Ghostbusters (2 page)

“No!” she cried. “I won’t do it again, I promise. I’ll never look at another dirty picture . . .”

And at that instant she turned the final corner and came face to face with the thing. They heard her scream all over the building.

There are worse occupations in this world than feeling a woman’s pulse.

—Laurence Sterne

Dr. Peter Venkman loved his work. He often said it to himself in precisely those words. “I love my work. I’m not always quite sure what it is, but I do love it. I love getting up in the morning. I love coming down to my lab in the basement of Weaver Hall. And I love getting paid by Columbia University for doing whatever it is that I do.” In fact, he often considered that a large part of what he did, perhaps the major part, consisted of just that: the search for identity, for purpose, for the meaning of just what it was that he did do. God, I love psychology. It’s so wonderfully . . . formless. You can get away with anything.

He smiled warmly at his two subjects. “Scott, Jennifer, are we ready?”

Jennifer favored him with a coy look and a quick anxious breath that made her breast rise and fall. She was convinced that Peter Venkman was a genius, or she soon would be. God, I love teaching, Venkman decided. He turned to Scott.

“Okay, partner?”

Scott Dickinson nodded nervously, his mouth pumping away on a quid of gum. He smiled crookedly at Brenda, who froze him right out. Venkman pulled a card out of the Zener deck and held it up.

“All right, what is it?”

Scott set his jaw and concentrated, but Venkman could tell that part of his attention was on the copper cuff strapped to his wrist, its wires running to the control box on Venkman’s side of the table.

“A square?”

“Good guess,” Venkman replied, “but no.” He turned the card over. It was a star. “Nice try.” He pushed a button, sending a mild shock through the boy. Dickinson twitched, but smiled gamely.

The next card was a circle. “Okay, Jennifer. Just clear your mind and tell me what you see.” She did, chewing on one adorable finger.

“Is it a star?”

“It is a star! That’s great. You’re very good,” Venkman said enthusiastically, burying the card in the deck and extracting another. A diamond.

“Scott?”

Scott rubbed his wrist nervously. “Circle?”

“Close, but definitely wrong.”

This time Scott gave a little whimper. Venkman ran through a few more cards, letting Scott get only one right, watching the boy’s growing impatience, his fear of the electric punishment. He even inched the current up a little. The monkeys had been able to take it, it shouldn’t have any effect on a sophomore business major. And if it did, who would notice? Besides, it was time to wind up this phase anyway.

“Ready? What is it?”

Jennifer licked her lips excitedly. “Ummm, figure eight?”

Venkman buried the triangle. “Incredible! That’s five for five. You’re not cheating on me, are you?”

“No, Doctor. They’re just coming to me.”

“Well, you’re doing just great. Keep it up. I have faith in you.” He considered stroking her leg under the table with his foot, see how she’d react, then rejected it. Might get Scott’s leg by mistake. He smiled thinly at the young man.

Scott Dickinson’s own smile had slipped a few notches since they’d started. He let out a noisy breath, his tongue flapping on his uppers, and sniffed loudly.

“Nervous?”

“Yes. I don’t like this.”

“Hey, you’ll be fine. Only seventy-five more to go. What’s this one?” Wavy lines.

“Uh . . . two wavy lines?”

No, you don’t. Venkman buried the card. “Sorry. This just isn’t your day.”

This time the kid’s knees came up against the table and his gum popped out and skittered across the floor. “Hey! I’m getting real tired of this.”

“You volunteered, didn’t you? Aren’t we paying you for this?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know you were going to be giving me electric shocks. What are you trying to prove?”

Venkman shrugged softly. “I’m studying the effects of negative reinforcement on ESP ability.” Dickinson leaned across the table and pulled off the electric cuff. “I’ll tell you the effect. It bugs me.

“Then my theory is correct.”

“Your theory is garbage. Keep the five bucks. I’ve had it!” He slammed the door hard enough to rattle the glass, leaving Venkman and Jennifer alone in the lab. Venkman shook his head sadly.

“That’s the kind of ignorant reaction you’re going to have to expect, Brenda, from people jealous of your ability.”

Jennifer smiled bravely. “Do you think I have it, Dr. Venkman?”

Venkman jumped as something touched his ankle. Her foot. He favored her with his shyest, most boyish smile.

