- 2 days ago
A schoolteacher in Jackson, Mississippi, thinks a stranger is following her during her evening run — a tall man with curly gray hair and a voice that knows her name. But as the pursuit closes in, she realizes he’s not after her address, or her wallet, or even her life… he’s after something else. Decades later, her daughter uncovers a chilling connection: two other strangers, years apart, claimed to hear the same voice. Whatever it is, it isn’t human — it's something supernatural, and it never lets go.
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CreativityTranscript
00:00I learned to run the way my mother learned to pray.
00:03By doing it when no one was watching and pretending it made me safe.
00:07When she told me the story, she never started with the man.
00:12She began with the heat, the feel of it pressing on her shoulders like a hand.
00:18Jackson in late summer, light slanting gold on brick and pine, gnats orbiting faces as if people
00:26were planets, the air so heavy it held sound like a bowl holds water. She'd say that every footfall
00:35she made sounded trapped inside the heat, slapping against the pavement and then floating up as if
00:41it didn't want to go anywhere. I didn't understand that image until I started going out at dusk myself,
00:49after work, tracing her old root the way a finger traces in boss letters.
00:54I didn't live in Jackson anymore. I'd moved two states over, took a job that paid just enough to
01:03keep dread and debt neck and neck. But I mapped the streets as she described them, adjusted for the
01:10wrong city, the different trees, the way light worked here. I ran past a boarded up laundromat that
01:19stood in for her boarded up grocery. I ran through the sound of a loose streetlight wire humming like
01:26a wasp trapped in glass. I ran toward a church that wasn't her church, a rectangular brick building with
01:35a white sign out front. And I told myself it would be there for me if I needed it. She says she knew the
01:42moment he fell in beside her, not because of his shadow, but because of how her breath sounded in
01:49her head. It went from a rhythm to a stutter. She didn't see him at first. She felt the fact of him.
02:00The footsteps were wrong. Not quite behind her. Not quite beside her. As if he were making his sound in
02:08her chest. She said she lengthened her stride. And he matched it without rushing. The way a tall man
02:16does when he's sure he'll catch you anyway. What did he look like? I asked when I was younger. Half
02:23hoping for a monster, and half hoping for a cop's sketch. Tall, she'd say, and laugh as if the word were
02:32a trick. Tall, like you could see him in a crowd without trying. Grey, curly hair. Not old grey,
02:40just grey like wool. His clothes weren't dirty. That made it worse. Like he came from somewhere
02:49respectable, but didn't belong to it. And his face? I don't remember, she'd say. And her eyes would move
02:59to a corner of the room as if that was where the face had gone. My mind didn't want to give it a
03:05place to sit. But his voice? Her mouth would flatten. She'd look at her hands. His voice was like a song I
03:17ought to know. The first time she told me the opening line, I felt my body mistake the sofa cushion for the
03:26seat of a car and brace for impact. You know who I am, and you know what I want. He didn't say her name.
03:37He didn't need to. The sentence held it, like a throat holds a swallowed thing. My mother said she
03:44answered without meaning to. No, like she was correcting a student who'd gotten a math problem
03:50barely wrong. But she did know. Some part of her. She insisted on that years later, in the kitchen,
04:00on a woman-cold morning, when the sunlight was too white to be kind.
04:05It wasn't like a stranger trying to be familiar, she said. It was a familiar thing, pretending to be a
04:14stranger. I started collecting the rest of it, the way you collect glass you don't remember breaking.
04:23Carefully, and angry at yourself for bleeding. He asked her where she lived, if she ran every day,
04:32and if she liked the neighborhood. Casual questions. The kind you answer by reflex because
04:39it's easier to keep the machine of conversation running than to jam it with fear. She lied without
04:45planning. Oh, just visiting my sister, she said. I take different routes. She didn't have a sister.
04:54She didn't take different routes. But the lies sounded thin in the air, like thread pulled too tight.
05:00She cut her run short. She could see the apartment from half a block away. Third story, second from the
05:10left. The one with a window that caught late light and made the living room look like whiskey.
05:17The lock on that apartment door was a running joke with my father. He'd jiggle it. Swear. Jiggle it again.
05:26Declare it had a personality that didn't like men. My mother would laugh and jiggle and jiggle until the
05:33bolt gave up with a long-suffering sigh. She had a key, but it preferred to test her.
05:42That day, the key turned as if the door had been waiting for her. She felt the teeth bite,
05:49felt the bolt slide, smooth, slick, an inhale opening a throat. She stepped in and turned the
05:57chain with a click that sounded like a small animal being snapped in half. She didn't ask why.
