Giving Up the Ghosts

The morning after the disastrous live-stream, sunlight streamed into the soundproofed apartment. The light, usually a welcome, if rare, visitor in the perpetually overcast town of Schroon Falls, felt harsh and accusatory today. It illuminated the dust motes dancing in the air and the profound exhaustion etched onto Donnie Keller's face. He sat on the edge of his mattress, haggard and sleep-deprived, his body still humming with the phantom vibrations of the previous night's psychic storm. A vicious, pounding headache, a souvenir from his battle with Dr. Elliott, pulsed behind his eyes.

He took a slow, careful sip of instant coffee from a chipped ceramic mug. The coffee was hot and bitter, a poor imitation of the real thing, but it was all he could manage. As he lowered the mug, a voice, sharp and crystal clear, echoed in the silent chamber of his mind. It wasn't his own thought. It was the distinct, cutting alto of Maria.

"Is that brown water the best this century can offer? Pathetic."

Donnie flinched as if he'd been struck. His hand jerked, and hot coffee sloshed over the rim of the mug, spilling onto his hand and the floor. He barely registered the burn. The voice had been so clear, so real, so undeniably her. It wasn't a memory of a performance; it was a fresh, new thought, a live broadcast from the judgmental matriarch who had taken up residence in his skull.

The gnawing anxiety that had been simmering since the experience the night before boiled over into full-blown panic. The lines weren't just blurring; they were ceasing to exist. He needed facts. He needed proof. He needed an anchor in the real world, something solid and verifiable to hold onto before he was completely swept away by the chaotic tide of spectral emotions. He needed to know, with absolute certainty, that Maria, Terence, Amanda, and Benny were not just voices in his head. They had to be real. They had to have been real people, with real histories, who had lived and died in Schroon River Manor. The alternative was a possibility too terrifying to contemplate.

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The Schroon Falls Historical Society was not a grand institution. It was a cramped, dusty, book-clogged archive in the basement of the Schroon Falls Public Library. The air was thick with the smell of old paper, binding glue, and the slow, patient decay of time. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting a flat, sterile glow on shelves overflowing with leather-bound ledgers, cardboard boxes tied with string, and stacks of yellowed newspapers. It was a tomb of forgotten facts, and Donnie had come seeking a resurrection.

Mr. Prince, the town librarian and self-appointed local historian, sat at a small wooden desk in the center of the room, meticulously cataloging a collection of old postcards. He looked up as Donnie descended the creaky wooden stairs, and his eyes, usually small and sharp, widened with a delight that was almost worshipful.

"Mr. Keller!" he exclaimed, rising from his chair so quickly he almost knocked over a stack of books. "An honor! A genuine honor to see you here." He scurried over, his face beaming with a mixture of excitement and reverence. "Researching for the next performance, perhaps? Adding new layers of historical authenticity to the narrative? Oh, this is splendid!"

The lie Donnie had prepared tasted like ash in his mouth. "Something like that," he mumbled, his voice hoarse. He couldn't meet the librarian's earnest gaze. "I need to see everything you have on Schroon River Manor. Everything."

The librarian practically vibrated with joy. He was no longer just a fan; he was a collaborator, a vital part of the great work. "But of course! Follow me, Mr. Keller. We have a treasure trove!" Mr. Prince declared, his voice filled with a proprietary pride. He led Donnie into the deepest, dustiest corner of the basement, a section filled with the town's oldest and most precious records.

"The original deed is here," he said, reverently pulling a large, heavy, leather-bound ledger from a shelf. "And census records... newspaper archives on microfiche... property tax assessments... oh, the stories these documents could tell!"

Donnie felt a small, fragile flicker of hope. This was it. The facts. The proof. He started with the original deed from 1875. Mr. Prince laid the massive book on a table, and Donnie leaned over it, his fingers tracing the elegant, looping script of the handwritten entry. The builder and first owner of Schroon River Manor was listed as a man named "Charlie Clifford." Clifford. No mention of Terence, of Spectral, of any other familiar name. A small knot of disappointment tightened in his stomach. It was a big house, he told himself. People came and went. He just had to dig deeper.

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The hours began to blur into hours of fruitless research. Mr. Prince, thrilled to be of service, became his eager, unwitting accomplice in his quest for sanity. He brought Donnie boxes of files, spools of microfiche, and dusty old maps, chattering excitedly about historical preservation while Donnie's hope slowly withered and died.

