Nick was the first to appear.

There was the smell of woodsmoke. Then the three men felt a warm, comforting presence fill the room. Then there was Nick, floating above them, crackling and glowing.

He was fire, for fire had ended his life and birthed his ghost. A weakness in his spiritual components prevented Nick from being anything other than a ball of fire. He could not form a body. He could not even form a face. He was, and could only be, a ball of fire, and when he first met Matthew and Joseph in the wilderness of the Thames settlement, he couldn’t even do that. Without the aid of gaeite candles, which revealed ghosts no matter how invisible they might be, he couldn’t be seen.

But though the spiritual component that controlled Nick’s physical appearance was weak, the spiritual components that controlled a ghost’s externalized power were strong in him. Nick’s fires were as hot as he willed them to be. They could be colder than a winter pond or hotter than a blast furnace. They could burn any physical material to ashes, and they could do the same to any Astral material. He didn’t like to do it, but he could reduce a ghost to a pile of charred ectoplasm--still living, of course, for the dead cannot die again, but living as ashes.

Nick was one of the most dangerous ghosts Matthew and Joseph encountered during their early manesological career in the Thames settlement, easily as dangerous as the Brute or the Sky Witch. He manifested before the survivors of the London fireball in phases. First, he manifested as a distant scream and a sudden, sharp rise in temperature, as if the sun suddenly came out from behind some clouds. As the scream got louder and louder, the temperature began to rise in tandem until things started to catch fire. When the screams reached their loudest, they competed with the crackling of a raging inferno. The frightened inhabitants of the Thames settlement called Nick the Hellbound Screamer.

From Nick’s perspective, he was trapped within a prison of fire. He could see the world, but the world couldn’t see him. Nick thought he was in Hell and being punished for what sin he couldn’t imagine, for he always thought he was a good man, and in truth, he was a good man. In his despair, he screamed, and sobbed, and cried out for God. He threw his emotions at the walls of his prison, for his emotions were all he had in his bodiless existence. These emotions manifested in physical space as smokeless fire that devoured all it touched.

That he was a dangerous ghost worked to Nick’s benefit, however, as it brought him to the attention of Joseph and Matthew. The two manesologists used the occult Operations of the Dyeus culture to restore Nick’s lucidity. Through their efforts, he became aware that he was not trapped by the fire, but was in fact, the fire itself.

But Joseph and Matthew were unable to make Nick look like a person. The spiritual component that controlled his appearance was very, very, weak, and while Dyeus Operations could weaken the spiritual components of any ghost to next-to-nothing, there was a limit to how much they could increase the strength of each component. The most they could do for Nick was to turn him from an invisible fireball into a visible one.

Nick was determined to repay them for their kindness, and so became an employee of Ernst, Morton, and Glass in Blackwall.

Nick was a very helpful employee. He kept the offices warm and lit. He cooked their food and warmed their coffee. And if they needed a little extra strength against a ghost, he could be summoned to their side in an instant through the Zacare Operation.

Nick appeared before Joseph, Martin, and Matthew in the form of a green fireball the shade of emerald. Nick could be any color he wished, that was one of the few things about his manifested body that he could control, but he chose to be green because he believed that there was no such thing as natural green flames. He believed his emerald color marked him as a living spirit instead of a living flame. But in truth, his flames were the color of burning copper sulfate, and Joseph threatened to give Martin the beating of his life if he ever, in his know-it-all sort of way, brought Nick’s attention to that fact.

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Shortly after Nick appeared, Esmee pulled herself piece-by-piece out of thin air. First an arm, then a portion of her dress, then her face, and then she filled in the gaps until she was all there. It was one of Esmee’s tricks. She had quite a few.

While her khet and sekhem were not as powerful as Nick’s, she was capable of using her ghostly powers with greater skill and precision. Nick was a strong hammer, but Esmee was a sharp knife. Most of Esmee’s tricks involved making things disappear and reappear by temporarily taking them into the Astral through a process Matthew Ernst termed “Odic induction.” These tricks made Esmee very useful to Ernst. Morton, and Glass, and she was glad she was a big help to them, for they saved her from her own madness just as they had Nick.

Unlike Nick, Esmee was very fortunate to have a spiritual component strong enough to grant her a human form. While no one would confuse Esmee for a human, she was human-looking enough for people to feel comfortable speaking to her. She was like a painting of a woman instead of a woman, but that was better than being a fireball without a face or a voice. What was more, she was very pretty. Some ghosts looked like they came out of nightmares. Esmee looked like she came out of a dream. All the slight imperfections Esmee Walker’s body had in life were made smooth and flawless in death. She looked like she was made of blue glass. She left no shadow. Light passed through her like water passing through water.

Light recognized her as a child of its substance. There was a faint glow to her body, nowhere near as bright as the glow Mr. Carter saw with his own ghosts, but in a dark room, she could easily be seen. It was as if something in her rejected the dominance of darkness.

Nick had a crush on Esmee, and everyone could tell.

Esmee and Nick were not the only ghosts that aided Ernst, Morton and Glass. There was, of course, Teddy, but there also were others, mostly kept in the basement and in the caverns dug beneath the basement.

These ghosts were not as sociable as Esmee and Nick. There was Edward Piers, who Joseph called “Peers” on account of his intense stare, who Illustrated Phantom Stories called Jack Frost. Piers was a homeless derelict who perished on a bench in early December. He rose from his body and was confused by what had happened to him, but he was confused by most things around him. He was a man born with low intelligence, who found his way onto the streets of Blackwall because of his inability to care for himself. He continued to do what he had done in life--look for warmth and food, but this time the chill of his death followed him. He would snuff out any fires he came across, crusting them over with frost, before moving on to another, not understanding why the fires kept going away. He was kept in the basement next to the boiler, and because the boiler’s fires were lit by Nick’s powers, they were hot enough to warm Jack Frost even through his ever-present chill. Piers was kept warm day-and-night, and so Piers was a content ghost. A warm place to sleep was all he ever wanted, in life and after-life.

There was Eva, a mischievous little sprite of shadows and whispers, who died too young to appreciate the sadness of her brief life. She saw the world as a great big playground. Walls were just doors to her that were always opened. If unsupervised, her childish attitude combined with her supernatural power could make her a potential danger to others, and so she was kept confined to the basement and the caverns with the power of the Nothoa Operation. She didn’t mind. She liked the dark far more than the light, and the caverns gave her plenty of room to explore. She also kept Blackwall’s sizable rodent population under control, though not underpopulated. She took good care of her numerous “kitties” and taught them that the caverns were their home, not the world above.

There was John Kale, an orange light who lived in books. He would suffuse one book with his light, read it, and move on to another. He was an avid reader in life, who regretted that there was more to be read than any man could read in one lifetime. Now, as a ghost, he really could read all there was to read. John was kept in a room in the back filled with books, which Joseph called the library and Martin called the book storage, because, as he argued, a library had books that were organized on shelves for optimal perusal instead of stacked from floor to roof for maximum storage. Matthew just called it John’s room.

Joseph called John their “great luminescent brain.” He glowed, and he read, and he remembered. He had gone through all the books that were originally in the room and was now working his way through a new batch purchased from Gaskell’s Occult Books down the street. There was little that John couldn’t tell Ernst, Morton, and Glass when it came to history or the occult. When they needed to ask John a question, all they had to do was ask him to jump into a blank book kept in Matthew’s desk. John would burn letters into the blank pages and in this way communicate with his friends.

And there were many other ghosts in the nooks and crannies of the offices. The lives of Ernst, Morton, and Glass were filled with ghosts. “When we finally meet our destiny, we'll be in good company.” Matthew once told his friends that had pulses.