Phantoms Inc and the Case of the Faceless Ghost

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Conner

I’m taking my furry dog friend Durham out for a walk. Brooklyn can be a cold town but he doesn’t seem to mind. He seems to be happy to be out. He’s not the only one. We’re walking round the block cause I need some space. The smell in the flat has got worse recently and Marshall has been bitching at me again about my action figures. I thought a walk around the block with Durham might do me some good, it’s certainly doing him some good, but I’m not enjoying it. It’s cold and I draw my coat tighter around me. It’s only late September, but the cold feels like it’s seeping into the very marrow of my bones.
I would have asked Klaus if he would have liked to grab a coffee - and he loves Durham - but he wasn’t around. I don’t have much cash but I’ve got a loyalty card from Ultimate Barista which entitles me to a free hot drink -  but no cakes - and it’s burning a hole in my pocket, but it gets to live and love another day.

I’m freezing but I don’t want to go back to the apartment. I need some space.

Marshall

Thank god Conner left the apartment. Maybe I can do some cleaning. The place looks like a dump and because this place doubles as our office there’s a chance - remote at the moment it seems  - that we might get an actual paying client dropping by. I dunno where Conner’s gone with Durham, he muttered something about Klaus under his breath. I just hope he’s in a better mood when he gets back. I might even open some windows to get the air circulating in here, despite the cold. You know, treat myself.

Conner
I’m thinking about heading back cause it’s really frigging cold. 

“What can you see boy?” Durham is sniffing at a wall, before looking up and whimpering. We’re standing in front of a brownstone apartment. Nothing unusual about that but sitting on the steps is a woman in her twenties with red hair who is finishing a cigarette before immediately starting another. The ash is  raining down from the trembles in her hand. 

“Are you okay?” Durham lead gets out of my hand and he runs up to her and starts licking her hand.

“No, not really.” she says but ruffles the fur on Durham’s head and smiles. He looks up at her with his soulful eyes.

“What’s wrong?”

She nods her head towards the brownstone. When I look at it I hear a buzzing, like a wasp trapped in a jam jar.

“Me and my girlfriend rented this place. We couldn’t believe our luck, finally catching a break, but - “ she laughs - “you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“There’s - “ she takes a deep drag of her cigarette “ - there’s something in there with us, and it doesn’t want to share. It’s driving us out.”

“I guess we’re not talking about something that Renta-Kill could sort out?”

She ruffles Durham’s head again.

“Renta-Ghost maybe. See I said you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Oh I believe you and I think I can help.” She gives me a weary smile.     

“Yeah? We could do with the help. We should have known it was too good to be true. I’m Maria by the way.”. We shake hands.

“Let me show you.”, she says and leads me and Durham into the apartment which is impressive. Instantly I feel a presence, but I need something physical to be able to connect with it. 

“What activity is there and is anything that it centers around?”

“Things move, sometimes they fly off tops and smash into walls, and there’s - there’s crying. It’s terrifying.”

“I can imagine.”

“And it centers around this.” Maria points to a large chunky brass key on a table in the hall.

“That wasn’t here when we first arrived, one day it just appeared on that table. I thought Louise - my girlfriend - was pranking me cause it doesn’t fit any lock in the apartment. She swore it wasn’t her, then it would disappear then reappear elsewhere. That was…odd, but then he began to appear.”

“Who…” but she shakes her head. Maria doesn’t seem to want to go near the key. I take a deep breath and pick up the key. Durham starts to whimper  and Maria gasps.

At the top of the stairs is a man dressed in work clothes which are at least eight decades out of date, and where his face should be is a nightmare swirl of red and pink, smear of lumpy flesh like a Francis Bacon painting made real. He has his  hands out, pleading, searching. I can see the blisters and buns on his hand, but instinctively I hand him the key. His cracked mouth opens and he lets forth a high pitched, pitiful wail which crashes through the apartment. The key clutters to the floor as the figure  on the stairs disappears. I pick the key back up but don’t get anything. .

“I’m so sorry.” I say to Maria. 

“That’s the worst it’s ever been.” she says with one hand on the front door handle, ready to bolt. “Please tell me there’s something you can do about it.”

“Yeah of course.” I lied. The truth is that I don’t know if I can.

“Is there any other trigger for the activity, or a spot in the apartment?”

“There’s a room we don’t go in, well it’s not a room really, it’s the cellar. It’s where we store things, but there’s what I can only describe as an atmosphere down there.” 

