, M.J. You pissed off the wrong woman.......
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