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In the town of Amity Park, there were a number of eye-catching buildings.
Some were ancient with facades made no less regal by their peeling paint, and others were painful eyesores that the whole city could really agree should be rebuilt but were protected by regulations about historical sites. But there was only one that struck the delicate union between military base and mad scientist’s lab.
Fenton Works was a building with an interesting history if anyone cared to look into its construction and former tenancy.
But no one ever did.
Built back in the 30s, it had served as an apartment for down-on-their-luck factory linemen for a scant few decades before a ragtag group of criminals had found themselves sleeping in its dirt-floored basement.
Within half a decade, that ragtag group of criminals had formed into a titian of organized crime, renting out and eventually buying the rest of the building, renovating the basement they had once called home to act as a warehouse. Only a handful of years later, their little criminal empire toppled in one bad raid, and the building stood empty for nearly a decade.
Briefly, for a stint of only three years during the cold war, the military had taken up residence there.
They had not been there long, but it had been long enough for threats of the atom bomb to have everyone from private to five-star general worried, and so, the once warehouse had been turned into a bomb shelter. Heavily insulated to protect from nuclear heat and nuclear winter alike, walled in thick sheets of lead to shield against radioactive fallout, and outfitted with a cutting-edge personal electrical grid should it become necessary to operate from within the shelter, the basement was an incongruous addition to the building, sleek flowing lines running up into crumbling brick, built to withstand should the bombs ever fall.
But the bombs never fell, and soon after, the threat was nullified, and spending taxpayer money to maintain an outpost in the middle of a civilian city was much harder to justify, so the military had sold the building to the city of Amity Park.
Several untimely deaths and disturbances, not to mention unseasonably bad weather, had delayed any intended public works projects, and eventually, the city, fed up, had sold the building to a real estate agency that was convinced they could turn a profit on the building in the private sector.
They were, in a word, unsuccessful.
By the early 80s, the building sat empty, rumors about its past warding off any future tenants, and at that point, the owners were desperate and, in a last-ditch effort, had renovated the inside of the building to attempt to sell it as a house.
The pair of ghosthunters who had eventually moved there found the home to be perfect, spacious enough for the children and experiments they hoped to have. The basement was really just a plus. In the end, it was simply the selling point. After all, they had only moved with the goal of finding a thin spot, and they had found it.
Or maybe there was only a thin spot because they had moved there. It really all depended on how to define such a menial thing as “first.”
Down in the lab beneath the curious building, the Fenton parents are busy, much too enraptured in their latest energy disruption field to spare a thought to the calendar upstairs with today’s date, circled, proudly proclaiming Parent-Teacher Conference.
The project that so consumed their attention had an interesting history of its own.
A discovery, off-handedly noted down by a once dear friend of theirs some decades ago, had been nothing more than a footnote in their research. The note taker had been distracted, lovestruck, and had written a seven where he really meant a two. A simple human error, unremarkable really, a mistake that could have been made by anyone.
Weeks later, when compiling data alone in his dorm room, he is jealous, his mind elsewhere as he analyzes the experiment. His meticulous methods are perhaps a little more careless than normal. He glances over the numbers, looks at the graph they create, and draws a conclusion of a pattern of behavior rather than a pattern of outliers. The conclusion is minuscule, with no effect on their work. Merely an interesting little factoid among the mountains of interesting factoids they had compiled.
Their work is all so theoretical anyway; it has no bearing on anything at all. This little statistic about how ectoplasm will hypothetically react to an induced magnetic field will never go on to be put to any use.
But last Tuesday, frustrated by the inconclusive results from her latest ectobiological experiment (A discarded can of soda had contaminated the experiment, not that anyone was aware), Maddie Fenton had found herself elbows deep in piles of paper files from their college research. They hadn’t had specimens back in college. Indeed, they could barely prove that ectoplasm truly existed, much less their theory that it was not a form of matter at all, but a type of stabilized energy. Despite this, she’s hoping that perhaps in the leagues of data they had collected back in college without any idea of its practical application will be of some use to her now.
She only glances at the little sentence and erroneously assumes it to be true, crowded among other data and theories that had proven sound with time, but it is irrelevant nevertheless, and thus it goes back on the pile.
Jack Fenton begins helping her a day later because despite his occasional bouts of absent-mindedness and his frequent irrational assumptions, he is an excellent scientist when he has a job he can put his hands on. The file is unremarkable to him too, and it’s clear skimming the first page it doesn’t hold what he and Maddie need, but he’s struck by wistfulness at the handwriting. He flips through it, head bent, reading snarky asides written in an old friend’s handwriting in the margins.
