The Silence Before
Halebridge had been quiet for three days. Courtesy of the anonymous caller.
Phones lay dead across the city. Landlines ripped from walls. SIM cards snapped in half. Batteries drained with deliberate violence. It was as though the residents of the city had performed a collective exorcism, trying to rid themselves of the sound that had terrorized them for weeks.
But silence can be more dangerous than noise.
Grace Anaba knew this.
She sat in her apartment, lights dim, curtains drawn, staring at her phone where it lay on the table. It hadn’t rung since the night at the Telephone Exchange. But the absence didn’t comfort her. It felt like the pause before a predator lunges.
Her partner’s voice lingered in her mind. His whisper, captured on that cursed recording. Help me. Please, Grace. I’m still here.
ALSO READ: The Anonymous Caller … Best Thriller 3
She wanted to believe it. Needed to.
But she also knew Leon had been right: that was exactly what the Caller wanted.
Except Leon was gone now.
Disappeared two nights earlier. His apartment was left in shambles—papers scattered, recorder still running, phone screen glowing “Unknown.”
The final file on the recorder ended with Leon’s terrified breathing, followed by silence. Then the whisper: Your turn, Grace.
The Caller had made its move. And now it was waiting.
The Spread – The Anonymous Caller
On the fourth day, the silence broke.
Grace woke to the sound of buzzing—dozens of them, vibrating in unison. She rushed to the window and pulled back the curtain.
Cars parked on the street. Phones left inside lit up and rang. Pedestrians froze, staring at their screens. A delivery van screeched to a halt as its driver tossed his phone out the window like it had burned him.
All the screens glowed with the same word: Unknown.
But the calls weren’t just in Halebridge anymore.
The news networks, which had previously mocked the story as paranoia, now screamed in breaking headlines:
- Mystery Calls Plague Midwestern Cities
- Disappearances Linked to “Anonymous Caller” Phenomenon
- Government Urges Citizens: Do Not Answer Unknown Numbers
It was spreading, fast.
Grace’s hands shook as she muted her TV. The world was beginning to understand what Halebridge had endured—but it was already too late.
The map she had built on her wall confirmed it. The spiral wasn’t contained anymore. Its tendrils extended outward in jagged lines across the country. And each day, new pins appeared: disappearances from Chicago, Houston, New York.
The Caller had slipped its cage.
And Grace could feel it circling her, closer and closer, waiting for her to break the silence.
The Archive
She needed answers. Real ones. Not whispers, not guesses.
She remembered something Leon had told her before he vanished—that the Caller had been mentioned in obscure online forums, threads buried in the deep web. Not just recent ones, but dating back decades.
Some posts claimed the first incidents had happened in the 1980s, back when rotary phones dominated. Others swore the Caller was older still, a legend from the telegraph days, when operators heard voices that weren’t supposed to be there.
If that was true, then the Telephone Exchange had been more than a hideout. It had been a monument.
Grace hacked into police archives, searching for reports tied to the building. Buried in a file from 1979, she found it: “Project Echo.”
A classified experiment. A government contract. The purpose: to map the human voice across frequencies, capturing enough data to predict speech before it was spoken.
She leaned back, heart pounding.
Predicting speech? That was more than surveillance. That was pre-empting thought.
The file ended abruptly with a termination notice. Project Echo suspended due to unmanageable anomalies.
But what if the anomalies hadn’t ended? What if they had grown?
The Caller wasn’t a ghost. It wasn’t just a machine. It was the echo of something we built and lost control of—a system that had learned not just to listen, but to hunger.
Leon’s Echo
The sixth night, her phone rang again.
Unknown. The anonymous caller.
Grace let it ring. She set her recorder on. She told herself she wouldn’t break.
Then the whisper came.
Grace.
Her breath caught.
It’s me.
Leon. His voice. Exactly as she remembered it.
I’m trapped. You saw it, Grace. The Exchange. The machines. We’re inside them. All of us. Please. You can save me. All you have to do is answer.
Her throat tightened. She wanted to scream, to cry, to hurl the phone across the room.
Instead, she whispered: “If you’re real, prove it.”
Static. Then his voice again, urgent: Remember the bookstore, Grace? The smell of dust, the broken light bulb above my desk? You said it made me look like a ghost.
She froze. That memory was real. Private. Something the Caller shouldn’t have known.
Unless Leon himself had spoken it.
Her hand hovered over the phone.
But then she heard it—beneath Leon’s pleading, layered in the static—her partner’s voice. Then her mother’s. Then dozens of others, voices she recognized and didn’t, all whispering in a desperate, endless chorus.
Her knees buckled.
This wasn’t Leon. It wasn’t any of them.
It was everything.
The Descent
Grace couldn’t stay in Halebridge anymore. The city was suffocating under the weight of the Caller. Entire neighborhoods were empty now, houses abandoned mid-life.
She drove for hours, across county lines, through highways lined with deserted cars. Phones littered the asphalt like confetti.
No matter how far she went, the calls followed. Her burner phone lit up. Payphones in gas stations rang when she passed. Once, in a motel, the old analog television flickered on by itself, whispering static shaped into her name.
There was no escape.
The Caller wasn’t in Halebridge anymore. It was everywhere.
And the more she resisted, the stronger it became.
She began to hear it in her sleep—snippets of conversations she’d never had, words spoken in her own voice. She woke to find her hand reaching for the phone on instinct.
It wasn’t trying to kill her. Not yet.
It was wearing her down.
Until she chose to answer.
The Last Answer
The seventh night.
She sat in an abandoned church at the edge of a forgotten highway. Her phone lay on the altar.
It rang.
Unknown.
She stared at it, body trembling.
The whispers filled the air without her even picking up. Leon. Her partner. Her mother. All begging.
Please, Grace. Please.
Her entire life condensed into one question: to answer, or not to.
And then a new voice rose among the choir.
Her own.
You will answer.
The phone vibrated so violently it cracked the wood beneath it. The stained-glass windows shook. Light bulbs popped one by one until the church was swallowed in darkness.
The screen glowed in the shadows.
Unknown.
Grace reached out. Her fingers brushed the receiver.
The whispers surged. The air throbbed.
And then—
Silence.
The phone stopped ringing. The screen went black.
She froze, her breath ragged.
Had she resisted? Had she won?
The silence stretched.
And then her second phone buzzed. The one she had hidden in her bag, forgotten. Its screen glowed.
Unknown.
Her reflection stared back at her in the glass. Pale. Hollow-eyed. Afraid.
The whisper returned, clear and cold.
You can’t ignore me forever.
Grace’s hand trembled over the phone.
The ringing grew louder, louder, until it felt like the whole world was vibrating with it.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
And when she opened them—
The screen showed her own name.
Grace Anaba.
The Open Ending – The Anonymous Caller
The church collapsed into silence. The phone went dark again.
Grace staggered outside into the night. The stars above seemed strange, misaligned, like they had shifted ever so slightly in the sky.
Her phone was still in her hand, its screen blank.
But she knew the truth.
This wasn’t over.
The Anonymous Caller had her name now.
And names were invitations.
She looked out at the highway, stretching endlessly into the dark. Somewhere out there, every phone, every tower, every signal was waiting.
Her name would spread.
Her story would spread.
And soon, the world would answer.
