Maddie was feeling nauseous. She'd been feeling nauseous for several hours, her thoughts caught in a vicious cycle of regret and horror that was only now slowing down enough to unravel. Ever since Phantom had spirited himself and the cockroach away into the night, his words had bounced around in her head like a geometric screensaver.

She'd been so thrilled by the possibility of ground breaking discoveries through experiments, that she hadn't stopped to think. Not what she was doing, not what the consequences would be. She had created a ghost. On purpose. She had replicated Phantom's… death?

Was Phantom even dead?

Was he alive?

Maddie shook her head. Having an existential crisis for a ghost while feeling like throwing up was no good. Not without a notebook at least. She got up from her chair and walked up to the shelf leaning against the back wall. She rifled through the messy stacks of notebooks and papers, haphazardly checking them for a notepad that would have enough blank space for thinking with ink. Many had charred edges, and most were filled to the brim with her own hurried and messy handwriting, or her husband's neater but larger notes. Eventually she found a mostly empty one, with the first few pages scribbled full of various contextless readings but the rest wonderfully blank.

Maddie grabbed a pen and sat back into her chair. She tapped her mouth with the end of her pen and pushed the rolling chair to and fro with her legs. Then she wrote on top of a blank page, Phantom.

It was finally time to compile everything she knew. Maddie underlined the topic and began listing off the piling inconsistencies.

Phantom had died in a portal. Both the ghost and Maddie had confirmed it. He had died and formed inside his own body, giving him a dense and rigid structure for a ghost, despite his recent tendency to deviate from this through strangely strict discipline. He was very powerful because of the incredible energy output of the portal. He had a very distinct ectoplasmic frequency that was similar to that of the Red Huntress' ghost armor, because he contained real-world matter, though Maddie did not know how much. These were simple facts, things Maddie had found easy to accept after they started to connect to each other.

Phantom had bones and muscles and played with both them and the laws of physics like they were his personal little sandbox. He had human friends and allies who were very good at staying anonymous. He could pass through any and all ghost shields she and Jack had created, eventually, usually the moment nobody was looking. Phantom could, allegedly, become alive again. Just like the cockroach.

And that was it, wasn't it? Somehow, Phantom was both alive and dead at the same time. Half-ghost, as he had said. That was why his ectosignature was so much like the Red Huntress and her ghost armor. Not entirely physical, not entirely ectoplasmic. If the cockroach was anything to go by, Phantom could become entirely… human. Undetectable. Hidden in the harmless low-level background radiation that permeated Amity Park.

There was a thought, drifting high above all the others, casting shadows on Maddie's mind like a cloud passing over the sun, but try as she might she could not grasp it.

A faint chittering sound distracted Maddie from her clouded thoughts. She glanced to the left, and saw the remaining three cockroaches still in their wire mesh cage, huddled in a pile in the corner of the cage shadowed by the small test portal. Maddie suddenly felt for them, feeling herself as well like a small creature cowering under the shadow of something that was simple on the surface but horrible and nebulous the moment you put your head under. She tucked the notepad in her pocket and picked up the little cage. The laboratory was no place for the cockroaches.

Maddie tiptoed through the house, not taking any chances of waking anyone up. Pale dawn light was shining through the curtains. Had she moped that long, all through the night? Fresh morning air greeted her as she stepped out of the door. The wind carried a faint but all-too familiar scent of charged ectoplasm. Had she been so zoned out that she'd missed whatever ghost fight has taken place?

No matter. Maddie could find out what had happened later. Right now, she had a mission. A little, insignificant mission, but a mission nonetheless. She headed for the park.

Not many people were around- Maddie saw a mailman, a couple of food delivery trucks, two drunk friends tracing a strange path towards home. One car on the road, no dog walkers yet. Maddie turned the last corner before the park, and halted.

The light scattering of trees and bushes and benches was surrounded by early dawn fog. The dew-laden grass was an unbroken silver carpet, disappearing from sight as the moisture of the night left the ground for the air. It suddenly looked an unfit place for her cockroaches, too airy, too wet. Too green and silver for the insects found huddling under the neighbor's stinky garbage bags. But somehow it felt wrong to even consider tossing them back where she'd found them.

In the end, Maddie deposited the insects amidst the roots of an older oak, where frost and weather had dug holes under the gnarly roots. The cockroaches stood still for a moment, waving their stringy little antennas, before one by one darting into a dark, damp crevice. Right now Maddie wished she could crawl under the roots with the roaches, but that wasn't an option. She couldn't just hide under a rock. She had a moral dilemma to tackle and a mystery to think through.

