Ghostbusters

by Nancy Holder

  It wasn’t that she was advocating mass hysteria. Far from it. If they could educate the world about the reality of ghosts and do something about the dangerous ones—She caught herself. Were there any that weren’t dangerous? Granted, their experience was limited, but so far they hadn’t run across any nice, happy ones. Which made her wonder if the good ghosts went to heaven and had no urge to return here. She and Abby had made a point of avoiding the philosophical and religious in their research. They were too emotional subjects for most people, and emotion tainted data. Plus they were both faith-based, which was all well and good, but that didn’t meld well with the scientific process and controlled experimentation. If she and Abby had included that sort of material in their book, it would have raised even more red flags among their peers.

  The idea that ghosts could be divided into good and bad categories was comforting in a way because it reduced the number of likely homicidal intruders waiting on the other side for their chance to cross and cause havoc. But it didn’t change the fact that there were a lot of them—half of the historical total of roughly a hundred billion dead people was still seven times more people than were alive today—and the fifty billion evil spirits were, well, lined up and waiting. Erin felt it would be better to let the world know what it was up against than to leave it to the mercy of spectral rage. Especially when the whole thing was being facilitated by some mad scientist. Hawkins and Rorke said they had the situation under control. But everything she had seen was out of control. They claimed to have made people forget all kinds of things, but had they? Where was the evidence? Then she had a chilling thought. Could “make them forget” be a department euphemism for “terminate?” It would be a low-tech, low-cost solution to a complex problem.

  Talk about scary.

  * * *

  The unsmiling agents drove them back to their headquarters and silently rejected Patty’s offer of an autograph. When Abby asked them if they wanted a copy of their book, Agent Rorke said, “That’s been effected.”

  Erin had no idea what he meant by that, but honestly? She was relieved when they left.

  When they turned on the TV, Ms. Lynch was being interviewed on NY-Local 1 News. Below her, the crawl read “Jennifer Lynch—Mayor’s Office” to leave no doubt on whose behalf she was speaking.

  “It’s fraudulent and unsafe,” she told the reporter. “These ‘Ghostbusters’ are just creating an unnecessary panic in a sad grab for fame. We went to their lab. There’s absolutely nothing there. People can rest assured that these women are just bored and sad.”

  Erin, Abby, Holtzmann, and Patty stood transfixed by the character assassination and invective. Then Erin lost it; with a sweep of her arm she shoved a bunch of equipment off the worktable. It crashed to the ground. Glass shattered. Tendrils of white smoke rose from the linoleum. It didn’t make her feel any better that she had been warned the cover-up was in process. She knew she was right, and had been all along. She had had unquestionable proof that she had never lied, that these brave women in their cockamamy uniforms had saved lives and could save many more.

  She should have had tenure at MIT, never mind lowly Columbia! Speaking engagements, books, their own show on the History Channel—those should have been the rewards coming their way, not claims by their own government that they were pathetic, delusional liars. Every discovery they had made had been confiscated and then publicly savaged by people in authority who had no idea what they were talking about. It was like one of those recurring nightmares, except that Erin was not naked. Or flying. Or both.

  She watched Kevin take in the mess on the floor, then the mess she was becoming. A kind of light came on behind his eyes. Like he was waking up from a daydream and fully aware of his surroundings for the first time.

  He said, “Guys, what the hell was that thing before?”

  “It was a ghost,” Abby said impatiently. “What do you think goes on here?”

  Kevin seemed a more little lost than usual. “I didn’t know. I answer phones in a Chinese restaurant where four women sit around in painters’ outfits. When people ask me what I do, my response is, ‘I have no idea.’ I guess I knew it had something to do with Chinese food and science. I couldn’t put it together.”

  Erin did not feel smug. Just kind of dazed at the revelation.

  “I asked you in the interview if you believed in ghosts,” Abby reminded him.

  “Yeah,” Kevin said. “I thought that was weird.”

  Abby persisted. “Just yesterday I was telling you all about a Class Three with distinct human form!”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Kevin responded.

