Capeworld Comics

For Mr. Gayer, who taught me the healing power of literature.

Late December, 1865

Mr. Simon Carter, director of the Gnome theater, waited restlessly in the dark outside the theater room in the main lobby. He couldn’t wait with a lamp, for he expected to see a blue light pour itself beneath and around the double doors very shortly and knew from experience that natural light was bright enough to obscure it.

He knew that he would see the blue light any moment now. It came every night, and by his careful records, it was coming sooner and sooner.

His pocket watch ticked away in the silence. Its mechanical repetition and Mr. Carter’s heartbeat were the only sounds in the Gnome theater.

No one else in the entire company was willing to monitor the haunting. So being the director, the responsibility fell to him–or so the company’s investors told him. According to their logic, related to Mr. Carter over long, contentious meetings, he was in charge of the stage. He commanded the people that got on the stage, and so he was also in charge of any ghosts that got on the stage.

That made sense–to them, at least.

Mr. Carter bitterly disputed their logic, but they countered with a point he could not dispute–he used their money.

Mr. Carter regretted the raise he gave his performers a few months back. It seemed to be a good idea at the time, it was a way to keep up everyone’s spirits after London was wiped off the face of the Earth in a massive, white fireball. It was a frighteningly unnatural catastrophe that shook the world from Japan to California, and no amount of scientists repeating that “ghosts are a natural, not supernatural phenomena and never again will such an event occur.” could quiet the existential fears of his Essex cast.

Extra money, however, was always appreciated in uncertain times.

But Mr. Carter couldn’t understand it–they used his money, yet they were at home sleeping in their beds while he was here, in the dark and silence.

Actors. They could talk to the ghost of King Hamlet, they could talk to the ghost of Julius Caesar, but could they stand to actually talk to a real ghost? No!

Suddenly, the blue light he had been expecting shined beneath the door frame. It flowed slowly underneath the door, like smoke, unlike any natural light born of fire or electric filament. It flowed underneath the door and then, to Mr. Carter’s surprise, through the door. The door itself absorbed the light like a sponge water and glowed blue

The blue light had never done that before. But it was the nature of ghostlight to be surprising.

The muttering that accompanied the blue light through the door was fortunately of the usual volume. At least that, if nothing else, was the same.

Ghostlight was what people called the blue radiance–normal people, that is. Those with personalities peculiar enough to research such things as ghostlight called it “a combination of dispersed ectoplasm and Odic energy.” But to the average man, it was light from a ghost, ghostlight. But from Mr. Carter’s perspective, it could have been called fairy dust, what was important was that it was the skin and bones of ghosts, and to ghosts with enough awareness, their ears and eyes, and potentially, even their arms.

If you could see the ghostlight, the ghost could see you. If you could touch the ghostlight, the ghost could touch you. That was what they said–though “could” was the operative word here. Not all ghosts were the same when it came to lucidity and thus sensitivity. Some ghosts were like sleeping dogs and could be touched without notice—if touched gently. Slowly. Softly.

Mr. Carter approached the door very, very slowly, and touched the door handle very, very gently.

The ghosts that haunted the Gnome Theater were evidently not very lucid. There was one thing a person could do, to Mr. Carter’s knowledge, that drew their attention, which he had learned by accident, but in his experience, their ghostlight could be touched without drawing their notice.

It was not the first time that Mr. Carter had touched ghostlight. He had touched it, night after night, for three weeks. But touching it now was just as strange as touching it the first time. It was strange in how it didn’t feel like anything. The door suffused with ghostlight felt just like the door in daytime. There was no heat. There was no chill. It was only light, but oh, what ghosts could do with that light, according to the stories!

Mr. Carter tried not to think of the stories as he opened the door, tried not to think about how a ghost in Boston once tossed a man into the sky. Where that man landed, if he landed at all, was unknown to this day. He tried not to think about how a ghost in Berlin pulled an entire boat down into the Spree and held the passengers to the riverbed until their faces were blue and inflated. He tried not to think about a million ghost stories that proved the old aphorism “The living have no defense from the dead.”

But he thought of a few of them, anyway. He couldn’t help it. Mr. Carter was the kind of man whose mind was but a stage for thoughts to play upon.

