#phantom boy

His own parents, however, never seemed to appreciate it. Nor did they realize that he did all of it to earn their attention and their love. Always vying for his parents' affection when they remained ensconced in their work resulted in disappointment, even resentment, more often than not. But his disappointment took a back seat to his determination.

He still tried. That was a feat his older sister had entirely given up on, focusing instead on her own aspirations, and drifting further away from her family with each passing day.

Unlike his sister, Danny remained optimistic. He’d just gotten back a major test with a perfect score—surely, this could earn him his parents’ praise.

"Mom! Dad!" he shouted as he practically skipped up the porch steps and in the front door, bright eyed, and smiling, full of hope, and life. "I totally aced that test the other day!"

His announcement met cold silence.

A house full of empty rooms greeted him, his own footsteps against the hardwood floor the only ‘welcome home’ he was going to get. He checked the kitchen, living room, upstairs bedrooms. His parents were nowhere to be found. They were probably in their lab again, working on their big project—the ghost portal Jazz always said they loved more than their kids. Danny could always find them there, whether he wanted to or not. He didn’t want to agree with Jazz, but it was hard not to, sometimes.

He crept down the stairs to the basement. "Mom? Dad?"

There was an anteroom next to the lab with changing rooms and radiation showers. Danny usually never bothered to go past it into the actual lab. For one, hazmats were required in the lab at all times, and those things were a pain. For another, his parents were always down there, and if he did something careless like ask a question, then he could forget about them listening to another word he had to say. They would spend hours blathering on about their work as if he wasn’t even in the room.

Still, the lab had always drawn him to it, fascinated him. It was pretty cool in a creepy sort of way. It was full of strange inventions and concoctions, and colored lights and glowing vials that cast strange shadows on the walls which were almost mesmerizing. And even with a hazmat suit on, he could swear the smell of chemicals permeated right through and followed him for hours after he left.

He looked through the window into the lab itself. Usually knocking would get their attention, although it often took a few tries.

Much to his surprise, he didn’t see them down there either. "Where are they?" he wondered aloud, reaching for a hazmat suit which hung on the wall. If they weren't home, maybe he could actually nose around without having to listen to a two hour lecture. Besides, once they got back, he’d have a better chance of catching them down in the lab than anywhere else in the house.

Once suited up, he pressed the button to open the door and walked through. The portal they were so obsessed with looked like a big, metal hole in the wall, much less impressive than some of the other things his parents had built, if you asked him. Danny scowled at it, running his fingers along the octagonal opening before walking inside to get a closer look.

Seeing it now, up close and personal, Jazz’s claim that Mom and Dad loved it more than their kids rose to the top of his mind feeling truer than ever. What was so great about this project they'd ignored him in favor of working on for so many years? Why was this more important than a relationship with their kids?

"I think this part from the Ops Center will be just the thing," he heard his mother's voice, loud but muffled, coming down the stairs. "It's so close I can taste it!"

"They're back," Danny muttered, turning. He was almost at the very back of the unfinished portal, completely in darkness, and began to walk out, his eyes focused on the hexagon of light spilling in from the lab.

He didn’t see the jumble of cords on the floor. They grabbed him by the ankles and sent him careening. He bit his tongue as his chin hit the floor, a bitter, metallic taste filling his mouth.

The cords wrapped around his feet, tangled around his ankles and crept up his shins as if they were alive and keeping him there intentionally, rather than by his own misfortune. Or perhaps it was his dazed mind or the blood which gushed from his lips and choked his breath that prevented him from untangling them. Perhaps, in his disoriented state, he was just tangling them further.

The door to the lab hissed as it opened. His parents didn't hear his alarmed shout when he fell. They didn't see his struggling form take off the hood of his hazmat suit to spit blood in the dark, shadowy depths of their portal.

"All set!" his mother said as she wired in the final piece. "Turn it on, dear!"

