The Likeness - Episode 1 of 4 - "Evidence"

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This is The Likeness. Episode 1. Evidence.

0:35 I want to be clear about something before I tell you this. I am not a paranoid person. I have never been a paranoid person. I spent 22 years married to a woman who would tell you without hesitation that I am the most relentlessly reasonable man she has ever known. That was not always a compliment, but it is who I am or who I was. I am telling you this because I need you to understand that everything I dismissed at first, I dismissed for good reason. I wasn't being careless. I was being myself. My name is Marcus.

1:16 I was 41 when this started. Divorced 11 months. Living in a city I didn't know in an apartment I'd chosen from photographs. Trying to build something that resembled a life. The apartment was on the fourth floor of a building in a neighborhood I'd picked, because it was close to work and I didn't know enough about the city to pick for any other reason. It smelled like fresh paint when I moved in. The windows faced west and caught the late afternoon light. There was a radiator in the bedroom that clicked and hissed through the night like something breathing.

1:55 I want to tell you that I loved it. I didn't, not at first. But I was trying to. That matters. I was making the effort that people make when they've decided to keep going. The first thing I noticed, and I almost didn't notice it at all, was the coffee mug. I am a creature of habit. Carol always said it was my most endearing quality and also my most infuriating one.

2:28 I make coffee in the same order every morning. I use the same mug. I set it on the left side of the sink when I'm done because the dish rack is on the right and I prefer to let it air dry separately. I have done this for as long as I can remember. It's not a rule. It's just what I do. Three weeks after I moved in, I came into the kitchen and the mug was on the right side of the sink. I stood there for a moment. I thought about it. Then I thought, you're in a new apartment. Your routines aren't set yet. You probably did this half awake and don't remember. I moved the mug to the left side and made my coffee and went to work. A week later, the window in the living room was open. This one I noticed more

3:30 because I don't open that window. It's a street-facing window and the building across the way is close enough that I feel watched if the blinds are up too long. I'd opened it once the week I moved in to air out the paint smell and I had not opened it since. But there it was, cracked two inches, cold air moving through the gap. I closed it. I checked the latch. I told myself I was still getting used to the space that maybe I'd opened it in the morning and forgotten. I am not prone to forgetting things.

4:09 But I told myself that anyway. The shampoo was harder to explain away. I buy the same shampoo I've bought for 15 years. It comes in a 10-ounce bottle. I know exactly how long a bottle lasts me. Because I am that kind of person. Five weeks, give or take a few days. I'd opened a new bottle six days before I noticed it was nearly empty. I picked it up in the shower and felt the lightness of it and stood there with hot water running down my face, trying to understand what.

4:44 I was holding.

4:46 Six days. A bottle that should last five weeks. I set it back on the shelf. My hands were steadier than they should have been. I think some part of me already knew even then that the explanation I was about to reach for wasn't going to be sufficient. But I reached for it anyway. I'd been distracted, forgetful, stressed.

5:15 I was probably using more than I realized. People do that. I bought a new bottle the next morning and said nothing to anyone. My daughter Phoebe was 16 that year. She'd stayed with her mother, with Carol, back home. The divorce had been what people call amicable, which means we were sad without being angry. And we'd both agreed without much discussion that upending Phoebe's junior year was not something either of us was willing to do. I called her every Sunday evening. Sometimes she called me first. Those calls were the best part of my week, even when they were short. Especially when they were short, actually. When she called just to say something small, something that had happened.

6:09 Something she wanted to tell me before she forgot. That's when I felt most like her father. Not the rehearsed Sunday call. The small, spontaneous ones. The Sunday about a month after I moved in, she called me first. She seemed fine. She told me about a history project she was working on, something about local labor movements, and I listened and asked questions. She told me her friend Danica had broken up with someone, and Phoebe had been helping her through it. And then maybe 20 minutes into the call, she said something that made me go very still. She said, I've been thinking about what you said, about balance. I asked her what she meant. She said I'd texted her the week before. She said I'd told her that she

7:03 needed to think about balance, about not letting friendships distract her from the important things. I'd mentioned her grades. I'd mentioned that junior year was when colleges started paying attention. I said, Phoebe, I didn't send you that. There was a pause. She said, Dad, it came from your number.

7:28 I kept my voice even. I told her I didn't remember sending it. She read it to me. I listened to words that sounded like me. The rhythm of them. The specific way a thought was structured. But were not mine. I had not thought that thought. I had not sent that message. I checked my phone after we hung up.

7:52 I checked the sent messages there was nothing there whatever had been sent had been sent and then deleted I sat on the edge of my bed for a while after that the radiator clicked and hissed outside someone on the street was laughing at something I thought your phone was hacked it happens you should call your carrier in the morning And then I thought about the mug on the wrong side of the sink, and the window, and the shampoo, and I thought, what if these things aren't separate?

8:34 I dismissed that thought almost immediately. It was too large. Too strange. Things that have mundane explanations don't suddenly acquire sinister ones because you stack them together and squint. That's how people spiral? I've watched people spiral? I was not going to do that. I called my carrier the next morning.

8:58 They found nothing unusual, no unauthorized access, no flags on the account. I changed my password anyway. I changed it to something long and random, a string of characters I'd never use for anything else. I wrote it down and kept the paper in my wallet. Two nights later, I couldn't sleep. The radiator was louder than usual, or I was more awake than usual. I lay in the dark and listen to the building settle around me. The pipes, the footsteps from the floor above, the distant sound of a door closing somewhere. You learn the sounds of a new place slowly, the way you learn a person. Room by room, sound by sound. until the things that woke you up at first become invisible. Part of the texture of being there, and I was still learning this building.

10:00 so when i heard a sound that i didn't recognize i lay still and tried to place it it was very quiet a rustling maybe something that could be the wind if there were wind but the night was still It came from the direction of the bedroom window, which was closed and latched. And then it stopped. And I listened to the silence for a long time. And eventually I slept. I found the notebook the next morning. I was getting dressed. It was cold in the bedroom and I turned the radiator valve up and moved the small decorative item I'd set on top of it. A ceramic bowl Carol and I had bought on a trip years ago.

10:46 The kind of object you take from a marriage without quite knowing why. And when I did, I saw it. It was pushed behind the radiator, between the back of it and the wall. Just the edge of it visible. Black cover, the size of a standard composition notebook. I thought, I put that there. I stored something and forgot. But I hadn't bought a composition notebook... I hadn't stored anything behind the radiator. I had no reason to. I pulled it out. The cover had no label. I opened it.

11:29 The handwriting inside was mine. I am certain of that. I know my own handwriting. The particular slant of my letters, the way I formed the lowercase a, the pressure I put on certain downstrokes. This was mine. There was no question. The first entry was dated eight months ago. Four months before I moved to this city. Four months before I'd even accepted the job offer. It read, He takes his coffee black. No sugar. He leaves the cup on the left side of the sink. I turn the page. He runs Tuesday and Thursday mornings, 6am. He takes the same route.

12:17 He doesn't vary it. The next page. He calls his daughter on Sundays. The calls last between 20 and 40 minutes. He is most relaxed when she calls him first. Page after page. My habits. My preferences. My patterns. Written in my handwriting in a notebook I had never touched. Describing a man I recognized completely. He trusts too quickly. He explains away what he doesn't understand. He is the most relentlessly reasonable man. I turned to the last page with writing on it. There was only one line. Almost ready.

13:09 I set the notebook on my bed. I sat down next to it. I put my hands flat on my knees and I breathed, in and out, very carefully, the way you breathe when you are trying not to become what the situation is asking you to become. Then I picked up my phone and I stared at it for a long time and I couldn't think of a single person to call.