Durham has recovered from seeing the ghost, and his tongue is out and he’s looking up at me expectantly. I tell him to stay while Maria leads me to the cellar. Durham stays on the spot, he’s a very good boy!

On the side of the staircase is a brown, wood paneled door, which she points at.

“Sorry but I can’t go in there “ 

“No worries.” I push the door open, and a chemical smell drifts up. 

I take a first step into the darkness.  

“Is there a light…?” I begin and  what’s below is suddenly illuminated, the cellar is being consumed by flames.  The man I saw earlier is desperately looking for a way to open the door, he’s looking for the key. In desperation he throws himself against the door. He’s a well built man but it still takes five attempts before he makes a dent in it. He manages to make a big enough hole in it for the orphans to get through. The children are crying but the man is keeping calm and only after the last child is out does he think about leaving, but before he can make his escape there’s a roar of a flame which blasts him in the face. He screams as he drops to his knees and grasps at his melting face. He falls through the gap in the door and stumbles up the collapsing stairs, manages to make  the door, and passes right through me  bumping into walls and doors, screaming, until - more by luck than judgment - he falls into the street still clawing at his mutilated face and falls into the road.

An extensive search on the internet - okay, thirty minutes - brings nothing of worth, so we tread down to the New York library. Marv - our bouncy geeky uber fan - has got a part time job there and with his  help we find a newspaper report about the fire in the brownstone and the man who dies. His name was Thomas Richardson. He was quite the fella. The apartment was originally an orphanage he'd set up. He’d made a killing back  in the day helping to build the railroads, he then used the money for philanthropic enterprises. If that wasn’t enough Thomas even worked at the orphanage, helping out round the building.

I wonder how we’ll be judged in a hundred years time?

Crucially we find two pictures of him. One smiling with a group of children at the opening of the orphanage. The second shows a more dapper Thomas Richardson and details the horrific fire in the cellar where he was the only casualty. The report mentions that usually the a big brass key which was usually in the door was found on the other side after the fire someone had locked them in. 

“What were kids doing sleeping in the cellar?” Marshall asks. He’s got a point.

“Oh it says that they were staying sleeping there temporarily cause there had been such demand for beds.” Searching the records I find two more mentions, one being of the - very - well attended funeral of Thomas and another saying that the cause of the fire was never found. That figures. The key to the cellar door is useless to Thomas now, but I thought that just the physical presence of it might be enough to put him at rest, but no, there’s something else. He’s searching for something else. Then it dawns on me what it is. 

“I know what we’ve got to do and who can do it for us.” I say.

“Yeah?” Marshall says, then his face drops. “Oh, you’re kidding.”

#

A few days later we find myself outside Maria’s brownstone again and she’s there chain smoking again but this time I’m with Marshall and we have a metal suitcase, which looks straight out of Mission Impossible. 

“How’s it been?” I ask Maria while I kick the curb.

“Not great.” her hand is trembling and she’s close to tears.

“I think we might have the answer. Her eyes go to the suitcase Marshall is holding.

“May we?” I gesture to the front room.

“Be my guest.”

Marshall and I enter the hallway. 

“Is that it?” He tips his head towards the brass key, I nod. 

“Wait there’s something I need to find out.”
I pick up the key and close my eyes and try to channel my question.

“Who locked the door that night?”

Instantly I see two men dressed in dark, grubby clothes approaching the cellar door, and I see the room as it was before the fire. They almost look like a comedy double act cause one of them is fat, the other one is thin. The thin one looks nervous, the fat one looks angry. 

“There must be another way?” the thin one whimpers.

“Get a grip.” barks the fat man. “This place is driving the property prices down. It ain’t good for the neighborhood having his brats around. We can’t have a do-gooder like Richardson ruining it for the rest of us. Go in and do what you have to do.”

The thin man goes in and plays with the boiler then both men leave. Later the fat man comes back and waits in the shadows. He sees Richardson go into the cellar and locks the door behind him. 

I drop the key and I’m back in the room. Please god, I hope the fat man didn’t know the orphans were in there, please god. 

“You okay?” Marshall asks, I nod and pick the key back up. A shudder runs through me and - it seems - the building.

“It’s happening.”

Though Marshall is standing right next to me he sounds miles away. 

I hear the steps. Heavy footsteps like nails being hammered into a wall, and there he is. Thomas Richardson. Lost, washed away in time but he’s lurching towards us. 

Blind and desperate.

