Larson sat at the elegant oak rolltop desk that dominated one end of his otherwise anything-but-elegant living room. If he sat at the desk, the top of which held an antique green banker’s lamp and above which hung a print of an eagle flying over a meadow, his back was to the rest of the room. From here, he could pretend the other part of his living room didn’t exist. Everything else in the room—the stained card table, two folding chairs, a ratty easy chair, and a blue vinyl beanbag chair—only made the place seem more empty and sad.

Taking a sip from the glass he held balanced against his chest, he looked at the framed picture of Ryan that the banker’s lamp illuminated. Ryan had been six when the picture was taken. He’d just lost his front two baby teeth. The resulting gap gave his freckled, blue-eyed face an impish look Larson loved. People said Ryan was the spitting image of his dad. Larson guessed he saw it. For sure he and his son shared dirty blond hair, freckles, blue eyes, and a wide mouth. Ryan had gotten his mom’s nose, which was good for Ryan. But sometimes, all Larson saw when he looked at his son were the differences between them. To Larson, his own face looked hard and closed, while Ryan’s was still eager and open.

How long would it stay that way?

A few days before, Larson had gotten a glimpse of what Ryan would look like when the possibilities of childhood collapsed into the obligations of adulthood. Larson had promised, swearing on a stack of comic books no less, that he’d take Ryan to see a movie premiere. Work had gotten in the way, and Larson had canceled. Ryan hadn’t taken it well.

“You don’t do anything you say you’ll do!” Ryan had screamed. His face was red and contorted with crushing disappointment.

“I’m sorry, Ryan.”

Ryan had sniffled. “Teacher says dads are like superheroes. But you’re not. Superheroes don’t break promises.”

Larson’s phone rang, and he snatched it up. Anything that could save him from the memory of his many regrets would be welcome.

“The Stitch Wraith was spotted again,” Chief Monahan rasped. “I want you to get over there.”

“Where?”

“The old fire site … you remember that bizarre fire?”

“Sure.” Larson set down his drink, glad he’d only had a couple sips. “I’ll be there in ten.” He stood. “Wait. Isn’t that the second time it’s been spotted there?”

Don pulled open the heavy metal door of the old ex-factory, and he and Frank headed to the food truck parked in the middle of what used to be one of the defunct factory’s assembly rooms. The truck, no longer mobile, was permanently placed in the room, and it was surrounded by wood picnic tables. It was a weird setup, but then, Dr. Phineas Taggart, the man who owned it all, was weird, too.

Don spotted Phineas sitting on one of the picnic table benches, and he nudged Frank. They watched Phineas carefully pull the tail of his pristine white lab coat out from under him and smooth it, then just as carefully spread a white linen napkin on the rough table in front of him. He flicked a speck of dirt from the napkin’s corner, then opened his sandwich wrapper in the precise center of the napkin.

“Thank you,” Phineas said to the sandwich. “Cells, please process this food with love.”

“Still talking to your food, Phineas?” Don called. He rolled his eyes and winked at Frank.

Frank just shook his head.

They watched Phineas close his eyes. It looked like he was praying, but he’d once told them he was creating a “mental shield out of light” when he did that. Whatever that meant.

“Hello, Don,” Phineas said. “As I have previously explained, I am not talking to my food per se. I am talking to cells, both the cells in the food and those of my body.”

“Right, right.” Don nudged Frank again. “Can you say one sandwich short of a picnic?” he muttered to Frank.

Frank, who had the same darkly tanned face and forearms and broad thick shoulders that Don had, set his hard hat on the picnic table next to the one Phineas sat at, and he stepped over to the food truck to order his food.

“How’s that ‘shield’ coming?” Don asked, dumping his hard hat next to Frank’s. Phineas watched Ruben scribble down Frank’s order, then he looked at Don.

“I am developing a modicum of expertise with shield creation,” Phineas said.

Frank returned from ordering and plopped on the picnic table’s bench. Dust billowed up from his thighs when he sat. Don noticed Phineas’s nose twitch. He probably wasn’t thrilled with how sweaty he and Frank smelled. Phineas was a little prissy.

“You gotta hear this, Frank,” Don said. He nodded at Phineas. “Tell him.”

