THE INSTRUCTIONS — Part 2: A Girl on the Phone Called Me Mum. I Didn't Know Who She Was.

0:04 This series is The Instructions. Episode 2. Turn the Mirrors. You came back.

0:28 Good.

0:29 I knew you would.

0:31 You did your locks last night, didn't you? Front door, back door, the window over the sink, the cellar. Say it, in your head, so I know it's in there. Yes, once it's in you, it stays. That's how I know you're ready for the next one. But first I have to tell you what happened to me between then and now, because it's a warning, and you need it before you do anything else. The steps grow. That's the thing no one tells you at the start. One is not enough for long, because the fear learns you. The fear finds the gaps you left, and you have to close them, one by one. And each thing you close becomes a new step, and the steps get longer, and they take more of the night. I don't want to frighten you with how long mine take now. I'll only give you

1:23 what you're ready for. Tonight, the second step. The Mirrors. After dark, you turn the mirrors to the wall, all of them, the one in the hall, the one over the bathroom sink, the little one by the door, any glass you can see yourself in. You turn it to face the wall, or you cover it, before the dark comes down, and you do not, ever, for any reason, look into a mirror after dark. I need you to promise me that one, the way you promised the locks, especially that one, Because I looked, once, before I knew, and I have to tell you what I saw, so you never do. It was early on, the second week maybe.

2:12 I hadn't learned the mirrors yet, they weren't part of it, and I was in the hall at night and I passed the big mirror there, the tall one that was my mother's. And I glanced at it the way you glance at any mirror, without thinking, just to see myself, and I saw myself. I was standing there in my nightgown in the dark hall, and my reflection was standing there too, exactly like me, and for a moment it was fine, it was just me. And then I noticed that the hall behind my reflection was not empty. There was someone standing behind me, in the mirror, back down the hall, in the dark, a figure, a person's shape.

2:56 standing very still and looking at the back of me, at my reflection's back. And I want you to understand what that does to you, the particular horror of it, because I could feel that there was no one behind me in the real hall. The space behind me was empty. I knew it was empty. And in the glass, it was not empty. In the glass, something was standing there watching me. And the two things were both true at once.

3:25 the empty hall and the occupied one, and my body understood before my mind did that the mirror was showing me the truth and the room was showing me the lie. I did not turn around. That is the only reason I am here. Some animal part of me knew that if I turned around, it would be there, that turning around was how you agree to it being there, that the mirror was a door only as long as I was looking through it. I closed my eyes. I closed my eyes, and I stood in that hall with my heart trying to climb out of my throat. And here is the part that still finds me at night. While my eyes were closed, I heard it move, in the glass.

4:10 I couldn't see it, my eyes were shut, but I heard, from the direction of the mirror, the soft sound of something coming closer, a step, and another. The sound a person makes crossing a wooden floor toward you slow, unhurried, and it was coming from inside the mirror, from the reflected hall, getting nearer to the back of my reflected self.

4:36 And I stood there blind, with my hand groping for the frame, and I knew that if I opened my eyes, it would be right behind me in the glass, close enough to touch my reflection, and that the next thing it would learn to do was step out. I reached out without looking, and I took my mother's mirror off its hook and I turned it to the wall. And the moment the glass faced the wall, the footsteps stopped, cut off, gone, as if they had never been. And I have never looked in a mirror after dark since.

5:11 Not once.

5:12 And you won't either now. That's why I turn them. Not so I can't see myself, so that it can't use the glass to stand behind me. Turn your mirrors tonight. Everyone, before dark, promise me, now. I have to tell you about the phone, because the phone is the third step, and because something happened with the phone this week that I am still shaking from. The rule is this. Once you have begun the steps, you do not answer the phone.

5:44 Not for anyone. The steps are a sequence, and the sequence cannot be broken. And the phone is how it breaks you. The phone is the thing that reaches into the middle of the ritual and pulls you out of it. And if you stop in the middle, you have to start over from the front door. And sometimes you cannot get back to where you were before the dark notices the gap. So when you begin, the phone does not exist.

6:11 Let it ring. It will ring.

6:14 Let it.

6:16 This week it rang while I was doing the mirrors. And I let it ring, the way you're supposed to. And it stopped. And then it rang again. And it stopped. And it rang again. And by the fourth time something was wrong with the sound of it. It was too loud. Or too long. The rings ran into each other. And I was in the hall with my hand on my mother's mirror. And the phone was screaming. And I thought, what if it's real? What if it's an emergency? What if someone I love is hurt? And that thought is the exact thought it wants you to have. Remember that.

