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The Soul Sepulcher

-By Sholay

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Chapter 22 — Amity's Bloody History

"Danny, Jazz, would you come with me into the family room? We need to talk."

Danny and Jazz exchanged glances at their mother's sombre tone. After their father's explosive reaction to Danny mentioning the Night of Abaddon, what remained of their dinner had passed in dead silence. It was only now, after the table had been cleared and the dishes neatly stacked in the washer, that Maddie was breaking the strained lull that had fallen after Jack had left the room.

Maddie led the way into the family room and the two siblings followed. The door to the basement laboratory was still conspicuously shut, and as Danny passed by he couldn't even hear any of the usual mini-explosions that regularly emitted from the lab whenever his dad was down there. He raised a hand, strongly tempted to turn the door invisible and just glimpse what his father was doing downstairs… But no, Danny drew his hand back. It didn't feel right.

Last to enter the sitting room, Danny saw that his mother had taken a seat on one end of the couch, while Jazz was curled up on their dad's armchair, her feet tucked to one side. Danny sank onto the other end of the couch, pulling his own feet up so he could cross his legs comfortably as he turned to face his mother.

Knowing there no point in beating around the bush, he cut straight to the point, "Mom, is this about Dad?"

Maddie sighed, indigo eyes distant. She took a breath, gathering herself before interlaced her fingers and looked straight up at them: first meeting Danny's eyes, then Jazz's. "Yes," she affirmed. "But this is a very serious topic. It isn't something you can tell other people about. I'm sorry Danny, but that includes Sam and Tucker." She favoured him with a brief, sympathetic smile.

Danny's faith in his two best friends was beyond reproach. He'd known both Sam and Tucker for nearly a decade and they shared everything. Even his parents treated them like they were extensions of the family. For Maddie to ask Danny to keep whatever she was going to say secret from Sam and Tucker… It… well… Danny didn't know what that meant. It had never happened before. Even the Ops centre and the family's jet plane weren't a secret from Sam and Tucker.

Both Jazz and Danny agreed to keep the secret, the latter noticeably more hesitant than the former, and Maddie nodded.

"Good. Now, this is something we have never talked about before. Your father doesn't like to talk about his past. It is… a very painful topic." Maddie took a breath. "We should start at the beginning. Your father and his parents were raised here in Amity Park."

"Really?" Danny interrupted. Resting an elbow on the armrest of the couch, he propped his cheek up on his knuckles. "I thought Dad was born in a log cabin… Where he had to eat horse meat." The teen shuddered, remembering his father's tales. A quick glace to the side affirmed that Jazz thought the same as she nodded, mild disgust twisting her mouth.

Maddie looked amused. "Yes, he was born in a log cabin outside the city. But that was only the place where his family would spend their summers. For most of the year they lived in Amity. Now, I don't suppose you know this, but ghost related professions runs in your father's half of the family."

"Oh yeah, I know." Danny nodded vigorously. "For a school project we had to look up our ancestors and I found John Fenton Nightingale," he offered in answer to his mother's questioning glance.

"Yes, he was one of your father's more illustrious relatives." Maddie said thoughtfully. "But what I want emphasize is that not all of your father's relatives were ghost hunters."

Jazz and Danny stirred. "No?" Jazz asked.

Maddie shook her head. "No. His mother, for example, was a medium for spirits."

Danny cocked his head in confusion but Jazz leaned forward, intrigued, "A spirit medium? They actually existed?" she wondered.

"Oh yes, they exist," corrected their mother.

"Wait… She was a what, now?" Danny puzzled.

"A spirit medium," Jazz elaborated in what Danny called her 'I'm going to educate you now' voice, "is someone who can see and talk to ghosts. I guess that's kind of redundant since we now know that everyone can do that. The main point is that a spirit mediums put ghosts to rest."

"To rest?" Danny echoed, an odd look in his eyes.

"Yes," Maddie nodded. "It is a completely unexplored area of parapsychology: fascinating yet completely inexplicable. It makes no logical sense how the encounter with a mere human—medium or no—would cause complete degradation of a paranormal entity's ambient energies—in fact, their entire genetic make-up down to the atoms. Can you imagine the sheer amount of energy that sort of decomposition would require? I would have loved to study the phenomenon further but, unfortunately, I have never seen a sending with my own eyes…"

Danny's eyes shifted to the side in the direction of his sister and the siblings shared a look.

