Allow me a moment to express my very deep gratitude to Obi-Quiet, who has been the most patient and insightful of betas for this chapter.

Chapter 5: Clockwork

You don't get it, do you? I'm still here. I still exist! That means you still turn into me."

I may have lost track of the passage of time, but I hadn't forgotten a single moment of that nightmare. Worse, when I spoke those words out loud it was that same deep, gravelly voice I heard. My own voice.

Had I finally proven him wrong?

Valerie's Thermos was squirming its way toward the edge of my parents' workbench, but I paid it no attention. I was occupied examining my face in the mirror over the sink in the darkened lab: round and wide-eyed, with a undersized nose and oversized mouth; thick, white hair in serious need of a trim, with a faint green cast reflected from the light of my eyes. Then the double-vision kicked in again; my hair burst into blue-white flames, my eyes glinted dark red and my mouth twisted into a cruel smirk.

Several hours earlier, at the Nasty Burger, Sam had asked me how I could have forgotten what happened ten years ago. It disturbed me that she could believe for one moment that I had somehow managed to erase those memories. Of course I couldn't forget! I just didn't bother keeping track of the date, as though the passage of each successive April twenty-fourth was some sort of accomplishment. No, I had observed the natural milestones of my life: each successive growth spurt, my gradually deepening voice, not to mention my ever expanding powers. Each and every time I caught myself using those powers for convenience, or satisfaction, or revenge—those were the moments to stop and remember, to reflect, to renew my promise. I will never turn into him. Never.

I squeezed my eyes shut, then reopened them, and the hallucination was gone. I saw myself, boyish smile, electric-green eyes, just the same, normal half-ghost I'd been for ten years.

I wanted answers. I needed answers. And I knew there was only one place to find answers.

I grabbed the Thermos and with a longing, apologetic glance up in the direction of our bedroom, where I hoped Sam was fast asleep and not lying awake wondering where I had gone and why I hadn't come home yet, plunged through the swirling green vortex into the Ghost Zone. Once through, I used a miniature remote-control (adapted by my dad from a standard garage-door opener) to shut the Portal doors behind me. Then I released Val's captured critters, gave each of them an ecto-blast parting gift to speed them on their way, took a moment to orient myself and flew off into the void.

That first year, Sam, Tucker and I had attempted a ludicrously ambitious project of mapping the Ghost Zone. We'd started with a crude sketch map of the region within a half-hour's flight in the Specter Speeder, but Tuck eventually developed a sophisticated three-dimensional plotting system, assigning each island, structure and door a unique set of three coordinates—roughly equivalent to longitude, latitude and altitude. But as we ventured farther and farther away from 0º 0º 0º (the Fenton Portal) Tucker began to notice significant anomalies, as distances between known points were not matching up properly with his calculations.

He finally shut himself up in his room for a long weekend and emerged on Monday afternoon to announce that space in the Ghost Zone does not obey the rules of either Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometry. He added that he would probably have to get an advanced degree in theoretical mathematics to make any sense of it. The funny thing is, I have no trouble at all finding my way around in here—I guess that's because I'm a ghost, and Tucker isn't. Jazz says it's probably just as well that I never made as far as geometry in school, or my brain might have exploded.

In any case, I was following a slightly roundabout course toward Clockwork's Tower, maintaining a respectful distance from areas patrolled by Walker and his minions, when I heard a plaintive whine behind me.

"Will you be my friend?"

I slowed my progress, turned around and drifted a little while Klemper caught up with me. In the course of ten years he hadn't changed a bit: baggy pink-striped pajamas, snaggle-tooth smile, that vacuous expression of desperate loneliness. His bulging, mismatched eyes pleaded with me as he asked again, "Will you please be my friend?"

I smiled reassuringly. "Of course I'll be your friend. How's it going, Klemper?"

