Stood on the rocky peak of a weathered down mountain, surrounded on all sides by a massive garden in the English style, Nightingale Manor peered down upon the world with an aristocratic mien, narrow facade bespoken of a certain wood paneled elegance, stringent lines and hard angled framework built in accordance to old glories that still held about them a certain sheen of pride. It was the visage of a place hard weathered, but unbroken.
Not that nature hadn’t tried her very best, despite it, and what victories she had could be seen scattered about the exterior in moss clotted gutters, bent down like angry brows over windows built in diagonals to the walls. Weeds stuck up in and among the old foundation stones, wind and rain had scrubbed all but the faintest trace of blue from the poplar boards that lay beneath.
Despite this, the house was in strangely good repair. No water stains marred the bone white wood, no cracks tore through the bottom. It towered, unbent, unbroken, intact seemingly in spite of itself atop that well worn hill, as though waiting for time itself to strike it, braced for the blow that might bring down so many years and days indebted upon its head.
Indeed, Danny’s first thought when he initially caught sight of the old manor house, still one wide field and garden distant, was that it seemed upset. Something about the crooked windows and wide double doors gave the impression of a face, struck ashen at some kind of horror, hang-jawed and half tearful before a terror only it could see.
It was enough that he might even have felt a little bad for the place, had he not been wholly preoccupied resenting the fact that he had to involve himself at all.
“Jack!”
“Davie!”
Jack Fenton, Father and co-conspirator in the creation of this latest “field trip” rushed his accomplice, tackling him between both arms in his embrace.
“Jack! Good to see you!” David pushed himself out of the hold. “Still doing the ghostbuster thing, eh? Complete with the suit!” He pinched at a handful of his father’s signature orange jumpsuit, tugging it playfully before letting go.
“You know it Davie!” Jack replied, still trying to reach out towards his retreating brother, evidently unsatisfied with just one hug. “Me and Mads have been supporting ourselves on ghost bustin’ and ghost hunting since our Jazzikens was a tot!”
“Well, color me glad to support the family business!” David compromised with one last pat on the back before tugging himself away once more. “Come on then, you and, huh. What’s your name, kid?.”
“Danny.” Danny said, still distracted by all the places he could be that weren’t right here.
“Danny then! Just follow me, and I’ll give you the tour. House is right up ahead.” He started his way up the remaining path, leaving Danny and Jack to follow his lead.
Put together, the two men resembled each other in many ways: The same broad shoulders and towering height, the same salt and pepper hair and keen blue eyes, but where Jack had a workman’s physique, long nights of ghost hunting and heavy lifting granting a firmness beneath the fat, David had a plushness about him, a marshmallow soft sense of give that made a poor match to the steely light that could be seen flashing now and again behind the friendly glimmer of his eyes.
Danny sighed, trudging alongside his father with grand reluctance, trying to ignore the weight of the ghost hunting equipment overloaded on his back.
“Come on, Danno, it’s not so bad.” Jack said, having at last picked up on the ill mood of his son. “I know you're not exactly fond of the family business, but look on the bright side! You get to meet your old uncle Davie–”
Who had spent the last eighteen years ghosting his entire family harder than the undead abominations underneath their basement.
“Learn some family history–”
About his psycho ghost hunting relatives who somehow managed to be even weirder than his parents.
“And get back to school with credits toward your grade and some real life work experience under your belt!”
Which he only needed in the first place because he was too busy trying to keep the aforementioned undead abominations from turning his town into their own personal playground to properly keep up with his homework.
It was a grand irony, really, of the kind that had come to typify his existence, that Danny’s ghost hunting directly lead to his getting forced into a “summer internship” to prevent him from failing the year entirely. Luckily for him, his parents were more than happy to volunteer as sponsors, immediately creating a position for their son as an ‘apprentice ghost hunter’ to join them at Fentonworks.
“Yeah, totally. I’m learning so much.” Learning how to dodge anti-ecto tech that had decided to target him over the ghost he was aiming at was so educational. “I can hardly wait.”
“See? That’s the spirit!” Jack managed a smile, but it was a tight thing. “Just, hang on a little longer, okay? I haven’t seen Davie in years, and it would mean a lot to your old man if you could show a little of that good old fashioned Fenton cheer.”
Danny sighed, the good feeling of his poor temper dampened by newborn regret. He didn’t want to do this, something he had made that clear during the long drive over.
Perhaps a little too clear, now that he considered it. His father's usual excitement had an undertone of tension it hadn’t had before, souring on the back of his tongue in the vague beginnings of upset.
His dad had opted out of a conference to make this trip, he knew.
He couldn’t force himself to have fun, but maybe he could fake it.
“I guess, I mean, I’ll try.” Danny said at length, deliberately aiming for a more cheerful tone. “Just have to smile, right?” Whatever grin he managed to pull across his face must not have been half bad, as it rapidly melted the tension from his fathers own in response.
“Attaboy!” Jack managed an affable shoulder bump against his son, the best he could do without slowing down his pace. “If all else fails, focus on the now, that’s what I say. Keep it up long enough, and don'cha know it, now's turned into later! Funny how that works, eh?”
The last leg of the hike was short but tiresome, late September sun leaned into the unexposed field girding the space between trees and garden, beating down on the unshaded heads of the small party with all the bitter dregs of summer’s heat as it departed.
It would not have been so bad had Danny not been obligated to have hiked the rest of the mountain to make it there in the first place. Whoever lived here last had seen no need for anything more than a narrow, winding donkey path of a road, which the Fenton GAV had proven itself too large and too heavy to scale.
The need to tote all their standard ghost hunting equipment along with them had done his calves no favors, either.
“...aiming to make it an inn in the long run.” David, slick as a well oiled seal, rambled on happily, seemingly oblivious to the cloying heat. “And never mind what those lousy stick in the mud Nightingales say, either. You shoulda heard ‘em, when they were told the closest living relative Alliaster had left was a Fenton!” He guffawed. “Unworthy this, and ignorant that. I tell ya, Nasty little zealots just wanted to keep all the good stuff for themselves.”
He gestured to a large gate demarcating the space between field and garden.
“I mean look at that, come on! Look at it!”
A dark outline mirroring that of the manor itself, the gate rose up like a storm cloud, two pillars punched out of the ground before bending into an elegant arch. The space between its framework filled with what, at first glance, appeared to be vines.
It was only when Danny looked closer at the black gnarl of the design that he realized they were in fact roots.
Thick, bulbous roots, seething tuberous masses clotting every inch of frame, clambering each over the other towards the archway’s peak, wrapped in mouthless hunger around the sole area relatively clear of their damp intrusion: A small, circular space, pierced by only the most slender of filaments, tenuously supporting the wart backed visage of an oversized garden toad, elegantly carved, the very picture of amphibious repose.
The eyes, however, were odd.
The sole concession to color within the work, its eyes were placed not upon the sides of the head, where a proper toad’s might go, but upon the back. Dark brown regard fused to the rear cranium as the sole human feature in the animals' otherwise realistic design. They looked down in cold blooded apathy, so well carved that Danny found himself reaching out to tap them, just to see if they would blink.
“Silver! Pure silver!” David exclaimed, half a second too late to stop Danny from scalding his index finger against the gate. “Not that you could tell with all the tarnishing–Can you believe it? That’s two hundred pounds of bullion baby, and those occult freaks just let it rot!.”
“Not totally.” Jack interjected. “The Nightingales are a pretty clever bunch. Could even be the remains of an old ghost ward. While it’s nothing real tech couldn’t match easy, I bet if you were grab a big bucket of salt and make a few lines here and there–”
“You’d keep out the spooks, yeah, yeah.” David waved his hand dismissively. “Wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t so ugly.” He shuddered, glancing up at the gate as he passed through.”Feels like that damn frog is watching me every time, swear to God.”
The shade of the garden proved less than relieving, unkempt boughs cut out all light while keeping in the heat, cooking bruised flowers and mildew spores into a heady atmospheric stew that took real effort to breath. Danny found himself grateful being half dead came with a lower than normal respiratory rate, particularly when he noticed some of the more exotic plants lurking among the moss, suspiciously similar to several of the more noxious specimens Sam was experimenting with in her greenhouse back home.
Thinking of—
Danny pulled out his phone, hoping the poor reception that had plagued the device during the walk over would have finally cleared up.
No luck, all his bars remained stubbornly empty. He stuffed his phone back into his pocket with a scowl, telling himself he’d try again once they reached the house.
It was only after they breached the stultifying atmosphere that the true pleasantness of the late afternoon made itself known. Sticky sunshine now seemed nothing short of cheersome, brushing cool breeze across sweat stained cheeks, swirling past their noses silky sweet and deliciously clear.
“Ah, that’s the stuff.” David took a hearty breath, nostrils flared in appreciation of the change. “Soon as we fix up the road enough for bulldozers, we’re flattening that allergy bed first thing.”
Apparently inspired by his more open lungs, he turned to his brother, new desire visibly pressing against his face. “Hey, hey Jack.”
“Hey Davie, watcha want?” His father, who had opted to fiddle with the insides of one of his many ecto-guns while they walked, gave a distracted response.
“Come up here a minute, woudja?” He gestured toward the entryway, now looming above them as a poplar bulwark against the sky. “You and the kid, I need a favor, yeah?”
Danny and Jack glanced at each other, and, seeing no reason to disagree, made their way up the steps, stopping where David indicated, just in front of the wooden entryway that led into the house.
“There we go, just like that. Jack you pose with the gun—No, it’s fine it’s not fixed, keep it up like that—Now with the kid, you said your name was Dunny?”
“Danny.”
“Danny, you get behind Jack here, look like you wanna know what’s inside. Good, good, now hold on, just like that!”
Once he was done posing them, David clambered back down, pulling out his cell phone to snap several photos of the scene.
“Really?” Danny said, low as he could, subtly keeping his hand a few centimeters above the handle, the same toxic metal as the garden gate.
“It’s just a few pictures, Danno.” Jack muttered back.
“Great! Now let’s get one with you crouched down, make it look like an ambush! Get the kid to peek through the window, think curious, but scared.”
Dannny rolled his eyes, but opted to play along, leaning himself against the fanlight in a half-hearted attempt to “peek in.”
It was this that proved to be his undoing. The ancient door, hinge misaligned or perhaps not fully closed, responded to the gentle pressure of his forehead by swinging open. Overbalanced and without support, there was nothing to stop him from toppling, face first, across the newly open threshold.
Danny was given just enough time to regret his life choices before being hit with an overwhelming wave of pain.
It felt like he was being stabbed. Worse, it felt like he was being drained, his vitality siphoned by the hollowed out fangs of some unseen leech clung onto his chest.
“Are you
As I am?
His core screeched, slowing down, fleeing deeper into the metaphysical hold of his living self, leaving him gutted, the absence of it spilling out in a pain that flared up his spine and settled into his bones. From the corner of his aching eyes, he could see it, the vampire source, a reflection of the moon carved from its gazing pool and set upright, speaking down to him as he shook.
Or are you
As they are
An interloper
Upon this earth
Devil in the shape of
A child now long
departed?
He felt it, when his humanity, already dominant, rose above his ghost, drowning it completely in heart-too-loud, breath-too-full noisome bellows of lungs and guts at last interceding between his core and the thing that would suck it dry. He felt shaky, he felt weak, a sense of abandonment mixing with fear and confusion over what was going on even at all.
Danny opened his mouth to reply: yes, no, maybe just a freak I’m not sure, but found his words cut short.
“Danny! Danno, are you okay!” A hand, broad and familiar, jostled against his shoulder, shaking him back to a more proper awareness of his surroundings.
The thing, too, vanished, gone in the same instant as Jack’s arrival, taking its sucking presence with it as it went.
“Dad?” Danny turned to his father, sheer habit guiding him to fumble for the nearest excuse. He still felt badly off balance, the absent sensation of a core hidden deeper and more still than any true ghost could hope to survive leaving him feeling uncommonly vulnerable. “Y-yeah I’m fine.” Why was his core still quiet? Was the thing still there, or was it some kind of long-term effect? “I guess I tripped?”
“You tripped?”
Was that not enough? Should he say more?
“...and maybe-kinda-sorta saw a ghost?” A statement that was probably even true!
Whoah, the pain must really be getting to him more than he thought.
"A ghost?"
“A ghost!” David, who had waddled up behind Jack while he kneeled over his son, looked on in wonderment. “Already!? Damn.”
