The Soot Man

The game has only just begun. Radio Silence Directors Matt Betnelli Open and Tyler Gillette are back for round two with their new horror comedy film Ready or not to hear I come. Samara weaving returns as Grace, the battle worn and bloody bride and is joined by stars Catherine Newton. Sarah Michelle Geller, Sean Haddesee, Nester Carbano, David Kronenberg and Elijah Wood. After Grace marries into a mysterious family and is forced to play a life or death theme of hide and seek, she emerges victorious. But what she didn't know is that by winning, she triggered a whole new twisted battle. This time with her estranged sister-fade on her side. The duo faces a shadowy group of rival devil worshipping families who control the world. And they must fight to the bloody death for the ultimate prize. Two times the kills, two times the satanic rituals and two times the human combustion. Don't miss the full tilt insanity. Ready or not to hear I come. When it hits theaters, March 20th. JP Morgan Payments helps you drive efficiency with automated payments and intelligent algorithms across 200 countries and territories. That's automation driven finance. That's JP Morgan Payments. JP Morgan, internal data, 2024, copyright, 2025, JP Morgan Chase & Company, all rights reserved. JP Morgan Chase Bank, NA member FDIC. The positives held non-US branches are not FDIC insured, non-deposit products are not FDIC insured. This is not a legal commitment for credit or services. Availability varies. Eligibility determined by JP Morgan Chase. Visit JP Morgan.com slash payments disclosure for details. No. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepy pastures and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or not simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Hey everyone. Still freaking freezing here in Minnesota. School's been canceled because of it. We'll go up Friday to see a negative 21 degree air temp. I'm sure some people out there might not even realize a temperature can go below zero. I'm a Minnesotan. Born here, raised here, went to school, college and grad school here, bought my home here, raised a family here. I've been through a lot when it comes to weather. Help one of our running jokes is that we can't shut up about the Halloween blizzard of 1991. Weather is a big part of our conversations here. And still, through all that, never in my life. Did I imagine that I could hate the existence of ice any more than I do right now? Most of us do. Because this is our home. We won't give up. We know how to stand up on the weather's worst. And we won't back down no matter how cold things look. And for the record, I do and always will drink my bourbon neat. Even today, single windshield outside has been around negative 20 or 40. And at this point, it seems like half the equipment in the station is just giving up. So those audio clips I mentioned last week are going to have to wait a bit. Plus, they're kind of scattered all around. No real rhyme or reason, which isn't the weirdest thing here, since I don't think that organization has ever been much of a priority. But it does seem strange that they wouldn't mark them as some kind of performance. Also, they're all really short. And there's no disclaimer, which you think would be important. I mean, even more of the worlds had an intro. For a little context. Before it was a movie, starring Tom Cruise, War of the Worlds was a 1938 radio broadcast. Historically, a lot of people remember it is causing widespread panic and riots, thinking they were actually being invaded by aliens. In reality, it was mostly just people contacting the police about what they thought could be happening, mostly around Grover's Mill in New Jersey. The other part that history seems to forget is that War of the Worlds did have a full introduction. Anyone listening from the beginning knew that it was just a radio performance. The problem was that the broadcast was on at the same time as the most popular radio program at the time, Chase and Sandborn. Yes, kids, there was a time when TVs didn't exist. Well, when Chase and Sandborn didn't add break, people turned the dial to the War of the Worlds broadcast at the moment that there was breaking news and had no idea what the context for the program was. And because the Mercury Theater on the Air, the program War of the Worlds aired on, was a sustaining show, which meant it ran without its own commercials. People thought it was a real show. Since then, the FCC got pretty serious about broadcast not causing any confusion. So, I really don't understand the stuff that I found around the station. Not one of them has any kind of intro or spoiler. I'll do my best to get one ready for you next Sunday. Anyway, let's get to this week's stories. First up, when a young man spends time wandering through an abandoned factory, he stumbles across something that seems to have been created by the silt inside the factory itself, something that follows him home. Creepy presents the silt man. I didn't grow up believing in ghosts. Mining, yes. Rust sure. Things that break your back and stain your clothes and hollow-out whole towns? Absolutely. But ghosts? No. Ghosts were for places with history. Old cities with cobblestone streets, mansions with secret passages, forests around since before people walked upright. Not for places like mine. Not for the remains of a two-mile factory corridor where everything was made a concrete and angles, and fluorescent lights that buzzed until they died. Not for a place like Hallowell Steel. But I'm telling you this, because I don't know who else will. And because I can still smell them. If you've never lived near a mill, you don't know what real suck is. You think it's the gray smear on your fingers after touching a fire pit? Maybe the soft black dust from a candle wick? That's nothing. Real soot is sticky. Oily. It gets into the cracks of your hands and stays there no matter how long you scrub, unless you're using lava soap. It cleans the clothes so deeply the washing machine smell like burnt metal for years after. When Hallowell was still running, the holy side of town was coated in a fine black haze. Tree leaves, porch railings, even your teeth if you smiled too wide for too long. People around town didn't smile too much for more reasons than that. That's the first smell that hit me when my family moved there. The sun didn't bend the metal. Always the metal underneath. