In twenty years working as a 911 operator, I’ve only had two calls I don’t like talking about. I work the night shift, and everybody knows the worst calls come in after midnight. I’ve had plenty of frightening calls with domestic disputes in progress. I’ve had to hear about unspeakable things happening to children. I’ve even had a few calls where somebody threatened to do unspeakable things to me. I joke about those calls with my coworkers on our breaks. That doesn’t mean I don’t care, of course. Gallows humor’s just a prerequisite for the job.
The two calls I don’t like to talk about weren’t scary or sad. They're hard to summarize. That’s partly why I don’t like to talk about them: I can’t just say “I had X kinda call,” and have everybody know what I mean. I have to recount the whole thing from start to finish – no punch line, no moral – and just let people draw whatever conclusion they can.
The first call came in about 1:45 AM on a pretty busy night. I went through my normal script: “911, what is your emergency?” You know the drill. I had to ask the caller to repeat themselves a couple times because they were whispering (never a good sign).
“Sir, did you say you were kidnapped?” It sounded like a young man, but it was hard to tell from the whispering.
“Yes! These guys have me locked in a basement.”
“Are you safe to continue talking to me?”
“I think so. They’re upstairs. I can hear them moving around. Oh, god. Oh, god.”
“Sir, do you know where the home is?” I work in a real rural area out on the prairie. Our territory is huge. Finding this guy without an address would be impossible.
“It’s not a home. It’s some kind of church. They threw me in the back of this van and brought me here. No windows. In the back of the van.”
I glanced at my computer screen. Miracle of miracles, the guy was calling from a landline. Whoever kidnapped him must have forgotten there was a phone in the basement.
“OK, sir. I can see the address the phone is registered to. Give me one second to contact law enforcement. Please stay on the line.” The zip code was for some town I’d never heard of called Burton. Sometimes, a “town” out here is just a gas station with an attached post office at the intersection of two county roads. It’s also not uncommon for a zip code to cover an entire county. This guy could’ve been fifty miles from the Burton post office.
I radioed in the call. Sgt. Pete answered – he’s a little grouchy, but he’s a good guy. He said he was about twenty minutes away. I thanked him and picked the call back up.
“Sir, law enforcement’s on their way. In the meantime, I need you to stay on the phone with me as long as it’s safe to do so.”
I kept the guy talking for the next seventeen minutes. He said they’d nabbed him in the IGA parking lot. He just felt someone grab him from behind and all the sudden he was in the back of a van. He didn’t get a good look at any of them because it was dark and they were wearing some kinda hooded robes, but it was at least three people in the van, and it sounded like a lot more moving around upstairs in the church. He was able to tell me that the door to the basement was on the right side of the vestibule when you first walked in. I asked him to hold so I could radio that in to Sgt. Pete. He didn’t know if they were armed – I had to put him on hold again real quick to radio that in – but they’d told him they’d kill him if he struggled. I asked him if he could see any weapons in the basement, but he said it was pitch black. The only thing he could make out was some antlers on the far wall.
At minute 18, things started to heat up. I could hear something in the background, and the guy started to hyperventilate.
“Sir, is something happening?”
“I don’t know! They’re chanting something up there!”
“Can you hear what they’re saying?”
“No, no! I think it’s in another language. Oh God Oh God Oh God!”
“Sir, I need you to remain calm. Law enforcement’s almost there.” I waited for a few seconds with no response. The background noise was getting louder. “Sir?”
“They’re – Oh My God, I hear footsteps. It sounds like they’re coming toward the basement door! Oh Guh–” He finished the word with a wheezing breath.
“Sir, breathe for me, OK? If it’s no longer safe to remain on the phone with me, please don’t hesitate to hang up. Law enforcement’s almost there. Is there a piece of furniture you can hide behind?”
The last thing I heard before the line went dead sounded like a door hitting the wall as it swung open. I debated whether it was safe to try to call back, but then Sgt. Pete radioed to say he was turning down the road the church was on now. I told him what had happened right before the call ended. This definitely sounded like a gun-drawn situation. In an ideal world, he’d have backup too. But that’s a luxury we don’t always have out here. The next closest officer could’ve easily been thirty miles away.
I snacked on some Cheez-Its while I waited to hear that he’d made contact with the caller. I ended up eating half the box, because it was ten minutes before Sgt. Pete got back into contact.
“Greta, can you confirm the address again?” My stomach was in knots. Who knows what could’ve happened to that poor guy in the last ten minutes? I read the address back.
“OK, well I’m here, and it’s an empty lot.”
“Shoot, really? You sure you’re at the right place?”
“I drove to the end of the road and back – there’s nothing out here at all. I think we got pranked.”
“No, the guy was calling from a landline. There has to be something there. You sure it’s the right road? “
We argued for a few seconds, and finally I told him to hang on. I tried calling the guy back. We’re sorry. The number you are trying to reach is no longer in service or has been disconnected.
Sgt. Pete stopped by the call center during my break on the next night’s shift to fill me in on what he’d found out. The sheriff’s office had contacted the phone company, and apparently that number had been out of service for years. The last address it was registered to was that empty lot; the property had been abandoned for over twenty years.