“You think that lousy spook knocked you down?” Jack asked. Danny couldn’t see it from his position, but he was sure his father was reaching for one of his guns even as he spoke. “Why I oughta–”
“No, dad, I really tripped.” The last thing he needed right now was a trigger happy ghost hunter shooting off right next to him. “Or fell, more like fell.” Danny leveraged himself up, only to be foiled by the pack of equipment still pressing down on his back. Was he imagining it, or was it heavier than it was just a few seconds before? “The ghost just, um, talked to me?”
“Oh really! What it say, kid? Any fun family secrets I wanna hear?”
Danny honestly wasn’t sure, and was, even more honestly, not sure if he wanted to be.
‘Are you, as I am?’
“Uh, I think she was asking if I knew her?” Danny rubbed his nose, which had managed to hit the floor sometime during the debacle. Did she mean a Halfa, an ex-halfa, was she what happened to a half ghost’s ghost? “And who I was,” what I was, “Like I was somehow supposed to know her back.”
“Already lying!” Jack said, helping his son back to his feet. “Typical ghost cunning. Danno, how about you head back to the car. Looks like this spook is nastier than we thought!”
“Whoah, hold up a second Jack.” David interjected. “You can’t leave the kid, the ghost came for him, he saw it!”
“Anyone can see a ghost if it lets ‘em.” Jack dismissed his brother’s protest, dusting off the floor grime still affixed to Danny’s shirt.“You head back to the GAV, Danno, your old man can handle it from here.”
“What?” Danny, caught off guard by the idea that his father would want him to not hunt a specter of any kind, almost lost control of his knees all over again.
Losing access to his core really did not feel good.
“You’re just an apprentice, Danno!” His dad was probably aiming for enthusiastic, but comforting, but what came he said felt unpleasantly like dismissal. “The Nightingales were top tier ghost hunters back in their day, so when Davie called me about a ghost problem, I–well.” Here he seemed somewhat abashed. “I didn’t think it would be too big a deal."
' But whatever that beastie was, it knocked you down faster than I could move! I brought you here to learn, son, not get yourself hurt.” Said the man who very regularly pointed guns at Danny, threatening him over and over again with every kind of pain.
“I’m fine, dad, really.” Danny shoved off his father’s hand, trying not to look irritated as he did. His parents had no idea he was Phantom, just like they had no idea that he was arguably a better ghost hunter than them both.
“See, kid’s fine!” David said. “Which, for the record? pretty crazy! I dunno how ghosts work where you come from, but the Nightingale ghost is something special.” Evidently pleased with having placed himself back in the center of attention, David swung through the other door, where he could face both Jack and Danny from the slight incline provided by the uneven floor.
“‘Cause I might not be a ghost ‘expert’, but I’ve been reading up. And our little lady spirit can’t be seen by just anyone! According to the documents some of the old Nightingales left behind, the only times this ‘grey waif’’ can be seen is when is when someone either comes too close to death, or–”
He paused dramatically.
“They’re psychic!”
“Psychic?” Danny and his father echoed the word.
“Psychic.” David repeated, then, overcome by some secret humor, fell to chuckling into his fist. “God, the look of you two, was that practice or improv…?” His words petered off as he laughed.
“But anyway,” He continued, poise regained, ”sensitive and shit, you know, kid can see ghosts.”
Danny would have thought the presumption funny, had it not been so damningly close to true.
“Danno always did have a knack for telling where a spook was…” His father said, unexpectedly willing to consider the notion. “What do you think, Danno? Want to stick it out?”
Danny looked back at his father, and considered it.
On one hand, no. No way, nu-uh, abort mission and return to base. This wasn’t his haunt, he had nothing to do with this. His powers were suppressed, and the simple prospect of walking out the door, shaking off whatever force had compelled his ghost half to stay so still and hide so deep was painfully tempting.
On the other hand, that would also mean leaving his father with nothing but shady uncle number two (this time by blood!) Alone, in a house that was haunted by a ghost he didn’t understand, that could somehow, impossibly, siphon power straight from his core. Worse still, it was fast, moving in and out of range instantaneously, and that wasn’t even accounting for how it had somehow evaded his ghost sense.
…Which, now that he thought about it, was odd. It was possible his powers were simply muted to the point of unusability, but—
Danny glanced at the ecto-detector strapped to his fathers hip.
It and the half a dozen other ghost sensing mechanisms loaded into their packs had been feet away from a high level spector, and made no sound.
Something wasn’t right, and Danny wouldn’t, couldn’t, just let it be. As much as he was inclined to doubt David’s suppositions, it was true that he was the only one who had seen the ghost, despite his father being right next to him when it appeared. It was possible that it was similar to Yungblood, only perceptible to those who met certain conditions, such as being psychic, or, in Danny’s case, very close to dead.
If that was true, then the power it exhibited, the speed, it was too much. Danny loved his father, but there was no denying he was more inventor than hunter, and with his mom filling in for herself and Jack at that parascience convention down in Wisconsin, Danny, hobbled though he was, was the closest thing they had to a fighter.
He couldn’t leave, not until he was sure his family was well and truly safe.
“Well, I guess.” He said at last. Then, in a flash of inspiration,
“but this totally counts as extra credit, right?”
What came next was set up, both Danny and Jack pulling apart their packs and readying detectors, turrets, guns, and a small ghost shield in the entryway foyer of the home, chosen both because of its close proximity to the door and its generous size, which was, according to David, something of an exception to Nightingale manor’s overall design.
“Looks like an entire newsroom got lost in a funhouse maze and died in there.” He’d said by way of description.
It was true. Every inch of the walls, all the way up to, then over, the grand overhead skylight was covered in a thick layer of print, filtering the late evening light until everything was bathed in some shade of sulfur. What wasn’t yellow was usually stained black, victim of cheap, runny ink. Articles melted into each other, words smudged to waterfalls devoid of meaning and smeared over wood and trim.
“Man, I tell ya.” David continued.“All this makes it clearer why mom and pops did what they did. If I thought you wanted to spend your life playing art collage with other people’s walls, hell!” He brayed. “I’d have kicked you out too."
“You parents kicked you out?” Danny hadn’t known that.
“Ah, well! My folks were just worried about my career prospects.” Jack pulled another set of batteries from one of their turrets, most of his attention still on the device. All of their equipment had developed issues with their charge, and it was proving difficult to find a fix.“They just had trouble thinking of ghosts as a science, was all!”
“Yeah, real scientific!” David scoffed. “No offense Jack, but what’s papered over walls and laser guns got to do with ghosts?”
Danny groaned, and Jack brightened, setting aside the innards of the faulty turret.
“Great question, Davie!” The only thing Jack loved more than hunting ghosts was talking about them. In great, nauseating detail, none of which the teenaged halfa particularly wanted or needed to hear.
“See, ghost hunting as a profession has changed and grown with the times! Back in the day, it started with folks collecting what they knew and passing it down as tradition, right? So if one old village guy spots a ghost that likes to read, he tells it to all his kids, and they tell it to all their kids, and before you know it—Hey presto! You have a whole culture pasting words all over their walls, convinced every spook that sees it will have to read it, instead of just the one.
‘Cause that’s the trick; every spook has its one thing. When a human soul stays longer than it’s supposed to, it’ll start to decay, just fade away to nothing until it poofs off to wherever dead folks are supposed to go. But–” He paused dramatically, one finger raised. “That’s only if they don’t have an anchor, a desire so strong, it weighs ‘em down and keeps ‘em whole. That anchor, we call it an Obsession, lets a soul stay, but at the expense of their humanity! Obsessions are so strong, there’s no room left for the person that made it. It just sucks ‘em up and uses ‘em for fuel until all that’s left is a bag of ectoplasm, mindlessly chasing whatever forced the poor thing to stick around long to turn into a ghost from the start!"
Danny kept as much focus as he could on helping with the setup, cursing his lack of internet access. This was exactly the kind of occasion he preferred to drown out with the loudest and most obnoxious songs Spotify could offer.
It was how theories like this came so close to right, he suspected, that made the parts that were wrong hurt so much more.
'Problem is though, that desire could be anything!” Jack barrelled on. “Maybe a ghost Obsessed with reading would be slowed down, but a ghost Obsessed with tinker toys wouldn’t even pay a set up like this a second glance!
'Of course, some stuff does work all the time, like extra pure silver.” Jack waved a hand in the rough direction of the gate. “Or salt or even blood blossoms, back before they went extinct! It makes it hard to tell what really works or is just folklore until you test it for real, and that’s not counting purity an’ cultivar types and how most of that stuff is either too heavy or too expensive to produce en masse!
‘That’s where new age ghost hunters like me and Mads come in! The Nightingales are great, but they’re old school, mixing up what works with tall tales and hookum and who knows what else. What you’re looking at here–” Jack patted the hull of his half gutted turret. “Is a product of that good old Fenton-ian dedication to logic, reason, and the scientific way! Instead of relying on hearsay and mysteries, we take the fight straight to the source! Fight ectoplasm with ectoplasm, I say! Human ingenuity combined with ghostly power! Mass producible and easy to use! Fenton products can put a spook on its knees faster than you can say surrender!”
'Or they can, most days, when–Hmm–” His contact with the weapon apparently reminded him of their ongoing technical issues. “Danno, could you get a spare set of batteries? I think these ran out.”
Danny hopped up, more than glad for the distraction. Unfortunately, he already had a sneaking suspicion it wouldn’t do them much good. Each power pack felt the same in his hands, painfully empty, the characteristic tingle of ectoplasm absent from their shells.
He remembered the sucking sensation on his core, vacuuming every scrap of power he’d had.
If it could drain him, it could drain their equipment.
Oh, this was bad, this was so bad.
“Here’s the stuff.” Danny brought the batteries over, brain churning furiously as he tried to work through the problem of how to convince his dad to get out. No ghost powers, no equipment, no wonder the ghost hadn’t shown up a second time, it didn’t need to, they were practically sitting ducks!
Had they already been locked in? Danny decided to pretend he hadn’t thought of that, he was stressing enough as is.
“Thanks Danno.” Jack took the batteries out of his hand with a distracted air. “Don’t know what’s going on with the equipment all of the sudden, little fellahs just don’t want to work.” He turned back the turret, quite missing the eyeroll David sent his way.
“So, uh, dad.” Danny said, not entirely sure how to broach the topic.
“Yep?” His father’s tone remained light, quite unconscious of the distress his son was instinctively trying to press against him.
“Say, hypothetically, there was something wrong with every ectoplasmic source of power, in um, the entire house. None of your weapons work and the ghost you’re hunting is super powerful. What would you do? you know, hypothetically.”
“Hypothetically?” Jack asked, “I’d probably re-check my equipment. That kind of phenomenon isn’t something a ghost could do—Some could probably pull ectoplasm like that a little, but the scaling would be terrible! The amount of power needed to drain everything like this would exceed the amount they could ever get back! It’s a net negative, and any spook that tried to would eventually just implode!”
‘I suppose a machine, or maybe an old Nightengale ritual could do it, but any nearby ghost would end up getting sucked dry, and since we know there is a ghost, you saw it yourself! Then it can’t be that, either! It’s a nifty idea, Danno,” Jack tucked the last of the exposed wires into its casing. “But when it comes to mechanical failure, you’re better off looking for mechanical solutions. Which I will find, eventually! Just as soon as I get these replaced."
The batteries went in with a satisfying snap, but the gun remained inert.
“Hm, maybe it’s a connection issue after all.” He said.
“Ooorr, Maybe the kid has a point.” David interjected, roused from his spate of post-lecture somnolence. “I mean, it’s better than admitting your machines just don’t work.”
“Well, yes, but–” Jack’s face twisted as he sought to explain. “ Davie, you don’t understand! This isn’t something a ghost can do!”
“Your ghosts maybe.” David shot back. “But I told you, didn’t I? This one is special. How do you know it's not some rare species, Jack, a once and a lifetime specimen, huh?” He hooked an arm around the other man’s shoulder, leaned in beside his ear. “Think about it, your name, emblazoned across ghost hunting history for taking down the world’s one and only super spook. Don’t you like it, Jack, doesn’t that sound good?”
Temptation swept over his father’s face, strong enough to color the taste of him. Jack loved people, Danny knew, loved showing off his grand ideas and sharing his excitement for everything ghost with everyone, all the time. The chance to be admired for that, after so many years of ridicule, even now, must be terrible in its allure.
