"Chapter 2: The Industrial Facts Concerning Jonathan McFadden And His Family"
Stewart 'Stinkie' McFadden was staring at a drill.
He had been staring at it for a very long time before a light bulb dinged! above his head. The Doc had called some repair guys over earlier that week in order to fix areas of the dilapidated manor. The Ghostly Trio thought the disarray was completely fine. Sure there was no hot water, the floorboards would give away, the carpets held over a hundred years of mould, and literally everything was covered in dust, but it was home.
The Doc got real ornery when the three ghosts attempted to spook the repair guys away, and after chasing them down the halls with a vacuum cleaner he bargained that either the ghosts stayed out of the way or be trapped in the vacuum bag for an entire week. That was diplomatic enough.
Now in the after hours, the contractors had left their equipment scattered everywhere, intending to utilise them in the morning. Which leads us to Stinkie staring at a drill.
Stinkie wouldn't say he was a gadget geek, but he was the most technologically savvy of the brothers. Growing up surrounded by kooky Edwardian breakthroughs excited him more than anything, except probably for Limburger cheese.
Now that he thought about it, he wondered what sparked such a fascination in the first place.
/X\
Jonathan Thomas McFadden inherited his business from his father, Jonathan McFadden, from his father Thomas McFadden, and his from his father and uncle, Hamish and Archie McFadden.
Both brothers were of Scottish stock and had left their homeland at the tender ages of six and five respectively. Settling in Friendship, Maine – at that point a factory district – their parents hurried them to attain the ultimate American dream. Build your own business and pass it along through nepotism.
When the two scraped enough together to create "McFadden Brothers' Industries", there were a few teething problems. While Hamish settled just fine into the passive aggressive world of industrial wealth, Archie didn't roll very well. His practical jokes and disturbing interests went unappreciated in the White Anglo-Saxton social circle. He went away for a while, leaving the business in the his older brother's capable hands, and returned years later mutually-madly in love with a large vampiric beauty of mixed origin known as Lacrimare Addams. For some strange reason most of the upper-crust fled in terror at the sound of her name.
It was certainly a happy union, but not one the McFaddens approved of. Still trying to keep their fragile reputation, his parents and his brother aggressively dismissed his chosen bride. Archie was given the ultimatum: Dump the girl or loose his share of the family business. He disappeared mysteriously that night and a few days later the wedding invitation tumbled through the letter box. It would be three decades before the brothers spoke to each other again.
Meanwhile McFadden Industries (the 'Brothers' was dropped for obvious reasons) boomed. If there was anything Hamish thanked his brother for, it was for investing in the coal and steel sector. Hamish himself was interested in branching out into transport, so when the early experimental stages of railway travel were needing extra scrap and fuel, Hamish McFadden's pockets were fit to burst.
Hiring the most expensive contractors he knew to create the most expensive manor imaginable (passive-aggressively nicknamed 'Whipstaff' as a nod to the way he worked his men to the bone), Hamish planned to drown in his wealth. Only one thing was missing – a nice gal. There was certainly a line of young desperate ladies with whom he shared interest. But he desired a strong erudite wife with the ferocity he so missed about Scotland. Finally as he reached his later years he found the perfect woman, a New Jersey oil and waste mogul named Lotta Verbinski. After the mandatory courtship period they quickly agreed to marriage. The only thing he would complain about was her god-awful body odour gained from her free reign of the factory floor.
Their eldest son, the adored jewel atop the family crown, Thomas McFadden, took the reins of the company very clumsily. A boy of weak frame and mind, he certainly wasn't ready to inherit the business. At the tender age of 20 he lost his father and mother to an outbreak of the White Death. The blow had been tremendous to the young lad, coddled by his mother and boasted by his father, he had never anticipated actually losing either parent. He wasn't allowed see them at their deathbed.
"Tuberculosis is too dangerous for a boy like him." he overheard his father say in-between wet retching coughs. He never even learnt what his parent's last words were, they choked on their own mucus before anyone could ask them to repeat what they had said.
McFadden Industries was almost eaten alive. Thomas struggled to balance the company along with his wife (a money-fallen Irish lumberjill named Siofra Barclay) and three rapidly hungry mouths. His siblings were busy running their mother's businesses all the way in Atlantic City and had no intentions to feed a dead scrap company. He saw no solution in sight, except to contact his extended family and ask them for assistance.
