"What the fuck, Ginny?" Chad roared, leaping to his feet.
Ginny leapt back, almost tripping over the tiled lip of the fireplace before she caught herself, clutching her papers to her chest.
Chad would grant her no sympathy; after all, that's just what she would want, playing this charade of a pale waif when they all knew the truth about her. No, no sympathy, the fucking masquerading pilferer. "That's not fucking funny. Give that here."
He stepped forward to yank the stolen text out of her hands, when Maika stepped in the way. "Whoa, Chad, back off, man. What's going on?"
"She's a fucking thief, Mike, now get out of my way." Still, Ginny cringed away, backing herself against the wall and avoiding his eyes.
Kirsten had the gall to step up beside Maika, inserting herself in the way too. "Chad, calm down and speak about this rationally." As if she thought he wouldn't strike her, if it came to that. Oh, she'd be surprised what he would do. He was equal opportunities in that regard. But still, she was right; truth and right were on his side in this case, so there was no need to get so unreasonably mad. As if she could sense the altered temperature of his mood, she continued, "What do you mean, calling Ginny a thief?"
"I don't know how, or why she did it, but she stole my work. That's the story I've been writing. She has to be using AI or something, and it's been leaching out what I've been writing through the wifi connection." He couldn't help himself, he was already on tiptoes and pointing at her, trying to get at her between them. A part of him, just outside of himself, told him he was acting like an excitable dog; was embarrassed for himself. "Give it to me, I'll prove, I wrote those words - or words very similar -"
"Nah, bro," Maika said, putting his hands on Chad's shoulders. Chad seethed, moments away from shucking him off. But Maika's eyes were shaken. "Listen... this is fucked, mate, but... I wrote that story too."
A silence descended between them. Kirsten stared at Maika, her lips open, trembling. Behind her, Ginny no longer cowered but gaped at the three of them. Chad looked Maika in the eyes. Dude really was shaking.
No, wait. Chad was the one who was shaking.
"The fuck?" he asked. Had he imagined the words out of Maika's mouth?
"Me too," Kirsten whispered. Her eyes were wide and brimming with tears. She stepped back and looked at everyone in the room. "This is too weird. Have we all been writing about the woman in white? About Emilie?"
Ginny nodded, her eyes darting away from Chad still. Maika let go of Chad, and huffed. He scanned the others' faces, gripping his notebook to his broad-shouldered chest. "Yup," he said finally.
Kirsten looked at Chad now, though he was loathe to meet her eyes. What was this bullshit? Were they all in it together, playing an elaborate prank against him? They had all been whispering to each other at different times, after all. Or texting. He'd seen them all doing it.
She blinked back the water in her eyes and spoke firmly. "Chad? You're saying you did too?"
He held the power of silence for a few moments, until he had them all in the palm of his hand. "Yeah. Yes. I wrote about a woman in this house called Emilie."
Kirsten walked back to her chair, picked up her writing tablet, and went to stand by Ginny's side. She linked arms with the pale, thin girl and dragged her forward. "Let's compare, shall we?" She unlocked her tablet and passed it to Ginny. Ginny gave her loose pages one last possessive look, then passed them to Maika. Maika passed Chad his leatherbound notebook. Kirsten looked to Chad expectantly, waiting for his laptop to pass her way. But he closed the lid, leaned over it, and scanned over Maika's scribblings.
Yep. It was all there. Sure, the words weren't exactly the same. And Maika's attention to detail was earthier than Chad's own, more grounded by mortal concerns. Hell, there was even some Māori words in there - what the fuck did that have to do with some white Swiss lady's ghost, the pretentious bastard? But still, the events, the feelings, they were all there, same as his own writing. Just wearing different clothes, looking through different eyes.
He shoved the book in Kirsten's direction and looked at Ginny and Maika. They were pouring over the words with confusion and concern too.
Chad almost believed them for a second.
Nah.
Chad stood up and paced away. Fuck these guys. This joke wasn't funny. "Nah. Admit it. You've found an exploit to get into my laptop, and you've been copying what I've been writing, as" - as revenge, he nearly said, except if they hadn't figured out his mortal sin, then it couldn't be, could it? - "as a big joke to scare me into believing in ghosts."
Kirsten frowned and shook her head. "I don't know how to do such a thing." God, she looked like such a stuck-up bitch with that proud, offended expression, chin raised all imperiously. While the others spoke, she orchestrated the return of everyone's writings back to them, clutching her tablet to her stomach now with her eyebrows meeting in the middle.
"Don't look at me," Maika protested, hands up in front of his chest. "I don't know a damn thing about computers, you know that. Stupid things go on the fritz around me all the time."
Ginny clutched her manuscript to her chest once Kirsten handed it to her, like it was a shield against Chad's onslaught. "I haven't working in tech in years. I don't know how to do any of that stuff anymore."
"Yeah, but you did know back in the day," Chad pressed, "and we both know you could re-learn that shit if you wanted."