Terrible, yes, but not enough to submerge his sense entirely. As fast as it came, Jack shook it off, his expression resettling into something more concerned.
“If that’s the case, then I need to call in Mads.” He said. “She’s the ectobiologist, this isn’t something I can just let her sit out.”
“And our phones only get reception at the base of the mountain.” Danny added.
“And we’d have to figure out some kind of insulator for our power packs. These things need more than just what an electrical socket can provide, y’know!”
“Which means we need to leave!” For a long time, a really long time, preferably forever, if Danny had his way.
“I’m sorry Davie.” Jack’s shoulders slumped in remorse. “If it was just me, why, I’d take the fight to that spook with fists alone! But Danno’s here, and my wife needs to know.”
The expression that crossed David’s face as he took in their words was an odd one: Frustration and impatience warred for control behind his eyes, but his face stayed slack, hiding some unknown calculation.
“But I tell you what!” Jack continued, straightening himself back up in an affectation of cheer. “You know that family discount I gave you? Well now it’s on the house! As soon as we can get some insulation over our batteries, we’ll beat that spook free of charge!"
“And what if you didn’t?” David’s response came unexpectedly, with a flat undertone to his words Danny hadn’t previously heard. “What if I said stay.”
“What? Why?” Danny couldn’t help but respond. Personally, he saw no reason why they couldn’t leave, right now, in fact. He was already halfway towards the door.
“Because I asked you to come, didn’t I?” David exclaimed, entirely ignoring that it was Danny who’d spoken, not Jack.
“Me, after all these years, I took a risk on you. Do you know what mom and dad would do to me if they thought I was playing around with the supernatural? Taking it seriously? Hell, I had to tell them I sold this place downmarket before they’d get off my back! Can you imagine what would happen, if they found out I was talking to you!?”
“Davie, I don’t–”
“Ghosts and spooks could be three times more popular than they are right now, and it wouldn’t mean shit with them! And you know what? You know what? Maybe it’s ‘cause they’ve got damn good reason!
“Davie–”
“You were my big brother Jack!” David was yelling now. “The best, the brightest! The natural born, bona-fide genius! Do you know how much I looked up to you? Do you have any idea how much it hurt, when you threw it all away!? You chose your own selfish passions over mom! Over dad! Over me!”
“And then, did you call, jack? Did you visit? Huh? Did you?”
“Mom and Dad told me to leave, Davie!” Jack recovered enough to protest. “I couldn’t come back!”
“That’s not the point Jack!” David replied. “The point is you never tried, just like you’re not trying now! One little snag, and you just gave up and ran away, lived your own life and left everyone else to deal with the mess you left behind!”
David moved in, faster than expected for a man of his girth.
“But I tried.” His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper as he spoke. “I called you, and I could call you again Jack. For Thanksgiving, for Christmas, and who knows? Maybe just to talk. But I need you to do this for me, Jack, I need you to stay for me.”
A grand silence followed, stuffed so thick with unrestrained emotions that Danny felt like he was in the garden all over again, fighting just to breath.
“Okay.” Jack said at last, breaking through the stillness that still lay tight between them. “Okay, I–I’m sorry, Davie, I understand. If you need me that badly, I’ll do my best to help. But—” He raised both hands, palms out, preemptively mollifying. “Only if we arm ourselves with all the silver we can find! And Danno, you’ve got to promise to stay outside, alright son?”
“That’s the spirit!” David patted his brother across the back, the tension of the moment popped like a stuck balloon. “Good old Jack.” He pulled out his camera once more. “I knew you’d come through.”
Danny, obviously, did not go outside.
He did consider it, even tested the door, giving it an experimental pull, just to see if it would give. It was with a sense of profound relief when he felt the heavy oaken panel shift easily beneath his hand, loosing the scent of outdoor air into the stuffy confines of the house.
Good news, he could get out: Bad news, there was no guarantee he could get back in if he went. Locking someone out of a haunt was just as easy as locking them in, and considering the Nightingale ghost didn’t exactly greet him with a smile, Danny was willing to bet he wasn’t its idea of a welcome guest.
He rubbed at his chest, wincing at the hollow ache that pulsed beneath it still.
He hated the sensation, the feeling of something so personal, deeply violated and constrained. The temptation to leave was nearly overwhelming, to step out of the house on even the faintest of chances that he could fill himself back up again, to halt for even the merest second that sense gum-toothed gnawing that ground against his soul.
But he couldn’t, not while the Nightingale ghost still maintained control.
So instead he stayed, waiting until Jack and David departed to start his own search throughout the house.
It frustrated Danny, slightly, as he chased the elder Fentons shadow’s up the narrow stairway towards the second floor, that he was expected to stay behind while David was not. Sure, he was a kid, and, sure, he’d made it clear hunting ghosts with his parents was a bore, at best. The fact that Jack and David were brothers, as strange as it was to think of his father as having family at all, perhaps played into it somehow, too. But still!
‘So much for being psychic.'
The thought grumbled across his mind as he squeezed his way up the stairs. Just as David had said, everything outside the entryway foyer was narrow, bent and uneven in a manner too deliberate to ascribe to anything but some kind of architectural malintent.
It certainly made getting to the second story a chore. Danny considered himself clumsy on a good day, and between the weakness that flooded in the wake of his ghost half, and the asymmetrical nature of absolutely everything, there was no question that today was exactly what a good day was not.
He ended up taking long enough that by the time he reached the landing, he’d lost track of Jack and David entirely, either past the blind corner at the end of the hall, or behind one of the doors that lined the way.
And there really were entirely too many doors.
Doors crammed next to doors, doors set crooked inside frames tilted to match their skew, there were even doors nested inside other, larger doors, up to four at a time, each fitted with their own knobs and fine, miniature knockers.
It was not so bad as to say the entirety of each wall was completely filled, but it was a close thing, and perhaps even preferable when compared to the hallway itself.
Like the stairs, the hall had been built at an angle, preferring to lean at a leftwards slant before snapping itself off into a needless corner, too sharply bent to see beyond. The floorboards, too, were tilted, eschewing the direction of the walls in favor of a right leaning tilt that left him slipping just a little with every step he took.
Glueing this madness together was more paper, layered over the plaster in a manner much like the main entryway below. Though still damp, the damage here was less severe, and headlines announcing the arrest of Al Capone were crammed cheek to jowl against the sinking of the Lucitania, the rise of the Bull Moose party, obituaries pasted over wedding announcements, celebrities, presidents, socialites pressed together in a meaningless cacophony of ink.
Everywhere there was space, lives began and ended in grand pronouncements and little footnotes, begging for attention even as the letters that preserved them faded and blurred. So many memories forgotten, human triumphs and tragedy discarded, too dry to rot, too wet to crumple.
Danny traced the wall as he walked, appreciating the feel of paper and wood alternating against his skin, trying not to think about how he had no clue about what he should do next. He had no idea where the ghost was, what it was doing, or why. Even if he did, he could hardly arm himself with silver, and to say his ghost powers were out of commission was putting it nicely. Just thinking of the vacant space beside his heart that echoed dimly hollow with every feeble beat brought forth a new rush of helplessness and fear.
Should he try to catch up with his father and uncle after all, he wondered, rather than tag behind?
It was times like this that he really missed his friends. Sam and Tucker would have kept him from messing up like this, helped him think of some kind of plan that didn’t involve falling face first into the jaws of the enemy, or at the very least, stop his family from following him in.
Caught in a moment of lonesomeness, he pulled out his phone. Still no bars, and worse, the battery was down by half of what it should be based on when he’d last checked it a few hours before.
Was the ghost, half ghost ghost? Draining electricity, now that it was out of ectoplasm?
Danny shut down his phone, hoping it was enough to save the charge.
Somewhat distracted, it took him a moment to appreciate his surroundings after he rounded the corner at the end of the hall.
What he saw when he looked around were doors crammed next to doors. Doors set crooked in frames built askew, doors pressed into walls papered over with dead gangsters and sinking ships he couldn’t help but feel he’d seen before.
Danny blinked, the thought of ‘oh I must have gotten turned around’ quickly replaced by ‘someone made two identical halls?’ It was the only explanation that made sense. He’d walked in a straight line and turned left, whoever built the house must have duplicated the hallways, some kind of obscure anti-ghost tactic, he was sure.
And he may well have convinced himself of that, had he not taken a step backward in his confusion, nearly slipping before he caught himself on the banister of the stairway that hadn’t been there before.
“What the…What?”
He stared in blank confusion at the impossible descent. It was in every way identical to the stairway that he’d used to climb up to the second floor in the first place, except, of course, it couldn’t be. The stairway, the real one, was a full corridor’s worth away.
Danny knew haunts tended to bend reality, had even done it himself a few times, subconsciously hiding his favorite breakfast cereal from the rest of his family, or forcing the temperature to flux down to his preferred range, but something of this level, warping space without any regard for real world physics or integrity of the space, so fast, so fluently would require an outrageous amount of power.
Roughly several batteries, a few generators, and a half-ghost’s worth, in fact.
Then came the knocking.
A cold, repetitive staccato of fist against wood, echoing next to his ear, from down the hall, from each and every door all at once, overwhelming his senses. The ache in his chest flared anew, as the thing–was it really a ghost? His initial doubt reconsidered–drew near.
Danny turned, both feet braced, arms raised and fists clenched in his best fighting posture as the knocking reached its crescendo, shaking old dust from the twisted rafters lurking in the shadows of the ceiling.
Powers or no powers, this time, at least, he’d face it standing.
Then, suddenly as the noise arrived, so it vanished. Danny was left, breathing hard as the grimy air swirled in the dim glow provided by the edison bulbs above.
It was thanks to these that he saw it, the moment when one of the doors began to push itself open. Slowly, creaking like a bear trap left too long to rust, it moved out from a wall that had manifested where the mimic corridor would have been an eyeblink before. Congealed lines of darkness leaked out from the space newly parted between the frame, where it pooled down to the floor before boiling itself to nothing between the splintered boards.
“Oh, haha, good one.” Danny kept his posture tense. “Honestly, I always thought the whole knocking thing was overrated, but you know what? You made it work. Eight out of ten for scary. What’s next? Blood from the walls? Fingernails over chalkboard? Sad moans? Some Wailing?”
The specter–He was sure it was still there, swelling hollowness in his chest serving in place of his usual ghost sense–Stayed silent. Shadows wisped up and dissipated into the murky atmosphere, commingling with the dust.
“I’m warning you though, I’m a pretty good wailer. In fact, why don’t you come outside, I’ll show you, we can make a chorus!”
The dim light burned narrow bands across the dark, revealing nothing.
“So that’s it, huh?” Danny wasn’t exactly sure why he was still talking, except that it was banter, and banter made him feel normal.“Blow all your budget on the opening act? Easy to do, but I paid the tickets and I’m not leaving until I get the whole show!”
Oh God, he was doing it. No powers, no backup, no clue, just standing there like a moron, offering to trade fisticuffs with a ghost.
Sam was right. His plans were terrible.
“Well, C’mon,” He said. “Show me what you’ve got!”
The door opened wider in response, spilling out a midnight glut. Pure dark pooled cool and hungry around his feet while the void behind the frame stood back and watched.
“Or maybe not. You know what, how about we don’t.” A fan of supernatural doorways, Danny was not, especially when they leaked all over his feet. Even the portal had the decency not to leave too much of a mess, not even when it fried him.
“Soo~,” he said, backing up to the edge of the stairwell. “No take-backsies?”
His questions brokered no response.
He gulped, looked down at the stairs he still teetered just beside. It was impossible to tell if it would lead him back to the floor below, or simply loop him up again, trapping him in the same narrow corridor over and over until he went where it wanted him to go.
All the doors probably did that, in fact, except the one, of course. Whatever ghostlike creature walked these halls, Danny and his father had provided it enough energy to do practically anything.
A stupid move on Danny’s part, not accounting for his usual bad luck.
Which led to the next question, fully screwed and out of options, what was he supposed to do now?
‘Be brave, Danny, you’re a hero, aren’t you?’ He imagined it was Sam, saying that. Her fearless gaze compelling him forward, pushing him towards destinations he alone would never dare.
Yeah, he was a hero, a ghost fighting hero, even if he was maybe, slightly, just a little bit in over his head right now, this was still a ghost. Or ghostly. Close enough.
