Detective Mariella Cruz of the Baltimore Police Department tapped her foot in agitation as she waited for her partner, the vampire Niles Gule, to complete his purchase. She glanced at her watch pointedly three times but nothing she could do would speed a vampire’s decision regarding a new, custom tailored Italian suit.
“That thing’s too well tailored,” she complained while Niles turned slowly in front of the mirrors to view himself from all sides. “You don’t look American, Niles.”
The vampire’s lips curled into a thin smile and his brilliant blue eyes shimmered. “That’s the point, Mari. Why should I look like a rumpled Columbo when I can aspire to be Lorenzo Richelmy?”
Cruz snorted. “Good luck with that! Richelmy has dark brown hair and hazel eyes. He’s a far cry from you, Mr. Norway.”
Niles shot her a wicked look before returning his attention to the tailor who fussed around him with a tape measure.
“The vest could use a bit of a tuck here,” the silver haired gentleman said. “You have such a slender waist, Mr. Gule.” Bernard always gushed when Niles appeared because the vampire never failed to purchase the finest suits at full price without demur. Not that he knew his best patron was a vampire. Niles kept his fangs carefully hidden.
“Call him skinny,” Cruz retorted. “He’s been on a diet.”
Niles grimaced at her. “I most certainly have not.”
Cruz shrugged. She glanced once again at her watch.
“What’s the hurry?” Niles demanded. He bent his knees to allow Bernard to ease the jacket from his shoulders with loving hands.
“I told you!” Cruz slapped her hands against her thighs. “I promised my friend Andrea I would pick her up at the train station. Niles! You know how important this weekend is! It’s her last days of freedom before she marries Charlie.” When Bernard made the mistake of glancing at her with a supercilious look, she lasered him with her dark eyes. “I’ve planned an entire girl’s weekend with her. She’s my best friend. After Niles, of course.”
“Of course,” Bernard murmured. The roll of his eyes told her what he thought of the tall, elegant, blond Niles juxtaposed to the short, curvaceous Latina.
Niles allowed Bernard to remove the gray silk vest. He settled his shirt collar and accepted his old jacket from Bernard. “When will it be ready?” he asked.
Bernard brushed the suit reverently. “One week, Mr. Gule.”
Slipping on his current jacket, which he’d also bought from Bernard, Niles nodded. “Good. Have it delivered, please.”
“It would be my pleasure,” gushed Bernard.
Now Cruz rolled her eyes. “I’ll just wait outside. The male love fest in here makes me think I’m in San Francisco.”
Bernard sniffed in disapproval but knew better than to speak.
Cruz stomped out of the shop to await her partner on the sidewalk.
Niles completed his purchase by handing Bernard his credit card. He then fingered another suit and watched Cruz through the store front while he waited for the charge to be rung up. Cruz remained a puzzle to the vampire, so he often watched her when she wasn’t looking. Today was no exception. He watched her answer her cellphone then scowl at it and thumb it off. He smiled as warmly as a vampire can smile when Bernard returned his card with an obsequious bow. Pocketing his wallet, Niles headed for the door only to see Cruz answer her phone a second time, yell something at the caller, then thumb it off again.
A soft spring breeze redolent with the scent of cherry blossoms struck him lightly in the face as Niles stepped outside. The sky flushed pink with the afterglow of sunset, painting the Crab Cake Capital of the World in pastel colors. Early evening traffic swished past on the boulevard. Life was returning to normal after the shutdowns of Covid.
Cruz’s phone rang again. With a huff, she thrust it to her ear, listened for a moment, then cursed and thumbed it off again.
“Something wrong?” Niles asked. He headed towards where his partner had parked her car.
“Either Andrea’s phone has a problem or some slimeball is trolling me.” The phone rang again. She handed it to her partner. “You tell me what you hear.”
Niles tucked the phone to his ear. With a frown forming between his brows, he listened to crackling and hissing static. Somewhere in the middle of all that noise, he thought he could barely make out a voice but wasn’t sure. He certainly couldn’t discern any words. He handed it back to Cruz.
“Sounds like the world’s worst connection. Do you recognize the number?” he asked.
Cruz held it up when it rang yet again. “It’s Andrea’s. It’s like she’s calling over and over again but the call’s not connecting.”
“She is on a moving train,” Niles commented.
Cruz shrugged. She shoved the phone into her purse and ignored the five more times it rang.
When they reached her car, Niles folded himself into the passenger seat while Cruz took the wheel. As she peeled off into evening traffic, Niles felt his own phone vibrating in his pocket. He grimaced at the number.
“Williams,” he grunted, placing the phone to his ear. “Gule here.”