"Um… Mom? What were you saying?" Danny prodded when it seemed she'd lost herself in thought.

Maddie looked up. "What? Oh, yes. Right. Well, disregarding the scientific improbabilities for the moment, your grandmother believed strongly that it was her duty to put ghosts to rest. But this caused… difficulties: between Jack and his parents, between his mother and father…" she sighed.

"What had become apparent, and was becoming more and more difficult to ignore with each passing year, was the effect of being a medium on the human body. Being a medium requires the person to have a strong connection between this world and the next; this effort taxes the fragile human body, mind and heart." Maddie continued at length.

" 'The next world?' Do you mean—" Danny began.

"No, not the Ghost Zone." Maddie said, inferring correctly what her son had been about to ask. "A spirit medium sooths a ghost's natural obsessions and regrets and, in theory, breaks all ties between them and these known planes of existence. However, if you are not born with this gift, the strain of putting a ghost to rest can kill you. Even your grandmother occasionally lost consciousness. Sometimes she experienced dangerous seizures and was quite prone to severe illness. It put great strain on your father and grandfather; it didn't help that the town ostracized her and feared her gifts."

Danny felt like a stone had lodged in his throat. His grandmother had talked to ghosts—had befriended them. Why had he never heard about this before?

"What… What happened?" Danny asked slowly. He knew his grandparents on his father's side weren't alive. But it had been a fact that had existed ever since he could remember. He'd never asked his parents for any details.

"There were risks involved in what your grandmother was doing. Ghosts would come flocking to her to have their souls healed. And many were not benign. She was able to handle the spirits most times. But it eventually caused a rift between her and your grandfather. Your father was just a child at the time, barely old enough to understand why his parents were always fighting." Maddie gave a short exhale, a small sign of compassion for the man she loved. "That was when his hatred of ghosts started. But it wasn't that your father wanted to hunt them. On the contrary, he wanted absolutely nothing to do with them."

Two sets of eyebrows shot up at that.

"Dad wanted nothing to do with ghosts?" Danny boggled.

A soft smile turned up the edges of Maddie's lips. "It is hard to believe, isn't it?" both teens nodded vigorously. "But it's true. Your grandfather made certain to keep your father away from ghosts. He was not allowed to see them, much less hunt them. So, by consequence, he never saw much of his mother either. I believe your father wondered if his mother was chasing invisible manifestations of her mind. He struggled. After all, it is difficult to fight rumours questioning your mother's sanity when you yourself are starting to believe them."

Here, Jazz shifted guiltily and Danny glanced at her, remembering how she had long accused their parents of being something southward of eccentric before she'd seen a ghost with her own eyes.

"Your dad wanted to be an architect." Maddie continued, "to create strange and unusual designs. He once showed me the most incredible sketch he'd made in his childhood…" She shook her head. "Anyway. There came a time that your father was so fed up with the everything that he ran away from home."

"He ran away? That could not have ended well." Jazz criticized.

"How old was he?" Danny wondered.

"Sixteen." Maddie answered. "He took his parents' car and drove off into the sunset. Didn't return for two weeks."

"Wow…" Danny marvelled at his father's gall. He couldn't say he'd never thought of running away: the thought had occurred to him during his most nightmarish visions of possible reactions his parents could have to his ghost half. But thinking about it and actually going through with it were two completely different things. And his dad hadn't had the added advantage of ghost powers to sustain him.

But while Danny was looking somewhat impressed, Maddie appeared pained. "I don't think your father ever forgave himself for that."

Danny and Jazz both sent her questioning glances.

"No one knows what really happened. Not even your father. But while he was gone, ghosts entered the town and razed the place to the ground." She spoke calmly and the lack of inflection in her tone only made the story more horrifying. "Something had swept through the place, setting fire to the trees, tearing up the ground and killing… everyone. Your father had come home, anger spent and ready to make amends, only to find everything he'd ever known, everyone he cared about, gone." Maddie's eyes closed.

Danny's hands had clenched into tight fists. He had expected something bad when he had first asked his father about the Night of Abaddon—after seeing that vision in Clockwork's mirror he'd have been foolish not to—but he hadn't expected this. He knew that what had levelled Amity Park had been no ghost. It had been Legion.

