by Ed Naha
Janosz marched out of the restoration studio and through the darkened corridors of the museum.
He strode toward the rear exit of the building, past the security-guard station, and out the door, leaving a bewildered Rudy sitting at his security desk, pen in hand.
"Hey! Mr. Poha!"
Rudy watched the wiry artist disappear into the night.
Rudy shook his head sadly. Eggheads. "I knew he'd forget to sign out." He sighed.
In the darkness of Manhattan, Janosz walked calmly, his eyes ablaze with Vigo's power.
They shone a bright, bloody red.
9
Venkman and Stantz emerged from an all- night coffee shop on East Seventy-seventh Street as a cold wind howled through the dark canyons of Manhat tan. Carrying a small armful of pastries, sandwiches, and coffee, Venkman was the picture of enthusiasm ... a concept that made Ray Stantz nervous. He had seen Venkman like this before. When Venkman was happy, trouble was on the way.
"I love this," Venkman said, gushing. "We're on to something really big, Ray. I can smell it. We're going to make some headlines with this one,"
Ray Stantz frowned. "Hey, hey, hey, stresshound! Are you nuts?"
Venkman pondered the query but didn't reply.
"Have you forgotten we're under a judicial restraining order?" Stantz pointed out. "The judge couldn't have been clearer—no, I repeat, no ghostbusting. If anybody found out about this, we'd be in serious trouble. If we're going to do this for Dana, we've got to keep this whole thing low-key, low-profile, nice and quiet."
"What?" Venkman replied. "I can't hear you!"
Stantz winced. Venkman couldn't hear him, and the reason was standing three yards away. Egon Spengler, wearing a hard hat and work clothes, stood in the middle of the intersection pounding a hole in the street with a huge jackhammer. Safety cones and reflectors had been set up, and Egon had lit the whole area with powerful work lights.
Stantz handed Venkman his half-chewed Danish and walked into the work area, tapping Spengler on the back. Spengler nodded and handed Stantz the hard hat and the jackhammer. Ray took a deep breath and pro ceeded to rip the street to shreds.
Egon walked wearily over to Venkman, rubbing his sore right shoulder. Venkman smiled and handed him a cup of coffee. Egon wasn't overly impressed. "You were supposed to help me with this."
"You need the exercise," Venkman replied.
The two men put down their coffees and sand wiches and stood, picks and shovels at hand, ready to clear the rubble.
Venkman glanced over his shoulder.
A police cruiser was slowly making its way up the street toward the men's impromptu construction site. Venkman heaved a sigh. There was always a cop around when you didn't need one.
Stantz, in the middle of the road jackhammering away, didn't see or hear the police car approach.
The two cops brought the car to a halt direcdy behind Stantz and waited.
Stantz, noticing a new source of illumination be hind him, stopped the jackhammer. He heard a car idling very close behind him. He turned and, flashing a smile known only to beauty queens and politicians, froze in his tracks.
"How ya doin'!" one of the cops yelled from inside th e patrol car.
Stantz began to sweat. "Fine!" he said, his mind reeling. "It's cutting fine now."
The cop inside the car considered this and frowned. "Urn," he offered, "why are you cutting?"
Stantz glanced over at Spengler and Venkman. Venk man offered a beats-me expression.
Ray began to lose it. "Why are we cutting? That's a great question, Officer."
He turned sweetly to Venkman. "Uh, boss?"
Venkman tossed on a Consolidated Edison hard hat and, his lips working overtime, executed a fine imitation of a typical New York Con Ed repairman.
"What's the trouble?" he groused, ambling over toward the squad car.
"What are you doing here?" the cop asked.
"What the hell's it look like we're doing?" Venkman spat.
The cop was dumbfounded.
"I tell you what the hell we're doing," Venkman continued. "We're bustin' our butts over here 'cause some nitwit downtown ain't got nothin' better to do than make idiots like us work late on a Friday night. Right, Rocky?"
He faced Egon Spengler. Spengler nervously raised a fist. "Yo!" he barked, stymied.
The cops in the car nodded, accepting the expla nation.
"Okay, boys." The driver of the patrol car nodded. "Take it easy."