"Yes, I could I suppose," Ginny muttered, "but the point is, I haven't. See all this?" She ruffled the edges of the paper, and turned the stack around to show him, though still clutching it close to her like a precious baby. "It's typewritten, see? There's an antique typewriter in my room. With a fresh supply of paper and ink, spare ribbons in the desk drawers even..." Her confidence withered in an instant. "Maybe I shouldn't have been using it, maybe the owner of the house was saving it all up for their own project. Shit. I didn't think of that. Kirsten, would you be able to message them and find out how much money I owe them?"
Kirsten waved it off. "Don't worry about it, I'm sure it's fine." While she said that, Chad's vision resolved on the pages. They were indeed typewritten, the paper having that older quality to it, the ink clearly having that stamped quality to it rather than an inkjet's grayscale haze.
"But... you could have been working beside a computer -"
"My computer is up there, but I've spent maybe twenty minutes on it since we've arrived, doing a bit of life admin."
Chad's gaze landed next on Maika. He waved his notebook, rifling through the pages with his thick black ink scrawls. "You saw for yourself: I've been writing by hand. And you know how much I hate using tech. I've had my phone off most of the time. I can show you my search history or whatevs. Just did some research into this place, but nothing else."
Kirsten folded her arms before Chad even looked at her. "And I've been writing on my tablet. It's not even hooked up to the wifi, because I didn't want any distractions. Are you satisfied yet, Chad?"
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
"No. Because the only other explanation is too fucking stupid."
"What explanation?" Ginny all but whispered. At some point she had drifted backwards again, and hugged the edge of the wall.
Under the weight of all three of them looking at him, Chad felt electrified, buzzing with energy, a little fried, even. He wanted to jump out of his own skin from the wrongness of the whole situation. "That we're all channeling some presence from the other side, or some shit."
"Is that so hard to believe?" Kirsten asked, her eyes already glowing with fervour.
"Well, of course you'd love some weird bullshit like that, Lee, but I don't believe it." Kirsten recoiled from his words. Was he going too far? Only if she wasn't faking.
She had to be faking.
Maika's eyes narrowed. He folded his arms. "Dude, what's up your arse lately? Why are you so agitated by all this?"
The answer was on the tip of his treacherous tongue, ready to jump off at a moment's notice. Maika had a look on his face like he could see it all unfolding on Chad's - that there was a secret, and that it was being withheld. That he would be more vigilant of Chad from now on. Chad glared back, and put his hands behind his head.
"Why don't you all just fucking admit it? It's fine. I'll laugh. Haha, it's all a big joke." His laughter was hollow, faked. There was nothing funny about their serious faces, and that fucked him off most of all. The joke was done. Enough of this deadpan shit. "It's all just AI. Admit it," he said, dancing dangerously close to his own reflection.
"Chad, it's really not," Kirsten insisted. "None of us use that soul-sucking capitalist bullshit. We're all better than that."
"Oh, fuck you, Miss High-and-Mighty. Just because you're the darling of all the little white ladies on the writers' festival circuits. LIttle Model Minority -"
He'd gone too far, and he knew it, bad joke or not. Kirsten drew back, her face reddening with trapped rage. But he couldn't back down. Not now. They were liars, all of them. They had to be. It couldn't just be him.
Kirsten stumbled into Ginny, who caught her and steadied her. Maika meanwhile, thrust himself forward. "Oi! What the fuck, man? Say how you really feel, why don't you?"
"I'm not scared of you, mate. You're about as far as anyone can get from that Once Were Warriors shit. Soft."
Maika drew back too, a sneer on his shaking head. "Geez man, I knew you were a dick, but this?"
"Chad -" Ginny began.
"Don't you fucking start, Vincent."
Ginny made a sound halfway between a gasp and a sob. Her papers clutched to her chest, she left the room, a blur of soft white dress with barely a footstep to be heard.
"I think you should leave, Chad," Kirsten stated, facing away from him. Locking eyes with Maika instead. Conspiring, just like he knew they had been. "Leave the house, I mean. Tomorrow morning. I can get you a flight back to New Zealand."
No. They weren't going to win. They didn't get to do this to him. It had been all of their faults, what had happened, not just his. Parker's first, then Lee's, and Ginny had just gone the fuck along with them, too catatonic to make sense of anything. Besids, if it was anyone's fault, it the one who wasn't here. But she'd paid for her part in it already. No, the four of them remaining; there was no backing out. They were all in this together.
All of them should be scared of ghosts. God knew, they had good reason to be.
Chad sidled up to her. "You can't tell me what to do, Kirsten," he muttered into her ear. "I took all the orders I'm going to take from you."
"I can call the police," she said, calmly, still not looking at him but at Maika, as if for strength.
"You call the police, and I'll tell them about Maika's little gardening project." He looked between their two shocked faces, revelling in the deliciousness of their realisation. He had the power here. All of it. They couldn't do a fucking thing. "Now, I'm going to bed. Perhaps in the morning, you three can explain why the fuck you think it's so funny to gang up on me with this ghost shit. And I suggest you do. Good night."