Vladdy had a sharp wit, and Jack was able to appreciate it when it wasn’t turned on him, and he could recognize its presence.
He pauses when he reads the false statement. It has nothing to do with Maddie’s current line of questioning, but it intrigued him. He pulls up some more recent data about ectoplasm reacting to gravity, and, after a moment bent over their lab computer, he erupts with delight.
He cannot contain himself, dragging his wife over to look at his findings. It’s not what they were looking for, but it promises a breakthrough in ghost containment and neatly diverts them from their original goal. They begin work immediately on the assumption their data is sound, too excited and caught up in the fervor of a breakthrough to think of rerunning an experiment to verify data gleaned in an experiment perhaps two decades ago.
It was a shame.
So much effort, such attention, misplaced.
Distracted.
So busy in the lab working on a project built on a misconception doomed to fall apart the first time it fired, they could not be bothered to consider such trivial matters as what day of the week it was, and young Daniel, nervously pacing his room and trying not to look at the report card on his desk certainly wasn’t going to be the one to remind them.
Whether such circumstances are coincidence or careful design is uncertain.
But most things were when Clockwork was involved.
And he was involved everywhen.
Clockwork did not need a portal between the Infinite Realms and the human realm. The Here and Now that most ghosts inhabited were the more fluid There and Then for him.
Clockwork would go to Casper High in the future; therefore, he was there now.
He appears in the instant that that previous parent goes around the corner in the direction of the school exit.
Inside his classroom, Mr. Edward Lancer is humming. He has five minutes before the next conference, which is plenty of time to sort through his files and pull up the appropriate report cards before the next parent arrives.
The next parent, the father of one Star Sternberg, who would be here if Clockwork was not, had had a mix-up at work. Nothing serious, a file has been emailed in the wrong format, and it has taken him only a few minutes to reformat the file and send it off as a .pdf. But in that moment he hit send, the moment he might have been pulling out of the parking lot, a tree had come crashing down right down the street and had made it impossible to get onto the main road.
It was unfortunate, and he had sent an email to Mr. Lancer informing him he would be delayed, at least by thirty minutes, and perhaps it would be wise to reschedule.
But Mr. Lancer had closed the window to his email account earlier that day, an accident as he closed a student's files to prepare for the next conference. It was a simple mistake, one he had not rectified because he quite simply had not noticed the window’s absence.
So he sits, in his classroom, blissfully unaware that his next appointment has already arrived, and straightens his papers. He steals a glance at the clock. Four minutes, plenty of time to squeeze in a few quick levels of Doomed.
Out in the hall, Clockwork takes a seat in the plastic chair meant for waiting parents. He folds his tail over itself and settles to wait.
If it had been necessary, he could have arrived at the exact instant before Mr. Lancer stuck his head out into the hall to call for Mr. Sternberg, but it hadn’t been necessary, and the Keeper of Time did not arrive early or late or even on time, he arrived only precisely when he meant to.
So he waits, crosses his arms and tucks his staff beneath his chin, allows his eyes to close, and, to all outward appearance, seems to do nothing save listen to the steady ticking that emanates from within his chest.
Beyond outward appearance, it's difficult to say if anything more was happening behind the serene expression teetering between age and youth, but if there was, it was nothing more than the subtle machinations behind every clock, working tirelessly towards a single goal.
It takes precisely six minutes and twenty-eight seconds before Mr. Lancer glances up from his VICTORY screen towards the clock and notices that Mr. Sternberg is late.
Curiously, he stands from his desk, exiting the game, and goes to the hall to peer and see if perhaps the parent was just waiting for him.
There is certainly something waiting there for him, but it’s no parent, it’s not even human, and Mr. Lancer finds himself with the distinct impression that it never was, though he could not explain exactly what gave him that impression. For a moment, he is simply stunned into silence. Time itself seems to freeze, holding him there with it as it stands still, staring at the strange blue apparition, perched in one of the hallway chairs, peacefully resting.
A clock chimes twice, the low bassy tones of a grandfather clock, and the ghost opens its eyes, and they are a terrible, unsettling red, unfathomable in their depths.
It drifts up, and the age seems to melt off its shoulders, the long white beard that had fallen across its crossed arms dissipating until an almost cherub-like sprite fills the space the grim spectre had stood- floated- Mr. Lancer doesn’t find himself remotely reassured by the fact that the ghost is now downright childlike.