And if he didn't stop the beast then history would repeat itself.

And yet…

"Did Dad ever find out what happened? I mean, why the ghost attacked Amity Park, how they got it to stop?" He asked. In his mind, he begged his mother for a good answer. Something, anything, that could help him with his fight now.

But Maddie just shook her head. "Your dad ran home and found his father dead, and his mother hanging on by a thread. She had a jewel in her hand."

"A jewel?" Danny's head snapped to his mother, his eyes narrowing.

"Yes…" Maddie remembered. "He showed it to me once. It was a beautiful thing. Shone like a rainbow."

Here Jazz sent Danny a sharp look that he ignored.

"Your father was devastated. He had arrived early enough that his mother was still conscious, but too late to do anything to help. He was helpless to do anything but hold her hand and watch her pass."

The three Fentons spent a moment in silence. Sadness and pity for his father clogged Danny's throat. He had only briefly experienced the pain of loosing his friends and family after the Nasty Burger incident—and he'd seen what that pain had turned him into—but his dad's loss had been permanent. And still, Jack Fenton was a jovial, if somewhat scatterbrained, man.

Danny couldn't imagine how.

"The government had to get involved. They cleaned the entire thing up, almost as though it had never happened. Amity Park was rebuilt and marketed to new settlers as a 'Safe Place to Live'. Your father, unable to deal with everything, left the state and enrolled in college in Wisconsin."

"So that's why he hates ghosts so much!" Jazz cried. "He blames ghosts for the loss of his parents and friends!"

Maddie nodded. "And that's why your father fights ghosts so passionately. I admit, my major in college was parapsychology, though the study of ghosts specifically has always interested me. After I met your father, and he told me what he'd suffered… It just cemented my desire to hunt down those parasitic subversions of post-human consciousness and ectoplasmic residue." Her voice had turned dark and Danny shivered, leaning away from that tone and the hate it carried.

How could he ever tell his parents his secret now? They had very good reason to hate all ghosts; why would he be any different?

'But they accepted me during that time with the reality gauntlet…'

'You only saw their very initial reaction. After you'd literally saved their lives. How do you know that gratitude would have lasted?'

"So… how… why did you and Dad come back here. And why is Dad so…" Jazz stumbled over her words and shifted restlessly in the armchair. "I mean, I never would've guess that Dad lost… in such a way…"

"Yes, your father has amazing resilience, doesn't he?" Maddie's said affectionately. "He has a simple mind, but a good heart. However, I think the loss did affect him. It did change him, in ways that we may not even be aware of. And he was the one who suggested coming to live in Amity Park. Maybe it gives him a connection to his parents."

Danny turned his head away, passing his fingers over his nose and cheek.

'When I lost everyone, I turned my pain into a well of rage. Dad turned his into gratitude for the things he does have. Sure, he's completely obsessed with tearing ghosts apart 'molecule-by-molecule', but about everything else he's pretty easy-going. Excitable though. Easy to anger, but calms down just as fast.' This thought, while it did hugely improve Danny's view on his dad, still made him feel like dirt.

"Hey mom, does Dad still have the stone that his mother gave him?" Jazz's words pierced Danny's depressing thoughts and he focused on the answer, also interested in what he mother would say.

Maddie's brows pulled together. "No… and that's the strange thing. A couple of years after college, I asked him about the stone but he just gave me a confused look and asked me what I was talking about. I was never able to figure out what happened."

Danny mirrored his mother's frown. Elbows on his folded legs, he entwined his hands, then rested his chin on them. What his mother was saying definitely was suspicious and it stank of ghostly interference. But no ghost Danny had ever come across could alter memories.

And yet, the word 'college' jumped out at him. Danny couldn't help it: whenever one of his parents mentioned something odd or strange going on around their college years the young hybrid's mind always angled straight to Vlad. A couple of years after college would have given Vlad plenty of time to get comfortable enough with his powers to go and steal his grandmother's memento.

'But not even Vlad's that heartless. Besides, how could he have changed Dad's memories? Better yet, why would he have even wanted the stone in the first place?'

Of course, it might just be a single move in another one of Vlad's confused, tangled plotlines. Maybe he did it just for kicks, or a private laugh. The man wanted to kill Jack for goodness sake. Nothing was beneath him, evidently.

Danny's lips pressed together.

