(This story takes place among the ongoing SHIELD Codex stories, but don't require any prior reading. All you need to know is this: What with one thing and another, Loki chooses to work with the agents of SHIELD chasing odd jobs and the occasional unearthly horror. This is a little holiday treat devoted to that. Three days of Halloween.)

We Lived in Castles: A Codex Halloween

"History is ultimately an inventory of ghosts." ~ Guillermo Del Toro

1. This Corrosion

. . .

Wet leaves still crisp from the autumn cold fluttered and scraped along the black asphalt as the detective shivered within his fleece jacket. He was tempted to pull his head in and bury his broad nose in its zipped up collar, but he refused. Not while the out of towner was standing stoically in front of him like the first lick of winter was meaningless against his exposed neck. The detective cleared his throat instead, turning his head away from the interloper and looking at a pumpkin topping a trash pile at the end of the lane edging the property. It was childishly carved with the lopsided face of a cat becoming almost menacing as it decayed in on itself. Halloween was over, a damp New England affair with kids wearing parkas and slick raincoats over their costumes.

But not entirely.

"I want the ownership history; legal documents, liens or other problems with the property. I would like it all before your offices close for the day and I would most certainly like it before sundown, when I have other plans. Time is not something I generally care to waste." The man's voice was clipped and elegant, almost English but somehow not quite. "It's problematic, I realize. It's a commercial facility with recent public use, therefore it will be a tangled matter. So my most efficient suggestion, detective, is that you simply step out of my way. I will assist myself."

"Problem with that, sir, is that half of it's going to be tied up at the town library. Archives, if you get me. It's old stuff, even though the facility just shut down in the spring." He managed to not sound grudging. The creepily pale special investigator had been a relentless living thorn in his heel since he drove into town that morning in a crappy airport rental at odds with the expensive airs he put upon. But the man's credentials cleared and the detective was tired of the frenzy the locals were whipping up. Last week's town hall had been enough for him even without all this. With the holiday ahead, every old biddy and young granola nut had seemed to crawl out of the woodwork to air concerns about things they think they saw on the condemned property. As they did every year. Property owner hadn't bothered to show again. Didn't even know who it was anymore. Maybe that was for the best.

Then the fire happened. Jesus Christ, the fire. That put the cat on the pigeons. If he inhaled hard enough to get past the dead leaves, he could still pick it up from here at the very edge of the property and past the bus lot. A rank mix of burning wood and plastic, charred metal and scorched paper. And whatever chemicals the janitorial staff left on the property. If he glanced to his left, he could see county officials finishing up the final air test. Probably not much to worry about, though a facility this size had enough chlorine and bleach on hand to be worth a check. Especially in the tight halls. Fire had only taken a part of one of the wings. Residential bunks, already stripped down to bare walls and bolted frames. No great loss.

None of them wanted to be there when the sun went down. Bunch of chicken littles among the locals.

The special investigator – Locklair, so said the thin badge he'd flashed - interrupted his wandering thoughts. "All the more reason you leave it in my hands. Libraries are a specialty of mine."

Unwillingly, the detective filtered his gaze back towards this Locklair as another knife of wind cut its way through his clothes. The man barely blinked. "Cold where you from, sir?" Nothing. Just that clear, considering look in the man's grey-green eyes. "Yeah, alright. I'll call ahead and get them to open up the record room for you at the office. Library's up till six, but if you get in the door and flash that badge, they'll hold you till at least seven or eight. After that, Jenine likes to get home for her kids."

"Thank you." Captain prim and proper here. Locklair turned away to pull a fancy-looking smartphone out of his suit's inner pocket. "That should do fine."

. . .

Loki finished snapping the last of the photos, looking over the documents he had neatly lined up atop the flaking beige file cabinets as he did so. He set the smartphone down next to the pile, picking up the pages in turn to study various bits of trivia. The sounds of munching came over the line even though the phone still showed his last few crisp pictures, his call back to base minimized in favor of the archival apps.

"It'll take me a few to process the rest of the docs. Enhancement's still chugging on the oldest files; good call scanning them in first." Munch, munch. He tried to not roll his eyes at Daisy's snacky intrusion, failed. "I'm not saving you any pee-bee cups. If you wanted the good stuff, you should have stuck around the party longer instead of zipping off after a ghost story. If there really are ghosts riled up, they're not getting any deader."

"They're noxious anyway." He grimaced at her mock-horrifed gasp. "If I cared, I'd think there'd be enough to last. I thought your end of year holiday revels were dreadful. I had no idea the excess involved in your odd little Saturnalia. Prioritizing Coulson's request was preferable to breathing pure sugared air for the next week."