Very slowly, very gently, Mr. Carter pushed the door open.

There were no lamps lit inside the theater, but all was aglow from the performers on stage.

Men whose skin and costumes were all of the same eerie blue crowded the stage. They were a shade of blue Mr. Carter had only ever seen in the arcs of electricity, only ever in the brass tubes of natural philosophers demonstrating scientific principles to laypersons such as himself or in the sky-splitting fall of a lightning bolt.

It was a soft shade of blue, a radiant shade of blue, and if there was no form behind the color, Mr. Carter would have found it a very soothing sight.

But oh, how disquieting was that color when it was in the form of people!

Mr. Carter did not recognize the men pacing and gesturing on stage. They certainly weren’t anyone that graced the stage in life. He was the first director of the Gnome theater and none of his players had died. But he did recognize who the men portrayed.

There was Brutus in his toga, dagger held close to his side, a look of stoic resolve on his face. There was Hamlet putting on an antic disposition, darting here and there in the throes of mock madness. There was Falstaff, rotund and jovial and ill-fitting in his armor, and Prospero, wise and thoughtful.

They did not act together. Each ghost seemed unaware that he shared the stage with others. They flowed through each other as they moved across the stage like clouds blowing through clouds. King Lear walked through Brutus. Brutus gestured and his hand went through Hamlet’s face. Hamlet walked into Prospero’s shoulder.

They did not act together, but they all spoke together, and the cacophony was maddening.

Mr. Carter thought Hell might have sounded like the stage–loud, incoherent, and meaningless. He thought Hell might have also looked like the stage. Perhaps in Hell, souls did the same actions, all the time, forever and ever. Perhaps in Hell, all the varieties of mankind were trapped together, but were unaware of each other. As one, they toiled alone, without reason or purpose and acted out at living, but never truly lived.

Mr. Carter crept closer and kept himself low to the ground and hidden by the audience chairs. He did not want to be seen, for while the ghosts could not feel him crawling through their ghostlight, he knew that they could see and hear as a man could see and hear.

They had seen him before, and he did not want to repeat that horrible experience.

In an attempt to calm himself, Mr. Carter reminded himself that hauntings were not so uncommon in this modern year of 1865. Ghosts were once a disputed fact of reality but now they were a topic of study. Manesology had been a branch of scientific inquiry since  Edward James published Multiple Intelligences Within The Human Body in 1861. Mr. Carter reminded himself that this was not a supernatural phenomena. He didn’t understand the physical, precise mechanics behind the ghosts, he couldn’t begin to understand the mechanics, but he couldn’t understand the precise mechanics of the flu that knocked him down season after season, but that didn’t mean the flu was incomprehensible. This haunting was scientific, understandable, and controllable.

But as Mr. Carter crept closer, he realized that repeating the words of the manesologists did very little to bolster his flagging courage.

When he got close enough to see the front of the stage, he saw something that made his heart leap in his chest.

There were more ghosts than he had seen from the back of the theater. Up close to the stage, he could now see that there were some who were off the stage—Othello and Oberon and someone else whose arms were the only visible part with the rest of him stuck inside the stage itself.

This had never happened before! Night after night, Mr. Carter had observed the haunting. The number of ghosts had steadily increased, and that had been some cause for concern, but the ghosts had never gone off the stage! Never! Mr. Carter had even dared to hope that the stage was some sort of prison for the ghosts and its boundaries, something they could not break. But they were breaking those boundaries before his very eyes!

Mr. Carter made a little noise in the back of his throat, but he wasn’t aware that he had made that noise until the sound was up on the air and in the blue ears of ghosts.

The cacophony stopped. Total silence filled the theater. The ghosts stopped moving, stopped acting, stopped talking, and turned, as one, to leer in silence at Mr. Carter.

The ghosts had done this before, when one night Mr. Carter’s pocket watch fell out of his pocket and clattered to the floor. Mr. Carter was frightened by the ghosts then as he was now.

Their faces were empty masks that expressed nothing in their blank features. Falstaff did not grin. Hamlet did not frown.

They looked, and only looked.