Back at Fentonworks lab, Maddie threw the empty mesh box to a corner and gathered the notepad and pen back to her hands. One solitary underlined word glared back at her from the top of the page. She hadn't managed to write anything else down. Too many thoughts were crawling like cockroaches over each other to be formed into written notes.

Maddie put the pad down and leaned her head on her hands instead.

Phantom was alive. Somehow. And dead. He had died, he had called it dying, but he could become alive. Maddie had seen it, just for the blink of an eye, little more than two months ago. He had hoped she'd missed it, hadn't he? Whenever she'd asked about the luminous rings that had appeared then, appeared any time Phantom removed a piece of his outfit, the ghost had dismissed it in a vague way that Maddie had taken for ignorance. In hindsight, it had been on purpose. Maddie could understand it, now. She could almost put herself in Phantom's shoes.

Because Phantom was too human.

How many times had Maddie had to remind herself that he was a ghost and not just any teenage boy while talking to him?

And that was just it. It explained everything, all the discrepancies, connected all the dots Maddie had been trying to cram into a pre-existing constellation.

Maddie had to focus, pick one dot, one star to unravel at a time. She was looking at the entire Milky Way at once and it was too bright. But what to start with?

The start. Maddie would start at the beginning. She picked up the daunting near-blank page of the notebook, and wrote below the title a heading.

Death.

Maddie thought back to everything she knew about Phantom's death, confirmed facts only, without the hypotheses she had made about times and locations. He had died in a portal. It had been painful, and he would not wish it on anything else. Maddie internally cringed at that; she had subjected living beings to the same fate. Insects, but nonetheless. Phantom's ghost had formed right there, inside his body, and molded itself to it directly as it died. Tremendous amounts of energy had somehow fused the ghost to the… corpse, and thus must have protected it from further damage, and finally restarted vital functions. If the cockroach was anything to go by, the physical body and the direct ectoplasmic imprint aka the ghost seemed to occupy the same space, the same entity, in turns. It was like… Maddie sought for a simple metaphor she could jot on the paper to return to in a clearer state of mind.

It was like a coin, she eventually decided. A multidimensional coin. For the sake of simplicity, let's say the real world was a flat two-dimensional surface, like a drawing on a paper. Phantom was a coin in a three-dimensional reality. If the coin was placed heads down on the paper, two-dimensional Maddie could see only the heads side of the coin, but not the coin itself, or the three-dimensional world beyond. If the coin was flipped to face tails side down, from two-dimensional Maddie's perspective the image of the heads disappeared, and in its stead there was an entirely different image of the tails. Two-dimensional Maddie lacked the ability to see the two sides simultaneously due to the dimensional limitations, but it didn't mean the three-dimensional coin couldn't exist.

There. That was a pretty good metaphor, wasn't it? Maddie wrote multidimensional coin hypothesis in her notes.

What next? What came after death for a ghost?

Well, usually the answer would be corpse and formation in the zone but both were out of the window here. Maddie had seen with her own two eyes the cockroach remain firmly in this dimension despite the delicious opportunity to fall through the opening portal into the zone, and leave behind no corpse.

Maddie's restless penhand stopped twitching. After she'd first begun studying Phantom through sensible conversation and he'd told her how he'd died, Maddie had gone through missing persons records, and found nothing. It came to her like a chill down the spine that Phantom would not have left behind a body, not because of its possible complete obliteration, but because there would not have been a body.

He hadn't died permanently.

He might not even a be ghost most of the time, Maddie realized. She did not know how it worked, not really, but the change was clearly voluntary. He could still have a life, somewhere. Friends. Family.

More pieces of the puzzle fell into place, cascading down at alarming speeds and constructing more details than Maddie had time to look at. It explained why Phantom never really went to the Ghost Zone and had no lair there, why he protected the humans of Amity Park, and why he'd been so offended when Maddie had assumed he was more interested in the town rather than the people. It explained why and how he had his little team of human 'sidekicks'.

Maddie felt once again a large and terrible thought shadowing her mind like a storm cloud. It was trickling down, oozing from her head into her shoulders, making them stiff and tense. It was flowing down towards her heart, making her chest tighten with anxiety and fear, fear she could not yet understand or name. She was feeling nauseous again, but this time it was not because of the cockroaches. It was the picture, the incomplete puzzle image of Phantom, that was weighing on her. Only a small area was missing, in the middle, the core or the jigsaw. She did not want to see it complete, now, but she knew that she needed to see it through. For herself, for the cockroach, for Phantom.

Where had she been? Right. The moment after death. Maddie picked up the pen again, if only to have something to nervously fiddle with. No body left behind. Phantom could've died a horrible, horrible death, all alone, screaming at the top of his burning lungs just as the cockroach had, and afterwards just… walked away. With none the wiser. With another horrible realization, the kind she was having with disturbing frequency right now, Maddie figured he might have even died here, in the basement laboratory, and neither she and Jack would never have known.