“Please. Peter.”

“Okay . . . Peter.”

He leaned forward across the table and took her hands in his. “Definitely. I think you may be a very gifted telepath.”

At that moment his arm came down on the button, sending a soft jolt through both of them. Jennifer jumped back, her sharp breath once again lifting her breasts. Ah, the wonders of modern science.

Suddenly the door to the lab flew open and Ray Stantz hurried in. He didn’t bother to close the door behind him, just ran to the storage bins and began pulling out equipment. Venkman noticed that someone had once again defaced the door. Written in red—in what was supposed to pass for blood, no doubt—were the words
VENKMANN BURN IN HELL
. His name had been misspelled.

He waited a moment, then sighed.

“Ray. Excuse me, Ray?”

“Yeah, Peter . . .”

“Ray, I’m trying to have a session here.”

Stantz pulled his head out of the parts bin, his eyes wide and wild with excitement. “Sorry, you’ll have to drop everything. We got one.”

Jennifer was looking at Stantz as if he had just fallen off the surface of the moon. Good thing he didn’t bring Egon, Venkman thought. He touched her hand.

“Excuse me for a minute.”

Stantz was plugging battery grid analyzers together when Venkman grabbed him by the arm. “Ray, I’m right in the middle of something here. Can you come back in an hour?”

Stantz put a finger to his lips, then dragged him back behind the bins.

“Ray, I’ve never seen you like this.”

“Peter, at one-forty this afternoon at the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, ten people witnessed a free-roaming, vaporous, full-torso apparition. It blew books off shelves at twenty feet away, and scared the socks off some poor librarian.”

Venkman thought of beautiful Jennifer, and weighed the thought of her against the clear call of scientific exploration. “That’s great, Ray. I think you should get right down there and check it out. Let me know what happens.”

Stantz handed him a valence meter and slipped the strap of a heavy duty tape recorder over his head. “No. Peter. This is for real. Spengler went down there and took some PKE readings, Right off the scale. Buried the needle. We’re close this time, I can feel it.”

So can I, Venkman sighed, but it looks like I’m not going to feel it now. “Okay, just give me a second here. And take this stuff . . .”

He slipped up behind the girl, placed a hand on each shoulder, and smiled sadly. She looked up at him as if . . . as if . . . Oh, the things I do for science.

“I have to leave now, but if you’ve got the time I’d like you to come back this evening and do some more work with me, say . . .”

’Eight o’clock?”

Venkman laughed delightedly. “I was just going to say eight. You’re fantastic.”

“Until then . . .”

Fantastic.

The cab let them off in front of the library. Venkman made sure that Stantz paid the driver, then helped him bundle his equipment out onto the sidewalk.

“Help me carry this.”

“Sure, Ray.” Venkman picked up a plasmatometer about the size of an electric razor. “You got the rest of that?”

“There’s something happening, Peter, I’m sure of it,” Stantz said, struggling to his feet with a double armful of gear. The tape recorder around his neck made him look like a pack animal. “Spengler and I have charted every psychic occurrence in the tri-state area for the past two years. The graph we came up with definitely points to something big.”

“Ray, as your friend, I have to tell you that I think you’ve really gone around the bend on this ghost stuff. You’ve been running your butt off for two years, checking out every waterhead in the five boroughs who thinks he’s had an experience. And what have you seen?”

“What do you mean by seen?”

“As in ‘seen.’ You know, ‘looked at with your eyes.’ ”

“Well, I was once at an unexplained multiple high-altitude rockfall.”

“Uh-huh. I’ve heard about the rockfall, Ray. I think you’ve been spending too much time with Egon.”

Peter Venkman was not the first person to have uttered those words. Throughout his childhood, in the quiet suburbs of Cleveland, Egon Spengler had provoked that reaction more than once. “I think you’ve been spending too much time with Egon.” While his friends were indulging in the delights of childhood—cutting school, shoplifting, minor vandalism—Egon Spengler was making a nuisance of himself at the public library, ordering books that the librarians had neither heard of, nor liked the sound of.
The Mysteries of Latent Abnormality. Electrical Applications of the Psycho-sexual Drive. Your Friend the Fungus. Astral Projections as an Untapped Power Source. The Necronomicon.

