Scary Stories #3, Sophia Worden [best book clubs .TXT] 📗

My husband and I live in a small, unincorporated town on the outskirts of a bigger city. Although we are almost 50 years old, we are 30 to 40 years younger than any of our near neighbors. Most of them have grandchildren who visit regularly, and drive them wherever they need to go. Not so for the man I usually just called “Professor.” His wife, Elena, died 12 years ago. I only knew her briefly, but she and the Professor were one of those “Life Goals” kind of couples. I loved spending time with them. They were both so erudite, and witty, and clearly still deeply in love. Elena’s passing hit her husband hard. For the last year, he had been battling cancer. With no bus service in our rural area, and cabs from town an expensive, long wait, I ended up driving him to doctors.

The Professor had been in the U.S. since his 20s, but he still retained a charming foreign accent. My name, he pronounced as “AWN-eh.” Usually, when he phoned me, he would say “Good afternoon, AWN-eh.” Sometimes, he would call in the wee hours, in pain, able only to gasp “AWN-eh!” I would drop the phone and run to his house to help him with his meds or take him to the city’s emergency room. He was adamant about NOT staying away from home. He knew the end was near and he wanted to go in his own bed.

On October first, at almost 4 a.m., my cell phone rang, showing the Professor’s number. When I answered, a strange voice asked, “AWN-eh?”

“Yes,” I answered. “Professor?”

“No!” The voice giggled. “This is Maria. I’m taking him tonight.”

Then I... woke up? I was sitting up in bed, with the phone in my hand. My husband and our dog were sleeping soundly. So, the phone hadn’t really rung. Or had it? I started to call the Professor, but if he was managing to get some sleep, I didn’t want to disturb him. So I got up and dressed quietly, and the dog and I slipped out to the backyard. I could see the Professor’s house from there. No lights were on, and everything was quiet. I wasn’t comfortable, though, so I went ahead and dialed. Twenty-five rings, no answer. Damn. I knew then. I went back in and woke my husband. We walked to the house and knocked. Nothing. We had to phone the sheriffs. They broke in. The Professor had died, seemingly peacefully, in bed.

Because of our unincorporated location, any of the chores which would fall to professionals in an urban area are taken up by neighbors here. So, that evening, with a deputy’s supervision, the families on our block began to sort through the Professor’s papers. We needed the “deed” to his burial plot and any kind of will or link to distant relations. I looked through a small scrapbook of old photos that was on his nightstand. There was no “Cousin Marco from the old country,” or “nephew Bob, NYC, 1997.” It was mostly pictures of Elena and the Professor. And their never-spoken-of young daughter Maria, who had died in Oaxaca, in 1971.

This took place when I was about 10 years old. My mom had rather quickly filed for divorce, but she only had a part-time job and made very little money, so finding a place to stay that was affordable and available immediately was tough. A friend of hers told her that she and her husband had a little mobile home that was currently sitting empty and we could rent it practically for free ‘til we figured out something else.

I immediately didn’t like the house. Part of this I’m sure was due to my parents’ abrupt divorce and having my life turned upside down, but it was also just the house itself. We lived in a mountain town, and this mobile home was way up a steep mile-long driveway. Beautiful pine trees surrounded it, but the house itself looked abandoned and out of place. It had two bedrooms and two bathrooms, so my brother and I shared a room and my mom took the bedroom with the attached bathroom. It was a very ‘70s home, with wood paneling and dated fixtures. There were also areas that showed strange damage, like holes in the wall that were badly patched up. For whatever reason, I immediately refused to use the hallway bathroom. I wouldn’t even step into it. My mom never really asked me why or questioned it, but let me use her bathroom.

Anyway, my mom was gone a lot trying to find whatever work she could, so I would be home alone a lot after school and on the weekends. Each time I received the 911 call, I was by myself.

My mom always told us not to answer the door, but we should always answer the phone in case it was her. So when the phone rang one afternoon, I figured it would be my mom since no one else really had our number yet. There was a woman on the phone who sounded very concerned.

“Hello, this is 911, returning your call. We received your call, but we got disconnected,” the woman said.

I immediately got a sick feeling. I told her that I did not call 911, and she asked me if there was anyone else in the house who might have called. I said I was home alone, but I started to get really worried that maybe I wasn’t. She said she would dispatch police to our address just to make sure everything was okay.

At that point, I was terrified to be in the house, so I sat outside and nervously waited for the police, who showed up in about 15-20 minutes. The officer asked me if I had called 911, and I said “no,” but they claimed I had called them. The officer just sort of shrugged, and said, “This kind of thing sometimes happens. They say that it can’t, that the numbers can’t get mixed up, but it happens.” He did a cursory glance around the outside of the house and left.

I tried to convince myself that the officer was right. It was just a mixed-up phone call, and hopefully whoever did actually call got the help they needed.

About a month later, the same thing happened. I got another phone call from 911, saying they had received a phone call from my number. I told them again that it must have been a mistake. The woman on the phone scolded me a bit, telling me that 911 wasn’t something to play around with and I was preventing people from getting help. She didn’t dispatch any police this time. Again, I was really worried someone was in the house, so I cautiously checked and made sure all the doors were still locked.

I don’t know why, but I always kept the hallway bathroom door closed. Maybe because of the eerie feeling I got from it. As I was checking the house, I just knew someone was in that bathroom. I was terrified. Part of me felt like I needed to open the door to check, maybe to prove myself wrong, but I was too afraid. So I just sat in the living room, watching that door. It was so quiet in the house, that after a few minutes I swore I started to hear faint little sounds coming from inside, like a kind of shuffling noise. I asked my mom to check the bathroom when she got home and she quickly looked inside. She made me come and look to see that it was empty and I was letting my imagination get the better of me.

The 911 calls happened three more times over the coming months, and only when I was home alone. The fourth time the dispatcher told me I could face criminal charges for what I was doing and they would contact my parents. I hung up the phone sobbing and terrified. I had that feeling like someone was in the house again, but if I called 911, they probably wouldn’t even show up. I felt like the girl who cried wolf, only it wasn’t me. It was like someone was playing a horrible, twisted joke on me. I sat and watched the bathroom door again, hearing noises like someone dragging their fingers across the door.

I decided my mom was right, and I was probably just letting my imagination get away. I decided to try and leave the bathroom door open so I wouldn’t get so freaked out by the thought that someone was in there. Then I got the fifth 911 call. This time though, after I hung up the phone with the dispatcher, the bathroom door slammed shut.

I ran. I ran all the way down our steep driveway and found a place to wait till my mom pulled into the drive. When she arrived, she was angry with me for leaving the house, but she saw how upset I was. I think maybe she thought I was acting out due to the stress of the divorce. I refused to be alone in the house again though, so we worked it out so I would stay later at school or go to a nearby friend’s house till she got off work. Not long after this, we got a notice from my mom’s friend that we needed to move out of the house because she her mom needed a place to stay. I was so grateful to be moving out. I told my mom she needed to tell her friend that someone was wrong with the house, but my mom thought that was a ridiculous way to pay back someone’s generosity.

I moved around a lot the next few years and tried to forget about that house. It wasn’t until I was older that I really thought about it. I witnessed an accident and had to call 911 and the fear and paranoia all came flooding back. I decided to do some research, which honestly, I wish I had never done. A few years before we moved in, a woman was killed in that house in some kind of “domestic dispute.” It was days, though, before she was found, shut up in the bathroom.