He didn't answer, but his face beamed with happiness and he demonstrated his joy with a barrage of golf ball-sized hailstones; I went intangible to let them pass harmlessly into the void, then fired back with a snowball the size of a watermelon. He didn't even try to defend himself, but just giggled gleefully as my missile exploded harmlessly against his chest. Klemper may have the IQ of a chicken salad sandwich, but cryokinesis is an extremely rare power among ghosts; we ice-makers have to stick together. The games I play with him are actually very useful training sessions for me. Besides which, he's immensely strong, and a guy can never have too many friends in the Ghost Zone.

And I do have friends in the Ghost Zone. More importantly, I have enemies with whom I have managed to build a fairly stable peace. For the most part they avoid the Fenton Portal and leave Amity Park alone; in return, I give them wide berth in the Ghost Zone and let them be. If they manage to find some way into my world other than the Fenton Portal. . . well, that's just the way things are. Ghosts have haunted the living since time immemorial, and they will continue do so long after I'm gone. All I can do is control access to the great big hole my parents had cut through the barrier between worlds and try to keep a lid on the worst threats.

Klemper tagged along with me until I was within sight of Clockwork's Tower, but would not come any farther. The ghost of time cultivates the reputation of being somewhat unapproachable, and Klemper clearly had no desire to draw his attention. I called out a quick good-bye and then redoubled my pace.

Although Clockwork is not an enemy, I can't exactly call him a friend, either. He's one of the few authoritarian figures in the relatively lawless Ghost Zone (Walker is another) and he is in no way impressed with or intimidated by me. He's not exactly a colleague and he's certainly not a peer. I owe him my life and I'll never stop being grateful to him for saving my family and friends, but I do wish it was possible to engage him in a serious conversation without ending up sounding naïve and foolish.

So I guess I should have known better than to come here looking for simple answers to straightforward questions. I had hoped for enlightenment, or at least reassurance, but instead I ran headlong into a stonewall.

ooooo0ooooo

"Time just doesn't work that way, Daniel. The fate of the Box Ghost—of all the denizens of the Ghost Zone—was immeasurably altered by your victory against your alternate self." Clockwork was in his child form, with a buck-tooth pout that makes it hard to read his expression. "But what has happened in your past will have already happened in Box Lunch's future. All has been, and will be, exactly as it should be."

My headache resurfaced as I tried to wrap my brain around his tangled verb tenses. I sighed, discouraged, and forced myself to look again into Clockwork's window on the past, where my fourteen-year-old self was busy battling a little girl ghost only half his size. Admittedly, she was not a bad little fighter, I thought, as I watched her knock me down through the roof of the Nasty Burger. Where, I knew, I would quickly come up with a clever, effective, painful counter-weapon to use against a food-summoning mattermorph.

"Given that she was clearly younger than you, and that she told you from the start that she was the daughter of two of the least powerful ghosts you've ever fought, I'll grant you that your reaction was somewhat less than chivalrous. But surely you are not suggesting that I send you back in time, just so you can undo an event you find inconvenient?"

He had let me do that, once. Once. "Of course not! If I don't fight with Box Lunch then there's no explosion; no explosion means no answers; no answers means no cheating." I shook my head wearily. "I understand that I had to be tested, and I had to fail in order to prevent that future from coming to pass."

"Ah. So you were paying attention. Good." Shifting to his adult form, he waved his staff and the image of the first Nasty Burger explosion froze at the exact moment I fell through Mr. Lancer's briefcase. "So tell me, Daniel, what exactly would you have me do?"

"All I'm asking is that you give me some. . . I don't know, some clue as to when my fight with Box Lunch happens from her end of the time stream. I mean, if she's only two years old now, it's still got to be five or six years in my future, right?"

"And what purpose would knowing that serve?"

"Well, for one thing I could move my family to Timbuktu a week or two beforehand, how about that?"

"Daniel. . . ." His voice was patient, weary, perhaps just a little disappointed.

"No. Of course not." I should have known better than to even ask. Clockwork may know everything, but he's very stubborn about sharing information. "I just wanted to be prepared, that's all."

