13 Months Haunted

In September 2024, history student Anders investigates a story about a haunting that attracted strangers to the rural town of Clover Creek, Wisconsin, in 2000. His distant cousin Piper Lowery-Palmer was at the center of the incident, and he persuades her to give an interview at the Iowa farmhouse where she lives with her husband, Robbie. Piper has avoided computers and cell phones for decades and insists that her identity be protected. She begins by describing her work as a library clerk and her encounter with an isolated eighth-grade student, Avery Wallace. The novel moves between this interview, Piper's recollections of 2000, Avery's earlier diary entries, and an account of the event that first exposed the Wallace family to a supernatural danger.

In October 2000, Piper visits Glen Fisher's classroom to collect submissions for a library scary-story contest. Avery is closely supervised by her mother, Susan, who follows her everywhere and even accompanies her to the bathroom. Other students, particularly Shane Brockway, bully Avery because her older sister Charlotte and father Richard recently died and rumors link the deaths to the family's former home in Grangeville. Piper is disturbed by a story Avery submits, The Thing in the Closet, about a fictional sister named Rose and an unseen threat. She reproduces it on an online journal without anticipating that strangers will become interested in the real girl. Piper befriends Avery through books, music, and tutoring, but she cannot understand why the child refuses to look at computers, has difficulty remembering old friends, and seems terrified whenever she might be out of another person's sight.

The mystery becomes more urgent after Shane and his friends trap Avery in a school custodian's closet. Piper frees her while the child screams that something is coming. Shane's father Dennis subsequently confronts Piper and Fisher, repeating accusations that Susan practices witchcraft. That evening Piper enters the Brockway house after hearing a commotion and finds Shane dead at the foot of the stairs. A dark, vaguely human-shaped mist hovers over him for a few seconds before disappearing. Shane's official cause of death is reported as a brain aneurysm, and Piper has no way to prove what she saw. Dennis later tells her Shane's computer was found badly damaged. Piper withholds her account of the mist because she fears Dennis will retaliate against Avery and Susan. Nevertheless, she shares increasingly detailed information and suspicions on her public webjournal, and her readers begin offering theories and urging her to investigate.

Seeking evidence, Piper contacts her brother Sam, a computer specialist, and travels to the Wallaces' former Grangeville house. Its new owner, Bill Oakley, shows her a den wall that had been extensively damaged and repaired, but she finds no obvious haunting. Avery's diary and a second fictional story, The Wall, suggest that something important may remain hidden in the house, although neither identifies an object. The town's rumors then begin pointing to an electronic file allegedly sent by Avery to Shane. During a classroom episode, Avery chants words about filth, disease, and death and behaves violently. Fisher investigates the words on a library computer; soon afterward, his memory fails and he reports a threatening presence that will kill him if he is left alone. Piper disables the library machine and removes a component she assumes is its hard drive. Wanting an explanation, she goes to Susan's cabin, where interior partitions have been stripped away so Susan can keep Avery in sight at all times.

Susan recounts the family tragedy. On September 25, 1999, she and Richard returned from an evening out to find Charlotte dead and Avery terrified. Doctors diagnosed Charlotte with bacterial meningitis, but Avery said an unseen malicious being had pursued both sisters. Afterward she could not bear to be alone, abandoned her computer interests, and suffered memory loss. The family sought doctors, therapists, and religious assistance without relief. Richard searched the household computer for an explanation and eventually destroyed it with a sledgehammer, also damaging the den wall. They left Grangeville for Richard's brother's home, where Susan later found Avery secretly using a laptop. Avery had attached a file named COOLGAME.exe to an email to Richard, apparently after retrieving it from a remote server, and recognized it as the file she and Charlotte had opened together before Charlotte died. Richard viewed the attachment on his BlackBerry while driving, then telephoned Susan in terror, reporting an unseen presence in his car. He crashed after saying he could see it. Susan inferred that viewing the file initiates a supernatural infection, taking approximately twenty minutes to activate, and that an infected person may die after about thirty seconds without another human in potential sight. The file also seems to compel its victims to transmit it. These are Susan's conclusions from the family's experiences, not findings she has been able to test safely.

Piper realizes that the same phenomenon may explain Shane's death and Fisher's condition, and that Fisher might also be driven to spread the file. Susan refuses to examine the computer component Piper took, fearing further infections. That night Avery wakes in a trance and speaks a disturbing sentence in Spanish. Susan tries to soothe her, but Avery thrashes and accidentally throws her mother neck-first onto a jagged wall stud. Susan survives emergency surgery but remains in intensive care. Piper takes Avery to her own apartment to ensure that the girl is never alone. There Piper discovers a BlackBerry Avery cannot remember stealing and suspects it belonged to the school principal; it may have allowed Avery to send the file to Shane and Fisher without Susan knowing. Piper hides the device in her freezer. She researches Avery's phrases and learns that the classroom words came from Geraldo Rivera's report on the abuses at Willowbrook. As a precaution, Piper ties her wrist to Avery's before sleeping. Avery later sleepwalks, seizes shears, threatens Piper and her dog Ripley, and must be restrained.