A wailing comes from his malformed mouth. He’s coming down the stairs slowly and I have to keep telling myself that he means no harm but that’s easy to do when you’ve not got a faceless ghost stomping towards you. The present is being overlapped by the past. I can almost feel the heat from the flames and I can feel the terror running down the stairs at me. Thomas is desperate and scared. I can see two versions of him, from the time  of the fire, and the shade which has terrorized the occupants of the apartment. 

 Every inch he moves towards me he seems to become more solid. 

He’s within four feet of me.

Marshall

All roads lead to Faulkmeyer. However, at the moment we’re in a curious position with our go-to procurer of the esoteric. Usually we come to him cup-in-hand but since our most recent case - which gifted us Durham the dog - we’ve been in possession of something he wants and he knows we have it, so he needs to play nice with us. 

“Phantoms Inc!” he exclaims in his - almost certainly fake - English accent “My favorite supernatural detectives!” Now I know what you might be thinking that’s a fairly low bar, but I’m sure he prefers our rivals, ‘Spirits Incorporated’.

“What can I do for you?”

“Didn’t you mention that you have access to a 3D printer?”

“Of course.” he hurumpfs with a look on his face as if I’ve asked him if he has access to running water.

“What do you need printing? A bespoke custom Star Trek figure for Conner’s collection?” Faulkmeyer says with a chuckle.

“Well actually - “ begins Conner before I cut him off.

“No, it’s to help us with a case.” I say - possibly a little too sharply, ah, but fuck him.

“Do tell.” 

“Better if I show you.”

#

How Faulkmeyer found out about my side hustle I’ll never know. Cause I’ve got a fascination with all things IT and digital. I've been helping out a CGI artist with some work, specifically ‘de-aging’ an actor from a leading SF franchise to fit into a new flashback episode of said franchise. So I do have access to some cutting edge facial CGI software. Well,access kinda, sorta. The guy I’m working with has spent a lot of time and money on the software, so he’s a bit touchy about who uses and for what. I’m pretty sure that he’d say no if I asked what we needed it for . To be honest I don’t even know if we can actually do what we need but we find ourselves in his tiny studio where I’ve helped him out and indeed - ahem - helped ourselves. 

When we get in and scan what we need it doesn’t take long to output the file that Faulkmeyer says he needs. I hope it’s enough.

Faulkmeyer, Conner and I stand around the 3D printer like expectant fathers and because printers are the most hateful of all IT equipment on the first three attempts it throws errors, and even though we have the instruction manual we just start pressing the flashing buttons in hope that it will work, and randomly it does! Before our eyes a face begins to form out of the hot plastic.

In total it takes two hours to chug out, and another two hours to cool down so that we can take it to a make-up artist friend of ours that we know via the Necronomicon convention so that they can apply flesh tones. It’s pretty uncanny valley realistic when it’s finished. Its empty eyes are a bit freaky. Conner picks it up and looks into its sightless eyes before turning to me.

“Let’s see if this works.

“I have what you’re looking for!” I yell.

Thomas stumbles to a halt. 

My hands are shaking so badly that I can barely undo the clasps on the suitcase, but after four fumbled attempts I manage to open it up. I quickly pull the mask out of the case and offer it to the ghost almost as though I’m offering up a sacrifice. 

Everything goes quiet. 

Thomas reaches out and grasps the mask. Our fingers brush together, and it’s like touching icicles. I hesitate to let go, because although the shade of Thomas has solidified I can still see details of the apartment through him. I don’t want the mask to drop and be damaged. I doubt that we’d be able to make another, but I can feel that it’s supported so I can take a step back.

For a breathless moment the mask hovers in mid air in the hands of the not-quite-there figure of Thomas Richardson. Slowly he brings the mask to his mangled face. A light shines out from beneath it. The mask begins to melt and bleed into the face of the ghost. Suddenly what was just plastic begins to have life and moves. Almond color eyes come alive behind the empty eye holes, eyebrows move up in delighted surprise. His lips bloom with blood and the edges turn upwards. His hands reach up to touch his face and his smile really breaks out. Thomas reaches back like he’s stretching and fades from view.

The difference is instant. It feels like there’s been a thunderstorm which has now cleared. Maria can tell that something has shifted and runs over to hug me. 

We walk back to our apartment.

“You did a good thing Conner.” Marshall says.

“Thanks.”

“Hold on, are we getting paid for this?” 

“Well I, the thing is.” I stutter.

“That’ll be a no then.” thankfully he laughs