Even if he was trapped, he couldn’t just let himself freeze.
Danny took a deep breath. If there was no way out but forward, then he’d go forward, show this soul sucking goo-thing who’s boss.
He forced himself to take one step, then another, trying to ignore the slosh and roll of darkness against his calves.
He thought of Tucker, always going on about being ‘just tech support’ when he was so cool all the time. He had such a talent for making things, in a way Danny always wished he could share.
He took it slowly, inching forward as smoothly as his aching muscles allowed. The closer he came, the denser the darkness, liquid shadow drained down, slurped back into the frame, tendrils receded as lines of black unstained themselves from the surrounding wall.
He was only good at fighting, really. A geek with a knack for destroying things and finding trouble that only seemed to escalate when he woke up half dead and wholly inhuman over a year and a half before.
Tucker and Sam didn’t need powers, he knew, could fight ghosts with nothing but a well programmed smartphone and two fistfulls of lasers between them.
Danny hoped right here, right now, he might be able to do the same.
The dark continued to coalesce, making way at the edges for emanations of silver. Its power grew stronger, clawing at him, trying to prise apart his humanity in search of the ghost he kept hidden deep within.
His thoughts turned next to Jazz, who learned his secret but chose to wait, who was still willing to be his sister even during that long interim when she thought he was well and truly gone, just a ghost cleverly disguised as what he used to be. It was a level of loyalty and love he honestly hadn’t expected to receive, was still astonished, sometimes, to know it had been given.
Danny kept moving, trying not to slip on the uneven ground hidden beneath the muck.
Silver lines gathered, forming the crude outline of a person, splitting itself into limbs hooked to hourglass curves, bellyful of shadows swirling within its waist.
There were his parents to consider, too. They loved him, he knew, in their own way. Always enthusiastic over his accomplishments, even the ones they didn’t understand, and when his grades became well and truly unsalvageable, they even went so far as to set up an internship, just for him.
A few steps more, he watched the darkness center itself at last, black sphere pressed deep within a breast of silver, void in place of a core, sucking power from everything around it with endless, hungry force. Not even its own container seemed immune, bright form eddying unsteadily around its maw.
All of them, his family, and the ghosts who offered much the same, Clockwork, Frostbite, Pandora, his kith, his kin, everyone, they were counting on him. To hold his own, to be brave.
And he had no intention of letting them down.
One last step, a herculean effort of motion towards the thing that lit every cell on fire and sent his hidden core crying in muted horror. He pushed forward, until he and the apparition stood face to face.
It was clear, now that he could see it fully formed and up close, that what he’d first perceived as nothing more than mist and darkness was obviously a person, distinctly feminine, just a bit shorter than Danny himself.
She held her head high, as he did, each of them staring the other down. Curvaceous and full, the woman had a petite, heart shaped face hidden beneath hair that curled down to her feet. sharp eyes, which struck a strange cord of memory in their shape, assessed him over a small, well shaped nose, equally familiar, though in a manner distinctly different from the piercing gaze she sent his way.
“Are you a ghost?”
Danny blurted out the question, his curiosity getting the better of him before he could think to hold it back.
In truth, it had been bothering him for a while, tickling the scientifically inclined portion of his brain. On one hand, she controlled the house in the same way he would expect of a real specter, but on the other, she triggered neither his ghost sense nor his father’s mechanical detectors, while sucking in power at a rate that should have caused her to self-destruct within the first few hours of her existence.
There was her appearance to consider, too. Even discounting the black hole pitted in her chest, the silver lady was strangely ephemeral, washed out in a way that no true ghost would ever be. In form and feature, however, she was a perfect reflection of a living woman, an oddity in and of itself. Ghosts, by their very nature, were not human, and the shape of them reflected that. Warped or twisted, allowing one’s mind and body to alter underneath the titanic pressure of death was the price they paid to keep going when the world demanded they move on.
Not even Danny had escaped. For all he kept on living, Every long toothed smile, every shake of his snow struck locks, every green blush against the skin, every one and more marked Phantom as a creature, a being fundamentally and essentially apart.
No.
The apparition responded.
I am not
Ah, well, that answered that question.
“Okay, so, not a ghost. Then would you say you’re, what, body-deprived? Spectral-American? Maybe just plain old undead?”
As I am not
Forsaken.
So you are not
alive
And yet your heart
Beats On
regardless.
Rejecting This
Truth.
“Not what I asked, but yeeahh, I’m weird like that.” He took a breath, hand venturing up to rub the side of his neck in an effort to sooth his nerves. As much his species was a daily fact of his existence, admitting it out loud remained hard.
“I’m a halfa.” He said at last. “You know, as in half-a-ghost, half-a-boy? Totally alive, except when I’m not?”
The silver lady gave him a blank look.
“Well, kinda.” He admitted. “I really don’t get it either. I just know I’m not completely dead.”
Strange
To be stuck so.
Trapped.
And yet
Desire
No release.
“Wait, what? Are you saying I should die, like all the way!?” Danny backed up in surprise, more than a little affronted. “Thanks, but that shit hurt enough the first time. And could you quit with the–” He waved his hands for emphasis “Stylings? Full offense, but this is Lancer’s intro to poetry all over again."
No
I cannot.
I see now
That
Your
Perversion
Prevents
You from hearing
The call.
“...huh?” Danny replied intellectually.
She’d lost him, not that he’d been following along terribly well from the start.
Come
And
Follow
If you
Care to
Know.
The lady turned, retreating beyond the door, which now provided entrance into an unexpectedly ordinary room.
No papers here were pasted over the walls, revealed as pale white plaster trimmed in oak. A window, slanted at an angle, overlooked a finely tended garden. Demure hedges and well groomed roses sprouted between a smooth marble pathway, connecting the space between the house and a grand silver gate, struck by the light of a newly risen moon, its unearthly hue identical to the apparition that walked before him.
In most other respects, the room was unremarkable, a vanity sat undusted opposite to a modest bed, lacy sheets in perfect array below a painting set just over the dark curve of a well polished headboard.
That which has
Departed longs
To go.
Though I know I swore
That I would not.
Those
many years
Ago.
She walked towards the bed, fingers dancing over its yellow frame with the motions of long familiarity.
And yet I
Betray that oath
In
Welcoming you
In welcoming
Those removed
From my line of kin.
In my
Longing
Ever greater
For rest.
She looked up, caught in a memory. Danny followed her line of sight, tracing it to the painting which sat proudly above their heads.
It was large, with an enormously ornate and gilded frame native to another era’s fashion, depicting a family of four before a newly built Nightingale manor. Bright blue and cheerful in a crooked, eccentric sort of fashion, it peered over the family in curiosity from its perch atop the clean grey stones of its foundation.
There was a man, obviously the father, cheerful and broad, a wife, leaned into the shoulder of her spouse, eyes cast upward in painted sparkle as she gazed upon her love. A son, too, sat beneath his father’s knee. And then, standing slightly apart, almond eyes cutting through the viewer, was a lady.
I thought
At first
That
we were
Alike.
Her voice had shrunk down to a whisper, a rustle of silk pulled softly between her lips.
The same face, the same nose, very much like his father’s, he realized, and even his own. The feature must be some kind of family trait.
But where
You
Chose
I
Was chosen
To stay was
An honor
They said.
There was one discrepancy within the painting, standing out from the otherwise cheerful scene. The sun, shining somewhere beyond the canvas, cast shadows of three out of the four members of the family only a little ways behind them, resting more or less undistorted across the lawn in a companionable cluster underneath their feet.
The lady’s, however, was stretched.
To live
Without living
Hidden well
From the
Long hand
Of death.
Over the field, over the garden, pulled out like taffy until there was almost nothing left, the woman sat in isolation from her own shadow, which looked back at her from where it lay pinned, affixed across one of the larger stones that made up the house's base.
On and on
Forever.
I told myself
It was an honor.
“So you don’t want to stay?” He said. It wasn’t really a question, but it was hard not to phrase it like one.
No
She responded.
I am
Already
Gone.
He could see the wistfulness in her, pale eyes tracing over the solid, living form of the girl she could not escape.
It took me too long
To realize
That
I think.
She turned to face him, and he felt himself shudder as the force of the void within her turned in kind, its full power trying to suck him in all over again now that he was once more within its sight.
I did
As I
Was
Bade
To do.
Fulfilled
Every
expectation
Gave
Everything
But
Forever.
She reached for his hands, her misty grasp delicate, but tangible, burning against his skin with cold fire as she laced her silver fingers between the empty spaces of his own.
I
Think that
I
Am done.
Her eyes, indisputably human, bored into his with such intensity that he could barely register anything else as she spoke, no, as she pleaded, palms clasped in desperate entreaty around the boy halfway towards the very kind of creature she had been made to end.
I
Think I
Would like
To be
Done.
Danny himself did not understand it, this desire for going. Having rebuffed it once, and in that instant changed, he had grown blind to the idea that a human soul might well begin to weary. That such a thing might seek other lands, in other places, beyond that great green forever which claimed him thus.
But there was one thing he knew very well, understood completely, beyond all doubt: This person was a person, and she needed his help.
Please.
She said,
Please.
“How?” He answered. “What do you want me to do?”
She pulled herself out from his grasp, leaving behind palms burnt red and blistered as she turned, arm thrust out, pointing with everything she had towards the cheerful vista centered above their heads. Then, in that last, determined gesture, vanished, her image scattering back to mist.
He looked up to the painting, which seemed much less wholesome, now, than it had first appeared.
Old legends, something Sam must have told him once or twice before, flitted across his mind, whispering about foundation rituals and deathless sleeps, how a family that hated ghosts but wanted protection might go about the creation of a guardian within their home.
He noticed how the shadow seemed to center around the leftmost cornerstone, in particular.
And just like that, the pieces of the puzzle slotted into place.
He knew where he needed to go.
At one point or another, the door had closed behind him, which wouldn’t have been so terrible a thing had the doorknob not been made of, what else, but silver. With his hands already burnt by the lady’s touch, Danny wasn’t exactly keen to add to the damage.
Damage that, in one more point against this whole ridiculous day, stalwartly refused to heal.
In the end, he opted to wrap his shirt around his palms as a sort of makeshift glove, hoping that the thin fabric lining might be enough to save what remained of his skin.
He grasped the handle, then, as fast as he could, pushed forward, directly into the face of the person standing in the way of its swing.
“Ghost!?”
“Dad!”
“Oh, it’s you Danno.” Jack lowered his makeshift weapon, another silver handle likely pilfered from somewhere nearby. “I thought I told you to stay outside.”
“Yeah, um, I came back in.” Danny lied. “Look, dad, this is going to sound crazy, but I–” Saw a ghost? No, that would make things worse. He needed his dad to listen to what he had to say, not discount it as ‘the lies of some lousy ectoplasmic scum.’ “...Had a psychic vision?”
“You did?” Jack asked. “You mean Davie was right?”
“Ha! Knew it. It’s always the weird ones that’s psychic.” David came up with his camera raised, snapping a photo of them both. “So whatcha get?”
“And why didn’t you tell us this before?” Jack, in preferring to remain focused on the fact that his son, otherwise honest so far as he knew, had elected to hold back something as serious as secret superpowers, was less easily led in the direction Danny wanted him to go.
“It’s new?” he suggested, promising to undig himself out of this hole later, during a time that wasn’t now. “Look, the point is, I think I’ve figured out how to get rid of the ghost. You just need to follow me for a bit, okay?"
“Well,” Jack paused, weighing the chance to catch a ghost over the need to have some kind of conversation with his son. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt.” Danny relaxed as his father did, willingly distracted by the task at hand. “Alright son, lead the way!”
“About damn time.” David said, rather more irascible as he followed along behind. “I was beginning to think this whole horse and pony show would go on all night.”
From there it was back to the first floor, navigating the twisting series of hallways he didn’t remember traversing when he first came up, down the stairs, then, in a flash of inspiration, making a pit stop by the scattered array of technology he and his father had hauled up earlier that day.
“Going for a mechanical solution after all, eh, Danno?”
“Yeah, unless you have a spare jackhammer lying around.” He responded. As much as he would prefer to blast his way in if, when, his powers returned, so long as his audience continued to tag along, subtly recharging a gun or two would have to suffice.
“Jackhammer? The hell you need a Jackhammer, for?” David was less enthusiastic, off pace and obviously unhappy with this new turn of events.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you.” Danny said, putting a few preemptive steps between himself and his would be uncle. “I maybe-kinda need to break a few things right now. No problem though, it’s fine, stuff like this happens in Amity all the time!”
