The only light in the gray, soundproofed tomb of Unit 4B came from the cracked screen of Donnie Keller's laptop. It cast a cool, ghostly glow on his face, a face set in a mask of profound apathy. On the floor beside his lone wooden chair, the sad, empty husk of a "Noodle-Rama" cup, 'Chicken-ish Flavor,' stood as a monument to his sad, empty evening. He was aimlessly scrolling through a social media feed, a digital river of manufactured joy and pointless outrage. He drifted past photos of people he barely knew on vacations he could never afford, their bright, toothy smiles looking like alien grimaces. He scrolled past furious arguments about politics, typed by thumbs in distant rooms, each person shouting into their own private void. He ignored a video of a cat playing a tiny piano. His thumb moved with a listless, hypnotic rhythm. Up. Pause. Up. Pause. Each new post was a fresh, tiny dose of disappointment. The silence in the room was absolute, a thick, heavy blanket that smothered all sound, all thought, all hope.
A flicker of movement, a subtle shift in the landscape of his hermetically sealed world, drew his attention. Underneath his apartment door, in the thin crack of space between the door and the floor, a sliver of shadow appeared, momentarily darkening the faint line of gray light from the hallway. There was no sound. No footsteps in the carpeted hall, no rustle of clothing, no knock. In the absolute, manufactured silence of his sanctuary, a soundless approach was an impossibility, a violation of the laws of physics as he knew them. Then, an object slid smoothly and silently across the cold, modern floor into his room. It was a thick, cream-colored envelope. It glided a few feet across the floor as if pushed by an invisible hand, coming to a gentle stop. It lay there, looking ancient and alien, a relic from another time that had breached the walls of his sterile sanctuary.
Donnie's thumb froze mid-scroll. His gaze, which had been glazed over with the dull sheen of internet-induced apathy, sharpened. It flicked down from the screen to the floor. To the envelope. He stared at it for a long, silent moment. The default setting of his mind, a deep and abiding suspicion of all things, took over. His features, moments before slack with boredom, clouded over. This was wrong. This was an anomaly. Mail was not delivered this way at the Gadsby Modern Living Complex. Junk mail and bills were unceremoniously dumped in the shared mailroom downstairs. Official notices from the unseen Mr. Kim, like the crumpled orange specter of the eviction notice now buried in his trash, were taped to the door with aggressive precision. Nothing ever came under the door. Nothing ever moved this silently. It was an intrusion, a foreign object in his carefully controlled environment, and he hated it instantly.
He rose from his hard wooden chair, his body moving with a stiff, deliberate caution. He approached the envelope as one might approach a strange, sleeping animal. It could be a trap. It could be a trick. It was almost certainly a prelude to some fresh new annoyance. He stopped a foot away from it, looming over it, studying it from a safe distance. It was thick, creamy, and looked expensive. He nudged it with the toe of his worn-out shoe. It was heavier than it looked, sliding another inch across the smooth floor with a soft, satisfying weight. It was definitely not a bill. A bill would be flimsy and light, filled with transparently false sympathy. This was something else. With a sigh of profound irritation at this disruption to his evening of quiet misery, he finally crouched down, his knees cracking in protest, and picked it up. The cardstock was thick and textured, of a quality he had never felt before. It felt like something from a historical drama, not a piece of mail in 2034. He turned it over in his hand, and his suspicion hardened into a specific theory. On the back, holding the flap closed, was a seal of dark purple wax.
He brought the envelope closer to his face, examining the wax seal under the dim light of his laptop screen. The design pressed into the wax was intricate and oddly familiar. It was a snake, its scales rendered in minute detail, curved into a perfect circle, devouring its own tail. An Ouroboros. The symbol of eternity, of cycles, of... pretentiousness. A small, humorless snort escaped Donnie's nose. A name surfaced in his mind, dredged up from the recent, humiliating past.
Rupert, he thought, the name tasting like ash. It has to be Rupert.
Rupert, the painfully earnest history major who had been his fellow cast member at Pilgrim's Passage. Rupert had played the role of the village blacksmith with a level of dedication that was frankly disturbing. He spoke of "authenticity" and "the spirit of the age" with a straight face. He probably churned his own butter. This, this absurdly dramatic, over-the-top gesture, had Rupert's fingerprints all over it. Only that Renaissance Faire reject would be this extra. The whole performance was a prank, a convoluted joke at his expense for getting fired. A fresh wave of irritation washed over Donnie. He pressed his thumb against the wax seal, a small act of vandalism against Rupert's ridiculous art project. The wax resisted for a moment, then cracked with a satisfying, sharp snap.