While his friends were playing pranks and throwing firecrackers. Egon was developing a compact new explosive made of guncotton and chicken dung. He wrapped a fist sized lump of the stuff in aluminum foil, set it atop a waist-high Erector set tower in a vacant lot, and surrounded it with three concentric rings of Plasticville houses stolen from his brother’s Lionel train layout, Then he ran wires to a handcrank generator and, retiring to a makeshift bunker he’d built, set the thing off. He’d been intending only to knock down the houses, but both houses and tower were vaporized, and he’d broken every window in a three-block radius. “I think you’ve been spending too much time with Egon.”

While his friends were going out on dates and fumbling around in each other’s underwear, Egon was observing their mating rituals through binoculars and taking notes. Then—based on a complex formula he had worked out involving ambient temperature, phases of the moon, tidal cycles for Lake Erie, and a dozen other factors—he calculated the exact number of cases of venereal disease that would be reported over the next three months, and posted his findings on the high school bulletin board. “If I catch you around that Spengler kid, you’ve had it.”

Somehow Egon survived to enter college, then grad school, then the real world, but it never quite affected him. He was always happier in the company of other mavericks like Stantz and Venkman than with the educators and businessmen with whom he was eventually forced to deal. He was always more at home with the arcane, the bizarre, the scientifically disreputable. Today he was at home with a table.

Venkman and Stantz found him sitting beneath a heavy oak reading table in the library’s Astor Hall, listening to the wooden underside with stereo headphones connected to a stethoscope. As usual, there was a large area around Egon totally devoid of people, and several patrons were peering warily at him from behind their books and newspapers. Even in New York, few people listened to tables.

Venkman motioned to Stantz to hand him the heavy copy of
Tobin’s Spirit Guide
, then rapped softly on the table. Egon froze, instantly alert, his wild eyes swinging from side to side. Oh boy, Venkman thought, this is wonderful. Any credibility we might have established with these people was officially shot down. He rapped his knuckles on the table again.

“Egon?”

Egon adjusted the control on his headset and peered closely at the table bottom, the rims of his glasses scraping the wood. Venkman slammed the spirit guide down on the top.

“Gnnaaauuuhhhh!”

“Egon, come out of there.”

Egon Spengler adjusted his glasses and goggled up at Venkman. “Oh! You’re here.”

“What have you got, Egon?”

Spengler clambered to his feet. “This is big, Peter. This is
very
big. There’s definitely something here.”

Venkman rubbed his temples. The day had started so well. “Egon, somehow this reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole in your head. Do you remember that?”

“That would have worked . . .”

Spengler’s explanation was cut short by the arrival of an unhappy-looking man in a rumpled suit. Venkman shook his offered hand.

“Hello, I’m Roger Delacourte, head librarian. Are you the men from the University?”

“Yes,” Venkman replied, all business. “I’m Dr. Venkman and this is Dr. Stantz. You’ve met Dr. Spengler . . .”

Delacourte nodded. “Thank you so much for coming. I’d appreciate it if we could take care of this quickly and quietly. You know . . .”

“I understand.” Venkman said soothingly. “Now, if we could see the woman who first witnessed the apparition . . .”

“Certainly.”

“You stay here and keep tabs on it, Egon,” Venkman suggested. No sense in shocking this poor woman twice in one day.

Alice Melvin had been made comfortable, which is to say that she had been stretched full-length on the couch in Delacourte’s office and was being tended by several of her colleagues. However, she seemed far from relaxed. Her body was stiff and severe, and little tremors passed through her limbs. Delacourte shooed the other women away and made introductions. While the woman related her experience with the card catalogue and the books, Stantz grew increasingly excited, until Venkman made him sit down, shut up, and take readings. Ray Stantz subsided behind the peeps and clicks of his apparatus. While he directed probes and counters at the librarian, Delacourte, and various inanimate objects in the office, Venkman tried to make some sense of the woman’s story, but it all boiled down to the fact that they would have to go into the stacks and look for the blasted thing. The woman didn’t look like a loony, but appearances can be deceiving. Spengler hadn’t seemed that crazy on first meeting either, and Stantz usually fooled most people, but nowadays you couldn’t tell. He decided to steer the questions around to credibility.