The Last Voicemail
After buying a refurbished phone, a man discovers a single forgotten voicemail. At first it seems harmless. Then it begins predicting events that have not happened yet.
I bought the phone because mine broke on a Tuesday afternoon.
There was nothing unusual about it. I had just finished work and was getting out of my car when it slipped from my jacket pocket. It landed face down on the pavement, and by the time I picked it up, the screen looked like a sheet of cracked ice. The repair shop quoted a price that was only slightly cheaper than buying another phone, so the following day I drove to a small electronics store on the edge of town that specialised in refurbished devices.
The shop occupied the ground floor of an old brick building between a laundrette and a closed travel agency. Inside, glass cabinets displayed rows of phones, tablets and laptops with small handwritten price labels. The owner was an older man named Harris, according to the badge clipped to his shirt. He asked what I needed, listened without trying to sell me anything expensive, then disappeared into a back room.
He returned carrying a black phone that looked almost new.
“It came in last week,” he said, placing it on the counter. “Battery is still excellent. We reset everything this morning.”
I checked it myself before paying. There were no contacts, photographs, downloaded applications or messages. It was exactly what I expected from a properly refurbished phone. I transferred my SIM card, signed the receipt and drove home without giving the previous owner another thought.
Looking back now, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had noticed the voicemail before leaving the shop.
I probably would have handed the phone back.
Instead, I discovered it later that evening while setting everything up. A small notification appeared at the top of the screen informing me that there was one saved voicemail waiting to be heard.
That caught my attention. A factory reset should have removed everything.
I opened the voicemail menu and found a single recording. It was forty seven seconds long, but there was no phone number, date or caller information attached to it. I almost deleted it without listening. Curiosity won.
The voice belonged to a woman who sounded as though she was in her forties. She was not crying or frightened. If anything, she sounded quietly exhausted, like someone leaving a message after several failed attempts to call.
“Daniel,” she said softly. “If you are hearing this, you probably ignored my calls again.”
I frowned.
My name is Daniel.
It is not exactly uncommon, and for a moment I convinced myself that the voicemail simply belonged to another Daniel. The coincidence felt strange, but not impossible.
“You left your coffee mug on the kitchen counter again,” the woman continued. “Please do not forget your blue umbrella tomorrow.”
Without thinking, I looked toward the kitchen. My coffee mug was still beside the sink, exactly where I had left it before going to work that morning.
I smiled to myself. Daniel was a common name. Forgetting a mug was hardly unusual. The message had simply stumbled onto two lucky guesses.
Then I remembered the umbrella.
I did not own a blue umbrella. In fact, I did not own an umbrella at all.
That single detail erased most of the unease I had felt while listening. Whoever the woman had been speaking to, it clearly was not me. I deleted the message, finished setting up the phone and went to bed.
The next morning, rain was falling heavily enough to blur the buildings across the street.
I was locking my apartment when the door opposite mine opened. My neighbour Emily stepped into the hallway carrying a handbag and two umbrellas.
“You are heading into the city, right?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You will need this.”
She held one of the umbrellas out to me. It was dark blue.
“My brother left it here last month,” she said. “I keep forgetting to give it back.”
I stared at it for longer than necessary.
Emily raised an eyebrow. “Do you want it or not?”
I took it and thanked her.
During the drive to work, I told myself that the colour meant nothing. Blue was probably one of the most common colours for umbrellas. The voicemail had belonged to someone who knew another Daniel, and that Daniel had also owned a blue umbrella. There was no mystery in that.
By lunchtime, I had stopped thinking about it.
At 4:36 that afternoon, the voicemail notification returned.
The message I had deleted was back in the same folder. It had the same duration and still showed no caller information. I assumed the phone had restored it from some backup connected to the previous owner’s account.
When I pressed play, however, the recording had changed.
The same woman spoke in the same calm, tired voice.
“You made it to work. Good. Tomorrow morning, do not use the elevator. Take the stairs.”
There was a short silence before she added, “It will happen at nine seventeen.”