Then, that purple cowled head turns, and its eyes find Mr. Lancer’s.
Time is suddenly hurtling along forward, playing catch up, and the moment of terrible suspense breaks.
“Horrors beyond life’s edge!” The teacher yelps, and Clockwork allows himself a smile.
“And once in a while, man’s evil prying calls them just within our range.” Clockwork finishes, and upon hearing the rest of the quote, the teacher blinks and seems to relax, if only marginally. Clockwork offers a gloved hand.
And this is where the timeline fractures into a million fragmenting fractals, each like a shard of glass flung, and caught in eternity’s light, for a moment defying gravity as Clockwork searches their facets for the best futures.
This is the moment meticulous planning gives itself over and becomes a game of chance.
But Clockwork doesn't play the odds without stacking the deck in his favor.
He’s been called a cheater, and yes, he is.
But he’s never been above cheating to win.
Clockwork doesn’t have all his bets placed on Edward Lancer, Clockwork doesn’t even have all his bets placed on this timeline because Clockwork plays the game from every angle, but even he was prone to favor certain paths to the same outcome.
Unfortunately, nothing is ever sure, despite his careful efforts.
This is where he bows to chance.
Clockwork has no control over the reasoning and thoughts that enter Mr. Lancer’s mind, no control over the millions of tiny firing electrical impulses that determine whether this day ended in success or mild catastrophe.
It was unfortunate.
He played the part of careful orchestrator, his fine attention to detail creating the bigger picture. History was not changed in battles or treaties, it was changed in forgetful mistakes and skittering rats, typos, and inconvenient litter, but where the true decisions are made, he holds little dominion. He can merely suggest, encourage, and guide.
Eternity spins in fractals before his eyes, and Clockwork waits. Time ripples around him and eddies, and if it seems to slow to allow the teacher a moment longer to think, well, that can easily be blamed on the ever-present temporal displacement that follows Clockwork like a shroud.
After a moment of fearful staring, Mr. Lancer’s manners, hardened by years of teaching high school students, take over.
He shakes Clockwork’s hand.
The timeline solidifies before him, tangents falling away, still branching infinitely but manageable, steerable.
“Edward Lancer,” He introduces himself, and Clockwork’s smile creeps wider as the hands on his personal clock tick forward. Mr. Lancer, to his credit, bites back any comment and only stares.
“Clockwork,” He replies in kind, and the human’s eyes flick between the watches bound around his wrists to the glass door of his chest, where cogs and gears tick unhurriedly by.
“I- yes, I see.” The teacher says at last and then, with no small amount of hesitance, steps back from the door to allow Clockwork into his classroom. “Please, come in.”
Edward Lancer had almost handed in his resignation two years ago.
His passion for teaching, like so many others in his profession, had been worn down by the meager salary, disrespectful students, and pushy parents, and after a particularly hard first semester two years ago, he had drafted up his resignation. He had returned from the holiday break with it clutched in one hand, with full intent to march up to the principal’s office and hand it in as soon as lunch rolled around. He would teach until the end of the year, prepare lesson plans for his replacement the next year, but that was all. He would find another job, even if it was just flipping burgers at the Nasty Burger, but he couldn’t stay teaching.
But the opportunity to march up to the principal’s office never came. Instead, a fight broke out among the sophomores, and Lancer found himself sporting a black eye for having tried to break it up.
On his drive home, as he squints through the bruising, it only strengthens his resolve to turn in his resignation when classes start tomorrow.
But classes don’t start the next day or the day after. A cold front unexpectedly blows in, the snow starts falling, and it doesn’t stop for the next three days. It ices over the roads and comes down so thick Lance can’t even open his door unless he wants to tunnel through it.
School is canceled for a week.
When classes finally resume, he’s shaking sleet out of his shoes before class starts when he finds a letter on his desk. He has no idea how long it’s been there, whether it’s been waiting for him since before the snowstorm hit, or if it was placed only minutes before he came in that day.
It’s not a particularly eloquent note, and there’s a spelling mistake in the first sentence, but it is, if nothing else, sincere.
It’s an apology, not from any of the culprits of the fight, but from one of his quiet students who scarcely says a word unless Lancer prompts him. Lancer has to sit down to read it, the five sentences that it is, telling his teacher he’s sorry that Lancer got hurt, that he hopes his eye heals, and then a final line which really means so much more than the apology.