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I grew up in the iron range in northern Minnesota. When work started to dry up there, a palm move of the family to start working at Hallowell. I was 18 when the mill closed. I'd never worked there but half my friends' fathers had. Whole family's upbreed at themselves when the announcement came. Some moved to Cleveland, some to Toledo, so I'm out of state entirely. Our town emptied like water leaking from a rusted pipe. Good to use to sit behind me in class and we didn't show up one day. And the teachers never bothered to explain. No sense in wasting time telling us what we already knew. My father got lucky on him because he already had an injury that forced him out about a year prior. Mangled hand from a press malfunction. He used to joke that the accident saved him from the real disaster, meaning the collapse of the mill and the flood of unemployment had followed. But then he'd stop laughing when he realized what the job had taken from him. Stranger's missing. The strange crackling pop of his wrist when he turned it a certain way. Hand not strong enough to pick anything up with it anymore. For most people the closure was the end of the mill, but the building stayed. They always do. To expensive to demolish, to toxic to repurpose, it is sit there, miles of steel skeletons and brick shells collapsing in slow motion, year after year after year. I used to walk through Hallowell after it shut down. I know that's un-stupid. I don't know if it's a teenager's due dumb things. Of course you see a belt all over YouTube doing the same thing too. But it wasn't just thrill seeking. It wasn't just a side hustle. The place felt, I don't know if this makes sense, but peaceful. Deserted in a way nothing else in town was. Like a dead city where everyone had simply disappeared mid-strived, even behind only metal and dust. The first time I saw one of them, I didn't know what I was seeing. Like I said, it's normal. You can't identify something and tell someone tells you what its name is. I was a quiet kid. Not a lot of friends transferring at the age I did. So no one had ever told me about the sit-man. That came later. It started with a flicker of movement. I was walking along the main conveyor line. This raised walkway of grated metal that connected one of the furnace buildings to the loading box. By then the railings were falling apart, and the panels buckled in places where the sports had rusted away. I was there for the quiet. My dad's pill that made him talk and have done. Regular chatty, Kathy, rambling about things no kid wanted to hear their dad talk about. And hollow was the only place I could go where his voice couldn't reach. The sun was setting. It kind of bruised purple light that made all the shadows look longer than they should have. And out of the corner of my eye, something shifted at the far end of the walkway. Just a dark shape, like someone stepping out from behind a vent, turning around a corner. I stopped. And it felt like it had stopped too. I tried to tell myself it was a trick of light. Plenty of jagging metal in that place for shadows to do strange things. But then it moved again. And this time, I got a better look at the movement. It wasn't fluid like any person I'd ever seen move. Thinking back on it, I keep thinking it looked like a... A sequence of still frames shuffled out of order, you know? They are then closer, but without the motion in between? I don't know if that makes sense. I backed up. I didn't run, not yet. But the shape stayed where it was. Too tall to be a person I'd ever seen around. Too featureless to be. I don't know. Finally, I turned around and left the walkway and didn't look back. Not because I wasn't curious, but because something in me told me not to be. That knowing wasn't worth it. That should have been enough to keep me away. But of course, it wasn't. It was almost a year before I saw one again. I was 19. Working at a dead-end stocking job at a hardware store. Living with my dad and a host, it felt smaller every day. The wall was still off limits technically, but no one patrolled it. Whoever still owned the land didn't seem all that interested in paying anyone to keep people out. The fences weren't anything more than a formality by then. Sin, metal and mesh cut open in a dozen places. People weren't supposed to go there, but everyone did. Teens drank there. Homeless folks slept there sometimes. Once in a while you'd hear that someone broke an ankle or gashed themselves on rusty metal. But no one talked about ghosts. That night I went back because I couldn't sleep. The summer heat was heavy. The air thick with humidity. I remember sweating through my shirt before I even got past the gate. A slow drizzle of rain made everything smell stronger. Wet rust, soaked dirt, old ash. My shoes left prints in the mud that steam slightly as the night cooled. I wasn't expecting anything. I wasn't even thinking about the figure from the year before. That had become a story I told myself was a hallucination, a trick of dusk. Something to file away under creepy things that happened in abandoned places. And then I heard the sound. Scraping. Soft at first like someone scraping nails across what cement. But it didn't fit. It was too steady. Too even. I followed it. And yes, I realized how stupid that sounds now. But you have to understand the mill was huge. You could hear echoes from a dozen yards away and never see the source. Sound behaved strangely among all the metal. The scraping continued as I made my way between two brick buildings. The moonlight barely reached the ground. Everything felt submerged and shadow. And then I saw him. Or it. I don't even know how to refer to it. What pronouns even apply to something that isn't human. Standing under a collapse loading bayonin is still a mannequin. A silhouette made of black powder. Its entire body was coated in soap. Not sprinkled but completely coated. Thick, packed. As if it had stood under a chimney while it burned for years. Its face was a smear of barkness. And as I move closer, I could see that it had no nose, no eyes. Just slight concavities where features should be. It faced the open yard. I didn't know if it heard me. I should have