Jenna marched downstairs at seven the following morning, holding the black grease pencil in one hand and the five-by-seven photograph in the other.
Her father was sitting at the kitchen table, reading court documents over black coffee. Her mother stood at the sink, washing an iron skillet.
Jenna slammed the photograph onto the table, right on top of her father's legal papers.
"You knew about this house," she said, her voice shaking with quiet, absolute fury.
Her father went rigid. He slowly looked down at the photograph, his jaw tightening.
Her mother turned from the sink, the dish towel frozen in her hands. She looked at the floorboards.
"We knew something had happened here," her father said quietly, not looking up.
"What happened?" Jenna demanded. "Who were those people?"
"It was a clinical field facility," her father answered, his voice devoid of inflection. "Dr. Isaacs conducted non-standard cognitive research here. The state closed it down in 2005."
"On people?" Jenna asked, her voice rising. "Were they experimenting on people?"
Silence filled the kitchen, heavy and suffocating.
Jenna slammed her palm onto the table. "Who is Elias Vale?"
Her parents exchanged a long, agonizing look.
Her mother dropped the dish towel, sat down in the wooden chair opposite her father, and buried her face in her hands, weeping silently.
"Elias Vale was an eighteen-year-old student who vanished from this house during a clinical trial in October 2005," her father said slowly.
"I know that!" Jenna yelled. "Why do I remember him? Why do I have his memories?"
Her father looked up at her, and for the first time in her life, Jenna saw pure, unadulterated fear in her father's eyes.
"Jenna," he said, his voice cracking with emotion, "you've been talking about Elias for six months."
The room seemed to drop ten degrees.
"What?" she whispered.
"Before we ever listed the old house," her mother sobbed, looking up with red, ruined eyes. "Before the divorce was finalized. You woke up in the middle of the night screaming about a boy named Elias who was locked in a cold room."
"That's… that's impossible," Jenna stammered, backing away from the table. "We only moved here three weeks ago!"
"Your father found this property through a commercial foreclosure listing because you kept drawing this house!" her mother cried. "You drew the Victorian roof! You drew the locked gray room! You told us he lived here!"
Jenna hit the doorframe, her lungs refusing to draw air.
"We thought it was stress," her father said, his voice breaking. "The doctor in Trenton said you were exhibiting severe dissociative coping mechanisms because of our fighting. He said you had invented an imaginary confidant to handle the isolation."
Jenna stared at them, the kitchen spinning around her like a carousel.
All this time, she had believed the house was a haunted machine that had infected her mind.
What if the house was entirely inert?
What if the ghost was not inside the walls, but inside her skull?