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When you put it all together, you realize that being a halfa is, other than being the stuff of legends, all the Ghost Zone’s nightmares and fears come true. And how ironic it must be that you had to be the one to look a ghost in the eye and put the fear of God gone wrong in them.
Your time in the hospital, as unnecessary and painstaking as it turned out to be, wasn’t entirely for nothing; acne or no, you were dragged against your will to be studied and scrutinized no better than the lab rats you used to take care of in the science labs in university. Guys in White they were not, but the scientists and caretakers were just as every bit the hyperactive crackpot, reckless dolt, and conspiratorial paranoiac as Jack; and they would not let you rest. Gods above, they would not let you rest – not when they pumped you full of medicine non-patented and dubiously OSHA and FDA compliant they could find, had you hooked up to every wire and machine they could cobble together and plug into the walls, ran you dogged through every test they could come up with until you passed out in your bed. And all over something as small and, as you would learn later on, as harmless as a moth zapper, as ghost acne.
If you weren’t so exhausted day in and day out, you would have done anything and everything you could to call an emergency hotline to a real hospital service and sic the cops on these fucking lunatics – every single one of them, no matter how cold and rational some of them tried to make themselves out to be. But then the outside world would learn that, no, your acne was rather far from normal no matter how non-deceiving it appeared to be, that the most modern medicine available on the market or currently being given the old trial and error run wouldn’t have been able to treat it, and then they would panic. Then they would pull all the stops and, once they saw none of their treatments worked, they would call in the government, and that would be the end for you. At least these nutjobs gave you water and sunlight; you would be lucky if the almighty American government gave you even a quarter of that hospitality.
Then again, you had thought more than once to make the call and let fate sort you out. You are already half-dead to begin with; what was one step closer to dying a second time?
On the other hand, fully mortal humans were nothing if not creative when it came to extrapolating data from things they did not – but would certainly try – to understand.
And so you settled for the next best option:
You read.
You read when you could, and you read long after you were finally discharged from the hospital and holed yourself up in hotels and holes in the walls until you could land a decent job where you could stay off the future of bumming the streets and keep as far away from people as you possibly could. You read what you could, because your medicines made you lethargic but mainly because most of the books the crackpots had during your stay were nothing more than unfounded, outdated, misinformed garbage and not a little bit biased against cultures that weren’t white Anglo-Christian.
One thing was obviously, painfully clear once you managed to sift through the tripe and got your marbles together long enough before the next dosage was administered: when it came to religion, no one knew what they were talking about. Everything was cherrypicked to fit the narrative that sounded the best to their ears and would sound the best to other peoples’ ears when they heard and read it.
Another thing that became clear, once your face turned back to normal and they had no choice but to let you go on the threat of government action, was: the government, from the East to the West and everything in between the seas, did not quite want to separate itself from religious affairs as much as they claimed they wanted to be. You would eventually find out that the Guys in White, or whatever name they took on that didn’t get tacked on from young internet celebrities, had one too many hands in glass jars for an organization that, for the most part, did not exist on paper and only existed to confirm paranormal activity that the world – one that saw atheism on the rise – considered pseudoscience.
Ironic, really, how certain arms of political movements would consider fearmongering as good deeds but the complete and total affirmation of the supernatural not only existing alongside them not just on a metaphysical level as heresy because of the same lack of separation of science and religion.
It wouldn’t hit you then, but you would come to realize that you don’t care about the hypocrisies of black and white thinking.
Somewhere along the way, you stopped giving a damn about others and started caring more about what you wanted out of life.
Or rather, your second life, because even if it wasn’t intentional Jack took your first.
So of course you would get back at him. Of course you would test out your new powers, build up your defenses, and play the long game.
And for the next twenty years, you did.