The more she thought about it the tighter her chest felt and the more it made sense. She'd assumed he'd died In Wisconsin and relocated here because there was more space for his haunt. But if he was alive and had family somewhere… he would not abandon them like that, Maddie was sure. She had gotten a decent understanding of Phantom's personality by now.

But how could it have happened here? Right under their noses? In their own house?

And when?

Maddie stood up on shaky legs and hobbled to the bookshelf. She rifled through the messy folders ad binders and stacks of records and notes, looking backwards through the dates. Maddie remembered the date they'd finished the portal, and the date they'd finally managed to turn it on. What she needed was the first sighting of Phantom.

In the beginning, Maddie and Jack had kept a detailed record of all the ghosts they had seen and concerned citizens had reported. Then the ghosts had just kept coming, the populace got used to them and stopped calling in every time they saw one, and then Maddie had realized there was no use keeping a list of every ectopus and will o' the wisp they saw, and even Jack stopped eventually in favour of active ghost hunting. They'd kept the early ghost journals, of course. No reason getting rid of perfectly good data.

There! The first little booklet of ghost sightings. Times, dates, descriptions, later on designations. The ghost activity was low at first, only faint ectoplasmic shadows coming through the portal. Maddie almost smiled at the excited tone the notes were written in. They'd been so thrilled about all the puny little wraiths. There were no signs of Phantom, though, as Maddie leafed through the little booklet. It covered the first two or so weeks. The second one covered barely a week, with the ghost activity increasing and more people becoming aware and concerned about their presence. No sign of Phantom there either. The third one was a bit thicker, covering the next three weeks and a bit. The ghosts described there were more varied, still mostly harmless spectres that just freaked the unadjusted people out, but recorded the first sighting of a confirmedly humanoid ghost. Maddie read the description given by the caller carefully, but it was not a match with Phantom.

There were no reported sightings of Phantom, either by her and Jack or by a caller, until a month or so after the portal was turned on. He'd been seen by the school, in association of another humanoid ghost possessing large amounts of... meat. Maddie remembered it, she and Jack had been there. Their first proper ghost fight. As she re-examined her memories, she could recall that Phantom had barely come out on top.

She re-shelved the journals, and sat down in front of the computer and turned it on. She wasn't yet quite used to the new one, but it was far quieter once it got going and started a lot faster. Soon Maddie was able to pull up their digital records, the very same ones they'd received back from an anonymous source. Their file on Phantom was outdated, but she wasn't after recent information. She sorted the files by date, and clicked open the first video. It wasn't the first sighting, but two or so weeks later.

Phantom was fighting against a ghostly wolf. He was struggling, it was clear even from the shaky and grainy camera footage, seeming to barely stay aflight. He looked… he looked so young.

Maddie paused the video and rewound it a bit, to a spot where Phantom was clearly visible. He didn't just look young, he was young.

How had Maddie not seen it before? The Phantom he'd talked to had been a young adult, confident and powerful. The Phantom shown in the grainy image on the computer screen was a child, ducking his head away as the ghost wolf's snapping jaws came too close to his face.

Phantom had been aging like a human this entire time, and nobody had noticed.

So, if he was nineteen now… Maddie counted back. Phantom had been fourteen, fifteen at best when he'd died. He'd been the same age as her son the entire time, same age as her Danny. She'd thought more than once that if things had been different, the two could have been friends. Now she realized that they really might have been. They were the same age. Phantom might even be in her son's class. That could explain how he might have gotten in their house.

Maddie tried to think back to almost five years ago, see if she could remember her son's friends. He'd been badly bullied back then, and try as she might, Maddie could not remember him having any more than the two friends, Sam Manson and Tucker Foley, with whom he was thicker than thieves even now, with the later addition of Valerie Gray who hadn't been around back then. Maddie had to admit that she hadn't exactly been mom of the year at the time, she and Jack had both been too busy with the portal and ghosts to pay enough attention to her son's social life. There might have been any number of short friendships that hadn't lasted as the teens got used to each other at the start of high school. Any number of children could have been at the house and she wouldn't have paid them any mind

But somehow, that didn't seem right. What would a new friend like that, barely an acquaintance at best, be doing in the laboratory alone, let alone put on a protective suit like Phantom was wearing, like she was wearing?

The cloud in her mind was darker than ever and starting to discharge lightning. Somewhere high above, the last puzzle piece began an inevitable hurling descent, just like Phantom had dropped from the sky toward her last night.