"Banzai!" his dad shouted, flipping the switch.

An instant later, Danny found his voice, shouting through a gargle of blood, slurred from his wounded tongue.

"WAI'!" he screamed.

Then he screamed.

The bloodcurdling, bone chilling sound of their own child dying an excruciating death punctuated their lethal mistake. Millions of volts of electricity shot through their fourteen-year-old son, and billions of joules of ectoplasmic energy, compounding together, amplifying each other, ripping a hole into another dimension through the boy between them.

"Oh my God, Danny!" his mother shouted. "Turn it off! Turn it off!"

Shaking himself out of his horror, skin still tingling from the energy in the air and spots dancing behind his eyes from the bright white flash, Jack fumbled for the switch.

But it was too late.

The portal was on, self-sustaining. The lab was awash with green light from the swirling vortex of ectoplasm they had built, and the two parents held their breath.

A glowing corpse drifted out of it, floating as if on a gentle current.

Their son’s subdermal skin had been burnt and blackened by the heat. Jagged, glowing green electrical marks covered his whole body. Holes had been burnt right through his protective jumpsuit, and the hood was gone, and his hair was frayed, shock white, soot covered, and smoking. His eye sockets were empty, and full of ash, his face caked with blood, his teeth shattered.

But beneath it all, it was—it had been—their son.

"Danny..." his father breathed, gently resting a gloved hand on the floating body’s collapsed chest.

"What have we done?" his mother rasped, her voice choked with tears. "We—we have to fix this. We have to make this right."

Jack nodded, and though they did nothing to discuss how. They were both on the same page.

Carefully, they pulled the floating corpse of their son down to their examination table for samples.

If they were going to bring him back, they had to restore his body first.

Hours dwindled by, dinner time came and went, and Jack and Maddie grew neither tired nor hungry, consumed by their work. Late that night, the door opened at the top of the stairs. It was only as it slammed shut that the two of them heard it and realized Jazz must be coming down to check on them.

They shared a glance, then Maddie threw a sheet over the table while Jack crossed into the anteroom to place his bulky frame in front of the stairwell, blocking his daughter’s way in.

"Have you seen Danny?" she asked him.

"Danny's gone to sleep at a friend's house tonight, since we're going to be performing some dangerous experiments with the portal, and wouldn't want you kids getting hurt," her dad said. But she could always tell when he was lying, and she could tell now by the way his eyes darted around when he pushed off his hood. "We're very close to finishing it, so I suggest you find a friend to stay with tonight, too, for your safety. In fact, you may want to be out of the house for the rest of the week."

"What aren't you telling me?" Jazz asked, suspiciously.

“Not telling? Nothing—”

She backed up the steps so she could see through the window over her father's huge shoulders and noticed the swirling green portal on the opposite wall. "It's... already on..." she said, and her brain rapidly picked apart what her father had just said. "Dad... where's Danny?"

"Jasmine," he said sternly, but she pushed forward, trying to force him out of her way.

"Where's Danny?!" she shouted. Her parents were a lot of things, but liars wasn’t typically one of them, especially when it came to her and Danny. "What happened to him?! What did you do?!"

"Jazz...."

She had never seen her father cry before, but he was crying now as he wrapped his arms around her, as much to hold her in place as for his own comfort.

“What’s going on?” she asked again, a hard edge to her voice.

"We didn't know he was in there,” he whimpered into her hair. “Didn't hear anything… we didn’t know he was in there.”

She shook her head, uncomprehending, and tried to pull away, but wasn’t strong enough to escape her father’s vice-like grip until her mom came in and made him let go with a touch of her hand.

He stepped back a bit so Jazz could see them both. Their hoods were down, and on their faces all she could read was grief. "He... he's dead, Jazz," her mom said, audibly struggling to keep her voice level. "He was inside when the portal turned on, and we had no idea he was there until we heard him scream, and by then it was too late. We… we couldn't even recover a body."