But you never did stop reading; even as the money poured in from investors and tycoons that you happened to sway over after a little convincing into your bank accounts, you never stopped turning the pages in books, and you were never without them for very long. You had to, because the first time you decided you were going to tap into that cold, squirming feeling in your gut that wasn’t just temptation at scraping your life back together at any cost but ectoplasm that irrevocably and irreparably warped your DNA beyond the likes of anything which science has seen before you and observe the results with your own eyes, you felt something in the world scream.
Maybe you were imagining it in your desperation, because you wanted more out of your job than a shitty nine-to-five and a hotel room with thin walls, awful television reception, and noisy neighbors that were interfering with your sleep, but you thought in the instant you changed from a man to a creature that looked more vampire than ghost you heard the world come to a sudden, grinding halt. No sound of birds singing, no sound of traffic passing by or children playing off in the distance – not even the wind.
Time, for all you knew, stopped.
Time didn’t stop, but every single soul in the Ghost Zone did. Every single one of them felt the echoes of your transformation ripple through reality.
In that moment, the legend of the half-ghost, the Halfa, was reborn, with stark and utter terror.
Of course you wouldn’t know this, not right away. That had been your first bank robbery, and there was a moment where you were disgusted with yourself. At what you were doing, because this wasn’t how your parents brought up and how you were meant to be raised, like the good Wisconsin boy that you were. Not just disgusted but horrified when you got your first glimpse in a mirror at the creature that was staring back at you, only for you to realize that wasn’t a Halloween costume you had suddenly called on to disguise you from the cameras or tripping out from the lack of drugs that had been pumped into your system for two years straight but you as the ectoplasm had turned you into. At what you turned out to be.
By all accounts, you looked like a monster.
By all accounts, this was going to be your life now if you continued down this path.
On the other hand, you wanted more out of it. You wanted to be more than just the college student from Madison that used to have a name made for himself. Who was going to believe people when they told the cops and the news reporters that a ghost vampire broke into their bank and stole all their money?
Honestly, who was going to stop you? What was going to stop you? A good guy with a gun? Thoughts and prayers?
And, if you had to be honest with yourself, it felt good. It felt incredible. For once in your miserable life, you had power. You had control. And not all the medicine and governmental power in the world would be able to stop you from getting what you wanted.
So you started building up your fortune, your name, your reputation, block by building block. You practiced with the ectoplasm that Jack only paid attention to and poor Maddie couldn’t stabilize for what little time you were in the room before you hauled out of there and realized, with enough patience, you could do more than just phase through walls and scare people. You were a ghost, you looked like a vampire; you could do more than that. You can.
And so you did.
Over and over and over again, until it became second nature.
But you never stopped reading.
Now, more than ever, you had a reason to find the diamonds in the rough and keep them for yourself. Because why give them back to the very people that prided themselves on speaking of succor and enlightenment when you could keep the truth close to your chest and feed the masses what they wanted to hear? At the very least, no one would think to suspect you for the uptick in thefts, market manipulation, and illegal insider trading that was taking the Midwest, and the other parts of the country that flew in for business, by storm. No one would ever think to bother you.
All the more reason for peace and quiet.
All the more reason to hold onto that anger and let it flourish.
You would have said like a flower, and for the first few months the description was very apt, planted and watered and well cared for. Then somewhere down the line, at least a couple years into being the outside world longer than you were trapped inside that damned hospital, you learned that you had what was called a ghost core, that it formed at the same time your DNA was scrambled and saw your life flashing before your eyes in the blast you were bathed in, and that you could bring fire to life with but a snap of your fingers. Only you found out the hard way by inadvertently, and rather accidentally, setting the bank you had staked out for a good month up in flames when security caught you sneaking onto their premises right before closing (and that was your mistake, you got too cocky going so late) and they were growing increasingly suspicious of the answers you were giving them on top of the panic you couldn’t quite tamp down. That was one of the few times where you truly regretted the loss of life, because even if you didn’t care how much you frightened them out of their minds you always made it a goal not to kill. People weren’t worth your time but they weren’t worth sacrificing – not like that.
But you could use fire now where you couldn’t before, and you could think of a few ways you could utilize it to make your life much, much easier.