His nemesis’ deep, rumbling voice reverberated loudly. “You know where Cruz is?” the man asked without preamble.
“Yes. She’s sitting beside me.” Niles frowned at Cruz who turned at the sound of her name. “What’s up?”
“I tried calling her twice, Ghoul,” complained Williams.
“She’s having phone problems.”
“Yeah, well, tell her to get both your asses down to Jones Falls Highway just north of Penn Station.”
“What’s happening?” Niles asked. He gave Cruz Williams’ instructions.
“Massive train crash,” Williams said in a breathless voice. “I mean real bad. It’s all hands on deck.” The big man hung up on him.
Niles swallowed, wondering how to tell Cruz her friend might be in danger. “We need to divert to Jones Falls Highway north of Penn Station.” When Cruz frowned at him, he added, “Williams says a train derailed.”
Cruz drew her breath. For an infinitesimal moment she clung frozen to the wheel. Then she snapped out of it. She slammed her foot on the gas and little Fifi shot like a rocket towards 83.
Niles clung to the grab bar as his feisty partner swerved through evening traffic like a Formula One racer in Monaco. Although Williams hadn’t provided an exact address, they found they didn’t need one. The accident had occurred where the north-south rail lines dogged alongside 83 just north of the city. From the highway, Niles spotted a blizzard of emergency lights collected on Falls Road. Cruz pointed her car in that direction.
Fire police forced them to park in an industrial lot across from the crash site. Cruz bolted from the car quicker than Niles could even unplug his seat belt. After unfolding himself from the tiny car, he hastened after her, his eyes all the while scanning the disaster.
An Amtrak train lay in a pile, most of its forward cars toppled on their sides. The handful at the rear had jackknifed in a z pattern. Momentum carried the engine into the base of an overpass where its crumpled front end smoked and steamed in protest to the sudden stop. Still on the rails stood a freight train, its massive engine bucked off line but still upright. It must not have been moving very fast because its string of coal cars stood unmolested behind it.
Fire fighters swarmed the toppled Amtrak cars, their dayglo markings brilliant even in the dark. Ambulances with their lights strafing the night clustered along the tracks. The silhouettes of people staggering to safety filled the swale between the tracks and the emergency equipment.
Terrified for his partner, Niles searched the melee for a bobbing black ponytail. He found her near one of the lines of escaping people. While fire fighters and EMTs assisted those in need of support, Cruz stood on her toes searching for her friend.
Drawing a heavy sigh, Niles marched through the maelstrom to reach her side.
“I can’t see her!” Cruz complained in desperation. “Niles! I’m not seeing her!”
Niles rested a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Describe her. I’m taller and I can see better in the dark.”
Cruz drew comfort from his calm tone. With a shaking voice, she described Andrea as a short, plump girl with long sandy brown hair and the tendency to wear overalls. While she stood on her toes looking frantically, Cruz clung to Niles’ arm, her fingers digging into his sleeve. Meanwhile, Niles searched the chaos for one small woman in a mass of churning humanity. He didn’t see anyone who matched Andrea’s description.
Becoming hysterical, Cruz fished her phone from her pocket and punched in Andrea’s number.
“Come on…” she urged. “Answer it.”
Niles kept hold of his partner while she waited endlessly. The phone just continued to ring.
Eventually, he suggested she assist with collecting information from the survivors so that an accounting of the passengers could be made. He would venture further into the disaster to see if he could find Andrea. With a sniff, wiping tears from her cheeks, Cruz wordlessly nodded and did as he suggested.
Due to his predatory night vision, Niles viewed the benighted world in shades of gray and black. He could clearly delineate each human as they stumbled free of the wreckage either under their own power or with the assistance of a firefighter. Flashlight beams raked the darkness. People yelled. Someone in charge ordered portable spotlights to ignite and within seconds the zone of destruction gleamed under thousands of watts of light. Niles floundered on.
Near the overturned cars, he found emergency personnel working feverishly to remove bodies from the wreck. Given the turmoil, Niles couldn’t be sure if those unmoving people were alive or dead, but given some of their injuries, he suspected many hadn’t survived the crash. For almost an hour, he added his strength to the effort, tugging bent metal or shifting seating to reach those trapped in the wreck. All the while he kept his eye out for a blond girl in overalls. He didn’t find her.
Sometime around midnight, everyone sensed they’d found all the survivors and the process shifted to extricating the dead. One by one bodies were lifted from the debris and placed on backboards to be carried to waiting ambulances. Niles continued to work alongside the fire fighters who appreciated the abnormal strength of a strange man in an Italian suit and tie.