Mr. Carter did not know why they looked at him, he could not even guess. But he knew that when they looked at him, they did not look at him as their characters. It was not Othello, or Halet, or Brutus that looked at him. It was not the characters that leered, but the actors.

It was the ghosts, dead men, that looked at him with emotionless eyes and expressionless faces.

And Mr. Carter could not begin to guess what they wanted from him, if they wanted anything from him at all.

He was frozen to the spot, on his hands and knees.

Then he stood up, rising slowly, moving one knee beneath himself, and then the other.

He walked backwards the way he came in, never taking his eyes off the ghosts, for they never took theirs off him.

Mr. Carter continued walking backwards until he could see the frame of the doors he had opened previously stand before him. Ahead of him, framed like a portrait by the doorframe, the faces of the actors had gathered together.

Not an eye in the theater wanted to leave him.

Then, Mr. Carter, as slowly and as gently as he had opened the door, closed it.

And then, with that little barrier giving him a little courage, he turned his back on the nightmare, and he ran.

Mr. Carter ran, stumbling through the dark, bumping his leg against walls and furniture.

He ran and he didn’t stop running until he reached the little kitchen in the back of the building and locked the door.

He knew it was foolish, locking the door. Everyone knew ghosts could walk through doors. But he did it anyway.

He stared at the locked door. Oh, these ghosts were making a fool of him. Did he think he could do anything to them, if they suddenly all rushed through the building and grabbed him? “The living have no defense against the dead” was a common saying for a reason.

He made a face, then jerked the key out of his pocket and slammed it into the lock. He pushed the door open.

There! At least, if the ghosts had aims on making him dead, he wouldn’t be a dead fool.

Mr. Carter would have shouted something defiant and obscene at the ghosts, but he considered the possibility that actually doing so would really bring them running after him and a pressure in his throat stopped his words.

Moving in the dark, for the kitchen was familiar to him, he found the icebox, pulled out a long bottle of beer, and opened it. He normally liked to savor his beer, to pour it in glass and wait for it to warm up a little. It tasted better that way, but he wasn’t so much concerned with taste now as numbing his anxiety, and so down his hatch it went.

The alcohol only made him feel a little better, but a little better meant a lot considering how he was feeling at the moment.

He took a deep breath.

“They say we’re a modern theater,” he thought. “And we are. We’re only three years old. We haven’t even had our first cobweb yet. We called ourselves the Gnome after one of the races the thaumaturgists saw in their recent visions of the pre-human past. We’re very modern, so it makes sense that we would have modern problems. Like hauntings. Hauntings are a very modern problem, like electric fires. And well, an electric fire wouldn’t have left a theater, now, would it?”

He found the knob for the gas lamp and turned it. Light filled the kitchen. This was one of the rooms that hadn’t yet been fitted with an electric lamp. Mr. Carter had fought long and hard against the electric invasion of his theater, but it was a losing battle. The gas lamps were rather old fashioned for a recent building, and the investors wanted to be as modern as possible. But Mr. Carter found gas lamps to be much more attractive than modern filament lamps. What was more, he had heard rumors about electric lamps. They worked on a similar principle to the gaeite candles used by manesologists–an electric current ran through a metal wire, and many reported that because of the similarity, filament lamps had some of the power of a gaeite candle and could attract ghosts like moths.

Of course, these were only rumors, and Nisbet’s Manesology said nothing about electric filament lamps attracting ghosts, but Mr. Carter had a simple philosophy concerning rumors–they were best collected, but unexplored, out of the fear they might actually be confirmed true.

And, of course, electric lamps had a greater chance to cause a fire. Everyone knew that.

With the light, Mr. Carter could now check his pocket watch, which he did after every haunting–but never during a haunting, as he never wanted to risk dropping it again after the first time.

The watch face read 10:30.

That wasn’t good. That wasn’t good at all.

When the hauntings first started, they happened a little after midnight. Then, they were pushed back, gradually, over several nights, to 11:00. Now, in the span of a single night, they were pushed back a whole half-hour.

And on top of that, the population of ghosts had grown so much that they were overflowing the stage.

And perhaps they would keep on growing, until they emptied into the streets for all to see…

Mr. Carter sat down in a chair, inhaled, exhaled, and thought.