He shifted again, this time to his ancient form. Stooped and shriveled, he exuded an even greater air of serene condescension. "You have successfully fought both the Box Ghost and the Lunch Lady before. Surely it would be no great difficulty to fight them again."

"But I don't want to fight them! They're not my enemies!" I had worked so hard to end that stupid cycle of fight and capture, release and return, fight and capture, again and again and again. We had a truce, a reasonable relationship that occasionally teetered on the edge of respect, and I couldn't allow that delicate balance to be shattered.

"At the risk of sounding meddlesome—"

"Heaven forbid," I muttered. Distracted by the thoughts of an endless feud, I couldn't help myself; the sarcasm just flowed naturally.

"At the risk of sounding meddlesome," he repeated, with just a touch of irritation, "I suggest that you inform both of the child's parents of your youthful transgression long before they find out about it from her."

"Oh, so it's okay for them to know what's going to happen in the future, but not for me?"

"They will have learned it from you, which means they will know no more than you know. All these events will come to pass, but not in a way that either you or they can anticipate or prevent. Everything will happen exactly the way it is supposed to happen—and you will have made a sincere effort to atone for what you have already done." He pointed with his staff to the scene from the past, which had shifted to the moment I discovered the sealed packet of test answers stuck to my back. "That's all anyone can do—and you already know that. So I don't think you've been entirely honest about your reason for coming here tonight."

He was right. I had broached the subject of Box Lunch in an attempt to avoid the real issue. I tore my eyes away from the image of the past and took a deep breath. "My wife, my sister and my best friend threw me an anniversary party tonight."

"I know. But then, I know—"

"—know everything. Right. Do you have any idea how annoying that is?"

"Of course I do, Daniel; don't be impertinent. You are operating under a misapprehension, however. They did not throw the party for you; it has been their practice to gather every year on this date to commemorate the fact that they did not die."

"They do?" That caught me off-guard. Suddenly I felt isolated, deprived, left out. Ten years of observances and they never even bothered to tell me. "Why. . . ?"

"Because it was the opinion of your sister, and not without good reason, that you might not appreciate being reminded of those events. After all, what didn't happen to you is very different from what didn't happen to them. It is instructive to remember that their memory of those events does not match yours. They know that you managed to defeat yourself before the explosion that would have killed them, but you are the only one who saw it not happen."

"'Saw it. . . not happen'? But it did happen. You were there, you saved them, but it all happened. The Nasty Burger blew up."

"No, it didn't, you only remember it that way. That explosion is just a series of synapses in your brain that misfire every now and then and make you remember something that never happened."

"Are you saying that my memory is false? I didn't invent that memory, I was there." That series of synapses fired, and suddenly I was there again, exhausted and feeble, falling flat on my face on the street, then temporarily blinded by the flash, deafened and tossed through the air by the shockwave. Had Clockwork not intervened, I would probably have been horribly burned and scarred by the flying debris. Had Clockwork not intervened, I also would have been utterly alone. But time stopped. . . .

"The Thermos! That's real, that's no faulty memory. You still have the Thermos with him inside." I floated over to the shelf at the rear of the chamber, where my old Thermos had sat gathering dust for ten years. "He is still in there, isn't he? I mean, after ten years he'd have to be totally insane—way more insane than he was to start with. What if he escapes? Or maybe he's gradually fading away, or he already has faded away, or he might have just popped out of existence at the exact moment he jumped backwards in time—because he never came back to this time. And that was yesterday afternoon, right?" I had to stop babbling and catch my breath.

"Yesterday? What made you think it was yesterday? The evil creature known as Phantom will have departed from the time stream at ten-fifteen am local time on June tenth, 2016."

"June tenth? But that's. . . what, six weeks from now? How the heck did that happen?"

Clockwork shook his head wearily. "'Ten years.' Your simple mind hears 'ten years' and naturally you just jump to the conclusion that it means precisely three thousand, six hundred and fifty-two days. What in the world would make you think that he would destroy Amity Park exactly ten years to the day after cheating on the C.A.T.?"