06:05She didn't think. She leaned her whole weight against the wood and listened. The hall outside
06:12swallowed sound and gave it back as footsteps. Then the knock. Not loud.
06:20That made it worse, she said. It was a polite knock, the kind a neighbor uses when they don't want
06:26to cause trouble. You know who I am, the voice said through the door. The wood flattened it. And you
06:35know what I want. What do you want? My mother asked. And felt the question arrive too late,
06:44like a door closing after someone has already stepped through. He laughed. And the laugh was
06:50the sound of someone not laughing saying the word laugh. She told him she was calling the police.
06:57She wasn't. The phone felt like a fake prop on a stage where real things had just started happening.
07:04She told him she had a husband who would be home any minute. My father was teaching night classes then.
07:12He wouldn't be home for hours. She told him to leave or the man upstairs would come down.
07:19There was no man upstairs. He said nothing, which is worse than a word. Then footsteps in retreat.
07:27Then nothing. It ought to end there. Most stories like this do. The not-quite crime. The woman who did
07:38everything right. The relief that is also a humiliation. Because relief is not a victory,
07:43it's a permission. But she didn't feel permitted. She felt enclosed. She crossed the room to the window
07:52and looked down onto the street. The church across from the apartment building, Bethel House of God,
08:00was lit up like a box of teeth. She joked about it once. The ugliness of the light. How fluorescent bulbs
08:09make even angels look like factory workers. That night, it was beautiful.
08:15The sign out front showed a verse about deliverance. The letters were black on white,
08:22and a moth wobbled over the o like a drunk halo. She grabbed her sneakers, stuck her feet into them
08:29without socks, and ran. My mistake, she told me later, was thinking sanctuary was a place.
08:38As if a room could keep something out that had already gotten in. She crossed the street on a red,
08:46because the world had narrowed to a single verb. Go. A car braked hard. A horn split.
08:55She flinched as if the horn were a hand. She went up the church steps two at a time and tried the door.
09:01Open. Not just open. Easy. The way the apartment door had been easy. The lock that had fought them
09:12for months now bent for her. She stepped into cool air that had been breathed by singing.
09:19The sanctuary smelled like paper and dust, and the sharp sweetness of disinfectant.
09:25She moved down the aisle like a woman late to her wedding. The pastor's office light was on.
09:33A man looked up from behind a desk piled with pamphlets that taught grief how to behave.
09:40He was small and exhausted. And he smiled the way people do when they've been trained to smile,
09:47even when their bones hurt.
09:48My child. He said. And my mother hated him instantly for the phrase. But she sat.
09:58She told him the story in a voice that belonged to her but sounded rented.
10:02She left out the part about the lock because she did not yet know it mattered.
10:07She left out the part where the man's voice had sounded. No. Not sounded. Felt. Like a song she ought to know.
10:16Now. The pastor listened as if listening were a job. He said the right things. He offered a prayer.
10:25He called a deacon to walk her home. The deacon was six feet of quiet, with a ring of keys that
10:32jingled like a joke about authority. They crossed the street. They checked the stairwell. It was empty
10:41in the way rooms are empty, after having been full of something you can't name. Do you feel safe?
10:48The deacon asked at her door.
10:51She wanted to say no.
10:54She said yes, because dignity wins small arguments, and fear picks bigger ones.
11:00When she told me this, she paused.
11:03And for once, I didn't fill the space with a question. The questions I asked when I was a
11:10teenager were the wrong kind. Why didn't you call the police? Why did you open the door?
11:17Why did you go to the church instead of a neighbor? I was older now, and fear had wised me up.
11:24A better question bloomed and waited. She finished her glass of water, as if the last swallow might
11:32be the one that kept her alive. I don't know why the lock worked for me, she said.
11:39I don't know why the church door opened so easily. I don't know why he didn't try harder.
11:46Maybe he didn't need to, I said. And the look she gave me was a mirror I wish I had covered.
11:53It would have been a story we told at holidays. Mama's creepy runner story, if not for two other
12:01things that happened years later to people my mother never met. They shared their versions with
12:07friends of friends, who soothed, repeated, and embellished, just like any living story does.
12:17The changes were in the details. The core was a cinder that stayed hot.
