Mr. Carter ran, stumbling through the dark, bumping his leg against walls and furniture.

He ran and he didn’t stop running until he reached the little kitchen in the back of the building and locked the door.

He knew it was foolish, locking the door. Everyone knew ghosts could walk through doors. But he did it anyway.

He stared at the locked door. Oh, these ghosts were making a fool of him. Did he think he could do anything to them, if they suddenly all rushed through the building and grabbed him? “The living have no defense against the dead” was a common saying for a reason.

He made a face, then jerked the key out of his pocket and slammed it into the lock. He pushed the door open.

There! At least, if the ghosts had aims on making him dead, he wouldn’t be a dead fool.

Mr. Carter would have shouted something defiant and obscene at the ghosts, but he considered the possibility that actually doing so would really bring them running after him and a pressure in his throat stopped his words.

Moving in the dark, for the kitchen was familiar to him, he found the icebox, pulled out a long bottle of beer, and opened it. He normally liked to savor his beer, to pour it in glass and wait for it to warm up a little. It tasted better that way, but he wasn’t so much concerned with taste now as numbing his anxiety, and so down his hatch it went.

The alcohol only made him feel a little better, but a little better meant a lot considering how he was feeling at the moment.

He took a deep breath.

“They say we’re a modern theater,” he thought. “And we are. We’re only three years old. We haven’t even had our first cobweb yet. We called ourselves the Gnome after one of the races the thaumaturgists saw in their recent visions of the pre-human past. We’re very modern, so it makes sense that we would have modern problems. Like hauntings. Hauntings are a very modern problem, like electric fires. And well, an electric fire wouldn’t have left a theater, now, would it?”

He found the knob for the gas lamp and turned it. Light filled the kitchen. This was one of the rooms that hadn’t yet been fitted with an electric lamp. Mr. Carter had fought long and hard against the electric invasion of his theater, but it was a losing battle. The gas lamps were rather old fashioned for a recent building, and the investors wanted to be as modern as possible. But Mr. Carter found gas lamps to be much more attractive than modern filament lamps. What was more, he had heard rumors about electric lamps. They worked on a similar principle to the gaeite candles used by manesologists--an electric current ran through a metal wire, and many reported that because of the similarity, filament lamps had some of the power of a gaeite candle and could attract ghosts like moths.

Of course, these were only rumors, and Nisbet’s Manesology said nothing about electric filament lamps attracting ghosts, but Mr. Carter had a simple philosophy concerning rumors--they were best collected, but unexplored, out of the fear they might actually be confirmed true.

And, of course, electric lamps had a greater chance to cause a fire. Everyone knew that.

With the light, Mr. Carter could now check his pocket watch, which he did after every haunting--but never during a haunting, as he never wanted to risk dropping it again after the first time.

The watch face read 10:30.

That wasn’t good. That wasn’t good at all.

When the hauntings first started, they happened a little after midnight. Then, they were pushed back, gradually, over several nights, to 11:00. Now, in the span of a single night, they were pushed back a whole half-hour.

And on top of that, the population of ghosts had grown so much that they were overflowing the stage.

And perhaps they would keep on growing, until they emptied into the streets for all to see…

Mr. Carter sat down in a chair, inhaled, exhaled, and thought.

Waiting for the problem to go away wasn’t working. He had hoped, he had prayed, that the hauntings would stop on their own. He heard rumors that hauntings were like illnesses in that if you waited them out, they would go away on their own, unless the hauntings had abnormally powerful ghosts. Illustrated Phantom Stories had a story just the other day about a woman who was haunted by her mother for a month, and just a month. One day, her mom went off into the Astral like a good ghost, and hadn’t been heard from since. Mr. Carter hoped that the ghosts that haunted the Gnome theater would do the same. But now, with what he had seen, the haunting was clearly not just persisting but growing.

It was time to get help--professional help.

One of the benefits of living in an age of phantoms was that there were trained professionals in dealing with them.

Mr. Carter reached for a shelf above the icebox and looked through a little collection of books, reading material for actors coming in to have a snack or for the cook to have something to read while the pots boiled--that cook, more often than not, being himself.

He found his copy of Nesbit’s Manesology, an introductory text to the scientific study of ghosts he had been reading through in an attempt to gain some understanding of the hauntings, and removed a folded stack of papers he had been using as a bookmark.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

He spread the papers out on the table: a business flyer and a couple of copies of Illustrated Phantom Stories.

He looked at the flyer and allowed himself a brief smile.

Ernst, Morton, and Glass: Manesologists.

His potential saviors!

Below their names, which were written a fancy cursive not too dissimilar to what Mr. Carter used for his own programs, was a drawing of a gaeite candle. That alone was a good sign. The frauds and the hucksters, they were afraid to so much as draw a gaeite candle for two reasons, the second far more pressing than the first.

The first reason was that people were still afraid of gaeite candles after London, and there was serious money to be made presenting an alternative, any alternative, to gaeite candles. The frauds claimed to be able to use quartz crystals, or silver crucifixes, or oak wands, or what have you to tame ghosts. These things couldn’t blow up a city and thus seemed safer, but there was no scientific power to them. They were as useless as those that wielded them.

The second reason was that the thaumaturgists were very protective of their manesologists and the gaeite candles which they had given them. There were stories of foolish men who tried, for whatever mad reasons, to mug a manesologist. A man would appear from out of the shadows and drag him away, never to be seen again. The thaumaturgists were always watching the world from Paradial. Prudent men through it was best not to advertise a false claim on their property.

Mr. Carter then looked at the copies of Illustrated Phantom Stories, which proudly bragged that it was the “world’s most popular publication on current manesological happenings.” It was by the same people that published the lurid but popular Illustrated Police News and people said that for as popular as Illustrated Police News’ stories of murder and theft were, Illustrated Phantom Stories sold three to four times as much.

