The Admirer

****

It began about seven years ago, when my sister and I were still teenagers and lived in our parents’ house. My sister and I looked very much alike, though we weren’t twins — the age difference between us was three years. I wouldn’t say I was handsome, but my sister somehow managed to look very similar to me and at the same time be one of the prettiest girls in the upper grades. This brought her a lot of popularity among boys, even beyond our school.

One Sunday morning I was woken up by the ringing of the phone. Our apartment was three-room, and my bedroom was as far as possible from the hallway, plus there were two closed doors — one from my room to the living room, and another from the living room to the hallway. At that distance, behind two doors, I wouldn’t have heard even a cannon shot. But this time the phone rang very loudly, as if it were right next to me, at arm’s length. Waking up, I noticed that I could barely hear the ringing, just as it should have been. Spitting on the phone (I was home alone that morning), I decided to sleep some more. But as soon as I began to drift off, the ringing suddenly grew louder. Louder and louder. It felt as if the sound was penetrating straight through my ears into my brain, flowing like a liquid. I got up. The phone was ringing quietly again. And I was sure that about five minutes had passed — a single call couldn’t possibly last that long.

With difficulty pulling on my tight jeans, I dragged myself to the hallway. I picked up the receiver and said the usual: “Hello?” — and heard just one phrase:

“Hello, may I speak to Nastya?”

Nastya was my sister, and she had gone with our parents to a friends’ dacha for an overnight stay. I alone had stayed home, having asked permission to sleep longer and thoroughly ruin my eyesight watching TV.

“She’s not here. And she probably won’t be today.”

Short beeps followed on the other end. “He could have at least said goodbye,” I thought, and went to the bathroom.

A year later my sister turned sixteen, and for that occasion she was given a Siemens mobile phone. In general, it was almost useless to her, since at that time very few people had mobile phones. A week later, having played with it enough and spent about five hundred rubles on calls and SMS, she finally began to treat the phone like an ordinary object. At my request she loaded a couple of games onto it, and now I could at least occupy myself on Monday evenings. After some time the battery indicator became empty and blinking — it was no longer possible to play, and charging it felt too lazy — so I just put the phone on top of the refrigerator.

It should also be noted that Siemens phones have one feature — they emit a very loud signal three times, audible throughout the area, indicating that the phone is about to shut down due to low battery. I was absolutely sure I had heard those signals while I was in the bathroom.

The next day my sister came back from some party, and we had a big fight (I don’t even remember what about). In general, it should be said that we had no real brother–sister relationship. We didn’t even have the relationship of bad friends. We were simply each in our own world, each for themselves. That’s why a scandal could erupt between us almost out of nothing, as it did this time. After shouting at each other until our mother separated us, I went to the toilet. Coming out, I heard the phone ringing in the hallway. I picked up the receiver and heard the same voice:

“Hello, may I speak to Nastya?”

In my anger I again didn’t pay attention to the call. I didn’t even notice that the same voice had spoken the same words as a year earlier. I just barked into the receiver, “No!” and slammed it back onto the base. Then I went into the living room and sat down in an armchair. My sister ran out of her room, having heard the ringing, and asked who had called. Turning away, I replied:

“Just another one of your boyfriends…”

She was already about to take a deep breath to tell me everything she thought of me, when her mobile phone — the one I had left on the refrigerator the day before — rang. But I was sure it was discharged; there was no other possibility.

After she chatted for about half an hour, I decided to talk to her. Guessing who it might have been, I asked about the phrase with which the unknown caller had greeted me twice already. She looked at me in surprise and asked:

“How do you know?”

I continued questioning her. It turned out the guy’s name was Dima, and he studied in the same grade as her. He had suggested they go for a walk together. At the end of my interrogation (she hadn’t planned to tell me anything at all at first), I told her that the phone had been discharged — to which she showed me the screen, where the battery indicator was at half. After a few seconds of speechlessness, I raised my voice, confused inside, trying to prove that the phone had in fact been discharged and that I myself had drained it. To which I received the reply that maybe the phone had “glitched.” Or maybe I had.

The next day I sat near the front door, waiting for this Dima to arrive. Evening came, and the doorbell rang. I opened the door. There he stood — an ordinary guy, like the ones I saw every day, looking neither better nor worse than others. Ordinary jeans, an ordinary jacket, ordinary sneakers, an ordinary haircut, an ordinary face… Apparently I stared at him too long in silence, because I soon heard a quite reasonable: “Excuse me, may I come in?” Later my sister left with him.

After that they became friends. Nothing more, just good friends. To the usual calls from her admirers was added Dima’s signature greeting. Half a year passed, I had already gotten used to it, when suddenly…

One day my sister came home in tears and told our mother that Dima had been hit by a car. Killed. His spine had been broken in all possible places, ribs pierced, and his neck broken. The doctors couldn’t do anything.

That was when unexplainable things began to happen. At first they were hidden from my sister’s and my eyes (our parents noticed nothing like that). For example, a switch might click somewhere, or a gas burner light itself, or a newspaper rustle. My sister, by the way, liked it. She said we had acquired a “poltergeist” (there’s a bad joker in each of us). But over time it became more serious, and my sister and I both started noticing it. Lights would turn on by themselves in rooms (and once on, they never turned off by themselves), objects would fall, and so on. My sister kept joking, but it was clear she was scared too.

Another half a year passed like this, until the apogee of all these events. Sitting in the living room watching a TV series about Mr. Bean, we both noticed with horror a shadow of some humanoid creature on the opposite wall. The feeling was that it wasn’t just a shadow on the wall, but that something invisible was standing in the room and casting its shadow. After a few seconds the shadow stopped — and although it was completely impossible to make out any details in the image on the wall, I suddenly understood with some animal instinct that this “something” was reaching toward me. Unable to do anything out of fear, I simply waited… But everything ended as suddenly as it had begun. There was no shadow on the wall anymore. And for some reason I felt no fear. Only my sister was crying beside me from what she had seen. Our father ran in from the kitchen because of the noise (our mother worked twenty-four-hour shifts), and I told him everything. He didn’t believe us and advised us to watch less television.

From then on all anomalies stopped. A year passed, and I already told stories about this poltergeist as a joke or a scary tale to my friends. Until one more thing happened…

It was a weekday morning. I was already studying at a cadet school and decided not to go to classes that day, choosing to sleep in. The irony of the situation was that the circumstances were exactly the same as on that very first Sunday morning — I was alone at home, all the doors were closed… But this time there was one more “but” — I had earplugs in my ears, which helped me not hear the car of some idiot whose alarm had been wailing all night. I couldn’t hear anything at all in principle, but…

I was woken by the ringing of the phone. Loud. Clear. Penetrating everywhere, into every cell of my body. On half-bent legs I made my way to the hallway, picked up the receiver, and in a strained voice said, “Hello.” And I felt my hair literally begin to move on my head, like in the famous saying, because I heard the same voice and the same words:

“Hello, may I speak to Nastya?”

I collapsed onto the floor. My hand released the receiver, and it crashed against the cabinet. After taking a few deep breaths, I decided to pull myself together. With trembling fingers I picked up the receiver again and dared to ask one single question:

“Who are you?”

But as soon as the speaker grille touched my ear, I heard short beeps.

I decided not to tell my sister anything. I felt sorry for her. After that there was nothing else, and I heard nothing more about Dima. For several years now I’ve been living like all ordinary people, and nothing supernatural has been happening.