Parchment crinkled under the fingers of Maddie’s gloves, the sound echoing weirdly off the vaulted ceiling of the ruin she had discovered floating only thirty minutes from the Fenton Portal. She wore a Fenton Ecto-Exploration suit, designed to protect a human being from all the dangers of the Ghost Zone, a tether and hose tying her back to the Specter Speeder.
Already, this first foray into the Ghost Zone had yielded more data than she and Jack had gotten in all the time before opening the portal, and more data than they recorded in a week back in Amity Park, waiting for the ghosts to show up on their own terms. Minutes after entering, they had encountered whole swarms of lesser ghosts, little creatures that barely showed up on their scanners, and to their surprise, a vast variety of ghostly architecture.
True, most of the buildings were ruins, and there were far too many stairs and free-floating doors to be at all logical for entities that could fly, but their presence had been entirely unexpected and brought up whole new lines of inquiry.
Who built these structures? Why? How? Had humans once lived here? Because ghosts didn’t have the focus, the organization, or the intelligence to do something like this. Perhaps they were stolen. She and Jack had researched occurrences of people and vehicles being spirited away, most notably in places like Bermuda. But for all these buildings to suffer a similar state…
Maddie had to investigate. That meant leaving the relatively safe confines of the Speeder. Jack had objected, of course, not to the concept of entering one of the buildings, but to Maddie being the one to go. But she had talked him over to her point of view. She was the better fighter, after all, and less likely to set off any traps the ghosts had left in the buildings.
She had lucked out, too, in their choice of buildings. This appeared to be an abandoned library, or some kind of record repository, full of scrolls and bound books.
There were too many for her to take all of them, sadly. The ecto-preservation box she had brought for samples would only fit a few of the thick, dusty tomes- and she had to put them in the box. There was no telling how quickly they would decay if exposed to normal, real-world air.
She picked the five books that looked best preserved, with leathery covers and silver-edged pages. The scrolls appeared to be more fragile, even if she could probably fit more of them in the box.
Giving the room one last glance and snapping one last picture with her Fenton Ecto-Imager, she turned, and followed her tether back to the Speeder.
They kept the books in a sealed glass containment unit, using attached gloves to reach in and manipulate the pages, as if they were handling lethal chemicals or disease-carrying vials. For all they knew, the books could be just as dangerous. Even something as innocuous as a musical instrument could become a weapon in a ghost’s hands.
Still, the main reason for their precautions was to preserve the books. The pages were fragile enough, and scans showed that the paper and parchment they were made of had a high ectoplasm content; a high enough content that, were the ectoplasm in them to disperse, the pages might crumble entirely.
Maddie and Jack painstakingly took pictures of every page. They were written, and beautifully illuminated, in a language neither of them were familiar with, forcing them to send the work of translating them to a linguist friend.
Jack literally held his breath, waiting for the linguist to call them back. Maddie was less optimistic about the response time. Jocelyn was a friend, yes, had been a friend since college, but Maddie was well aware of the reputation she and Jack had built up over the years. They would be lucky if Jocelyn looked over the images this month, let alone within five minutes of-
Maddie hit the speaker button. “Hello, this is Fentonworks, Dr. Fenton speaking.”
“Maddie, this is Jocelyn. Where did you get these books?”
“The Ghost Zone!” said Jack, excitedly.
Jocelyn laughed. “Right, right, don’t tell me, that’s fine. Anyway, four of them look like they’re in Voynich script-”
“So you can translate them?” asked Maddie, excitedly.
“Afraid not! Before you showed me these, I thought there was only one example of that in the world, and no one has been able to translate it. You should get these all tested for authenticity, by the way. If any of them are legit, you have a fortune on your hands. Anyway. The fifth one seems to be mostly in Gaelic script, with some notes in Latin and Ogham. Very interesting. Subject matter seems to be ghosts from what I can tell, which, well, I’m not surprised, exactly.”
“So you can translate that one?” Maddie asked, eagerly. She didn’t want the trip to come to nothing.
“Well, some of it. I’m not super familiar with Irish languages. I’ll have to ask my colleagues, and they’ll really want some kind of confirmation about the books before they spend too much time on it. You know?”
“That’s reasonable,” said Maddie, even as she winced. She’d have to follow up with Jocelyn on what kind of ‘confirmation’ translators would want.
“Anyway, from what I can tell just by looking, this is a treatise of some kind on the ‘half-dead,’ compiled by a couple different authors over a long period of time. The Latin notes read like clarifications, or personal anecdotes, but there are also a lot of references to the god Janus. There’s a bit much to go over on the phone.”
“You can email us,” said Maddie.
“How about I drive down to Amity? I’ll bring my notes, and I really want to hear where you got these.”
“We told you! The Ghost Zone!”
“You always were a joker, Jack. Good to see life hasn’t changed you. So, do you guys mind if I come?”
“Not at all,” said Maddie.
Jocelyn regarded the portal with guarded disbelief. “I can’t believe it. I really can’t. No one is going to believe this.” She paused. “Were those books written by ghosts?”
“Unlikely,” said Maddie. “Ghosts lack the mental capacity. It’s more likely that these were stolen from people who were researching ghosts.”
“Right, right, that makes sense, I suppose. Anyway, I think I’ve put together a good summary of what’s in that book. I had to call in some favors, by the way, so you owe me. Also, you’ll have to pay to get the whole thing done, sorry.” She put her bags on a clean counter top, and gazed longingly at the books under the glass. “Man, I hope you can get more of those. Wouldn’t it be wild to translate the Voyinch manuscript?”
