Resident Phantoms

Resident Phantoms are those phantasmal entities whose manifestation is bound to a fixed address within the Tower rather than to a sound, a procedure, or an expectation. Where Anticipatory Phantoms occupy the space of holdings not yet accessioned, and the Phantoms of unheard sounds saturate the Spire of Auditory Phantoms, a Resident Phantom occupies a room, a landing, a stairwell, or — in eleven recorded cases — a single particular flagstone. It does not travel. It does not accrete. It is, in the phrasing of the Ledger of Partial Resolutions, "present in the manner of furniture and answerable in the manner of a tenant." Residency is established not by haunting but by registration. A Phantom becomes Resident on the day its address is entered in the tenancy schedule of its floor, and most disputes in the field concern not whether a Phantom is present but whether the schedule was properly amended. The distinction matters practically: Resident Phantoms are counted in floor censuses, are subject to the same quiet-hours observances as living occupants, and may not be relocated without a Writ of Seclusion countersigned by the floor's registrar.

Classification and the Tenancy Schedule

The Office of Tenancy Schedules maintains the Tower's residential registers and distinguishes three grades of Resident Phantom by the firmness of their attachment. Grade A Phantoms remain within a defined boundary and are entered on the schedule with dimensions. Grade B Phantoms drift within a single floor but return to an anchor point no less than once per cycle. Grade C Phantoms are recorded as resident on a floor they have not been observed on since accession, and are retained on the schedule "pending the courtesy of an appearance" (Ordinance of Domestic Registration, cl. 9.2).

Grade C entries account for a persistent arithmetic difficulty. The census of Floor 14,302 has, in each of the last nine cycles, reported a residential population one greater than the number of persons and Phantoms actually counted, and the discrepancy has always been assigned to the Grade C column without further inquiry. The registrar's standing note on the matter reads simply: "The seat is warm. The schedule is correct."

The Matter of the Warm Landing

The clearest body of precedent concerns the north landing of a residential tier administered jointly with Spiral 299 Residence Halls, where a Resident Phantom of Grade A held the second-floor window recess for the better part of four cycles. In the winter of the fourteenth cycle the landing's residents petitioned for the Phantom's relocation on the grounds of draught — the entity being accompanied, at all hours, by a cold that the hall's stoves could not answer.

The petition failed. The adjudicating clerk, Registrar Ovell Marrant, ruled that a Resident Phantom inherits the thermal conditions of its address and cannot be held to introduce conditions the address already possessed. Marrant's ruling, preserved as the Ruling on Inherited Conditions, has since been cited in forty-one matters, including three concerning damp.

"The Phantom does not bring the cold. The cold is on the schedule. It was entered before the Phantom was, and it will be entered after. A tenant may not be removed for the faults of the room."

— Ruling on Inherited Conditions, cl. 3

The cold, it should be recorded, was subsequently found to originate in a disused service duct and was remedied by the hall's maintenance order in the following spring. The Phantom remained. The landing is now warm and the Phantom is still described in the schedule as a source of draught, the entry never having been corrected.

Relationship to Other Phantom Classes

Resident Phantoms are frequently confused with Documentary Phantoms, which also attach to fixed locations — a shelf, a drawer, a folio — but which are catalogued as records rather than occupants and are therefore ineligible for the tenancy schedule. The Auditory Permit Office has ruled twice that a Resident Phantom which produces no sound is nonetheless a resident and not a document, on the principle that silence is a condition of occupancy and not a form of filing.

The boundary with Anticipatory Phantoms is less settled. When the Office of Tenancy Schedules attempted to reclassify the unoccupied rooms of a western tier as anticipatory — on the reasoning that each awaited a resident — the Spire of Auditory Phantoms objected, noting that an anticipatory entity holds space for a holding while a Resident Phantom is the holding, and that the two could not share a room without one of them becoming furniture. The objection was upheld under Concordance 47, which the Spire had ratified in the fourteenth cycle.

Scholarly Disagreement

The principal controversy in the field concerns whether residence precedes or follows registration. The Annex of Administrative Phantoms holds, in a long and labyrinthine guideline cited by the Office of Procedural Claims, that a Phantom is Resident from the moment it takes up a position, and that the schedule merely acknowledges what the room already knows. Against this, the Seventeenth Concordance, Clause 17.404.1a provides that no Phantom shall be deemed resident until entered, and that an unentered Phantom is "a visitor of indefinite stay and no rights of tenancy."

The two instruments have never been reconciled. Supplement to the Ninth Concordance attempts a compromise — residence accruing at the moment of entry but relating back to the moment of arrival — which the Office of Tenancy Schedules has declined to apply on the grounds that it would require the office to know when a Phantom arrived, a fact it has never possessed and does not intend to acquire.

Notable Holdings

A short inventory of Resident Phantoms whose entries are considered settled:

• The Amber Lens of Floor 710, catalogued as an object but entered on the tenancy schedule since the lens's own registration was disputed.
• The second-floor window recess of the north landing, Grade A, draught struck from the record in the fifteenth cycle but not removed from the schedule.
• The east stairwell of the western tier, Grade B, anchor point a single newel post, observed returning to it in all but two of the last forty cycles.
• The eleventh flagstone of the lower concourse, Grade C, unobserved since accession and retained pending the courtesy of an appearance.

Floor censuses continue to be taken in the first week of each cycle. Resident Phantoms are counted, greeted where custom requires, and left where they are.