Phineas looked at his sandwich, but then he straightened his narrow red tie and adjusted the stiff collar of his gray dress shirt. He cleared his throat. “The creation of a personal field has its origin in the work of a psychologist who did a series of experiments on the effect of being stared at.”

“Why would anyone study that?” Frank asked.

Don, who stood at Ruben’s counter ordering his food, said, “I hate being stared at. Makes my skin crawl.” He loved winding Phineas up and listening to him spout off about all the weird stuff he was into.

“Precisely,” Phineas said. “That’s why this psychologist was studying the phenomenon. Why does it bother us when people stare at us? To measure the test results, the psychologist used EDA—electrodermal activity—readings. The readings show responses of the sympathetic nervous system.”

“That makes perfect sense,” Don lied. He winked at Frank, who grinned.

Phineas was oblivious to their amusement. He continued his informational download. “The results of his experiments were that those being stared at showed significantly higher electrodermal activity when they were being stared at than would have been expected by chance.”

Frank shrugged. “So what?” He rolled his eyes at Don, who chuckled.

“So,” Phineas went on, “this man did other experiments as well. He wanted to know if it was possible for people to influence others with negative intentions. If it was, could one protect oneself from these negative intentions?

“He conducted more experiments, in which one group of subjects was given no instructions and another group was instructed to visualize a protective shield or barrier that would protect against interference of another person’s mind. The experimenters then attempted to raise all of the subjects’ EDA levels by staring at them and willing the levels to rise. The result was that the group that had shielded themselves showed far fewer physical effects than the other unshielded subjects.”

“So will your shield stop speeding bullets?” Don laughed as he took his grilled ham and cheese from Ruben.

Phineas smiled. “Speeding bullets aren’t nearly as dangerous as human emotion.” He picked up his sandwich and took a bite.

Frank snorted. With his mouth full, he said, “That’s just stupid. My neighbor’s anger can’t leave me gut-shot, but the old lady’s shotgun can.”

“You’re looking only at the short-term timeline,” Phineas said. “You see the result of the shotgun’s energy, so it seems greater to you. Human emotion is slower to impact, more insidious. It emanates from us or is excreted from us, if you will, like sweat or tears, and it wafts outward like a noxious cloud, soaking into the surroundings. For some time, I have been studying the effect of these emotions. I am getting close to a breakthrough.”

Phineas left his ersatz friends by the food truck and returned to the main part of the ex-factory—his private area. He wished the food truck was his private area, too, but alas, Ruben wouldn’t agree to that.

When Phineas used to work at Evergreen Laboratories, Ruben’s food truck used to be parked outside the ugly concrete building that housed the labs. When Phineas retired, he asked Ruben to set up shop in Phineas’s factory-converted-to-laboratory because he loved Ruben’s food. Ruben agreed, only if he could remain open to the public in general. Hence the presence of men like Don and Frank. Phineas knew that they, and others, thought he was nutty, but he still occasionally enjoyed their company.

Phineas brushed his teeth after lunch and made sure he still looked spiffy. Being retired was no excuse to get sloppy. So Phineas still dressed as he had for work, and he still kept his graying hair trimmed short and his round homely face clean shaven. When he was growing up, his mother told him, “Being ugly is no excuse to be a slob.” She also frequently asked him, “What do you need looks for when you have such a brain?”

Phineas agreed with his mom, which was why his life’s work—not the pointless pharmaceutical work he did at his job, but his true calling—was the study of the paranormal, the study of energy and its effects on all matter, animate and supposedly inanimate.

Satisfied that he was presentable, Phineas left the bathroom and walked down the narrow hall to his Protected Room. Punching in his security code and deactivating the pneumatic seal that guarded his treasures from errant energies such as those of mold spores and the like, Phineas entered the all-white room of shelving and glass cabinets. Indulging himself, as he did daily, he strolled up and down the rows looking at his accumulated bounty.

Phineas knew that to the untrained eye, the items in this room would look like either rubbish or the collection of a horror movie aficionado. It all depended on perspective. Only Phineas knew that every item in this room was said to be “haunted.”

