by Nancy Holder
He turned around, left hand cupping his right elbow, fingers of his right hand touching his chin—a classic speculative pose.
“Is now a bad time?” There was a mischievous glint in his eyes, and his lips formed the faintest hint of a mocking pout.
In person, Martin Heiss was a bit of a jerk. A pompous, smug, self-satisfied jerk.
Could he sense that Erin was weirded out by this uninvited intrusion? Did he think that meant that they had something to hide? She caught herself reverting back to old Erin, the self-doubting, fearful Erin. What the heck did she have to be defensive about? They had caught a frigging ghost, for pete’s sake. An empowering image flashed through her mind: her shouldering a proton pack, then beam-smacking his tailored butt down the stairs and out of the building, like what Patty had done to that dude in front of the theater. Liar, liar pants on fi-ahh!
“Actually, it is—” Abby began, but Erin cut in.
“Not at all. Please, have a seat.” She turned to Kevin. “Kevin, could you get Mr. Heiss some water?”
The professional paranormal debunker sat down. The Ghostbusters joined him, their expressions ranging from anxious to indifferent to jolly.
“I sure hope you don’t mind being recorded.” Again he flashed that self-satisfied smirk, as if he thought they were stupid and he was so smart that he was going to make them look even more stupid on TV.
Erin’s inner bravado began to weaken—in postproduction editing he could put whatever they said in an unflattering context. “Well, I actually would prefer—”
He whipped out a camera and put it on the table. Then he hit record. He also pulled out a notepad.
Weiss the weasel had played it perfectly, and from the way his smirk broadened into a grin, he knew it. If she challenged him now over the fact that he was recording the interview, he could air her unwillingness to go public. That would make the Ghostbusters seem like charlatans.
“Oh, okay.” Erin shifted in her chair. Then Kevin set down a glass of water that was inexplicably only one-eighth full. Just enough for Heiss to choke on?
“Let’s start light and easy,” Heiss said, actually batting his eyelashes at her. “Ever hear of the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge? James Randi offered to pay one million dollars to anyone who can prove paranormal claims under scientific testing criteria. No one has. Why are you pretending to catch ghosts?”
The unprovoked insult and condescension lit Abby’s fuse. She said, “We only know what four percent of the universe—”
“Breathe,” Erin told her gently. Turning to Heiss, she said, “Sir, we believe in the scientific method. I’ve dedicated my life to it. We have been working on bringing the paranormal into a controlled environment so we can supply that proof. This has been very difficult to do. But we have now done just that.” She gestured to the ghost trap. “At 4:23 P.M. today we successfully trapped a Class Three vapor.” She said it clearly. Let him record that.
“You’re saying there’s a ghost in the box?” Again, there was glee in his eyes and a smirk on his mouth.
Contempt dripped from his chin like ectoplasm. Mockery, apparently Heiss’s forte, was the lowest form of humor, and Erin wanted to make him eat a yard of it. “Yes, I am,” she said with confidence. She was proud of what they had achieved, and rightfully so.
There was another flurry of eyelash batting. “Well, I would just love to see it. Wouldn’t that be a treat.”
Abby stepped in. “You can’t. We still have to establish the best method of testing that can contain it in the lab.”
“What a shame.” Phony sigh. He quickly wrote something in his notebook.
“Otherwise we would show you,” Erin assured him.
“Hey. You gotta keep it contained.” He shrugged, beaming at her. “What can you do?”
Erin decided to appeal to him, one scientific professional to another. “Listen, I know this sounds like we’re making it up.” She gestured to their jumpsuits and proton packs. “Obviously, we look a little ridiculous right now.”
“You look like the Orkin of Bullshit.”
Ooh, she could tell that he loved saying that. His eyes shined in triumph. He had probably worked on it on the way over. What a jerk—
“Well, it was real nice of you to stop by,” Patty said.
