Call

I want to tell you about a very real incident that happened to me quite recently.

I was up all night, walking around the city with friends. I came home at 7 a.m. and went to bed, cherishing the faint hope that by midnight I would miraculously wake up on my own and show up at the university for my third period.

I woke up because my home phone rang. It was 12:44 p.m. (and I had to be at class at 12:30 p.m.). A call to my home phone is extremely unusual for me, because I live in a rented apartment and keep in touch with everyone I need via cell phone or the internet, so practically none of my friends know my home phone number; there's no need for it. Half asleep, I rushed to the phone and picked it up.

An unfamiliar child's voice rang on the other end—a child of about 8 or 9 years old. He spoke in a language unknown to me, as if he were reading something—either a poem or a work of prose. He read with obvious expression, emphasizing points and pauses. Some words resembled English, but only a few—I didn't remember any specific examples because I was sleepy. One word was repeated very often—in Russian transcription, it would sound something like "khambauam" with the stress on the final "a"—or "khambaue." There were almost no background sounds, only once did I hear a siren, either an ambulance or a police car—the sound was completely different from that of similar vehicles in Russia. I listened to the voice for about three minutes, and I became increasingly terrified; I couldn't squeeze a sound out of myself. Then the numbness eased, and I almost shouted into the phone several times: "Hello!" The voice didn't react at all—there wasn't a single hesitation in its speech, except at one point, it very insistently repeated "hambauam" several times in a row, immediately after my "hello." I even got the feeling the owner of the voice simply didn't hear me. I finally hung up when I realized I had no more than twenty minutes to get to the university and make it to at least the second half of my important class. Five or six minutes later, I left the apartment. During that time, no one called back.

What could it be? I'm consumed with intense curiosity. And for some reason, I'm certain the voice wasn't a recording, but real. At one point, as I was listening to all this, a strange thought even crossed my mind—that the voice was casting some kind of spell that would work on me if I listened to it in its entirety...