Not in those words mind you. There was a subtlety to this course of action. Uncle Hadrian needed a few carpets moved, Cousin Who (from the Addams side of the family) needed somewhere to hide his collectibles, and Aunt Miasma had some herbs and spices that needed to be guarded during their transport. Word spread quickly through the very deep underground that a certain McFadden was willing to do anything to keep his father's manor. And so did the grime accumulate in Whipstaff.
Supposedly cursed relics and stolen artifacts made their way into some of the many storage rooms of Whipstaff, along with some objects that were less than honest. Thomas quickly learnt that some of the hard money was in warfare. Needless to say when the Civil war broke out he found himself richer than he had ever been before, but became morally bankrupt as a result. Whipstaff for what ever reason was infected with hidden prison cells and rooms of "negotiation" in it's bowels. When an associate tried to back out of a deal, Thomas McFadden made them see it through, less they be found weeks later mangled and putrefying the riverbed.
Soon his own wife grew fearful of her husband and demanded that he step down from his place at the company. When he had struck her multiple times and threatened that he would leave her for a pretty blonde about a third of her age, she took action.
No one truly knows how Thomas McFadden perished. His gravestone has been eroded clean by years of rain, bird droppings, and deliberate vandalism by his own children. The public health records tell that he was extremely feeble as he neared the ancient hallmark of 45 years old and passed away through the old nugget of a heart attack as he slept peacefully in his bed.
Then again all who knew Siofra were aware that she spent a few years in a nursing college, and still kept a collection of syringes and bottles of strange bitter mixtures in her sewing room. After the day her husband tragically passed on, one bottle was permanently misplaced.
From upon his father's (secretly anticipated) expiration Jonathan McFadden took hold of McFadden Industries with a smile and a handshake. Eager to shake off Thomas' cruel reign, Jonathan divided the company between his two other siblings (Frederica and Albert McFadden) so to avoid absolute power. His siblings weren't overly interested however, meaning that Jonathan could only leave the company for small bursts of time before one of them lost complete control.
Soon he took upon the drive of his Grandfather, the passive-aggression of his Mother, and the jokes of his Granduncle. With trains and automobiles going from New York to San Francisco, there was no rest for business and certainly no rest for Jonathan McFadden. Even in his spare time you could find him tinkering with a radio that he claimed never went loud enough, repairing a perfectly fine table leg he said was wobbling, or on top of the dangerous roof of the manor scoping out for loose shingles. He walked the halls of Whipstaff with a screwdriver in his left pocket and a small hammer in the other.
This grand ability (and arguably an obsession) to keep things neat and optimally functional passed on to his four sons, which unfortunately bred their desire to keep them broken and dirty.
/X\
Stinkie lifted his finger from the drill's trigger and looked at his work in pride. Every single board on the winding staircase had been repaired, every nail and incision made perfectly as if they had never been harmed. If he had sweat glands or a body for that matter, his clothes would be soaked through by now.
"What in the name of disarray did you do?" his eldest brother squawked angrily, descending from the ceiling. "I thought we'd agreed on no messing with the fleshies!"
"We did but I got the urge to fix things." Stinkie dropped the drill and other hardware equipment like they were hot brimstone, accidentally damaging the wood of the banister in the process.
"We're ghosts stink-breath! We like things being not-fixed. What urge could possibly make you want to do the opposite?" Stretch glared at his younger brother, unconvinced that there wasn't multiple stink bombs embedded into the stair case.
"I... remembered somefin' about Dad." Stinkie stared at the ground like a child caught with their hand in the cookie jar. Stretch's scowl fell into a more relaxed state as he caught on what was happening. The middle brother laughed nervously. "Remember when we was small fleshies and he hated these stairs? Every time he got the chance he'd-"
"-Tear it up and still swear there was a creak..."
The two floated there in silence, only the distant sounds of the Doc snoring in his room and Fatso's TV playing a mindless late night crime drama was heard.
"Should we get the bulb-head to re-loosen these things?" Stinkie asked cautiously, twiddling his fingers. Stretch sighed tiredly, running his hand over his face.
"Nah. They'd just get fixed again anyway. Next time we're with the Doc we'll bring up the whole 'cat's in the cradle' thing."
Later that week James Harvey had to embarrassedly dismiss the contractors as a paranormal phenomenon had blown through the house and fixed literally every kink and leaky sink. At first he thought that Casper may have done it but when the friendly ghost was asked, he claimed that he'd done nothing. The Doctor decided to chalk it up to helpful supernaturall creatures and never thought for a second that three certain ghosts had hand for craftsmanship.