He wakes up. It takes a minute for the groggy lethargy to leave his eyes. By instinct he turns his head to see his alarm clock. The digital face reads 3:33am.

At the same time, he has another realisation. His ears react to a noise. A faint foreign noise. He determines in his mind that this noise must've been what stirred him awake. He gets up out of the bed and puts on his new designer dressing gown. It had been a Christmas present from his sister the previous year. It's very warm, especially during these cold winter nights.

He exits his bedroom and slowly walks from the landing to the top of the stairs. He can hear the noise a little clearer now. He recognises the noise to be a vibration buzz from a mobile phone. He descends down the stairs. Thinking to himself, who could be ringing at this hour? The longer he heard the buzz, the more he failed to come up with a logical answer. And that thought concerned him a little.

He reaches the foot of the stairs. He doesn't bother to flip on the light switch. He figured the beams from the streetlights outside his house were enough to find his phone and tell whoever it was to piss off and then return to bed. He's meeting his sister in the morning anyway. It's been a few months since they last chatted over coffee, and they were missing each other. He didn't want this late-night disturbance to sour his mood for tomorrow.

He fumbles around in the dimly lit hallway. Reaching out to his jacket hanging next to the front door, he searches the pockets. It is a habit of his that has led to quite a few awkward starts to the day, leaving his phone in the jacket for it to be dead the next morning. However, there was no phone in the jacket. Yet he still heard the buzzing noise. His mild annoyance from being disturbed from sleep was replaced with frustration as he searched the pockets again, twice, and three times. The buzzing continued. 

It eventually dawns on him that the buzzing noise is coming from underneath his jacket. He peers down to the floor and slightly to the left. "What the hell?" he muttered to himself as he saw that vibrating on the wooden floor at the foot of the door, was the source of the buzzing.

He leant over to see it was indeed a mobile phone. An old Nokia. He hasn't owned one of these since he was 18.

This phone doesn't belong to him.

It was lying with the screen face down, and he picked it up with some hesitation and turned it around to see Unknown Number appear on the green screen.

He answers it.

He says an anxious "hello?" Or more accurately the attempt at a hello. At this point he can feel an uncomfortable feeling creep up into his mouth, which he tries to swallow back down mid hello.

Something is very wrong. And he knew that the second he put that phone to his ear.

"That's a lovely dressing gown Jacky boy." 

In the span of just a second after Jack heard those words, it was like every fibre in his being was ignited in an intense blaze that was telling him to run. Without thinking, he frantically starts looking around his home. Up the stairs, down the hallway, looking into the kitchen and through the peephole in the door. Nothing except his Porsche Cayenne parked in the driveway. He could feel his heart beating at a million miles per hour. It was so loud. It almost prevented him from hearing what the man on the other line said next.

"Must've been quite expensive."

"A gift maybe?"

"A Christmas gift?"

"Yeah, that's it."

The voice was definitely a male. English, probably from the east coast of England, in his early 50s perhaps. Jack wasn't entirely sure though. He had never heard this man's voice before. As a matter of fact, he was too busy piecing together everything that was happening at that moment that he said nothing except a shaky "who..." before the voice spoke again, cutting him off.

"Looks like the type of gift from someone who loves you a lot, eh?"

There was a cold confidence in the man's tone. Like the type of confidence you would get from a man whose profession is that of an entrepreneur or a stockbroker. Except this voice had an undertone to it. Something that Jack could hear in every sentence so far. Something malign. 

With the phone still against his warm ear, he could feel his sweat dripping down the sides and front of his face, covering the device in his warm perspiration; he could feel the phone getting damp in his hand. He finally utters a complete sentence to the man on the phone. He asks just 2 questions. Fear and anger were present in his tone. With the volume in his voice loud enough to cause his close neighbours to stir as a result. Jack had long forgotten about the late hour. He didn't even realise how loud he was until he finished.

"Who are you? What the fuck do you want?" Jack said, still shaking.

It sounded like there was something of an irritated sigh before the voice on the phone replied.

"I think the question you should be asking yourself, Jacky boy, is how much do you love your sister?"

 

Would very much appreciate any constructive criticism.