12:23A woman in Tennessee heard a voice outside her window that used her dead sister's way of saying
12:29her name. It said,
12:31You know who I am. A man in Oregon answered his intercom at midnight and listened to a delivery
12:39driver recite the last conversation he'd had with his ex-wife, verbatim, then end with,
12:45You know what I want. My roommate in college told me both stories on a night when the dorm heaters
12:53clicked like someone counting. And all I could think of was my mother's face when she told me the line,
13:01how it sounded like something that had grown up inside the shape of her mouth and then moved out.
13:06I ran more after that. I told myself it was for my health. I told myself it was to get my breath back.
13:16I told myself it was to make the stories small by outpacing them.
13:19On my runs, I started to listen not just for footsteps but for echoes.
13:26Some nights, the sound of my feet came back to me just a fraction not right,
13:31late by a hair.
13:32I counted in eights like a dancer to make sure. I changed shoes. I ran on asphalt, then on a track,
13:43then on a path made of ground-up tires that swallowed sound. The echo followed.
13:50On the nights I heard it, it felt like someone tapping the inside of my ribs with one finger.
13:56I kept my mother on speakerphone sometimes, letting her voice fill the air beside me like a second
14:03shadow. You worry too much, she'd tease. I was fine. I am fine. You left Jackson, I'd say.
14:17Everybody leave somewhere, she'd say back. Which wasn't an answer, but had the force of one.
14:24When the knock came for me, it didn't come on a door. That courtesy felt old-fashioned now.
14:33It went on a pane of glass the size of a book, an ordinary window over my sink with a sill too
14:39narrow to hold anything but a small plant. It came in three taps spaced too far apart to be social.
14:48I had been washing a mug I didn't like. I had been thinking about the way my mother
14:53described the pastor's tired smile. I had been humming a hymn I did not remember learning.
15:01Tap, tap, tap. I looked up and saw my face reflected in front of me first.
15:08That's the trick of night windows. You see yourself before you see outside.
15:13My face looked young, and then, in the exact moment, old, as if the glass had to try two
15:20different truths to see which fit. Through the reflection, a shape stood on the strip of back
15:27lawn between my building and the fence where Ivy braided the slats like hair. Tall, curly,
15:34gray hair. Those are the words I have. The rest of it was not a face. It was a decision to be a face,
15:45and then think better of it. I didn't move. The water ran over my hand like a small river
15:52that had forgotten its source. The shape lifted its chin the way my mother does when she's about
15:58to say something unforgivable in a voice full of love. You know who I am. I heard it without sound.
16:08The words pressed the air down. The words reached me through the bones of the building,
16:14through the pipe and the wire, through the small plant on the sill that leaned its leaves toward it
16:20like a question. I think that if my mother had been there, she would have said,
16:27Close your eyes, and I would have obeyed to do the right thing. But I was alone, and loneliness is
16:35a poor instructor. You can't be, I said, and my voice sounded as if it had traveled from far away
16:44and arrived out of breath. You can't be him. The window replied with a soft answering thud,
16:53like a heartbeat attempting language. My phone lay on the counter on top of the day's mail.
17:00I could have picked it up and called a friend, the police, or my mother. I could have.
17:06Instead, I turned off the tap with careful fingers, as if the sink were listening, and reached for the
17:14latch on the window. It had always been a sticky thing, resisting me as if it were made of old gum.
17:23That night, the latch lifted as if it was someone else's hand doing me a favor. The window slid up
17:31without complaint. The air that came in smelled like damp soil and the last of the day.
17:40Don't, I told myself. And then I did. I leaned into the square hole I'd made and looked down.
17:49No one. No man with gray hair. No anything. Just the rectangle of the yard, the fence where Ivy
17:59wrote in a language that didn't need vowels. A plastic tricycle someone had left behind like
18:05an argument they'd lost. I listened for footsteps withdrawing into the dark like a tide. I heard a
18:12leaf turn over, which is almost a sound. I listened to my blood. The voice crouched beside my ear like
18:20a friend about to confess a sin. You know what I want. It used my mother's voice.
18:27Not her speaking voice. The one she uses on telephones or to the lady at the pharmacy.
18:35Her laughing voice. The voice that had told me secrets about my father. The small mean ones,
18:42while slicing fruit that made the knife smell like coins. It wore that voice like a coat that used to
18:49fit. What do you want? I asked. My mouth was pressed against the screen, leaving a small grid on my lip.
19:00It didn't answer with a word. It answered with a feeling. The feeling of a lock turning easily.
19:07Of a door opening to you as if you were expected. Of air holding sound so tenderly that you think noise
19:15can't hurt you because it will never leave the air's soft hands. I slammed the window,
19:22fumbled the latch, and made it stick the way it should. I stepped back and kicked the cabinet
19:29and felt the satisfying ache of actual pain, the kind that proves your body is yours.
