The Last Message

I never believed in ghosts.
Not until my phone buzzed at exactly 3:17 AM—the same time my sister Emily died one year ago today.

The message was simple:
“Help me. It wasn’t an accident.”

My blood ran cold. I sat up in bed, heart pounding so hard I could hear it echo in the room. Emily had died in a car crash on her way home from our family house in Brookwood. The official report said it was reckless driving. Everyone moved on. Everyone but me.

Emily never drove fast. She was a rule-follower to the core. She never even jaywalked.

I stared at the glowing screen. The message had come from her number. The same number that had been disconnected last winter. I’d tried calling it for weeks after she passed, desperate to hear her voice on the voicemail. Eventually, it went dead.

So how could I receive this?

I replied with shaking fingers:
“Who is this? Is this some kind of joke?”

Three dots appeared… then vanished. Nothing.

At exactly 3:30 AM, another message appeared. A photo.

It was dark and grainy, but I recognized it instantly: our childhood attic. The cracked window, the crooked lamp, and in the corner—the green wooden trunk we used to play hide-and-seek in.

I hadn’t been to the house since the funeral. It had been left abandoned, like everything else from that life.

I should have ignored it. Called the phone company. Blocked the number. But something in me—maybe grief, maybe guilt—drove me there that morning.


---

The house was silent when I arrived. Peeling paint clung to the sides, vines creeping through the cracks. I found the key where we always kept it, under the third flowerpot.

I climbed the attic stairs, the boards groaning under my weight. The air smelled like dust and time.

The green trunk sat just where it always had.

Inside, under old blankets and a moth-eaten scarf, was Emily’s journal. The leather cover was scratched, the pages yellowed.

Most of the pages were innocent—lists, doodles, entries about school, about me.

Then I found the torn page tucked deep in the binding. It was frantic, written in smudged pen.

“He said if I told anyone, I’d disappear. But I have to leave clues. He can’t watch everything. The ring. Watch the ring.”

At the bottom was a crude sketch. A circle with rays—like a sun—with a single eye in the middle.

I froze.
Jason. Her ex. He had a ring with that same symbol. I remembered how she hated it, said it creeped her out. He said it was from a “private group” he was part of.

After her death, he didn’t even come to the funeral.


---

I did something reckless.

I took a photo of the journal page and sent it to Jason. No words. Just the image.

He responded within minutes.
“We need to talk. Alone.”


---

We met at a coffee shop on the edge of town. I spotted him instantly—he looked thinner, older. Haunted.

“You’ve been to the attic,” he said, voice low.

“I know you lied about that night,” I said.

He didn’t deny it.

“She found out about the group,” he said. “We meet in secret. No names. No pasts. Just symbols.”

“What did she find out?” I asked.

He looked around, paranoid. “She found a file. On her dad’s laptop. Something he was hiding. About the group. About what they were doing with the town’s water supply—contracts, payoffs, cancer cases. She wasn’t supposed to see it.”

My heart sank. Our father was the town’s chief engineer for twenty years.

“She told me she was going to report it,” Jason continued. “I tried to stop her. I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

I saw something flicker in his eyes. Regret—or fear?

“She wasn’t dead,” he whispered. “When she fell. She was breathing. But they came. They finished it.”

I didn’t want to believe him. But something in me already did.

He pushed a flash drive across the table. “Everything she found is on this.”

Then he got up and left. I never saw him again.


---

The flash drive contained documents, audio files, and one grainy video from the night she died. It showed Emily arguing with Jason. Then two men—faces blurred—dragging her into her car.

She didn’t crash.
They drove her off the road.

The video and documents were enough. Within weeks, arrests were made. The group was real. A cult-like circle embedded deep in our town’s leadership. My father… had been forced into it years ago. Emily’s discovery cost her life.


---

The case went national. Her story sparked protests, new laws.
Emily became a symbol of truth—of justice.

But every year, on July 3rd at exactly 3:17 AM, I still receive a message. Always from her number. Always brief.

Last night, it simply said:
“I knew you’d come.”


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Author's Note:
Sometimes the dead don’t want to haunt you. They just want to be heard.