“Hey!”
David lunged, but he was no match for the half ghost teen. Danny darted out of the house, using the nose of this weapon to pull the door open as he did.
His father, for whom the destruction of ghosts always took priority over a touch of property damage here and there, happily barreled past his brother, wearing the largest grin Danny had seen all day.
He felt it, the moment he made it past the threshold. His core sprang back, swooping out from hiding with a glorious hum, flooding his veins with a sense of energy and power that left him feeling absurdly, outrageously, paradoxically alive.
He managed to avoid stumbling from sudden rush, but only just.
A quick jog across the fallow lawn, and he had made it to his destination: A great, crudely carved block of granite, placed in the highest part of the foundation between the eastern and western walls.
“Wait dammit!” David, still lagging behind, struggled to catch up. “This isn’t what I wanted!”
He had already charged his rifle during his run, and a quick hand pressed against his father’s own weapon ensured that the battery was active as well.
“All right," he said, "so something important to the ghost is in that rock, and if we can shoot it out, I’m pretty sure the ghost will come out too.”
“Now that’s a solution I can get behind!” Jack replied, hoisting his weapon at the ready. “You’re reminding me of me already!”
Danny grimaced, wondering if he’d think the same if he knew he was trying to help the being, rather than harm it.
“On three, alright?”
Father and son raised their guns, large, heavy repeaters designed to hammer specters out of the sky.
“One”
“Two”
“Three!”
The late evening was lit in a barrage of stark green rays, stone shattered and sent flying with each successful hit. Cracks spread over the boulder, shedding gravel between larger chunks that turned ever more unstable with every strike.
It didn’t take long, no more than two dozen shots, not counting those of Jack’s that went wild, before the entire face of the cornerstone collapsed, revealing the hollow space within.
Danny lowered his gun, Jack following in kind soon after. David, who had run up too late to stop them, mouthed in astonishment, voice stricken at the sight of what lay within the stone.
“It’s a body.” He said when words returned, still halfway between horror and doubt. “It’s a god-damn body.”
“So that’s why the Nightingale House was haunted.” Jack agreed.
It was indeed a body, though in a state of such excellent preservation it was difficult to call it dead.
It was a woman, or perhaps a lady, newly minted in her maturation, no more than twenty. Her cheeks, just visible from where her head lay against her knees, dusted with a pinkish blush beneath hair that had grown into a cloak around her, wrapping her in a cradle of curly brown, tangled with the roots that pierced their way through the otherwise perfect seal of stone. The fine white filaments, never large, but everywhere, clambering up her hair and into her scalp, fusing with every inch of naked flesh, merged so perfectly that it was impossible to tell if she was the source of the roots, or just their victim, suspended as some horrible seed in a spiders web of growth.
Danny felt a pressure on his core, glimpsed a shimmering silver presence emerge out of the corner of his eye.
“A body.” David repeated, “You found a body, in my house, which you shot to shit, like a lunatic, because what? Your stupid kid said you should?”
“Well, ghosts don’t usually haunt places for no reason, I suppose.” Jack said, himself still slightly bewildered. “So far as reasons go, I guess that’s as good as you can get."
“A body, I can’t believe it, a body! Do you have any idea how much paperwork this is going to be? You stupid bastard–” David cut himself off, hit by a sudden realization. “did you know this was here!?”
“Davie–” jack started.
“Don’t Davie me!” The scorn in his voice was unmistakable. “You knew this was here, didn’t you, didn’t you! God, is this some kinda revenge? Some kinda punishment for not taking enough time to check on my oh-so-precious brother, for ignoring your stupid ghost bullshit for so damn long?”
“You’re the one who called me about the ghost!”
“Because there’s no such thing!” David was yelling now, face gone purple as he marched up to an astonished Jack. “Because I read about the grey waif in a journal and thought it would be a cute gimmick for a new hotel! Rent the cheapest damn ghost hunters I can find for a cut rate family discount and some extra cred! Hell! Maybe bring their creepy kid along for the ride, too! Sure, why not!”
“You take that back about my son!”
“Just admit he’s a creep Jack! A failure and a freak, just like you! Just like everything you ever goddamn did! Fucking up everything with superstition and bullshit and ghosts, I bet that redheaded psychopath you call a wife is just ba-”
David's tirade was cut short by the sound of his own jaw, snapped out of place by the haymaker sent flying across his chin.
“My son is not weird.” Jack said, low and tired, looking down to where David had fallen, sputtering in the dirt. “My wife is not crazy. And you–” He took a deep breath, bracing himself.
“You are not family.” The words came out cracked, but firm. “Come on, Danno, let’s head to the GAV.” He grabbed his son by the arm, shaking the halfa from his wide eyed distraction. “We won’t be coming back.”
Later, after evening had descended into night and succumbed again to morning, Danny woke to an empty space beside his sleeping bag. He levied himself up, touched the cold blankets, rumpled from the restless motions of its former occupant, before following the bitter taste of his father’s remorse to where the man himself sat, leaned back in the driver's seat, watching the deep blue rim of morning encroach ever brighter towards what stars remained.
“We never talked much, growing up.” He murmured, having taken notice of his son’s approach.
“My fault. I do this thing sometimes, get so wrapped up in this idea or that, I forget what’s going on around me, let a lot of stuff pass me by, that way.”
Danny was familiar with the habit, more intimately than most. How could he forget, the feeling of changing so completely, falling through tables with breath misting cold between his teeth, while his father, too preoccupied with ‘that gosh darn Phantom’, working on some project or device, that he failed to notice the ghost right in front of his face.
How many scrapes had he gathered, how many bruises did he hide, how completely he had grown?
“I did it with Vlad, I did it with Davie. Sometimes I worry I do it with you and Jazz, too.” Jack reached over to his son, who had climbed in the passenger seat beside him, thumbing over his dark locks.
Was it too late to say he was too late? Danny wondered.
“I thought when Davie–David called me, it was a chance, to maybe fix things, make up for–Make up for running off like that, all those years ago.”
“He didn’t deserve it.” Danny muttered. David had treated them lightly from the beginning. Ghost hunting had been a game to him, and the people who practiced it a joke.
“I know.” Jack replied. “But I couldn’t just leave him, either. He was family, and that’s what family does for family. Sure you, have fights, or make mistakes, or–or maybe leave for a while, find your own way. But I’d hoped, I’d believed, it would last, that somehow we could go on forever.”
“Nothing’s forever.”
Everything but forever. The words of the silver lady, had he really never gotten her name? Echoed back across his brain.
He still remembered what he saw there, hours before, too enraptured to pay any heed to the fight between brothers raging on behind his back.
How the hole in her chest had been filled, inch by inch, as she reached fingers forged from starshine towards the vessel of her former self, how, imperceptibly, those tender, root tipped digits had tried to reach back.
How her dark brown eyes had opened, gazing towards the brilliant silver heart that beat, then grew silent, as the woman allowed, at last, to live, expired.
How her apparitionary self collapsed into the darkness, freshly opened, quickly sated, gone in a moment of departure, to a music's calling that sang something to the hollow space he knew now, lay hidden behind his core.
He remembered the look of profound gratitude, on both her faces, as he watched her go.
“No.” Jack agreed at length. “But nothing’s for never, either. You’ve always got to try, son. Especially when you don’t know what comes next. That’s just what living is.”
Paper Ants
Part One:Run
“–So it's not space or time, it's spacetime, 'cause it's all one thing, and get this, it's bendy.”
“Dipstick –”
“You think that's how Clockwork makes those blue portals wherever he wants?”
“Not the time, Dipstick!”
“That's what I'm saying, Sam, he's not the ghost of time, but spacetime like, all at once, you know?
“Don't know!”
A fresh volley of blaster fire forced Ember to dodge, jostling the lanky burden splayed across her back. That all of this was happening after Phantom's frankly alarming growth spurt was typical, Ember found, of her poor to lousy luck. This would have all been so much easier back when he was a midget.
“Don't care!”
She continued to barrel down the wooded slope, trying, and failing, to dodge the innumerable branches that turned the area into a great, brown spider's web. Ember didn't like nature on a good day, and today was not a good day. It was a horrible, shitty, get-ambushed-and-captured-and-then-rescued-by-a-Dipstick-who-really-should-have-melted-by-now kind of day, and so far as things were going, sentient living realm foliage with a vendetta against all ghostkind would have been par for the course.
“Not you're girlfriend!”
Ancients, but she should've just stayed home.
“Aw, Sam, you said the whole real world physics and ghosts thing was cool.”
Because of course he would. Of all the regrettable things Ember had learned about Phantom as he blathered endlessly on whatever passed through his hollow excuse for a core, it was that he was a giant dweeb. The most dangerous ghost the Wasteland had seen in ages, who not only claimed a permanent portal as part of his territory, but held it against all comers, was a hopeless, Poindexter worthy nerd under the honest assumption that science was a girlfriend worthy topic. The fact that he actually did manage to get a girlfriend, even a spooky living girlfriend like the one always making doe eyes at him when she thought he wasn't looking, just made the whole thing more galling.
The guys who beat her up and ruined her plans for world domination weren't supposed to be lame, dammit!
Another hail of blaster fire cut the thought short, forcing her to skew left to avoid getting hit. With the powers of both herself and Phantom suppressed to nothing, their physical bodies were all they had left.
She ignored the way Phantom whined as he slid partly off her back, putting all her focus on maintaining her increasingly precarious speed as she all but slid down the wooded gradient. They were gaining distance, she knew, which only fueled her desire to gain more.
For a split second, she thought she had it, her sideways momentum seemed to balance with her forward skid, riding down the steepening slope with a speed that felt almost like flight. Almost, but not quite.
Then, the branches, one of the countless amputated limbs that littered the rotten brown battlefield reached out to grab her. Ember had just enough time to register the flare of pain before tilting forwards, all semblance of control lost as she and her delirious cargo went tumbling down into the dampish maw of the cold, dark woods.
Ember's first thought, as she shook off the disorientation from her fall, was that all her prior concerts had clearly skimped on the pyrotechnics. Anywhere with this many trees obviously needed more fire. Her second thought was that she hurt far more than she did before.
All the major wounds on her right side had reopened, bright green ooze coating the older, duller stains already covering the hospital gown she'd been forced into upon her arrival at the facility. Her head hurt, and she could feel a cold welter of fresh ectoplasm seeping into her hair.
And her toe, Ancients, her toe, it throbbed in time with every rotation of her core, and assaulted her mind with a sense of searing agony whenever the least bit of pressure was placed against it. Naturally, thanks to the suppressor rings around her wrist, she had no choice but to do exactly that all the time, constantly, if she wanted to remain upright. Never again would she take for granted a ghost's natural tendency to float. Why the Dipstick voluntarily spent half his time walking around when he could just fly instead was an damn mystery.
Reminded of her unwanted passenger, Ember took a glance at the half human, who lay uncharacteristically still amongst the foliage, and winced.
He had been worse off than her from the start, pretending he wasn't already bleeding from a hit to the side in their fight earlier that day. The humans had done their own damage, too, contributing a long, vertical incision up the belly, turning ragged and ugly where the work of the butcher who did it must have been interrupted at the ribs. As though that weren't enough, Ember was certain he'd been drugged. Some manner of hallucinogen, it seemed, designed to keep him passive while the Gunts in White, (she had the niggling suspicion that the name wasn't quite right,) played their game of real life operator.
It was a testiment to the incredible vitality of halfas that he'd managed to stay upright long enough to escape, and an act of proper insanity that he'd spent most that vanishing energy rescuing her.
Ember shuddered, both at the sight of of Phantom, still as marble, as well as the memory of her own captivity. There had been a scientist there, she was sure. She knew because she could hear him giggle. He always made sure to stay just out of her line of sight, however, reduced to a narrow band by the hard metal clasps that kept her pinned to the table. Whether by accident or his own psychotic design, the room was prone to echoing, making the scientist's laughter impossible to pin to any one location. Every now and then, however, a hand would reach from somewhere above her head, from a slightly different place every time, sometimes with a knife, sometimes a scoop. Each time, the hand, made milky from the glove that encased it, would cut a little deeper, and scoop a little more. And in between, the giggling would last just a little longer, get a little louder, seem a little less controlled.
Ember shuddered.
