The Likeness - Episode 2 of 4 - "Groundwork"

0:12 Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This is The Likeness. Episode 2, Groundwork. I did not call the police. I want to explain that. I want to explain it carefully, because I know how it sounds. A man finds a notebook in his apartment, written in his own handwriting, describing his own habits, and his first call isn't to the authorities.

0:56 But here is the thing about finding a notebook written in your own handwriting. It makes you question what you know about yourself, before it makes you question anything else. I sat on the edge of that bed for a long time, and what I mostly felt was uncertainty. Not fear. Not yet. Uncertainty about what I was holding and what it meant, and whether I was, in some way I didn't understand, responsible for it. I know that sounds like the thinking of someone already defeated, but I am asking you to remember who I am. I am the most relentlessly reasonable man. So I did what a reasonable man does.

1:43 I started checking things. I called my building manager. Her name was Patrice, a woman in her 50s who kept a small space heater under her desk year-round and always seemed slightly annoyed to see me. though not unpleasantly so. I asked her how long the apartment had been vacant before I moved in. She looked it up. Six months, she said. Previous tenant had broken the lease. Left suddenly, left clean. She'd been surprised, actually. Most people who break leases leave a mess. This one had left nothing. I asked if she knew why he left. She said she.

2:28 The previous tenant was a woman. She didn't know why. People don't always say. I asked if she remembered what the woman looked like. Patrice thought about it. Average height. Quiet. Paid on time. She honestly couldn't picture the face. You get a lot of tenants, she said, not apologetically. You stop seeing them after a while. I asked if I could get a name, and she said she'd have to check with the building's management company. She would email them.

3:04 I thanked her and went back upstairs. The building had an electronic entry log. Residents used fobs to access the main door, the elevator, the parking level. I'd been given two fobs when I moved in. I asked building management for my entry log. This required two emails and a phone call, but... They sent it. I went through it on a Tuesday night at my kitchen table. With a glass of water, I kept forgetting to drink. My fob had been used to enter the building on 47 occasions since I moved in. I knew this. I lived there.

3:42 What I was looking for were the discrepancies. I found two. The first was a Thursday evening six weeks after I moved in. I had been in another city for work. A two-day trip. flights both directions, hotel receipts. My fob had been used to enter the building at 11.14 p.m. that Thursday. I was 300 miles away. The second was a Sunday morning five weeks later. I had driven to a town two hours away to look at a piece of furniture I'd seen listed online. A desk, the kind I'd been wanting solid wood, the sort of thing you buy once. I had a receipt from a diner there.

4:30 My fob had been used at 9.47 a.m. I was sitting in a booth, eating eggs. I stared at those two lines in the log for a long time. Someone had a copy of my fob. Or my fob had been cloned. Either way, someone had been walking in and out of my building using my credentials. on the nights they knew I wouldn't be home. The question I couldn't answer was, how did they know when I wouldn't be home?

5:04 I thought about the notebook. He runs Tuesday and Thursday mornings. He calls his daughter on Sundays. They'd been watching long enough to know my patterns, long enough to know when it was safe. I told Janet. Janet was my closest colleague at the new job. The person whose opinion I'd come to trust fastest. Which in a new city and a new office meant more than it might have anywhere else.

5:34 I told her over lunch, methodically, in the order things had happened. The mug, the window, the shampoo. The text to Phoebe I hadn't sent. The notebook, the entry log. She listened. She was good at listening. It was one of the things I liked about her. She didn't interrupt. When I finished, she was quiet for a moment. Then she said, Marcus, how are you sleeping? I told her I was sleeping fine, she said, because the divorce was, it was a big thing. Starting over somewhere new, that's a lot of stress, even when you're handling it well.

6:23 even when you think you're handling it well. I told her I wasn't imagining the entry log. The entry log was a document. It had timestamps. She said, I know. I'm not saying you imagined it. I'm saying maybe there's an explanation. A fob glitch. A data error. Systems make mistakes. I thanked her for lunch, and we went back to work.

7:00 I called Carol that evening. This was not our usual arrangement. We didn't call casually anymore, not since the divorce had settled into its permanent shape. But I needed to ask her something directly, and I couldn't do it by text, she answered on the third ring. She sounded cautious the way you sound when a number you recognize calls at an unexpected hour. I asked if she had a few minutes.

7:23 She said yes. I asked her what she meant when she'd said I'd been different lately. She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, Marcus, you've been sending some strange messages. I asked her to tell me that she didn't want to. I could hear it, the reluctance, the weighing of whether this was worth it. But she told me, Over the past three months, she'd received half a dozen texts from my number. Small things at first. A comment about the house. Whether she'd considered selling. A question about Phoebe's college plans that was worded oddly, more formally than I usually write. Then one that was harder. Something about whether she ever regretted how things had ended. She'd answered that one carefully and the reply she got back had

8:20 been stranger still. She'd assumed I was going through something and hadn't wanted to push. I asked her to forward them to me. She said, Are you saying you didn't send them? I said, I'm saying I don't remember sending them and I'm trying to understand why. She forwarded them. I read them standing in my kitchen. They sounded like me.

8:46 Not exactly like me Slightly off in the way that an impression is slightly off. The vowels right, but the consonants just a little wrong. But close enough that Carol hadn't questioned them. Close enough that I could see how someone who knew me well might read them and think, he's having a hard time, that's all, he's having a hard time. I checked my sent messages. Nothing. Nothing. Whatever was being sent from my number was being sent another way, through something that could use my number without touching my phone.

