Ghostbusters

by Nancy Holder

  “Uber’s here,” the short one said to the tall one. They headed for the curb as a Fiat stopped in the street and the traffic zoomed around it. The tall one glanced at Abby over her shoulder. “Try Shark Tank. That’s what we did.”

  “Awesome, what is your product?” Abby called after her as they headed for the waiting car.

  “Glow-in-the-dark eye makeup,” the girl replied. She and her companion both opened their eyes as wide as they could, and then closed them.

  “Now you see us; now you really see us,” they said together.

  It had to be a marketing slogan.

  “We’re breaking sales of six million this year,” said the tall one. She looked at Erin and clucked her tongue in disapproval. “We’re nakedeyes.com. Use the contact form and ask for Tonya. That’s me. We can fix you up.”

  “You must be a librarian,” the short one added as she slid in beside Tonya.

  Then the door closed and the Uber sped away.

  “I can’t believe that,” Erin said in exasperation.

  “I know. Six million dollars? For glow-in-the-dark eye makeup?” Abby whistled.

  “No, they thought I was a librarian,” Erin sputtered. With an effort she gathered her dignity. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

  “Come on and I’ll show you some real glow-in-the-dark,” Patty said, stepping up beside them. “And for the record? I don’t believe those two. If you have six million dollars, you dial up your limo, not an Uber.”

  “Also, I think your dress looks very nice,” Abby assured her.

  They made their way across town on foot. Not for the exercise—no cabbie would stop for them. When they finally reached the entrance to the Seward subway station, they left the busy streets and headed down the stairs. Patty helped Holtzmann lug the unwieldy proton box and duffel to the mezzanine, where they piled it back onto the cart liberated from Kenneth T. Higgins. She pointed out her ticket booth as they hurried past. “That’s me!” she said, waving energetically at the clerk on the other side of the window. “Hey, Milt!” she called out to him. “We got a ghost on track three.”

  He made a sour face and looked away.

  “Nice,” Patty said. “Real nice.”

  The subway platform was thinly populated, and although they drew stares from the sprinkling of commuters, they had no trouble weaving their way to the far end.

  Erin looked at the black maw that loomed before them and could not repress a shudder. But Abby, Holtzmann, and Patty had no problem. Abby turned on the PKE meter. Holtzmann pushed her cart. And Patty led the way into the darkness.

  “I told my supervisor and he insisted I take a drug test,” she said. Her harrumph echoed down the tunnel. “You know the old York prison used to be right up there above us? That’s the first place in New York they fried people in the electric chair. But I always knew something was weird down here.”

  The dim and widely spaced lights flickered and Erin looked around nervously. She wasn’t alone. Even Abby seemed a bit skittish.

  “Strong correlation between negative incidents and paranormal presence,” Abby said authoritatively. “It’s very difficult for anything to pass through the barrier back into our world. So any spirit determined enough to pull that off, well, that’s likely an angry ghost.”

  Staying as close to the others as she could, Erin reviewed the details of Patty’s story about the apparition. She claimed to have seen a man floating above the ground wearing an old-timey prison uniform and a sparking skullcap designed for electrocutions. Patty had described his angry, evil smile. Gertrude Aldridge’s smile had been angry and evil, too. Erin doubted that Mrs. Barnard had ever smiled a day in her life, but she had angry down. And there was also the strange electronic device Patty said had exploded in the tunnel at the same time she had her encounter.

  Erin tried not to breathe deeply. The air smelled bad and it was thick with the fine grit raised by the trains. Plus there had to be rats galore, so decomposed rat poop was in the mix. Between the overhead lights the passage was dark, and under the lights, dirty—more than a century of grime and grease deposits coated everything. She hoped she didn’t accidently brush against something, or worse, trip and fall on the floor. Although if she fell, she’d have a good excuse to go shopping and she could buy some different clothes.

  But I like my clothes the way they are. Walking along, she had a thought: No one started commenting on my attire until I was up for tenure. Aha. That’s the problem. I didn’t look conservative enough. I was too hip for that ship. That’s why Abby likes my style.

  The lights flickered again, plunging the tunnel into darkness for a fraction of a second. Everyone jumped, including Patty. Then she pointed at something just ahead. A guy—who looked human enough—was spraying paint on the tunnel wall.