Sam arrives from Iowa and initially doubts the supernatural explanation, although he refuses to abandon his sister. He identifies the supposedly recovered hard drive as a RAM module, meaning the library's actual file storage remains in place. He also confirms that his automated searches have uncovered no other public reports of a killer computer file. Piper recruits advice through her webjournal. Commenters propose exorcisms, exposing Avery to danger, and applying computer antivirus concepts to a person. The last suggestion leads Piper and Sam to try an imagined quarantine procedure, but Avery's apparent improvement is fleeting and she lashes out again. Attempts to restore her memories through familiar email services and music likewise fail. Meanwhile, Dennis has discovered the online journal through information shared by Bill and others. Drunk and seeking revenge for Shane's death, he breaks into Piper's apartment with an ax, rifle, and gasoline. He admits that he previously entered the apartment and moved Piper's mail, and followed her to a remote campsite with a knife. These earlier frightening incidents had human causes, not the unseen entity.

While Piper and Sam try to reason with Dennis, Avery unexpectedly regains enough awareness to open her sent email and run COOLGAME.exe on Piper's computer. Dennis becomes transfixed by the screen. Sam knocks the monitor down to interrupt the display, but Piper catches a brief peripheral glimpse. Roughly twenty minutes later Dennis and Piper begin sensing an invisible presence. Avery, in contrast, becomes lucid and no longer feels the entity that had pursued her for more than thirteen months. To escape Dennis's rifle, the three retreat to the bathroom and leave him alone. He pours gasoline and sets the apartment on fire, then shoots through the door, wounding Sam in the shoulder. The thirty-second interval expires, and Dennis dies. Piper and Avery help Sam escape the flames. Piper goes back into the burning building to rescue Ripley and, while momentarily alone, senses her new unseen pursuer approaching. She reaches the others in time. Avery has recovered, but Piper is now subject to the same potentially fatal isolation rule.

At the hospital, Susan remains alive and Avery can once again enter a room alone. Piper keeps her infection secret initially. Concerned that Fisher's library computer still holds a copy, Piper returns there with Avery and Fisher's wife Carol. They find Fisher dead at a workstation and another dead man, Frank, in the basement. Bill Oakley explains that Piper's blog allowed enthusiasts to identify Clover Creek and travel there. He and Frank persuaded the deteriorating Fisher to accompany them to the library, where the adults removed the actual hard drive and connected it to Frank's laptop. Fisher wandered away, was left alone, and died. Frank viewed the file and was killed when Bill hid rather than helping him. Avery destroys the laptop and hard drive without looking at the flashing image. Back at the hospital, Avery provides the credentials for her email account and asks Piper to remove the remaining copies from its sent messages. Piper, Sam, and Ripley then leave Clover Creek for Des Moines, while the larger public's interest in the story continues.

In Des Moines, Sam studies the downloaded file's code without executing it. A subsequent return to September 25, 1999 reveals that Avery herself began writing COOLGAME.exe on a school laptop as a prank. Her proposed program featured an image of a floating black mist, a three-second appearance, a countdown instructing users to find another person within thirty seconds, and a prompt to forward the file. It also promised that any lingering curse would end on Halloween, but only after at least a year of fear. Unable to make the original code work, Avery copied occult text and unfamiliar scripts from an anonymous website she and Charlotte had found while exploring Blair Witch-related material. The code then began writing itself, growing into an enormous and incomprehensible program. Avery backed it up to a private remote server and went to show Charlotte. The event establishes how a childish prank acquired an unexplained supernatural effect, though the origin of the website and the exact mechanism remain unknown.

Sam's analysis supports this origin. Within the self-generated code he finds links and scraping routines that collect disturbing recordings into a rapidly flashing mosaic of videos. Those recordings explain the otherwise unexplained phrases Avery recited during her episodes, including the Willowbrook quotation, a declaration about the Revelator, a missing woman's telephone call, and the Spanish words heard before Susan's injury. The ghost image and three-second display duration correspond to what Piper briefly saw over Shane's body. The Halloween release clause explains why Avery was freed on October 31, 2000, after thirteen months, rather than simply because she transmitted the file again. But Piper saw only a fraction of the image and does not experience the memory deterioration or spreading compulsion of more fully infected victims. She and Sam fear she may also have missed the part of the infection granting release. They delete Avery's sent messages to Richard, Shane, and Fisher and empty the trash, but do not know whether a surviving remote or local copy remains.

In the September 2024 epilogue, Piper confirms that her suspicion was correct: she has remained haunted for nearly twenty-five years, never able to be alone. Robbie accommodates her condition, and she avoids computers and phones. Sam eventually destroyed the copy he had been studying because its code was changing and becoming more dangerous. Avery, however, has remained healthy, lives in California with two children, and is close to Susan, who survived. Piper lets Anders share an anonymized account, hoping people will take the possibility of a similar threat seriously. Anders leaves unconvinced, but during the drive home he visits the Wallaces' former house. Remembering Avery's fictional wall story and her reference to something still hidden there, he pries loose a baseboard in a former child's bedroom and discovers the old school laptop that Richard never found. The original COOLGAME.exe file is still on its desktop. At his parents' home, Anders and his sister Grace ignore the warning and open it. They see the video mosaic, become haunted, and develop a powerful urge to transmit copies. They send it through school and university mailing lists, messages, and social media. Anders disguises a copy as a transcript of Piper's interview and sends it to Robbie, who replies by asking whether it is the feared file. The renewed outbreak is established, while Robbie's next action and the fate of the numerous recipients remain unresolved.