If her own scientist hadn't been such a sadist-
If Phantom been there, or just chosen to save his own skin instead-
They would have ended her: She would be dead, this time for good.
Ember minced over to where Phantom lay, trying to ignore the distant shouting, just loud enough to be heard over the alarms still blaring from the facility above.
“C'mon Dipstick, your beauty sleep can wait, get up.” As much as she hated his chatter, A conscious Phantom was a Phantom who could at least keep a grip on her back, saving from having to support his full weight. At this rate, even the smallest of advantages were a necessity.
“Dipstick, hey! Babybop! Wake up!” Ember smacked one pale cheek as she spoke, trying to ignore the undried ectoplasm that peeled away with her touch. He couldn't be gone, because Phantom was a ghost, and ghosts destabilized when they ended, melting down to nothing. He was still solid, so logically, he had to be fine.
Except Phantom wasn't just a ghost, he was human, too, and humans, Ember knew, looked essentially the same whether they were alive or dead, at least at first.
“Shit.”
Ember put a little more weight into her attempts to jostle him awake, trying to ignore the increasing proximity of the shouts from above the hill, their pursuers taking the slope at a more sedate, but inexorable pace.
“Wake up Dipstick! If you end on me now, I'll brainwash your whole stupid town! I'll steal your portal! I'll write a whole song dedicated to how you were finished like a fucking moron in the middle of the woods, so wake the hell up!”
She smacked him one more time, and finally, Phantom stirred, one dull green eye squinting against the pain of his awareness.
“...Sam?” The inquiry was little more than a hoarse mutter, “What're we? What's going on?”
“For the last time, I'm not your—you know what? Fuck it, C'mon, we've gotta move.” Ember hauled him up, managing to hoist him back up to her shoulders after a brief struggle. She was tired, and Phantom was heavy, far more than any full ghost his size should be.
The brief respite had done nothing to refresh her, had, indeed, served only to emphasize just how much everything hurt. Every cut and gouge, every bruise and ache sent painful protests to the center of her core. Phantom, serving as a literal deadweight, did nothing to help. The sheer quantity of ectoplasm he'd managed to bleed making him even more difficult to hold, turning the space between them into a slippery mess.
Ember kept her focus narrow, ignoring the terrifying dampness that slid down her back, the sharp blade of agony that every other step sent her way, the chafe of the suppressor that sent its own suffocating sensation deep into the very center of her being. She was Ember Mclain, she was a popstar, and she was going to keep moving.
Ember stumbled foreward, gaining a little momentum with each passing minuet. Her healing ability, reduced though it was, still seemed to be functioning, and she felt just a little of her energy returning over time.
Ember used that energy to go faster, deliberately ducking low into the foliage in an attempt to hide the feeble glow they both put off. The sirens still wailed above, a high, oscillating lament for the captives that fled it. They were still being chased on foot, as well, but the search hadn't yet found the ectoplasm trail Ember knew they were leaving, whether thanks to the greenery of the underbrush being sufficiently close to the hue of 'plasm to hide the color, or just simple luck was impossible to say. All that mattered was that they were once again gaining a lead over their pursuers.
It was in that moment, of course, just as Ember began to hope, that Phantom, the dick, just had to ruin it.
Ember was trudging through an especially thick patch of undergrowth when it happened. The dipstick had been muttering to himself this whole time, something about how nature reserves were more hippy than goth when he suddenly went silent, the hands that had only loosely kept a grip on her letting go completely. Ember, unable to completely hold her him on her own, was left trying to keep a grip on his bottom half as his front flopped backwards, almost bringing her down with him.
Again!?
Ember dropped his legs, allowing them to thump against the forest floor. Why, why, why, today, of all days, did everything have to go wrong?
She should just leave him, she really should. Ancients, he was probably the reason she'd been snatched in the first place! One way or the other, Phantom seemed to attract trouble, bringing it with him like a tide that swept everyone and everything around him into its depths.
So what if she was usually one of the ones causing the trouble?
So what if he'd saved her, in spite of it all?
“Ugh.”
Running out of the question, Ember grabbed his legs once more, looking for a suitable hiding spot, instead. Phantom was going to so owe her for this, fucking big time. She tried to distract herself from the increasing proximity of their pursuers –Had they found the ectoplasm trail?–by imagining all the ways she could spend that favor later on.
“Ooow, Sam, watch the...head.”
“Shut it, Dipstick.”
She could hear a stream off to their left, the indisputable culprit of both the thick gnarl of plantlife crowding every inch of space, and the all pervading film of pure wet that clung to her skin like spittle. The sensation was disgusting, and did nothing to warm her to the idea of trodding through an entire stream of water by her own volition. It was, however, their only chance of erasing their trail, both physically and chemically.
Phantom had gone quiet again, descending from unfocused complaints at “Sam's” manhandling as he was drug over the ground to near total silence. The only sign that he was even slightly conscious was the hard, burbling rasp that came with each ill advised respiration. Breathing was a stupid hobby for a ghost to have, but it was a sign, at least, that he wasn't completely gone, the way he seemed to be when he collapsed just minuets before.
It was not long after the thought had passed her mind that the stream, or rather, the river, came into view, announcing itself as a sudden streak of liquid sunshine glittering between the mouldering latticework of twigs and branches knotted against it.
It was also then, at that moment, she heard a victorious shout, flat and brassy in the way living voices always were, followed by a harsh rustling of greenery disrupted by the large forms now rushing through it.
They'd been found.
Ember didn't even bother to haul Phantom back up to her shoulders before breaking into a sprint. Her toe screamed anew, tender scabs were jostled open and erupted into emerald streams of pure hurt, and Ember noticed none of it. All her concentration, all her prodigious will, focused on that shining pathway that lay just ahead.
She was so focused, in fact, that the steep incline of the river embankment skipped her awareness entirely. Only when her feet met air, pinwheeling for a moment before falling down with the rest of her, did she register her mistake.
In her bid for freedom, Ember and her woebeggotten cargo tumbled once again into the earth, down and down, where the river lay waiting.
Ember felt the water hit her like a full body slap, smashing against her side in brief repudiation before the surface tension broke, and she was swallowed beneath the stream.
Her first coherent thought, once she finally had the chance to process the last few seconds of her increasingly awful day, was that living realm water was almost insultingly different from what she had become accustomed to in the Infinite realms. There, what was known as water was a thick, opaque substance, frequently warm from the sheer density of the energy that formed it. Practically anything could float on that kind of water, and practically everything did. Ember could still recall an entire lair on one particularly large stream, riding the waves on mechanical fins expertly rigged to the rocky sides of the isle. Each passing fin had set off flares of color as the stream was disturbed, spreading out in great, multihued ovals that scattered and mixed among the waves. It had been an awesome sight, and truly beautiful.
This stream, however, was nothing like pretty. Once her head went below the surface, the illusion of gold was replaced with a dark, muddy reality. Blurred and shadowed forms, obscured further by tumbling leaves and black twiglets, whirled past her vision, while she herself was pulled along with them by the cold mountain current, which snuffed out the flames of her hair and thrust cold fingers down every possible orifice with repulsive glee as it dragged her foreward.
Ember grabbed Phantom, who had almost immediately begun to flail towards the surface, forced out of his stupor by some unknowable human instinct that spurred him to panic once submerged.
Ember dragged the both of them farther down, fighting against the buoyancy that wanted to keep them both floating somewhere just above the midway point in the stream. There was a dark patch near the bottom of the river, just above where the water transitioned from stream to silt, some kind of larger stone poking out from amongst the muck, or perhaps even a hollow place, deep enough to provide shelter against the ever pulling current.
It took longer than she'd hoped, with Phantom tugging against her all the while, but she made it, and it was better than she had even dared to hope. There, peeking out from two great, stony shelves that had thrust themselves above the thick mud-drifts that seemed to coat everything in that dim underworld of living slime and half-suspended earth, was a cave.
Ember grabbed onto the edge of the outcropping, using the leverage to push herself forward, then down, deeper into the columnar hollow that opened up beyond the narrow entryway. While both their glows had been reduced to almost nothing, there still remained sufficient light for Ember to see how the ground leveled out not too long into her swim, and spot the hole from which the current, which had never ceased to swirl against her, appeared to spring.
Embers memories of her time as a human, like all ghosts, were dim, broken things, little more than a handful sand clutched against the wind. Looking at that darker hole, fire core aching with increasing intensity from the combination of constant exertion paired with the all pervasive cold and wet, however, Ember recalled, with sudden, brutal clarity, how mountain streams were often fed by underground rivers, some of which opened up into caves.
Ember was nearly finished, the exertions of the day finally stacking up into something more than her consciousnesses could bear. She also knew that she couldn't quit, not yet. They had escaped the humans, escaped the forest, and now, with the chance to escape the river, so tantalizingly close, how could she possibly give up now?
With the last of the force remaining in her limbs, ignoring the screams of pain each motion incited, Ember pushed against the current, pulling Phantom just behind, until they were through the opening at last, and Ember felt her face breach the surface of the stream.
The sensation of air was pure relief, a gentle caress against cheeks abraded by gnarled woods and rushing waters. Ember clambered onto the bank, whose silty surface was mixed with mica, forming silicate stars quickly snuffed by the murk Ember was now free to heave out of her system, preventing it from diluting what ectoplasm she had left.
She managed a glance at Phantom, who was likewise in the process of expelling his own quantity of liquid onto the shining ground, quite a bit more, she noted, than what she herself had voided moments before.
“That's what you get for breathing, baby bop.”
Ember's last thought before unconsciousness subsumed her was that maybe the dipstick would finally quit that peculiar habit of respiration. It couldn't be healthy, working his abdomen all the time like that, when it could just as well rest instead.
Part Two:Hide
Ghosts couldn't dream.
Some of the more scholarly ghosts, the kind Ember usually preferred to avoid, liked to speculate as to why. the theory among such types was that the dead never dreamed because they never slept, at least not truly. Rather, on those rare occasions a ghost's core was stressed to the point it could no longer maintain form as well as consciousness, the body was simply granted priority above that of the mind.
In that sense, a ghost's sleep was more akin to that of a human coma: A slide closer to oblivion, a brief stuttering of the mind as it fought against the fall, a bad copy of the relief that came from the peace born from true rest.
That was why, when Ember awoke to a mouthful of dirt and the sensation of someone prodding her side, she knew for a fact that it was no nightmare.
Even though she very much wished it was.
“Ember? Ember? Whoa—“
Phantom, damn him, somehow managed to spot the fist she sent by way of response, lurching back just far enough to let her attack go sailing inches from his face.
“What the heck, Ember! I was trying to help!”
“Well I was trying to sleep, so quit it, wouldja?”
“Ghosts can sleep?” His tone was one of utter bafflement.
“Duh.” Wasn't he the one who was always complaining about how other ghosts were ruining his beauty sleep? Ember didn't get what was so surprising.
“Oh, uh, sorry? Honestly, I thought you were dying. Ending. You know.” Ember could practically see the nervous gesture, hand against neck, that Phantom was so prone to making as he spoke.
“You had gone all blurry, sorta fused together like one giant blob ghost, I was seriously afraid you were going to start melting if I didn't do something about it.”
Sleeping made her look like a blob? That, she honestly hadn't known. It wasn't as though ghosts slept much, ever, if they could help it. On those rare occasions Ember had been forced to sleep, she'd managed to do it in her lair, protected and alone.
“Yeah, well I'm fine. Just super.” Ember still hadn't bothered to raise her head out of the dirt. Only the thought of deforming while unconscious, in front of Phantom, of all people, kept her from giving into the exhaustion all over again. “Just lemme alone.”
“Ember, wait.” Phantom touched her again, this time gently, on the shoulder. Ember was familiar with the gesture, she'd seen humans do it often enough, but wasn't entirely clear as to what it was supposed to mean.
“At least tell me what's going on. The last thing I remember is us getting captured, then I wake up and we're – where are we, anyway? Why do I feel like someone threw me through a garbage disposal? And why the fudge am I still a ghost!?”
Ember groaned, sober Phantom, it seemed, was just as prone to nattering as his stoned counterpart. Mustering all her remaining energy, Ember tried to think of a way to end the conversation as quickly as possible.
“Cave. Brought us here. Crazy humans beat us up. Dunno what you mean about ghosts, but if you're messed up, blame these.” Ember loosely brought her forearm, shaking her shackled wrist for emphasis.
