A Call

The chipped mug warmed my hands, a lukewarm shield against the October chill seeping in through the drafty windows. "Still can't believe it," I muttered, staring into the dregs of my coffee. "Even though I was there."
My parents, bless their cotton socks, were glued to the TV, some inane reality show blaring from the speakers. The quintessential American dream right there: suburban comfort, a mortgage, and enough channel surfing to induce a coma. Then the phone rang. A shrill, jarring ring that cut through the manufactured drama like a chainsaw through butter.
I grabbed the receiver, the plastic cold against my ear. "Hello?"
The static crackled, a vicious little beast gnawing at the line. A voice, faint and raspy, fought its way through the noise. "Nikki? It's...it's gonna be hard to hear me...Nikki, is...is Nick and Barb home?"
Nick and Barb. That's what my parents, Nicholas and Barbara, went by. And that voice… it sounded warped, like a cassette tape left in a hot car.
"Yeah, Mom, Dad's right here. Who is this? The connection's terrible."
"Tell them… tell them it's Sal. They need to get me outta here. I’m so sick. So terribly sick. It's Alex...Alex from Chicago..." The line went dead, swallowed by the static.
Sal. Uncle Sal. My mom's brother. Alex from Chicago was his hometown. Except, Sal was supposed to be, well, you know... gone. Six feet under. Took a dirt nap, pushing up daisies, bought the farm, the big sleep. You name the euphemism, we’d used it. He’d succumbed to the sweet release of a massive heart explosion while trying to deep-fry a turkey, a scene so brilliantly chaotic I’d always thought it deserved a spot in the Darwin Awards.
My parents were staring at me, the vacant TV glow reflecting in their eyes. "Who was that, honey?" my mom asked, her voice thick with the worry she usually reserved for misplaced grocery coupons.
"It...it sounded like Uncle Sal. He said… he said you guys need to get him. He's somewhere, doesn't sound good."
My dad, usually a bastion of calm, went pale. "Sal? But...that's impossible." He reached for the phone, a sudden urgency sparking in his eyes.
Within hours, they were packed. Suitcases crammed with God-knows-what, a frantic energy buzzing around them like angry wasps.
"We have to go, Nikki," my mom said, her voice trembling. "Something's not right. Something really bad is not right."
"Go where? Mom, Uncle Sal is dead! We all went to the funeral. We threw dirt on his coffin, for crying out loud!"
My dad just shook his head. "We have to go to Chicago. That's where..." He trailed off, lost in his own horrified thoughts.
They left that night, the taillights of their minivan disappearing into the darkness, leaving me alone in the unsettling silence of the house. I spent the next few days in a state of bewildered anxiety, alternating between chain-smoking and Googling "phantom phone calls" and "grieving family delusions" – a very productive coping mechanism, I assure you.
Three days later, the phone rang again. This time it was my mom, her voice weak and shaky.
"Nikki… we found him."
"Found who? Uncle Sal? Mom, I thought you are losing your mind!"
"The morgue. He was in the morgue. They were about to bury him as a John Doe. He'd been there for a month."
The floor seemed to tilt beneath me. A month? A month ago, we were watching horror movie marathon in Mom and Dad's living room, laughing at a scene where a zombie pops it heads out of the grave - so realistic it made us to spill popcorn everywhere!
"But...the funeral? The eulogy? The… the actual body in the casket?"
The line crackled again. "We don't know, Nikki. We don't know what happened. But it wasn't Sal they buried. It was someone else."
That's when the real question hit me, a cold, clammy fist squeezing my heart. If Uncle Sal was in the morgue for a month, about to be buried as an unknown body, and if it wasn't him we put into the ground...
Who the hell called?
The answer, of course, is the stuff of nightmares, the kind that keeps you awake at 3 AM, staring at the ceiling, convinced there's something lurking in the shadows. A restless spirit? A cruel prank? Or something far, far worse?
I still replay that night as if it was a VHS tape, trying to fast forward or rewind to make sense of it. I even paid a visit to medium, who gave me more scares than any horror movie.
I’m pretty sure one day I’ll figure it out. Maybe. But until then, I'm keeping my phone on silent. And maybe, just maybe, investing in a good, old-fashioned Ouija board. Because if you're going to talk to the dead, you might as well do it with a little bit of style. And a whole lot of black humor. After all, what's the point of being scared if you can't laugh at the absurdity of it all?
But even now, years later, sometimes when the wind howls outside, and the phone rings at an ungodly hour, I feel a cold dread creep into my bones. And I remember that scratchy voice, whispering through the static.
And I wonder... what did Uncle Sal see in that morgue? And what, or who, was trying to get out?