  “Hey! What did I say?” Patty asked him.

  Wearing the guiltiest possible expression, the kid tried to pretend he was using a can of spray deodorant. Patty scoffed and advanced on him, arms swinging, jaw set.

  “That is not spray deodorant! Have you yet again mistaken me for a stupid person?”

  “Is he down here a lot?” Abby asked.

  “Oh, this is his art studio.” Patty rolled her eyes.

  Abby walked up to the kid. “Have you seen a Class Four semianchored entity around here?”

  “You might want to try English,” Patty suggested drily, but Abby didn’t seem to pick up on the joke.

  “Have you seen a ghost?” Erin said.

  The graffiti artist looked at them coolly. “Yeah, I’ve seen a ghost.”

  A ripple of excitement coursed up Erin’s spine. “Can you describe it?”

  The guy thought about it for a moment. Then he spray painted the outline of a ghost on the subway wall.

  “Don’t you draw a ghost on that wall,” Patty ordered him.

  He stopped. Then he added a few more touches, fleshing the image out—so to speak.

  “Do not make me tell you again.” Patty was insistent.

  He stopped. Then sprayed some more.

  “I mean it,” her voice rising.

  He stopped, finally and for real, and stepped aside so they could admire his masterpiece. It was a cartoony outline of a white ghost with a hand outstretched. Its face was winsome and at the same time a bit goofy. It didn’t look at all like an evil electrocuted criminal.

  “I don’t want that damn ghost up there,” Patty said.

  The kid grabbed another can of paint and quickly drew a red circle with a line through it over the ghost. When Patty grabbed the can of spray paint from his hand, he abandoned his art and ran back toward the station. Patty walked on, clearly pissed. Erin paused while Holtzmann snapped a shot of the kid’s work with her phone, saying, “I can make a logo with that,” and then they followed.

  She and Holtzmann struggled to push the proton box over the rail ties. Too much speed and the vibration as they bounced over the ties could damage the sensitive innards; too little speed and they lost momentum. Ahead of them, Abby had out both her PKE and EMF meters. Patty kept glancing farther down the tunnel; Erin assumed she was hoping to see the ghost again, or hoping that she wouldn’t.

  “We don’t have much time,” Patty told them. “No one touch the third rail.”

  She’s more worried about a train coming than the ghost, Erin translated. If we get hit—or touch the third rail—maybe we’ll start floating around down here. As she pictured them as ghosts, trapped forever in a stinky black tunnel, something tapped her on the shoulder. She shivered and shut her eyes. Just her imagination playing tricks.

  It happened again.

  She tipped her head back and looked up. Something was dripping from the ceiling, and had dripped onto her shoulder. She moved under the light. It was the same green slime that Gertrude Aldridge had barfed all over her. It was running down her blazer.

  “Oh, c’mon, I just dry-cleaned this,” she protested.

  Looking at the splotch of goo, Patty wrinkled her nose.
“Yeah, I figured you were gonna get your fancy clothes dirty down here. I should have given you some coveralls. My bad. The MTA won’t pay your dry-cleaning bills. Trust me. I’ve tried. Cheap bastards.”

  “We’ve got something over here.” Abby gestured to a large discolored splotch on the wall. It looked like something had scraped away the layers of grime. “Are these burn marks?”

  Everyone grouped around her.

  “That’s where I saw that weird sparking thing,” Patty said, pointing a finger at the spot.

  “What was it?” Holtzmann asked.

  “Darlin’, if I knew, I wouldn’t have said ‘that weird sparking thing,’” Patty told her.

  There were fragments of metal and plastic scattered in an arc over the floor of the tunnel. As Abby began collecting them, Erin picked up and examined a piece that lay by her foot.

  “That looks like fission scorch,” she said.

  When she held it out, Abby leaned over and sniffed it. “Huh. Smells of both electrical discharge and isotopic decay,” she declared. “Holtz, smell this. You agree?” Holtzmann gave the piece a good sniff as well, and then she stuck out her tongue and licked it. “Definite neuron burn,” she concurred, smacking her lips.

  They all leaned in and smelled the piece again. The sprockets in Erin’s mind turned as she tried to reverse-engineer what the components of the device might have been and what it had been constructed to do. It certainly hadn’t been a bomb; the explosion was secondary to function. Overall it seemed familiar—power source, materials, construction—yet she couldn’t quite put a finger on it.