Waiting for the problem to go away wasn’t working. He had hoped, he had prayed, that the hauntings would stop on their own. He heard rumors that hauntings were like illnesses in that if you waited them out, they would go away on their own, unless the hauntings had abnormally powerful ghosts. Illustrated Phantom Stories had a story just the other day about a woman who was haunted by her mother for a month, and just a month. One day, her mom went off into the Astral like a good ghost, and hadn’t been heard from since. Mr. Carter hoped that the ghosts that haunted the Gnome theater would do the same. But now, with what he had seen, the haunting was clearly not just persisting but growing.

It was time to get help–professional help.

One of the benefits of living in an age of phantoms was that there were trained professionals in dealing with them.

Mr. Carter reached for a shelf above the icebox and looked through a little collection of books, reading material for actors coming in to have a snack or for the cook to have something to read while the pots boiled–that cook, more often than not, being himself.

He found his copy of Nesbit’s Manesology, an introductory text to the scientific study of ghosts he had been reading through in an attempt to gain some understanding of the hauntings, and removed a folded stack of papers he had been using as a bookmark.

He spread the papers out on the table: a business flyer and a couple of copies of Illustrated Phantom Stories.

He looked at the flyer and allowed himself a brief smile.

Ernst, Morton, and Glass: Manesologists.

His potential saviors!

Below their names, which were written a fancy cursive not too dissimilar to what Mr. Carter used for his own programs, was a drawing of a gaeite candle. That alone was a good sign. The frauds and the hucksters, they were afraid to so much as draw a gaeite candle for two reasons, the second far more pressing than the first.

The first reason was that people were still afraid of gaeite candles after London, and there was serious money to be made presenting an alternative, any alternative, to gaeite candles. The frauds claimed to be able to use quartz crystals, or silver crucifixes, or oak wands, or what have you to tame ghosts. These things couldn’t blow up a city and thus seemed safer, but there was no scientific power to them. They were as useless as those that wielded them.

The second reason was that the thaumaturgists were very protective of their manesologists and the gaeite candles which they had given them. There were stories of foolish men who tried, for whatever mad reasons, to mug a manesologist. A man would appear from out of the shadows and drag him away, never to be seen again. The thaumaturgists were always watching the world from Paradial. Prudent men through it was best not to advertise a false claim on their property.

Mr. Carter then looked at the copies of Illustrated Phantom Stories, which proudly bragged that it was the “world’s most popular publication on current manesological happenings.” It was by the same people that published the lurid but popular Illustrated Police News and people said that for as popular as Illustrated Police News’ stories of murder and theft were, Illustrated Phantom Stories sold three to four times as much.

There were certainly more accurate accounts of ghostly activity than Illustrated Phantom Stories, but none were as comprehensive. Every delusion, every misidentification, every lie, was reported in Illustrated Phantom Stories–but also every truth.

Ernst, Morton, and Glass weren’t uncommon sights in the broadsheet publication. Manesologists were to Illustrated Phantom Stories what policemen were to Illustrated Police News. They weren’t the main attractions, those were the ghosts and criminals, but they were the ones that pursued and contained the main attractions. They swept them from the stage, cleaned up after them, and told their audience to go home.

Mr. Carter could relate.

He looked at one cover depicting Joseph Morton. He loomed, as if he was a ghost himself, over an imp-like ghost that crawled away from his approach. JOSEPH MORTON HUNTS THE BREATHSTEALER OF BURKEN TOWN, the cover stated. Joseph Morton’s eyes were small black pinpoints drawn into the wrinkled sockets of his eyes. The breathstealer’s eyes were wide and white and fearful.

Mr. Carter figured that was the expression he would make if Joseph Morton was ever after him.

Joseph Morton was a tall, hulking man. Illustrated Phantom Stories loved to draw him, for he was visually striking. Everything about him seemed elongated from his stovepipe hat to his long beard to even his age. His wrinkles placed him at a sagacious age, but there certainly wasn’t anything sagacious about temper. Though he was mostly known as a jovial character skilled in calming victims of a haunting and getting them to open up about details they would otherwise be reticent in sharing, he had a temper, and though his temper mostly manifested through his tongue, it sometimes manifested through his fists. He once punched a rival manesologist in the face over a disagreement concerning a case they were both working on. Rumor had it that Ernst, Morton, and Glass had to pay out in a settlement and buy the man false teeth.