“Haunted” was not a term he himself used. Usually used as a word to refer to something embodied by a ghost, the word could also mean part of what Phineas knew to be true of all things. “Haunted” could mean showing signs of torment or some kind of mental anguish. And this was the more important definition of the word. These items on Phineas’s shelves weren’t possessed by ghosts; the ones that were truly haunted were energized by agony.

The rack, the head crusher, the wheel, the Judas cradle—these torture devices were some of the purest examples Phineas had collected, but he also had everything from the Madonna’s image on toast to nonmechanical dolls that opened their eyes by themselves to a rocking chair that rocked on its own. He’d acquired all of these special objects from online auctions. He loved each and every one of them.

But he couldn’t linger here all day. He had work to do.

Exiting the Protected Room, Phineas returned to his small office, where a laptop computer sat in the middle of a simple oak desk. There, he began to type up his latest findings.

“As I expected,” he typed, “extreme human emotion appears to impact its surroundings far more powerfully the more negative it is. Agony, I’m convinced, radiates farther from people than any other emotion. Love has its influence, but the experiments being done with water crystals have been misinterpreted. Just because love forms beautiful ice crystals doesn’t mean it’s the most powerful emotion. Yesterday, I mimicked the ice crystal methodology, and by allowing all the hurt and anger I usually keep well in check to burst forth, I watched water manifest a hideous crystal in a matter of seconds.”

Phineas stood and crossed to the grow light over his collection of exotic flowers. He ran his fingertips over the lobster-claw-shaped yellow and orange Heliconia, the satisfyingly symmetrical lavender Lotus flower, the red clusters of flowering ginger, and the brighter red perfumed passionflowers that reminded him of blood-soaked starfish.

Other researchers had their water. Phineas had his flowers. He believed flowers, not water, were nature’s purest vessels for emotion. He was drawn particularly to the passionflower because the passionflower was known to hold a vibration so pure and innocent that its energy could repattern consciousness. Phineas leaned over and inhaled the flower’s pungently sweet scent. This flower, he’d learned from an expert in flower-energy essences, was known to repair the ego. It could literally mend the superego and facilitate enlightenment. He believed that he was approaching the day when he was so attuned to the flow of his own energy that he could get in resonance with this extraordinary blossom.

But not now. Phineas checked his watch. It was time.

Every week, Phineas received a new shipment of emotionally charged items. This week, he had some very special objects coming.

Hurrying down the hall to the loading dock at the back of his old brick factory, Phineas practically skipped over the stone floor. He couldn’t wait to see his new purchases.

“Yo, Phin,” a burly bald man called when Phineas stepped onto the concrete platform.

“Hello, Flynn.” Phineas bounced on the balls of his feet and rubbed his hands together. He leaned forward to peer into Flynn’s truck. “What have you?”

Flynn leaned over and picked up a box. He grinned. “You’re putting me on. You know what you’ve ordered. Today’s the special day, right?”

Phineas laughed.

Flynn leaned back and widened his warm brown eyes. “Whoa, doc. That’s some mad scientist evil laugh you got there.”

“Do you like it? I’ve been practicing.”

“Nailed it.” Flynn, his pink head glistening in the sun and his back muscles rippling under his black T-shirt, began unloading boxes onto the dock.

Phineas didn’t bother explaining to Flynn that Phineas didn’t even have a natural laugh. One of the reasons he was so fascinated by the bandwidth of human emotion was because he could never seem to access the whole range of emotions himself. He didn’t have a natural laugh because he’d never felt real joy.

What he felt now, though, had to be close. Flynn unloaded the fourth box from Phineas’s shipment, checked his manifest, and said, “That’s it, doc. Let me just get the handcart, and I’ll take this stuff back to your lab.”

“Thank you, Flynn.” Phineas was careful not to add a “hurry up,” even though he wanted to. Flynn wasn’t dawdling. Phineas was just impatient.

Flynn tossed the handcart onto the dock, then jumped up and stacked the boxes. The tower was over his head, but he said, “Got it” and went off down the hall, holding the top two boxes on the cart with his left hand as he pushed the cart with his right. Phineas scurried after him.

It only took a few seconds to reach the main lab, which was the vaulted core of the factory, what had once been the factory floor. Previously full of automated assembly equipment, this space was now home to Phineas’s various methods of measuring energy. Like Braud, he had his EDA. He also had his EEG, his REG, his MRI, and his X-ray machines. He’d used all of them at one time or another in experiments designed to measure the emotional energy left behind in objects that had been near the site of a tragedy.