The patrol car puttered away. Ray Stantz heaved a mighty sigh of relief, trying to get his heart to stop pounding through his work clothes. Taking a deep
breath, he hunkered over the jackhammer and began pounding into the street again.
Bzzzzark.
The jackhammer stammered to a stop.
"I've hit something, guys," Stantz called. "Some thing metal."
Spengler and Venkman used their picks and shovels to clear away generations of paving material. There, at the bottom of the hole, was an ornate iron manhole cover. Stantz stared at the ancient slab of circular metal. On its top was engraved a strange logo, along with the letters NYPRR.
Stantz squinted at the weird manhole cover. "NYPRR? What the heck does that mean? Help me lift this."
Venkman and Spengler picked up crowbars and removed the manhole cover from the bottom strata of street. Stantz produced a flashlight and peered down into the dankness.
"Wow!" he theorized. "It's an old air shaft! It goes on forever!"
Spengler pushed his head inside the hole, along with his Giga meter. The indicator on the meter nearly flew off the machine. "Very intense," he said thought fully. "We need a deeper reading. Somebody has to go down there."
Venkman smiled at Stantz. "I nominate Ray."
"I second," Egon blurted.
"All in favor?" Venkman injected before Ray could respond.
"Aye," both Venkman and Spengler chorused.
Venkman turned to Stantz and pumped his hand. "Congratulations, Ray. You are nominated. You're one lucky guy."
Stantz nodded sadly. "Thanks, boys."
Standing as forlornly as a child being snapped into a bulky snowsuit, Ray Stantz allowed himself to be strapped into a harness by Venkman and Spengler. A cable attached to a huge winch was secured to his back. Ray strapped to his belt a radio, the Giga meter, and a small extension hook with a scooping device.
He sighed and climbed into the manhole, his com panions slowly cranking him down into the darkness.
"Is that dedication or what?" Venkman said to Spengler.
"Keep going," Ray called from the shaft. "More. More. Easy does it."
Inside the seemingly endless air shaft, Stantz rappeled off the metallic walls, descending slowly into a land of total darkness.
Stantz, unable to yell up to the surface, grabbed his radio. "I'm okay," he reassured Venkman and Spengler. "Lower ... lower."
He flicked off the radio and gazed into the murkiness around him. "Gee," he concluded sagely, "this is really deep."
Suddenly he felt himself kicking against thin air. The long shaft had ended. Stantz found himself spinning wildly at the top of some titanic tunnel. Stantz felt like a yo-yo on its last big spin.
"Hold it!" he cried into the radio. "Hold it."
The cable stopped moving.
Ray pulled out the powerful flashlight from his utility belt and, flicking it on, aimed it at the vast tunnel below.
Ray suppressed a gasp. He was dangling near the top of a beautifully preserved chamber with rounded, polished tile walls adorned with intricate, colorfully enameled Art Nouveau mosaics. Ray felt as if he had just leapt backward in time. He trained the flashlight on a
finely inlaid sign that identified the location. van horne
STATION.
Ray whistled through his teeth, scanning the walls with his flashlight.
The place looked like a subway passenger's vision of heaven.
Smiling to himself, he raised
his radio. "This is it, boys," he whispered reverently. "The end of the line. Van Horne Station. The old New York Pneumatic. It's still here."
Aboveground, Venkman shot a puzzled glance at Egon. "The New York Pneumatic Railway," Spengler explained. "It was an experimental subway system, com posed of fan-forced air trains. It was built around 1870."
Ray's voice crackled over the radio. "This is about as deep as you can go under Manhattan without digging your own hole."
Spengler cradled the walkie-talkie in his hands. "What's the reading, Ray?"
Belowground, Stantz shone his flashlight onto the Giga meter. The meter was going crazy. He whistled into his radio. "Off the top of the scale, Egon. This place is really hot. Lower me to the floor, will ya?"
Stantz felt the cable quiver.
Soon he was being lowered closer to the old tun nel's floor. He slowly scanned the area with his flashlight, eventually spotlighting the floor.
Stantz's eyes grew wide in terror. "Hold it!" he yelled into the radio. "Stop! Whoa!"
In the beam of his flashlight, Stantz saw not a solid floor below him, but rather a river of bubbling, pulsat ing, glowing slime. A torrent of disgusting ooze.