  Holtzmann spoke up on his behalf. “That’s fair.”

  “Listen,” Kevin insisted, “we have to get ahead of this thing.”

  The sudden change in his demeanor and tone of voice was remarkable, almost as if in this moment of crisis he had reached deep into some previously untapped reservoir of strength and intelligence.

  “Form a group to study it,” he continued assertively. “Clear out all that kitchen equipment and build something to fight the ghosts.”

  “Oh my god, this is what we’re doing,” Abby said.

  “Well, we need to do more,” Kevin said emphatically. “Okay, look, we sell the restaurant. We don’t really get any customers anyway. It’s time to face it. This restaurant isn’t working.”

  Erin gaped at him. So did Abby.

  “Are you serious right now?” Abby asked.

  “I just—I’m really confused,” he confessed.

  Kevin had run out of steam. Erin completely understood why. That was a whole lot of words he had strung together. And many of them would have made sense in some other context. He seemed to be taking everything in and processing it, but very, very slowly, and of course, incorrectly.

  “For now, could you please get some baking soda out of the fridge?” Holtzmann asked him. “Erin just spilled hydrofluoric acid all over the floor.”

  Whoops. That was what was making the caustic white smoke. It didn’t help the smell ambience that the hydrofluoric was burning up decades of ground-in cooking sauces, shrimp shells, and fortune cookie crumbs.

  Kevin donned rubber gloves and started cleaning up the mess Erin had made. She imagined the top of her head smoldering, too; that was how massively she was still pissed off.

  “They think we’re a laughingstock,” she said.

  “I don’t think anybody’s actually laughing,” Patty said. “That’s a very serious news report.”

  “Painting us as delusional frauds,” Erin replied.

  “So what?” Abby said. “We’re not.”

  “But nobody knows that!” Erin said. “In fact, look, it says ‘Frauds!’ Right there on the screen.”

  It did say that—directly under a group shot of them mugging under the theater marquee.

  “But that doesn’t make it true,” Abby reiterated. “Kevin, sweetheart, don’t rub the baking soda in your eyes,” she added.

  “But they burn,” Kevin whimpered.

  Abby gestured for Holtzmann to help him and she rushed to his aid, guiding him over to the sink, which was full of dirty dishes from days gone by. Bending him over it, she sprayed water on his face.

  “Last week we saw a Class Four malevolent apparition,” Abby reminded them. “And then we came back here and we figured out how to catch one. And it worked. Who cares what anyone else says? We know what we’re doing. And there’s bigger issues at play here. Look.”

  She crossed to one of their computers and gestured to the screen. “A wailing spirit sighted on Sixth and Twenty-sixth. A spectral polar bear on Park and Forty-fifth. Weeping walls at a thrift store in Chelsea. Someone’s clearly trying to open the barrier and unleash the dead and we need to—”

  Then Erin had a thought. “Wait,” she said. “Sixth and Twenty-sixth…” The synapses started to fire. She ripped down the map of New York and with a pen started marking off the addresses that Abby had read aloud.

  “W
here did we find the first device?” she asked.

  “At the subway,” Patty replied.

  Seward Street, Erin thought. Right. She scanned the map. “Here’s the theater. Give me the other sightings…”

  Abby obliged, sliding the computer toward her. Erin notated all the locations and drew two lines straight through Manhattan. They intersected.

  She indicated her handiwork. “What do those look like to you?” she asked.

  “I can’t see,” Kevin replied.

  “Ley lines,” Abby and Holtzmann said together.

  “What are ley lines?” Patty asked.

  “A hidden network of energy lines across the Earth. Currents of supernatural energy. Let me see if there’s a map of New York City.”

  While she hunted, Erin took up the thread of her explanation for Patty. “Supposedly if you look at sacred sites and weird events around the world, you can draw a line between them. And where lines intersect create an unusually powerful spot. Abby and I always dismissed it because it seemed too likely to happen at random to have any merit.”

