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“What do you want?” Phant—Fenton(?)’s eyes bore straight into Dash, his expression dark. Meanwhile, Dash was too busy flickering his attention between the pissed-off ghost and the…
…
“Well?” Phantom folded his arms.
“Uh…what?” Dash asked.
“What do you want? A lifetime of free passes to beat me up? Me to do your homework for the next month? What is it?”
“Um…” He tried to peel his eyes away from the gruesome sight before him, but he couldn’t. Couldn’t stop seeing the protruding bones, decaying flesh, holes, wrinkles, burns.
Jesus fuck.
And Phantom—Fenton, it was Fenton—towered above him, his simmering aura murky despite its bright glow, his eyes blistering into Dash’s skull.
He…wanted something? From Dash?
But why?
Dash was never the smartest person in class. He never got the best grades, he never knew all the answers. So maybe he just wasn’t smart enough to understand, or maybe it was a little fucked up that there was a dead, decaying corpse between them and Fenton-Phantom didn’t seem the least bit phased by it.
“I’m sorry, I—uh—what the fuck?”
Phantom slapped his hand to his forehead. “I’m asking what you want in exchange for keeping your mouth shut.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, oh. So, you know, just name your price.”
Dash swallowed thickly, his nose burning from the smell. He finally tore his eyes away from the corpse to see Phantom bristle, crossing his arms again. Dash was sure that if the ghost had legs at the moment, he’d be tapping his foot with impatience.
He just…he didn’t understand. Why was Fenton’s corpse here when he was standing—floating—before him? How was this possible?
And how the fuck was Phantom really Fenton?
“Are you dead?” The words stumbled out of Dash’s mouth before he could stop himself, and his face instantly flushed in regret.
Phantom’s eyebrows pulled in, and his lips thinned. Dash watched as one of his gloved hands tightened its grip on his arm.
Shit, shit. Was that rude? Wasn’t it a cardinal sin to ask a ghost about their death?
But then the fear zapped through him and disappeared once again. Because really, truly, he was just confused. He didn’t get how this was possible, how Danny Fenturd, the loser who he had been picking on since the sixth grade, was the town hero.
Well, they did look sort of alike. Now that Dash had seen the transformation with his own eyes, he had mentally slapped himself for not spotting their similarities earlier. Even if the whole Phantom is a ghost and the glowing aura had made things a bit fuzzier.
But their face shape, general height, and haircut were where those similarities ended. Because everything else was drastically different. So different, in fact, that Dash was still reeling at how the fuck this confident, angry ghost with his shoulders back and threatening aura spilling from his pores could be the same weakling who ran from Dash at every minor thing.
Seriously, what the fuck?
“Well?” He found himself pressing. “Are you?”
Phantom took a long, deep breath like he was about to lecture a group of children. “I’m not explaining myself to you.”
Dash blinked.
Of all the answers, that hadn’t been one of them.
Especially since…
Dash pointed to the corpse on the ground. “I think you have to.”
He wasn’t sure exactly where he was getting the balls to pry from, but Fenton-Phantom didn’t look particularly surprised.
But instead of responding, Phantom posed a question of his own. “What the hell were you even doing out here?”
“Training,” Dash said simply.
Which hadn’t even been a lie. These hiking trails were some of the best around for conditioning running.
And that one line also seemed to slice through the last of the spell in Dash’s mind. The ice melted in his body, and he felt like he could move again, and then the questions poured out of him in a tsunami. “Seriously, what the fuck, Fenton? Why the fuck do you have a corpse of yourself here? How are you Phantom?”
“Why do you think I have a corpse of myself here? For fun?”
“This isn’t fucking funny. Are you really dead? Have you been disguising yourself as a human all this time?”
“I’m not actually dead. I’m half dead. That body is only half of me.”
Dash was no expert, but it certainly looked and smelled like the full thing.
“It was my parent’s portal accident. I was inside when it turned on, and it killed me and brought me back to life. But not all of me made it.”
Jesus. That didn’t sound better than what Dash had been thinking. He tried to picture his soul ripping from his body, but refusing to let go, still clinging onto the scraps. It sounded horrific.
Was that even possible? Was Fenton just delusional?
“Why the hell did you take it from the ground?” Dash said instead.
“I didn’t! The stupid rainstorm flooded this area and eroded a bunch of dirt. I guess I didn’t bury it deep enough the first time so now I’m fixing it.”
Fixing…it…?
What the HELL was there to fix?
“You mean you’re not going to tell the police?” Dash asked.
He could have sworn the temperature dropped several degrees. But maybe that was just the chill from Phantom’s now-blazing aura which seemed to dim the world around it.