19:34I turned on every light I owned. I sat with my back against the fridge, legs out, hands pressed flat to
19:45the tile, and waited for my breath to remember how to count. I called my mother.
19:53Mom, I said, and already I hated the word for being a smaller version of a bigger sound.
19:59I think, she answered before I finished. You're fine, she said, using that voice that can pick you
20:09up even when you're heavier than your worst day. I felt you thinking about it earlier. I was going to
20:16call. Did you say the words? What words? You know who I am, she said, and my neck turned cold as if
20:26someone had poured milk down the back of my shirt. And you know what I want. Did you say that back?
20:34No, I said. No, I didn't say anything like, you should have. Something in her tone shifted,
20:44not toward anger, not toward worry, toward attention. Say them now, say them out loud,
20:51so it knows you know. Mom, where are you? At home, she said, and then casually. Across the street.
21:04The church is open tonight. I might walk over. I stood. The room telescoped slightly, distances softening
21:14like bread. Across what street? Don't be silly, she said gently. You know which one? The one with
21:24the sign. I like the verse tonight. It's about deliverance. She had not lived across from a church
21:33in years. The last place she'd lived outside of memory was a beige condo with a pool that saw more
21:40leaves than people. The change washed through me like a tide that carried sand away from my feet,
21:46until I felt the ground shift. Mom, I said again. And now the word was just a mouth position,
21:56passing for a prayer. What did you open for it? A small silence. I could hear the shape of her room
22:04inside it. The clink of a glass. The hiss of air through a vent that hadn't been cleaned. The sticky
22:11adjustment of a chair leg against linoleum. Then, I didn't open anything it didn't already have the key
22:20to. The refrigerator hummed as if warming up to sing. I reached for the light over the stove and
22:27turned it off. The apartment leaned into the dark. A neighbour upstairs walked across their kitchen
22:36and put something heavy down, and the sound travelled into my body like a bruise. I moved to the window
22:43and placed my palm against it. Cool. My hand left a print that looked like a flower trying to remember
22:51its original shape. Tell me what you want, I said into the glass. Say it. If you know me, say it.
23:03The voice that answered was my own. Younger. The way it had sounded on an old voicemail where I told
23:10my mother not to worry. The way voices always tell mothers not to worry when they mean, please worry.
23:16It said my name the way you say a word right before you look it up to see if it's spelled the way you
23:22think it is. You. Just that. As if the word were a house, it was inviting itself in. I closed my eyes
23:34and saw the lock turn easily. I saw the church door open like a mouth. I saw a tall man's grey hair like
23:42wool under a lamp. I saw a pastor's tired smile. I saw a deacon's kind hands. I saw my mother looking
23:52at her hands while she told me the part where she ran across the street and survived.
23:58You're not a stranger, I said. You're not a man. You're not outside. Silence like a held breath.
24:09You're the thing that finds the open part of a person and calls it a doorway.
24:16I was proud of that sentence for half a second. Then I realized I'd heard it before,
24:23not in words but in a feeling. The first time I'd opened a message from someone I shouldn't have
24:30forgiven. The first time I'd let a small lie stand because it was shaped like mercy.
24:37The first time I'd mistaken relief for safety. It didn't need to be true. It only needed to feel
24:46efficient. The phone against my ear grew heavier. Are you with me? I asked her out loud. The way you
24:56ask a child in a store to answer so you know where to find them. I'm always with you, my mother said,
25:03and the sentence slid into the room like a shopping cartwheel that doesn't squeak anymore because
25:09someone oiled it with something slicker than oil. I opened my eyes because I was afraid to see what I
25:16would know if I didn't. Through the window, the yard sat like a photograph of itself. The fence wrote
25:24nothing. The plastic tricycle did not move. A moth tried the glass once and fell back into the air as
25:33if embarrassed. I could have believed I had invented everything. The mind is a generous liar when it
25:42wants to keep you whole. I turned the latch on the window, the way you touch a sleeping person's wrist,
25:49to make sure they're warm. It stuck. I smiled with my teeth.
25:56Good, I said to nobody. The way you say good dog when you don't own a dog.
26:02You should come over, my mother said in my ear. It's late. You shouldn't be alone. I can make tea.
26:11What kind? Something gentle, she said. Something to quiet your heart.
26:21We never drank tea when I was growing up. Coffee, bitter and scalding. Soda, flat at the bottom of the
26:27glass. Tea belonged to other kitchens. I pressed the phone harder against my ear until my cartilage
26:35complained. Say the line, I told her, and I didn't know which of us I meant to trap with it.
