Ghostbusters (3 page)

“Did the thing have two arms and legs, or what?”

Alice Melvin remained staring at the ceiling. “I don’t remember seeing any legs, but it definitely had arms because it reached for me.”

“Arms! Great! I can’t wait to get a look at this thing.”

“Cool it, Ray.” Venkman set down his pad and pencil. He smiled reassuringly. “All right, Miss . . . Melvin. Have you, or has any member of your family, ever been diagnosed as schizophrenic or mentally incompetent?”

“Well, my uncle thought he was St. Jerome.”

Stantz and Delacourte looked at each other. Venkman smiled again. “I’d call that a big ‘yes.’ Do you yourself habitually use drugs, stimulants, or alcohol?”

“No,” Alice Melvin replied shakily.

“I thought not. And one last thing. Are you currently menstruating?”

Delacourte turned several shades of red. “What’s that got to do with it, Dr. Venkman?”

“Back off, man! I’m a scientist!”

Delacourte, outraged, turned to Stantz for support, but he only nodded sagely and ran an ionization meter up and down the man’s tie. Alice Melvin did not seem offended.

“It’s all right, Mr. Delacourte. He
is
a doctor . . .”

“Well, I never . . .”

“Just answer the question, Miss.”

But Venkman got no answer, for at that moment the door flew open and Spengler raced in. “Hurry. It’s moving!”

The two followed Spengler down the darkened corridors leading into the stacks, as only Spengler could make sense of his complicated, primitive equipment. Every so often he would stop, observe the pattern of blinking lights on the plasmatometer, then indicate a new direction. Stantz was as excited as a kid with an armful of new toys, but for Venkman the thrill was rapidly wearing thin.

“You sure you know where you’re going, Egon?”

“Shhhhhh.”

They reached a spiral iron staircase and tiptoed down into the dimly lit basement. Corridors stretched away in all directions, flanked by steel shelving covered with books. In the distance some piece of machinery—a water pump most likely—was softly humming. Spengler stopped short.

“My God, look!”

The floor was covered with books and catalogue cards, tumbled and strewn in all directions. An overturned cart blocked one aisle. Venkman experienced a sudden chill. Loonies I can ignore, but there
are
books all over the floor. Those are real. Spengler pocketed the plasmatometer and held up a black teardrop-shaped device with wings. He called in an aurascope. Venkman thought it looked like it had come from one of those sex places on Forty-second Street, but the lights on the thing’s upper surface immediately began to blink. Spengler let out a thrilled squeal.

“Through here. Careful.”

They worked their way slowly toward the catalogue cabinets, the piles of Dewey cards getting thicker on the floor. Venkman tried not to think about the possibility that they’d actually found one this time. That they were way in over their heads. Stantz passed him a plastic Petri dish.

“What’s that for?”

“Specimens.”

Specimens? He considered trying to fold a file card into it, then gave up and slipped the dish into his pocket. Spengler halted and raised one hand.

“Will you look at that?”

“What?” The three crowded together and peered at the card files.

The file drawers were in all manner of disarray; some in, some out, some on the floor, which was knee-deep in file cards and . . . paste? No, some sort of gluelike substance. It was everywhere; bubbling and oozing in streams from the drawers, speckling the books, dropping in stringy blobs from the ceiling. Venkman fumbled the Petri dish from his pocket, then stopped, not sure how to go about it. Stantz and Spengler were huddled together, whispering.

“. . . incredible, a plasma flow of this magnitude . . .”

“. . . hasn’t been anything like it since the Watertown Pus Eruption in 1910. This is making me very excited . . .”

This is making me very sick, Venkman said to himself. He turned the Petri dish sideways and managed to capture a quantity of the discharge, then snapped the top on it. It still got all over his hands. Just what I need, cosmic boogers.

“Come on, Peter . . .”

Venkman tried to wipe his hands off on the cabinet, then on the remaining books, finally settling for the tail of Ray’s sport coat. He caught up with Spengler at the end of the corridor and passed him the specimen.

“Here, Egon. Your mucus.”

But Egon was staring at an eight-foot pile of books standing against one wall. They teetered gently but did not topple. Again Stantz and Spengler went into a huddle.

“What do you make of that?”

