THE LISTENER — Part 2: I Talked to My Sister for Five Minutes. The Phone Was Never Off the Hook.

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories.

0:16 This is The Listener.

0:18 Episode 2, It Learns.

0:26 I didn't answer it again after that first night. Not for a while. I want you to give me that much, at least, because it's true. I heard my own name come out of the dark in my own voice, and something in me finally understood that whatever this was, it was not a friend, and I stopped talking to it. I went quiet, and I thought, in my foolishness, that going quiet was the same as being safe.

0:54 It isn't.

0:57 I'll explain the difference before we're done. for now just know that I stopped answering, and it did not stop coming, and that gap between the two is where the real horror lives. The days helped, that's the cruel rhythm of it, the way the daylight lets you argue yourself back down. In the morning, with the sun on the frost, and the ordinary sounds of an ordinary world, the whole thing seemed impossible, and I'd decide I'd imagined it, a woman alone too long, hearing things, the way lonely people do.

1:32 I'd almost have myself convinced, and then the light would start to go, earlier every day, because this was the deep of winter now, the nights eating further into the afternoons, and I'd feel the dread come up in me like water in a tub as the dark came down, because some part of me that was wiser than the rest knew the daylight was the lie and the dark was the truth. Then it started to talk, Really talk. It came up slowly, the way everything about it came up slowly.

2:05 First just my name again, but from different places now, the yard, the roof, the hall, then two words, then a little phrase, halting, like a mouth learning to work. And here is the thing that turned my blood to water. Every night it was better. The first phrases were wrong, the rhythm off, the stresses in the wrong places, a voice reading letters it didn't understand. But it listened to itself, I think, the way it listened to everything, and it corrected.

2:39 Night after night, the wrongness got smaller, the seams closed. If you have ever heard something learning to sound human, getting closer to it by inches... you know there is nothing on this earth more frightening because you can hear the intelligence in it, patient and cold and tireless, and you can hear that it is doing it for you.

3:01 And it wasn't only voices it learned. It learned me. It learned that I flinched at certain words and softened at others. It learned that if it spoke and then went quiet and let the silence stretch, I would lean toward it, the way you lean toward someone speaking too softly to hear because a lifetime of not being listened to had trained me to strain after any scrap of attention.

3:25 It used my own hunger as a handle. Some nights it would say just half a sentence and stop, and leave the rest hanging in the dark, and I would stand there, aching to hear the end of it, aching, and that ache was the leash, and it knew, it always knew, exactly how hard to pull. And then it found my mother. I don't know how to make you feel this part, and I need to, so listen. Listen.

3:52 One night, out of the dark, I heard my mother's voice. Not close, at first. From somewhere out past the window. Soft. Six years I'd nursed that voice and three months I'd have given anything to hear it again despite everything. And there it was, saying my name the way she used to. Marion. With that little downward turn she put on it. And I froze in the dark with my heart going. Because it was her. It was exactly her. Every grain of it right. And then it said the things she never said.

4:25 It said, I'm proud of you, Marion. My mother never said that. Not once. Not in 40 years. Not at the end. It said, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for all of it. She never apologised for anything in her life. And then it said the one that broke me. The one I hadn't even known was the thing I was starving for. Until I heard it offered. It said, soft, warm, certain.

4:56 I heard you, all those years. I heard every word you said to me. I always heard you. And I stood in that dark kitchen and I felt the tears come up hot and fast, because that was it. That was the whole hole in the middle of my life. And the dark outside my window was offering to fill it, in her voice, for free. And all I had to do was answer. All I had to do was say, Mom.

5:23 One word. I got as far as opening my mouth. I got as far as the breath before the word. And something stopped me. I still don't fully know what. Maybe the memory of my own name in my own voice. The wrongness of that. Sitting under all this sweetness. Maybe just the animal thing that knows a trap by its smell no matter how good the bait. I closed my mouth.

5:49 I did not say Mom. Mom. I stood there, and I shook, and I wept, and I did not answer it. And it waited, patient, for a long time. And then it went quiet. And I want you to notice what I felt, in the middle of my terror. Under the fear, I felt grief. Because I'd wanted to answer. I'd wanted to so badly. Refusing it felt like losing her a second time. Like turning down the only apology I would ever be offered. That's what it does. It doesn't threaten you.

6:23 It offers you the thing you want most, and makes refusing it the cruelest thing you've ever done to yourself. Remember that, when I tell you at the end what I had to refuse, remember how much it costs to say no to a voice that loves you. The phone was how denial finally died. A few nights later, the phone rang. My mother's old phone, the one on the wall in the kitchen, and I want you to understand that a ringing phone at that hour, in that silence, was so ordinary and so real that I answered it without a thought, the way you'd answer any phone. I picked it up and I said hello, and it was Fran, my sister. Her voice, ordinary, a little tired, no ghost in it at all, just Fran, saying, hey. It's late.