"Lost me. The Saturn-what-now?"

"It was an old Roman festival where social norms are upturned and the rules set aside. The servant becomes the master, the wise caper as madmen, so forth, until the end of the day where nothing truly changes. A safe-maker holiday, a societal valve." He set aside the last page and rested his hands well apart atop the cabinets, narrowing his eyes down at the chain of ownership. Nothing unusual jumped out at him. "Later revisited in some of your cultures as a 'feast of fools,' again with a reversal of them daily norms. What I'm getting at, Daisy, is that your corn-syrup fueled orgy is strikingly bizarre to me; most of you lot quite strictured in your day to day behavior. As befits a land founded by uptight religious zealots, to be cruelly fair. But suddenly fall strikes and ruddy everything is mopped up in orange and black and bloodstained eyeballs." He snorted. "On the bright side, it makes it easier to shop for a variety of new dark shirts for a few weeks."

Silence filled the line for a moment while she absorbed that. "I did like your crack at the party about how you already show up in costume every day."

He tightened his lips. It was only half a joke. It was still sometimes difficult to look at a mirror and know what he truly looked like. There'd been a temptation to simply wear that hidden face into the raucous party that spilled from the rec room and down the halls of the SHIELD facility, but he found he couldn't quite bring himself to. The point of many of these reversion festivals really wasn't lasting change. He was still afraid showing his blue skin might cause exactly that. "I suppose I could have made a slight effort and shown up in full armor. Coulson only twitches a little when I do that, and it might have given some of the guests a nasty knock."

"Maybe too nasty."

"Thought you lot liked to be scared, this time of year." He pushed a hand through his hair and sighed. "I'm going to get ejected from this place in another half hour, I'd prefer to be on my way before that."

"Just one more moment, dude. They're finalizing. You've been on a press all day with this thing, whatcha up to?"

"I intend to let myself onto the property for the night and continue my investigation that way." He heard Daisy shift, but he kept going before she could burble something to interrupt him. "Here's the sequence of events as I understand it so far. The property changes hands from a coal magnate who realizes he has a loser to a Tepper family patriarch in 1876. Deemed unsuitable for commercial exploitation by the burgeoning energy industries, this Tepper fellow also fails to make a go of it as a northern plantation. The parcel lies fallow for a couple decades until, quite aged at this point, Tepper makes a honeyed deal with state and local authorities. He retains ownership but it is functionally state property going forward. He gets the tax breaks and any profit, they get the usage. And then the ownership trail begins to smudge as Tepper promptly flip-flops the property's paperwork around to, I think, make even better deals out of his tax breaks before Death claims him. Meanwhile, building starts just shy of the 1910's and Llewelyn Jones Boys Academy opens its doors in the closing years of World War I."

He rummaged through the yellowing documents in another neat pile, pulling out the old, preserved newspaper clippings. These he hadn't photographed for their safety's sake. His memory would be enough. "Concerns were raised by the end of the decade. Numerous refugee children brought to the states and harbored in boarding schools like this one, and with them the seemingly ever-present rumors of abuse. Investigations turned up nothing and the academy trudged along. The circumstances repeat after World War II, only with a fraction more documentation. One boy escaped and went to a New York paper with his tale. I'll spare you the details. It's fairly lurid and comes to naught, like all the rest."

His eyes picked them out again, however. The picture was unavoidable. A young boy named only Arthur, his back covered with whip scars and the tell-tale pockmarks of burns. Arthur told the authorities a tale of children frightened in the dark by the power of authority, guards and other adults that would pull them from the rooms at night for physical abuses the boy couldn't describe without shaking, and for odd, illogical punishments like digging holes for long hours until they collapsed. And other things, besides. Things too wild for stodgy newsprint, buried and dismissed under the umbrella term 'ungodly.'

The subsequent investigation showed nothing amiss at the Academy, and the implied countercharge that the scars on Arthur had come from a father broken by the great wars. Arthur had been returned to the Academy. There was nothing more. Loki had found no leads on an online records search. Nothing to indicate what was the truth. Arthur was gone into thin air forever afterward.

"Suffice to say the pattern of accusation and absolution continues until at last the academy is marked for closure. A series of break-ins conducted by copper-thieves and other desperate miscreants begins shortly after the doors are chained shut. Then, last week, a fire at last scorches out a piece of this abandoned piece of history. But before that finale, it spent almost two decades openly dressed as a rehabilitation facility. A for-profit children's prison."

"Ye Olde School for Wayward Boys."

