Ghostbusters (6 page)

She wanted to run, to scream, anything, but she was paralyzed by the insanity of what she was seeing. A temple, in my refrigerator. And then, ever so slowly, the doors began to open.

Dana was struck by a terrible impression of what she could think of only as living evil, nothing definite, but the worst, most frightening feeling she had ever known. I’m going mad, she thought. It’s that commercial, it’s Louis. I’ve been working too hard. The temple doors clanged back.

The steps somehow continued to rise beyond into the sky or a mass of blue vapor, and there was something on them that she could not see. It was too far away and somehow indistinct, as if it were not mortal. A superior being, a god. Now, why would I think that, Dana thought with one part of her being while the rest of her concentrated on breathing, on not passing out. And it sees me. It’s coming for me.

The chanting stopped. There was an instant of fearful silence, and then a voice so deep, so shocking, that it could only have come from the thing on the stair.

“ZUUL!”

Dana lunged forward, slamming the door, cutting off the evil orange light, the rising chant. She turned, stumbled toward the phone, trying to remember the mnemonic number, and then decided that she’d just as soon not be here anyway. Grabbing her purse, she ran for the elevator.

Ghosts remind me of men’s smart crack about women, you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.

—Eugene O’Neill

Janine Melnitz was beginning to have serious doubts about her job. In fourteen days no one had come in, no one had called, nothing had happened. Zip. She’d read
Vogue, Cosmo,
and
Playgirl,
made and consumed endless coffee, browsed through the various spirit guides, done her nails at least six times a day, and attempted to have conversations with the three men she was working for. It wasn’t easy. Stantz seemed to spend all of his time under the hood of their disreputable ambulance, converting it into something he called an Ectomobile. Venkman hustled in and out, made phone calls, and smooth-talked their creditors. And Spengler was always buried in a mess of wiring and constructing devices he would not explain and which Janine could not even pronounce.

Today, at least, he was doing something comprehensible, crawling around beneath her desk, connecting up an alarm system. Occasionally he would poke his head up, look around to get his bearings, and disappear below once more, his hands full of tools, a wire clamped in his mouth. Janine sighed luxuriously. He
was
cute, in an intellectual sort of way. Janine had always had a thing for brainy guys. They were all so absentminded. They needed guidance, and Janine liked to guide. Maybe I can draw Egon out, get to know him, find out what he’s really like. At that moment, as if on cue, Egon Spengler popped up from under the desk, adjusted his glasses, and groped around for his coffee mug. Janine favored him with a warm smile.

“You’re very handy, I can tell,” she said, passing him the cup. “I bet you like to read a lot.”

“Print is dead,” Spengler snorted derisively.

Janine was undeterred. “That’s very fascinating to me. I read a lot myself. Some people think I’m too intellectual. But I think reading is a
fabulous
way to spend your spare time.”

Spengler looked at her, shrugged, sipped his coffee.

“I also play racquetball. Do you ever play?”

“Is that a game?”

“It’s a
great
game,” Janine said brightly, warming to the chase. “You should play sometime. I bet you’d be good. Do you have any hobbies?”

Spengler nodded. “I collect spores, molds, and fungus.”

Janine’s jaw dropped, and she eased her chair backward a few inches. “Oh. That’s a very unusual.”

Spengler shook his head confidently. “I think it’s the food of the future.”

“Remind me not to have lunch with you.”

Dana was still confused and upset when the cabbie let her off. At first she could not believe he could have gotten the right address. The neighborhood looked so seedy. It was obvious that nothing had happened in this corner of town in a long time, at least nothing pleasant. Some long-haired Chinese hoods watched her from a warehouse loading dock, debating whether to approach her. There must have been some mistake, she thought, and then she spotted the old fire-house with its red and white “no ghosts” logo. There really was such a place. She hurried to the door and went in.

In the garage bay a man was hanging over the fender of a battered Cadillac ambulance, cigarette in mouth, attempting to dismantle what appeared to be the carburetor.

“Excuse me,” she ventured. He looked up. It was Stantz, the tall one from the commercial, but she still asked, “Ghostbusters?” He pointed toward the rear. There was a redheaded woman at a desk, filing her nails and looking disconsolately at a bank of phones.