7:21 I know. I couldn't sleep. I've been thinking about you out there on your own. And oh, the relief of it. A real voice. A living voice. My sister reaching across two years and four hours of distance in the middle of the night. I talked to her.

7:39 I did.

7:41 I stood there in the dark and I talked back. I said her name. I said I'd been thinking about her too. I said it's been so long. And she said, Warm. I know. I know it has. Tell me how you are. Really.

7:57 I'm listening.

7:59 And I started to. God help me. After all of it, I started to tell her. And then she said something. In the flow of it.

8:09 Easy.

8:10 And it was a detail. She referred to something. A thing about our mother's last days. A small specific thing. And it was slightly wrong. Wrong in a way only the two of us would know. Wrong. The way a thing is wrong when someone has heard about it but wasn't there. And I stopped. And in the silence after I stopped, I became aware, slowly, the way you become aware of a draft. That the phone in my hand did not have the small vibration a live line has.

8:43 That there was no faint sound of a room on the other end. No breath. No space. That the phone... in fact, was dead, was cold, was, I understood, not connected to anything, had not rung, could not have rung, because when I truly listened, I could hear the dial tone still going, faint, underneath, and I was holding it to my ear, and the voice, Fran's voice, my sister's living voice, was not coming from the phone at all, it was coming from the window, I had been standing in a dark room with a dead phone pressed to my ear, answering the black glass, and it had let me.

9:26 It had let me talk to it for five minutes thinking I was safe, thinking I was finally reaching out, and the whole time I was doing the one thing, the exact thing, I was never supposed to do. I was answering. I had answered and answered and answered. I dropped the phone. I didn't hang it up. I dropped it, and it swung on its cord and knocked against the wall, and I backed away from the window into the corner of the kitchen, and I put my hand over my own mouth, physically, my own hand over my own mouth to keep myself from making another sound I did the practical things after that the things you'd do the things you're already thinking I should have done I unplugged the phone from the wall and put it in a drawer

10:16 I pulled every curtain in the house and pushed a chair under the kitchen window, and stuffed towels along the door where the cold came in. I made the house into a sealed dark box, and I sat in the middle of it, and do you know what I learned? That none of it mattered. Because it had never needed the phone, or the window, or the door. Those were just places it chose to sound from, because it knew I'd believe a voice more if it came from somewhere a voice should come from. With the phone in the drawer and the curtains drawn, it simply spoke from the middle of the room, from the air, from wherever it liked.

10:56 I had been trying to lock out a thing that was already using the inside of my own house as its mouth, and all my locks and towels and drawers had done was teach me that there was no outside to it and no inside. There was only the sound, and the sound could come from anywhere, and the only door it actually needed was the one in me. the one that opened when I answered. I tried to call Fran for real the next day, in the daylight, when I was braver. I dialed the number with shaking hands.

11:29 And here is the thing that I think finally broke me all the way, the thing that took the last floor out from under me. When it rang and a voice said hello, I could not be sure. I stood there with the phone against my ear and my own sister saying, Hello? Marion? Is that you? And I could not be certain. I could not be certain whether I was talking to Fran or to the thing that had learned Fran, because it was that good now, and I hung up without speaking on what might have been the one living person left who loved me. Because I no longer trusted a single voice in the world, not even the ones that came down a telephone line in broad daylight.

12:15 Do you see what it took from me? Not just my nights. It took my ability to believe anyone at all. It poisoned every voice I had left. That night I made a decision. I decided I would not speak again. To anyone. To anything. Not one word. Until I understood what this was and how to end it. I would be silent. Total silence. It was the only thing I could think of that felt like safety. And I clung to it. And in the small hours, in the middle of the silence I was holding so hard my jaw ached, it spoke to me one more time. Gently. Kindly. In my mother's voice. The warm one. The one that said the things she never said. It said, That's alright, Marion.

13:06 You don't have to talk. I'll wait. And then it said the thing that told me It knew exactly what I was doing, that it had all the time in the world, that my silence was not the escape I thought it was, but simply the next part of the game to it. It said, soft, loving, patient as the grave. You were always such a good listener, and it settled in to wait. I could feel it out there, content, unhurried, certain.

13:39 It had all winter. It had longer than that. It had as long as it took. I sat in my sealed dark house with my hand over my mouth and my sister's number I couldn't trust and my mother's voice that wasn't hers, and I understood that I had walked, all on my own, out of loneliness and into something that made loneliness look like a kindness. I had prayed for a voice in the dark. I had been answered.

14:07 And now I could not unanswer, and I could not stay silent forever. And I did not yet know that silent forever... was exactly, precisely, the only way out. Listen to me. Are you still there? Good. Stay with me. This next part is the part that saves your life.