Orpheus Group was contacted by Lt. Harold Garland of the Restwood Police Department, asking for assistance in a child-abduction case. Although usually the Board of Directors avoids any direct contact with law enforcement, for some reason they agreed to work with the Restwood police. Agents Herschler, MacMillian, McGee, and Morrisson were assigned to the mission. Walter Hanley handled the briefing.
Three young boys had been abducted in the last six months in Restwood, a suburb several miles north of the City. The police were concerned that the culprit might be the same person who abducted seven boys from the same general area between 1996 and 1999 and was never caught. The most recent victim managed to escape, and led police back to an old house in the Madley Hills Forest Preserve, where a forensics team discovered the remains of the seven original victims buried in the dirt-floored cellar. Garland wanted a team of Agents to enter the house, attempt to contact the victims' ghosts, and glean from them any information they could provide about their abductor, about whom the police otherwise knew nothing.
Hanley warned the Agents that, since the children most likely died under conditions of extreme trauma and fear, there was a good chance that some or all of them might have turned into spectres. He urged them to proceed with extreme caution and to retreat at the first sign of hostile response.
The Agents established a temporary base of operations in Restwood. They interviewed Lt. Garland and several other people involved with the case. They learned that, although the seven bodies found beneath the house in the woods were positively identified as the remains the seven boys abducted years earlier, search teams had found no evidence of the two more recent victims inside or anywhere near the house. In fact, there was no evidence that anyone — including the boy who escaped — had occupied the house for years. Emma MacMillian interviewed the boy, whose name was Ben. He could not remember being abducted, but he had clear memories of being inside the house and of running through the woods away from it. He said that a "good man" had helped him to escape. This "good man" cried a lot and wore a bow tie. Ben also showed Agent MacMillian a picture he'd drawn of the "Halloween boys" who lived in the house — jagged stick figures with red mouths and many sharp teeth. Ben did not draw any pictures of the house itself, explaining that it was "too big" to fit in a drawing. "The house is outside the edge of the paper," he said.
After concluding their interviews, the Agents returned to Headquarters to project. Because of the distances involved and the possibility of needing to interact with Lt. Garland, Agent McGee elected to return to Restwood in-body and project at the mission site.
The team was led to the house in the woods by Lt. Garland. Agent Herschler first attempted to reconnoiter the situation by inhabiting the structure of the house itself. However, he was overpowered by an entity already within the house and became trapped. The other three Agents entered the cellar and discovered a hallway built of some painted black material. The hallway led in turn to a series of rooms and hallways further underground.
Herschler meanwhile managed to wrest control of the building from the other entity. He sensed the black hallways as a strange contortion in space, turning inward upon itself in a tangled spiral. He warned the rest of the team to go no further, then joined them, relinquishing his possession of the house.
The team encountered the ghost of one of the original seven victims. However, when provoked by Agent MacMillian, it reverted to its true form, one of the "Halloween boys" from Ben's drawings. Agent Morrisson drove the spectre off, but more began converging on the Agents' position.
They retreated to the cellar, where they found the ghost of a tall, thin man wearing a bow tie. The man introduced himself as George Ranford Peltz and explained that he had abducted and killed the original seven boys. A week after burying his last victim, Peltz had died of a stroke. His ghost was now trapped in the house, tormented by the spectres of his victims. Recently, however, the spectres had begun expanding their activities, luring living boys to the house, trapping them in the cellar-labyrinth, and converting them into more spectres. Peltz, in an attempt to atone for his sins, had helped the latest victim escape.
A heated discussion ensued, concerning possible ways to resolve the situation. Although some Agents were extremely reluctant to consider it, eventually they agreed that permanently destroying Peltz's corpus had the best chance of severing the spectres' fetters and releasing them from this world. Peltz was resistant but unable to put up any effective defense. Agent Morrisson used his beckoning power to hold Peltz immobile, while Agent MacMillian reshaped her arm into a blade and used it to disrupt Peltz's corpus until he discorporated.
The hallway leading out of the cellar disappeared as the spatial distortion collapsed upon itself. The spectres have not reappeared. No further abductions have been reported.
At the request of Walter Hanley, Agent MacMillian has been placed on a temporary reprieve from mission assignments, due to emotional strain.