“Whenever they see you, they give you their undivided attention like good little schoolboys.” Joseph said. “It seems they want to hear from you. You’re a director. Maybe they want you to direct them?”

“But Dr. Morton, I can’t be sure of that.” Mr. Carter said “Maybe they do want me to direct them--and then they’ll dislike my directions, turn on me, and kill me!”

“That seems very unlikely. Remember, ghosts are the children of humanity, as they say. They are as unpredictable--and predictable--as humans are. If all your ghosts ever did was stare at you, it is extremely unlikely that they ever meant you harm.”

Mr. Carter raised a finger. “Unlikely, but not impossible! Manes have done odder things than suddenly turn on a man and rip his throat out!”

“So have men!” Joseph replied. “But if you found that strange men, night after night, were using your stage, and then looked blankly at you while you looked fearfully back, what would you do?”

“I would speak to them.”

“Well, there you go, Mr. Carter!”

“But those would be men, not ghosts!”

Joseph sighed. “Ah, Mr. Carter, you aren’t getting it. It is wise to be afraid of ghosts. It is wise to be afraid of anything that can kill a man just by looking at him. But it is unwise to be incurious about ghosts. I say that to your benefit, sir. Because more and more ghosts are walking the Earth every day. Those Archon walls that separate our physical universe from the Astral have been thinning since the Dyeus, since before the Dyeus even, and they’re going to keep on thinning. We’re going to resolve your haunting, Mr. Carter, but I don’t want to see you back here one day telling us how night after night you watched another set of ghosts look at you while you said nothing.”

“Well, most nights they don’t see me.” Mr. Carter said. I hide behind the chairs.”

“We have had cases similar to yours where men and women have encountered silent ghosts that stare at them. Those men and women said something to their ghosts because, as with humans, their behaviors are dominated by patterns. If someone knocked on your door every night, you would think they wanted something from you. Those men and women spoke to their ghosts, and how their ghosts responded told them a lot about their motives. It made their cases so much easier to approach . You wonder what people in Essex would do if they saw your ghost actors on the street outside the Gnome? Well, they’d probably ask them why they were there! Have you ever heard of the story of the Fisher King, Mr. Carter?”

“I’m afraid in my cursory reading of Illustrated Phantom Stories that I have not come across that ghost.”

Joseph smiled. “The Fisher King isn’t a ghost, Mr. Carter. He’s a figure from Arthurian folklore. You know, King Arthur and Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table?”

“Oh.”

“His story is that he had a magical connection to his kingdom. So long as he was healthy, his kingdom was prosperous. But one day, he was wounded, and his kingdom began to fall to ruins. Crops withered and died. His kingdom was friendly to Camelot, and so King Arthur sent his knight Percival to aid him. Percival comes across the king, but he doesn’t look like a king. He’s lamed because of his wound, and all he does all day is fish, hence his name. Percival wants to help, he’s on this quest to save the king and his lands, but he’s a child of the Camelot court. He was taught never to ask unnecessary questions, and could this lamed fisherman really be the king? He thinks not, and so goes on his way, failing his quest when all he had to do was ask the fisherman who he was. All he had to do to begin the healing of the Fisher King and his lands, was to ask a question--who are you?’

“That’s a very nice story, Mr. Carter, but I am not a knight, nor a manesologist, nor any sort of man who deals with adventurous sorts of scenarios.” Mr. Carter said. “I am a theater director. You are the knight.”

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

“I’m afraid we’ll have to knight you, in this case, Mr. Carter.” Matthew said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Mr. Carter, so that we can work in both your best interest and the best interest of the manes, we have to ask you to accompany us on our investigation.”

Mr. Carter was speechless for a moment. Then he gasped out “What?” and in the silence of the room his gasp fell like a thunderbolt.

“I shall explain.” Matthew said.

“Please do!”

“Perhaps Illustrated Phantom Stories doesn’t make it very clear, because they like to depict us as near-superhuman ghost fighters who jump into a haunted house and clear out all the manes inside, but we believe in a heterogeneous approach to resolving hauntings.” Matthew explained.

“I don’t understand.”

“You are involved in this haunting. When the manes see you, they stop, and they look at you. There is clearly something about you that the manes see as special. We would like for you to be involved in the investigation because of this.”