  “All right, if you’re all done making out with that piece of dirty garbage, we only have a few minutes,” Patty warned them. “For real, I gave us no cushion room.”

  As soon as she finished the last sentence, the tunnel lights flickered for a third time and went out.

  “Huh, boy,” Erin moaned. She hoped their high-tech equipment hadn’t caused the blackout. No, wait. Maybe she did hope that, because if they weren’t to blame, there could be another weird sparking thing hidden somewhere in the tunnel with them. Not knowing what was coming next or from what direction made her knees start to quake. At that moment, she wished she were back at headquarters, prying ancient pot stickers from the linoleum with a butter knife.

  “Did you see that? The eyes?” Holtzmann said.

  Always the joker, Erin thought, bristling. “Holtzmann, please don’t mess … oh.” Suddenly she saw what Holtzmann was talking about—farther down the dark tunnel, it looked like a pair of glowing yellow eyes hanging disembodied in space. Or maybe it was just two lightbulbs that hadn’t blown out. But they were spaced about as far apart as human eyes would be.

  “That is … unsettling,” she managed to mutter. An understatement for sure, but it was the only adjective she could summon from the turmoil in her brain.

  “Holtzmann, illuminate the subject,” Abby said.

  “Yeah, get some light on that,” Patty said.

  Holtzmann aimed the beam of her flashlight down the tunnel. Erin let out a soft little whimper. The yellow eyes belonged to a tall, spindly ghost with a thin, skull-like face. He was wearing a hundred-year-old prisoner’s uniform and a sparking electrocution cap, and he was floating in the middle of the tunnel staring at them.

  Immediately the antenna on the PKE meter in Abby’s hand started spinning wildly. “That is somehow more unsettling,” Erin said.

  “And fantastic!” Abby cried. “That’s another Class Four, but way more ionized than the Aldridge ghost. Look at the meter. I’ve gotta get this on film.”

  Erin tried, but couldn’t take her eyes off the ghost as it rose into the air and glared down at them. Her mind was replaying the very first time she had laid eyes on the vengeful phantom of Mrs. Barnard, recalling that strange cognitive dissonance that assured her what she was seeing wasn’t there, even though she knew it was. She knew …

  Oops. Erin realized she had missed part of the conversation around her, because Patty was in the middle of a sentence. “You say somebody’s trying to bring ghosts back?” she exclaimed. “Why the hell would a person do that?”

  “No idea,” Abby said. “Let’s bring this bad boy back to the lab. Holtz, power up.”

  Take it back to the lab? A ghost? Erin opened her mouth to suggest a more prudent course of action, such as run and hide, but Holtzmann and Abby were already swinging into action. Holtzmann hit a switch on the proton box and frantically typed into the keyboard on top as Abby pulled out her camera and began to record.

  “This is early stages,” Holtzmann told Erin and Patty, “so it’s a little rough. I’m going to adjust the levels. Erin, hold this.”

  Holtzmann handed her a large, cumbersome proton wand that looked like the business end of a vacuum cleaner. It was attached to a flexible tube that was in turn attached to the proton box. And even for its size, the wand was surprisingly heavy. It took two hands to lift it.

  “This will shoot a proton stream, so just aim it at the ghost when I say. Oh god, I almost forgot—”

  Aim it at the ghost? Erin thought incredulously as Holtzmann clapped what looked like a metal neck brace around her neck. A look of horror crossed her face as she realized it was attached with a thick wire to the machine.

  “Just a little bit of grounding,” Holtzmann explained. “Okay, don’t move too much. Or talk. And definitely don’t sweat.”

  Oh god, oh my god. Erin stood stock-still while Holtzmann fiddled with some switches on the box. Holtzmann’s flashlight, held tucked under her arm while she tweaked the settings, was pointed down. When she pointed it back up, Erin’s jaws clenched and every muscle in her body contracted.

  The ghost had cut the distance between them in half! When? How? They hadn’t heard a thing. The PKE and EKE meter antennas were whirling in a blur like the rotors of miniature helicopters.

  “Hey, look,” Holtzmann announced with glee. “He’s getting closer.”

  Without moving her lips, Erin said, “Holtzmann.”

