Hell Calling by Enrique Laso Read Free Book Online

any attention, until she heard a sort of light whimper.
    “Are you alright?”
    Carlos was crying on the other end of the line. He cried in a muffled, inconsolable way, in the way that only small children do.
    “Yes Marta, I think so.”
    “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure Elena comes tomorrow.”
    “Will she be coming to my house?”
    “Yes. It’s better that way. She likes to work directly in the area concerned. Your daughter... is... manifesting... in your house.”
    “Manifesting?”
    “Well, the best thing for you to do would be to talk to her. She’s a great person, if a little eccentric. In any case, I’m sure that her eccentricities will suit you at the moment.”
    “Thank you so much again, Marta.”
    She waited; she waited a few seconds, before saying, and regretting it almost instantly:
    “It’s no problem. Don’t hesitate to call me whenever you need to. I won’t fail you, I promise.”
    XXVI
    He decided to spend the night out in the fresh air, walking through the streets, every now and then popping into some café to have a drink of something, only to resume afterwards an aimless and senseless walk. Well, it did have one aim: to be far away from his house, far away from that device through which his daughter communicated with him... Or in which he manifested his deep-seated insanity.
    ‘I could destroy the alarm clock, or throw it into any bin, or chuck it in the river, and then I’d never see it again.’
    But then he was gripped by a strange fear: he could lose forever the unifying link with Laura. If his daughter really was trapped in Hell and urgently needed his help, how could he destroy the only link that was keeping them in contact? On the other hand, if those voices were the product of his extreme madness, he would surely imagine new ways for it to manifest, and as such it was useless doing away with something which was really just a symbolic object that his own mind had chosen to currently torment and torture him with.
    ‘Her voice is so real...’
    The streets were wet, as a result of the recent passing through of the street cleaners. The delicate gleam from the streetlights on the road gave off a pleasant sense of tranquillity, of peace. It was good to feel the air; even if he could not stop thinking about things completely, it was good to clear his head for just a short while at least. But that night, everything he did was done from a different perspective. He also had to put himself in Laura’s place, although that suggested embarking upon a terrible exercise. He imagined her defenceless, in the Hell that’s always been described to us, red and with numerous open craters, overflowing with fire and lava. But it couldn’t really be like that, even though her drawings did indeed depict a very similar panorama. And then there was the other big, gaping question; another great unknown in the case, if it were to indeed be true: how could she be establishing contact with him?
    ‘She does it via waves; radio waves, at a certain frequency.’
    If that were the case, anybody else could listen to the message. Any other person could tune in to that particular frequency and hear his daughter asking for help. Yes, it was going to be very easy to demonstrate that he hadn’t lost his mind at all. All he needed was for just one other person to dedicate themselves to working their way through the radio frequencies until they found his daughter’s. But no, that was almost ridiculous, because the device insisted on contacting him, as if it had a life of its own, or as if somebody could manipulate it remotely.
    As far as theories go, it was pretty hare-brained, because the radio-alarm clock emitted the messages for him , whether he liked it or not, and whether it had an energy source or not . His daughter had found a paranormal way of establishing contact with him, and it was almost madness trying to conjecture, and find a rational, logical explanation as to how she did it, when everything else was