  Holtzmann pulled a book out from under a pile of stuff. Erin recognized the cover; it was a copy of a ley line map book she and Abby had used for research in the olden days. As she flipped it open to the page showing the city’s ley lines, Abby put their marked-up New York map next to it. The ley lines matched up.

  “I guess there is some merit,” Abby muttered, shaking her head.

  Erin felt tension building in her stomach as the implications dawned on her. This was not good. Not good at all. “He’s been using those devices to charge up the ley lines.” Erin jabbed a finger on the intersection. “He’s creating a vortex.”

  “If he has something powerful enough in here”—Abby pointed to a block under the crossed lines on the map—“he could rip a hole right through the barrier.”

  Holtzmann picked up the thread. “Letting everything out there come in here.”

  Patty swallowed, then said, “I feel like I should say something, too.” But she didn’t. That was it.

  “What’s there now?” Erin asked Holtzmann, again tapping the intersecting lines.

  Holtzmann squinted at the city map. “‘The Mercado.’”

  Erin typed the name into the computer search engine.

  “The Mercado,” Patty drawled. “Well, that makes sense.”

  Holtzmann looked at her. “Why’s that?”

  Patty turned to them. “The Mercado has one of the weirdest histories of any building in New York City. Check out these online reviews.” She clicked a tab and began to scroll down through them.

  “Half a star. ‘I felt strange noises there,’” she read aloud.

  “‘Loud noises in my closet throughout the night.’

  “‘I took a man back to my room and the next morning he was missing.’”

  Patty clucked her tongue. “Oh girl,” she said, “that was a one-night stand.”

  “So it’s a haunted building?” Holtzmann asked Patty, trying to maintain the course of their conversation.

  Patty shook her head. “Nah, this is even before it was a building. All sorts of massacres happened there. Like a peaceful trade with Captain Warren and the Lenape Indians and suddenly everyone dies. You know, no other section of New York has more power outages? My cousin got hit by a car in front of there.” She shrugged. “But he’s an idiot.”

  Erin processed that as she scrolled down the current Web site of the Mercado. There was a picture of the entire staff standing in the lobby. Everyone was smiling except for one person: a guy with a high forehead and big blue eyes. He stood straight-faced and humorless wearing what appeared to be a short-sleeved doorman’s uniform.

  Patty looked over her shoulder. “Hold on!” she cried, pointing at the screen. “That’s the dude from the subway! Talking about cataclysms.”

  At the intersection, trying to create a vortex; they had their mad scientist. Erin said, “Bingo.”

  “Fire up the car and let’s get over to this high-rise of horrors,” Abby said.

  They piled into ECTO-1 and, siren blasting, barreled down the street. Patty called out the directions to Holtzmann from her phone’s GPS.

  They found a place to double-park and headed through the massive front doors into the Art Deco building’s lobby, dominated by a dramatic swirling floor, a double staircase that joined at a landing, towering gilded ceiling columns, and sculpted light fixtures. A clerk in a snappy uniform jacket stood with her back to them behind a wide, highly polished service desk. She was speaking on the phone. A walkie-talkie sat on the desk in front of her.

  She said into the phone, “And did you try adjusting the thermostat before making this call? Oh, what a wonderful tone you’ve decided to use with me. I see the cold draft has not cooled your temperament.”

  This person is not from the Midwest, Erin thought as she took in the clerk. We are far more polite than this. She said, “Excuse me?”

  The clerk half turned and gave the group a hold-on-a-sec hand gesture.

  “Uh-huh,” she said into the phone. “Well, that sounds more like a your problem. Hold on.” She looked up at the Ghostbusters. “What do you want?”

  Abby said, “Where’s your janitor?”

  The clerk sighed and made a face. “Ugh, that guy. What has he done?” Then she waved a hand as if throwing in the towel. “I don’t care, take the stairs down, get him.”

  The four rushed over to the door that she’d indicated and headed down a flight of stairs. Walking along the hallway below, they found a sign on the wall that read GENERATOR ROOM. A blinding light flashed from underneath the metal door. It was that kind of light, weird and sparkling. They exchanged knowing looks and, fanning out, powered up their proton packs.

