#pen died ill have to do jonah later

[acemenagerie-a]

Can I have a SparkNotes on Jonah's ex-friend ghosts?

(( splitting this into ghosts that are definitely haunting jonah and those i can imagine would haunt jonah.  mostly publishing just for the general reference if anyone wants to thread in this space for some reason, they’d know which ghosts may be floating around sdjhfghjsdfghjd ))

Ghosts definitely haunting Jonah:

Jonah is like... directly responsible for these people’s deaths :D

Albrecht von Closen:  

Notable for opening his letter with ‘My dearest Jonah’ and the fact the first letter he appears in he apologizes for writing again so quickly without giving Jonah a chance to respond.  Found a spooky crypt in Schwarzwald that had equally spooky books in it with a lot of eye imagery.  

While to Jonah he claims to have left the books, he apparently did retrieve them at some later date and said about them:  “I do not read the books. They read me.”  He got them rebound at Jonah’s preferred bookbinders; Jonah conspired to steal the books - having the bookbinder bind blank pages and return them.

After being beset with a severe mysterious illness and under Dr. Fanshawe’s hypothesis the books might have had some contagion on them, he tried to return the books to the crypt.  As the last of the false books were shelved, he died horrifically.  An autopsy revealed all of his organs, bones, and inner skin were covered in eyes.

He had a wife, Clara, and, while he had no children of his own, he looked after his nephew as his own after his brother died. 

Barnabas Bennett:  

Opens letter with ‘My dear Jonah.’  Apparently got into debt with Mordechai Lukas and was a bit brash when Lukas finally demanded repayment, telling him to “bring it before the courts.”  In turn, Lukas sent him to the Lonely, or perhaps something very similar.  Either way Bennett was entirely alone, though people he could not see could affect his plane of existence and he could affect theirs in turn.

In desperation, he left a letter to Jonah asking for help since Jonah was on good terms with Lukas.  Unfortunately, Jonah is an asshole and left Barnabas to die just so he could watch.  When Barnabas’s bones finally dropped into the world, Jonah retrieved them “sadly enough” and put them in his office.

Barnabas was unmarried and without children and apparently was closest to his brother.  He enjoyed being alone before this.

Ghosts perhaps haunting Jonah:

Robert Smirke:  

Architect famous for his implementation of symmetry and was a literal real human person that the podcast was like ‘what if they were an occultist?’  Known spookily for his theories regarding the fears, which thus became known as Smirke’s 14.  

He got some info from Maxwell Rayner, an avatar of the Dark, but had plenty of ideas and theories of his own and also had dreams about individual powers long before ever penning his taxonomy, likely even before meeting Rayner.  Believed in somehow balancing the fears against one another to keep humanity from being overwhelmed.  Also responsible for putting many ritual ideas for the powers on paper, though whether that gave them rituals is hard to say.

He had many people in his circle discussing the powers, including Jonah and Mordechai, but all of them save himself and, he thought, Jonah fell to one power or another.  Jonah secretly modified Smirke’s plans for Millbank Prison such that it would be perfect for his ritual.

Smirke got wise, several decades too late, and begged Jonah not to go through with it.  During this time, bullshit eye shenanigans were happening to him - people turning their heads 180° to look at him and, notably, the night before he died, he woke up and found his daughter in another room.  His candle went out and when he finally lit a match, her face was inches from his own with eyes too-wide for the sockets.  The next day, Smirke wrote his letter begging Jonah not to go through with the ritual while choosing to assume Jonah wasn’t explicitly targeting him and these occurrences were just related manifestations to the ritual.  He died of apoplexy before finishing the letter.

Dr. Jonathan Fanshawe:

Doctor that Jonah requested go check on von Closen when he fell ill.  Notable for starting his letter incredibly brusquely with only ‘Jonah.’ and also having a letter explicitly telling Jonah to fuck right the fuck off for being The Worst.  He directly helped in returning the “books,” is the one who figured out that Jonah stole the real books, and the one who performed Closen’s autopsy.  

Honestly, Jonah does not seem to have directly led to this dude’s death and he did get the most closure with a very well-worded ‘fuck you’ and very decidedly wanted to be done with Jonah.  But like... I can see him ending up stuck because of that fury and just making the most of it.  Severing a friendship did not work, perhaps being a source of endless harassment will.