My dead mother's WhatsApp just messaged me. — EPISODE 1
I've been writing screenplays for years, and I'm trying something different: posting an original thriller one episode at a time.
Each episode will be around 2–3 pages, and I'll continue the story based on where the mystery takes us.
Here's Episode 1&2.
THE VOICE NOTE
EPISODE 1 — "11 Seconds"
INT. AARAV'S BEDROOM — NIGHT
2:17 A.M.
Darkness, broken only by the pale glow of a phone screen resting face-down on the nightstand.
AARAV (28) lies on top of the covers, still in yesterday's clothes. He hasn't changed them. He hasn't really slept either , just long stretches of staring at the ceiling, broken by shorter stretches of nothing at all.
Beside the phone: a framed photograph of his MOTHER, mid-laugh, caught off guard by whoever was holding the camera.
Aarav isn't looking at his phone. He's looking at her.
A soft BUZZ. The screen lights up, casting a rectangle of white across the ceiling.
He doesn't move at first. Then, slowly, his head turns.
One word on the screen.
MOM.
Aarav sits up so fast the bed frame creaks. He stares at the notification like it might vanish if he blinks. It doesn't. He picks up the phone with both hands, the way you'd hold something that could break , or something that could burn you.
The chat opens.
MOM — Last seen 3 days ago.
Three days ago. The day before the funeral.
Below it, a single voice message. Eleven seconds long.
His thumb hovers over the play button and stops. He glances at the photograph, half-expecting her to answer for him.
AARAV (barely audible) Maa?
Nothing answers. Of course nothing answers.
He presses play.
A beat of static , the particular static of an old recording, or a bad signal, or something in between. Then, underneath it, a voice.
Hers.
Thinner than he remembers. Tired in a way she never let herself sound when he was in the room.
MOTHER (V.O.) Aarav...
His breath catches audibly. It's her voice. Not a memory of it , the actual sound, the actual weight of it in his ears for the first time in three days.
MOTHER (V.O.) (CONT'D) If you're hearing this...
A pause just long enough to hurt.
MOTHER (V.O.) (CONT'D) ...I'm already dead.
The recording ends.
Aarav doesn't move. Doesn't breathe, it seems. Then, almost against his will, his thumb finds the play button again. He listens to it a second time. A third. Each time searching for something he might have missed , a clue, a joke, proof that this is some kind of mistake.
His hands have started shaking. He sets the phone down like it's suddenly too heavy, then picks it back up before it even settles.
He taps her contact. Presses call.
Ringing. Once. Twice. A third time, cutting off mid-tone.
CALL FAILED.
He stares at those two words longer than they deserve.
Then another buzz. The screen updates.
MOM — 0:07
Aarav doesn't reach for it. Not yet. His eyes drift, instead, to the photograph on the nightstand , and something about it unsettles him, though he couldn't say what. He picks it up, turns it over in his hands, checks the back like the answer might be taped there.
Nothing. Just cardboard and a date written in his mother's handwriting.
He sets it down. Looks back at the phone. The message is still waiting.
He presses play.
MOTHER (V.O.) Don't trust your father.
Her voice is different this time , quieter, quicker, like she's speaking with someone listening at the door.
Aarav's expression shifts. He turns toward his bedroom door.
Beneath it: the faint outline of a shadow. Still. Unmoving. As if someone on the other side is standing just as frozen as he is.
Neither of them breathes.
Then the shadow is gone.
Silence returns to the room , the kind of silence that feels louder than noise.
His phone buzzes a third time.
MOM — 0:03
Aarav looks down at it. His thumb hovers over play.
CUT TO BLACK.
END OF EPISODE 1
EPISODE 2 — "Something Outside the Door"
INT. AARAV'S BEDROOM — CONTINUOUS
The three-second message still sits unopened. Aarav hasn't moved from the edge of the bed. His eyes stay fixed on the door, on the strip of hallway light beneath it, waiting for the shadow to return.
It doesn't.
He counts to ten in his head. Then twenty. Somewhere around thirty, his heartbeat starts to slow, and the part of his brain that still believes in ordinary explanations starts making its case: a draft. A trick of the light. Grief doing what grief does at 2 A.M.
He almost believes it.
Then, faintly, from the hallway , a FLOORBOARD CREAKS.
Aarav freezes.
Not the house settling. A footstep. Weight, then release. The sound of someone trying very hard to be quiet and not quite managing it.
He sets the phone down without looking at it and gets to his feet. His legs don't feel entirely like his own.
INT. HALLWAY — CONTINUOUS
He opens the door slowly, wincing at the small creak it gives. The hallway stretches out in front of him, lit only by the amber glow of the streetlight through the far window.
Empty.
He exhales — and stops halfway through it.
At the end of the hallway, his mother's bedroom door, which has stayed shut since the day of the funeral, hangs open by a few inches.
Aarav stares at it the way you'd stare at a door you already knew you had no choice but to walk through.
AARAV (quiet, to no one) Dad?
No answer. The house holds its silence the way it's held it for three days carefully, like it's trying not to wake something.
He moves toward the room, each step slower than the last. His hand finds the door frame. He pushes it open the rest of the way.
INT. MOTHER'S BEDROOM — CONTINUOUS
The room is exactly as it was left , bed made, curtains drawn, her reading glasses still folded on the nightstand as if she might walk back in and put them on. It smells faintly of the sandalwood soap she always used, which somehow no one has thought — or dared — to move.
Aarav steps inside. His eyes move slowly across the room, cataloguing what's changed and what hasn't, though nothing seems to have.
Except one thing.
The bottom drawer of her writing desk sits open an inch. Just an inch. Not forced , opened by someone who meant to close it properly and didn't quite manage it in the dark.
Aarav crouches beside it. Hesitates. Then pulls it open the rest of the way.
Inside: old letters, a stack of medical reports rubber-banded together, and , tucked beneath them, half-hidden , a second phone. Cheap. Unfamiliar. Not the one that was buried with her.
He picks it up. The screen is cracked in one corner. He presses the power button, and against all reasonable expectation, it flickers to life.
One app open on the screen. WhatsApp.
The chat is empty except for a single contact he doesn't recognize — saved only as a string of numbers, no name.
His thumb hovers over it.
Behind him, from the hallway, a FLOORBOARD CREAKS again — closer this time.
Aarav turns, phone still in hand, heart slamming against his ribs.
AARAV Who's there?
Silence. Then, from his pocket, his own phone buzzes — the third message, the one he never played, suddenly impossible to ignore.
MOM — 0:03
He looks down at the cracked phone in one hand, his own phone in the other, and understands, in a way he can't yet explain, that he is holding two halves of something he was never supposed to find.
The bedroom door, behind him, creaks slowly shut on its own.
CUT TO BLACK.
END OF EPISODE 1 & 2
Okay, I’m curious what you think.
Aarav now has two phones — one belonging to his dead mother, and one he was never supposed to find.
And someone is clearly inside the house.
Who do you think is behind all this?
- His father
- Someone connected to his mother's past
- His mother planned this before she died
- Someone else entirely
And most importantly...
Would you play that 3-second voice note?