“Power restraints?” She felt him grab her wrists, observing the white ring bound thereon before letting out a low groan. “These are good, like my dad was giving away ghost hunting tech again good. If it were the old model, I could've gotten us out, but this – ” She heard something scrape against the restrainers, followed by a shock coursing down her arm in a bolt of sheer pain.
“Ancients!”
“ – could take a while. ”
“What the hell was that!?”
“Sorry, sorry, I think it has some kind of anti-tampering thing on it? Just give me a sec and I'll—”
“Fuck no!” Ember scooted away, an action which hurt more than she remembered, before rolling to her side, allowing her the perfect angle to glare without actually expending an excess of energy. A necessity, it seemed, when one spent any time at all in the dipstick's general vicinity. “If you want to play around, do it on yourself.”
She gave him one more, particularly cutting look, just for emphasis, before allowing her head to fall back to the earth.
Realms, she was tired.
Unfortunately, sleep proved harder to grasp than she expected. Though just as exhausted as before, the world around her kept intruding just enough to keep her distracted.
Everything, from the omnipresent clatter of the river just behind, to the aches and pains of her own body, seemed to conspire against her every attempt to ignore them. The moment they seemed to fade into the background, something would twinge down in her leg, or a wavelet would lap against the muddy shore of the river bank in such a fashion that Ember would be jerked back to full awareness whether she wished it or not.
That she was aware of another ghost beside her, awake and potentially a threat, bothered her also. As much as she was sure Phantom was too much of a goody two shoes to do anything to her, the idea of slumping into some helpless blob in front of him was an anathema.
The persistent yelps that came from his direction, the sort one might make if they just so happened to be fiddling with a device that existed for the express purpose of making them suffer, was not doing much to help.
“Ah, huh, whew.” Phantom leaned back, wincing as his own remaining wounds, far nastier than Ember's own, reprimanded him for the motion. She honestly wasn't sure how he was up, much less so damn cheerful. “I got the casing off, but the insides are going to be harder. This is definitely one of my parents better designs, which means it's one of their worse designs, which means I am so haunting – ugh!”
He'd been picking at the exposed mechanics as he spoke, which sent yet another shock through his system for the attempt.
“-all my dad's fudge, and his ham. As soon as I get back. ow.” Phantom bent over, clutching at his chest, the dirty, tattered gown doing nothing to hide the long green strips that had been cut into his flesh. The veneer slipped, if only for a moment, and pain, frustration, and agony were clear on his features as he heaved against the punishment.
“Ancients, just let it go.” How precisely someone else's pain and suffering could be aggravating, Ember wasn't sure, but then again, it was the Dipstick. He was talented like that. “I don't know if you noticed, baby-bop, but you're not exactly Technus, what are you even gonna do? Fix it?”
Oddly, that seemed to strike him as funny, inspiring a harsh, wheezing laugh from the hollows of his sundered breast.
“Technus? Oh, if he were here, just imagine: 'I, Technus, master of all technology,' “ Phantom pitched his voice high, an unexpectedly decent copy Technus's nasal intonation, “ 'Have now turned these power suppressing cuffs into power suppressing armor! Behold!' ” Phantom began chuckling again, painfully, maniacally, bent over double without any regard to the fresh upweltering of ectoplasm the motion inspired.
"God, that would be lame." He said.
There was a pause, the sound of the river doing little to mask the greater silence of the cavern at large. Mouthless stone bore forth the quietude of millinia on, seeping into every shadow, bearing down upon the two ghost's pallid glows in a slow press of ages. The darkness was too old, too wise to strangle, but the weight of it, the ominous press of eternity, pushed with a force passionless as a mountain upon an ant. A living thing could flee death, the darkness whispered, and a ghost may spite it, but neither could escape. Not now, not then, nor ever.
Never before had Ember heard that promise more clearly, than in the still breath of that hollow place, and the silence which lurked therein.
She was still exhausted, but, very suddenly, Ember found she was no longer tempted to sleep.
“Hey.”
Phantom had taken to staring at the cuff in lieu of fiddling with it, mouth thinned into a contemplative half moon as he gazed fixedly at the device. Whether it was some attempt to visually plot out its inner workings, or he was simply lost in his rather sudden fit of ennui, Ember cared not at all.
“Hey Dipstick!”
“Huh?” He looked up, a mildly surprised expression plastered across his face.
“You didn't answer my question.” Reluctantly, Ember pushed herself up on one elbow, affecting a decent show of awareness. “You're not some tech ghost, so what are you even trying to do? Aside from hurt yourself for fun, I mean.”
Phantom had the gall to roll his eyes. “Would having someone like Technus even help? I mean, he only knows how technology works in the first place because his power lets him, right? So wouldn't these-” he tapped the cuff with his free hand, “Sort of, I dunno, turn that off?”
“What!? No way.” What was he suggesting?
“They're power suppressors, not mind suppressors. It's not like they would fuck with our core. Even if he couldn't manipulate them directly, he'd remember how it'd work.”
“Would he?” Phantom flicked his gaze up from the device, one eyebrow raised.
“Duh.”
“Do you remember?”
Ember squinted at him. “What, technology?”
“Nah, music. How to sing, play instruments, that stuff.”
“Of course I fucking remember!” How dare he! Ember felt a flare of anger at the mere idea that her one talent, her one unique skill, could possibly be manipulated by some sort of over glorified wrist bangle. The idea wasn't just insulting, it was absurd.
“Even the things you never practiced?”
The abuse she had been all set to pour down Phantom's idiot head stuck halfway up her throat.
“...what.”
“Well, I guess you actually worked at some of your music stuff, or did when you were alive. That probably carried over. But if you're a music ghost, then your powers should help you in anything related to it. Like to, uh, play the Oboe, even though you've never actually learned it, in the same way Technus can program stuff, even though he died way before CSS or Java was a thing and never really put in the effort to really figure them out. I just thought, the general theory is, suppressors work on all aspects of a power...not just...the active ones...”
Phantom must have seen the look on her face, or perhaps simply realized the sheer scope of what he was implying, as he had the decency to pause.
“Or not! Totally possible! I, none of my powers are passive like that, so I don't, I don't really know.”
Now that she thought about it, Ember never had taught herself to play the oboe.
“Ember? Eeember? Hello?”
But she did know how to play it, she was certain, she remembered remembering.
“Did I break her?”
So why were the exact details suddenly so hard to grasp?
“Oh god, I totally broke her.”
Ember was brought out of her stupor by Phantom, who, ever the gentleman, had seen fit to scoot directly into her personal space, where he had taken to snapping his fingers just below her eyes.
“Would you stop that!” Ember swept aside his intruding arm, anger providing a welcome buffer between herself and the implications her own disturbing epiphany. Her hair, now dried, sent up a shower of sparks as they reignited at the ends.
“Hey! I'm not the one who zoned out all of a sudden!”
“I'm not the one bullshitting about other people's powers! Why would you even think that!? Why would you even want to think that? What is wrong with you?”
“I was just trying to help!”
“Well big help. Dipstick, I can't play the oboe, not as long as I've got one of your parent's little fashion statements glued to my wrist!”
Ember shoved him away, ignoring the hard flinch it incited, before flopping back down to the cold earth.
“Happy now?” She asked.
“...Sorry.” She heard Phantom scoot away, the steady tapping of his attempts to pry apart his own cuffs resumed a second later.
The silence lasted for about a minuet.
“I guess, I grew up with this. How ghosts work, why they work, what they can do, blah, blah, blah. Then I became a halfa, and all those questions became practical. I couldn't not think about them, because my arm was sinking through my desk and I thought, maybe if I could just figure out how and why then maybe I could make it stop. And with my parents still going on and on about ghost science and suddenly having to deal with all their inventions working on me I couldn't avoid it even if I wanted to, it just never occurred to me that—ow!”
It seemed Phantom still hadn't bypassed whatever was causing the shocks, as he was suddenly interrupted by the bracelet's defense system. Ember raised her head slightly, where she found Phantom lain prone from the pain.
“It just never occurred to me that it wasn't normal, that you guys didn't need to wonder, all the time, over what you were.”
He sighed, then, slowly, with a stiffness of motion that betrayed just how much he must surely hurt, Ember watched Phantom push himself back up, before bending over the bracelet once again.
Gone was the foolish teenager who she'd drug through a forest and down a hole. In his place sat a youth of steely determination and unyielding will, weary but unbeaten. He looked down at the cuffs with grim obstinance, a look Ember was surprised to find she recognized: It was the same expression he often bore not just when fighting her, but any ghost that challenged him within his territory.
“Fucking hell, no wonder you're a psycho.”
For some reason this brought out a smirk, the visage of the warrior she'd glimpsed before crumpling beneath the wry half moon of its humor.
"Eh, better psycho than a fruitloop any day."
Conversation finished, silence lapsed again between the two, the discomfiting physicality of it reminding Ember why she had done something as ludicrous as attempt conversation with Phantom, of all ghosts, from the start.
Kitty would've loved this, Ember reflected. Always more curious than her friend, the biker ghost would've seized the opportunity to extract any morsel of gossip worthy material from a real-life hybrid. She had a way about her, too, of making the most awful situations more amusing than they had any right to be.
She felt a faint smile creep up her cheeks at the thought of her friend. If only she were stuck here with Kitty, things might still be just as desperate, but at least she would have someone to talk to, someone she understood and could be understood by, and not the mad thing beside her. Not stupid, stupid, Phantom, who treated being captured, cut, and suppressed as though it were somehow routine.
In fact...
If the she was stuck with the dipstick, she may as well get some use out of it, she supposed. She could bring some fun facts back to Kitty, and maybe even get back at Phantom for pulling the rug out from under her very sense of self.
He wasn't the only one who could ask uncomfortable questions, after all.
“Hey.”
The fact that Ember was now suddenly, viscerally homesick was not related in the least.
“What now, Ember?”
Phantom's voice was aggrieved. He had been in bad shape from the start, and the constant jolts to his system obviously weren't be helping. His hands shook, and a slick layer of sweat beaded his forehead as he fought to keep them steady, reaching again and again for the device he knew would hurt him. His expression, however, was still held the same, stolid determination of before. Indeed, it had, if anything, become all the firmer.
“What's it like to be alive?”
“Eh!??”
“I said, what's it like to be alive. None of the humans can explain, and I don't remember.” She shrugged, affecting nonchalance, “So I thought I'd ask you.”
“No, uh, it's just I normally get the question the other way around." Phantom seemed somewhat flustered. "Most ghosts I actually talk to don't bring that stuff up."
Those ghosts, unlike Ember, were probably his friends. Very little was known about halfas, but one place where both ancient legend and modern rumor agreed was that such creatures were touchy about the finer details of what they were, exactly.
Phantom, however, didn't seem overly bothered, actually pausing in his masochistic attempts at cuff disassembly as he contemplated the question.
“Living is...it's like a clean blanket, like right out of the drier, that you're wrapped up in, but not inside, you know?”
Ember didn't know, but Phantom didn't seem to notice, his eyes taking on a distant quality as he barreled on.
“You're out on one of those really good autumn nights, where the sky is clear and all the leaves have turned but haven't fallen yet, and you know its cold out, but you've got your blanket, and you know its dark, but there's the whole sky above you, and you know it won't last forever, but you don't want to go, because you know once you do, it's gone.
"You can get a new blanket, or go out on another night, but it won't be the same. It won't be that night or that blanket, cause you only get both of those once, no matter how many times you come back, or what kind of thing you become, it's already gone..."
Phantoms gaze slid back to the present, refocusing on her. “So yeah, that's living.” He seemed oddly proud of himself as he said it.
“Dipstick.”
“Yeah?”
“You made a lot more sense when you were high.”
“Hey! I'm a C average student, Okay?”
“Seriously? You were going on and on about Clockwork being some kind of space-time ghost, and I got more out of that than fucking blankets.”
“Clockwork is a space-time ghost, otherwise his portals could only pop up in any time, not in any place, and you know he can totally do both!”
“Sure thing, baby-bop, that's totally how it works.” Not that Ember actually knew anything about the powers of the near legendary monster that supposedly lurked not far from her own lair, but it gave her an excuse to dismiss Phantom and his nonsense, to regain a sense of control that came with the familiar verbal parlay that was as much a part of competition among the Wastelanders as physical combat.