“Right here, Flynn.” Phineas pointed at two large bare tables, and Flynn shifted the stack of boxes to the floor between them.

He gave Phineas a salute. “Have a good one.”

“I will.”

Before Flynn had taken a step, Phineas was tearing into the first box. Peering into it, he saw a stack of party plates. “Wonderful,” he said.

He opened the second box, which was flat and oblong. When the box was open, Phineas found himself staring at his own reflection. This was the decorative wall mirror that had watched a man murder his entire family. Oh, what agony might this contain? Phineas ran his hands over the shiny surface.

Then he took a deep breath and opened the large square box. As he suspected, this box contained yet another box—an empty jack-in-the-box box. Wonderful. This was going to have a lot of juicy agony in it.

And last but not least … yes, there it was! Lying in a puffery of Styrofoam peanuts, a man-size endoskeleton lay, just waiting to be activated and given a purpose.

Phineas lifted the endoskeleton from the box, and he frowned when it hung limply in his arms. He hadn’t expected it to be this broken. Well, no matter. At the moment, it looked like nothing—just a ruptured metal network made to stand in for human bones. But it wouldn’t be nothing for much longer.

“Don’t worry,” Phineas said. “I’ll provide.”

Phineas got right to work. Hooking together the lines and electrodes of his various energy-measuring devices, he set up what he thought of as an energy cascade. The machine would pour energy already captured from previous items into the first new item—in this case the plates—and then usher that energy through all the additional new items until they culminated in the endoskeleton.

Phineas stepped back to watch the process. Not that there was anything to see. Unfortunately, the transfer of emotional energy occurred at a frequency the human eye couldn’t discern. If Phineas turned out all the lights and used a blue light, he could detect just a bit of the energy flow. He’d discovered, however, that blue light tended to distort the field. He couldn’t risk turning it on now.

Instead, heeding his growling stomach, Phineas decided to return to the food truck for an early dinner.

“How is your daughter doing?” Phineas asked Ruben while Ruben fried the portobello mushroom for Phineas’s veggie burger.

Ruben shrugged, his black ponytail swaying. “Still painfully shy.”

“I could give you a remedy for that, a flower essence called Mimulus.”

Ruben leaned on the counter and cocked his head with a smirk. “What’s a flower essence?” He made it clear he was poking fun at the idea.

Phineas disregarded Ruben’s tone. “In the early part of the last century, a homeopath discovered that diluted energies of various plants and flowers had an impact on emotion and the physical body. A flower essence called Mimulus transforms fear into strength.”

“So a flower would make her less shy.” Ruben shook his head and looked up at the ceiling in what even Phineas could tell was a “Now I’ve heard everything” expression.

Phineas ignored the dismissal. “Not exactly. The energy of a flower would make her more confident. Only a molecule or two of any given flower is suspended in a solution of water and alcohol for each flower remedy.”

“Oh crap.” Ruben realized he’d burned the mushroom. “Sorry.” He started over. “So, is that what you’re working on? Flower … energies?”

“Not quite.” Phineas straightened and clasped his hands. “You see, I’m convinced that agony has a greater energetic radius and power than any other emotion. I have done numerous experiments to measure, capture, contain, and study the leftover emotion embedded into objects that were near a tragedy. My work is focused on my hypothesis that you can take a saturation of agony, add any kind of intelligence—even an artificial one—and they will combine together to transmute the energy of emotion into the energy of physical action. This, I believe, is what explains what people call ‘haunted’ objects.”

Ruben laughed, shook his head, and managed to properly cook Phineas’s portobello. “No disrespect, doc, but I’m glad I don’t believe in magic. Your flower essences sound like hocus-pocus. But the rest of that stuff you just said; that’s even worse—it’s bad mojo.”

“Maybe,” Phineas admitted. “But maybe it’s the key to understanding the energy of all things.”

By the time Phineas returned to his lab, the endoskeleton lit up like a Christmas tree when Phineas tested its energy levels. It was ready. Now he just needed to give it a bit more presence so it could properly express the agony it had soaked in from the other items.

