My dumbest friends–Dave, Anika, Hari, those guys–are minorly obsessed with urban legends. Or should I say fads. They made me do the cinnamon challenge with them in Hari’s back yard (since his parents don’t give a shit about anything). It sucked, it was a stupid terrible idea, but we did it together and after we finished drinking gallons of shitty lemonade it was pretty funny. This was different… they didn’t end up doing it together with me, but I’m not really sure why.
Okay, so, out of all the stupid YouTube challenges and stuff like that we’ve done, the newest one was the midnight call. We saw a guy do it on his channel and it was the fun kind of spooky, you know? Incredibly easy to fake, of course. But they’re pretty gullible, and even though I told them it was fake they said it would still be fun. And what can I say, peer pressure works.
The story is that if exactly at midnight you call your own number you can talk to yourself. Nobody agrees on whether it’s your future self or your past self or an alternate dimension self or whatever, but obviously they have the same phone number as you. I still don’t honestly know if that’s true, but I sure talked to something that sounded like me. But look, the audio quality wasn’t great, and if you psych yourself out it’s easy to read into stuff. I wasn’t trying to psych myself out but my dumbass friends kind of got to me, I guess, because the second I heard it I knew. Anyway, we got Hari’s parents to let us sleep over at his place as long as we weren’t too loud and didn’t wake up his grandma (which we weren’t worried about cause she sleeps like a log). So at 11:58 my alarm went off and we stopped laughing at Dave’s stupid joke and all entered our own numbers. There was this excited tension as Anika was opening up time.gov on her laptop so we could get the timing exactly right. And then at 00:00… we all pressed call.
I don’t know why it only worked for me. Maybe I was a tiny bit early or a tiny bit late. But their phones just kept ringing, and mine picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hello?” said the voice on the other end. Yeah, that was the moment when I was sure it was me. All it took was one word in my sleepy-annoyed voice when I was staying up late gaming. And then I thought to myself, that doesn’t make any sense. I’m right here, so who am I talking to? Who answered the phone I’m holding in my hand?
When I didn’t say anything the voice on the other end said, “If this is some kind of prank I’m hanging up.”
“What’s your name?” I asked. This was the point when everyone else realized it’d actually worked for me. Anika whispered, “Put it on speakerphone!”
That’s why everyone heard when the voice on the other end of the line said, “Uhhhm, Maddie? Look, what do you want?”
Dave had to practically stuff his fist in his mouth to stop laughing like an idiot. I think I flipped him off. Someone asked if the person was Maddie Lewis and they said yeah, WHO IS THIS?
“This is Maddie Lewis,” I said. I don’t remember the conversation exactly but everyone started yelling questions and asking if the other maddie was a ghost. Eventually the other Maddie said, “You’re all freaks, don’t call me again.” And hung up.
After that we spent some time trying to figure out what the hell just happened, but really how could we? I still don’t know, except I’m confident it wasn’t time travel, because I didn’t say that. You’ll see later.
So Anika uploaded the video to YouTube (I think it has like 3000 views now, which isn’t bad) and we messed around for a while before getting to sleep around 3AM. Me and Anika were sleeping next to each other and I think we were the last two awake, because she started talking to me about what I really thought it was. And why it was just me. I didn’t know! But when it was just the two of us I could admit it really freaked me out. The voice sounded JUST like me–when I’m talking out loud I go “uhhhhm” a lot in this weird way no-one else does and everyone gives me shit for it–and I just didn’t know how it was possible. I made Anika promise not to tell anyone I was scared. She laughed like a total bozo but she pinky promised me not to tell.
That was the last time I felt completely safe, because I started getting these weird phone calls. Not at midnight but around midnight, usually a little bit after. And it wasn’t every day at first. I was playing Fortnite the Saturday night after the whole sleepover thing when my phone rang. I didn’t really check the number cause I was distracted wondering if I was about to get attacked and I needed to keep an eye on the screen. So I just muted myself in voice chat and answered “Yeah?”
“Who is this?” said the voice on the other end. She sounded scared.
“Maddie Lewis? Why?”
“Shit!” she said, and hung up. It was only when I checked the number in my calls history that I realized the number that called was mine. I unmuted myself and told Dave and Anika in voice chat what just happened. They thought it was cool and I couldn’t tell them it kind of freaked me out, so we just went on playing until my mom yelled at me to be quiet and I had to go pretend to sleep.