Jazz could feel her chest tighten, her heart crawling up into her through, a sting in her eyes as her vision blurred. All of the physical sensations came first, before the emotion finally registered, and her legs turned to jelly beneath her as she collapsed back into her father’s arms wracked with sobs. Danny… her brother… was gone.

The three of them hugged and wept in the stairwell for hours before finally moving upstairs for some comfort food and hot cocoa. It was easy for Jazz to clock when her father was lying to her, but she never even suspected that her mother had lied, not until a little over a month later.

It wasn't suspicious that her parents threw themselves into their ghost research, working obsessively on some new project they wouldn't tell her about. People responded to grief in different ways. Focusing only on work was a common coping mechanism. One Jazz apparently shared, as she studied relentlessly for college entrance exams she wouldn't be taking for over a year.

She didn't bother to even ask about her parents' new project until they emerged from the lab, over the moon, excitedly proclaiming that they'd done it! That their experiments were successful.

"Done what?" Jazz asked, but she didn't have to wait for an answer.

Sitting on the couch in front of her, sipping hot cocoa from his favorite mug, sat Danny.

At first glance, he looked exactly the same, but looking at him closely, Jazz felt a sense of uncanny valley creeping up her spine. When he smiled, his teeth were too bright, too white. His eyes were wrong. They looked just the same as she remembered them, but they distinctly weren't in a way she couldn't describe until the light caught them at a certain angle and they glowed green.

"Danny?"

His eerie grin brightened.

When she stepped closer, she could see very faint white scars criss-crossing his skin, like lace, and dark shadows around his eyes that couldn't be explained by lack of sleep.

"Hey Jazz," he said. His voice was so very slightly deeper, huskier, that she thought she could be imagining it.

"Is that really you?" she asked.

"Yeah, I'm finally back from the hospital."

"Hospital?" Jazz asked, shaking her head in disbelief. "But—"

"Jazz, sweetie, can I talk to you for a moment?" her mother called from the kitchen. "Now."

Jazz obliged, following her mother into the kitchen, but the whole time she was looking over her shoulder at... whatever that thing was wearing her brother's face.

"Mom, what did you do?" She demanded under her breath. "You said he was dead. You said you couldn't even recover a body. What on Earth did you do?"

"We brought him back," Maddie answered. "You may call us crackpots, but your father and I are brilliant paranormal scientists. We used all our knowledge of ghosts and the afterlife to formulate a way to get our baby boy back. Wouldn't you have done the same to get your brother back if you could?"

"What? No!" Jazz shouted, then lowered her voice again, not wanting the creature that once was Danny to overhear and come to check things out. "No, Mom, I wouldn't. Jesus Christ, this is more than just a bad coping mechanism, this is—what you did—it's against nature. It's wrong."

"He's my son, Jazz," Maddie implored. "We couldn't... you can't possibly imagine what it's like for a parent, losing their child. It's like losing a part of our soul. Maybe someday, if you have kids of your own, you will, but it's... it's devastating, unbearable, more painful than you can even comprehend. And it was our fault, our experiment that killed him.”

Her voice stayed soft and level, but she was trembling, barely holding it together. She clenched her jaw and took a shuddering breath, looking Jazz directly in the eye.

"We couldn't let it go and move on when we had the means to fix it. He's fourteen, sweetie, and he's our baby. He never should have died in the first place. All we did was put things back the way they're supposed to be."

Jazz only stared in disbelief. "You're wrong," she said finally. "And soon enough, you'll realize that. This isn't going to change what happened. You may think you've fixed him, but it won't fix you."

"I'm sorry you feel that way," Maddie responded with a pinched frown. "Please don't take it out on Danny, and try to be civil with him."

"Of course I will," Jazz said. "He didn't ask for this. He shouldn't have to suffer because of your mistakes.” She turned to go, silence stretching taut between her and her mother. “I just hope you know what you're doing."