THE INSTRUCTIONS — Part 3: My Sister Said There's Nothing Here. Every Mirror in the House Moved.

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This series is The Instructions. Episode 3. Start over.

0:26 You're still doing them, aren't you? The locks, the mirrors, I can tell. There's a steadiness in the ones who've started, and I can feel it in you now, the way you've settled into it. Good. That's good, because tonight I have to teach you the hardest rule, the one that nearly finished me this week, and you need to be steady to hear it. The rule is, if you lose your place, you start over, from the front door, every time.

0:58 No matter how far in you were, it sounds simple. It is not simple, and I'll tell you why. Because this week it turned into the worst night I have had since the beginning, and you need to know what you're agreeing to when you agree to start over. Here is what happened. I was doing my steps, the full sequence, and it's long now. It's so much longer than the little four-door song I taught you. There are things I do in every room now, in an order, touching things, saying things, And it takes the better part of an hour if nothing goes wrong. And I was most of the way through. I was upstairs, near the end, when I lost my place. Just for a moment. I couldn't remember if I'd done the landing window or only thought

1:48 about doing it. And that's the rule. That's the iron rule. If you can't remember, it counts as undone. And undone means you start over. From the front door. So I turned to go back down, all the way down, to begin again, and the figure was on the stairs. It was standing on the stairs, below me, between me and the front door, between me and the beginning of the steps.

2:17 The same shape, the dark one, the still one, the patient one, from the foot of my bed. It was standing on my staircase in the dark, and it was facing up, toward me, and it was in the exact place I had to walk through to start over. And I understood what it was doing. It knew the rule too. It knew that I had lost my place, that I had to go back to the front door, and it had put itself on the only path there, because it knew I would have to come down, that I could not stay half finished on the landing all night, that eventually I would have to walk down those stairs and past it to begin again, or else leave the sequence broken and let it in that way instead. It had me in a vice. Go down and pass within a

3:08 foot of it, or stay up here with the steps unfinished, which is its own door. Both roads went through it. That is what it learned to do. It stopped needing me to make a mistake. It started building the mistakes for me. I went down the stairs.

3:26 I had to.

3:27 I want you to understand there was no other choice. The unfinished steps were already thinning the air. I could feel the house getting ready to let something in, and the only way to stop that was to start over, and starting over meant the stairs. So I went down them, and it did not move. It stood there and let me come. And I came down one step at a time, with my eyes fixed on my own feet, because I would not look at it, I would not. And I passed it, I passed within a foot of it, close enough that I should have felt the warmth of a body, and instead felt the cold of the opposite of a body.

4:09 A cold like an open freezer, like the inside of the ground, and it turned its head to follow me as I went by.

4:16 I heard it.

4:18 I heard the small sound of it turning to keep looking at me, and as I passed it, in the dark, it breathed. Right next to my ear, at the exact height of my ear, close as a lover. It let out a slow breath, and the breath was warm. That's the thing. After all that cold, the breath was warm and damp against the side of my face. A human breath.

4:43 A living breath. And it smelled of nothing I can describe, except that it was familiar. It smelled the way a person smells. A specific person. Someone I have stood close to. Someone I have held. And I nearly turned, I nearly turned to see whose breath was warm against my ear on my own dark stairs. And turning would have been the end of me, and I did not turn. I kept my eyes on my feet, and I got to the bottom, and I put my hand flat on the front door, and I said, front door, and I began again.

5:20 And I did the whole hour over from the start with it standing on the stairs behind me the entire time, watching me work. When I finished, near dawn, It was gone. It's always gone by dawn. But I had done my steps for two hours straight with that thing at my back. And I want you to know that I was not frightened.

5:40 By the end. That's the part that should frighten you. By the end, I was calm. Because I was doing the steps. And the steps make me calm no matter what is standing on the stairs. And there is something very wrong about being calm with that thing behind you. And I can't feel how wrong it is anymore. But you still can. So let me borrow your fear for a moment and say, that is not safety. A person calmly performing a ritual while a dark shape watches from the stairs is not a person who is safe. I know that when I'm talking to you. I forget it the moment I begin the steps. Now I have to tell you about Kath. Because Kath came back. And this time I let her in. And I wish to God I hadn't. or I wish I had, I can't tell

6:30 which anymore, and that not being able to tell is the thing I need you to sit with. She came in the afternoon, in the daylight, when I'm more myself. She'd got a key from somewhere, our mother's old key maybe, and she let herself in before I could stop her, and she stood in my hallway, And she looked around.