“Classic. Symmetrical book-stacking. Like the Library of Alexandria Incident . . .”

“Sure,” Venkman added. “It’s obvious. No human being stacks books like that.” He grabbed Spengler by the arm. “The ghost, Egon. Where is it?”

“Right.” He held up the aurascope. “This way.”

Halfway down the passageway a book jumped off the shelf and flew at Venkman. He caught it neatly. It was a copy of
The Shining.
Real nice.

A few steps later the hair went up on the back of his neck. Spengler turned and held up the little detector, its bat wings now extended outward, their miniature bulbs blinking rapidly. The device was emitting a low hum. Spengler pointed wordlessly. Stantz and Venkman nodded and pointed back. Their meaning was clear. You go first. Swallowing a lump the size of his fist, Spengler leaned out and peeked around the corner. A second later he slipped back and nodded.

“It’s here.”

“What is it?” Stantz asked.

“What do you think it is? It’s a ghost. See for yourself.”

The three tiptoed quietly into the hallway and looked on in amazement, There, floating about four feet off the floor between the stacks, was a glowing ethereal presence, a swirl of colored lights bobbing among the books. Stantz attempted to raise yet another instrument, but Venkman slapped it down. “No sudden moves,” he whispered, not knowing if the ghost even registered their presence, but unwilling to take chances. Spengler slowly closed his gaping mouth.

“Look. It’s forming.”

The light swirled in tighter and began to take on a definite shape, that of a somewhat portly torso, the essence still vaporous where the arms, legs, and head should be. The lines of two large, sagging breasts began to emerge.

“What is it?” whispered Stantz.

Venkman shrugged. Whatever it was was hardly threatening in this state. “It looks like a pair of breasts and a pot belly.”

Stantz very slowly raised his camera and began to take infrared photos. Spengler toyed with the aurascope. A head and arms began to take shape.

“It’s a woman,” Spengler gasped.

It was. The apparition had taken on the form of a matronly, somewhat elderly woman, complete with a bun of silver-green hair and a dress of the style popular around the turn of the century. She was reading a book. Venkman noticed that there were still no legs connecting the phantasm to the floor, but he wasn’t in the mood to quibble about it. This was pretty amazing.

“Nice goin’ Egon,” he whispered.

Stantz snapped another picture, then moved to switch cameras. Their subject had still taken no notice of them. “I told you it was real.”

“Yes, you did, Ray. So, what do we do now?”

Stantz shrugged. “I don’t know. Talk to it.”

Venkman nodded. Why not? He took a step forward, the other two moving in behind him. The phantom still hovered silently in the air. “What do I say?”

“Anything. Just make contact,” Stantz replied, snapping pictures as fast as he could work the camera. Venkman squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and cleared his throat.

Nothing.

“Uh . . . hello. I’m Peter.”

This time she turned in his general direction and seemed to look right through him. “Where are you from? Originally?”

The apparition put a finger to its lips and mimed a shushing sound, then went back to its spectral hook.

“Ray, the usual thing isn’t working. Think of something else.”

“Okay, okay,” Stantz whispered. “I got it. I know what to do. Stay close to me. I have a plan.”

Stantz edged forward, shifting from foot to foot, the others keeping close behind him. Venkman’s mouth was dry. He realized that he hadn’t been so frightened since he was a kid. Spengler’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. Stantz paused when they were barely three feet from the woman. “Okay, now everybody do exactly as I say. Ready?”

Venkman and Spengler nodded.

Stantz tensed to spring. “Okay . . .
get her!”

He flew forward, his arms reaching around the ghost. She was, of course, not there, and Ray Stantz hit the bookcase, bounded back, and went down on top of Venkman and Spengler, who had run into each other. The ghost reformed a few feet away and exploded upward and outward in a rush of air into the form of a hideous demon, claws outstretched, coming toward them, They stumbled back, smelling the horrible breath of the thing, feeling the heat as it screamed forth a single word.

“QUIET!”

