I should have known something was wrong the moment my phone started ringing. I mean, I was literally holding it in my hand, scrolling through Instagram while sitting cross-legged on my bed. It was around 7 PM on a Tuesday, and I’d just gotten home from tuition classes in Bangalore. My parents were downstairs making dinner—I could smell the tadka from the dal wafting up to my room.
But my phone was ringing. The screen showed an incoming call, and when I looked at the caller ID, I felt my heart sink.
It was my own number.
I stared at it for a few seconds, thinking maybe it was some kind of glitch or a telemarketing trick. You know how these scam callers spoof numbers now? I’d heard about it happening to my classmates. Obviously, I should have just ignored it, but curiosity got the better of me. Looking back, I realize how stupid that was.
I answered.
For a moment, there was only breathing. Heavy, deliberate breathing that made the hair on my arms stand up. Then I heard it—my own voice, exactly as I sound, with the same slight rasp I get when I’m nervous.
“Don’t come home tonight.”
The call disconnected.
I dropped the phone like it had burned me. My hands were shaking as I picked it up again, checking my call log. There it was: incoming call from my own number, duration twelve seconds. I tried calling back, but it just rang and rang—basically calling myself, which made no sense and somehow made everything worse.
“Maybe I was just paranoid,” I muttered, trying to rationalize what had just happened. Deepfake technology, AI voice cloning—I’d read articles about this stuff. Someone must have hacked my number, recorded my voice from somewhere. That had to be it.
But I was standing in my bedroom. I was home.
“Didi! Dinner’s ready!” my younger brother Rohan called from downstairs.
I went down, trying to shake off the creeping dread settling in my chest. My parents were serving rice and dal, and everything looked normal. My mom was talking about her office drama, my dad was watching news on his phone. Rohan was being his usual annoying self, trying to flick dal at me when no one was looking.
Something wasn’t right, though. I couldn’t focus on anything they were saying. The words “don’t come home tonight” kept echoing in my head in my own voice.
About an hour later, after dinner, I was back in my room doing homework when my phone buzzed. A text message. From my own number.
“Please. You have to leave. All of you.”
My hands went cold. I screenshotted it immediately—proof that I wasn’t losing my mind—and ran downstairs.
“Mom, Dad, something weird is happening with my phone,” I said, my voice shaking. I showed them the call log, the text message.
My father frowned. “It’s probably some new scam, beta. Don’t worry about it.”
“But Dad, it’s my own number—”
“These hackers can do anything nowadays,” my mother interrupted, not looking up from loading the dishwasher. “Just block it and forget about it.”
I didn’t want to seem crazy, so I nodded and went back upstairs. But I couldn’t ignore the growing pit in my stomach. I should have trusted my instincts.
At around 10 PM, my phone rang again. Same number. This time, when I answered, my voice on the other end sounded desperate, almost crying.
“The carbon monoxide detector. Check it. NOW.”
The line went dead.
I felt my heart pounding so hard I thought it would burst out of my chest. Carbon monoxide? We had a detector in the hallway, installed when we moved into this house three years ago. I’d barely ever noticed it.
I ran out of my room, and there it was—the small white device mounted on the wall. I pulled a chair over and examined it closely. That’s when I saw it: the batteries had been removed. The back panel was slightly open, and inside was completely empty.
My blood ran cold.
“DAD!” I screamed. “MOM! WE NEED TO GET OUT NOW!”
I don’t know what it was—maybe the pure terror in my voice—but they didn’t question me this time. My father immediately went to check the gas connections in the kitchen, and that’s when he smelled it. That faint, sweet smell that shouldn’t be there.
“Everyone out. Right now,” he said, his voice urgent.
We grabbed Rohan and ran outside into the humid Bangalore night. Our neighbors, the Sharmas, let us stay with them while my father called the gas company’s emergency line. They came within thirty minutes.
The technician’s face was grim as he emerged from our house. “Massive leak from your water heater connection. Another hour, maybe two, and—” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.
Carbon monoxide is odorless. What my father had smelled was something else, something that saved our lives because I’d already raised the alarm. But we would have all gone to sleep eventually. And we wouldn’t have woken up.
We stayed with the Sharmas that night. I couldn’t sleep. I kept checking my phone, but there were no more calls, no more messages. I looked through all my social media accounts, my voice notes, everything—trying to figure out how someone could have cloned my voice so perfectly, known about the detector, known about the leak.
I never figured it out.
The police investigated. They checked the detector—someone had definitely removed the batteries, but there were no fingerprints, no signs of forced entry. Nothing on our security cameras. The gas leak was deemed accidental, a faulty connection that had been slowly deteriorating.
But who disabled the detector? And who called me?
To this day, I still check our carbon monoxide detector obsessively. Sometimes, late at night, I wonder if I should call my own number, just to see what happens. But I’m too terrified of what might answer.
My family thinks I somehow figured it out on my own and don’t remember clearly because of the stress. But I know what happened. I know what I heard.
Someone—or something—warned me. Someone with my own voice, calling from my own number, who knew exactly what was going to happen.
I’ll never forget those words: “Don’t come home tonight.”
Even though I was already home.