run. But something about the stillness held me there like a hook in my brain. Because fear may come from stillness. But panic comes from movement. It just stayed there like a statue someone had put up in remembrance to soap. Then it twitched. A small movement barely perceptible. Not like turning his head. More like remembering that turning a head was something a body might do. I gasped. Too loud, it turns out. The sootman rotated as if the air resisted him or was playing for dramatic effect. Or there was just nothing in the world that feared enough to move at any pace other than the one I wanted to. The shoulder was moved first. Its neck and its head. Framed by frame. Not a smooth motion. Jerky. Framed by frame. Then it looked at me. I say it looked. But I don't know if it had eyes. I just knew this tension was on me. My whole chest felt tight. My tongue went dry. I thought it would come toward me, attack me. Do something. It didn't. Oh, that's not entirely true. It did do something. It dissolved right in front of me. The gust of black particulates swept off him, like ash blown from a fire poker. One second he was there. The next the air was full of drifting sit flakes scattering across the concrete. That's when I ran. I didn't stop until I was out of the gates and halfway down the empty road toward town. Even then when I finally slowed, he ends up my knees as I tried to force air back into my lungs. It appeared in my mind as same way it appeared in front of me. Sudden and wrong and inevitable. I didn't sleep much that night. I remember the old stories in the morning. Not about the suit man, at least. Not in a way that I understood them. Things I'd heard growing up. Things my father mumbled about when he thought I wasn't listening. Stories of accidents and furnaces. Men falling into vats. Workers crushed or buried. Supervisors denying what had happened. People, mostly people who'd worked there. Saying that dead never really left. But I'd never believed them. Not until then. The third time wasn't a sighting. It was a smell. I was brushing my teeth when I noticed the burnt metal scent. Sharp, hot, like getting your face too close to an exhaust pipe. Don't ask me how I know that. My first thought was that something in the house was burning. I checked the stove, the vents, even my dad's room. Nothing. Then I saw the smear on my pillow. A thumb-sized gray streak. Pitch black in the middle and feathering out at the edges. But I hadn't been near the mill in days. And I never brought anything back from the hall of all. No one did. I sat there at a way of sticking to everything you touched. It wasn't normal dust. It almost felt alive. People avoided bringing pieces of hollow well home because the smell would never leave. There it was. On my pillow. The next morning I found more. On my shoes, on the inside of my shirt pocket, on the corner of the bathroom mirror. I told myself it had to be something rational. Clothing contamination. Car ventilation issues. Something. But the smell kept appearing. Not constant. Just sudden waves of it drifting through my room at night when the windows were closed. My father smelled it once. He paused in the hallway, sniffing the air the way animals do when they sense a storm coming. But he didn't say anything. Just furrowed his brow and walked away. I should have asked him. But I didn't want to hear the answer. Still, I knew it had smelled. Months passed. The suit was an occasional intrusion, like a reminder. But I didn't see another suit man. I began to think maybe whatever they were. They've noticed me, and then just forgotten me. Then came the night I heard them. It was late, maybe two in the morning. The wind was loud, rattling the loose trim on the windows. My father was asleep. I was lying awake, staring at the ceiling, thinking about the same nothing and everything that usually kept me up at night. Then I heard the roar, low and rhythmic, like the distant home of an industrial fan, but slower, deeper. A vibration that settled into the bones of the house. I had come to hear that Hallowell had an appower in the ears. There were no fans, no machines running inside it, at least none that I'd ever seen in my explorations. But I knew where that sound came from. I knew without knowing. I got out of bed and looked out the window toward the old factory. And I saw the movement. Not outside in the yard, not in the distance at the factory. I mean inside the reflection in the glass, behind me. I turned so fast I almost fell over. The room was empty, but vibration continued, soft, insistent, like something breathing through a ventilator deep underground. I checked every corner of my room. Nothing. Checked the hallway? Nothing. And yet the fan light hum continued. Even as I walked through the house, it didn't grow louder or softer. It seemed to be coming from everywhere I know where I once. I started to think it was inside of me. Needless to say, I didn't sleep much that night either. People say humans adjust anything if given enough time. I'm not so sure. I didn't adjust. I just endured. Maybe I just didn't get enough time. Things kept happening. Gradually at first, then, faster. Smudges of silt on my dresser. A faint black footprint down the bathroom tile. My phone buzzing at night with no notification. Once I have walked to find silt under my fingernails, the tips of my fingers black is if I've been poking around in a fire pit. Figuring that I needed to do something first and foremost I stopped going to hollow well. I thought that would fix it. It didn't. Genies and bottles, I think the same goes. Two months after the night of the harm, I woke up to a soft, pattering sound, like sand being poured under the floor. I sat up. The room's dark except for the sliver of street light creeping through the blinds. The sound continued. Fine grains hitting hardwood. I turned on my bedside lamp to see that it was snowing inside my room. Black snow. Flakes have stood drifting from the ceiling. Not falling from a vent or a crack or any visible source. Just appearing and floating downward like dead skin from the sky. I didn't move. Or maybe I couldn't. The flakes landed on my blankets, my floor, my shoulders, dissolving into faint streaks when touched. After less than a minute it stopped. In the morning the mess was still there. Dad saw but didn't comment