Your my favorite teacher, I don’t want another English teacher.
It’s the wrong you’re, which means Lancer should probably be concerned about whether he’s doing his job right, but he can’t find it in him to worry. He reads the letter five or six times before the bell finally rings and his class starts ushering in.
It doesn’t undo the years of a thankless job or even go a long way to mitigate his desire to leave, but in a way, it’s a reminder of why he started teaching.
He doesn’t turn in his resignation that day or the next. Instead, he tapes up the letter over his bathroom mirror.
It doesn’t stop him from turning in his resignation. But it delays him. Eventually, a week after taping up the letter, when he finds himself exhausted from grading papers and wanders into the bathroom to get a drink of water, he finds himself struck with a firm determination instilled sloppily written plea.
Two years, he promises himself, just long enough to see this student graduate.
This is his last year, as per his private promise, and there's a copy of his resignation in his desk.
Mr. Lancer only does parent-teacher conferences for students in his homeroom, a class of freshmen this year. Freshmen that he had almost narrowly missed teaching at all.
“I’m here to discuss one of your students,” Clockwork says, winding one of the watches bound around his wrist as he hovers above the chair Lancer had set out for parents. “While not his parent, I could best be described as his legal guardian.”
Mr. Lancer is a high school English teacher. He isn’t stupid.
“Phantom.” He says and fights the disbelief in his own voice.
He has his theories. Everyone in Amity Park has theories. How could they not? The teenage ghost that zipped around the city whenever trouble was afoot, always with a witty quip straight out of a comic book, was a magnet for speculation, but Mr. Lancer's theories are perhaps truer than anyone could know. After all, most ghost attacks during the school day occur during Mr. Lancer’s third period or homeroom. And well, he’s a teacher. He can recognize a pattern, especially when that pattern has been put in place especially for him to notice.
Clockwork dips his head in acknowledgment.
“Yes.”
Mr. Lancer had his theories, but it had always been a leap too far, unthinkable. How could it even be possible? It had merely been a streak of coincidences, that was all, an unfortunate parallel between a living boy and a dead one, a glaring cautionary tale that Lancer do his best to save this one, since someone, a teacher, just like him, had missed the last one. It was impossible.
Clockwork waits patiently, watching the conflict play across the teacher’s face.
Impossible, and yet here they were.
In another timeline that runs very near parallel to this one, he makes excuses, tries to rationalize the slipping grades, the conveniently timed bathroom breaks, the striking similarities, the flashing lights it seemed only he had been around to spot.
In this timeline, he seeks confirmation.
Everything is by design, and everything is as it should be.
“Great gatsby, surely you don’t mean Mr-”
“Yes.”
Mr. Lancer pales, and Clockwork nudges the timeline to ensure he won’t pass out at the realization.
He seems to collapse to pieces back into his chair, his gaze on neither Clockwork nor his desk but fixed into some middle distance.
How could he have not seen it? How could he have been so negligent as to not notice his young student was-
“No, not dead, but not alive, not as you might define those terms,” Clockwork says, replying to a timeline in which Mr. Lancer chose to voice his internal monologue. “He’s liminal.”
“Then-”
“Yes, his parents will be coming later today.” Late, Clockwork doesn’t add. Just to ensure there’s no way they could arrive in time to catch him here. Their project would keep them busy that long, at least. “ No, they are unaware. Yes, of both myself and him. Yes, it should remain that way.”
Mr. Lancer narrows his eyes and closes his mouth.
After a moment, he speaks with the tone of a high school teacher who knows every trick in the book.
“You’re very astute.”
“Thank you,” Clockwork replies evenly and continues before the question can even make its way from the tormented recesses of a guilty human mind into the air between them. “The fault can be attributed to a great many places, the actions of one individual do not cause nor prevent an outcome, but all actions in their entirety yield the timeline we are presently in.”
A beat of silence fills the room.
Mr. Lancer has to know.
“Could I-” Mr. Lancer pauses, hoping the ghost will continue, will answer without forcing him to finish the unthinkable question that spins around his head, but no answer is forthcoming. The ghost simply gazes evenly across the table at him, and the seconds seem to drag in silence. Mr. Lancer swallows around a throat that feels dry. He reaches for his water bottle, only to recall he left it in the dishwasher at home and cannot use it to stall this conversation. He forces his mouth to work. He has to know. Even if ignorance would perhaps be far sweeter, he must know. “Could I have prevented his death?”
