The sun was high in the sky, its light pouring into the soundproofed apartment with an almost mocking cheerfulness. Donnie stood numbly beside the cheap, all-in-one printer he had bought with his séance money. It hummed and whirred, a mundane, domestic sound that was completely at odds with the earth-shattering text it was printing. With a final, quiet sigh, the machine spat out the last page. Donnie reached out and gathered the papers. They were still warm from the printer, a small sheaf of flimsy, unassuming sheets filled with a truth so monstrous it had shattered his reality. This document, these pages of cold, clinical text detailing the "Implanted Persona Protocols," was not just information. It was a weapon.
He stumbled through the familiar streets of Schroon Falls in a dissociated daze. The world around him, once a backdrop of dreary, comforting gloom, now seemed like a cruel, elaborate joke. The town's gothic architecture, the quaint storefronts, the perpetually overcast sky—it was all a theatrical set, a stage designed for a lie he hadn't even known he was telling. He heard the whispers of the townspeople as he passed, the same whispers that had once filled him with a mixture of annoyance and awkward pride. "There he is," a woman said from the doorway of the bakery. "The medium." The words, once a source of his income, were now a chorus of profound, searing irony. He clutched the printed papers in his hand, his knuckles white, the sharp edges of the paper digging into his palm.
He arrived at the immense, rusted wrought-iron gates of Schroon River Manor. The place no longer felt haunted, not in the way he had understood it. It didn't feel mysterious or menacing. It felt sad. It looked like a derelict stage, a hollow, forgotten set piece where he had performed a one-man show for an audience of one: himself. The sagging porch, the dark windows, the silent, looming turret—they were all just props. With a grim, newfound purpose, he pushed open the heavy gate and walked up the overgrown driveway, the paper weapon clutched tightly in his fist.
He entered the dusty Grand Hall, his footsteps echoing in the vast, empty space. As if on cue, as if sensing his arrival, the four translucent forms of the Spectral Siblings shimmered into view near the cold fireplace. They arranged themselves in their usual, familiar tableau. Amanda, the tragic maiden, struck a pose of delicate, concerned beauty. Terence, the boisterous captain, looked ready for action, his spectral fists on his hips. And Maria, the stern matriarch, appeared with her arms crossed, her expression watchful and severe. They seemed worried about him, concerned for the well-being of their medium, their vessel. The sight, which would have once filled him with a familiar sense of weary obligation, now filled him with a cold, clear, crystalline rage.
"The show is over," he said, his voice quiet, but trembling with a fury that seemed to shake the very dust motes in the air. He held up the printed pages, the flimsy paper rattling in his shaking hand. "I know what you are."
He pointed a shaking finger at Amanda, who flinched back, her concerned expression faltering into confusion.
"You," he spat, the word filled with venom. "You aren't Amanda. You're not a heartbroken poetess. You're IP-Beta. A construct. A collage of sad poetry and cheap romance novels, stitched together and shoved into my head to keep me docile."
As he spoke the clinical, horrifying truth, Amanda's spectral form distorted violently. Her image, usually so gracefully translucent, began to pixelate like a bad video file, her edges breaking apart into shimmering, jagged squares. For a split second, her beautiful, tragic face flattened and morphed, becoming the sharp-featured, unimpressed face of a dark-haired scientist in a lab coat—the face of Dr. Maria Finlay from the file—before snapping back into the familiar, sorrowful visage he knew so well. It was a glitch in the program, a momentary slip of the mask.
He turned his rage on Terence, who was puffing up his chest in a silent, protective roar.
"And you!" Donnie shouted, his voice gaining strength. "You're not a sea captain. You're not a hero who fought a kraken. You are IP-Gamma! A pressure valve! A story generator designed to channel my aggression into harmless, boisterous fantasy!"
Terence's form swelled, his silent mouth opening to mime his signature roar. But the sound that emerged this time was not silence. It was a distorted, electronic KLAXON ALARM, a loud, panicked, screeching sound from a forgotten laboratory, a sound of emergency and containment failure. The ghost's image flickered wildly, his solid, spectral form breaking apart into green, blocky, digital artifacts before struggling to pull itself back together.
He wheeled on Maria, the matriarch, the program's enforcer, the ghost of his own self-doubt.
"You," he said, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous growl. "You are IP-Alpha. The matriarch. A program designed to instill discipline and self-critique. You're not even a real personality. You're just a voiceprint! A copy of a scientist named Finlay, a ghost in my machine!"
Maria's stern, solid form wavered intensely, like a heat haze on a hot road. The judgmental voice inside Donnie's head, the one that had tormented him that very morning, became a storm of white noise, a roar of static. And interwoven with the static, he could hear snippets of Dr. Finlay's real, clinical voice, the voice from his fragmented memories: "...Subject D-K... behavioral compliance unsatisfactory... emotional state requires regulation... administer sedative..."
Finally, his furious gaze fell upon the last, smallest figure. Benny. The little spectral boy was cowering behind Maria's flickering form, his translucent hands covering his face, his ghostly teddy bear clutched to his chest. As Donnie looked at him, the white-hot rage that had been fueling him suddenly faltered, the fire extinguished by a wave of immense, soul-crushing pain.
His voice, when he spoke again, was no longer a roar of fury, but a broken, trembling whisper.
"And you..." he said, a tear tracing a path through the grime on his own cheek. "You're IP-Delta. The Sorrowful Child. You're just... me. You're the part of me they broke."
Unlike the others, Benny's form did not glitch. It did not pixelate or dissolve into static. It simply trembled. The little boy slowly lowered his hands from his face and looked back at Donnie. And in the ghost boy's wide, terrified, spectral eyes, Donnie saw his own childhood terror, perfectly preserved and reflected back at him. It was the most horrible, most intimate connection of all.
The three adult "ghosts," the programs, the constructs, now flickering and unstable, recoiled from him. The raw truth of his words, the knowledge of their own artificial nature, was a weapon they had no defense against. The weapon he held, the flimsy stack of papers, had given him power over them. The haunting of Donnie Keller by the ghosts of Schroon River Manor was over.
Now, the real haunting began: the haunting of Donnie Keller by Donnie Keller. He stood alone in the center of the Grand Hall, the dust settling around him. He looked down at the papers in his hand, the terrible weapon of self-knowledge. He had won. He had won a battle against the phantoms in his own mind, only to realize, in the devastating, silent aftermath, that he was the battlefield and the war.