The jacket lay in the sink. After she repacked the first aid kit and replaced it in the cupboard she turned her attention to it. She wasn't sure entirely what to do but throwing it out seemed like a reasonable option. She lifted it up from the sink, the one sleeve still dark with red blood. As she removed it completely she shook it out a little in preparation for disposal.
That's when she saw it. The green that she had completely forgotten about on his arm. It had washed off his skin but the stain still remained on the inside of the sleeve. As Amity Park's leading ghost expert (besides her husband who bless his heart was due to call around nine, and she had no idea what to say to him) she knew exactly what it is without any need for analysis. It was ectoplasm. Perhaps this was what the Ecto-Locator was honing in on, Maddie thought. She shook the jacket even more gingerly, trying to keep the ectoplasm on, and carried the jacket down to the lab. She hadn't expected to spend this much of her day in the lab but then again, what else was she planning on doing? Groceries were done and her son was out who-knew-where getting his arm sliced open God-knew-how. She was sure the cut had looked deep before she approached him.
With a pipette she extracted the ectoplasm from the jacket's fibers and put it on a microscope plate. Surely this would help her, at least. Ectoplasm anywhere near Danny baffled her, let alone having it on his arm beside a wound – could he have been fighting ghosts? After all this time, laughing at the mere suggestion of him hunting ghosts alongside her and Jack, had he really been doing it behind their back? But even if he had, how had he been getting those injuries when she and Jack received none?
She brought the sample into focus on low magnification. Ectoplasm was a very homogenous substance but all the same, it gave some indication of what level ghost it came from. The more solid, the more powerful. It wasn't much as far as answers went but it was a start; perhaps something in it could help identify which ghost it had come from. At that point, she was grasping at anything she could reach.
This sample was a very big clue, evidently. There was no mistaking a sample of ectoplasm this distinct. It belonged to Phantom.
Jack and Maddie had captured Phantom their fair share of times, but each time he'd managed to escape. During these brief successes they had managed at least twice to knick him with a weapon and extract ectoplasm. The first time they threw the sample out, assuming it had somehow been tainted. The second time there was no question about it, Phantom's ectoplasm was different. Maddie did not dare go so far as to say he had DNA but that was certainly what it looked like; crystalline strands of DNA, almost impossible to see.
The Fentons worked laboriously for days trying to get to the bottom of this impossibility, but the giant ghost dog trashed the lab on the fourth day and any samples they had were tainted. So, Maddie thought, her trembling hands turning the dials on the microscope, her son had been in contact with Phantom. If he was the one behind her son's injuries, that blew the ghost boy's hero persona straight out of the water. Maddie clutched the dials of the microscope hard, trying to keep herself from gearing up right then and hunting down Phantom. No, she had this sample to focus on. She turned the dials again and sure enough, she could see the little wisps of what couldn't be DNA. She was a scientist but her subject of study did not generally involve genetic material, so she couldn't tell for certain either way.
Genetic material, she thought again. There was simply no way. No possible way. Ghosts were merely electronic echoes of people who had died, nothing physical of them was retained – their forms were conceived based off of the memories or self-image of the ghost. This electronic energy held ectoplasm together, a malleable and simple material that was not alive, could not reproduce. There was no way for a ghost to have genes.
It was perhaps these strange strands of… whatever that gave Phantom's ectoplasm its density. Maddie shifted in her seat and her gun holster rocked against her hip. It was a new invention, one she and Jack had finished not long before the convention. It was a modified Taser, one that worked against the flow of a ghost's electric energy and disrupted their form. In mild amounts it merely disoriented ghosts, but with a high enough voltage it completely disintegrated them. This gave Maddie an idea.
Maddie dug through the bin on the far side of the lab where they stored their prototypes. This gun only had one prototype and it wasn't too far from the current version but it hadn't able to get to a high enough voltage because of the type of wire and size, so Jack had insisted they make it bigger and better. The byproduct of that decision was strapped to her waist. She removed the blast doors on the prototype and detached the probes from the cartridge, yanking the wires out and stripping the casing off the probe ends. She rewired the inside so that it activated, albeit at a very low level. She tapped the wires together and earned a tiny pink spark and, thus satisfied, she ran this current through the sample.
The ectoplasm seemed almost to flash white at the contact, but the reaction lasted for a split second before it was over. Nothing had changed, so Maddie cranked up the power. It may not have been a powerful enough tool to utilize in battle but here in laboratory settings with such a small sample, it surely would suffice.
The white flash lasted longer the more power she put into the charge. She was surprised the tiny sample was so resistant, but no matter how stable it was she knew that it would work. She cranked the voltage two notches and this time felt a satisfactory jerk in the wires when they entered the ectoplasm. She slid her goggles off from her eyes once the considerable flash had subsided. Her fingers froze on the goggles and her jaw set with a snap.
The ectoplasm had changed from green to red.
Dissolving would have been an acceptable reaction. Dissipating, perhaps even rising up and attacking her, like a scene from that John Carpenter movie, would have been an acceptable reaction.
This reaction she could not begin to comprehend and she had to clap a hand over her mouth from throwing up or screaming.
It looked like blood, dear God, it looked like blood.
She forcibly regained herself and put the slide back under the microscope. She was a woman of science, and science was not forged by women who stood around and screamed – that was for the movies. Her hand was even shakier on the dial but she focused it on the sample again. She hardly studied human blood in her field of work but with what little experience she had from college, she could assume with some certainty that this was, in fact, blood. Somehow she had melted down Phantom's ectoplasm into blood. Real, human blood.
No theory she could begin to imagine, no matter how ridiculous, made an inkling of sense with this evidence. She had almost completely forgotten about Danny in all this. Danny would wait until morning, she knew – but Phantom she could deal with tonight, because there was no way in Hell she would be able to sleep.
The first thing she did was check on Danny. As she had expected, he was not in his room. At first when it all began, she and Jack had suspected it was about Sam. Towards the end of freshman year they had begun dating and Maddie started to notice his absence at night. It explained why he was so tired in class all the time. If it weren't for Sam herself Maddie would have forced her son to stop seeing her, but she knew how happy Sam made him. His effervescence had begun to die out his first year of high school but when he was with her, he was so animated and alive, more like his old self. The best she could do was to leave a package of condoms on his bed one day while he was at school. Danny never mentioned them to her but she found the box under his bed a few days later, unopened. She wasn't sure what to make of it but Danny seemed a little more relaxed for a few weeks after that so she didn't think much of it.
She stood in his room now looking out the window. From there she could see the park, where she and Jack encountered Phantom most often. He didn't have one particular haunt so the task of actively finding the elusive ghost when no other ghosts were active daunted her. She did, however, have the Ecto-Locator, which she now knew could track Phantom's ectoplasmic signature. She had questions for Phantom, but the most pressing ones involved Danny. Somehow, this ghost was involved, and if Danny planned on lying to her again that morning, she needed some evidence for herself.
The night was warm and muggy as she stepped out of Fentonworks. Maddie decided to go on foot. With the Ecto-Locator in her hands and the Fenton Taser in her holster, she set off in search for answers.
AN: Hello everyone! I was very nervous about posting this story but I was pleasantly surprised by the response! Thank you to everyone for reviewing, each review made me so very happy! :) As always if you see any mistakes or things to be improved upon, please message me so I can fix it or work on it in the future. There may be two more chapters instead of just one.