He hunched over the 1880 U.S. Census records, the pages thin and brittle, the faint, looping script of the census-taker almost impossible to read. With a finger that was soon smudged with century-old ink, he scanned the columns, looking for the entry for Schroon River Manor. He found it. The listed residents were the Clifford family: Charlie, his wife, Mary, and their three children. There was no stern matriarch named Maria, no tragic poetess named Amanda, no boisterous sea captain, no sad little boy.

"Perhaps they were later residents!" Mr. Prince chirped helpfully, sensing Donnie's frustration. He produced the records for the 1900 census. Donnie scrolled through the pages again. A new family, the Waltons, now resided at the manor. Mr. and Mrs. Walton, and their two young children. Again, the names were all wrong. There was no historical record of a sea captain named Thomas Terence, a matriarch named Maria, or children named Amanda and Benny ever having lived at that address.

He moved on to the newspaper archives, his last, best hope. He sat before a humming, clanking microfiche reader, its green-tinged screen giving him a fresh headache. He scrolled through years and years of The Schroon Falls Chronicle, the ghostly, backlit pages of the town's history flashing before his eyes. He searched for any mention of the stories that had become his stock-in-trade. He looked for a heroic sea captain's death, for an obituary for a Gilded Age poetess who had died of a broken heart, for any report of unusual or tragic deaths at the manor.

All he found were the mundane, unremarkable annals of a small town. He read about church bake sales, town fairs, and disputes over property lines. He scrolled through pages of obituaries, reading of lives that had ended not with a heroic battle against a kraken or a poetic sigh of despair, but with influenza, old age, farming accidents, and childbirth. The lurid, melodramatic, and highly entertaining stories of the Spectral Siblings were completely, utterly absent from the town's recorded history.

As the afternoon light began to fade outside, a cold, heavy feeling began to settle in Donnie's stomach. There was nothing here. No proof. No validation. Just a void.

Just as he was about to give up, to surrender to the terrifying emptiness of the archives, Mr. Prince approached, his face alight with the thrill of discovery. He was holding a large, heavy, framed photograph, handling it with the delicate care of a museum curator.

"Found this in the photography collection!" he announced, his voice a triumphant whisper. "A portrait of the Walton family, the ones who owned the manor around 1910. Marvelous, isn't it? Such a stern-looking group."

Mr. Prince placed the photograph on the table in front of Donnie.

It was a black-and-white photograph, the image sharp and clear despite its age. A stern-looking man with a thick mustache and a severe suit, a tired-looking woman in a high-collared dress, and two small, solemn-looking children posed stiffly in front of the familiar, gothic facade of Schroon River Manor. For a heart-stopping moment, Donnie's breath caught in his throat. He expected, he needed, to see the faces of his roommates staring back at him from the past. He searched the faces in the photograph, his eyes darting from the stern man to the tired woman to the solemn children, looking for a flicker of recognition, a hint of Terence's bravado, of Maria's judgment, of Amanda's sorrow, of Benny's fear.

But the faces were all wrong. They were the faces of complete strangers. This stern man was not his sea captain. This weary woman was not his matriarch. These children were not his ghosts. This family, this Walton family, had no connection to the voices in his head. This photograph was the final, undeniable, soul-crushing proof.

The historical record was a complete, categorical refutation of everything the ghosts had ever claimed, of every story he had ever told. The Spectral Siblings, as historical figures who had once lived and died in Schroon River Manor, did not exist.

Donnie leaned back in the hard wooden chair, the weight of this void, this absolute absence of fact, crashing down on him. The gnawing anxiety he had arrived with, the fear that he might be going crazy, had been replaced by a much colder, deeper, and more terrifying dread. He had come here looking for proof that the ghosts were real. And he had found it. He had found definitive proof that they weren't. At least, not in the way he had so desperately needed them to be.

Mr. Prince, oblivious to the existential crisis unfolding before him, beamed at Donnie. "So," he asked, his voice filled with cheerful pride, "did you find what you were looking for?"

Donnie slowly looked up from the photograph of the strange, dead Walton family. His face was pale, his eyes hollow. He looked at the kind, eager face of the librarian, the man who believed in him so completely.

"No," Donnie said, and his own voice sounded strange and distant to his ears. It was the voice of a man who had just looked into the abyss. He did not find the ghosts' history. He found the complete and utter absence of one.

And that, he realized with a fresh, chilling wave of terror, led to a far more terrifying conclusion: if the ghosts did not come from the manor's past, then where, in God's name, did they come from?