The Likeness - Episode 3 of 4 - "The Mirror"

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This is The Likeness. Episode 3, The Mirror.

0:35 I stopped sleeping around this time. Not all at once. It happened the way things erode, gradually and then completely. The first few nights I lay awake for an extra hour or two, my mind doing the thing minds do when they've been given a problem they can't put down. Then the extra hours stretched. Then I'd find myself still awake at three, at four, watching the numbers on my phone change. listening to the building, the radiator, the floor above, the particular silence of the city between two and five in the morning, which is not really silence at all, but a different kind of noise, thinner, more exposed. I told myself the sleeplessness was temporary, that once I understood what I was dealing with, the understanding would bring some relief.

1:33 This turned out not to be true. Understanding made it worse. Understanding always does. Here is what I came to understand in those long nights. Working backward through everything I knew. They had been building a version of me for three years. Not imitating me casually. Not wearing me like a costume for a night. Building. The way you build something that has to hold weight. Carefully, with Attention to the load-bearing elements.

2:09 Testing each piece before you move to the next. They had my handwriting, which meant they'd been practicing. They had my speech patterns, my texting cadence, the specific rhythm of how I construct a sentence. They had my physical appearance close enough that they'd written with confidence, the face is right.

2:27 And they had been using what they'd built. Not recklessly. That was the part that kept me awake more than anything else. If they had been reckless, if they had sent dozens of messages, made themselves visible, overplayed their hand, someone would have noticed sooner. Instead, they had been surgical. A text to Phoebe about balance, worded just wrong enough to create distance, a lukewarm word in Dennis' ear about my professional character, a call made to a dying woman, carefully timed, devastating in its precision, messages to Carol that made her think I was going through something that kept her at the careful remove of someone managing a fragile situation.

3:20 Each one was a small thing. Each one was designed to accomplish a specific narrowing. The circle of people who knew me well, who would notice if something changed, who might sound an alarm, That circle had been, quietly, patiently, drawn inward for three years. And I hadn't seen it because I'd been inside it, watching it happen from the wrong angle. I thought about the previous tenant. The woman who had broken her lease suddenly and left clean, and whose face Patrice couldn't quite remember. I thought about the six months the apartment had sat empty before I moved in.

4:03 I thought about the particular convenience of this building. Its electronic entry log, its fobs. The ease with which a copy could be made of a small piece of plastic. They had been in my apartment on the nights I wasn't home. I was certain of that now. Not just twice, as the log showed. Those were only the times they'd slipped.

4:29 The other times they'd been more careful. They'd come in through a method I hadn't found yet, or they'd timed it perfectly, or they'd simply been better on the nights that mattered. They had been in my bedroom, in my kitchen, touching my things, learning my things, being inside the space where I lived, until they could move through it the way I moved through it. The wrongness wasn't just that someone was watching me. The wrongness was that someone was rehearsing me. I tried to call Phoebe on a Wednesday evening, which was not our usual time. She picked up, but she was different on the phone than she'd been in our last good call. Careful. There was a flatness to her voice that I recognized from her younger years. The

5:32 voice she used when she was hurt and didn't want to show it. I asked her how she was. She said she was fine. I asked how things were with Danica. She said fine. And then she said, Dad, I got your message. I went still. She said that earlier that week she'd received a voicemail from my number. She described it.

5:57 I'd sounded tired, she said. I'd said that I'd been watching her social media videos I'm not on her social media I have never asked to be. That has always been her space. And I was concerned she was spending too much time with her friends when she should be focused on applications. I'd said some things about self-absorption, about priorities.

6:24 She repeated the word I'd apparently used, and it was a word I do not use, have never used. A word that would not occur to me when speaking to my daughter. But the voice had been right. The cadence had been right. Close enough. She said, Is everything okay with you? And I heard what she was really asking, which was, Are you someone I can still trust? Or have you become someone I need to manage? I told her I'd not left that message. I told her I needed her to believe me. And I told her why.

7:02 Not everything. Not the parts that would frighten her, but enough. Enough for her to understand that someone had been using my number, my voice, possibly my face, to interfere with my life. I kept my voice even. I did not cry. I came close. She was quiet for a long moment after I finished. Then she said, I knew that wasn't you.