"So all this happened in Amity Park and no one talks about it? How is that even possible?" Jazz piped up once more. She wasn't letting up with the questions and for that Danny was grateful: it gave him time to think without missing out on any important information.

"Well, let's just say there's a reason why your father and I distrust the government." Maddie said wryly. "They are very good at burying things they don't want to be found out. They recorded the incident that levelled Amity Park as 'The Night of Abaddon'—"

"Abaddon…" Jazz mused. " 'Place of destruction,' " she frowned. "Very appropriate."

"It was," Maddie agreed. "Then they proceeded to pay your father off to promise to never tell this story to anyone."

"That's, that's—!" Jazz gaped, unable to express her indignation. Danny had no such problem.

"That's evil." He said, not a hint of humour in his voice.

"And that's why you can't tell even Sam and Tucker about this. It's a very dangerous secret." Maddie looked at Danny seriously, who straightened in his seat. "Which is why it is also very strange for you to have simply 'heard' the term 'Night of Abaddon'. Danny, almost no living person knows that Amity Park was once destroyed. We've taught you how to recognize ghosts. So tell me: was it a ghost you heard it from? And did you really just come across it on the street?" She sent him a piercing stare and he wondered, as he always did, if it was simply a 'Mom thing' to be able to tell when a kid was not telling the whole truth.

Danny's head tipped. "No…" he mumbled, avoiding eye contact. "It wasn't on the street. It was the museum. Remember the ghost I saw in Natural History museum last month? It's because of it that I heard about the 'Night of Abaddon'." It took some fancy wording, but it wasn't a lie. Not exactly. He could tell Jazz was giving him a weird look from across the room though.

"Danny! You should have told us sooner! Did that ghost say anything else? Are you absolutely sure that ghost didn't hurt you?" Her gaze drifted to the bruise on his cheek and she blinked, an odd expression crossing her face.

"Yes to the second and no to the first… more or less. I can't remember exactly what the ghost said. I'm fine, Mom." Noticing her attention to his face, he tilted his chin away in an attempt to hide the bruise. It was healing: several times faster than it should have been. The last thing he wanted was his mother commenting on that fact.

"That's twice now that a ghost has attacked you and I haven't been able to help." She said regretfully and Danny instantly knew what she was thinking.

"No, Mom, I'm sure the ghost didn't attack me to get to you." He assured, "I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. At the museum and in the lab. It doesn't help that I'm really clumsy." He said with a lopsided grin.

Maddie didn't bother restraining the urge: she leaned across the couch and gathered her son in a hug. A startled look crossed Danny's face at first, but that quickly melted into an awkward smile as he returned the embrace. Jazz meanwhile, shook her head with a smile and decided it was probably a good time for her to make a quiet exit. Her brother was a sap, but very much less inclined to engage in said sappy behaviour if he had an audience. And so, she rose and slipped out of the room. As she made her way of the stairs a thought struck her and she turned back with a somewhat evil grin. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out her cell phone and snapped a quick picture.

Jazz giggled mischievously all the way to her room.

Back in the family room, Maddie and Danny were still discussing his recent ghost encounters. "It's good that, for the lab at least, Vlad was there to help." She said.

The instant she mentioned Vlad's name, Danny had tensed and all levity vanished from his expression.

"I know you don't like him." Maddie stated frankly, "but your father thinks the world of Vlad. So we have to be civil, right?"

Danny looked surprised when she included herself in that statement. "I thought you liked him since he…saved me and all." He seemed to have to force the words through his teeth.

"I believe he's a good man, deep down." Maddie clarified. "But Vlad Masters could infuriate even a priest."

"And he's creepy." Danny added with a dry grin.

"And he's creepy." She repeated, her answering smile identical to his.

They spent a moment in silence then. Danny's eyes were far away and Maddie was tempted to ask what he was thinking about. She refrained. Instead, she simply watched her son. She marvelled at how fast he was growing up. Wasn't it just last year that he'd been in Junior High: worrying about going to Jazz's school with 'teenagers', realizing girls made him giggle and battling the horrors of puberty and acne? Back then he'd always needing her advice before doing things, and her nagging to do his chores and homework.

