Every Night at 2:17 the Same Number Called and Said Nothing

I took overnight calls for a roadside assistance line, the kind you get with your car insurance -- flat tires, dead batteries, people locked out at truck stops at four in the morning. It was a lonely job but a real one. People called us when they were stranded and scared, and mostly we helped them, and mostly it felt good.

Except for 2:17.

It started in my second week. At exactly 2:17 in the morning, a call came in from a number with no name attached. I picked up, gave the greeting -- "Roadside assistance, this is Cole, are you in a safe location?" -- and there was nothing. Not silence exactly. There was a sound. Wind, maybe. A car passing far away. Breathing, slow and even. But no words.

"Hello?" I said. "Are you there? Do you need help?"

Nothing. And then, after about a minute, the line went dead.

The first night, I figured it was a pocket dial. The second night, when it happened again at 2:17 on the dot, I figured it was a glitch. By the fifth night I had stopped figuring anything and started dreading the clock. I would watch it crawl toward 2:17 and my stomach would tighten, and sure enough, 2:17, the call, the wind, the breathing, the minute, the dead line.

I asked the others. Marcus, who worked the desk beside me, said he had never gotten it. Denise on the far side said the same. It only came to me. It only ever came to my extension, which is not, our IT guy assured me, technically possible, because calls route randomly to whoever is free. But I was not always the only one free at 2:17. Sometimes all four of us were sitting there. And it always, always came to me.

I started talking to it. I don't know why. Somewhere around the ninth or tenth night, I stopped saying the script and just started talking, the way you talk to something you have decided is real. "It's Cole again," I'd say. "I'm here. If you can hear me, I'm here." And the breathing would go on, slow and even, and once -- once -- I swear it changed. It caught. Like whoever it was had heard me, and reacted.

I finally told my supervisor, a no-nonsense woman named Pat who did not believe in ghosts, or overtime, or fun. Pat pulled the call logs to prove me wrong. And this is where it stops being a fun spooky story and becomes the thing I don't like to talk about.

The number was real. It was assigned to a customer. A man, sixty-one, who had a roadside membership with us for eleven years. Pat pulled his account to call him and tell him to stop, and his account had a flag on it. A note from another department.

He had died. Four months earlier. On the interstate, at night, waiting for a tow that -- because of a dispatch error that was quietly settled and never talked about -- never came. He had called us. That night. And no one picked up.

Pat did not say anything for a long time. Then she closed the laptop and said, very quietly, "The account's been deactivated. It shouldn't be able to call anything."

The next night I sat there and watched the clock. 2:16. 2:17. 2:18. Nothing. It never called again. Whether that's because Pat deactivated something, or because somebody finally said "I'm here," I genuinely do not know. But I hope it was the second one. I hope he just needed someone to pick up.

I don't work nights anymore.