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“Danny!” Maddie smiled when the doppelganger walked into the house. Disgust roiled in her at the notion of acting so nice to the ghost—the thing was pretending to be her son—but it was the only way to catch it unaware. “You did great on your last test!”
Danny—no, the thing, did a double-take at her enthusiasm. For a moment, Maddie worried that she had blown her cover by coming off too strong; when had she last welcomed Danny home like this? She strived to remedy that once Danny was back home.
“Yeah.” The doppelganger finally said, wariness in its stance. Maddie tried not to frown; it knew something was up now. “I didn’t think I could…it’s a nice surprise.”
It would’ve been a nicer surprise if the actual Danny was the one who received the grades, but she wasn’t going to tell Danny’s doppelganger that.
“I made something,” she told it, brandishing a plate of chocolate pieces that were infused with enough blood blossom extract to destroy even the most powerful of ghosts. “It’s from a food machine Jack and I have been working on! The machine turns ectoplasm into a form safe for people to consume; here, try some!”
For some reason, her words made Danny’s doppelganger relax. Did it think she was buttering it up just to get a willing test subject?
Well, it wasn’t wrong.
Wrinkling its nose, the ghost gingerly took a piece of chocolate from the offered plate.
Maddie held her breath as the doppelganger popped it into its mouth.
It had taken her days to synthesize a blood blossom extract of a strong enough concentration to kill a powerful ghost; enough that she had to sacrifice all the blood blossom samples they had in store. The ectoplasmic radiation the doppelganger emitted—one of the first things that tipped off this ‘Danny’ wasn’t the real Danny—implied the ghost was concerningly powerful. Maddie had no idea why it was impersonating her son, but ghosts were illogical like that.
If this was a case of simple overshadowing, the blood blossom would drive out the ghost and leave Danny untouched. If it wasn’t, like she strongly suspected, the results…
Well, the results would be something she strongly anticipated witnessing.
The ghost frowned as it swallowed the chocolate. “I don’t know, Mum, it feels—”
Its breath hitched. The ghost coughed and tried to open its mouth again, only to retch and vomit blood all over the floor.
Maddie eyed the blood as the ghost gasped for air—not that it needed to. This was…unexpected. She had expected the ghost to expel ectoplasm immediately, not blood.
“Mum—” The ghost’s face twisted like a person in pain. It retched again, blood spilling out of its mouth. Its hands clutched at its chest and neck, as if to tear the poison from its body.
Maddie didn’t allow her eyes to soften. This was all a trick, obviously. The doppelganger had to be good at impersonating human emotions if it could trick her—trick all of them—into believing it was Danny for so long.
Before long, red bled into green. The ghost tried to wipe the ectoplasm from its face, only to kneel over as its body began to seize.
When the contractions stopped, the ghost tried to crawl up from its position on the floor. It didn’t succeed, its hands giving out as it tried to push its torso from the ectoplasm-soaked floor. The ghost sobbed, trails of green making their way down their cheeks. Ectoplasm dripped out of its mouth and nose.
Interesting. Maddie hadn’t hypothesized crying tears of ectoplasm as an effect of blood blossom poisoning.
“Mum, please—" It gasped, just before it began to retch again. Its chest heaved, and its face contorted in pain.
This was all so fascinating. If Maddie wasn’t so worried about her son, she would’ve jumped at the chance to write down the doppelganger’s reaction to drinking a concentrated dosage of blood blossom extract.
Still, she felt a mild vindication at the ghost’s reaction. Whether or not it could feel the blood blossom tearing its insides apart, there was satisfaction in watching the thing which tried to impersonate her son suffer.
The doppelganger’s face began to turn blue, and its eyes glowed bright with ectoplasm. A hand reached out to clench at its throat again, just as something—white, glowing, larger than anything that had come out of its mouth—emerged from its mouth.
Its eyes widened at the round object it had vomited out, almost looking as if it was scared. Then, with a final, unnecessary heave for breath, the ghost unceremoniously slid sidewards onto the floor.
It stilled.
Curious. Maddie used her foot to flip the ghost onto its back. It complied obediently, lying on the ground as if it was dead.
Danny’s wide, empty eyes stared blankly into her own. It was a little unnerving, but that was probably the ghost’s intention, a final parting gift of sorts.
Strangely, the body wasn’t melting into uncharged ectoplasm. In fact, the remains on the floor looked and felt like human remains, even down to the body’s cooling skin. This must be one of those physical flesh shells she and Jack had theorized about; empty vessels that ghosts wore to blend in with humans. The ghost must have vacated its physical shell once the blood blossom weakened it too much for it to maintain control of the shell.
Maddie crouched down, peering at the round, glowing object that the ghost had spat out. The crystalline object gave off an iridescent shimmer, light fracturing into rainbows as she looked at it from different angles.
Hm. It looked somewhat like a core, but was nothing like the ones she had found from dissecting ectopusses and blob ghosts. Those were viscous, condensed balls of ectoplasm, barely different from the ectoplasm that composed of the ghosts’ bodies. This one was like a crystal; more solid and refracting light in a manner unlike any ectoplasm she had seen.
Maddie picked up the core-like object and Danny’s body—the ghost’s shell. Throwing the shell over her shoulder, she carried the two objects into the basement laboratory, placing the crystal into a statis chamber and the shell into the ecto-containment unit.
There’d be time for the experiments she wanted to try later.
But for now, it was time to find where the ghost had hidden her actual son.