Ringtone

The monsoon in Hyderabad was a relentless, grey curtain, blurring the streetlights into water-color smudges. From her seventh-floor balcony, Meera watched the rain lash the slick tarmac below. Three weeks. It had been twenty-one days since she had executed her escape plan. New job. New flat. New number. A clean slate, meticulously crafted to bury the ghost of her past. She had fled Mumbai, leaving behind a life packed into cardboard boxes and memories that clawed at the edges of her sleep, refusing to stay buried.
Her new apartment was sterile, impersonal, chosen for its anonymity. It smelled of fresh paint and unfulfilled promise. Tonight, the oppressive humidity seeped through the window frames, carrying the scent of wet earth and jasmine. It was a smell Rishi would have loved. She flinched at the thought, a traitorous intrusion she quickly batted away.
Her phone, resting on the glass-topped table inside, vibrated. The sound was a jarring tear in the fabric of the night's quiet symphony of rain. She glanced at the screen. 12:03 a.m. The digital clock’s numbers glowed with malevolent precision. It was the exact same time as the night before, and the night before that.
Unknown Number.
Her hand trembled as she slid the screen to answer, pressing the phone to her ear with a sense of grim inevitability. Silence. But it wasn't an empty void. Beneath the static hiss of the connection, she could hear it. Breathing. Faint, rhythmic, and undeniably intentional. A slow, deliberate inhale… and a patient, measured exhale. It was the sound of someone listening, waiting.
A cold dread, sharp and invasive, pierced the humidity. It wasn't the breathing or the punctuality of the call that terrified her most. It was the sound that had accompanied the very first call, three nights ago. A sound she thought she had purged from her life forever.
"Astronomia." The frantic, upbeat synth of the coffin dance meme song. She had jokingly set it as a custom ringtone for Rishi, her college boyfriend, a morbid little inside joke between them. The ringtone, like Rishi, was supposed to be dead.
He had drowned two years ago. A trekking accident during a sudden cloudburst. That was the official story. They had broken up months before that. It was an ugly, scarring separation, leaving a residue of unresolved arguments and a guilt so heavy it felt like a physical weight on her chest. Meera hadn't even gone to the funeral. She couldn't face his family, couldn't face the hollow space he had left behind.
She had deleted that ringtone from her phone with savage finality the day she heard the news. Erased the file, scrubbed the cache, and never used it again. And yet, when that first call came in, the familiar, mocking beat had echoed from her phone’s speakers, a digital phantom rising from a grave she had dug herself.
Tonight, after the breathing finally ceased and the call disconnected itself, she stared at her phone, her reflection a pale, haunted mask on the dark screen. She tried calling the number back. An automated voice, devoid of emotion, informed her the number was disconnected. As before, she opened her call log. The screen was pristine. There was no record of any incoming call.
The following night, she took control. She powered her phone down completely, the screen going black with a satisfying finality. She placed it in a drawer, buried under a stack of sweaters. There would be no call tonight. She would starve the phantom of its medium. She sat in the dark, watching the clock on her laptop. 12:02 a.m. The rain had softened to a drizzle. Her heart hammered against her ribs. 12:03 a.m.
Silence. A profound, beautiful silence. A breath she didn't realize she was holding escaped her lips in a shuddering sigh of relief. It was over. A glitch. A network error.
Then, from the corner of the room, her smart speaker, a sleek black cylinder she hadn't even used yet, whirred to life. Its blue light pulsed gently in the darkness.
"Incoming call," it announced, its synthesized voice unnervingly cheery. Then, the music started. "Astronomia."
It wasn't just a ringtone; it was a full-throated assault. The bassline throbbed, filling the sterile apartment with the sound of her deepest regret. The device wasn't connected to her phone. It wasn't logged into her account. Yet it played the song. Her song. Rishi's song.
She didn't scream. The sound was trapped in her throat, a knot of pure terror. This was not a glitch. This was not a memory. This was an invasion.
She didn't move cities this time. Running was a temporary solution, a flimsy shield against a predator that knew how to find her. Panic gave way to a cold, razor-sharp fury. A ghost wouldn't need to hack her speaker. A memory couldn't manipulate her Wi-Fi. This was a person.
She forced herself to think, to trace the threads of her past. Who knew about the ringtone? Who had the technical prowess? Who hated her enough to orchestrate this elaborate, psychological torture?
The name surfaced from the depths of her memory, slick with resentment. Sameer.
Sameer, the tech prodigy. Rishi’s shadow, his best friend, his self-appointed guardian. Sameer, who had worshipped the ground Rishi walked on and had always looked at Meera as if she were a contamination. He was the one who had cornered her in the college library a week after the breakup, his voice a low hiss. "You'll regret this," he had said, his eyes burning with a zealot's fire. "You have no idea what you've done to him."
She found him on a professional networking site, a Senior Cybersecurity Analyst for a top firm in Bengaluru. A ghost in the machine was his job description.
A new plan formed, born of desperation and rage. She couldn't go to the police. They would see a grieving woman on the verge of a breakdown. She had to lure the ghost out into the light.
She contacted an old mutual friend, Priya, someone she knew was still in touch with Sameer. After exchanging pleasantries, she let a piece of carefully crafted bait slip. "I'm actually thinking of visiting Mumbai next Saturday," she typed, her fingers cold. "Just for the day. I need to visit that little cafe by the sea, 'The Salty Brew,' for some closure."
It was a lie. The Salty Brew was the one place Rishi had despised, complaining the coffee was terrible and the chairs were uncomfortable. It was a detail so specific, so personal, only someone intimately familiar with their relationship would know its significance.
The following Saturday, Meera wasn't in Mumbai. She was in a rental car parked across the street from The Salty Brew, her phone camera recording, her body thrumming with a mixture of terror and adrenaline. The minutes ticked by, each one an eternity. She was about to give up, to dismiss it as a paranoid delusion, when she saw him.
Sameer. He didn't approach the cafe. He stood on the opposite corner, partially hidden by a newsstand, his gaze fixed on the entrance. He was thinner than she remembered, his face etched with a bitter tension. He was waiting. Hunting.
Her breath hitched. She got out of the car, her movements feeling strangely distant, as if she were watching a character in a film. She crossed the street, the traffic noise fading into a dull roar.
"He hated this place, Sameer," she said. Her voice was steady, betraying none of the chaos inside her.
He spun around. The mask of a casual bystander fell away, revealing a flash of raw, undiluted hatred, followed by a flicker of shock.
"You're not…" he began, his voice raspy.
"The calls stop now," Meera interrupted, taking another step closer. "The ringtone. The smart speaker. I know it was you."
A slow, chilling smile spread across Sameer's face. It was a smile of triumph, of righteousness. "He's not a memory you get to delete, Meera. I wouldn't let you. You broke him, and then you ran away. You didn't even have the decency to come to his funeral."
His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "It wasn't an accident. Not really. He was heartbroken. Distracted. He fell. His last call attempt, from his satellite phone before the battery died, was to you. At 12:03 a.m. But you'd already blocked his number."
The world tilted. The air felt thin.
"I pulled the data from his devices before I gave them to his parents," Sameer continued, his eyes gleaming with sick pride. "I have everything. Every photo. Every note. I built a ghost from his data, Meera. A ghost to give you the closure you never gave him. I made sure you would always answer his call."
Meera stared at the man before her. He was no phantom. He was flesh and blood, animated by a twisted grief and a terrible, brilliant mind. The mystery was solved, but the horror had only just begun. The supernatural was fathomable. This calculated, human cruelty was a darkness with no end. She had found her haunter, but she knew, with a certainty that chilled her to the bone, that she would never truly be free of the ringtone.