“Of course.”
Mr. Lancer takes in a breath, and it rattles weakly in his lungs. His hands are clasped so tightly around his desk that had his pen been slightly closer, had he left it any closer after his last conference and picked it up before this conversation, it would have broken and left him and his office covered in a thin layer of ink, and then he could focus on something other than the death of his student. But he didn’t, and thus, he isn't, and therefore he can't.
Instead, he sits with the weight of those two words leaden upon his shoulders.
Clockwork laces his fingers together and waits.
In his chest, his pendulum sways in the only accurate measure of time, back and forth, twenty times before he speaks.
“You are responsible, yes, but no more than his parents, his sister, his godfather, his friends, his bullies. You are responsible but not to blame.” The man glances up from his desk to meet Clockwork’s gaze. “If you must blame someone, you may blame the one who saw it coming and did nothing to stop it.”
Mr. Lancer is a high school teacher.
He isn’t stupid.
He stares across the desk at the ghost, if it can even be called that.
The clockwork pulse that emanates from the ghost seems to make the room quiver with a strange quality with every tick. Mr. Lancer’s chest is raw with grief and guilt, too snared together to try an puzzle together if he should attempt to muster anger on young Daniel’s behalf to level against this ghost.
His student was dead, or not wholly dead, Clockwork had said liminal, only half-dead, and Mr. Lancer was, in some way, responsible.
Absurdity clouds his head, and he deliriously wonders if the responsibility is liminal too.
The edge of his desk cuts into his palm, two searing lines of pain that drag him back into the present.
“Why are you telling me this?” Why isn’t it Daniel across the desk from him?
“His parent’s profession makes it complicated for him to choose to reveal his nature, but I believe it in my ward’s best interest to have an adult in his life who can be entrusted with knowledge of his identity.” And Mr. Lancer isn’t stupid. He understands that when this ghost says he believes, it means he knows. “I trust you can be discrete, Mr. Lancer.”
Mr. Lancer does what he does best in times of great stress.
He quotes.
“The past and the present are within the field of my inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.”
The ghost leans forward, wearing an eerie smile.
“Perhaps for some,” He murmurs, and Lancer swallows thickly. “But we’re here to discuss Danny, not me.”
Mr. Lancer nods sharply and forces himself to remember that whatever happened to his student, whatever he could have done in the past to prevent it, is done. What matters is how he can help young Daniel in the future, and that begins in the present.
Reluctantly he pries his hands away from the table and tries to ignore how badly they're shaking as he pulls up Mr. Fenton's grades on his computer.
“Yes, let's see,” Mr. Lancer says, trying to sink into the familiar routine of his job. "How shall we start," he muses, staring at Mr. Fenton's... Less than incredible grades.
Sudden existential dread hits him as he realizes he has no idea how to assist a half-dead child that regularly makes headlines for fighting ghosts and the government alike, a child living a double life in his own home for safety from his parents. Should he call CPS? Would they believe him? Worse, if they did, what if they decided that as a ghost, Mr. Fenton was outside of their jurisdiction? Could Mr. Lancer attempt to sway the Fentons’ minds about ghosts to make it safer for their son to live in the same household as them? But if he accidentally revealed Daniel’s secret, it would only make everything worse for the boy.
The ghost across from his desk rapidly goes from sporting a lengthy beard to an infant-like facade, the sudden change jarring Mr. Lancer out of the spiral.
"Perhaps," Clockwork says, floating up above the chair to accommodate for his decreased height. "We might begin by discussing extended deadlines in light of his extracurricular activities.”
Mr. Lancer nods because, yes, he can do that.
He can help make school less of a burden to Mr. Fenton, and that’s as good a place as any to start.
"That’s an excellent idea. Obviously, I cannot set up Mr. Fenton with a 504 plan without the consent of his human parents, but I can make a recommendation to his other teachers and file a..."
The letter of resignation in Mr. Lancer’s desk drawer is going straight in the shredder as soon as this conference is over.
Three more years.
Mr. Fenton would have him, whether his student ended up needing him or not, whether he ever decided to disclose his secret to Mr. Lancer personally, whether or not he even knew there was someone looking out for him.
Daniel would have him.
And Mr. Lancer would do everything in his power to make sure that everything would work out as best it could for Daniel.
There’s something behind the decidedly pleased expression the ghost was wearing that told Mr. Lancer the feeling was mutual.