On the steps out front, Harlan Bojay and Robert Learned Coombs were getting ready to move along. The day was waning and they had lost the sun, the drop in temperature portending the approach of winter’s chill. Bojay shook himself loose from his perch and staggered up, a day of inactivity and half a bottle of wine having taken their toll, when the front doors of the library flew open and three men came tearing out, pursued by the chief librarian, Delacourte. Bojay knew who he was because the man had hassled him more than once, but something had kept him busy this day because Bojay and Coombs had remained unmolested. Bojay drew back behind the stone lion to listen as Delacourte caught one of the men by an arm. “Did you see? What was it?” he cried, but the other man broke free, shook his head, and ran, calling over his shoulder. “We’ll get back to you.” After a moment Delacourte headed back into the library, looking very much like a man summoned to witness an execution. Perhaps his own. Bojay shook his head. Curious town, he thought, and getting curiouser by the moment.

Then something caught his eye and he moved out to see what it was. A small curved and rounded black object on which lights flashed. He picked it up carefully. It had obviously been dropped by one of the running men. He listened, for it made a humming sound, but he could find no button, switch, or trigger. Very strange. Coombs moved up to his shoulder to look at the artifact.

“Whatcha got there, Harlan?”

“I honestly do not know, my friend. A cunning device of some kind. A mechanism, an artifact, a construction.”

“Do you think we can get anything for it?”

Bojay smiled. “At least a bottle of wine.”

Some people are so fond of ill luck that they run halfway to meet it.

—Douglas Jerrold

It is over seventy blocks from the New York Public Library’s main branch to Columbia University, and it seemed to Venkman that it took him at least half that distance to get Stantz and Spengler stopped and settled down. They bundled into a taxi and rode uptown in silence, none of them feeling like speaking. The taxi driver frowned, knowing that three sourpusses like that wouldn’t be much good for a tip, but Stantz had regained his usual cheery composure by the time they arrived and the cabbie did better than he had figured. As he headed off for his next fare, the three trudged back across campus, falling into their old ways. Stantz babbled happily. Spengler worked calculations on his pocket computer. Venkman wondered how difficult it would be to get them both committed, ghosts or not.

“It really wasn’t a wasted experience,” Stantz said doggedly. “I mean, you can’t expect results from every experiment, can you?”

Venkman was having none of it. “I can expect to survive them, can’t I? I mean, that thing almost killed us.”

Stantz shrugged, plainly embarrassed. “Hey, Peter. It was only a ghost. Come on, you know there’s an element of risk in the scientific method.”

“Yeah? Yeah? ‘Get her’? That was your whole plan? You call that science?”

“Hey, I guess I got a little overexcited. Wasn’t it incredible? I’m telling you, this is a first. You know what this could mean to the university?”

But Venkman wouldn’t buy it. “Sure, this is bigger than the microchip. They’ll probably throw out the entire engineering department and turn the building over to us. We’re probably the first serious scientists to ever molest a dead old lady.”

Spengler stepped between the two, adjusting his pace to theirs. “I wouldn’t say that the experience was completely wasted. Based on these new readings, I think we have an excellent chance of actually catching a ghost and holding it indefinitely.”

“Then we were right,” Stantz said enthusiastically. “This is great. And if the ionization rate is constant for all ectoplasmic entities, I think we could really clean up—in the spiritual sense.”

But Venkman had stopped, his mind reeling. The beginnings of an idea were forming in his agile mind. Why, there could be opportunities in this; for advancement, for scientific discovery and recognition . . . For money. But could they get the university to go along with it? He hurried to catch up to the two.

“Spengler, are you serious about actually catching a ghost?”

Spengler turned a stony expression toward his friend. “I’m always serious.”

“Wow!” Venkman said softly. He glanced at Stantz, who grinned. Spengler just nodded solemnly.

“It can be done.”

Venkman reached into his pocket. “Egon, I take back every bad thing I ever said about you. Here.” He held up a candy bar. Egon smiled delightedly and reached for it, but Venkman pulled it back. They looked at each other for a moment, then Venkman pressed it into his hands. “You earned it . . .”

“Baby Ruth,” Spengler said reverently, ripping off the paper and cramming it into his face. “Gooomph!”

They passed into the familiar dark confines of Weaver Hall, talking excitedly, making their way past knots of students and an antlike stream of men carrying equipment.

“If you guys are right, if we can actually trap a ghost and hold it somehow, I think I could win the Nobel Prize.”