Chapter 4 Busy Signal

The road to 184 Holly Drive was mostly forgotten now-a dead end off another dead end, swallowed by overgrowth and disrepair. Gwen's tires crunched over gravel as she pulled onto the shoulder across from the lot, killing the engine.

The wind had picked up. Leaves scraped across the asphalt in dry, hollow little dances.

Across the street, the remnants of her childhood home sat in still ruin behind a sagging chain-link fence.

The sign zip-tied to the gate was sun-bleached and flapping lazily in the breeze:

NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

Half the letters were gone. No one had prosecuted anything here in years.

Gwen stepped out of the car.

The smell hit her first.

It wasn't smoke-not anymore. That had faded long ago. But something lingered. Wet ash. Mold. The bitter scent of rot held down by rain.

The fence ran the perimeter of the property, laced with weeds. Vines curled up through the links like fingers trying to escape from below.

She walked the length of it slowly, scanning the lot. Most of the house had collapsed inward-only two outer walls and the back portion of the hallway remained standing, black and skeletal. A staircase with no second floor. A chimney with no fireplace.

But the strangest thing was the path.

It wasn't much. Just a break in the weeds. A line of flattened grass, leading from the back fence to what remained of the rear entrance.

Someone had been here.

Recently.

She turned to make sure no one was watching, then crouched and pushed at the loose chain-link panel she remembered from years ago-the one that had always sagged, even before the fire.

It still gave way.

She slipped inside, her heart ticking faster now.

Inside the perimeter, the ground squelched underfoot. Water pooled in corners. Bits of charred wood poked through like bones rising from a grave.

But none of it mattered as much as how the air felt-wrong, like it carried too many memories and not enough oxygen.

The house was watching her, or worse-waiting.

She stepped over the collapsed threshold, boots crunching against a layer of soot and broken glass. The remains of the kitchen were to her right-or what used to be the kitchen. The counters were long gone, reduced to stumps of charred cabinetry, and the sink was just a rusted curve embedded in the wall.

To her left, the living room had fared worse. The ceiling had collapsed, taking part of the floor above with it. Shattered beams jutted upward like jagged ribs.

But her body remembered the route.

Straight ahead: the hallway.

Past where the phone had once hung.

Past the linen closet with the broken hinge.

Past the framed school pictures that had once been neatly lined up-Lila's with the crooked smile, Gwen's always serious.

The hallway was still mostly intact, somehow spared the worst of the fire. The air grew colder as she moved deeper in, though she told herself that was just the stone foundation beneath.

She paused outside what had been her bedroom.

The door was long gone. The walls were scorched, but she could still see it-the posters that had once covered the paint, the old twin bed shoved against the wall, and the nightstand with the red lamp. She'd thrown that lamp during an argument with her mother once. She didn't remember why.

She didn't step inside.

Instead, she turned to the left-toward the hallway wall where the phone had been mounted.

There was a strange tension in her chest now, like a held breath that had lasted too long. She stepped carefully. A floorboard groaned underfoot but held.

The wall at the end of the hallway still stood, scorched but upright. The paint had bubbled and flaked, exposing the bare wood beneath-blackened, dry as paper. But there, still bolted to the frame like it had refused to die, was the phone jack.

A square plate. Slightly melted.

Cracked in one corner.

And hanging from it, like a forgotten limb, was the cord.

Old. Stiff. Blackened at the tip.

Gwen's breath caught in her throat.

She reached for it.

Her fingers hovered an inch away.

Then she stopped.

Because beneath the silence... she heard it.

A hum.

Low. Subtle.

The kind of sound you feel in your bones before your ears.

Like a dial tone that didn't belong to any phone still wired to this world.

The hallway held its breath.

Gwen stared at the melted phone jack, its metal edges warped into a kind of sneer. The plastic was bubbled and blackened, but the socket-impossibly-looked intact. As if it had survived on purpose.

The cord dangling from it was frayed at the end, with no phone attached. It reminded her of an amputated limb still reaching for the hand it once held.

The hum was louder now.

No, not louder.

Closer.

It wasn't coming from the wall. It was coming from inside her.

She stepped forward.

Kneeling carefully, she reached out and placed two fingers against the jack's edge.

The surface was cool.

Then warmer.

Then

"Gwen."

It wasn't a sound exactly.

It was a pressure behind her eyes. A vibration in her teeth. A resonance in the hollow of her bones.