Erin realized it was the first time she had spoken to Heiss. He’d probably riled her up making fun of their uniforms. And who was he, anyway, to sit there and rush to judgment when the scientific method demanded that one keep a clear and objective mind when new theories were being advanced? He wasn’t just a jerk, he was more than a jerk. He was a scurrilous, slanderous, pompous buffoon who made a living by humiliating people. Well, she was about to put him in his place.
“You wanna see it?” Erin said. Her caustic tone and inflection made it a declarative statement: You don’t have the balls to see it.
“I would love to see it,” he said, assuming the elbow-resting, chin-cradled speculative posture.
“Too bad. He can’t,” Abby insisted.
“I think he should see it,” Erin shot back.
“This jerk’s approval doesn’t matter,” Abby said. “There are more important things at play.”
“I bet,” Heiss said. He was just loving this.
Erin had already locked in her course. “We’re showing him.”
As she stood up and started over to the trap, Holtzmann and Patty shot each other looks of alarm. They bolted for the wall hooks, pulled down their proton packs, and shouldered them. The devices made a scary pinging sound that built to a roar as they powered up to max output. Patty and Holtzmann tapped their wands, ready to recapture the freed ghost.
Erin moved the trap from the lazy Susan to the floor in front of the table. “I would stand over there behind us,” she suggested to Heiss.
He didn’t move a muscle. “I weirdly think I’ll be just fine here,” he insisted, practically hugging himself with glee.
Abby stepped beside Erin and blocked her hand from the trap’s reset. “Erin, no. We finally caught an entity. I’m not letting you do this.”
“Okay, fine, fine, I get it,” Erin said.
Abby said, “Good,” and backed off.
Just as Erin knew she would.
She immediately hit the release button and the two halves of the trap snapped open with a loud clunk. A cloud of steam puffed out and rose to the water-stained ceiling. Then … nothing.
No ghost.
Heiss’s bemused expression was terrible to behold—it looked painted on.
“Oh come on,” Erin said after a few very long seconds passed. She tapped the side of the box with her toe. Still nothing. Gave it a harder kick. Nada. She was baffled. How could the specter have gotten out? Had the force field broken down? Had the power supply failed for a microsecond? Had that caused the polarities to reverse? Had its not-of-this universe molecules simply evaporated? Had it found an unknown way to return to the other side?
Shaking their heads in disbelief, Patty and Holtzmann lowered their wands.
Heiss stood, and with a flourish turned off his camera. “Well, it was lovely meeting you—”
In the span of a single heartbeat, a crushing and humiliating defeat became something infinitely worse. Without warning the theater ghost burst out of the trap, and fangs bared, in full demonic mode flew straight at Heiss, who seemed rooted to the floor. The intervening distance was less than ten feet. Before anyone could say or do anything, it swung the debunker into the air and threw him through the window. Right through it, with tremendous force—window frame blown out, glass shattering. Glittering fragments hung in the air as Heiss’s shoe soles toppled out of sight; his warbling scream presumably cut short by unyielding pavement. The ghost darted through the emptied window frame and disappeared.
“Oh my god!” Patty cried. They ran to the window, and as they stuck out their heads the ghost vanished over the rooftops across the street. Erin stared down in shock. How far the mighty had fallen.
; Shortly after they put in a 911 call, sirens began to wail in the distance, and a few minutes later an FDNY EMT ambulance and NYPD squad cars arrived, lights flashing. Then the second part of the ordeal began.
A patrol officer named Stevenson took charge of the scene. He pulled aside and interviewed the Ghostbusters. He quickly made it clear that he was no more accepting of the existence of the paranormal than Martin Heiss was. It was still too soon to know how to refer to TV’s favorite debunker. “The late” seemed somewhat premature. Heiss had been rushed away in the ambulance with screaming sirens and spinning lights. Erin recalled that when the firemen left with dead Mrs. Barnard, there was no such fanfare, but rather a quiet, leisurely departure.
“I’m going to ask you one more time,” the officer said. “And if you tell me a ghost threw him out the window again, I swear to Christ, you’re all answering this behind bars.” He stared hard at Holtzmann. “Okay, here we go. What happened?”