"And through it all, the local legends begin to build of ghosts seen on the property at odd hours. In the forties, neighboring homes took to leaving candles in the windows. To light the lost on their way home well away from their imprisonment. The rumors never took root with authorities, never came to fruition. Even some few of the captured thieves regaled the police with tales of things they saw on the campus in the dark. I suspect the tangled weave of ownership plays a part here as well. But the locals were sympathetic... and too afraid to intervene openly even when that new title all but recalled the old lore. And so here, we are. Like as not a fire set by squatters by mistake, but that's not the fable sold by the papers for an extra coin or two. Coulson picks up the local news oddity of this, a fire set by furious ghosts, since he finds it funny to send me off on stranger errands when they arise. However, I find I'd like to know the why and the wherefore of all this. The little and the lost, what's true and what's not. A whimsy, if you like. A cold mystery."

There were still candles in the windows today. They were LED-bright and battery-powered now, but as he'd driven down the streets of the surrounding, almost rural neighborhood, he'd seen them gleaming white in the face of almost every old Colonial Revival house, like a glint in a drawn and drowsy eye lidded by the overbearing skeleton trees on every lawn.

"Sometimes there isn't a why, dude. Things just happen."

"There's always cause and correlation, Daisy. You only have to take a longer view."

"Okay. So, you're really, truly, genuinely ghost-hunting. That is awesome."

"That implies I go out there already prepared for the veiled unknown. I do not, exactly. I go with an open eye. Now tell me what I wanted to know since your machines are surely completed with their work – who owns the property today?"

"Untangled weave, dude. All that paperwork and we go right back to the beginning. Stephen Nicholson Tepper. Widowed, no children, one sister, deceased. He's got a legal license but he hasn't practiced since the eighties. The last living patriarch of the family, according to the family tree app. He lives on the edge of the county over on what Google Earth tells me is a super nice gated property. According to local records, he does not get involved with township politics or anything. Ever. I think your first pass pretty much got the highlights."

Loki smiled, satisfied. "It always comes back to families, doesn't it? One more favor I'll set you to, while I work. Trawl the rest of the Tepper history for me with your access to better networks. For historical oddities, for anything that strikes your eye. Go by instinct."

"Need that by a certain time?"

"I don't. It's reference work. But I'll likely check my mail in the morning and not at night. It may take an eve or two before I consider the matter completed."

"Tell me again you're not really ghost-hunting. Because that totally sounds like something a ghost-hunter would say."

"I'm not hunting tonight, Daisy. There's no prey. Only, perhaps, victims." He rang off before she could tangent again, looking up at the clean grey walls and the frozen moments of township history scattered along them. Here a county clerk standing in front of some old monument of war's cost, there a dedication of the new kindergarten building. New businesses. Gardens. Historical train markers. There were no pictures of the torched academy. Not a single one.

. . .

Loki left the rented car in a safe lot several blocks away from the abandoned academy as the sun began to dip below the horizon. He checked the back seat and the trunk one more time to ensure he'd lost no stray things from his hoodie's pockets and then he began his walk down damp, leaf-strewn streets past those houses and their guiding lights in the windows. He walked slowly enough to enjoy the cool, crisp air as it cut between the old restored houses belonging to New England families with old names and older money, the palm of his hand occasionally tapping some hidden rhythm against the thick canvas duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

He was not going to ghost-hunt – true. But he was arriving prepared. His way, of course.

In the bag were tightly packed necessities. A few changes of simple black clothing. A leather-bound book of blank paper, useful to shape into a grimoire at need or, likelier, a simple hand-writ record of events to come. Pens. Packets and tools of magician's trade, things like a particular knife wrapped carefully in white silk to the ever-unassuming and universal cleanser, salt. And the less-esoteric tools; a handheld scanner he'd lifted from county officials to test carbon and air quality. A ground scanner and metal detector. A small but high-powered flashlight. A phone charger, and then the other scraps of expected travel gear, including a few small bags of snacks.

None of which had candy in them, a point of private pride. That said, he had done some fairly remarkable damage to the tray of (overly, in his opinion) iced brownies at the party the other night. He could have gone for a few more of those, particularly now after an unremarkable and quick meal at some anonymous local diner. Nobody was fully immune to sweets.

Loki looked at the gabled houses with a sigh, noting more than a few of them still kept their hollowed pumpkins on the porch. He passed a half-deflated plastic balloon witch with a lift of his eyebrow, noting the sad creature's green skin under her pointy black hat with bemused sympathy. Here and there were stray skeletons still on display, some human but a few animals dotted windows not taken up by the candles. He liked the plastic crow he found in a high sill, though it wasn't quite right in the details. Once he was passed by a squealing brace of children at play on the sidewalks, little girls smudged with neon monster paint along their cheeks and their arms tied with scraps of golden princess taffeta from the night before. They turned as they went by the figure in black, attempting to utter creepy noises and he flashed his fangs back at them in a responding snarl that lacked any real malice. They cheered him, unafraid, then disappeared down and around the corner to another street.