The message ended.
I listened to it twice more before checking the call history. There had been no incoming call. My mobile provider showed no voicemail activity. As far as every part of the phone was concerned, the recording did not exist.
I deleted it again.
The following morning, I reached the office building at 9:11. The elevator doors opened as soon as I stepped into the lobby. Two colleagues were already inside, and one of them held the door for me.
For a few seconds, I stood there feeling ridiculous.
Then I remembered the woman’s voice.
It will happen at nine seventeen.
I told my colleagues I had forgotten something in the car and turned toward the stairwell. I climbed six flights, arrived at my desk out of breath and spent the next few minutes ashamed of myself.
At 9:17, the elevator stopped between the fourth and fifth floors.
Nobody died. One of my colleagues injured her shoulder when the lift dropped suddenly, and another suffered a panic attack while they waited to be rescued. The building manager later blamed a damaged control unit.
I watched the emergency workers from the office window, unable to move.
The third voicemail arrived that evening.
“Do not answer the call at eight forty three.”
That was all she said.
At exactly 8:43, my phone rang.
The screen displayed an unknown number. I watched it vibrate across the coffee table until the call ended. No message followed.
The next morning, a colleague named Mark arrived with his wrist in a cast. He had been involved in a collision on his way home. The other driver crossed the centre line and struck the front of Mark’s car at speed.
“I tried calling you from the roadside,” he told me. “I did not know who else to ring.”
My stomach tightened.
“What time?”
“Around quarter to nine.”
The police later confirmed that the other driver had died before the ambulance arrived. If I had answered Mark’s call, I would not have been involved in the crash or placed in any danger. I would only have heard him frightened and injured beside a dead stranger.
That seemed to make the warning more disturbing, not less.
The messages did not arrive every day. Sometimes a week passed without one. When they did appear, they always contained a warning.
Do not take the usual road home.
Move the chair away from the bedroom window.
Leave the restaurant before ten.
Each instruction seemed arbitrary until something happened.
A truck overturned on the road I normally used. A loose section of masonry fell from the building opposite my bedroom and shattered the window. A fire started in the restaurant kitchen eleven minutes after I left.
The woman never explained how she knew. She simply told me what to do, and I obeyed.
After a month, my life had begun to revolve around the phone.
I stopped turning it off. I carried a charger everywhere. I checked the voicemail folder every few minutes and felt anxious whenever it remained empty. The messages frightened me, but silence was worse. Silence meant that something might happen without warning.
I took the phone back to Harris and asked whether he could identify the previous owner.
He entered the serial number into his computer and shook his head.
“It was part of a bulk purchase,” he said. “Insurance returns, trade ins, estate clearances. We get dozens at a time.”
“Can you tell me where this one came from?”
“Not without going through old invoices.”
I placed two hundred dollars on the counter.
He looked at the money, then at me.
“Is the phone stolen?”
“No.”
“Is someone threatening you?”
“I just need the name.”
Harris took the money and told me to return the following afternoon.
When I did, he had printed a single page from an old inventory report. The phone had been included in a box of personal electronics collected from a house clearance company. The report gave an address but no name.
The house was thirty minutes away, in a quiet suburb I had never visited. It was a narrow two storey property with a neglected garden and newspapers gathering behind the front gate. A faded sign from a real estate agency stood near the driveway.
I knocked twice before a woman from the neighbouring house came outside.
“Nobody lives there,” she said. “It has been empty since the accident.”
I asked who had owned it.
“The Mercer family. Laura and Peter, with their little boy.”
“Was there someone named Daniel?”
The woman studied me carefully.
“The boy was Daniel.”
I felt the phone become heavy in my pocket.
“How old was he?”
“Eight, I think.”
She told me the accident had happened nearly a year earlier. The family had been driving home late at night when their car left the road and struck a tree. Peter and Daniel died at the scene. Laura survived but remained in hospital for several months.
“Where is she now?” I asked.
The neighbour looked toward the empty house.
