smacky and bucky

Title courtesy of Will Shakespeare (and then borrowed by Will Faulkner. Lots of good Wills out there).

The night began normally enough. Heated up some leftover Chinese food (szechuan shrimp and walnut chicken) for my dinner alone. Watched a rerun of Homicide: Life on the Streets, read a book for an hour, then watched CSI (an episode I had missed about a psychic that has a premonition of her own death). Then I climbed into bed and read for another half hour, going to sleep at 10:30 with the dog and both cats sleeping beside me.

At 12:15 a.m., the thunder woke me up. The dog was already awake, and started licking my face. I assured her everything was all right. I could feel the thunder reverberating in the walls, and the lightning was so numerous that the sky had a strobe effect. I went back to sleep and woke up again at 1 a.m. as the electricity cut off, silencing the air conditioner. (Alarm clock has a battery back-up, so it still worked.) Glancing at the window, I could see the near continuous lightning through the blinds. The thunder was overlapping, a big bass drum repeatedly kicked.

Suddenly my cell phone began ringing from the living room. Who calls at 1 a.m., unless the news is very bad. I jumped up, still half-asleep, and ran to answer it. The phone display glowed in the darkness. I didn't recognize the number. Not even the area code.

"Hello?"

No one answered. Then I began to hear voices. Two men having a conversation. Their voices were very clear, and they were speaking English, but between my lack of consciousness and the thunder, I couldn't make out the words.

The phone disconnected, and the call duration flashed 23 seconds. By now I was just awake enough to seriously creep myself out. I imagined I was in a horror movie, and the second male voice on the phone was going to sense I was there:

"Excuse me a second," he says to his companion, voice still muffled.
Suddenly his voice is loud and clear.
"Don't turn around."

I know he's talking to me, and I know there is someone standing behind me. Helpless to stop, I begin to turn...


"Holy shit, stop it," I said out loud to myself. I looked down at the dog, who is sitting at my feet, looking up at me. I looked out the front window as it rocked from another burst of thunder.

I went back to bed and tried to think of something else, after freaking myself out with that middle-of-the-night waking dream.

I woke up at 6 this morning. The sun was rising on a clear sky. The electricity came back on at 6:15 as I was brushing my teeth.

I just looked up the number on anywho.com. Since it's a cell phone number, it doesn't have a listing. I looked up the area code, and it's local, about 10 miles outside of town. Somehow, in the midst of all that storming, signals got flung around, and my phone intercepted someone's call. It just happened to happen during a huge thunderstorm, at one in the morning, seconds after the electricity went out.

Damn.