9:25 A SIM clone, maybe. I didn't fully understand how it worked. I understood that it was possible. I checked my email next. I don't know what made me look. Some instinct. I went into my account settings and checked the login history, and what I found was 17 logins over the past two months, from an IP address I didn't recognize. Not a foreign country, not obvious. A domestic address, general location somewhere on the eastern seaboard. Nothing flagged by the security system because nothing inside the account had been changed. No emails deleted. No messages sent. Just access. Just reading. The password had been changed on one occasion six weeks ago, at 2.17 in the morning. and then changed back eleven

10:20 minutes later. They'd gotten in, done whatever they'd come to do, left everything exactly as it was. I sat with this for a long time. I am a methodical person, so I made a list. Not of the incidents, I had that already, but of the relationships in my life that had changed in the past year. The ones that had cooled without clear cause. I made myself think carefully without assumption the way you review a document for errors. There was Greg, a friend of twenty years. We'd stopped talking eight months ago after what Greg had described as something I'd said at his birthday dinner. I hadn't been able to get him to tell me specifically what I'd said.

11:14 I'd assumed I'd offended him somehow and forgotten. I'd reached out twice. He hadn't replied. There was my professional reference, a former manager named Dennis, who had warmly agreed to vouch for me during my job search and then, inexplicably, had given a lukewarm reference to one of the companies I'd applied to. That company had passed. Dennis, when I followed up, had been vague, apologetic. He'd said something about having heard some things. He hadn't said what. There was my sister, Renata. We had spoken briefly at the holidays and not since. I'd assumed she was busy. She lived a full life, three kids, a demanding job. But four months was longer than our usual silences and I hadn't pushed.

12:06 I told myself she'd call when she was ready. Looking at the list on paper, in my own handwriting... A different kind of handwriting than the notebooks. I could see something I hadn't let myself see. When the relationships were still just cooling one by one in a way I kept explaining away. I wasn't drifting from these people. Something was pushing me. I called Renata. She picked up immediately, which told me something. People who are merely busy let calls go sometimes. She'd been waiting. I asked if everything was okay between us, she said, Marcus. What you said to mom about me. My mother had been dead for four years. I asked her as calmly as I could to tell me what I had said. Renata said that

12:57 eight months ago I'd called our mother. She said this, our mother, without noting the impossibility of it, and told her that Renata had been saying things about me, about my character, about the divorce. She said I'd been very specific. Names, incidents, things Renata had supposedly said to mutual friends. Renata said, I know she's gone. Someone told her, told her mom.

13:26 I don't know how. But I got a call from Aunt Patricia saying your mother was very upset before she passed. And I knew it wasn't me. I never said those things, so I thought, I thought you must have I thought you were angry about something and I didn't know why and I've been... She stopped. I told her I hadn't made that call. She said, Marcus. I said, Renata, I need you to believe me. I didn't make that call.

14:02 There was a long pause. Then she said quietly, Then who did? I didn't have an answer. Not one I could give her yet. I told her I'd explain everything, when I understood it better myself. I told her I loved her. She said she loved me. We stayed on the phone a little longer than we needed to, neither of us quite ready to hang up. After we said goodbye...

14:39 I sat in my apartment and felt something shift inside me. Not panic, not yet, but the thing that comes just before it. The moment when the water is rising and you're still telling yourself you can manage it and some part of you, deeper down, has already stopped believing that. I went to the radiator and I don't know why.

15:02 I think I was drawn back to where I'd found The first notebook, the way you return to a wound, you're not done understanding. I crouched down and looked into the gap between the radiator and the wall, and I thought, there's nothing else there. Of course there isn't. But I put my hand in anyway. The second notebook was pushed further back than the first. I had to press my cheek against the radiator to reach it, the metal warm against my face. This one had no writing inside. It had photographs, printed on standard paper, taped to the pages with careful even strips of tape, taken from outside windows, from across streets, from angles that suggested patience and distance and long waiting. The first photographs were of a house

16:02 I recognized, my old house, the one I'd shared with Carol. My home office window lit from inside. My silhouette visible at the desk. The next section was an apartment I hadn't lived in for two years. A short rental just after the divorce. Before I'd found something more permanent. I'd been there four months. They'd been outside that window too.

16:32 The last section was this apartment. My bedroom window. My kitchen window. I recognized the angle, taken from the roof of the building across the narrow alley, maybe 40 feet away. The photographs were dated. The most recent one was from 11 days ago. The caption beneath it, printed in small, neat letters that were not my handwriting, was this. The face is right. The rest takes time. I put the notebook down on the floor beside me. I sat there for a while. The radiator ticked. Outside, someone was walking quickly along the street below, their footsteps clean and regular, fading towards silence. Three years. They had been outside my windows for three years. And they looked enough like me that they thought the face was right. I understood then

17:32 what the reasonable explanations had been keeping me from understanding. This wasn't a stalker. This wasn't someone who wanted something from me. They were learning to be me. They had been learning for three years. And whatever they were almost ready to do, I had 11 days less to stop it than I'd had when that photograph was taken. Ghost, Scary Stories is a production of Calaroga Shark Media. Some elements of AI may have been used in this production, but it was written, edited, mixed and produced by real, live people. Executive producers Mark Francis and John McDermott.