behind a quiet, clean this shit up. I never brought it up again. It took me most of the day just to clean my carpet. I slept in the living room for weeks after. But flakes never reappeared. My father kept asking me why I was suddenly jumpy in a corner cat. I didn't mention the sip because I knew he wasn't going to acknowledge it again. So I made excuses. Stress, work, headaches, anything to avoid telling him the truth he didn't want me to say. And that was sort of okay. Because I really didn't want to say it out loud. Saying it out loud would make a real more real than stains on a carpet. The final encounter wasn't like the others. It wasn't subtle. It wasn't uncertain. And it didn't happen in Hallowell. It happened in my house. I've gone to bed early that night. My father was on a long run at double shifts trying to save up money. House was quiet. A whole too quiet thing if I'm being honest. I had taken to keep an array of you on low volume to drown out the silence. That night I'd forgotten. Drifted into sleep. Not deep sleep. Just the shallow kind where your body rests but your mind still floats into the surface. Something woke me. I don't know what. Maybe a floorboard creek. Maybe a brass that wasn't mine. Maybe a sudden cold that spread across the room. I opened my eyes and knew standing in the corner. Not outside. Not a couple hundred yards away in an abandoned mill. In my bedroom. A sup man. Still a stone. A silhouette carved from darkness. Edges shimmering with powder. Taller than any person I'd ever seen. Chest rising and falling and jerking movements as if mimicking breathing without understanding the purpose. I wanted a scream. But the scream didn't come. It died somewhere in the back of my throat. Trapped but pure animal terror. I didn't move. It didn't move. For all the time that ever was, neither of us moved beyond breathing. Or the idea of breathing. Then it did. A single step forward. But the step didn't look right. The leg didn't bend. The foot didn't left. It simply shifted closer. The way a photo might appear closer after clicking the next slide on a projector at school. My body reacted on instinct. I scrambled out of bed, stumbling backward until my finger slammed against the door knob. I flung the door open. And ran. I didn't stop to look behind me. If it was falling, I didn't want to know. I barreled down the stairs out the front door into the cold night air. Barefoot, no coat, heart ripping itself apart in my chest. When I reached the street I turned. It was standing in the doorway, perfectly still watching me. I had tilted at an angle somewhere between broken and not attached at all. I actually flickered once, twice, and burst with a sharp pop. Darkness swallowed at all. When my father came home at dawn, he fell me sitting on the curb, shaken. I wanted to take me to the hospital, but I refused. I told him I'd had a nightmare. The cold had woken me. That I was fine. He didn't believe me. I saw it in his face. There was something older, something like recognition. I moved out the next week, couch served with friends until I could find a place for myself. But I never went back home again. I'd been thinking about it for a long time at night, when I couldn't sleep. This soot man was just the straw. Here's the part where I tell you it stopped. That the soot man never returned. That he stayed in Hallowell where he belonged. That would be a lie. I still see certain places it shouldn't be. A streak on my steering wheel. A fine dusting on my shoes. A perfect black fingerprint on the inside of a drawer I never open. Sometimes I smell burnt metal in my apartment, even though I disconnected every faulty appliance months ago. And once, only once. I heard the hum again. Deep, rhythmic, heavy, like something stirring far below the surface of the earth. I think they follow people who see them. I think the soot is a mark, a reminder, or maybe a promise. Either way, I don't sleep much at night anymore. Because I know that one night I'll wake up again. It'll be standing there. Not in the mill, not in the doorway, but in just from my face. Close enough for me to see the soot shifting where the eyes should be. Close enough for me to taste the burnt air as it breathes in slowly, curiously. Like a thing learning how to mimic humanity. Close enough that I'll understand the one truth no one ever set out loud. The soot men aren't ghosts. They aren't memories. They aren't the living dead. They're what's left when a place like Hallowall takes more than bodies. When it absorbs the fear, pain, the despair, and shapes itself into something that watches, something that waits, something that remembers. And I know, I know the next time he comes, he won't dissolve. He won't stand still. He'll reach out. And when he does, I don't think I'll wake up again. The next. A quiet, methodical man's private routines begin to feel disturbingly purposeful, as ordinary silence, measurements, and silences hinted something being carefully prepared beneath the surface. For my derricky fits Patrick and narrated by neat defort, creepy presents, grave work. Evan timed his mornings by what the air would let him smell. On clear days, the yard behind the cemetery shed gave off tin and soap, a thin mineral brightness from the spigot's slowed drip into the rusted runnel. Damp days, exhaled soil, warm bread, clean cave, the earth's patient breath. He preferred damp. The damp gave. He unlocked the shed and the overhead LEDs rose in a shiver. Light made everything confess. The hairline knick along a handle, a thread of grit in grease, a blunt edge, trying to pretend otherwise. He liked confessions he could fix. Ledger first. The book had learned as discipline. It spined no longer argued when he spread it flat, columns of dates, weather, a neat procession of numbers, small box around the word acceptable next to yesterday's final entry. Then the box crossed out as if he'd already grown ashamed of it. He wrote, Run 17, onset improved, residual chatter minimal. Run 18, latency stable, after sound, undesirable, hollow. He wound the vented stopwatch he'd bought from the clock shop downtown. The crown warmed under his thumb. The owner, Caferi, a man soft as the velvet he kept under his trays, had told him not to overwind. Everything has a limit to what it's willing to hold. Evan had nodded. He thought about