26:43Say it the way you remember it. She didn't hesitate. You know who I am, she said. And her voice was my
26:52voice. And then the voice was the man's voice. And then the voice was a girl's whimper from a
26:58playground I'd left decades behind. And you know what I want.
27:05The apartment went colder in a way the thermometer didn't record. The plant on the sill leaned toward
27:11me again. My breath fogged the glass. Somewhere in the wall, something clicked. A pipe agreeing with a
27:19pipe. What do you want? I asked, because some rituals only work if you finish them.
27:25The answer came as the softest sound in the room. The sound of the chain on my front door
27:32settling against its bracket. A sigh of metal-like relief. I hadn't touched it. And then, from the
27:42hallway, a knock. Polite. Space too far apart to be social. Exactly where the door stood. I looked at
27:51the door the way you look at a word you've written correctly. And suddenly doubt. Three knocks.
27:58A silence that let my heart find its rhythm and then forget it.
28:03My phone screen lit up in my hand. The call timer ran. The number at the top of the screen said,
28:10Mom. But the name looked misspelled, though each letter was correct.
28:14I set the phone on the counter. I did not hang up. The knock came again. Softer. Like a courtesy
28:25extended to someone who had already agreed. I stepped toward the door and stopped at the church
28:30aisle that wasn't there. I wasn't in Jackson. I wasn't across from a sanctuary. I wasn't 22 and sweating.
28:40I was older and sweating for different reasons. I put my hand on the deadbolt. It turned as if it had
28:50been waiting for me. I closed my eyes and thought of every threshold I'd ever crossed without knowing
28:58the room's rules. I thought of my mother running across a street lit like a box of teeth. I thought
29:06of a pastor's prayer that was a sentence like a fence that keeps nobody out. I thought of the words that
29:14meant you belong to me. Said three different ways to three other people in three different decades.
29:21I thought of relief dressed as safety. And kindness dressed as invitation. And comfort dressed as consent.
29:32I stepped back from the door. The knock came a final time. The way a last question does.
29:42As if the teacher were kind enough to repeat it. The phone on the counter spoke in my mother's voice.
29:48But the consonants wobbled like heat over asphalt.
29:52I said, darling, she said. Don't be scared. Open up.
30:01I picked up the phone. I held it to my ear and breathed into the mouthpiece like a swimmer who's
30:07just broken the surface and can't believe air requires so little effort after so much water.
30:13You can come in, I said. And tasted the wrongness of it like a penny under my tongue. But you'll have to
30:22use the stairs. I set the phone down again. I turned all the lights off, one by one, until the apartment
30:31was the kind of dark that makes you aware of your angle in space. I stood in the middle of the room and
30:37let my hands hang at my sides, palms forward like a person about to receive. The knock did not come
30:45again. The chain did not move. The window did not lift. The air did not get colder. The quiet became
30:55correct. When my phone finally made the sound that says a call has ended, it did not come from the phone.
31:02It came from the building itself. A slight tone like a bell remembering what being a bell is for.
31:11I stood there until my knees hurt. I stood there until the first pale suggestion of mourning turned
31:18the window into a thing with intentions again. I have told myself a dozen endings to this,
31:25one in which I opened the door and found nothing. And that was the horror. One in which I opened the
31:33door and saw my mother, younger, holding a cup of tea that never steamed. One in which I removed the
31:41chain and the lock, and the door swung inward without my help, and I saw the church aisle and
31:48went down it like a bride. One where the tall man with the grey wool hair asked me gently if I'd like
31:56to go for a run. But the ending I have is this. Sometimes, late, I hear the three knocks from
32:04somewhere that isn't my door and isn't anyone else's. I let them pass through me the way heat does,
32:10carrying sound. I do not answer. I do not call my mother. I do not pray. And now and then,
32:21when I'm running at dusk and the gnats orbit me as if they've been told I'm their new son,
32:26I feel a set of footsteps fall in beside my own. Not behind, not beside, exactly, but somewhere within
32:34the frame of my ribs. I lengthen my stride. The footsteps do not hurry. A voice that is not a
32:42sound moves through me like a key being turned in a lock that has decided to be kind. You know who I am,
32:49it says, patient, like a teacher giving you back your name. I keep running. I cut my roots short.
33:02I do not go home. I do not go to church. I run until I find a room that doesn't have a door.
33:10I run until I don't know which is worse, that the voice belongs to something outside me, or that it doesn't.
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