“What exactly do you expect me to do? You don’t expect me to actually be in the theater with you while you’re interacting with the ghosts, do you?”

“We do expect you to be physically present.”

Mr. Carter bit his lip.

How could they ask him this? How could they not understand how unnatural, how off-putting, it was to so much as look at a ghost let alone speak to one?

If these manesologists couldn’t understand his anxiety…then maybe they really were ghosts?

No.

No, they couldn’t be.

He pushed the thought deep down into the bedrock his mind.

What was he supposed to do if they were, in fact, ghosts inhabiting dead bodies? Get up and walk away? And go where? To other manesologists? If Ernst, Morton, and Glass were ghosts inside human bodies, then all manesologists were ghosts in human bodies.

He had to trust that they were human.

Mr. Carter straightened up. He took a deep breath in through his nose. He carefully considered what he had to say--he was in front of celebrities, after all.

And, perhaps, ghosts in the bodies of dead men…

“Dr. Morton, Dr. Ernst, and Dr. Glass, I do not agree with your heterogeneous approach to haunting resolution.” Mr. Carter said. “I cannot speak to the ghost side of this approach, as I am neither ghost nor manesologist, but it seems very burdensome and troublesome from the perspective of the human side.”

“There may also be another reason for you to accompany us on our investigation.” Matthew said. “Mr. Carter, are you familiar with the Ogdoad Quad?”

“Yes I am. The “Eight that is Four,” it’s like a ghost’s anatomy, it’s all their spiritual components.”

“Correct. Eight spiritual components, called papnors, divided into four pairs, called salmon. There’s a salmon called the sema, and it contains the rn papnor and the ib papnor.”

“I’ve heard of the sema, but I’m not very knowledgeable. Nesbit’s Manesology described the sema in rather poetic, hard-to-follow terms.”

“The sema is the trickiest salmon to discuss.” Matthew said. “It’s the most difficult salmon to observe in a scientific context and thus the least understood. In truth, no one, be they layman, manesologists, or thaumaturgist, is very knowledgeable on the sema. The sema is commonly called the part of a manes that doesn’t truly belong to a manes. It’s a system distributed across the Astral, across the entire metaphysical sphere of human thought.”

Mr. Carter shook his head. “It’s when metaphysical spheres get discussed that I lose the trail.”

“The ib component of the sema unites a manes with those that were close to him or her in life--friends, family, even beloved pets. When a manes looks at a painting of how he looked in life, and miles away his daughter starts to cry and doesn’t understand why, that is the working of the ib. The rn unites the manes with the a wider, more generalized portion of humanity When a manes feels drawn to churchyards and pacified by crucifixes, it is because these objects are commonly understood by Englishmen to have spiritual power, and so they exert power over the manes through the rn. The rn is why, when we have to affix ghosts, we like to affix them to crosses. It makes them feel comfortable compared to being affixed to, so say, a rock.”

Matthew pulled out a small wooden cross from his pocket. ”We keep several of these in our pockets.”

He placed the cross on the table. “You may keep it, if you like, Mr. Carter. Think of it as a Blackwall souvenir.”

“I respectfully decline.” Mr. Carter said.

“Very. Well. As I was saying,all other spiritual systems and components of a manes are localized.” Matthew continued. “They exist close to each other. But the rn and ib function irrespective of all physical distance. The manes of a Chinese Buddhist feels nothing when he hears the name of Christ, not even if he’s standing inside Salisbury Cathedral. But he trembles at the mention of Zhong Kui, a legendary figure from his culture noted for quelling demons, ghosts, and spirits. And if the manes of a man’s wife binds her ib to his soul, then that man can climb the tallest mountain or dive to the bottom of the sea, it will make no difference--when the manes cries, he will also cry.

“Dr. Ernst, are you implying that a ghost’s ib has bound itself to me?” Mr. Carter asked.

“It is a possibility.” Matthew replied.

Mr. Carter sighed and clutched at his head.

They were going to want to illuminate him, he was sure of that. Illuminating was when they shined their gaeite candles on people to see if a ghost had done anything to them, and it was something he dreaded.

To be bathed in the same light that burned London to the ground, that was something he was sure he wouldn’t be able to stand.