Using thepromptfoundry’s Ominous October list. krakaheimr‘s Chicago Spirit setting, all original characters. Ghost phones are our collaborative creation. 😀
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Officer Emil Novak sits atop the telephone pole with the wire-tapped earpiece pressed to his ear, waiting to overhear a phone call. The number of hoops the Chicago Police Department has had to jump through to get to the point of figuring out who would be calling in, when, from where, to let the Spirit know about a particular shipment of smuggled goods that’ll be crossing the border into the US next week… But they’re here now.
It’s a chilly night, coming round the bend of summer into October, and Emil is shivering a little by the time he hears the connection he’s looking for, nine minutes after the time he’d been given to expect it.
“Hello?” This first voice is low but timid, afraid of reprimand.
“You’re late.” This second one is dark, gravelly, and flatly unimpressed.
“Sorry. Sorry. There was a…never mind. Okay, the shipment is coming in at the end of the month…”
Emil listens, and takes notes. There’s a strange static, running beneath the voices. It’s deep and thrumming and rhythmic, almost like there’s a train in the background, maybe. Emil ignores it at first, but it keeps getting louder, until it starts getting hard to hear the men’s voices over it. Maybe it is a train.
“…send the…a replacement to…Philadelphia…”
There’s a distracting cadence to it—the rhythm draws the attention, like speech you can’t quite make out, and Emil finds himself having to refocus over and over to keep from losing track of the conversation, until he finds the conversation becoming the distraction from whatever it is that static is trying to say.
“Well, if you refuse to obey good sense,” it says.
He jolts, fumbles his pencil, watches it fall all the way to the ground. The other two voices have fallen silent before this one, dark and rattlingly deep as though it’d resolved from the background noise, and he waits with held breath to see what this one will say next.
“‘As though?'” It laughs, and the laugh is the static. “Oh no, my friend, I’m afraid you’ve been listening too well.”
Each syllable of that voice rumbles through his ears and fills up his head till it’s all he can hear. Disorienting. He sways at the top of the pole, grabs for the hand holds to begin climbing down.
“It’s too late now,” the voice says from the receiver. It’s all he can hear.
That voice is all he can hear as he clambers down the pole—not his feet or hands on the ladder brackets, not the wind in the trees and the wires, not the traffic clattering by on the other side of the buildings. He can’t hear his own breathing or heartbeat, or his own voice cry out when his hands slip, sweaty with panic. He can’t tell whether he shouts for help as he loses his grip and falls.
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