“Excuse me?”

“Yes, may I help you?” the redhead asked pleasantly.

“I—I uh, wanted to see a Ghostbuster.”

“Hello!”

She looked up. Another of the men from the commercial—the cute one—was standing in the doorway to an office. He dashed forward, leapt the low rail between the office and the garage bay, and stepped up to her, a bit too close for her tastes, but she didn’t pull away. He’s not nearly as threatening as that thing in my refrigerator, and I do need help.

“I’m Peter Venkman, What can I do for you?”

“Well . . . yes . . . I’m not sure. What I have to say may sound a little . . . unusual.”

Venkman slipped his arm around her, kicked open the gate in the railing, and ushered her toward the office. “We’re all professionals here, Miss . . .”

“Barrett. Dana Barrett.”

“You just sit down and we’ll talk about it.” He leaned back out of the office. “Janine, hold all my calls.”

“What calls?”

The office was not what she had expected, but then neither had she expected to find a cult living in her refrigerator. It was a cross between a doctor’s office and a TV repair shop. Diplomas hung on the walls, but the books on the shelves competed for spaces with oscilloscopes, dials, gauges, meters, nests of colored wire, and a series of strange instruments. She recognized a video camera and recorder, what appeared to be a polygraph, several tuning forks, a computer terminal, a crystal ball, a mine detector, and some old television sets. The tall one, Stantz, appeared in the doorway, wiping his hands on a rag, and smiled.

“Customer, Peter?”

“Yes. This is Dana Barrett. Dana, Ray Stantz. Ray, you want to get Egon in here?”

She told her story, then allowed the one with glasses, Spengler, to hook her up to the polygraph and fit a headset device that he called a visual imaging tracker. She told the story again, Peter nodding pleasantly, and the other two monitoring their instruments and making little guttural sounds to each other as they compared results.

“And you slammed the door and ran? You didn’t open it again for a second look?”

Dana laughed nervously. “After seeing what I saw? Would you have opened that thing again, Doctor?”

Venkman’s smile was engaging. “Yes, I would have. But then, I’m a scientist. So, what do you think it was?”

She paused, listening to the tick-tick of the polygraph. The colored map of her head on the imaging scope flickered and shimmered, Stantz watching it intently. She turned back to Venkman, who cocked his head to one side.

“Well.”

“I think something in my refrigerator is trying to get me.”

Venkman’s expression seemed to flatten uncertainly, then he gave a little bob of his chin, as if he were trying to swallow this new theory. He didn’t look entirely convinced.

“Generally, you don’t see that sort of behavior in a major appliance. What do you think, Egon?”

Spengler looked up from the graph. “She’s telling the truth—or at least she thinks she is.”

“Of course I am. Why would anyone make up a story like that?”

“Some people want attention,” Venkman said. “Some are just crazy.”

Stantz tapped the video screen. “You know, Peter, this could be a past-life experience intruding upon the present.”

“Or a race memory stored in the collective unconscious,” Spengler said excitedly. “And I wouldn’t rule out clairvoyance or telepathic contact either.”

It was too much for Dana. “I’m sorry I’m laughing. It’s just that I don’t believe in any of those things. I don’t even know my sign.”

Spengler tapped on his calculator, then looked up. “You’re a Scorpio with your moon in Leo and Aquarius rising.”

“Is that good?”

Venkman winked. “It means you’re bright, ambitious, outgoing, and very, very sexy.”

“Is that your professional opinion?”

“It’s in the stars.”

She smiled at him, then thought, no, Dana. Not another nut. First a science fiction writer, then that filmmaker last year. You’ve got enough trouble with a monster in the cold cuts without a dingbat in the bedroom. Carefully she asked, “What would you suggest I do?”

“Why don’t I check out the building?” Stantz said. “It may have a history of psychic turbulence.”

“Good idea, Ray.” Venkman looked at Dana, his eyes merry but unreadable. “Were any other words spoken, any that you remember?”

“No, just the one word, ‘Zuul,’ but I have no idea what it means.”

