Sepia-toned flashback. Young Deck is running heedlessly through the woods, branches slapping at his face, clawing his arms. Behind him, the cabin is in flames. A man is screaming — whether in anger or in pain, it is not clear.
Deck comes to a stop, panting. "Marco," he whispers. "Polo," comes the barely audible reply.
He finds his way to the mouth of the steep ravine, and begins to climb down. Deep down inside, hidden amongst the undergrowth, is the skeleton of a small child, dressed in tattered clothing. Deck searches until he finds a blue plastic ID bracelet on the skeleton's wrist; gingerly, he slides it free of the bones.
He runs some more, until he emerges from the trees onto a highway. In the distance, headlights are approaching.
Cut to a nervous-looking woman following a sheriff's deputy through a brightly-lit corridor.
"I should warn you, ma'am," the deputy is saying over his shoulder, "It's been six years since he went missing. He had some injuries — nothing serious, you understand, but he was pretty emaciated when we found him. I'm just sayin', he don't look quite like his photograph anymore."
"I just want to see him," says the woman.
The sheriff opens a door and gestures her in. Sitting on a chair is Deck.
The woman covers her mouth with her hands and drops to her knees. "Holly?" she whispers, "Holly, is it you?"
Deck rushes forward and embraces her. "I'm sorry, Mom," he says, "I'm sorry I was gone so long. I... I was hurt."
"How did you....?" she cries.
"I had help," says Deck. "Well, an imaginary friend, really. But I don't need him anymore, so he has to go. And he wants to say good-bye."
The woman shakes her head, not understanding.
Tears run down Deck's cheeks as he hugs the woman tightly. "Good-bye, Mom," he whispers. Unseen to everyone, Holly's ghost slips out of Deck's body, smiles, and rises up through the ceiling in a cloud of sparkling light.
Over the woman's shoulder, Deck smiles. The blue bracelet on his wrist reads, "Holland Lane."
In the present day, Bozzie brought somene into the polio ward of St. Joseph of Arimathea Hospital with something important to tell the Orpheus Agents. Bozzie's friend — the ghost of an elderly man named Albert — explained that since the incident at Babbitt Plaza, many ghosts had been taking to the subway tunnels to stay clear of the spectres that now crowded the City's skies. Albert had been with a group of ghosts looking for a place to hole up in the tunnels when they were threatened by a ghost weilding a shotgun and warning everyone to "clear off" of his "property".
"I recognized the guy," Albert said. "Rayburn Wallack. He and I used to work in the same department in City Planning, back in the day. He was a real prickly bastard, uptight conservative, always ranting about the Communists and the Jews and the Mexicans. He ended up killing himself, probably because there were rumors he was gay."
The Agents looked at him expectantly, not sure why any of this was relevant.
Albert sighed. "When I choked on that turkey bone back in '04, I'd been retired for 20 years. Rayburn Wallack killed himiself in 1981."
Agents MacMillian, Morrisson, Watts, Herschler, and Lane immediately went to investigate. On the way to the station, they noticed hives being build all over the City, residue from the scores of spectres that had been released by the Babbitt Plaza event.
At the subway station, dozens of ghosts crowded the platform, waiting for the next train. Rayburn Wallack had been encountered on the blue line, halfway between the Central Square and Elsevier Heights stations, so the Agents boarded the next train with the intention of phasing out through the train walls when they reached the right spot.
Before they reached the spot, however, they ran into a trap laid by spectres — a web of hardened ectoplasm stretched across the tunnel. The train ran right through it, but the ghosts inside were carried into it and chopped to pieces by the wire-thin strands. Thinking quickly, Agent Macmillian manifested physically and pulled the train's emergency brake.
A pack of spectres moved in for the kill ü grotesque hybrid things like giant silverfish. During the battle, an enormous spider-shaped spectre dropped through the tunnel ceiling; in fending it off, Agent Morrisson was forced to accumulate a significant amount of spite energy, and manifested a dramatic and horrific stain — his entire face erupted in a forest of huge, misshapen fangs.
"God rejected Cain's offering because it was unworthy, so Cain slew his brother, and lifted up to God a new offering of blood and bone and muscle and skin. And God was pleased. She put her mark on Cain, and sent him forth to bring the gift of oblivion to all the people of the world."Two hundred souls? A thousand? A million? What is that to God? A drop in the ocean. Her hunger is greater -- is grander than all of that. She stopped me all those years ago because my offering to her was pitiful. I did not realize it then, but she set me on the road to righteousness. And now, finally, she has given me the chance to make a new offering, one that is finally worthy of her brilliance."
Bishop stands up. In his hand is a wooden mallet.
They found Wallack's hideout at the end of a side-tunnel, behind a door made of the black, howling metal found in ghost-shot bullets and Terrel & Squib's ghost cages. Agent Watts knocked; a judas door slid open and a shotgun poked out. Agent MacMillian managed to diffuse the situation and get them inside. Wallack's place was a cramped, concrete bunker with old posters warning of the dangers of Communism and nuclear fallout.
Wallack was rude and arrogant, but he talked. He referred to a "City of the Dead" that had once existed in some sort of "underworld" dimension. It was destroyed by an event he called the "Deluge" — when a tidal wave of spectres erupted from directly underneath the Dead City, utterly destroying it and scouring the underworld clean. Then the spectral storm spilled out into the world of the living, and the monsters began devouring every ghost they could find.
This was not ancient history, however. All of this happened in 1983.
"I survived because I had already built this." He put his hand through the concrete wall and rapped his knuckles on something embedded several inches deep. "Genuine dark steel. Had it brought up years before, installed it myself."
"But everyone else," MacMillian asked, "all the other ghosts — they were all destroyed?"
Suddenly Wallack snatched up his shotgun. "Who the hell is that?" he yelled.
The Agents turned to see Donald Sanderson standing in the middle of the room. His eyes were ringed with black; his fingernails elongated into dirty, yellowed claws.
"It is happening again," Sanderson intoned. "It is happening again."
Bishop is standing now, silhouetted against a single window of dirty, paned glass. He is looking down at the black gong.A soft voice of indeterminant gender speaks from off-screen. "You are ready? You are prepared for what will happen to you?"
Tears streak down Bishop's face, but his expression is one of ecstacy. "In life, in death, and beyond death. I have been preparing for this moment since I was born."
He holds up the mallet. A low, discordant note rises from the silence. It grows louder and louder. Bishop swings the mallet.
At the instant the mallet touches the gong, the screen goes black, and the note stops.
Everywhere across the City, hives began bursting open, pouring clouds of spectres into the sky.
Bare floor in an empty room. The gong and Bishop are gone. A wooden mallet bounces off the dusty floorboards in slow-motion.