“She died in February.”
That evening, I searched their names online.
The first result was a local newspaper article. It included a photograph taken before the accident. Laura Mercer stood beside her husband and son at a school event. She looked about forty, with tired eyes and dark hair tied behind her head.
I had never seen her before, but I recognised her voice immediately.
A second article reported her death. She had suffered complications from injuries sustained in the crash.
The date was four days before the phone arrived at Harris’s shop.
I barely slept.
At 2:13 in the morning, the voicemail notification appeared.
For the first time, Laura sounded frightened.
“Daniel, listen carefully. You need to leave your apartment now. Do not pack anything. Do not use the front stairs. Go through the fire exit and keep walking until you reach the park.”
She paused, and I heard something in the background. It sounded like a door closing.
“You have six minutes.”
I was already pulling on my shoes.
Then she said something that stopped me.
“I am sorry I could not save you the first time.”
The message ended.
I stood in the middle of my bedroom, staring at the phone.
It had never been speaking to me.
Not really.
The messages were meant for her son. Another Daniel. A child who had died before any of them could have been recorded.
Yet every warning had applied to me.
The phone showed 2:15.
I left through the fire exit.
The metal staircase was wet from the rain, and I nearly slipped as I ran down. I crossed the alley behind the building and continued toward the park without looking back.
At 2:19, an explosion tore through the top floor of my apartment building.
Investigators later blamed a gas leak in the unit beneath mine. Three apartments were destroyed. Two people were killed.
I stood beneath a tree in the park while flames climbed through the roof, holding the phone so tightly that my hand ached.
Another voicemail appeared.
This one was only twelve seconds long.
“You are safe now,” Laura said. Her voice had returned to its usual calmness. “Please do not go back for the phone.”
I almost laughed.
The phone was already in my hand.
Then I realised she was not talking about the device I was holding.
Across the street, inside the burning building, I could hear a phone ringing.
The sound came from my apartment.
My own number appeared on the screen of the refurbished phone.
I did not answer.
The ringing stopped after thirty seconds.
A new voicemail arrived.
There was no voice this time. Only a recording of someone moving through my ruined apartment. Glass cracked under slow footsteps. A door opened. Then a child whispered close to the microphone.
“Mum?”
The recording lasted forty seven seconds.
I threw the phone into a rubbish bin near the park entrance and walked away before the emergency crews could question me.
For the next six months, nothing happened.
I moved to another part of the city. I bought a new phone and changed my number. I never returned to Harris’s shop, and I stopped searching for information about the Mercer family.
Eventually, I began convincing myself that the recordings had been created by someone who knew more about me than they should. The alternative was harder to live with.
Last Tuesday, a parcel arrived at my new address.
There was no return label.
Inside was the refurbished phone.
The screen had been cracked by the fire, but the battery was fully charged.
One voicemail was waiting.
I did not listen to it immediately. I placed the phone inside a kitchen drawer and tried to continue with my evening. At midnight, it began playing through the closed drawer without being touched.
Laura’s voice filled the apartment.
“Daniel, I need you to answer me this time.”
The drawer rattled.
“I have been trying to reach my son.”
There was a long silence.
Then her voice changed. It became quieter and more uncertain.
“You are not him.”
The kitchen light went out.
From inside the drawer, a child began to cry.
I did not move until the sound stopped.
The following morning, the phone was gone.
In its place was the blue umbrella Emily had given me months earlier. It was folded neatly inside the drawer, still wet from the rain.
I called Emily and asked whether her brother had ever collected it.
She was silent for a moment.
“Daniel,” she said, “I do not have a brother.”
Before I could respond, another call appeared on my screen.
It came from my own number.
This time, I answered.
For several seconds, I heard only static.
Then a boy spoke.
“Is my mum with you?”
I looked toward the kitchen drawer.
The blue umbrella had begun to open by itself.
“No,” I said.
The boy started crying.
Behind him, very far away, I heard Laura’s voice.
She was counting backwards from six.
The call ended before she reached one.