7:33 I just didn't know what to do. Those words. I have thought about them many times since. The particular loneliness of knowing something is wrong and having no framework for it. I had spent weeks not knowing what to do either, and I was the adult, and it was happening to me directly. My 16-year-old daughter had been sitting with it alone, not knowing what to do, Because the wrongness was too large and too strange. And the person she'd normally call for help was the person the wrongness was about. I told her I was going to fix it. I didn't know yet if that was true. Three days later, I followed myself home. I had been watching the building. I want to be precise about this because it sounds unhinged.

8:29 And I am aware that it sounds unhinged. But I had exhausted the investigations I could do from inside. And the only thing I hadn't done was wait and watch from outside. I took a personal day from work. I positioned myself at a coffee shop across the street and slightly down the block. A window seat. A good sight line to the building's main entrance. I brought a book I didn't read. I drank three cups of coffee. I watched.

9:03 Nothing for four hours. And then, the door opened and someone walked out wearing my coat. I recognized the coat first. Dark green. Slightly too long in the body. A peculiarity of the cut I'd always meant to have adjusted. I had owned it for six years. I'd left it on the hook by my front door that morning. Because the day was warmer than expected, the person wearing it walked the way I walk. That is a difficult thing to describe.

9:39 Gait is subtle. It's composed of a thousand small habits of weight and balance. But I know how I walk. The way I know my own handwriting. The slight forward lean. The way the right hand moves a little more than the left. Almost right. Not quite right. Like a song played in a slightly different key. I left money on the table and followed them. I stayed half a block back.

10:11 They moved with purpose, heading east, and I matched their pace. My heart was doing something I didn't have good language for. Not racing, not exactly, but enlarged. Present in a way hearts aren't usually present. For three blocks, I followed myself through the city. At the third intersection, they paused, and I closed the distance without meaning to. The light changed unexpectedly, and the crowd around me surged forward, and I was suddenly closer than I'd planned. maybe 15 feet, angled slightly behind and to the left, close enough to see the hair was right, close enough to see the coat fit correctly across the shoulders, which meant the shoulders were right.

11:08 From behind, at 15 feet, on a crowded street, I could not have told you which of us was Marcus. Then the crowd shifted. and they were gone into a gap around a corner somewhere I couldn't follow quickly enough without running and I didn't run because something in me had stopped working properly and couldn't issue that instruction I stood on the sidewalk while people moved around me I understood something then that I hadn't let myself fully understand before they weren't going to hurt me not the way you think of being hurt not violence, not confrontation. That wasn't the plan. The plan was quieter and more complete than that. The plan was to make me unnecessary. Every relationship they'd damaged, every distance they'd introduced, it was preparation.

12:09 When Marcus disappeared, the people closest to him would think he'd been struggling, he'd been pulling away, he'd been saying strange things. It made a kind of sad sense. And whoever stepped into his life would carry those same relationships, already shaped to receive a version of him that was slightly diminished, slightly unreliable, slightly changed. They wouldn't need to explain the change. The groundwork had been laid for it.

12:46 By the time anyone thought... to question whether the man in Marcus' life was actually Marcus, there would be no obvious seam to find. I went back to the apartment. I sat at my kitchen table for a while. Then I opened my laptop and I went through it again. Email, accounts, everything I had access to. Looking for anything I'd missed.

13:18 I found it in a folder I hadn't thought to check. A cloud storage account I'd set up years ago and largely forgotten. Used occasionally for large files. Someone had been accessing it. In a subfolder I hadn't created there was a single document. The file name was my full name. I opened it. It was an obituary. My obituary. Written in first person. which is not how obituaries are typically written, but the voice was mine, or near enough to mine to pass, the way everything about this passed near enough.

14:00 It described the details of my life with accuracy, my marriage, my daughter, my career, my relocation. It described a man who had been struggling since his divorce, who had become increasingly isolated. who had spoken to people in his life in ways that worried them. The details it cited were things that had happened, things that had been arranged to happen.

14:31 The cause of death was listed as suicide. I read the date it had been written. I read the date that had been filled in at the top. The date of death. Six weeks from today. They had given themselves six weeks. They had a date. This had always been a project with a completion date, and I was holding the document that proved it, written in a voice that sounded enough like mine that people who loved me might read it and think, yes, yes, that sounds like how he would have gone. I closed the laptop. Six weeks.

15:13 Six weeks. I had been reasonable for as long as I could afford to be reasonable. The time for that was finished.

15:36 Ghost Scary Stories is a production of Calaroga Shark Media.

15:42 Some elements of AI may have been used in this production, but it was written, edited, mixed and produced by real, live people.

15:52 Executive producers Mark Francis and John McDermott.