My daughter called me in the middle of the night, begging, “Mom, please open the door, I’m so cold.” Hearing this, I froze in terror, because my daughter died four years ago 

When I looked out into the yard, I saw something strange on the porch.

The phone rang shortly after one in the morning, when the house had long been submerged in silence. The mother lay in the darkness, listening to the old wall clock with a brass pendulum, inherited from her own mother, strike a single dull chime. Almost immediately after that, the phone rang in the living room.

She slowly sat up in bed and listened. In this house, every sound was familiar to her: the creak of the floorboard by the threshold, the quiet sigh of the radiator, the barely noticeable rustle of the wind outside the window. Her legs barely obeyed her, especially at night, but she still found her slippers, put on her robe, and walked down the dark hallway toward the phone.

The receiver was warm. The mother pressed it to her ear, ready to hear anything except what came next.

“Mom, please open the door. I’m very cold.”

The voice was painfully familiar. The intonation, the way the vowels stretched at the end of the sentence, the habit of speaking softly, as if apologizing for the disturbance. That was how Anna spoke. That was how she had always spoken.

The mother felt everything inside her tighten. Her mind immediately reminded her that Anna had been gone for four years: she had died after a terrible accident. The mother herself had closed the coffin lid and went to the cemetery every week.

And now she was calling. But how?

“I’m on the porch,” the voice continued. “Please, open up.”

The mother didn’t even understand how she had found herself at the front door. She turned on the porch light and pressed her eye to the peephole. In front of the door, she saw something that filled her with horror  Continuation in the first comment 

The yard was empty. Under the streetlamp lay wet asphalt, an old bench darkened against the wall, and there was no one else.

“Anna, is that really you?” she asked in a trembling voice, without taking her eye from the peephole.

On the other end of the line, there was a pause for a few seconds, and then an unfamiliar, awkward laugh sounded.

“No… I’m sorry. I’m not Anna. My name is Emma. I think I dialed the wrong number. I’d had a little to drink and got confused… I’m sorry, please.”

The mother slowly hung up the receiver and stood by the door for a long time, staring into the emptiness beyond the peephole, realizing that the most frightening thing about that night had not been the call, but how easily her heart had believed it.