The Wrong Number

• 4 minute read
• Ages 10-13
• Horror Stories for Kids

My sister started getting calls from a number she did not recognise.

Not many. One every few days, always in the afternoon, always from the same eleven digits.

She answered the first three. Each time there was nobody there: no breathing, no traffic, no room noise at all, just an open line and then it ended.

After that she stopped answering.

The recording

Our phone kept a log of missed calls and she showed me, and it was the same number every time, and she had saved it under a name so she would know not to pick up.

She had called it "DO NOT".

I asked her whether she had tried ringing it back.

"Twice," she said. "It rings and rings. Nobody picks up."

The afternoon

Then one Thursday she was out and her phone was on the table and it rang.

I looked at it. It said DO NOT.

And I answered it, because I was fourteen and because a thing you have been told not to do is very hard to leave alone for eleven rings.

There was nobody there. It was exactly as she had described: an open line with no sound at all behind it, which is stranger than it seems, because there is always some sound behind a call.

I said hello twice and then I did something she had not done.

I stayed on the line and did not speak.

Eight minutes

The call lasted eight minutes.

For the first three there was nothing. Then, very faintly, somewhere a long way from whatever the phone was next to, I heard a television.

I could not hear what it was saying. But I could hear the rhythm of it, the way you can tell an advertisement from a programme without hearing the words.

Then I heard a door.

Then somebody walked past the phone, close, without picking it up, and kept going.

And then the call ended.

What I noticed afterwards

I sat there for a while.

And then I worked out what had been bothering me, and I checked, and I was right.

Our television had been on in the next room the whole time.

It was on the same channel. And the advertisement I had heard down the phone, faintly, a long way away, was the advertisement that had been playing in our house.

It was not the same programme at the same time on the same channel, which would have been a coincidence and which is what I told myself for about ten seconds.

The sound down the phone was about a second and a half behind ours.

Since

My sister changed her number the following week and the calls stopped, and nothing else ever happened, and we did not talk about it again for years.

But she asked me once, much later, what I had heard.

I told her the television.

She was quiet for a moment, and then she said the thing I had never thought of and have not stopped thinking about since.

"A second and a half behind," she said. "That is not very far away, is it."