There were certainly more accurate accounts of ghostly activity than Illustrated Phantom Stories, but none were as comprehensive. Every delusion, every misidentification, every lie, was reported in Illustrated Phantom Stories--but also every truth.

Ernst, Morton, and Glass weren’t uncommon sights in the broadsheet publication. Manesologists were to Illustrated Phantom Stories what policemen were to Illustrated Police News. They weren’t the main attractions, those were the ghosts and criminals, but they were the ones that pursued and contained the main attractions. They swept them from the stage, cleaned up after them, and told their audience to go home.

Mr. Carter could relate.

He looked at one cover depicting Joseph Morton. He loomed, as if he was a ghost himself, over an imp-like ghost that crawled away from his approach. JOSEPH MORTON HUNTS THE BREATHSTEALER OF BURKEN TOWN, the cover stated. Joseph Morton’s eyes were small black pinpoints drawn into the wrinkled sockets of his eyes. The breathstealer's eyes were wide and white and fearful.

Mr. Carter figured that was the expression he would make if Joseph Morton was ever after him.

Joseph Morton was a tall, hulking man. Illustrated Phantom Stories loved to draw him, for he was visually striking. Everything about him seemed elongated from his stovepipe hat to his long beard to even his age. His wrinkles placed him at a sagacious age, but there certainly wasn’t anything sagacious about temper. Though he was mostly known as a jovial character skilled in calming victims of a haunting and getting them to open up about details they would otherwise be reticent in sharing, he had a temper, and though his temper mostly manifested through his tongue, it sometimes manifested through his fists. He once punched a rival manesologist in the face over a disagreement concerning a case they were both working on. Rumor had it that Ernst, Morton, and Glass had to pay out in a settlement and buy the man false teeth.

Another cover depicted Matthew Ernst. The middle-aged professor looked on with fearless interest as a disembodied hand wrote in a book. MATTHEW ERNST STUDIES THE SAGACIOUS HAND! WHO DOES HE BELIEVE IT BELONGS TO? MERLIN? NEWTON? NOSTRADAMUS?

Mr. Carter remembered it ended up belonging to a scrivener named Alvin Hope. Not all the stories in Illustrated Phantom Stories lived up to their advertisements.

Matthew Ernst was, at once, the least and most popular member of Ernst, Morton, and Glass. He was very popular in the manesological community, for he wrote a lot of academic papers. He was famous for pioneering the oppositional theory of manesological composition which stated that certain elements of a ghost’s composition worked against each other. It was assumed, early on in the field of manesology, that all parts of a ghost worked together to support the whole as organs did in the body. But Matthew Ernest believed that some parts worked against each other, particularly two parts known as the ba and ka, the memories and behaviors a ghost carried from his living body against impulsives and thoughts novel to the ghost. But the average person didn’t particularly care about the academic minutia of manesology, and so the soft-spoken Matthew Ernst was, to most, the “other” member of Ernst, Morton, and Glass.

People said that Matthew Ernest was the ghost of Ernst, Morton, and Glass, because he was the one that didn’t seem to be present, even when he was. And that was something Mr. Carter could understand, for as the director of the Gnome theater, he did everything that wasn’t seen by the audience.

A third cover depicted Martin Glass, the youngest member of Ernst, Morton, and Glass and also the last to join. Matthew Ernst and Joseph Morton met each other during what people now called the “Thames settlement” in which the survivors of the London fire huddled along the Thames river in leather tents and log cabins. They operated as manesologists in secret, for people feared and hated manesologists due to the cause of the fire, and eventually settled, like most survivors of the fire, in Blackwall. It was in Blackwall that they met Martin Glass.

The cover showed Martin in one of the strange, Astral worlds known only to thaumaturgists. He was one of them, in a way. He had learned from them, trained to become one, was even brought to Paradial, the city of the thaumaturgists. But something had happened which caused him to turn away from the path just before he became a thaumaturgist, something he would not disclose to the public. Whether he told Joseph Morton and Matthew Ernst, none could say. He wasn’t a full thaumaturgist, but he retained some skills from their teaching, the most notable of which were his “dogs,” depicted on the cover as two floating canine heads, noble and strong like heraldry animals. They flanked him, his loyal and protective hounds, as he walked through a sandy wasteland filled with eroded pyramids and titled obelisks. Above him, bright stars burned in an alien sky. MARTIN GLASS IN THE DOMAIN OF THE SILVER STARS.

In real life, his dogs were invisible pockets of force. Neither man nor beast nor ghost could see them, for they were what were called “thought-forms” born from out of Martin Glass’ own mental energies.

He, without a doubt, would have been the most illustrated member of Ernst, Morton, and Glass if Joseph Morton wasn’t so damned odd. Martin was a striking man. He had short, blonde hair and bright, blue eyes, but he was not a wrinkled giant like Joseph Morton. His features were often exaggerated by the illustrators to make him look more interesting. The cover before Mr. Carter had his hair long, almost angelic, and it moved in the wind. His eyes sparkled as he looked over a hostile, unknowable world with a clam, knowing expression.

Because of his age and background, he knew less than his colleagues and yet more than they ever would.

Mr. Carter was aware that some of the stories in Illustrated Phantom Stories had to be exaggerated or even fictionalized. He doubted the stories about them destroying vampires were real. No one said vampires were real. No one published academic papers about vampires. But there were just so many stories, and if only one percent of them were true, then they were surely the men for this job.

They would work. They could do this.

“Gentlemen, you do this for me, and you’ll have free passes to my theater for the rest of your lives.” Mr. Carter said.

He looked at the bottle, had a fleeting moment of reconsideration, then upended the bottle and poured its contents down his gullet.

“But just for your lives. I hope you’ll understand.”