She could ignore where she was, like this. She could ignore how she'd gotten there, and, if only she could annoy the dipstick hard enough, she might be able to ignore that he was their best bet for escaping where they had ended up.
“It totally is! Just because the rules get weird in the ghost zone doesn't mean they're gone. There's got to be some kind of logic to it!”
“Like how you can fit an entire country behind a flying door?” Ember scoffed, “Sure, your living world rules totally work inside a completely different dimension, ”
“It's not a different dimension!” Realms, the Dipstick was getting properly worked up now, gesticulating broadly as he spoke.
“Pft. Like you would know.”
“I do!”
“What, did Clockwork tell you that, too?” Ember rolled her eyes, the very picture of smug. She affixed her best smirk to her face too, just to drive home the victory of which she was now so certain.
Yes, this was how it was supposed to be, this was the rhythm to which she was accustomed. She would pick a fight, and Phantom, or Skulker, or whoever the hell was in range that day, would fall to match her, distracting her from whatever ill had tried to rise from the mental depths she threw them in, buried beneath the petty violence and snappy comebacks that made it so much easier not to think.
Phantom, however, wasn't done yet.
“Yeah.” he replied, “He was the one who told me the Ghost Zone and reality are connected, messing up one messes up the other.”
“And I guess he told you how, too, huh?” Ember asked, mildly irritated. The Dipstick truly didn't know a loss when he saw one.
“He said they were like two sides of the same coin.” Phantom cast his eyes back down to his cuff, which he began to fiddle with again, as though something about the subject made him uncomfortable. “But I think, it's more like the inverse version of the same side? Like a mobius strip.”
“Huh?” He'd lost her.
“A mobius strip. They're these weird twisted loop things with one side and one edge. They thought the universe might be one for a while, so I learned a bit about them, 'cause it was space travel stuff, I guess.”
Something clicked in the suppressor, and Ember prepared herself for a yelp that never came. Whatever it was that Phantom had pulled off this time hadn't triggered any sort of defensive shock.
“The crazy thing about mobius strips is how they loop. Anything living on a mobius strip could understand everything but the twist, because they're two dimensional people living on a mostly two dimensional plane, but the loop in a mobius strip can only be seen by something that lives one dimension higher, in 3D."
Ember wanted to interject, regain control of a conversation that was rapidly slipping out of her grasp once again, something snarky and reflective of how little she cared, but she wasn't fast enough, as Phantom's mouth, like his fingers, seemed to settle into a groove.
“Imagine we're all paper ants living on something like a mobius strip. The ant starts at one point, then travels the full loop, completing the circuit of a full, living life. But mobius strips are weird, and crawling once around the edge doesn't actually take you the full length of the strip: it inverts you instead. You end up in a perfect opposite to where you began, on the other side of the curve without even knowing how you got there in the first place."
Phantom gave a faint half smile, nearly a smirk, though with an edge of ennui that belayed the sense of trepidation that lurked beneath it.
“It kind of explains halfa's, too. Most of the ants have to travel the full loop to move between life and death, but some ants manage to find a hole, something that lets them crawl from one side to the other without having to go all the way around each time. And 'cause these are magic ants, I guess, they can take the hole with them, at least for a while, as they keep going around and around.”
Something snapped, and Phantom tugged what looked like a small, glowing green box out from the depths of his suppressor.
“Ah-ha! The ecto-collecter! Almost got it!” He pumped his fist, a motion that was immediately followed by a wince, the gesture rather obviously aggravating his many wounds.
“But, yeah, like I was saying, we can see what mobius strips are because it's a 3D loop, and we're 3D beings, but there's another version of these things, called Klien bottles, that are the same thing, but with a 4D twist instead of a 3D one. If the life and death, the ghost zone and the real world, really were one of these things, than we'd be the same as ants drawn on a mobius strip, looping around and around a shape we can't understand, in directions we can't see, basically forever."
One last twist, and the suppressor finally gave out, falling off the halfa's wrist with an unimpressive thump into the muck below. Phantom smiled at her, a full, broad grin of victory.
“Cool, right?”
“Phantom.” Ember's core ached, but there was no way, absolutely none, she would let the dipstick get the last word in, not after all this.
“Hm?” He tilted his head, unmindful of the bright sparks forming around his waist as he awaited her reply.
“You're still really fucking psycho." Full blown, extra goddamn crazy. "I don't get how you even stand it.”
“Eh, you learn to live.” Phantom shrugged as the sparks formed a ring, shining with a painful clairity in the vanquished dark.
“Or learn to die, I guess. Whichever works.”
The rings split, washing over him in a swift, smooth motion. Green wounds turned red, pale white locks darkened to a glossy black, overhanging pale blue eyes filled with that eerie depth so distinctive of the living.
The change from ghost to human didn't take more than a second, maybe two, and Phantom didn't move an inch while it happened.
But in those scant moments, watching the change occur, Ember couldn't help but be struck by the sudden conviction that he was somehow in motion, falling at an angle that didn't exist, down a most peculiar kind of hole.
The tracker beeped, and Maddie winced.
She thumbed down the volume, setting the device aside before ascending the stairs.
Early on, Jack and Maddie had named the uppermost portion of the ops center "the crows nest". A wirework rendition of wood masted perch, it was meant as a bit of whimsy, somewhere you could appreciate a sense of levitation the oversized addition otherwise lacked.
The ghost was still there, stretched out on his back with both arms behind his head, for all the world as though he hadn’t heard her coming a full flight below.
She licked her lips, trepidatious.
“Phantom.” She said.
“Maddie.” He replied. His gaze stayed focused on the sky.
She padded closer, slippered feet crunched over air-pocked ice.
Phantom said nothing when she lay down beside him, and tensed only slightly as she folded her own arms, in echo of him, and turned to stare.
Many considered Phantom one of the more human-like ghosts, and not just by character. He was boy-shaped, in a general kind of way, a careful habit of keeping his distance ironically important in lending the impression of an approachable, friendly teen.
Because Up close, it was hard to miss.
skin textured like an old mask, shadowy outlines of a skull visible in the places where flesh had worn thin. Lit by his aura as much as his blood, defying any natural sense of contour and lending a distinct off-green color that did nothing to ease the impression of light up taxidermy. Peer too close, and Phantom became Something dry rotted, something with moth eggs and cotton in the space between its bones.
If it weren’t for the look of discomfort he was wearing, all too human pasted on his monster face, she might be tempted to reconsider it once again. This idea, this absurd notion, that such a creature could be her son.
Yes, the jawline was the same, and yes, so was the nose. The hair, though drained off color, was cut in the same style her son had worn for years. The same tendency to chew the lip when he was thinking, the same preference for high places and avoiding what he feared.
--And yet.
She hadn’t seen it.
Not in the crosshair closeups, head pinned down beneath the sight of a gun.
Not in all the ecto samples of hair and flesh.
Not the times when Phantom slipped and called her mother.
Not when he was at last subdued.
Not when she saw the rings, not in the moments after, when the body beneath her fingers turned warm and came to life.
She hadn’t seen it.
Not once.
and not now, either.
Phantom’s squirming got worse, legs twisting into tail that twitched in nervous synchronicity with the shuddering that had started in his chin. He kept his eyes fixed upwards, but his gloves creaked against themselves beneath his hair.
It crossed her mind that this was the longest the she had ever seen him. Phantom usually ran off when when humans tried to stare.
She yanked her gaze away, blinking away the afterimage of his light, and tried to focus on the stars instead.
It was a moonless night, clear and cold in that cloudless winter way that came when the winds died down and the storms waited on someone else's sky.
Where the air was weightless, the silence lay heavy, pressing down against her breast.
Maddie shivered, her frosted fingers had gone from painful to a dull, throbbing sort of numb. She should have planned this better, or perhaps just planned at all.
”I used to love these.”
“These?” She asked. Almost resigned to the quiet, Phantoms words had caught her by surprise.
“Yeah.” Phantom pulled out one hand, gesturing vaguely at the dark cathedral above their heads.
“These. Space stuff, star gazing. Used to—Used to think I could tour it. Like in a rocket ship, y’know?”
Maddie smiled. She remembered that.
“You still could.” She said, and she meant it. “We could help.”
Phantom snorted, the sound echoing in doubled up derision from his throat.
“Sure, not like there’s a ghost portal in the basement or whatever. You can totally just ignore that, stop making weapons, build bullshit instead.”
“Language.” The response was habitual, as was, she suspected, the scoff that came in response.
The conversation ebbed, a new silence threatening to roll in between them, even worse than what they had before.
Maddie took a breath, focusing on the way the air pooled in her lungs. She didn't want that.
“It’s not stupid to chase your dreams, hon.”
“Nah." He said. "It’s pretty stupid. I mean, even if you and Jack had the time or whatever, it’d be pointless. ‘Cus—look at that, right?”
He waved his free hand at the night once more.
“What do you see?”
She saw--
A void of diamond dust and shadow, vast swaths of darkness deeper than her eyes could reach.
Impossible depths, the weight of worlds against glass atmosphere, infinite pressure pressed before uncertain strength.
A vastness, a void, something often looked upon, but never seen, not truly.
Not until the fell in, and she began to drown.
“I see the stars.” She said.
“Nope!” He popped the final plosive in an affectation of cheer. “You see what the stars were. Like a time capsule? It’s not the real thing. The real star’s moved on, it’s different now. What you see up there is more like, well—“
A brief silence. Phantom’s eyes darted towards her, A flash of green lighting the corner of her eyes in an uncertain shade of death.
“Like their ghosts.” She finished for him. This time it was she who kept her eyes pinned pinned upwards, avoiding him.
“...Yeah.” Phantom said, his voice subdued.
The color of his haze shifted away.
“It’s hard to imagine they’re really all dead.” The words slipped out despite herself, an ill thought out aside to keep the faltering conversation from collapsing on them both.
“Eeh.” Phantom pulled his shoulders, a cross between resettling from an uncomfortable pose and a stiff sort of shrug, seemingly untroubled. “Mostly not, stars live a long time. They’re still there, just...different.”
“Different?”.
She heard him swallow, audibly choke back whatever he felt the need to say.
“Enough that it’s not worth it.” He said, his voice hoarse. “To go and see.”
A new still fell between them, thicker still with the tension that had been plaguing them since she and Jack learned to keep their son meant letting Phantom go.
Was this what she had come up for, To ruin this, too? This softer silence, With her questions, with her needs, cutting into what must have been one of the last spaces the ghost—her son—the ghost, must have had for himself alone?
To slice it open, splay it wide, reach deep and pull. All the precious secrets of viscera and bone, rainbow hues of bellyfat slick with mysteries fine as any star?
Even after she had pushed everything so far, ruined so much, with all these wounds she herself had opened, was some part of her was still convinced if she just kept fingering through the remains of their relationship, that she’d truly find something to repair it all?
That Maddie Fenton could be innocent again, That Danny Fenton would cease to be a ghost?
She pulled her eyes from the jewel laden night, so far beyond her, then turned to Phantom, who still lay close.
“Danny.” She said.
And for the first time, both their gazes met, searing green to a very human teal.
“Mom.” He croaked.
Something ancient reared inside her, the cold crept deeper in. These feelings were ignored.
“Danny.” She said. She shaped her face to look glad.
She reached her hand out, crossing the inches that stretched between them in a moment that took forever as much as no no time at all.
His hair was less substantial than she expected. Fine white strands scattered into mist that coiled around her fingers as their owner leaned into her hand. The feeling of the scalp that lurked underneath was tacky and distinctly dead.
It felt terrible. She felt terrible, snuggled close against a corpse that still looked nothing like her son.
She knew her hands were likely over warm, too hot in for him the same way he was far too cold.
But she didn’t take her hand away, and Phantom did nothing but come closer, moving to press himself bodily against her side.
Maddie Fenton had lost her youngest child, lost him years ago, killed in an accident she had never even seen.
But that was okay.
She had another option.
She could learn to love what remained.
“Do you want to stay a little longer?” She asked.
“Yeah” Phantom said
***
To those who mourn the midnight hour
as a portrait of our doom
and point to lights there shining
as effigy or tomb
who say the heavens there be haunted,
bright and starry host
some parade of specters
or litany of ghosts
Hold your grief, and sound no sorrow,
sigh no sad lament,
for the blackened midnight hour,
Nor the souls that keep it lit
And know that which is from life departed,
may remain by living due,
in solemn oath,
or just by loving
and for those that love them, too.