And so you read, and read, and read, and as you read you added arson onto the list of burglaries you conducted and misdirection you started and watched take off when it seemed as if the government that so loved their law and order had you pinned dead to rights. Not just fire that’d cause the alarms to go off but also clones, something you picked up on from digging deep into Asian cultures, and you sat back and watched the money flow.
Yet the world never seemed to stop taking pause and recoil when you transformed, and it didn’t take you long to figure out why.
You are what the Ghost Zone calls a half-ghost: a mortal human with the ability to turn into a ghost, return back to corporeal form, and back again – all without dying and being reborn. However, when you really think about it, perhaps a better – and more appropriate – term for a person like him would be aberration. You are – were – a man that was once fully mortal that should’ve lived to his fullest, natural lifespan, and by all accounts you should’ve died to that overexposure of ectoplasm in the science lab. Died a quick and humiliating death from not just the acne that sprouted all over your pores but whatever work it should’ve done to your insides. Yet by dint or by providence, you didn’t. Somehow, be it a blessing or a curse, you became something more. Something wrong. Something, in this modern day and age, that would now be considered unnatural.
Part man, part ghost, straddling the line between life and life after death.
The people in the hospital had no idea what they had on their hands, taking in somebody like him.
Someone like Jack – and, unfortunately, someone like Maddie - certainly had no idea just how much he had changed the world, for better or for worse.
No one knew how much your existence broke every single scientific law and religious doctrine just by being alive.
Indeed. Some would call you a miracle of God…but some would also call you a curse from the Devil.
You find that you don’t care what people would think about you. You stopped caring a long time ago.
The Ghost Zone, on the other hand, would at least be honest and call you an aberration. If not that, then a nuisance. A zombie. An outcast. A bastard. For what place does a half-mortal have among a society of ghosts once fully mortal?
There are no documents or records on the Ghost Zone, no matter how much time and effort you throw yourself into researching it. There are volumes upon volumes of spirit mediums - from the itako in Japan to the priests and priestesses that perform the Lên đồng in Vietnam, the Umbandan psychics in Brazil, the shaman and medicine men of indigenous tribes the world over, so many that it made your head spin with wonder and glory you hadn’t felt since high school, when you truly knew what career you wanted to make for yourself. But while some of those involved spirit possessions, none of them explained the creation of the half-ghost: the Halfa.
Unless there were records lying somewhere forgotten and buried from the light of day, you were – as far as you were concerned – the first half-ghost in existence. Perhaps even the first half-ghost in the history of the Ghost Zone.
That was another thing that took a while to sink in, and when it did you had almost made yourself sick with the thought.
The Ghost Zone was just as much an afterlife – if not the afterlife then the crossroad to many afterlives that preceded it – as it was a world of culture, history, travel, invention, competition, and commerce as Earth was a living, breathing world of science and religion and warfare. They may now be a lawless universe with areas filled with varying levels of independent rule, but they had as many legends and stories and tall tales about humanity and its creatures as man had about ghosts and angels and demons, and what would entail to bring about their return.
You thought it was a load of horseshit, expecting something like the biblical End Times when ghosts were more than likely to give an answer to what might possibly cause that...but then again, maybe the Ghost Zone thought the same thing about the Halfa. Of the mortal man that couldn’t stay dead. What did the arrival of the Halfa mean to them?
A lot, you surmised. You didn’t have to frequent the Ghost Zone, both out of your status as the first known halfa and fear of your safety, to know that it would mean a lot to them. They would be afraid of you. They would abhor you. They would not know what to think of you.
You were a mortal once. You should’ve died. And when a person dies, you either go straight to heaven or hell. You might go wander limbo for eternity because you couldn’t let go of your earthly attachments. You might be reborn into the cycle of life and try again at escaping Samsara so you can reach enlightenment. You might even just cease to exist altogether, no different than at ant getting squashed underfoot – the Jack London method, you jokingly called it once, before you saw how scandalized it made Maddie and how much she ranted that If we can prove that ghosts are real and they exist, then that means we can also prove that the afterlife is real and there is life after death and quietly and thoughtfully dropped it afterwards. Man has no place within the afterlife unless he is either on the brink of death, be it truly his time or as a near-death experience that would send him back to his mortal coil, or at the whim of gods for reasons only they were privy to.