that sentence when he woke at 3 a.m. And the room felt like a box with its flaps closing in around him. When he raised the watch, the glass threw back a ghost of his face. Late 30s, hair clipped for convenience rather than vanity. The kind of jaw that looked decisive, even when he felt hollowed out and vague. Evan wasn't an old man, but he wasn't young anymore either. But he was still handsome in a formal sort of way. Outside, past the chain link and the winter-paled grass, rows of stones leaned at their chosen angles. He was not sentimental about them. He liked the way the wind read their edges and made the grass bow, then let it stand again, like a teacher with a patient hand. He moved with deliberate quiet. Glove, glove, breath. The ground gave just enough to keep his confidence distrustful. He checked the chalk marks he'd laid yesterday, softened by dew, better like this, more honest. Then he touched a notch he'd carved in his memory rather than any surface. His rituals happened where no one could find them. He started the watch. He didn't count. Counting pulled him ahead of time, let his mind rush the moment and land hard on its far side. Better to ride it, leave it in a current, angling itself without knowing how. The sound came. A throat cleared in the machinery of mourning, and he felt its pressure in his sternum first. He stopped the watch and wrote the number down. He wrote the weather. He wrote after sound too long. He felt and pressed his open palm against the damp, lifted it to see his walls printed there. Red grooves crossed the low part of his fingers, the quiet heraldry of a man who gripped and released heavy things on a schedule that had nothing to do with the cemetery's work order. On the way out, he paused at the fence line, letting the winds smooth the rough of his thoughts. Almost, he settled out. Not promise, not threat. A lead turning on a mason jar until the threads caught. Almost. Evan marched walked the town in routes that made sense only to him. Different shops on different days, small quantities from many hands. When the clerk at the hardware store asked what he was building, he smiled with the half-truth that never tangled. A timed installation, something about gravity. Ambitious, she said, tapping her painted thumbnail on the counter. He recognized snowflakes in the design, six crooked spokes, and white over blue. She bagged the innocuous things he'd chosen and gave him a receipt, printed with the date, as if a date could explain anything. He added a candy bar to the purchase to smudge the pattern. He always added one thing irrelevant. It was a rule he had never written down. At the salvage yard, the owner let him pick through the offcuts. He took pieces that could have been for anything. A practice he refined until the habit itself was proof against questions. He liked weight that could pretend to be something else, until the exact second it chose not to. He trained his body the way he trained his measurements, slow lifting, not to protect his back, though he did, but to teach his hands the grace of bearing. He wrapped linen around a wrist where a bruise had started, and cut the end short, no tails to catch and tattle. In the mirror over his sink, his face looked like a blueprint, all measurements, and no picture. He told himself the shopping was also a kindness to small businesses. He told himself lies that kept him from feeling like a man who was assembling the most important thing he would never explain. He tested outside town in a patch of low pine where the ground opened easily and closed with the same reluctant manners. Evan took care to leave the place as near to unmarked as attention allowed. He learned the sounds the earth made when it received weight all at once, the flat syllable of an impact than the hush that followed like a listening. He made recordings, not of the machine, but of the silence afterward. He played them back at night. The silences came out different depending on weather and hour. On some evenings the hush felt thick and kind. On others it felt as thin as skin over a bruise. A stray dog came through once, a rag of a thing with a worried brow. The dog watched him in suspicion and curiosity, and then laid down with its chin on its paws. Evan had tossed a piece of his sandwich into the pine straw and looked away so that the animal could dare to claim it. After that he ate his lunches with care to leave no routine for another creature to rely on. He would not build habit into anything that would not endure. Back home that night he wrote in the ledger, run 23, no drift, release sure, after math clean. Note, reduced the music in the metal. He didn't know how else to say it. The after-vibration had been too present, a faint ringing like a glass touched by a wet finger. He lay in bed and tried to figure if the sound belonged to the world or to himself. Sleep found him at the far edge of patience. The groundskeeper at the cemetery was Miller Shaw, Shaw to the locals. Late 50s the kind of man who let a coffee thermus to find the size of a morning. Shaw appeared at the shed door with a set of keys and a question. He was still open with the reset and section D this week, Shaw asked. So many storms will ask few years. I saw everything settling like it's tired of standing. Yes, Evan said dryly. I liked the work. Funny thing to like, Shaw said, but he made a gentle as if acknowledging a shared weirdness. He leaned against the doorframe and told a story about a stone that had fallen forward in the night. You get up close, you can smell the old cement when it cracks, Shaw said. Like wet paper, you wouldn't think cement has a smell till it gives it up. It has a smell, replied Evan. Shaw sipped and nodded as if the sentence had been about something practical. You do that tidy straightening, Shaw added, a compliment dressed in the plain coat of observation. You got a system. I like when things sit where they're supposed to. Don't we all, Shaw said. And then he was gone, leaving the shape of his body in the air like a door just closed. Evan put the day's tasks in order. He performed the ordinary helpfulness the cemetery expected. He took care that his other preparations belonged not to the shed or the stones or to any place that could be named. Ownership left a trail. He had learned this the same way he'd learned everything by the patient study of when things went wrong. He brought redundancies into being the same way people brought prayers, quietly, again, again. Not because he didn't trust his hands, but because he knew them too well. Sweat changed grip. Cold changed grace. Panic turned a well-taught body into a stranger. And he did not intend to meet a stranger at the end of this. He filed edges smooth, oiling, what needed oil, leaving other surfaces dry so their honesty would report itself. He looked for the small betrayals, a screw with a brightened slot, a line that wanted to lie slack. He tightened what asked for it, rejected what kept asking. He made himself rehearse steps he did not name. Not steps he corrected himself in the ledger, but temperatures. Each minute would have its own heat. He marked the clock when he moved a thing from one place to another and learned the way certain hours favored clumsiness. 