“We’re not talking to the police.”
It was a statement. A threat.
…Oh.
Dash understood the question from before. “What do you want?”
What Dash wanted was to dial 911, but that was supposedly no longer an option. Still, he couldn’t help but run his big, dumb mouth as he said, “What will you do if I report this?”
Because he knew he’d done a lot of stupid things—a lot of stupid things—but being complicit in covering up a dead body?
Jesus Christ.
And now his mind was reeling once again.
He could picture it. The day the police found the body. Forensics running DNA analysis just like they did in the crime shows and extracting a single strand of Dash’s blond hair. They’d pull him into the interrogation room, and a mustached man wearing sunglasses would interrogate him for hours as if Dash were the murderer, citing reports of Dash wailing on Fenton in class, saying that he had the motive and the evidence to lock him up for life. Dash would have no choice but break down and tell them the truth, that he’d been running in the woods, he stumbled across Phantom bent over the dead body, that he’d screamed and had tried to run away but Phantom was quicker, he cornered Dash not even five steps into his attempted escape, and he’d transformed into a living copy of that same corpse rotting in the ground to try to prove that it was him.
Would the police even believe a crazy story like that?
Either way, Dash would be fucked. He would either be locked away for murder, or he’d be locked away in aiding a cover-up. And that was something he couldn’t do.
No.
No way.
No matter how much he loved Phantom…his hero…
Shit. Fucking shit.
“Well? What will it take?” Fenton-Phantom said
“Fenton, I—”
“I will do your homework for the rest of the school year.”
The offer was tempting, Dash had to admit it. But it wasn’t like Fenton’s grades were much higher than Dash’s at the moment.
“No, that’s—Fenton, I’m serious.”
“And so am I.” Phantom’s stare was dead-on. “Do you know what the government will do to me? If you report this?”
Dash shivered. Had it always been this cold under the shade?
“Ghosts aren’t citizens of the United States, Dash. They’re not human. They’re not given the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn’t matter if I have a heartbeat and a pulse when I also have a ghost core. Do you understand? They will kidnap me and I will become the government’s personal lab rat for the rest of my life.”
Nausea swept through him, and his fingers felt numb despite their obvious trembling.
And Phantom was slowly creeping closer across the path. A trail of frost followed the dirt under him, and static seemed to crackle in the air.
“Do you know what branch the Guys in White fall under? The Department of Defense. You know, like the military. You really want the military to have unlimited access to a level seven ectoplasmic creature’s core? One whose powers could easily level an entire city block?”
Had Fenton always been like this? Threatening? Fierce? Was the scared, aloof idiot that Dash had seen every day in school just a persona that he’d been wearing?
“Ghosts are highly manipulative creatures,” Dr. Maddie Fenton read off a paper. She stood in front of the class dressed in her signature teel hazmat suit, a whiteboard with GHOST 101 written in large letters splayed behind her. “They will do anything to satisfy their ghosty obsessions. They’ll play any role, and they will sweet talk, argue, challenge—whatever they need to do in order to fulfill that obsession. They are semi-sentient, true, but they are not sapient. They do not have the same brain functionality that you or I do. They cannot truly learn, grow, or feel empathy to others. They can fake it, they can express a whole range of human emotions, but at the end of the day they are nothing but imprints of ecto-electricity.”
But no…he had never really believed that, did he?
He always loved Phantom. Looked up to him. He couldn’t…he wouldn’t…
“What about Phantom?” Dash asked, too impatient to raise his hand. “More powerful ones are different, right? So what about Phantom?”
“Power doesn’t lead to sapience. It doesn’t necessarily mean wisdom, the ability to learn and grow. Ghosts can only act on their impulses, and their impulses tell them to do whatever it is that will satisfy their core. They’re a bit like mosquitos, just ones that can talk,” Dr. Fenton responded.
“I don’t know, Phantom clearly loves me!” Paulina said. “He saved me from a ghost last week, it was so romantic! He even remembered my name!”
“Because interacting with the younger generation benefits him. He wants to be seen as the town hero, so he will do whatever it takes to get there.”
But now, that can’t be right. Phantom wasn’t like that, he was different. He was telling the truth about being a half-ghost! Even though that was impossible….No, he wasn’t just faking it to manipulate Dash. He was different. He was a hero.
“So let’s make a deal, Dash. What do you want in exchange for keeping this quiet?”
He wouldn’t lie to everyone about this. He was telling the truth. He wasn’t manipulating anyone.
“Um…” Dash felt his brain short-circuiting.
God, was that…burnt lime coming from the corpse? Why did it smell like that?