Finally, Niles located Andrea. She’d been in one of the first cars and had therefore suffered from the worst of the blow. Her car had smashed against its neighbor, crumpling its nose and killing everyone in the first ten rows. As a pair of EMTs carefully lifted her lifeless body onto a board, Niles stood watching sorrowfully, knowing the pain he would bring his partner when he told her. Not for the first time in his life, he wished he understood human religious ceremonies because he felt an urge to make some motion over her, but he didn’t know what. The EMTs carried her solemnly away.
The flash of light on glass caught Niles’ eye. He bent down to find a cellphone lying beneath the remains of a seat. He thumbed it awake to see a photo of a girl with sandy brown hair gazing back at him.
Andrea.
Disheartened, Niles picked clear of the wreckage and sought somewhere to sit down while he sorted out his thoughts. He found a metal utility box related to the rail line upon which another person also sat.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked, not wishing to disturb another person suffering from the horrors of the day.
The man gazed up at him with an ashen face. He nudged over and patted the box.
“Make yourself at home.” He offered a hand. “Reverend Donald Ashman.”
Niles shook the hand quickly before withdrawing because humans flinched from his cold fingers. “Niles Gule. Baltimore Police.”
Ashman sighed with a soft groan.
“Were you on board?” Niles asked in alarm.
Ashman nodded. “Oh, don’t worry! I’m not in too bad of shape. Wrenched my back mostly.” He drew a heavy sigh. “I thought I should give last rites to those who needed them,” he explained, rubbing his grimy hands together. “Give the dying some peace.”
Niles nodded, pretending to understand. He didn’t.
Ashman watched in agony as the EMTs carried Andrea across the line of tracks towards the ambulances. “Poor girl,” he murmured. “She was one of those I gave rites to. Saw she wore a cross, so I figured she wouldn’t mind.”
Niles nearly blurted that the girl was dead, so she wouldn’t mind anything, but he caught himself in time.
“Hmmm…” he murmured.
He fiddled with the phone while he calculated how he would tell Cruz her friend was dead. The phone’s notifications scrolled across the screen. To Niles’ surprise, he saw notation after notation of outgoing calls to a number he knew well. Cruz’s.
“That’s strange,” he murmured.
Ashman turned a weary face towards the vampire. “What is?”
Niles rattled the phone. “According to this, Andrea called my partner seven times in the past three hours.”
Ashman shook his head. “That’s not possible. That girl died almost instantly in the crash.”
Niles fiddled more with the phone and realized Andrea didn’t lock it with a passcode. He opened her outbound calls and read the timing.
“Says here she called at 10:05, 10:06, 10:09, 10:17, 10:30, 10:42 and 10:59.”
Ashman started. “The crash happened at almost 10:00 straight up. I remember thinking we would arrive at the Baltimore station exactly on time at ten o’clock. There’s no way that girl made those calls.”
Niles gazed at the phone, thinking about the strange series of calls Cruz had received. The static. The distant, disembodied voice he couldn’t understand. He found himself shivering.
Ashman laid a hand on his arm. “Are you all right?”
Niles shook his head. “No. I’m sure you won’t believe this, but that girl called my partner seven times after she died. I heard one of the calls.”
Ashman drew his breath. Then his body slouched. “Praise God!” he breathed.
Niles stiffened, affronted. “Come again?”
Ashman’s dirty face creased into a weary smile. “Those calls prove the soul survives death, Mr. Gule. Something, I, as a man of God, believe fully. But it’s nice to have it verified once in a while.”
He patted Niles on the shoulder, then hauled himself to his feet and trundled away into the darkness.
He left a disturbed vampire pondering a phone and phone calls from the dead.
© 2022 Newmin
Niles comments: The internet is rife with strange tales about mysterious phone calls. However, the story of Andrea and Charles and the phone calls from the dead have been documented. One half of the young couple was involved in a horrific train crash. In the hours that followed some 35 calls to friends and relatives came through from the cellphone although no one heard anything other than static. Fire fighters use the cellphone signal to locate the body, but the calls finally stopped around 3:00 AM the next morning.
Various theories have been raised to explain this strange story. Some people claim the calls might have been the work of trolls — but this is surely ruled out by the fact that no one besides Charles knew Andrea was even on the train.
Another popular theory is a device malfunction, which is a possibility. However, it does not explain why the calls only seemed to extend to her nearest and dearest and were not reported among her wider contacts.
Although the phenomenon is rare, such calls have been reported all over the world.
Of the calls that have been verified, they follow a particular pattern:
- They usually occur a short time after the person’s death
- They typically reach people to whom the deceased was close in life
- They are often distorted by static or the voice sounds as though it is far away
I’m a vampire. I don’t know what to think of these calls.