With the seal broken, Donnie slid the contents out of the heavy, cream-colored envelope. It was not a folded piece of modern paper. The thing that emerged was a single sheet of what looked and felt like parchment. The paper was stiff, yellowed with age—or a very convincing tea-stain—and the edges were brittle, one corner already flaking away into dust. As he drew it out, a faint, strange smell hit his nose. It was the scent of old books, of dust and decay, but with an undercurrent of something else, something sharp and clean, like the air after a thunderstorm. Ozone. The smell of static electricity. He had to admit, Rupert had gone to a lot of trouble. The letter was handwritten, the ink a faded, sepia-toned brown. The script was elegant and looping, full of flourishes and long, graceful tails, clearly written with what was meant to look like a real quill pen.
Donnie held the crumbling parchment in his hands, his expression shifting from sour suspicion to outright mockery. This was, without a doubt, the most elaborate "you're fired" gag he had ever been the victim of. He decided that if Rupert had gone to all this effort, the least he could do was give the material the dramatic reading it deserved. He cleared his throat, leaned back, and in a low, hokey, Dracula-like voice that dripped with theatrical gravity, he began to read aloud.
"'To the Master of Voices...'" he intoned, letting the words echo in the sound-proofed quiet of his room. "'We have heard of the unique timbre of your talents through the very ether of Schroon Falls...'" He paused, rolling his eyes so hard he felt a strain in his optic nerves. "The ether," he muttered in his normal voice, shaking his head. He abandoned the Dracula impression and continued reading silently, his eyes scanning the elegant, looping script. The letter, penned with a flair for the dramatic that was truly impressive, was a formal summons. It requested his presence at the old Schroon River Manor at his earliest convenience. It spoke of a "service of a most peculiar nature" and "a matter of great spiritual urgency." It was all so wonderfully, laughably melodramatic. He could almost hear Rupert reading it aloud in his booming, wannabe-Shakespearean actor's voice.
His eyes skimmed down the page, past the flowery descriptions of their "dire predicament" and their "unquiet spirits," ready to be done with the joke. He was already composing a short, blistering text message to Rupert. But then, a certain phrase, a short, simple line near the bottom of the page, caught his full attention and brought his skimming to a dead halt.
"...for which you will receive a most significant and material compensation."
Compensation.
The word seemed to lift off the page. For a fleeting, traitorous second, the mockery on his face vanished, replaced by a flicker of something else. The cynical armor he wore every day cracked, just for an instant. Money. The letter promised money. A "most significant" amount. The image of the crumpled, neon-orange eviction notice, now lying in state atop his trash heap, flashed in his mind. He saw the number, $1,200.00, typed in its severe, unforgiving font. The thought of a "significant" compensation was a tiny, tantalizing drop of water in the vast desert of his financial ruin. For one brief, shining moment, he paused.
The pause was brief. The absurdity of the situation, the sheer, unadulterated ridiculousness of it all, came rushing back in, and the crack in his cynical armor sealed itself shut. It was a prank. Of course it was a prank. The money was just the bait, the most unbelievable part of a thoroughly unbelievable letter. Rupert was probably hiding in the bushes outside the Manor with his phone, ready to record him showing up like an idiot. The thought was so galling that he scoffed, a short, sharp sound of disgust. His cynicism returned, not like a shield this time, but like a comfortable old coat.
He looked down at the bottom of the letter to see who was supposedly responsible for this masterpiece of historical fan-fiction. The letter was signed in the same elegant, looping script.
Yours in tragic anticipation,
The Spectral Siblings.
Donnie read the signature, and a dry, humorless laugh escaped his lips. He looked around his empty, gray room, as if sharing the punchline with an invisible audience.
"The Spectral Siblings," he said to the silent, foam-padded walls. "Right. And I'm the ghost of Christmas past."
With a final, disgusted sigh at the sheer waste of time and high-quality stationery, he took the ancient-looking parchment and, with a violent, satisfying clench of his fist, crumpled it into a tight ball. The stiff, brittle paper protested, letting out a loud, crackling crunch, a sound of miniature bones breaking. It was a much more substantial, more satisfying sound than the eviction notice had made. He walked the few steps to the overflowing metal trash bin in the corner, a sad monument to his recent life choices. The bin was a layered tapestry of failure: empty noodle cups, discarded junk mail, and, near the top, the crumpled orange ball of his real-world problems. Without a moment's hesitation, he dropped the crumpled letter from "The Spectral Siblings" onto the top of the heap. The plea from the ether, the promise of significant compensation, now rested on a bed of garbage, just another piece of trash in a life full of it.