You are not supposed to be on Earth. You are not supposed to be in the Ghost Zone. You are supposed to be dead.
And yet, here you are, able to go back and forth between the afterlife half-alive and half-dead.
Here you are, entering heaven alive without the mercy and love of the gods.
Here you are, alone. The only known halfa in recorded history.
All alone, with a fame and fortune you didn’t rightfully earn.
You feel older than your forty-some years of half-existence, and you spend far more time living inside your own head than you do interacting with the few people that deserve your time of day in your mansion (and only because it’s become routine, and you have a reputation to uphold that isn’t tainted by blood and fire and misanthropy). Sometimes, you think about going to get help. You think about giving away all your wealth, to charity or for science you didn’t know and didn’t care, get rid of your ancestor’s home, all your company assets, and commit yourself to a hospital. A real hospital, with doctors that follow their Hippocratic oath and believe in restorative justice and rehabilitation over malpractice and vengeance and would help you address your lingering anger towards Jack, your unhealthy feelings towards Maddie that if known would more than likely land you on a terrorist watch list with the other political and religious extremists, and the hurt betrayal you felt during your long stay in recovery when you realized that they never once bothered to check up on you even before they graduated, got married, and moved down south to Illinois to open up their workshop in Amity Park. It didn’t have to be a recurring thing. It could’ve been just one or two times and you would’ve been okay with that.
You even briefly consider turning yourself in to the police, with all your receipts and documents in tow, and admit that you were the mastermind behind all those thefts and fires they couldn’t solve even with federal assistance. You would guaranteed be given a trial and probably sent to prison with twenty-four hour surveillance, if not forever then for a long, long time, and you would probably never get much peace and quiet with all those cameras trained on you, but at least this time it would be deserved. This time you wouldn’t complain. The only ghosts that would bother you would be the very demons in your head that you cultivated for twenty years.
You even consider, even more briefly, going to Amity Park to tell Jack and Maddie that they did prove ghosts to be real, that their portal wasn’t a mistake, and even if your accident was a result of pure negligence that could’ve been entirely preventable, you were at least still alive. Not completely whole, and not completely all there in the head or in spirit, but alive all the same.
But then you remember that it was Jack who made you this way. Jack, for not paying attention. Jack for being the hyperactive buffoon and not keeping his hands still for two fucking minutes. Jack, who somehow wormed his way into Maddie’s heart and was chosen over you. Jack, who was once your best friend, big of heart if yet small of brain.
You hate him. You hate what he did to you. You hate how much he distanced himself from you.
You even find yourself hating Maddie. Maddie, who was just as fixated on ghosts as Jack but had the wherewithal to stop once in a while and adhere to common sense. Maddie, who always made sure you got plenty of rest after a long day at the lab and something to eat and drink before you got your station put together and went to work. Maddie, who laughed and listened to rant and rave about your love for the Green Bay Packers and their dedication to all things cheese and dairy-based despite being a boring Chicago Bears fan who liked that corny Super Bowl Shuffle featuring Payton Manning from way back when.
You hate her. You almost hate her even more than you do Jack. For not visiting you. For not loving you. For not giving you a chance. For not being a good friend.
You hate everyone, and you hate how much they would hate you if they knew you were no longer normal. That you were more than just a mortal man. Hate you and try to wipe you off the face of the earth for being different and having something they could not have – the same way they did with their beloved messiah.
But then all the anger and self-loathing seeps out of you and you feel less like a man and more like the vampire that can’t walk in the daylight without fear of catching on fire, all alone on top of a hill in a mansion much too large and much too empty for you. You remember that things would be much, much different if you hadn’t been so close to the proto-portal and maybe, just maybe, you wouldn’t have made all these awful decisions.