“Spengler, why don’t you check out the literature, see if you can find Zuul in any of the standard reference works. I’ll take Miss Barrett home and check her out.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Your apartment,” Venkman corrected himself smoothly, slipping on his sport coat, and hefting a device that looked like an electronic watering can with a squeeze-bulb arrangement. He held it out like a golf club, took a few practice swings, then slung the thing over his shoulder. “Got to find out what’s really bothering you.”

Oh fine.

On the taxi ride over, Venkman tried to put her at ease with small talk, noncontroversial chitchat, but she was having none of it. Still too upset from her earlier experience, he decided. Not the best thing for a chick to find a temple of devil worshipers in among the meat loaf. I know it’d put me off my feed.

Deep down, Peter Venkman was still skeptical that what they were doing would work. Even after the incident at the library he wasn’t convinced that there was a way to capitalize on this thing. Oh sure, Egon said they could catch and hold ghosts, and he and Ray were certain that the equipment they had built would do the job, but it was a job that no one had ever done before. And staking your life’s work and your life savings—or at least Ray’s life savings—on Egon’s word could reasonably be considered self-destructive behavior. Egon was unconventional, even by Venkman’s standards.

Egon was the one who had attempted to nullify gravity by wrapping a high tension power cable around a playground jungle gym, certain that reversing the polarity of that much steel would propel the object into space. He had succeeded merely in browning out the northern third of Ohio for six hours until someone had discovered his immense electromagnet and cut the line. Granted, Spengler had accomplished a few firsts. He had been the first scientist to hypnotize a hamster by subjecting to it low-frequency radio waves. Peter tried it later and found that it also worked on coeds. Egon, in an attempt to build a death ray, had come up with a sonic gun that had little effect on people but set off soft-drink cans at a hundred yards. After the night that Peter had gotten drunk and taken it down to the local Coca-Cola warehouse, Egon had insisted on dismantling it.

On the plus side, the detectors that had registered the presence of the ghost in the library had been Spengler-designed and Stantz-built, and Ray vouched for the soundness of Egon’s theories regarding the traps and containments they had designed for the firehouse basement. “They’ll catch ’em and hold ’em,” Ray had assured him. “I’ll stake my life on that.” “We all will, Ray,” Venkman had replied, wondering how dangerous a ghost could be. Well, if it can throw books around, I don’t think we’re talking about
Sesame Street
here.

Peter Venkman sometimes wondered how he’d ever gotten mixed up with Stantz and Spengler. He had never believed in most of the things those two took for granted—ghosts, Bigfoot, UFOs, the Bermuda triangle—what Venkman referred to as “the implied sciences”; and Venkman had only entered the study of parapsychology because grant money had been readily available and because the study of ESP was in its infant stages and therefore formless, malleable. There was no map, no structure, and if a thing has no structure, who’s to say that the one you put up is wrong? In fact, until Dean Yaeger had thrown in the monkey wrench, Venkman had had a pretty successful career studying just about whatever he wanted. I’m not a dilettante, he decided. I’m just surveying new ground. And as long as a surveyor keeps moving, keeps out there ahead of the builders, he’s got a job.

Dana Barrett’s building was a 1920s high rise on Seventy-eighth and Central Park West, a towering ziggurat of red stone. From the street he couldn’t see the top but sensed that there was some sort of ornate cap. Well, if it was built in the twenties, maybe someone had planned to moor dirigibles to it. The doorman gave him a funny look as he carried the analyzer into the lobby but spoke pleasantly enough to Dana. Good-looking woman, he decided. Intelligent, attractive, sensible, the kind that never falls for me. He stood behind her in the elevator, gazing at the soft wisps of hair curling down over her neck, wondering what she’d be like. Probably thinks I’m not good enough for her. Still in all . . .

The apartment was dark, but he noticed that she had no fear of walking in, switching on the lights, and hanging up her coat. The disturbance had been in the kitchen and she was satisfied that it had stayed in the kitchen. Maybe, but after that fiasco at the library I’m not so sure.

“Have you thought of moving out—at least until this disturbance blows over.”

“No,” she said firmly. “If I moved out now, I’d be acknowledging that what happened was real. I’m not ready to do that.”

“Gutsy, that’s good,” Venkman muttered, looking around the living room for dark corners, hidden secrets, spotting her cello instead.