Chapter 3: It Knows My Name

The dust from the handprints washed away in the shower, but the memory of them remained, seared onto my skin like an invisible brand. I started wearing hoodies to school, even as the autumn air remained stubbornly warm. It was irrational—no one could see the phantom marks—but I felt exposed, marked. I felt like prey.

My personal, private horror became public in the worst way possible: it became a joke.

Thomas, in a moment of brotherly indiscretion, must have told his friend Josh, who told his girlfriend Ashley, who then broadcast the story across the sophomore and junior classes with the speed of a viral meme.

"Hey, Carter!" a jock named Mike yelled at me by the lockers. "Heard you got a direct line to the dead! Can you ask Casper if I'm gonna pass my trig test?"

His friends howled with laughter. I just clutched my books tighter and pushed past them, my face burning. My terror, the nightly rings, the whispers that curdled my blood—it was all reduced to a funny anecdote. Liam Carter's Haunted Pizza Hut Phone. It was the perfect high school legend: weird, harmless, and just dumb enough to be endlessly amusing.

During lunch, my own friends were no better.

"Seriously, man, you should totally record it and put it on YouTube," said my best friend, Sam, leaning over the cafeteria table. "You'd get millions of hits."

"I tried," I muttered, pushing a tater tot around my tray. "It doesn't work. It's just static."

"Because there's nothing there," chimed in Maya, ever the skeptic. "It's probably just interference from the microwave picking up a weird radio signal. Old wiring can do crazy things."

They meant well, but their casual rationalizations were like sandpaper on my raw nerves. They couldn't see the dark circles under my eyes, or the way I flinched at the sound of the school bell. They couldn't feel the chilling memory of those long, dusty fingers gripping my shoulders in a dream that was too real to be a dream. Their laughter and dismissal built a glass wall around me, and on the other side, they were all living in a world that still made sense.

My only escape was to try and join them on that side of the glass. I decided to ignore it. All of it.

That night, I barricaded myself in my room. I put on my heaviest noise-canceling headphones and cranked up the volume on a playlist of thrashing, chaotic rock music. I focused on a history textbook, forcing myself to read about the Peloponnesian War, anchoring myself in the solid, unchangeable facts of the past.

11:47 PM came and went. I didn't hear a thing. For a moment, a wild, intoxicating hope surged through me. Maybe that was the key. Maybe if I stopped listening, it would stop calling.

The music eventually faded, and I drifted into an uneasy sleep, my head on my textbook. I was jerked awake by a sound that wasn't in my ears, but in my bones. A low, insistent vibration traveling up through the floorboards.

I ripped the headphones off. The house was dead silent, the digital clock on my desk glowing a malevolent red: 2:19 AM.

And then I heard it.

BRRRING!

It was louder. Sharper. Angrier. It was no longer a scheduled call. It was a demand. It had waited until my guard was down, until I thought I was safe. The entity, the thing in the phone, was not just calling anymore. It was hunting.

My strategy of ignoring it had backfired spectacularly. The calls grew more aggressive, more erratic. The predictable 11:47 PM ritual was gone, replaced by a torturous unpredictability. One night it would ring at one in the morning, the next at three-thirty, shattering the deepest part of my sleep and leaving me trembling in the dark.

The house at night transformed from a sanctuary into a minefield. Every creak of the floorboards, every groan of the pipes was a prelude to the inevitable, shattering ring. Sleep became a precious, stolen commodity. I was exhausted, strung out, my nerves frayed to the breaking point. The world outside my private torment felt fuzzy and distant, and the person in the mirror looked like a stranger—a pale, haunted boy with eyes that were too old and too scared.

After a week of this new, relentless siege, something inside me snapped.

It was almost four in the morning. I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, my body rigid with anticipation. The silence was a taut wire, ready to break. When the ring finally came, a vicious, piercing shriek that seemed to echo directly inside my skull, it wasn't fear I felt. It was rage. A hot, desperate fury born of sleeplessness and terror.

I threw back my blankets and stormed out of my room. I didn't tiptoe. I let my bare feet slap against the cold hardwood of the stairs. I was done being haunted. I was done being the victim.

The kitchen was bathed in the sterile, silver light of a full moon. It illuminated the Orange Anomaly, making it look less like a quirky antique and more like an alien artifact, a cancerous growth on the wall of our home. It was ringing and ringing, a frantic, unceasing summons.

I didn't hesitate. I ripped the receiver from its cradle, the plastic cold and slick in my sweaty palm. I pressed it to my ear, but instead of listening, I shouted into it, my voice raw and shaking.

"What do you want from me? Just leave me alone!"

The line went dead. The ringing stopped. But the silence that followed was different. It wasn't empty. It was heavy, expectant, like the held breath before a lightning strike. The familiar hiss of static was there, but it felt deeper, charged with an ancient, malevolent energy. I could feel the presence on the other end, listening, waiting. A predator that has finally cornered its prey.

I waited, my heart pounding a frantic, painful rhythm in my chest. For a moment, I thought it was over, that my defiance had scared it away.

Then, the whisper came.

It wasn't the faint, fragmented murmurings of before. It wasn't a desperate plea from a lonely spirit. The sound was perfectly, terrifyingly clear. It was intimate, spoken directly into my ear with a chilling, possessive clarity, as if the speaker was standing right beside me, their lips brushing my skin.

It was a single word.

My name.

"Liam."