He picked up his laptop and left the room.
His bedroom was a short stomp up the stairs. It was nowhere as grand as Lee's bedroom, but it was large enough for his taste, with a King bed and an ensuite and an off-centre view of the lake during the day, though it was cut off by a tree. He stopped by the window to see what he could see, as he fought to get his breath back down to something of a calm state. No lake; only tendrils of the fogbank pressing against the window, reflecting what little light the bulb in his room put out. He shut the blinds and breathed in.
Again, that electrified feeling coursed through his body. He let the air out of his lungs with a long whistle between his teeth. The breathing exercises were ones his mother had taught him to control his rage, but the whistling between his teeth, that was all his father. He used to do that. The old man used to do a lot of interesting mouth sounds actually, before he drank himself to an early grave; man could whistle any tune no matter how difficult, could imitate any bird, could click and cluck and wolf-whistle enough to turn every stuck-up bitches' head on a given street, ready to accuse him of whatever misogyny she fancied. It was almost all he had left of the man. The greater share of its father's earthly possessions had gone to his older brothers, successful in sport and business respectively. To the weird f-word writer son of the family went some albums, some clothes, the neglected guitar which needed restringing. And the f-word appellation, passed down as a pet name for him, from his father to his brothers, unshakeable despite the inaccuracy of it.
But he had the whistling. He had always imitated that better than either of his brothers.
He placed his laptop on the charger and cracked it open, sitting down before it on a broad-backed wooden chair. His slamming of the lid earlier hadn't interfered too much with the operation of his latest creation. It resumed after a few seconds, reiterating over and over the text per his instructions.
They had no idea how much work this took. They thought they were so much better than him, just because they picked their words by hand from the tree of inspiration. He'd made a machine to harvest. If he kept that machine secret, it was only because they could never understand. It wasn't shame. No.
Besides, what was the bet they were using AI in secret anyway? Lee had cranked that last novel out way too fast. She'd said in an interview it was a 'pure flash of inspiration' - whatever. He would have placed good money on AI being involved somewhere along the way. And Maika and Ginny had to at least have tried it out, right? How could they not have? It was like a genie in a bottle. Well, not perfectly so, not yet anyway. It still needed a human hand to guide it. He was that hand. He was so good at being that hand, that nobody had caught him yet. Not a single Bestreads review with even a whiff of suspicion.
The way he figured, if this was his path, then so be it. He had tried for so long to carve out a path to success similar to Lee, only to be faced by rejection after rejection. He didn't have her gender or ethnic appeal, as he saw it; nothing like the wasted potential of Maika with his ethnicity and wastrel addict appeal; nor Ginny's whole transgender thing or her not-of-sound-mind artiste aura; no, he was just a boring white Pākehā straight cis male able-bodied sound-minded guy. No advantages in that regard. No sop story to glom onto. A few years ago, mid-30s, getting nowhere with this whole writing biz, he'd seen the opportunity, and he'd taken it.
And now he was making enough money that he'd been able to leave his soulless corporate career, a decade and a half of bouncing from one tech startup to another to bullshit his way through some coding which he was perfectly able to do, so long as he put a sheet over his soul to make it shut the fuck up for just a second. He'd rigged up a few servers of his own, overseas, difficult to trace back to him, and they ran custom AI instances dedicated to churning out possible manuscripts for C. T. Woodham, bestselling thriller and crime writer.
The weird thing was though, the AI was doing a shit job with Emilie's story.
As soon as she'd wandered into his imagination through the fog, he'd fed a series of prompts into his engine and waited to see what it spat out. Everything it had sent out was wrong.
Instead, the previous afternoon, he'd opened up a blank document and written the words himself for once. Tentatively, not trusting it like the first steps on an previously-injured foot coming out of a cast, he'd felt for the words Emilie was whispering to him; tentatively, he'd read them back and thought to himself, 'I've still got it.' He hadn't felt this way about something he'd written for maybe a decade, back when he was deluded by youth and optimism.
He'd been so looking forward to tonight. To reading it aloud. To seeing them smile at him. Genuinely, even.
Fuck Ginny. Fuck all of them. They still weren't over that fucking night fifteen years ago, were they? That had to be it.
He ran a scan on his laptop, but there was no trace of any malware which could explain their plagiarism. Feeling crazy even as he did it, he climbed on his chair at each corner of the room, feeling for a pinhole camera or something, anything to explain how the hell they'd done it.
Who knew how much later, he stopped, a thin sheen of sweat from the effort coating his upper lip.
Seriously, fuck those guys.
He opened the tab with his private cacophony server, the one where he was the only member. He clicked on the channel #scream-into-void.
He typed:
They hate me. They've always hated me. They always will. They still blame me for what happened to Tessa.
He gazed at the words in white on a charcoal grey screen for a good ten seconds. Then Right-click, Delete.
The words were gone.