Now things were different. He was getting older and it seemed like a whole new set of problems were arising. He appeared more comfortable with himself, and more serious. She still had to nag him to do his chores and homework but those conversations would often result in loud arguments. He had become secretive, and guarded his privacy jealously. These days Maddie barely had any idea what her son did from morning until he returned home.

And Jazz said he was being bullied.

Danny said he'd walked into a wall. But unless he'd run flat out into the wall while looking somewhere off to his left, there was no way he could have given himself that bruise.

Which meant someone had hit him. Someone had struck her son.

Maybe Danny wouldn't talk to her, but she'd be damned if she let him get hurt again.

Danny sighed then, and Maddie's attention was drawn back to him as he unfolded his legs and stood. "I… I'm getting a little tired now. I think I should just go work on some homework and then go to sleep… It's… a lot to think about all at once. Thanks for telling us, Mom." He glanced behind himself, as though expecting to see Jazz there on the armchair and blinked when he saw the chair was empty. Maddie herself had noticed when her daughter had made her exit—and took that picture, she remembered with an amused shake of the head.

Danny bid his mother a good night but only got as far as the foot of the staircase before he paused and turned around.

"Hey Mom?" He asked, fixing ice-blue eyes on her.

"Yes, Danny?" She nodded from the couch.

"You said that when Grandma Fenton acted as a spirit medium it put a strain on her and caused seizures… How come?" Danny's gaze was extraordinarily keen as he focused singularly on his mother. "Why is it so dangerous to put a ghost to rest?"

Maddie hesitated before answering. "It has not been studied..." She said slowly, unwilling to continue speculating on a tangent so far removed from proven fact.

"Can you guess? Or hypothesize something?" There was something in Danny's expression, some buried distress that struck her hard enough to change her mind.

"I believe that it is due to the nature of the act." She told her son honestly. "We are living creatures. Every day, we fight to sustain this life, to guard it and preserve it jealously. Death is a vast unknown and we deify it; it clashes with the very essence of human life and vigour. Do you understand? But in order to put a ghost to rest, the spirit medium must establish a connection, a pathway, between this plane of existence and whatever it is that lies beyond. The medium is acting as a facilitator for the ghost's passage and to do that, the medium must have a foot planted firmly in each world: that of the living and that of the dead.

This dual existence contradicts the very core of our nature. It is more than a physical or mental strain. Every second that the medium spends in this limbo causes grief to the soul: which, while being drawn to death, is still chained to the living body. Can you imagine the struggle? Tempted by eternal rest from difficulties and strife—how much strength it would take to return to this world, where every day brings new struggles?"

Maddie fell silent at this point. She looked like she could keep on talking—theorizing on this fuzzy but fascinating unexplored branch of paranormal philosophy—but she could sense that Danny was starting to be confused.

Indeed, although Danny was trying his best to follow his mother, he still felt like his head was starting to spin. This was of thinking was completely new to him and he didn't know what to make of it—much less how it applied to him as a human-ghost hybrid who just happened to have put a ghost to rest the other day.

Just how closely did he court death? Was it a distant shadow that he brushed against every time he turned ghost—or was it closer, did he actually hop back and forth across that line?

He barely managed to mumble a distant goodnight to his mother as he made his way upstairs, more than ready to throw himself into the shower and attempt to wash these weird thoughts out of his head.

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Danny met Jazz before the door leading to the lab many hours after their parents had gone to sleep.

"Did you get any sleep?" His sister asked, looking at the smudges under his eyes in concern.

"Couple hours." Danny suppressed a yawn. "I didn't expect the talk with mom to take so long."

"Yeah," she agreed. "I'd never even thought about it before. I mean, I knew Dad's parents were… had passed… but I never really asked how or why."

"Me neither."

"So," Jazz sent him a sidelong look. "Do have a plan to get into the museum?"

"Er… no." He looked sheepish. "I was hoping you could help with that part."

She heaved an exaggerated sigh, then sent him a sly grin. "You are so lucky you have me for a sister."

Danny rolled his eyes. "Okay, okay fine. I bow to your ego, which is ten times more inflated than mine could ever be. Now, what's this brilliant plan of yours, oh amazing one?"

Jazz huffed, crossing her arms. "Just for that I might not tell you."

"Ja-aazz…" Danny practically whined. "Don't start that one."

"Fine, fine. Just trying to lighten the mood. Here, I snuck this out of the lab after diner." From behind her back, Jazz pulled out an object that looked very much like a screw jack to Danny.

