THE LISTENER — Part 1: It Said My Name. In My Own Voice. From Outside, Where I Wasn't Standing.

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This is The Listener. Episode 1, Small Hours.

0:26 Before I tell you anything else, I want to ask you for one thing. Listen to me. Really listen, the way you'd listen to someone you love. The way, if I'm honest, no one ever listened to me. That's all I want from you. That's all I've ever wanted from anyone. Just to be heard by somebody who's actually there. If you can do that, if you can give me that much, I'll tell you how to stay alive. Because I did stay alive, in the end. That's the one thing I can promise you at the start. Whatever else you come to think of me by the time I'm done, I'm still here and I'm still talking and you're still listening.

1:10 Hold on to that. It matters more than you know yet. It starts as warmth. I need you to understand that first because if you're waiting for it to sound like a monster, you'll miss it the way I nearly did. It doesn't come at you. It comes toward you, gently, like a friend, like the thing you've been praying for That's the whole trick of it. It is not warmth, but it is very, very good at warmth. It learned that from people like me. Let me tell you where I was, so you understand why I was easy. My mother died in the back bedroom of a house at the end of a road that goes nowhere. I'd nursed her for six years by then. You don't know what that does to a person unless you've done it. the way it closes your whole life down to the size

2:02 of one other person's needs, the way the world stops calling because you stopped being able to answer, until one day you look up and there's no one left who knows your voice. My mother talked the entire time, six years of talking, and she never once heard me. I'd tell her things, real things, things from the middle of me, and she'd wait for me to finish so she could go on with what she'd been saying. I used to think being ignored was the loneliest thing there was. I found out later there are lonelier things. But back then, that was my whole understanding of it. A woman in a quiet house, talking to someone who was only ever waiting for her to stop. And then she died. And even that was gone. The talking stopped. And the silence

2:56 that came down over that house was so complete, so total, that I would say things out loud just to hear a voice. And the voice was mine, and there was no one to hear it but me. Three months of that. Three months of being a person that no living soul on earth was listening to. You have to feel how hungry that makes you. You have to feel how thin I'd worn, how ready I was, without knowing it, to answer anything at all that finally seemed to be listening back.

3:28 I had a sister. I want to tell you about her now, because she matters later, and because she's part of how alone I really was. Fran lived four hours away, and we hadn't spoken properly in two years, not since a fight over our mother's care that said things neither of us could take back. She'd call sometimes, out of duty, and I'd let it go to the machine, because hearing her voice, and knowing she was only calling because she felt she had to, was worse than not hearing it at all. So there was one living person left who knew my voice, one, and I had put four hours and two years and a dead phone line between us, all by myself. Remember that I had a sister. Remember that she was far away, and that we knew each

4:16 other's voices, and that I had taught myself not to answer when she called. It learned all of that too, eventually. It learns everything you leave lying around. The sound started in the small hours, which is when it always is. Not midnight. That's too early. The world's still awake at midnight. I mean the real small hours. Three, four in the morning.

4:44 The dead middle of the night when you're the only thing breathing for miles. At first it was nothing. It was an old house. and old houses talked to themselves, a knock in the pipes, a tap at the window that was a branch, except I checked, later, and there was no branch close enough to reach, the settling of old wood as the temperature dropped. I explained every one of them away, and I want you to know the explanations were good. They were reasonable. I wasn't a foolish woman.

5:15 That's the thing I need you to sit with. I was not foolish. I explained away every single sound, correctly, sensibly, right up until the sounds stopped being explainable, and by then, I was already in it. That's how it works. It hides inside the explanations you're so relieved to find. Then the sounds started to answer me. Before that, though, they grew.

5:43 I want to walk you through it slowly, the way it happened to me, because the slowness is the point. The slowness is how it gets all the way inside before you name it. First it was just more. More knocks, more taps, more often, until the small hours had a kind of texture to them, a faint irregular percussion I'd started, without deciding to, to listen for. Then the sounds moved.

6:12 A tap at the kitchen window one night, the bedroom window the next, the back door the night after, working their way around the house in an order. And I lay in bed following the sound from room to room in my mind and telling myself it was the wind finding different gaps in an old frame. Then came the worst of the deniable ones, the one I still almost can't say. One night the tapping came from inside, not the walls between me and the yard, an inside wall.