  They pushed open the door and rushed through it, single file. The generator room had been redecorated, turned into a chamber of mirrors of various sizes, all crackling with intense supernatural energy. In the dizzying reverse reflections, Erin glimpsed an incredible Byzantine hellscape stained with clouds of burnt-orange smoke, brimming with ghosts that looked like demons, ghouls, and regular ghosty people, all scratching and clawing against the glass, frantic to break through the assembled mirrors and enter this dimension.

  At the center of it all, a man stood bent over a strange round machine that looked kind of like a large brass boiler adorned with glowing windows and large conduits and wires protruding from it, some of which dipped into jars of burbling ectoplasm at his feet. Two long poles, one on either side, were ringed with dark metal coils. He was working a set of levers like a concert maestro. It was the same man whose unhappy face had caught their attention on the Web site. Rowan somebody. Erin wondered what had prompted a scientist so clearly gifted to take such a drastic step over to the dark side. She highly doubted it was a failed bid for tenure. Not that it mattered, except as a reminder to self—whatever happens, don’t go bonkers.

  “Stop!” Abby said in a commanding voice. “Okay, I know you’re having a ball bringing all these ghosts into New York, but the thing is, we happen to like this world the way it is.”

  Rowan looked up and smirked at them, surprisingly unruffled by their intrusion. “I don’t. I think it’s garbage,” he said. “And when the barrier is destroyed, the armies of the undead will pester the living.”

  That gave Erin pause. She cocked her head and said, “Okay. I mean ‘pester’ doesn’t sound too bad—”

  “They will pester the living with unspeakable pain and torment. Everyone will be eliminated.”

  “Different meaning of pester,” Erin said. As in make up your own definition and run with it.

  “Yeah, that’s something else,” Holtzmann concurred, deadpan.

  Abby was not done berating him. “You don’t like people? I get it. People can do terrible things. Don’t get me started on this one.” She nodded at Erin, which, hey, like wasn’t that over?

  “But then there’s good things!” Abby continued. “All sorts of good things like … like soup
and…” She paused. Struggled. “Jesus, why is the only thing I can think about right now soup? I’m very stressed out. Just stop the machine, damn it!”

  Rowan hurriedly stepped toward a power coupling. There were two, one on either side of the massive chassis. Abby aimed her proton wand at him and he froze. Not that she had immobilized him literally, but because he didn’t want her to use it.

  So he knows what it is, Erin thought. Has he seen us in action? Was he there in the tunnel or the theater, watching?

  The wail of approaching police sirens pierced the air. Erin wondered who had called them. The desk clerk? Or had certain scary quasi-terminators been watching from afar?

  “Don’t take another step!” Abby shouted. “The police are on their way down.”

  The strangest look passed over Rowan’s face. How could he be excited about the police coming to take him to jail?

  “Well,” he said, merrily, “in that case, bye.” With that, he turned around and placed a hand on each of the metal poles. Thus the circuit was closed, and electricity zinged through his body. It sucked so much juice from the system that the room lights actually dimmed. His legs straightened abruptly and he shot up on tiptoe like a ballet dancer, convulsing in a wild straining dance. When his body collapsed to the floor, smoke rose from his hair. His eyes were wide open and staring at nothing. He wasn’t breathing. He looked dead.

  “What?” Erin cried, unable to fathom this turn of events.

  Abby said, “Turn the machine off!”

  Holtzmann ran over and shut down the power grid. The tiered mirrors all went instantly blank.

  The Ghostbusters bent over Rowan. His chest still wasn’t moving. He was totally, irredeemably dead.

  “Weird move,” Holtzmann opined.

  “Holtz, are we okay?” Erin asked, gazing anxiously at the normal-looking mirrors.

  Holtzmann read the machine’s meters. Erin had never been more grateful to have an engineer on the team than when she reported, “Yeah, I think so.”