  “Aim the wand at it,” Abby told her.

  Erin succeeded in unfreezing her muscles just enough to comply. A weak little beam skittered out of the massive tip—a mere fizzle of faint, watery light. Proton stream, my ass. Squeezing the wand seemed like her only option, but that had no discernable effect on output. Erin felt the panic rising in the back of her throat.

  “Well, that’s underwhelming,” Abby grunted. “Use more power.”

  “Trying.” Holtzmann played the dials like a deejay. “Okay, Erin, do it again.” As Holtzmann straightened up, her flashlight beam once again illuminated the tunnel.

  Erin choked back a squeal. The ghost was even closer. She could read his prisoner identification number on the strip of scorched fabric sewn to his chest. Abby kept filming. Holtzmann kept dialing. And in desperation, Erin aimed the wand at it again. The beam that exited the nozzle was definitely more intense, more like a set of beams that vacillated from particle to wave and back again, and the wand vibrated against her hands like a runaway chainsaw. The oscillation was accompanied by a sizzling noise, and this time the undulating beam extended just far enough to touch the ghost. He stopped moving, but she couldn’t tell if it was from the beam or if he’d just decided to play it coy. The wand was definitely getting heavier, which was impossible, unless the constant force of gravity had changed. No, that was crazy talk. A more likely scenario was that the violent shimmying and the effort to keep it on target were draining the strength from her arms.

  I’m dripping sweat, she thought. She told me not to sweat and I’m pouring sweat. I’m drowning in sweat. I’m going to get electrocuted, too. The unpleasant irony of that made her squirm.

  “Can this thing get stronger, please?” she begged.

  Holtzmann shot her a wistful look. “Not at the moment. Live and learn, I guess. I wish I had time to run back to the lab. You couldn’t hold that for a while, could you?”

  The crackling beam was striking the ghost’s chest and h
olding it in place no more than a yard away from her. Its yellow eyes bored into hers. Its smile revealed hideous, jagged teeth. It reached out for her, arms waving, stretching. “No!” she said emphatically, her whole body shaking from the strain.

  When the ghost suddenly pushed forward, the proton beam acted like a solid object between them; like a battering ram, it knocked Erin off balance and onto her tush on the dirty gravel. Somehow she kept the beam focused on the ghost and held him at bay. The ghost no doubt thought he was holding her pinned to the ground. He looked like he wanted to tear her limb from limb. She knew if something untoward happened to the beam she would die in the subway tunnel covered in ghost slime and sweat with an enormous dog collar around her neck. She imagined the headline on her tabloid, front-page obituary: “Defrocked Scientist Commits Suicide in Bizarre Autoerotic Ritual.” Talk about laughingstock.

  Keep him centered in the beam and you’ll be okay.

  Suddenly there were more lights, much brighter, focusing in on her, blinding her. What the—

  “That’s the train. We gotta move!” Patty cried.

  Even if Erin could have moved under the pressure the ghost was putting on her, she was so sopping wet she didn’t think she could summon the traction to push herself back up. She wanted to let the others know, but because she was expending every ounce of strength she couldn’t utter a peep.

  Abby pulled out a small metal box that she had called a “ghost trap” when they were loading up the duffel bag. “We are not losing this thing. Erin, drag the ghost back to the platform.”

  The ghost leered at Erin, flailing his arms, fighting to close the distance between them and only succeeding in pushing her harder down onto the gravel. He paused to laugh as Erin stammered, “W-w-what?”

  “There’s no time!” Patty shouted. “Grab her sides!”

  Patty grabbed the back of her metal collar and jerked her toward the platform. The jerk didn’t break her neck, but felt like it might have; that’s how strong Patty was. Like a mama lion carrying a cub, she hoisted Erin to her feet as Holtzmann and Abby grabbed hold of her arms. For all that, even as she was dragged bodily away, Erin continued to keep the beam on her target and hold the ghost off them. As she was hauled down the tracks, so was the ghost. Until that instant, he hadn’t realized that he was being more than just repelled—he was caught in the beam like a bug on a pin. It was something he did not enjoy, and he demonstrated his displeasure by swinging his arms and kicking, and trying to take a bite out of them with his snaggly spectral teeth. Connected to the wand in her hands, the proton box banged along behind them as the subway train bore down.