“It’s odd, though. I walked around, and there wasn’t any trace of a building there – not even a trailer hook-up. You know what I did find, though?” He held up a finger and ran back out to his squad car.
He came back a couple seconds later with a giant pair of moose antlers – I was surprised he could fit them in the back of his cruiser.
“Found this leaning against a tree. Pretty weird, right?”
The antlers were bolted to a big wooden sign, where the moose’s head should’ve been. There were small words carved into the middle – I had to squint to read it: Alces Nihil Alces. I figured it was a Lakota expression.
My coworker Dee had been in the corner working on her crossword this entire time, but she looked up when Pete brought the antlers in.
“Where’d you say this empty lot was at, Petey?” Sgt. Pete winced at the nickname and described the location. “Mmm-hmmm.” She nodded like something was coming back to her. Dee’s a real old-timer; she’s been working here longer than anybody. She cleared her throat and launched into a story about The Order of The Existential Moose.
A few years before Pete and I had started working out here, there was this weird cult: The Order of the Existential Moose. These kids were mostly the black sheep of local farming families. “Buncha looney tunes” was how Dee put it. They’d try to recruit folks at the grocery store and say a lot of weird stuff that freaked them out. The moose antlers with the three foreign words was like their logo. They had tattoos of it. They painted it on their van. They printed it on their pamphlets. You get the idea. People thought it was especially strange since we don’t have any moose this far south.
Anyway, they bought this piece of property outside of Burton and built a little church on it. 911 used to get calls from farmers in the general vicinity accusing them of being up to no good. They never had any specific complaints — just a bad feeling. Of course, a couple people went missing during this time – not anymore than usual – but everybody called in and swore up and down it was the “Moose Freaks” who did it.
Then one day, they were just gone. The electric company sent somebody out to read the meter, but there was no meter. It was like the building had never even been there. It was just flat, empty prairie again. Nobody reported any of them missing, so the cops didn’t really have a reason to look into it.
Sgt. Pete and I just looked at each other.
“That story’s wild, but it still doesn’t explain how somebody called from a disconnected phone line.”
Dee patted me on the shoulder.
“It’s OK, baby. Everybody gets one ghost story. Any more, though, and we’ll have to start calling you a loony tune. Hey, Petey Pie – if those antlers aren’t evidence, why don’t you leave them here with us? We could use some decor for the break room here.”
I never heard of any young men in the area being reported missing, and I still avoid the break room to this day. Those antlers give me the heeby jeebies.
The second call came in about a year later, around 1:45 AM on a slow night.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“I’m lost out here.” It was a young woman. She didn’t sound particularly distressed. Something about her voice sounded familiar, though.
“Lost where, ma’am?”
“Do you ever wonder if there’s anything beyond the prairie?”
“Excuse me, ma’am? Can you describe your surroundings so we can try to locate you?” I glanced at the computer: this was a cell number with an out-of-state area code.
“When you look out at it, it’s so vast and empty. You can see clear to the horizon. But the horizon isn’t real, you know? You can’t walk up and touch it. You’re just looking at the limit of your own perception.” This lady was either on drugs or starting to lose it from dehydration and hypothermia.
[Note to E and A: please pretend these are more advanced philosophical musings and that your minds are blown right now]
“Ma’am, do you have location tracking enabled on your phone?” Hopefully she wasn’t too gone to figure that out. She’d managed to call 911, after all.
“Maybe all the memories you have outside the prairie are like the horizon.”
“Are there any distinctive features in the landscape you’re in that might help us to locate you? A tree? A stream?” She probably wouldn’t be able to see any of these things in the dark, but focusing on her surroundings might get her thinking straight for a minute.
“Scientists have all kinds of complicated explanations for what’s at the edge of space, but when you really think about it, even if the universe just wraps around and starts over again, there has to be something outside of it. And there has to be something outside of that, too. Even if it’s just a void – a void is still space that can be occupied."
"Ma'am, could I get your name please?"
"Or does the Universe just go on, forever and ever? No corners, no edges. Is that what infinity looks like? If you kept traveling out, would more space just iterate itself into existence as soon as you reached it?” There was something about this lady’s voice that really bothered me, for some reason.
“Ma’am, do you remember if there was maybe a Twilight Zone marathon on TV recently?” I was pretty sure this gal was high now. Hopefully just marijuana, but you know they have all kinds of new terrifying drugs these days. I haven’t heard any cases of bath salts out this way yet, but it’s just a matter of time.
“Alces nihil alces.” The line went dead. I tried calling back. We’re sorry. The number you are trying to reach….
I radioed it in to the Sheriff’s office. They came back and asked me to confirm the number. I repeated it, but they said there must be some mistake: that area code didn’t exist. I told them it existed plain as day on my computer screen, and they said there was nothing they could do. This was impossible.
I took a deep breath and opened my bottom desk drawer: Slimfast break! This evening’s shake was vanilla cake batter flavor. I pulled my food journal out of my purse to mark this down and review my meal schedule for tomorrow. I’d already lost four pounds in the last seven months.
MOOSE! I love the tone, the twist at the end and am very invested in the cult. This feels like it could become a whole, fleshed out story very easily. This pasta is very crispy
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