"Gwen."

Her body locked.

The voice wasn't behind her. It wasn't beside her. It was inside her.

Lila's voice.

But not like the tapes.

Not like memory.

This one carried breath. Urgency. It felt like someone was in the room trying not to cry.

"You're close," the voice said, softer now. "Don't stop."

Gwen pulled her hand back.

The moment snapped.

The hum cut out.

The silence that followed was deafening.

She staggered to her feet, breath shallow, heart pounding like it was trying to escape her ribs.

The hallway was the same as before. Ruined. Empty.

But the voice hadn't been a hallucination. Her fingers still tingled where they'd touched the metal.

Her pocket felt heavy.

The recorder.

She reached for it.

It was warm.

The red light was on.

Gwen pulled the recorder from her coat pocket with trembling fingers.

She hadn't turned it on. Not consciously. But the red light was glowing, steady and soft, like a heartbeat under skin.

She held it close to her ear and hit STOP, then REWIND.

The tape whirred softly.

She looked back at the wall-at the jack, the dangling wire. It didn't hum now. It was silent. Harmless. But the skin of her fingers still buzzed, a faint electric ghost tingling along the nerves.

She pressed PLAY.

At first, just static.

The hiss of dust and age, the familiar texture of analog silence.

Then-a click.

And the voice.

"Gwen."

She stopped breathing.

It was exactly as she'd heard it in her head.

But now it was real-external. Imprinted onto magnetic tape.

The voice came again, softer:

"You're close. Don't stop."

There was a break. A pause. Then the faintest distortion of breath, like someone exhaling into the recorder itself.

Gwen's hand tightened around the device.

This wasn't in her mind. It wasn't trauma echoing back from the void. It wasn't grief making noise in the walls.

It was her sister's voice.

Recorded.

Captured.

Proof.

She backed out of the hallway, every nerve on high alert, barely feeling the soot and broken wood under her boots. The air in the house shifted behind her-a slow exhale, as though something watching had lost interest. Or grown satisfied.

She slipped back through the sagging section of fence and returned to her car. Her fingers had started to shake again.

She slid into the driver's seat and closed the door behind her.

Silence.

She sat there for a moment, clutching the recorder in both hands like it might dissolve.

Then she flipped down the sun visor.

The mirror caught her eyes.

But only for a moment.

Because in that sliver of glass, in that fragment of reflection-she saw Lila's eyes. Not hers.

Not a trick of the light.

Lila. Watching. Waiting.

The reflection blinked once-and was gone.

The apartment was dim when Gwen returned; the late afternoon light filtered through cloud-thick windows, turning everything gray and flat.

She closed the door behind her and locked it with the usual two clicks-deadbolt, chain-even though it felt absurd now. The thing that had whispered her name wasn't going to knock.

She dropped her coat on the couch and sat at the table, laying the recorder down gently. It felt heavier now, as though it contained more than just sound.

She pressed play.

Static.

Click.

"Gwen."

"You're close. Don't stop."

Each syllable crawled down her spine. There was no mistaking it: not just the voice, but the texture of it. Lila's voice had always had a lilt-like every sentence was a half-joke, even when it wasn't.

But this version was quieter. Slower. Like it came from farther away.

She played it again.

And again.

She scribbled notes beside the tape, out of habit. Patterns. Timestamps. Possible distortions.

But there was nothing distorted.

That was the worst part.

The voice was clear.

After the third replay, Gwen heard something new-a low murmur just behind the words. She turned the volume up. Leaned closer.

A whisper underneath the whisper.

She looped it again.

This time, she caught it.

Not words.

A rhythm.

Five tones.

Low, high, low, low, high.

It wasn't part of the message. It was something else. Like...

A signal.

Gwen grabbed her notebook and wrote the sequence down phonetically. Then she stopped.

It wasn't just a sound.

It was familiar.

From somewhere deep in her memory-somewhere unreasonably far back.

A tone she'd heard before.

Late at night. On the radio?

No.

On the cordless phone.

Back when she was a kid, she and Lila used to prank call numbers at random. Once, they'd hit a line that answered without a voice-just tones. Repeating. Like this.

And Lila had said something then.

"It's like the phone's trying to call itself."

Gwen stared at the recorder.

The message wasn't just a warning.

It was a trailhead.

A redial.

A voice trying to bring her back to wherever it was speaking from.

Wherever it was stuck.