“Well, lets work on the one we have now,” said Maddie.
By the time Jocelyn left, Maddie was obsessed.
The book was about half-ghosts, a species of ghost that had to be either entirely mythical or, at least, extinct in the modern day. Humans simply couldn’t have ghost powers. The science didn’t work.
But the stories were fascinating. The descriptions of how ‘half-ghosts’ developed and acted were detailed. The logic of the ancient authors compelling.
As far as the translated portions went, in any case.
It left Maddie wondering: What if half-ghosts were possible?
She and Jack spent hours pouring over the notes Jocelyn had left, staying up all night. Her visit hadn’t been nearly long enough to go over everything.
Maddie felt a little guilty. She knew her children, Jazz and Danny, worried over them when they got so invested in a project like this, especially a project so likely to come to nothing. Danny, in particular, had come down several times to bring them snacks or peek over their shoulders.
Maddie and Jack, feeling guilty, and also tired, had relented towards dinnertime, and ordered pizza for the family. Then, they had gathered on the couch to watch a movie. Jack fell asleep right away, but Maddie was too wired.
“So,” said Danny, his eyes fixed blankly on a dialogue-free action sequence. “What are you guys working on, down there? You’ve been busy since yesterday.”
“Well,” said Maddie, “you remember that we took our first trip into the Ghost Zone a few days ago?”
“We found those books there, and Jocelyn translated some parts of one of them for us. We think they’re field observations made by medieval ghost hunters.”
Skepticism and exasperation flitted across Danny’s features, but quickly vanished. Maddie pushed away her disappointment. Danny and Jazz had never been very enthusiastic about their work, and she despaired of what would happen to Fentonworks when she and Jack got too old to keep it up.
Still. He was showing interest now, even if it was only to be polite.
“Okay,” said Danny. “What are you guys going to do with them?” He rubbed his hands back and forth on the couch upholstery.
“We were planning on running a few tests to see if the claims made in them are feasible.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll make sure everything we do is perfectly safe,” said Maddie, patting his knee.
“You’re going to be playing Mythbusters with ghosts,” said Danny, dryly. “I really doubt that’s going to be safe.”
The characters in the movie started talking again.
Danny had a point, Maddie had to admit. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if she were testing these things on herself, and Jack was around to double-check all her calculations.
“… manuscript retrieved from the Ghost Zone,” said Maddie, clearly, into her recorder, “suggests that natural portals formed an important role in the formation of the first generation of so-called ‘half-ghosts’ or ‘doorway spirits.’ The exact role is unclear at this point in our translation efforts, however, based on our own interaction with the Fenton Portal, and the fact that we do not exhibit the abilities of ‘half-ghosts,’ we believe the most likely cause is being ‘caught’ in a forming portal. If, of course, there’s any validity to the manuscript’s claims in the first place.”
Maddie paused, adjusting some of the controls in front of her, making sure everything was in place. Jack was taking care of the mice.
“We are going to test this theory with mice. Based on our current understanding of portal physics, our current expectation is that the mice will simply die. However, we ignore the wisdom of the past at our own risk. Are you ready, Jack?”
“Just about!” said Jack, fitting the last mouse into a harness to keep it from escaping the opening portal. He jogged over to stand with Maddie behind the blast shield.
Maddie nodded, checked the cameras, and then pulled the lever to bring the portal gun into alignment. They both pulled on their tinted goggles.
“Will you do the honors, dear?” she asked Jack, nodding at the firing button.
The lab was filled with a flash of light, making both of them wince, and then everything went dark.
“I think we tripped a circuit breaker, Mads,” said Jack, sheepishly.
“It happens,” said Maddie. “I hope the kids weren’t in the shower…” She tapped the night-vision switch on her goggles and walked over to the breaker box. She flipped the culprit switch. “There we go. Now, let’s take a look at the mi-” She blinked at the wreck of the mice cages. “They’re gone!”
They would have to revise their theories. None of them had predicted the mice being vaporized.
“I think I know why our experiment with the mice didn’t work,” said Jack.
“Oh?” said Maddie. She was working on preparing the Speeder for another expedition.
“No Obsession. To get a halfa, we need something that would have become a ghost on death anyway.”
“Easier than saying ‘half-ghost,’“ explained Jack.
“You may have a point,” said Maddie. “But that just means we’ll never be able to create a halfa in the lab. We can’t predict what will make a ghost.”
“That’s true,” said Jack. “But, we agreed before, halfas would be able to blend in with the living pretty well, right? Their human brains would override most of their ghostly impulses?”
“Except for a slight tendency towards violent and possessive behavior, yes,” said Maddie. “What are you getting at?”
“Well, natural portals still form all the time! And there are more humans than there have ever been. Halfas could be all around us and we’d never even know it! What we need is a way to detect them.”
“You’re right,” said Maddie. “But how?”
“Well, in theory they’d have ectosignatures, like ghosts, right? So, we could use our regular scanners, and if a human showed up as a ghost on them, then they’d be a halfa!”
“But, Jack, our scanners never work properly. They keep latching on to Danny, remember? Ever since…” Maddie’s brow furrowed. “Ever since… his accident with the portal.”
Jack had gone an odd, pasty color. “You don’t think-?”
“No,” said Maddie, firmly. “It isn’t possible.”
Maddie looked up, as if she could see through metal, concrete, wood, laminate, carpet, and drywall, all the way to Danny’s room on the second floor. “If it was… We’d just have to ask him, wouldn’t we?”
kianamaiart
ellievsbear
germansingergirl
origamiaround
snowghoul
titsay
jbbartram-illu
