The Phone call

When I was 6, we had just moved to our current house.

At the time, I was in the second grade, and I lived no more than 5 minutes walking distance from school. As a result I would get home around 3:00 and my parents, both working, would get home around 6:00 or 7:00. This was never a problem of course, I was hardly afraid of the dark and spent most of my time in my room with the door almost closed so the idea of being scared of the rest of my house never took root.

My parents prided themselves on getting the best appliances and home technology that they could find back then, so we had a set of wireless home phones that were spread with chargers across the house and rang together when we were phoned. One in my parents's bedroom, one in the kitchen, one in my room and one in the basement. They were pretty top notch.

One day after school I was alone in my room, building some kind of bionicle or something while watching T.V., when the phone rang. I didnt pick it up at first, because for some reason it wasn't very loud. I muted the T.V., got up, and answered it, and immediately heard the opposing caller hang up, and then a dial tone. I put the phone back on its charger, and went back to where I was sitting on the floor, but in about 4 minutes, the phone rang again. I got up to go get it, answered the call, and answered "Hello? Hello hello hello hello?" In mid sentence the call was cut, and I figured it was some defective telemarketer machine that only knew how to leave messages on voicemail, or something.

About 10 minutes after that call, it called again, and I waited to let it ring to voicemail. My parents were relatively quiet people, so we had it set that after 3 rings, the call would be sent to voicemail. 5 Rings later, I picked up the phone again, and said nothing. I listened to nothing but that endless static feedback for 10 seconds, until I heard just the slightest breathing on the other side. I was the one to hang up this time, and I turned off the phone so that it wouldn't ring anymore if someone called.

A couple hours later, my dad arrived home, and as usual asked if anyone had called. I said that someone had called a couple times, but didnt say anything, and it was probably just a machine or a repeated misdial. He asked me if I had looked at, or tried to redial the number that called, and I didnt, so I went to my room to look at the phone's incoming call history, as he left to go get dinner before my mom arrived.

The last 3 calls were from INT-4. I had no idea what that meant, so I picked up the phone and pressed the redial key, and got up to go to the kitchen, holding the phone to my ear. As I walked down the hallway, I heard a phone ringing.

I quickly went downstairs and saw the phone on my dad's computer table ringing away, with the lit up screen display saying "Intercom call from INT-2." Only the phone in my room had rang when it called me earlier, and phones cant leave messages on their own voicemails.