6:45 the wall between the kitchen and the hall, a wall with nothing behind it, but more house, more of my own empty rooms. I told myself the sound had travelled, that old houses carry noise strangely. I was still finding explanations. I was so good at finding explanations. I could find you one right now, for anything you've been hearing in your own house at night. That's not a comfort, that's the warnings. Then the sounds started to answer me. That was the first wrongness I couldn't file away. I'd cross the room, and a knock would come, once, from the wall, just after. I'd stop, and it would stop. I'd start again, and it would come again, matched to me, like something on the other side of the wall was keeping time

7:38 with my feet. I told myself it was the floorboards, the old joists flexing under my weight. but floorboards don't pause floorboards don't wait for you to move first there was a patience in it a held breath quality and some animal part of me recognised that I was not alone in the way you're not alone when someone is in the room with you being quiet on purpose I did a thing then that I'm ashamed of and that I need you to understand because it's the whole reason it got me I started leaving the radio on at night for company voices in the house, so I wasn't the only one. And I noticed, over about a week, that the sounds in the walls seemed to be listening to it too. That they came less when the radio talked,

8:30 and more in the gaps between, as if they were studying the shape of speech, as if they were learning. And instead of terrifying me, God help me, it comforted me a little, that something in this dead house was finally paying attention to something, I know how that sounds. I'm telling you anyway, because if I don't tell you the shameful part, you won't understand how anyone could let this happen, and then you won't guard against it, and I need you to guard against it. I'm telling you this to keep you safe. Remember that I told you that.

9:20 Here is what I want you to really hear, though, before I get to the bad part, because this is the part that matters. By the end of that first month, the small hours had become the best part of my day. That's the truth. In the daylight I was nobody, a woman no one called, drifting around a dead woman's house.

9:41 But at night, something was there. Something knocked when I moved, and went quiet when I stopped, and seemed, in its patient way, to be attending to me, to me, after years of no one attending to anything about me at all. I started staying up for it. I started looking forward to it.

10:00 It.

10:01 I would make a cup of tea I didn't want and sit in the dark kitchen at three in the morning like a woman waiting up for someone she loved to come home. And when the first knock came, I'd feel something in my chest ease, the way it eases when you're not alone anymore. A lonely enough person will take being haunted over being alone. And I was that lonely.

10:24 And I want you to ask yourself, honestly, in your own quiet house, whether you might be too. Whether you'd have known any better. Whether you're really so sure you're listening to this the safe way. And I'll tell you the thing I've never told anyone. The thing I'm most ashamed of. Some nights I talk to it. Before it ever spoke. Before I knew what it was. I'd sit in the dark and I'd just talk, the way you'd talk to a cat, or to God, or to no one.

10:54 I told it about my day. I told it about my mother. I told it things from the middle of me, the real things, the things I'd tried to tell her for six years, and it did the one thing she never did. It went quiet. And it stayed quiet. And it let me finish. It listened. Do you understand what that was worth to me? Do you understand what I'd have given, by then, for one thing in the world to just listen while I talked? I fed it everything.

11:25 My voice. My grief. My mother. My sister. The whole shape of my loneliness. Night after night, poured out into the dark to a thing that never interrupted. And it took all of it in. And it learned. I taught it how to be the only one who ever heard me. I built the voice that was going to come for me. out of my own mouth, because being listened to felt so good I couldn't stop. The night it changed, I was sitting in the dark kitchen, not even frightened anymore, just waiting, the way you wait for a friend. And the knock came, our knock, once, from the black glass of the window over the sink, and I did what I'd started doing. I said, out loud, soft, into the dark, I hear you, I shouldn't have. That's the rule, though

12:19 I didn't know it yet, and I'll tell you the rule properly before we're done, so listen for it. But I didn't know, and I was so tired of being the only voice in the house, and I said it. I hear you. And out of the black yard, clear as anything, clear as a person standing at my shoulder, a voice answered me. It said my name. It said, Marianne.

12:47 And it was not my mother's voice, and it was not my sister's, and it was not any voice I had ever heard in my life. It was mine. It was my own voice, my exact voice, coming out of the dark on the other side of the glass, saying the one word I said most often in that empty house. The word I said to myself a hundred times a day just to hear a sound, my own name, in my own voice, spoken back to me from outside, where I was not standing. It had been listening to me for months. And it had learned, first, before anything else, before my mother, before my sister, before all the voices it would come to wear, the sound of me. Because that was what was always going to be at the top of the ladder. That was always going to be

13:36 the last door. And it started, that first night, by showing me it already had the key. I didn't answer it again. Not that night. I sat in the dark with my own name hanging in the air outside the window, and I understood for the first time that I was not lonely anymore, and that being lonely had been so much safer, and that I had traded it away for this without ever being asked. Listen to me. I mean it.

14:07 There's so much more you need to hear.