9 a.m. made him imprecise. 3 p.m. made him cruel. He built for dawn. At home, he arranged his room so it stopped looking like it belonged to a person with preferences and started looking like it belonged to a person with intentions. He put spine out books in color gradients, not because he believed in the aesthetics of such things, but because he liked the way the gradient made a kind of tide along the shelf. Evan tilted his head slightly to one side and interrogated the clothes that hung in his closet. He ironed the one shirt he wore when he wanted strangers to believe in his competence. He hung it where the morning could find it. He did not write to anyone. This had stopped being a life that invited questions and he had learned that silence gave a kind of respect that talking never did. What he did write, he wrote in a second ledger. Operating notes, the cover said in black letters, he had transferred with water and patience. Inside, the sentences did not so much instruct as they gestured at principles. Weight is obedient until it isn't. Friction wants a conversation. Time will not be hurried, but it will be courted. He numbered the entries, not because order mattered to the content, but because numbers kept the mind from calling a thing wild. 1. To begin, begin carefully. Do not wake anything that has learned to sleep in your absence. 2. Test the silence before you test the sound. Silence lies less. 3. The hand should be heavy when it needs to be heavy. Otherwise, it should be a rumor. 4. If your breath becomes a metronome, ask it to slow. Counting is a temptation toward control you don't possess. 5. Leave every path better than you found it. Erase what can be erased. If a mark must remain, make it honest. 6. Redundancy is not confession. It is kindness. 7. Every release is also a refusal. Be sure of what you refuse. 8. Do not perform. Performance is tried to be seen. This is the opposite. He recopied these lines twice, then a third time, with a perfectionist's tyrannies. The same pressure, same spacing, until each page looked machine drawn. He pinned them on a corkboard, then took them down, and stacked them clean and flat, banded with twine. The manual wasn't for him anymore by then. It was for a mind like his. Somewhere he would never know, to recognize a kindered fever, and put it to a use he could not predict. When he was done not finishing it, he slid the bundle into a plain envelope and wrote, operating notes, general, on the front. He put the envelope in a drawer that did not lock, and left the drawer a fraction a jar. As if the room had drawn a breath, and was waiting to decide what to say. The weather turned, and a wind came up that scoured the sky to bone, and left the air ringing. Evan preferred damp, but he took what he was given, making small compensations and marking them, as if his ledger could bless a decision already made. In the shed, he went through what anyone else might have called a checklist, but what he refused to give that name. Checklists were invitations for panic to argue a line, into becoming a door. He touched every place that needed touch. He looked at what needed looking at. He let his hands rest on weight, the way a doctor rests a hand on a shoulder, before a diagnosis, neither of them can reroute. He made two small changes. He refused three others that tried to present themselves as improvements. He felt how much pride wanted to be clever at the end. He felt how much fear wanted to throw everything away and start over. He walked outside and stood in the cold until his ears ached. He let his eyes water, and did not blink them clear. Somewhere, down on the street, someone's radio played a few soft bars and stopped. The silence after felt like the held breath before a dropped dish. He memorized the silence. He would need something to compare it to later, even though comparison would be meaningless by then. At home, he scrubbed the soil line from his cuticles, the crescent stain that made him look careless to people who didn't understand, he was the opposite. He watched his hands under the water, and tried to decide if they looked like a murderer's hands or a maker's. He decided they looked like anyone's, which made him feel worse and better in equal portions, two cups on a scale. The room was in order. He straightened the envelope again and again until it kept its place without complaint. He placed his wallet in the kitchen drawer where he kept spare keys, not so anyone would find it easily, but so when they did, they would think he had been clean and thoughtful, and not what he also was. Tired, past remedy. He lay in bed with the light off and the world moving backward across the ceiling. He did not sleep. He let night have what night had always wanted from him, his unguarded mind, and he practiced not arguing. When the clock slid to the hour he had chosen because the hour had chosen him, he rose, dressed, and breathed into his palm to check if he would need a mint, which he took even though it did not matter. Respect had become reflex. The cemetery before sunrise was the inside of a bell. Frost silvered the grass at its tips. The air was a clean bite. Evans stood at the gate long enough to make of the moment a covenant. No witnesses, no signatures, but a felt agreement that the world and he were capable of keeping terms. He crossed the grounds with the gate he used when carrying something heavy that was also tender, nothing