Once Barry gets over his shock - which does, admittedly, take some time and is not at all helped along by Cisco ("Dude, the look on your face") - he is left with so many questions, though his brain still feels like it's rebooting and he has yet to pull himself together enough to ask any of them. He finds himself sort of collapsed into one of the bean bag chairs; the movement wasn't quite a conscious effort on his part so he's also sort of half-flopped onto the floor. Cisco's sitting next to him in the other bean bag, and he's been grinning widely ever since it became clear that Barry was not, in fact, going to hyperventilate and pass out.

"There's a ghost in the lab," Barry finally manages to croak out with an impressively steady voice.

"Yeah, man. That's not going to be a deal-breaker, is it? Because this is a very ghost-tolerant endeavor; my great-aunt has been haunting our attic for at least a decade, and she never bothers anyone."

Barry stares at him a moment, nonplussed; he thinks we had a deal? and this is not how I thought my day would go and holy shit did someone die down here? but what he blurts out is, "I'm sorry for your loss. I mean, I'm sorry to hear about your great-aunt – that she died, not that she's a ghost! That's… cool, I guess… My condolences?"

Cisco regards him critically for a moment. "You're looking a little pale; do you feel light-headed? Here, have a dum-dum." He thrusts the sucker insistently towards Barry until he takes it.

"Thank god you didn't say I looked like I'd seen a ghost." Barry is starting to feel like he's getting some of his equilibrium back.

Cisco scoffs. "Too easy. Do I look like an amateur to you?"

"Um…" In deference to his own sense of comedic timing, Barry pointedly does not answer, and instead looks down at his dum-dum. "Do you have any other flavors? I'm not a big fan of sour apple."

Cisco tosses the whole bag at his head in response; Barry fishes out a red cherry sucker. Excellent.

"Dr. Wells, I think he's handling it very well."

Barry looks up, and sees that Cisco has turned to address the chalkboard, where new words have appeared, in a looping handwriting:

My apologies, Mister Allen. I did not mean to alarm you.

Barry's palms feel cold and clammy. He'd quite forgotten about Wells. Not the fact that he was a ghost, no, that was foremost on his mind - but he had forgotten all that that entailed. He'd forgotten, for instance, that haunting the laboratory meant that Dr. Wells was present at this very moment, that he could see Barry and hear everything he was saying.

Finally, he finds his voice. "Don't, um, don't worry about it." Good manners didn't cost anything, after all. "But I actually should be going; Cisco snagged me on my way out the door. This has been… mind-blowing, thanks for showing me, Cisco. It was nice to meet you, Dr. Wells." Barry nods in the general direction of the chalkboard, and hopes he isn't too far off the mark. (He wonders if ghosts even have singular, discrete presences.)

There's no reply from the chalkboard, and the moment stretches. Cisco waves to catch Barry's attention.

"What?"

"He can't move the chalk if you're watching it - it takes too much energy."

Barry turns that over in his mind for a moment. "So it's like being quantum locked," he suggests.

Cisco gives him an enthusiastic high-five. "We have got to have a Doctor Who marathon someday, buddy," he says, before he adds more seriously a moment later, "But really, that's it exactly; it takes a lot more effort for him to affect something that's being observed."

Barry looks back at the board to see it has changed once more:

I hope to see you again, Mister Allen

"Please, call me Barry."

The ride back up in the elevator feels very different from the ride down. Cisco is just as bouncy and excited, happy to have shared his 'secret' room with Barry; he expounds upon his experiences working with Dr. Wells, filling in details while Barry mutely nods along, listening with half an ear.

Barry, meanwhile, feels like he's just taken a sharp detour into The Twilight Zone, and that any minute now Rod Serling's ghost is going pop up through the floor to start narrating - it isn't as though Barry's day could get any stranger.

He'd believed in ghosts once, when he was a kid. Well, maybe saying 'believed' was overstating things a bit; he had at least been willing to test the hypothesis. After all, while Sherlock Holmes, the most amazing detective ever, had once famously said, "The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply," his creator on the other hand had been wildly enthusiastic about Victorian spiritualism, particularly séances.

Roping Iris into holding a séance themselves to try to contact the late great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had seemed like logical sense at the time, reasoning that a man who had strongly believed in séances in life would be more likely than other spirits to answer one after death, right? (Neither of them had raised the question of attempting to contact either of their mothers. On some level they'd realized that the cost of failure would be too great; it was better to test the methodology first.)

Bell and book and candle, and staying up waaay past their bedtime, even going so far as to light the candle (very briefly, before they chickened out - Joe would have had a fit if he'd known they'd had a live fire in Iris's bedroom). Bell and book and snuffed-out candle, and no ghost.

Barry had been disappointed, but not surprised.

As soon as Barry gets back to his apartment, he Googles 'Harrison Wells' (he also Googles 'ghosts' and 'paranormal activity,' but it's too difficult to sort the credible from the conspiracy to be of much use). There's not much on him; he was a physicist who worked at STAR Labs and died of a heart attack sixty years ago. Wells had had a wife who'd died in a car accident two years earlier, and they' had one daughter.

He is able to find a couple of Wells' academic papers on JSTOR, and the man was - is? - clearly brilliant. But the question remains – why, how, did he become a ghost? Cisco seemed to think 'unfinished business' was reason enough, and the guy did have more experience with ghosts, what with his great-aunt and all, but in Barry's opinion, if that were all it took, there'd be a great many more ghosts hanging around. He needs more information.

And who better to ask than a professional investigative journalist?