I started getting calls from a boy named Tommy sometime in February. The first one came while I was washing dishes after dinner, and I almost ignored it because I didn’t recognize the number. When I answered, there was a few seconds of silence before a child said, “Is this Mrs. Carter’s house?” I told him he had the wrong number, and he apologized in a surprisingly polite voice before hanging up.

He called again the next evening.

This time I asked where he got my number. He said it was written on a piece of paper beside the telephone. I assumed he was a kid playing around, so I told him to stop calling. He went quiet for a moment and then asked if I knew where Tommy was. I thought he meant another boy, so I said no and hung up.

The calls continued.

They never came at the same time, which made them harder to ignore. Sometimes Tommy called while I was working, sometimes just after midnight, and once at six in the morning. He always asked about Mrs. Carter. Eventually I searched the number online and found nothing useful. I also started reading scary short stories online late at night because I wanted to see if this was some kind of prank people had tried before.

Most of what I found was ridiculous.

There were stories about haunted phones, dead relatives, and people receiving calls from numbers that supposedly belonged to cemeteries. I didn’t believe any of it. The calls bothered me because they were too ordinary. Tommy never threatened me or said anything dramatic. He just sounded like a lonely kid who couldn’t figure out why nobody was answering the phone.

One night, I asked him what Mrs. Carter looked like.

He said she had gray hair and always wore a green sweater.

That meant nothing to me at the time.

Then he asked, “Are you still living in the blue house?”

I looked around my kitchen.

My house wasn’t blue.

I told him that.

He said, “It used to be.”

That was the first call that actually frightened me.

I hung up and blocked the number. The next morning, I mentioned it to my neighbor, who had lived on the street for more than thirty years. When I described the calls, she asked me to repeat the name.

“Tommy?”

She stopped what she was doing.

Then she told me there had been a boy named Tommy who lived in my house when she was young.

I thought she was joking.

She wasn’t.

The house had been blue when she moved in, she said. An older woman named Mrs. Carter had lived there with her grandson. Tommy disappeared one summer when he was around nine years old. His grandmother stayed in the house for several years afterward before moving away.

I asked what happened to him.

She said nobody ever found out.

I went home and searched the property records that evening. The previous owner was indeed listed as Margaret Carter. I couldn’t find anything about Tommy, but I did find an old newspaper archive that mentioned his disappearance.

The article was from 1987.

Tommy had vanished from his grandmother’s house in February.

That was the same month the calls had started.

I stopped answering after that.

For almost two weeks, there was nothing.

Then my landline rang at 2:13 in the morning.

I had forgotten I even still had one.

I picked up before I realized what I was doing.

“Hello?”

Tommy sounded different.

He wasn’t whispering, exactly, but his voice was much closer to the phone.

“Did you find Mrs. Carter?”

I said no.

He asked me to look in the hallway.

I didn’t.

Instead, I asked him where he was.

He didn’t answer.

I could hear something in the background. It sounded like an old television, and beneath that was a faint ticking noise. Then Tommy said, “She’s waiting for you.”

The line went dead.

I stayed in bed until sunrise.

The next day, I started moving my things into boxes. I hadn’t decided whether I was actually leaving, but packing made me feel less trapped. While clearing out the hallway closet, I found an old piece of wallpaper underneath a loose floorboard.

It was blue.

Behind it was a child’s drawing.

It showed a house with three windows and a telephone beside the front door. Underneath the drawing was a name written in pencil.

Tommy.

I sat on the floor for a long time looking at it.

Then my phone rang.

I almost didn’t answer.

It was Tommy.

This time, before I could speak, he said, “You’re in my room.”

I looked toward the end of the hallway.

There was a door there that I had always assumed belonged to a storage room. It had been painted shut before I moved in, and I’d never bothered with it.

The paint was cracked now.

The door was slightly open.

I didn’t go inside.

I called my neighbor instead and asked her what had been behind that door. She told me it had been Tommy’s bedroom.

Then she said something I still think about.

“There wasn’t a telephone in there.”

I asked what she meant.

She said the only telephone in the house had been in the hallway.

I looked at the phone in my hand.

Tommy was still on the line.

I could hear him breathing.

Then he said, very quietly, “You found it.”

The call ended.

I left the house that afternoon and stayed with my sister for several days. When I came back, the door to the old bedroom was closed again. I had a locksmith remove the handle, but there was nothing unusual inside. Just an empty room, a cracked window, and marks on the wall where something had once been hanging.

I eventually sold the house.

The buyer told me he planned to renovate it.

I never told him about Tommy.

A few months later, I received a letter at my new apartment. There was no return address. Inside was a single sheet of paper with a phone number written across the middle.

It was my old landline number.

Underneath it, in childish handwriting, were three words:

Can you hear me?