"Six more weeks! So. . . it's not over. Not yet." I felt somehow betrayed. He was right; it was silly to think that the 'anniversary' would work both ways, but I had spent the evening believing— "Wait a minute. Does that mean he's still out there?"

"Who's still out there?" Clockwork shifted to his middle form, the better to look disgusted at my simple-mindedness. "Out where? He has not been 'out' anywhere since you captured him in that Thermos at five-eleven pm on April twenty-fourth, 2006. How can he be 'out there' if he never existed?"

"Never existed? Of course he existed! If he didn't exist, who did this?" I picked up the Thermos gingerly, with both hands. Its once-smooth, shiny surface was now a moonscape of dings and dents where the ghost had pounded it from the inside. Among the countless marks I could just make out the miniature image of his face (my face except for the fangs) where he had apparently head-banged the inner surface of the trap early in his imprisonment. All of this I had seen before, of course, but I couldn't tell whether any of the dents were recent. Today the Thermos was silent, inert, with no sign of life from its maybe, maybe-not captive.

"He was in here. I captured him, and he was in here. But is he in here now? Is he still. . . ?" I found myself straining to find the right words, wondering why I couldn't manage to master all those fancy verb tenses that Clockwork uses so easily. "Why don't you understand? I need to know!"

"You do not need to know anything. And I am not some kind of ghostly wikipedia, so kindly refrain from treating me as such. If and when I share information with you, it is for purposes that are far beyond your limited understanding."

Frustration boiled over. "I think I'm entitled. After all, that's me in there! Maybe it's the me that would have been if things worked out differently, the me that absolutely deserved to be Thermosed for all eternity, but it's still me, and that means I'm entitled to know!"

Clockwork wrested the Thermos away from me and returned it to the shelf. "You are not entitled to anything, Daniel. The guardianship falls to me, not to you. It is none of your concern, and I suggest that you find a way to put it out of your mind and get on with the rest of your life."

"No. No, I can't! I. . . can't live with that kind of uncertainty."

"You can't live with uncertainty?" He stared at me for a moment, as if I had grown a third eye or sprouted wings. It was a bit uncomfortable, enduring his stare. "Tell me, Daniel: do I understand correctly that your unborn child is both a boy and a girl?"

"What? That's not— That's not the same thing at all.That's just a game Sam and I play, a way of. . . I don't know, a way of keeping an open mind. I can imagine he's a boy, or she's a girl, and I love him—her—either way. And a little less than three months from now, we'll know for sure."

"And from that happy moment forward there'll be no more uncertainty?" The corner of his mouth twitched, and I knew he was leading headlong me into a trap. "Tell me this, then: is your child fully human, or half-ghost? And when will you know? And how will you know when you know?"

I had no answer for that.

"You better get used to living with uncertainty, because that's what parenthood is. Is he healthy? When will she start talking? Why does he have so much trouble making friends? Where is she, and why hasn't she come home yet?" He floated in close, peering into my electric-green eyes. "Do you honestly think your own parents don't live with raw, aching uncertainty every single day of their lives?"

My perspective wheeled around on its axis, and suddenly I was looking at myself from the outside. Why is he always out so late at night? Why is he exhausted all the time? Why are his grades falling? Why is he so tense, so secretive, so nervous, so distant?

Why won't he confide in us?

Eventually I did confide in them, and I knew that they both grieved and resented the years that I had kept them in ignorance. Even so, there were details, thousands of wounds and torments and miseries that they would never know. For one, they would never know how close to death they came exactly ten years ago tonight.

And we were back to that. Back to that central, imperative, unrelenting question. Frustrated, drained, and unwilling to let go, I asked again. "Please, just tell me. . . is there anything inside there?"

"Nothing!" he snapped. "Everything. Schroedinger's Cat."

"Schroedinger's. . . what?"

"Ask your mother. She'll explain it to you." He raised his staff, and in the wink of an eye. . .

. . . I was home.