The next call was Wednesday night. I was actually doing homework because fuck history papers. This time when my phone rang I checked, and yeah it was my number. I think that was the time I didn’t answer it at all. I kind of wanted to see if she’d leave a message. She didn’t, though. But every couple days after that I’d get a call. Depending on how much energy I had I’d usually answer it. But it was some creepy shit. One time the other Maddie told me something like “I don’t know why this is happening, but STOP CALLING ME. It’s so creepy!” One time she said, “I just want you to answer a couple questions. Please don’t hang up, PLEASE don’t hang up, this is really important.” But all the questions were weird bullshit about animals I’ve never heard of and the whole thing was like a shitty bio exam. The thing is, it was hard to hang out because she sounded so scared. She was halfway through asking me a question about a long-necked bukbuk or something and she just started crying, just sobbing and I couldn’t understand anything she said. One time she tried to just have a totally normal conversation with me like we were friends who happened to have the same name and she wanted to catch up. It was so random I really don’t think it could possibly be the same person every time unless they were working from a script written specifically to be as weird as possible.
I started to get them more often, like every other night. This was maybe two weeks in, and it was really affecting my sleep cause I’d lie awake after the call trying to figure it out and feeling my skin crawl like the other Maddie was going to actually find me. My grades got worse cause I wasn’t sleeping and my mom banned me from Fortnite but that meant that after I finished my homework (or got too frustrated to keep going) the only thing I had to do was stare at my phone waiting for it to ring. I started rejecting more calls but they’d call back until I picked up and listened to them. I straight up turned my phone off–no good! It would ring anyway! I tried leaving it downstairs but from 11:30 until 1AM I would lie in my bed anyway imagining I could hear my ringtone until it really did start. I hate that ringtone now. 90% of the calls I’ve gotten in the last month were from the other Maddie so even when it’s my mom or Anika my heart starts pounding and I get so afraid.
Recently the calls have been even creepier. Sometimes it’s just sobbing. Sometimes… really bad threats that give me nightmares. On Tuesday she read out the essay I was writing, which I thought was the scariest thing she could possibly do until the very next day–I had to keep looking over my shoulder to make sure she wasn’t in the room, and I even flailed around to see if she was there but invisible. On Wednesday I begged my mom to let me stay over at Anika’s… and the other Maddie called Anika instead. I can’t do that any more. Even if she believes me now about how creepy it is.
But yesterday… it wouldn’t have been that bad, really. It was just like a normal prank call, and I thought maybe I wouldn’t get nightmares from this one. Until she asked me my name and I heard Anika’s voice saying “Put it on speakerphone!”
“No,” I said. “No, no no no, we’re not doing this.” I wanted to hang up, I seriously did, but I couldn’t move. It felt like how people describe sleep paralysis, only I was sitting up so it wasn’t like there could be a goblin sitting on my chest.
“Are you Maddie Lewis?” said Hari’s voice. I could hear the way he always suppresses his excitement like he’s right on the edge of laughing but he never quite does.
“No. I’m Gracie Sinclair.”
“Then why are you on Maddie’s phone! Don’t lie!”
And they started asking me questions. It was probably the same questions they asked that night a month ago. I don’t know. They were just normal questions like was I a ghost, was I from the future. I snapped and screamed at them, “YEAH I’M FROM THE FUTURE. STOP CALLING ME.”
The other Maddie’s voice got really quiet, like she didn’t want everyone else to hear. “You really want me to stop calling? I’ve never called you before.”
I called bullshit, and then the call went–like the crazy audio distortion in those weird techno-metal or whatever songs my cousin Allen likes. It hurt my ears but I still couldn’t really move to hang up. Then: click. And my phone immediately started ringing again.
I didn’t even answer it, I swear I didn’t answer it. I couldn’t have moved to swipe the accept call button if I wanted to. But the other Maddie was right there anyway. “Tomorrow night will be the last call,” she said. It sounded like she was trying to apologize or reassure me. “I promise it’ll be the last one. Uhhhm, I’ll talk to you then, okay?”
Listen. I don’t know what she means by the last call. But there’s no way it’s anything good. I’m sick of being scared all the time. I guess one way or another it’s going to end.
Bye.