But then you remember you weren’t the one to knock fucking soda over the controls and press the button to activate the proto-portal, despite how incorrect the calculations were.
Then you remember how much you wish the faculty had cracked down on Jack’s carelessness and did something, anything, to make him repay for all the damage he caused in your life.
Then you remember you stopped caring for people a long time ago, how much you hate them and their governments and their policies and the religious institutions and the way both of them twist the words of faith and judgment and righteousness for their own ends.
How much you hate yourself.
But you are alone, and as much as it hurts to reflect on it those are your decisions that you’ve made and you would do them all over again if it meant you could get back at Jack and make him understand the gravity of what he has done to you. You would do them all again, even if that meant causing a rift in his marriage and making Maddie hate you and the monster you’ve become. The monster that took hold over you.
You wonder what would you do if it ever got to that point. What would happen if you got your wish and finally succeeded.
You don’t know.
You don’t care to know.
You only think to yourself I will find out when I get there and leave it at that. For now, you simply content yourself maintaining a hold on your fortune, dusting off your Packers memorabilia, checking to see if your cheese collection is still safe from mice and spiders and properly secured, and host functions that make you die a little more on the inside but makes you feel just lively enough to go out onto the floor and act human.
You are a monster…but you already knew that, and there are plenty of ghosts in the Zone that are just as conniving and self-absorbed as you are. That, and they don’t care as much about the ramifications of your Halfa status as most of the folk tend to do. You’re no savior of mankind, and you’re certainly no mortal arbiter of ghost-kind, either. Best of both worlds you are not.
There’s no deal to make with the Devil, since he’s currently locked away in the Sarcophagus of Forever Sleep, but you can make deals with the troublemakers and ruffians of the Zone. This is how you first make introductions to Skulker, and this is how you start soliciting and trafficking mortal weapons from science labs to military bases to even the houses of so-called proud and patriotic right-wing scum of the earth for ghosts like Skulker and his ilk to synthesize and imbue with ectoplasm. Honestly, who was going to stop you? Walker? That blowhard? You could laugh. You could almost laugh.
And you do.
For the first time in who knows how long, you laugh.
You laugh, even as you hate.
You laugh, even as you ache for love.
And still, you laugh, even as you watch Skulker and your other clientele grab the weapons you’ve amassed and study them with that same avaricious gleam in their blood-red eyes the hospital staff treated you all those years ago and scowl at them with all the disgust that bubbles up from your cold, black heart.
You’ll get back at Jack. You’ll get back at everyone that’s denied you. It’s only a matter of time.
And so you wait.
Until one day you finally get the chance to lure him and the rest of his family out for the college reunion you decide to hold at your mansion, after spending the last month directing ectopuses, Skulker, and the vultures to put an end to him once and for all. But they have failed and you can’t determine the reason why anger-drunk ghosts, hired birds of prey, and an actual bounty hunter would have such a hard time against Jack Fenton and his array of projects that have a better chance at falling apart than staying together.
Something was stopping them. Something was stopping you from succeeding.
It’s not until late at night Skulker alerts you to an unwanted ghostly presence that you transform and decide to check it out for yourself, telling him to be on standby – not for the help but so that he can capture the menace and collect a most handsome reward from your weapons laboratory. That’s when you happen on the boy-ghost with the snow-white hair and glowing green eyes and make quick work of him. He doesn’t stand a chance.
Only – instead of discombobulating into green ectoplasm like the other ghosts do when in the human realm, the energy that’s holding him together loosens its hold on him, and leaves him knocked out cold and on the floor. Solid and half-mortal, with black hair and blue eyes – the same shade as Jack’s.
For the first time in your life, you are not alone.
For the first time in the history of the Ghost Zone, and perhaps in all recorded history, there is more than one Halfa.
And, for the first time in your life, you finally have a Hero willing and brave enough to fight against the Villain.
You can't help but smile.