in his hands, everything in his hands. He went to the place that had been prepared for its own reasons. He admired it the way a carpenter admired as a square corner. The void at his feet was honest and clean as if the ground had opened because it trusted him. He moved through preparations whose names he had forbidden. Touch, sight, a breath to feel what his breath wanted, a pause to see if the pause returned an omen. The wind lifted and laid the grass by turns. The last star held on to ridiculous dignity in the west and then agreed to be done. He stood at the edge and felt his body argue all its stupid arguments. The body loves the body, even his did, despite his training. He let his hands find what they needed to find. He placed what needed placing. With care so exaggerated, it became plain. Evan lowered himself into the earth. For the first time there was the smell from inside, not above. Cool, mineral, the history of rot rewritten as a kind of bread. He pressed his palms to the walls. The granular cold gave, then held. He stood with his back to one side and the fronts of his shins to the other and centered himself. Not because centering mattered in any rational sense, but because rituals are a hand we put on the shoulder of fear and say, you may speak, but you may not steer. He sat down, pulled his knees tightly to his chest, arms around his legs, then set the watch against his pulse and felt the way the two rhythms tried to make a third. He waited for the small tremor that meant readiness had stepped out of nervousness and in declarity. When it came, he let the second hand go. He closed his eyes, not to avoid seeing, but to make a room inside the moment, large enough to hold what was about to occur. The wind outside made a thin ribbon sound. Somewhere in the hedges a sparrow scolded nothing. The soil rested against his coat with a polite coldness, like a cat that has decided to sit on you for reasons you will never be allowed to understand. He heard the faint mechanical sigh that had written itself under weeks of mornings. The almost musical intake, the world makes before it allows weight to decide something. He exhaled to meet it. The stopwatch shivered past the fifty-ninth second, the one that had always threatened to stick. There was the briefest suggestion of a click. Not metal on metal, but the sound a room makes when someone leaves it forever, and the air permits itself to relax. He did not pray. He had already done what prayers do when they are honest. The moment stretched, silent, suspended, as though the air itself was waiting for permission. Then the mechanisms began to stir. A low hum, steady and obedient, threaded through the soil above him. Metal teeth found their mates with soft authority, each connection a small confession of precision. The worrying grew, a polite, confident whisper of motion, not struggle. He felt it through the soles of his boots, a vibration that ran up through bone and into breath, as if the world were clearing its throat. Then came the sigh. The release, a brief woosh of displaced air, as the mass above him began to move, surrendering to gravity's long patience. He heard the dull clink of stones, meeting one another, a scatter of pebbles, the shuffle of clouds breaking apart as the weight rebalanced. And then, all at once, the earth dropped. It fell in a smooth inevitable cascade, a dark ocean finding its shore. The first wave struck him coolly, heavy with the scent of rain and rust. Another followed, and another, until the sensation was not impact but embrace. A dense yielding pressure that filled every fold of his body, every quiet left inside him. His lungs fluttered once against the weight, reflexively searching for air that no longer belonged to him. The soil settled, damp and final, its chill, threading through his clothes and into his skin, until it could no longer tell where he ended and the ground began. The sound when it came, was not loud, it was simple and complete, a single syllable the earth spoke and then held, a syllable that carried no appeal and no reply. Then, nothing but morning settling, and the sparrow rustling the hedges is if the world had put down a burden and remembered it had wings. The End And finally, the girl raised in motel closets by her mother quietly learns how to survive, escape and choose what kind of family she'll finally belong to. From writer Mia Dahlia, and narrated by Danielle Huat, creepy presents, Sunshine Girl. The closet smelled musty. All motel closets smelled the same, no matter what was in them. Even if it was a pile of freshly laundered clothes, an old suitcase, and a young girl named Lottie. Lottie made herself comfortable in one corner, creating a nest out of the clothes. The rady old bedspread, from the motel bed, made a makeshift tent that absorbed the brightness of her flashlight. Lottie had her plush turtletoy and her books for company. She could be very still for a very long time, like a turtle. Lottie first saw turtles a few years ago when mom on her stayed in a motel by the water. She could no longer recall the name of the motel, or the town, or the river, but she never forgot the turtles, the way they perched on a fallen tree branch, a family of them. All three different sizes, so perfectly still and content, stunning themselves. The way the water around them rippled ever so gently, and caught the sunlight, shining and sparkling like tiny mirrors. The river water surrounding them was dirty with mud from a recent storm, and man made debris. But the turtle family was on their own private island, amid all of it. Perfectly in sconce in their own world, impervious to ugliness and danger. Lottie thought that's what it must feel like to have a real family. All she had was mama. It would never made her feel that way. She remembered telling mama about the turtles that evening, and mama scoffing at her whimsy through a cloud of cigarette smoke. I'm like them turtles of yours, you know. Lottie couldn't possibly see how that could be true. But later, when she learned her letters and read books after books about turtles, she found out about negligible sentience. It sounded magical. She had to look up both words. Turned out it was just a fancy phrase for not aging. Turtles didn't get old into crepe and die. Unless someone did something to them. They stayed the same. Like