Above the shingled roofs and underneath the glooming autumn sky he could see the top of the academy just another street over. The neighborhoods bordered it close on most sides, a grandfathered situation from the days when it was supposedly just a school. Tall layers of brick wall and razor wire coils keeping the former youth prison separated from the world beyond, gaping only for the side lot and the main entry. He had to jog over to a now disused lane to get the front gate, using a small brick-lined path that fed off the terminus of a dead-end street.

The black steel bars were open, and at this hour there were no police cars left to halt his entry. The detective's grumbling resistance to the local legends aside, no one else was volunteering to stay. He let himself in easily, ignoring the squeal of the flaking gate as he pushed it shut behind him. That would be enough to let him know if he was about to be interrupted.

The academy had a face, and he regarded it plainly. The screaming maw was the wide front entrance with its bolted double doors of heavy wood and strip-steel flung open to the chill air, set underneath the single spire permitted under the rules of its red brick neo-gothic architecture, and it had dozens of eyes that stared emptily at its approaching visitor. Ripped curtains flapped out of more than a few, and cracking plastic slat shades, and here and there the dirt and broken pottery of forgotten plants. No light reached them, and he could see with his own sharp eyes the wilting remnants spilling free for a last chance in the open air. They would strangle in the coming winter, the last gasp of life in the dead building.

He could barely see the far wing where the fire started from the entrance, a much newer structure that squatted on the academy's flank like a boil. He'd already seen the publicly available floor plans. An attempt had been made to fit the only decades old residential wing – more like a barracks – with the rest, modern steel covered hastily with bricks too garish to blend with the wind-slapped rest.

The foyer was startlingly pleasant despite its stripped decay, a warmly painted, almost rococo-style scrap of old Victoria framed on either side by tall staircases whose dark wood bannisters were now chipped and abused. Mismatched squares of wood along the walls showed where large oil paintings once hung. All gone. None of them had been found in the library's stores either, Loki noted. Across from the little alcove that hugged the entrance was a beautiful brick fireplace. He crossed the long room and put his hand above ashy logs. Cold, as he expected. He could sense a whisper of air coming from down the long chimney as if it breathed.

He put his duffel bag down by the mantle and turned to regard the room again. Pretty. Comforting. A welcoming lure, no doubt putting a number of parents at ease about their children's fate. But the still-lingering quality of the room told him there simply wasn't that much traffic here throughout the years. The residents saw a room like this once as they entered – and then perhaps again as they left.

He thought of Arthur, the disappeared boy. If they were lucky.

. . .

Clouds lit silvery grey by a high moon peeked in the windows at Loki as he rustled through left behind papers in one of the administrative offices. He ignored the prickling feeling that followed the light. Almost everything useful had been carried away. What was left were scraps of contraband; student papers that had been taken away for being disruptive notes or what were labeled 'improper drawings.' Some of those he looked at for a while, relics of children that had survived old wars. The younger ones drew looping shapes in black crayon, earning themselves long talks with now-anonymous health disciplinarians according to attached notes. In some of them he saw crudely sketched prone bodies within the black smoke. The name scrawled on one such paper was that of a Polish child. The year on the file was 1943.

The older children drew weapons, or fire, or self-portraits of themselves screaming. Those he looked at the longest, disturbed. It didn't matter the decade. Patterns repeated. He could attach most of them to the varying wars or economic changes. The most recent were also the most obscure. Children of the eighties and nineties, still haunted by something. Many of these pictures featured intricate grey bars.

The eldest of all eras drew nothing at all, but still had their names marked in the abandoned disciplinary reports. They'd stopped screaming, it seemed. They ate themselves quietly instead. Like good, stoic children ought.

Loki took a handful of the papers back down to the main halls to continue his study as the moonshadows grew longer along the gaping windows and found shapes to make against the dark, ignoring the snapping wind as it curled inward to snarl up inside the building. He watched them from the corner of his eye, looking at the way they quivered and whirled along the floor. He pulled an apple from the duffel bag, giving it a contemplative crunch before setting the papers in his other hand down on the seat of one of the abandoned chairs that littered the room. "I see you," he said, utterly calm. He didn't turn around.

Leaves skittered along the staircase behind him, a rustling noise chased by a sudden shriek of nighttime wind. When he glanced over his shoulder at steps now warping from nature's exposure, the littlest shadow was gone.