Holtzmann muttered, almost inaudibly, “Ghost did it.”
Stevenson cocked his head and glared at her. He looked like a Tasmanian devil about to take down a wombat. “Say that louder, please? I just want to be sure I’m hearing you right.”
But this is supposed to be our day, Erin thought. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right. In a few unforgettable seconds, hard-earned glory had slipped through their fingers. Their ghost was gone, and Martin Heiss was just another stain on the sidewalk of life.
The police officer was about to put on the cuffs when several black SUVs pulled up. Two men in suits got out and flashed wallet badges at the cops.
“Official business. We’ve got this,” said the red-haired man, stepping through the line of uniformed police.
“You need to come with us,” his dark-skinned companion told them. He had a very intense and soulful expression, not angry or hostile. It took a second for Erin to put her finger on it: the expression in his eyes was disappointment. Like he could see through every layer of a person’s façade and into their private thoughts, and what he saw saddened him.
Erin balked. “Why? Who are you guys?”
“The mayor would like a word,” said the first man.
The Ghostbusters were packed into one of the black SUVs and driven at high speed through the streets of Manhattan. When pressed, the black agent finally identified himself as Frank Hawkins, and his red-headed partner as Rorke but that was all he would reveal. If Martin Heiss hadn’t just been thrown out of their window, Erin might have been more assertive about her rights as an American citizen and demanded to know what was going on. Even Abby seemed cowed by the way they had been scooped up, and she kept glancing warily at the other black SUVs, one leading and one following their vehicle. Holtzmann said something self-deprecating about her streak of putting men in comas, and Patty asked the back of Hawkins’s head if he’d seen her on TV.
“We’re famous, you know,” she added.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and that was all he said. He didn’t look up in the rearview mirror. Patty rolled her eyes and crossed her arms and went on at length about how some men felt threatened by strong women. After that, everyone fell silent as it sank in how weird it was to be driven to an elected official’s office after almost being arrested for attempted murder on the same day that you captured and lost a ghost. Erin wondered if these guys were two of the mythical “men in black” who went around threatening people who had seen UFOs not to say anything about it. Which would make them factual. “Mythical” thereby being inaccurate …
The dreamlike sense of reality accompanied her as they were let out of the SUV and shepherded to a reception area outside the mayor’s office. Before they stepped through the double doors, Hawkins told them the mayor’s assistant, Jennifer Lynch, would be also present.
Lynch was a very striking young woman. She stood beside the mayor, who was seated, as Erin and the others entered and lined up like good soldiers to discover what they were here for. The mayor seemed almost merry as he regarded them, which eased Erin’s mind greatly. Maybe he wasn’t going to throw them all in jail.
“There they are,” he said in a friendly tone. He had a very thick New Yawk accent. “Sorry for all this drama. Please, have a seat.”
They sat uncomfortably in the comfortable chairs.
Erin felt compelled to speak, to justify the Ghostbusters before the meeting started. She leaned forward in her chair and said, “Listen, something big is happening. We’re not frauds. We are scientists—”
“We know you’re not frauds,” the mayor said. “Because we’ve been monitoring the situation as well.”
It was difficult to imagine something topping what had already happened that day, but there it was, right in their laps. It turned out they were not alone. Bombshell! At first blush, it was wonderful, exciting news, and then a barrage of questions started popping into Erin’s head. From their expressions, the others were clearly puzzled, too.
“Agents Hawkins and Rorke are with Homeland Security,” Ms. Lynch said. “We’ve been investigating this extremely quietly.”
Erin was pleased to learn she had guessed correctly.
“So what do you know?” the mayor asked her.
Erin looked at Abby, then Holtzmann, and then Patty. Evidently they were cool with her acting as spokesperson. “Um, just that we believe someone is creating devices to attract and amplify paranormal activity.”
“And this activity could be escalating toward a large-scale event,” Abby added.
Well put, well put, Erin thought. It was just supposition at this point, but it was a scary supposition. The mayor concurred.
