Chapter One

Who's There?

The first call didn't really scare me. Not one bit. And why should it? The phone rang and I answered it.

"Hello."

Silence on the other end.

"Hello," I said again. "Hel-lo?" I was getting annoyed now. I tapped my numb left hand on the counter. A silence like that could mean that the person who called was hesitating because they had something really, really important to say. Maybe it was that reporter wanting to follow up on her article that had appeared last week about my running. It hadn't been a bad piece, despite its corny title: descendant of chiefs wins big meet. Or maybe it was great news -- like that I'd won a prize or something.

Or maybe something awful. Maybe this was the kind of call where the person on the other end was hesitating because they have to tell you bad news. Like someone close to you has just been hurt or even died. I knew what that kind of call was like. That kind of call makes you hold onto the phone as if it was a lifeline, the only thing to keep from falling a long, long way into a deep, deep chasm. But hard as you hold onto it, a part of you is already falling and will never stop falling. I'm sorry is how the person on the other end of the line begins the conversation in that sort of call. Then they say there's been an accident. And from there on in, it never gets better again.

It wasn't that kind of call. Whoever was on the other end didn't say anything, good or bad. They just hung up.

But as soon as I put the phone down and started to walk away from it, it rang again.

"Hello. Hello? HELLO?" The third time I said it, a lot louder than I'd meant to, I was starting to feel both disgusted and dumb.

But I didn't hang up. By now I just knew what it had to mean. This was one of those dumb telemarketing calls that everyone gets. Any second now I'd hear someone mispronounce Aunt Lyssa's name and then ask for a donation or try to sell us something we don't need.

But there was no sales pitch. Just more silence. The kind of silence that told me someone really was there on the other end. I couldn't hear that person breathing, but I could hear him in another way. I heard him with the sixth sense my dad's side of the family believes in so strongly. Intuition is what Aunt Lyssa calls it, although I think it's more than that. It's a kind of knowing.It told me there was someone on the other end of the line, listening just as intently to me. And this is when I really should have hung up. But I didn't.

Maybe it was one of my friends playing a dumb joke. Or some bored kid just dialing numbers at random for a goof.

My friend Brittany and I used to do that sort of thing on Internet chat rooms. Her persona was Ingrid, a twenty-one-year-old Swedish model. Me, I only added on five years when I identified myself as Natasha, a mysterious eighteen-year-old Gypsy ballerina from Transylvania.

I say that Brittany and I used to do that. But she and her family moved away last year, all the way out to Seattle. For a while she e-mailed me and called whenever she had a chance. But that was only for the first few months. I guess she found a new best girlfriend pretty quick. Girls like Brittany always do. I hadn't heard a word from her for months. Still, when the call came, she was the first person I thought about, so I guess I'd been missing her.

"Brittany?" I said.

The silence on the other end somehow seemed more echoey, like the silence in a cave. It was a little spooky.

"Roger?" I said. "Is that you?"

The lack of response was feeling ominous. Even if it was the middle of the morning, a sunny summer's day, it seemed as if things were getting darker around me.

I just couldn't stand it any longer. "Who's there?" I demanded.

"I am," a voice whispered. "I'm coming for you."

It was a voice as cold as ice. I felt as if spiderwebs were brushing across my face. I tried to say something, but I couldn't speak.

Then the line went dead.

---

Excerpted from Whisper in the Dark by Joseph Bruchac
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.