6:53 That thought is the bait, and I bit down on it, and I answered the phone. And it was a girl's voice, a young woman. And she said, Mum, Mum, why won't you pick up? I've been calling and calling, and I did not know who she was. That is the truth, and it is the thing I have to make myself tell you. A girl called me Mum, in a voice that cracked when she said it, a voice that had been crying. And I stood there with the phone in my hand and I felt only a vast cold blank where the knowing of her should have been. And I said, I think you have the wrong number. And the voice said, mum, it's me. It's mum, please. And she said a name.

7:40 She said her own name. And I want to tell you what the name was, but I can't because I heard it. She said it right into my ear and it went into the blank and it was gone. It did not stick. There was nowhere in me left for it to stick. And I hung up. I hung up on her. And do you know what I felt? In the silence after.

8:03 Relief.

8:05 Because I had broken the sequence. And I had to start over. And starting over meant doing the steps again. And doing the steps again meant the relief. The flood. The safety. I hung up on a crying girl who called me mum and I felt glad. because it meant I got to do the steps. That is what it does to you. I need you to see it clearly in me so you'll see it coming in yourself. It doesn't just take your people. It makes you grateful to be rid of them, because being rid of them is one more excuse to do the steps. I want to be fair to myself, because I think you're judging me now.

8:44 And you should, but be fair too. I did try.

8:49 After.

8:50 In the daylight. When the fear was low, I sat with the phone in my hand, and I tried to feel my way back to who she was.

8:58 A daughter.

8:59 I must have a daughter. The words sat there in front of me like a coat in a closet that I know is mine and cannot remember buying, and I reached for her.

9:19 I did.

9:20 I tried to picture a face and there was a shape where a face should be, a warmth, a smell almost, something about a small hand in mine. And then it slid away into the blank and I could not hold it. And the reaching hurt so much. It hurt so much to reach for my own child and close my hand on nothing that I did the steps to make the hurting stop. Do you see how it works now? The steps take her and then the steps are the only thing that eases the pain of having lost her. So the thing that robbed me is also the only comfort I have for being robbed. that is the trap that is the whole trap and I am standing in the deepest part of it telling you how to walk in after me and calling it a gift I have a

10:11 sister Kath I know I have a sister named Kath I've held on to that one I do the steps and I say her name sometimes to keep it, Kath, Kath. So it doesn't go into the blank like the others. She came to the house this week too, after the phone call, banging on the door, and through the door she was shouting that I hadn't answered my phone in weeks, that a girl had called her frightened out of her mind, that I'd missed things, that I'd promised to be somewhere and I wasn't, that I wasn't myself. that I needed to open the door right now and let her in.

10:50 And here is what I want you to learn from, because this is the hardest part to admit. I did not open the door. I stood on my side of it, and I did my steps, front door, and I put my hand flat on the very door she was pounding on, and I said, front door, and I felt her fists hit the wood under my palm. And I went on to the back door, and the window over the sink, and I did the whole sequence with my own sister screaming my name on the other side of the wood, because opening the door would have broken it, and because, and this is the thing, this is the thing, because some voice in me that sounded like the steps told me that she was the danger. That cath out there trying to reach me was the thing I was keeping out.

11:41 that the pounding on the door was just another version of the phone, of the mirror, of the fear, and that if I let her in, I wouldn't be safe anymore. She stopped, eventually. They always stop, eventually. And the house went quiet, and I finished my steps in the quiet, and I felt safe. But here is what happened at the end, and this is the thing I've been getting to.

12:09 This is the one that has me frightened in a new way. When I finished the steps that night, I went to turn my mother's mirror back around, because you can turn them back at dawn, that's allowed. And it was dawn. And I turned the mirror around, and I looked into it, which is allowed in the daylight. And I looked at myself, my own face, the way you check yourself in a mirror. And there was a half second, less than that, where my reflection did not do what I did, where I moved and it stayed. Just for an instant, my own face in the glass looking back at me, still, while I moved, watching me with an expression I was not making, an expression I have only ever seen on one thing, on the figure, that patient looking,

13:00 that cold attention, on my own face, in the mirror. In the safe daylight, on the one morning, I thought I was safe. And then it was just me again. Just my tired face, moving when I moved. I did the steps again. Of course I did. What else is there? I did the steps, and the fear went quiet, and the thought I could not afford to finish went quiet with it. The thought about whose expression that was, and why it was wearing my face, And whether the thing I have been keeping out of my house all this time has been keeping itself somewhere much closer than the hall.

13:44 Turn your mirrors tonight. Do your locks. Don't answer the phone once you've begun. And come back to me. There's more you need. And I'm the only one who can give it to you. And we've come this far together. And I would hate, I would truly hate, for the fear to find you now, when you're so close to being safe.