“Well, that sounds terrible,” he said earnestly. “I certainly don’t like the sound of that.”
Ms. Lynch nodded in agreement. Erin sagged with relief. If he believed them, if he really bought into the whole nightmare scenario, then that meant he would—
“Okay. Well, listen. Thank you. Great work. Really.” The mayor beamed at them warmly. “But it’s time to knock it off.”
Abby said, “Excuse me?”
After the build-up, Erin was flummoxed and flabbergasted.
The mayor gestured to the two unsmiling agents. “These gentlemen are on it. Let the government do its work.”
“The mayor’s concern is that you’re drawing way too much attention to yourselves,” Ms. Lynch elaborated.
Erin couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “I think we keep a pretty low profile,” she argued.
Agent Hawkins spoke up. “You drive a hearse with a ghost on it. You use an unauthorized siren. Do you know how many federal regulations you are breaking on a daily basis?”
“We’re going to have to make the public believe you’re frauds,” the mayor added.
“What?” Erin cried, her voice cracking shrilly.
Ms. Lynch took over again.
“The human mind can handle only so much. If people knew what was happening right now, there would be a panic. We’ll have to put out information that the concert was a hoax. Otherwise, there would be mass hysteria.”
To Erin’s shock, her three friends nodded in agreement.
“Listen,” Abby said. “All we care about is being able to continue doing our work.”
“Now, that’s true,” Erin said, trying to recover a reasoned, convincing tone. “But it just seems like all those people already saw what happened anyway and what we did. It must be all over the Internet by now.”
The others seemed to accept her premise, but Agent Rorke shrugged.
“You mean a bunch of whacked-out metalheads who saw a high-tech prop that went out of control? And then their cell phone photos were all erased by a magnetic wave blast? We’ve got it covered.”
“Jesus,” Abby blurted.
Men in black. Not mythical. Erin filed that away.
She was not finished. “It’s just … if we could back up one second … can’t there be both things? And I’m just spitballing here, but like, what if we told people what we did but then said it’s all un
der control now?”
“I think Miss Lynch here made it very clear we don’t want mass hysteria,” Abby reminded her.
“Okay, okay. Fair enough.” Erin thought a moment. “But what is ‘mass hysteria’? I mean, is it really that bad?”
“Let me show you a clip of it,” Ms. Lynch offered. She hit play on a video on her laptop labeled MASS HYSTERIA and showed it to the group.
It was a montage of selected incidents from around the world. Not pretty. People running around in circles, waving their arms in the air, tipping over vegetable carts, and yelling at the top of their lungs.
Erk. Erin felt queasy.
Patty said in horrified fascination, “Why would you even have that on your laptop?”
“Right, right,” Erin said, trying to find her way back to solid ground. But why would someone have that on their laptop? “It’s just, I feel like the cat’s already sort of out of the bag.”
“Are you finished?” Abby sniped.
“The cat’s been out of the bag before,” Agent Rorke said, “and yet people always get bored and put it back in. A police officer in New Mexico reports a UFO encounter. The crew of the SS Ourang Medan mysteriously dies. The entire town of Langville, Montana, goes missing.”
“What?” Erin raised her brows. “I never heard of that.”
Agents Hawkins and Rorke stared at her, waiting for her to draw the obvious conclusion.
“Time to get back to work,” Hawkins said.
“Well, on that horrifying note,” the mayor said, “thank you all so much for what you’ve done. We will always be grateful for your service. Please think of me as a friend.” He smiled reassuringly, then added, “A friend who will ignore you on the street, but a friend nonetheless.”
“A long-distance friend,” Ms. Lynch emphasized.
“Exactly,” the mayor said. “A pen pal. But without letters. Or any kind of contact. Never send me anything in writing.”
She remembered the cheers from the audience when they had sprung into action to catch the hideous, demonic theater ghost. The way the media had converged on them outside, asking about their fashion choices. But most of all, she remembered how good it felt to prove to the entire world that ghosts were real. And now that had all been taken away as if it had never happened.