Another cover depicted Matthew Ernst. The middle-aged professor looked on with fearless interest as a disembodied hand wrote in a book. MATTHEW ERNST STUDIES THE SAGACIOUS HAND! WHO DOES HE BELIEVE IT BELONGS TO? MERLIN? NEWTON? NOSTRADAMUS?

Mr. Carter remembered it ended up belonging to a scrivener named Alvin Hope. Not all the stories in Illustrated Phantom Stories lived up to their advertisements.

Matthew Ernst was, at once, the least and most popular member of Ernst, Morton, and Glass. He was very popular in the manesological community, for he wrote a lot of academic papers. He was famous for pioneering the oppositional theory of manesological composition which stated that certain elements of a ghost’s composition worked against each other. It was assumed, early on in the field of manesology, that all parts of a ghost worked together to support the whole as organs did in the body. But Matthew Ernest believed that some parts worked against each other, particularly two parts known as the ba and ka, the memories and behaviors a ghost carried from his living body against impulsives and thoughts novel to the ghost. But the average person didn’t particularly care about the academic minutia of manesology, and so the soft-spoken Matthew Ernst was, to most, the “other” member of Ernst, Morton, and Glass.

People said that Matthew Ernest was the ghost of Ernst, Morton, and Glass, because he was the one that didn’t seem to be present, even when he was. And that was something Mr. Carter could understand, for as the director of the Gnome theater, he did everything that wasn’t seen by the audience.

A third cover depicted Martin Glass, the youngest member of Ernst, Morton, and Glass and also the last to join. Matthew Ernst and Joseph Morton met each other during what people now called the “Thames settlement” in which the survivors of the London fire huddled along the Thames river in leather tents and log cabins. They operated as manesologists in secret, for people feared and hated manesologists due to the cause of the fire, and eventually settled, like most survivors of the fire, in Blackwall. It was in Blackwall that they met Martin Glass.

The cover showed Martin in one of the strange, Astral worlds known only to thaumaturgists. He was one of them, in a way. He had learned from them, trained to become one, was even brought to Paradial, the city of the thaumaturgists. But something had happened which caused him to turn away from the path just before he became a thaumaturgist, something he would not disclose to the public. Whether he told Joseph Morton and Matthew Ernst, none could say. He wasn’t a full thaumaturgist, but he retained some skills from their teaching, the most notable of which were his “dogs,” depicted on the cover as two floating canine heads, noble and strong like heraldry animals. They flanked him, his loyal and protective hounds, as he walked through a sandy wasteland filled with eroded pyramids and titled obelisks. Above him, bright stars burned in an alien sky. MARTIN GLASS IN THE DOMAIN OF THE SILVER STARS.

In real life, his dogs were invisible pockets of force. Neither man nor beast nor ghost could see them, for they were what were called “thought-forms” born from out of Martin Glass’ own mental energies.

He, without a doubt, would have been the most illustrated member of Ernst, Morton, and Glass if Joseph Morton wasn’t so damned odd. Martin was a striking man. He had short, blonde hair and bright, blue eyes, but he was not a wrinkled giant like Joseph Morton. His features were often exaggerated by the illustrators to make him look more interesting. The cover before Mr. Carter had his hair long, almost angelic, and it moved in the wind. His eyes sparkled as he looked over a hostile, unknowable world with a clam, knowing expression.

Because of his age and background, he knew less than his colleagues and yet more than they ever would.

Mr. Carter was aware that some of the stories in Illustrated Phantom Stories had to be exaggerated or even fictionalized. He doubted the stories about them destroying vampires were real. No one said vampires were real. No one published academic papers about vampires. But there were just so many stories, and if only one percent of them were true, then they were surely the men for this job.

They would work. They could do this.

“Gentlemen, you do this for me, and you’ll have free passes to my theater for the rest of your lives.” Mr. Carter said.

He looked at the bottle, had a fleeting moment of reconsideration, then upended the bottle and poured its contents down his gullet.

“But just for your lives. I hope you’ll understand.”