Phineas hurried to his Protected Room. He knew exactly what he needed, so it only took a few minutes to place the items in separate boxes and return to the lab. There, he put the boxes on the table next to the bare endoskeleton.

Running his hands over the metal skeleton, he reveled in the electric energy dancing at his fingertips.

“First, a head,” he whispered.

Reaching into the first box he’d set on the table, Phineas pulled out a three-foot-tall white doll covered in drawings done in colored markers. The doll was truly an abomination of decorative overkill. It had rainbow fingertips, green knees, brown smudges on its body and legs, and various bibs and bobs glued to it, one of which appeared to be a smiley face eraser. Uninterested in the doll’s body, Phineas grabbed the doll’s flat black-marker-drawn face and pulled it from the doll’s neck. He then affixed the head to the top of the endoskeleton.

“That’s better,” he said. “Gives you some personality.”

He reached into the second box. “And now for some heart.”

The item in the second box was an animatronic dog that clearly no longer functioned. Phineas set his shoulders and prepared himself to touch it. The dog was an ugly dog, as ugly as Phineas himself, what with its matted grayish-brown fur, triangle-shaped head, and wide mouth full of sharp teeth. But it wasn’t just ugly. It was wrong somehow. Of all the items in Phineas’s collection, he found this dog to be the most menacing. He sensed the dog had been responsible for some powerful agony. He’d never been entirely comfortable having it around. But now he was going to take it apart, so it wouldn’t be a threat.

Using sharp shears, Phineas tore into the dog’s fur. Then he used pliers to pull out wires and circuitry. In minutes, he’d revealed the dog’s battery pack, located in the dog’s chest where its heart would have been had it been a living dog. Lifting the large plastic-encased unit trailing a tangle of entwined wires, Phineas studied the endoskeleton. Where to install it? Phineas dismissed plug-ins in the endoskeleton’s head and neck and instead found a suitable port in the endoskeleton’s chest.

He grinned when he looked at it. “Ha. There. Now my Tin Man has a heart.” He chuckled.

The moment the endoskeleton got its heart, it became more than an endoskeleton. It became an animatronic being of great energy. And it moved.

Phineas laughed, genuinely laughed, in pure glee.

The being of great energy reacted to Phineas’s laugh by turning to look at Phineas with its black marker eyes. Phineas kept laughing, and the being reached out to touch its creator.

Phineas held his breath as the metal fingers met his skin.

Then, in one crowded instant, three things happened: Phineas saw the being’s battery pack pulse bright red. He suddenly sensed danger and attempted to throw up a mental shield. He began to convulse, grabbing his head to attempt to contain the excruciating pain that annihilated his consciousness.

Although Phineas owned the building where Ruben ran his business, Ruben thought of the cavernous room that held his truck and the picnic tables that surrounded it as his own space. The rest of the building was Phineas’s space, and Ruben had never gone into Phineas’s space. It wasn’t that it was off-limits. It simply seemed impolite to wander into Phineas’s domain.

This afternoon, though, Ruben thought he had to venture into the heart of the old brick building. He was worried about Phineas.

In the two years since he and Phineas had reached their agreement, Phineas had never missed a meal at Ruben’s truck. Today, he’d been absent for both breakfast and lunch. Something was wrong.

So Ruben went where he’d never gone before, and in minutes, he’d discovered why Phineas had missed his meals.

Phineas was dead.

He was not only dead, he was withered into near mummification, his mouth gaping open, his eyes gone.

When Ruben found Phineas, he immediately staggered back to his truck. He called the police, who came, investigated, and announced that they suspected some kind of electrical discharge killed Phineas.

Ruben wasn’t so sure. He spent the rest of the day trying not to see Phineas’s body in his mind’s eye. He didn’t want to see that or the weird lab with its wilting exotic flowers. He especially didn’t want to see the black tear streaks that had stained the dead scientist’s face.

In the middle of the stack of Phineas’s belongings on Flynn’s truck, the energetic being lay under a large heavy tarp that smelled like turpentine. Its metal extremities vibrating with the rumble of the truck engine, the being sat up. Turning, it surveyed its surroundings until its gaze landed on a pile of clothing.

The being grabbed a cloak from the pile and slipped it on.