He felt his eyes prickle, and he blinked away any shininess that was threatening to appear. He couldn’t let Fenton-Phantom see his emotions, could let the ghost-not-ghost(?) see the cracks within him.
But not because he believed Dr. Fenton—even though she had a PhD in ecto-biology and certainly knew more about ectology than Dash—but it was because he needed to look tough! It wasn’t…just in case.
“How about this? I’ll never tell a single soul about your bad habit of wailing on the nerds, and I’ll offer to be your free stress-reducing punching bag for the rest of high school. In exchange, this stays between us. Deal?”
This was wrong. No, Dash couldn’t make this deal.
This was so so fucked up.
He didn’t know what happened. He didn’t know the full story. All he knew was what was in front of him, and that was the dead body of his (former?) classmate, and his ghost hovering above it with the typical goofy, carefree expression swapped for something far more dangerous.
“Okay,” he breathed, his tongue barely moving. “Okay. Deal.”
Fenton-Phantom uncrossed his arms to extend a hand out to Dash, who only hesitated for a moment before meeting him halfway.
He suppressed the shutter as his body was plunged into a freezer at the contact.
But he’s still half-alive…right?
“Good.” The carefree smile was back on Fenton-Phantom’s face, the tension in his jaw melting away its sharp angles and his blazing aura reducing to something more shimmery, more heroic. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to put my half-corpse back into the ground.”
Dash couldn’t stumble away quick enough, and despite the lactic-acid beginning to build in his legs, he found himself all but sprinting away once he was sure he was out of Phantom’s eyeline.
Shit, shit, shit, shit.
Dash had made a deal with Phantom. He had made a deal with a ghost.
No, a hero.
Phantom was a hero.
But he didn’t look like a hero when Dash saw him. He looked stressed, his green eyes were too shifty. And even when he’d transformed to Fenton to “prove” that he was still alive, for the first time, he didn’t really seem that alive. Dash could still feel the hints of the chill, he could still see the way Fenton’s teeth looked a little too sharp and the tips of his ears were a little too narrow and his skin just looked a little too olive-green.
God, how had he been so stupid? How had he not seen it before?
How had no one noticed?
Was Phantom just really that good at fooling everyone? Had he put the town under a spell?
Dash reached the edge of the forest and bent down, panting. He hadn’t even realized how much his throat was screaming for more air.
Fuck.
He fumbled in his pockets and ripped his phone out.
He had just made a deal with Phantom about hiding a dead corpse.
Dash was many things, but this?
He pressed the ringing phone to his ear. His heart pounded in his chest, and every ring felt like a century.
But then the other line clicked on, and relief washed over him as he heard the famous, “911, what’s your emergency?”
“I just found a dead body.” Cold plunged through Dash as he realized what had happened all over again. “I found Phantom hovering over a dead body. I think…I think it was his.”
There was a pause on the other line.
“What is your location?”
“I’m at Rosemary Park. It was about a half-mile in from the parking lot, right off of the diamond path. I…I think Phantom was burying the body again. It, god, it was Danny Fenton. Fenton is Phantom. He’s dead.”
“Okay, please stay calm. Emergency services have been dispatched to your location. What is your name?”
“No, I can’t stay here. Phantom will kill me if he knows I called.”
“Sir, did he see you?”
“Yeah. He would know it’s me.”
“Please stay on the line. Can you get to a safe location?”
“I…” Dash felt the world tip, and he forced it to righten. “I can get to my car. I’m sorry, I need to get to my car. I need to go.”
Dash hung up, despite the protesting on the other end.
He needed to get out of here.
He ripped open the door to his car, threw himself inside, jammed the key into the lock, and all but floored it away. It only took a few minutes down the highway before he began to hear the sirens in the distance.
Shit, fucking shit.
If Phantom wasn’t caught…
He swerved to the first exit.
If Phantom found out that Dash tattled, he would kill Dash, and no one would know what happened because no one would know that Dash was the one who called.
So Dash needed help.
He needed people to know who he was.
He needed protection.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“It’s me again. The one who just called in Phantom’s body. Uh, Dash Baxter. I’m…coming into the station. I think he’ll try to kill me if he gets away.”
“Alright. What station are you driving to?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where are you currently?”
“I just pulled off of exit fourteen.”
“There is a police station about two miles from you. Do you know where the Verizon building is?”
“I…yeah. Yeah, I think so.”
“There’s a station right next to it. Can I transfer you to their building?”
“Okay.”
“Alright, please hold,” the voice said.
The silence was deafening.
And then a voice appeared in his ear once again. And Dash could have shuttered in relief because it meant he was going to be okay.
Sorry, Fenton. But I had to.
I had to.