mama. Mama always looked the same, and Lottie got older every year. You got your daddy in ya, mama said. You ain't like me. Don't know how that worked out. Now go buy me my smokes, sunshine girl. Aughta sound nice coming off of someone's lips. But her mama made it sound mean. Sun burned mama's skin. During the day, mama stayed in and slept and smoked and watched her soaps. While Lottie did errands and whatever else she wanted, and thought she could get away with. People watching and book stealing were her favorite activities. She only held on to the book she loved, though. The one she could read over and over again. The rest she made sure to clandestinely return to any used bookstore library in the next town. That way she reasoned. The books got to travel. Tumbleweeds. Just like her. But that was daytime. At night. Well, that was a different story altogether. Lottie was supposed to wear earplugs while in the closet. But they never cut out the sound entirely. Sometimes she'd lick her fingers and stick them in her ears instead. And that worked better, though. It made her arms tired. And sometimes the noise got through no matter what. And against her better judgment. She'd tilt the wooden slats off the door. Almost tell rooms seem to have those. With her fingers. And look out. Early on, Lottie learned that people came in certain types. There were the night motel clerks. Forever pale and tired. The diner waitresses. Fakes smiling through cheap makeup. And smelling of smoke and fries. The bookstore people and librarians. Always thin and serious with their glasses and cardigans. Places changed. Lottie and her mama were always on the go. But faces remained. There was a certain kind of comfort in that. The men mama brought home were all of a certain type too. Middle aged. Saga. With a wet hungry glint in their eyes. By the time mama was done with them. They were nothing but a bag of bones. Bones and cased and bloodless meatless sacks of skin. Lottie had seen what mama did to make them that way. But didn't have the words to describe it. She'd only ever seen animals feed like that on TV. A mindless, voracious, all devouring appetite that had to be satiated no matter what. Afterward, mama was always at her nicest. Her dark eyes hooded and her smile all lazy. And her expression distant and floaty. Sometimes she'd buy Lottie pizza and they'd watch late night movies together. Sometimes mama slept a heavy dreamless sated sleep. And that was all Lottie knew of peace. The rest of the time mama was edgy and quick to anger. Especially when no men came for a while. Her slaps felt like fire and ice on Lottie's cheeks. They were always moving. Town to town. Motel to motel. Once they had a car. But that was a long time ago. Mama said when Lottie got old enough to drive, they'd get another. Only once did they stay in one place for a while. Lottie remembered Nevada funnily. Miss Rita, the daughter of the motel owner, a schoolteacher by day, took a liking to Lottie, taught her to read, even took the girl to school with her some days. Miss Rita didn't fit into any of Lottie's types. She was as wide as she was tall, with deeply tanned skin, kind eyes, and a quick easy smile. She knew there acquaintance wasn't meant to last, and made Lottie promise to find a way back to her. Should anything ever happen to Mama? Lottie missed Miss Rita every day. She dreamed about what her life would have been had she'd stayed. Dreamed of school and friends, and no more closet time. Miss Rita gave her a dictionary, told her to learn one new word every day, and Lottie did. irony was her recent favorite. A word or an action deliberately in the opposition to the intended meaning or expectation. The bodies, once Mama was done with them, went into industrial strength trash bags, and then into dumpsters. Lately, Mama had Lottie dispose of them. The bags weren't heavy, just sloshy and disgusting. Afterwards, Lottie could never wash her hands enough, it seemed. The thin bars of cheap motel soap never quite did the trick. Lottie got rid of Mama's latest that night, and headed back in. Comforted by knowing it was the last time. The man was a fat one. Mama always fell asleep after she over ate. Lottie tore the sheets into strips and tied her to the bedposts, and she opened the curtains so that the morning sun would stream directly onto the bed. It would be enough, she thought, she hoped. Lottie rummaged around until she found Mama's money. Not a lot, but it would have to do. She straightened out the crumpled up $5 bill to leave for the room cleaner. As an apology, for a strange pile of ashes she'd come to find there during checkout. The rest of the cash she pocketed. Her backpack was pre-packed, the sum of her worldly possessions meager enough to not weigh her down. Just some clothes, her turtle plush, and a few books. She sat beside Mama for a while, listening to her snore, saying goodbye. Mama didn't stir. Quietly, Lottie left, heading over to the truck stop near the motel. She stopped by the gas station for some snacks. The clerk there was the type she recognized. Greasy skin, greasy hair, and a greasy smile that lingered too long. The man quickly put away his magazine when she approached the counter to get her snacks wrong up. The calendar behind the man had a wild haired woman in bathing suits posing on a motorcycle. He saw her look. Mother's date today, little darling. You want to get your maa card or something? Lottie shook her head, grabbed her purchases, her change, and left. So that's irony, she thought. The years of observing Mama have taught her the art of picking a ride. It was in their faces, in their eyes. A certain kindness you just had to find it. Lottie would look until she did. It was going to be a long way back to Nevada, but she'd make it. The new day was dawning, and the sunshine girls smiled brightly into the rising sun. For more information on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration, please visit CreepyPod.com. You can also follow us at CreepyPod on social media and YouTube. All stories told on this podcast are done so through creative, common, share-alite licensing, or with written consent from the authors. No portion of this podcast may be rebroadcast or otherwise distributed without the express written consent of the CreepyPodcast production team and the stories also.