He squinted one eye at the metal object, as though trying to glean secrets from its serrated edges, then looked at Jazz. "This is your plan? It's a car jack, Jazz." Skepticism dripped from his words.

"Ah, but it's a car jack with the word 'Fenton' on it." Jazz held up a finger knowingly as she coined one of their parents' favourite phrases. "It can lift up any ghostly object. Dad calls it the Fenton Jack."

Danny's eyelids fell half-mast. "You're kidding."

"Nope." Jazz grinned. "But regardless of the ridiculous name, the idea's not bad. Dad said they made it to widen an opening in the ghost-human shield around the museum."

"Umm… Aren't you forgetting one small detail? In order to widen an opening in the shield don't we first need a opening?" He exclaimed, throwing his arms wide to emphasize his point.

She slanted a look on him. "Yes, well, I was hoping you could help with that part, since I seem to be coming up with all the ideas so far."

Danny was about to retort with something sarcastic when he was unexpectedly struck with an idea. Brushing passed his sister, Danny walked straight through the door to the lab. With a flick of his wrist, he turned on the lights and loped down the stairs two at a time.

His sister called after him, unable to follow after him through the locked door. It had become a rule after the accident when Danny and his friends had snuck into the lab afterhours, he'd gotten curious, pressed a very inconveniently placed button and woken up the entire household with his screams. Now his parents had made it official: no one was allowed in the lab after Jack and Maddie went to bed.

Danny had joked to his sister once that their parents simply didn't want the kids making any more scientific breakthroughs without them present. Suffice it to say that Jazz hadn't found the joke very funny.

So the door to the basement was locked everyday at 11pm, the key kept safe in Maddie's possession.

Of course, locked doors had started to become a lot less meaningful to Danny once he gained the power to simply walk through them.

Rummaging around on the shelves on the wall adjacent to the ghost portal, Danny pulled down a spare Fenton thermos. After checking to make sure it functioned properly, he strapped it over his shoulder, settling the weight of the thermos across his back.

Reaching into his pocket he grasped the spherical object he found there and then his eyes hardened. A ring of white energy snapped into being around his waist. It split, spinning outward in opposite directions; cold numbness washed over him and then he was ghost. Before his eyes, the colour bleached out of his hair, silver gloves wrapped around his hands and his feet slipped off the ground, no longer feeling the pull of gravity.

He was about to zip back up the stairs to rejoin his sister when he spotted a single utility belt hanging from a hook on the wall.

It was the same belt his mother had been wearing when they'd been stranded in the Colorado.

"Hm… This could be useful." Reaching out, he pulled the belt off the hook. A quick inspection showed that there were half a dozen different devices hidden in the thing: a standard ecto-gun, the Fenton Fisher, the Jack-O'-Nine-Tails and a couple of other little gadgets he'd never seen before.

Danny grinned at the mass of silver and green weapons in his hands. It was pretty cool. 'You never know when one of these could come in handy.' Rather proud of himself for thinking ahead, Danny snapped the belt around his hips.

In spite of it belonging to his mother, the belt still fit relatively well. Patting it down, Danny's fingers found a small pouch on his left side, which he quickly zipped open.

Opening his clenched fist, Danny spared a few brief seconds to stare into the shimmering depths of the gem that sat in his palm. Then he tipped his hand, rolling the Lunch Lady's memento gently into the pocket.

Wasting no more time in the lab, Danny exerted a bit of willpower to turn himself intangible, then jumped up through the ceiling.

"Hey!" Jazz jumped as she saw him come through the ground near her feet. "Where've you be—eeeeahh!"

Danny didn't bother answering his sister as he swept her up in his arms and flew through the ceiling, heading in the direction of the Amity Park Museum of Natural History.

'Sam, Tucker, hold on. I'm coming for you guys.'

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End Chapter 22

To Be Continued…

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Done for now! OOooo, next chapter is where it starts to get juicy! I can't wait!

Thank you smallvillephantom14, starsinjars, Princess of Rose, Curious Nightmare, Yugisrose and VampirefrootloopsRule (for your awesome PM :D)

Please drop a line telling me what you think of the story thus far. Else, I'm not sure if you're liking it, loving it, hating it, or are somewhat moderately indifferent to it ^_^

Adio!