6:59 And her face. I'll never forget her face. She looked at my house the way you look at something terrible. And I tried to see it as she saw it. The mirrors all turned to the walls. Every one. Grey backing board facing out. The marks on the doors where I put my hand every night. Hundreds of nights.

7:20 Thousands.

7:21 Worn patches at exactly the height of my palm. The paths worn into the floor in the shape of the sequence, front door to back door to the window over the sink to the cellar and up and around. A track walked into the boards like a cow path in a field. She looked at the house I live in and she started to cry. And she said, Joan, what is this?

7:46 What have you done to yourself? And she said, there's no one here. She said, do you understand that? Do you hear me? There is no one here but you. There's no one after you. There's nothing in the house. You've been doing this for two years. You missed her school things. You missed everything. She thinks you don't love her.

8:08 And there's nothing here. There was never anything here. It's just you, alone, doing this, in the dark. And I want to tell you what happened in me when she said there's nothing here. For one moment, I believed her. For one moment the whole thing swung around like a door on a hinge, and I saw it the way she saw it. A woman alone in a dark house full of turned mirrors and worn tracks, touching the walls and whispering to no one. For two years, while her daughter grew up thinking her mother had stopped loving her, and no monster anywhere, no figure, nothing on the stairs, just a sickness wearing the shape of safety, just me, doing this to myself. and I opened my mouth to say, Oh God, Kath, you're right. Help me. There's nothing here.

8:59 The steps are the thing. The steps are what's taking me. I got as far as the front of the words. There's nothing. I said that much out loud. There's nothing. And the house went cold. Every mirror in the house, all of them, turned to the wall. I heard them. I heard the soft knock of every one of them shifting against the wall at once. A sound they cannot make.

9:26 They are facing the wall. There is no room for them to move. And they moved. I heard them move. And Kath heard it too. I saw her hear it. I saw her face change. And the cold came down the hall like water. And the light went thin. And the figure, I could feel the figure. Close. Closer than it had ever been in daylight. close and furious because i had said the words because i had come within an inch of the truth and the truth is the one thing it cannot allow and I understood in that frozen moment that saying there's nothing here is the most dangerous thing a person in my position can do that the doubt is not the way out the doubt is what brings it the doubt is the door so I did what I have learned to do I stopped talking

10:21 I closed my mouth on the rest of the truth and I turned away from my sister and I put my hand flat on the front door and I said, front door, and I began the steps and the cold pulled back and the mirrors went still and the light came back and I was safe and Kath left. She left crying, saying she was going to get help, saying she wasn't going to let me do this, saying my daughter's name, which went into the blank and did not stay.

10:50 and I let her go, because she had almost killed me. Do you see? She had almost talked me into the truth, and the truth had nearly opened the door all the way, and I cannot afford her. I cannot afford anyone who says there's nothing here, and neither can you, now. So listen to me. If anyone ever tells you the steps of the sickness, that there's nothing out there, that you're doing this to yourself, you must not listen, You must not even let yourself believe it for one moment, because I believed it for one moment, and the house went cold, and the mirrors moved, and the thing came close enough to touch me. The doubt is the door. The steps are the wall. Do not let them talk you out of the wall. And yet, I have to be honest

11:40 with you, because you're the only one I'm honest with now, and because in the daylight, right now, saying this to you, I can hold the thought for just a second before it slips. Here is the thought. There are two ways to read what happened with Kath, and they are both perfect, and I cannot choose between them, and neither will you.

12:04 Either I came within an inch of the truth, and the thing lunged to stop me, which means it's real, and the doubt is dangerous, and the steps are all that save me. Or, I am a sick woman who is about to be talked out of her sickness by the sister who loves her, and my mind, which does not want to be well, which is not ready to give up the only comfort it has, threw up the cold and the sound of the mirrors and the nearness of the figure to frighten me back to the steps before the cure could take. Do you understand that both of those are exactly the same from in here? That a curse defending itself and a sickness defending itself do precisely the same thing, feel precisely the same way, send the same cold down the same hall at the same moment,

12:52 I will never know which it was. I have stopped being able to tell the difference between something protecting me and something keeping me. And that, more than the figure, more than the stares, is the thing that would frighten me if I could still be frightened. That, I cannot tell my wall from my cage. That I have not been able to tell for a very long time. I have one more thing to teach you. The last things.

13:20 The deepest steps. And I'll give them to you next time, when you're ready. And then you'll have all of it. The whole sequence. Everything that keeps me safe. And it'll keep you safe too. You're so close now. Don't stop. Whatever you do, whatever anyone says to you, don't stop. Thank you.