The cable jerked to a halt.
Stantz found himself dangling above the torrent of psychokinetic mucus.
He lifted his feet as high into the air as he could, to avoid the splats of slime emitted by the constantly churning river.
Sweat began to form on his forehead. Gradually he became aware of the sounds of the city echoing around him: engines throbbing and pulsing in the bowels of the city; water rushing through pipes; steam hissing through air ducts; the muffled rumble of the ever-grinding sub ways; and the roar of traffic high above.
What Ray noticed most, however, were the echoes of people in conflict and pain. Voices of citizens shouting in anger, screaming in fear, groaning in agony. Ray sagged under the weight of the sad and eerie chorus.
Suddenly Ray's walkie-talkie barked to life. "What is it?" asked Spengler from above.
Ray grimaced into the ooze. "It's a seething, bub bling psychic cesspool," he blurted. "Interlocked tubes of plasm, crackling with negative GEVs. It's glowing and moving! It's ... it's a river of slime!"
"Yccch," he heard Venkman comment from above.
Stantz gritted his teeth. He had a job to do down here. He unhooked a long, slender device from his utility belt and pulled a trigger on it. The device shot out a long, telescoping fishing pole with a plastic scoop on the end. Reaching down tentatively, Stantz scooped up a sample of the slime and carefully started reeling it in.
The ooze beneath his feet began to churn and turn.
Without warning, a grotesque arm of slime reached up toward Ray, extending its glistening, skeletal fingers in the direction of Stantz's dangling feet. Ray screeched and jerked his legs up high into the air as other hands of ooze bubbled upward, reaching for him, clawing at him. Ray found himself squirming at the end of the cable
in a near fetal position. He felt like a pinata from another dimension.
"Haul me up, Venkman!" he bellowed into the radio. "Now!"
On Seventy-seventh Street, Venkman and Spengler ran to the winch and started to crank the cable upward. Just as they began their rescue attempt, a Con Ed supervisor's car pulled up. Behind it was the same police car that had patrolled the area earlier. Venkman and Spengler exchanged nervous glances.
"What now?" Spengler asked.
"Act like nothing is wrong," Venkman advised.
The burly Con Ed supervisor rumbled up to the two men, followed by the pair of cops.
"Okay," the man demanded, "what's going on here?"
Venkman and Spengler stopped pulling up the ca ble. Venkman quickly doffed his Con Ed hard hat and put on a phone-company helmet. He stared angrily at the Con Ed man.
"What, I got time for this?" he blustered. "We got three thousand phones out in the Village and about eight million miles of cable to check."
The Con Ed man smiled thinly. "The phone lines are over there," he said, pointing toward the curb.
Venkman turned to Spengler and, forming a fist, hit him over the head. "I told ya!"
Stantz's voice suddenly emerged from the walkie- talkie. "Help! Help! Pull me up! It's alive! It's eating my boots."
Venkman offered the cops a quick grin and switched off the radio. "You ain't with Con Ed," the first cop concluded, "or the phone company. We checked. Tell me another one."
Venkman scanned his brain for a comeback. He faced the cop. "How does a gas leak sound?"
Down below the street, caught halfway up the air shaft, Stantz gazed at the scene unfolding beneath his feet. The slime was now bubbling up the air shaft after him. The ooze seemed angry. Determined. Hungry.
Stantz panicked. Nobody was receiving him over the radio. He gazed upward at the tiny manhole opening, far, far above him. "Get me out of here!" he screamed.
No response.
Desperation and fear getting the best of him, Stantz began kicking wildly at the air shaft. The old metal began to creak and groan under the assault by Stantz's boots.
A section of an old conduit came loose and began to topple over.
Stantz watched its journey, befuddled. "Uh-oh," he whispered.
The conduit fell on a heavy electrical transmission line. It ripped through the cable neatly. A shower of sparks lit up the air vent.
"Definitely uh-oh," Stantz theorized as the sparks seemed to illuminate every underground passageway extending outward from the air shaft.
Venkman was in the midst of attempting to sell the police another story when there was a sudden buzzing sound from deep within the open manhole.
Venkman and Spengler exchanged worried looks as Stantz's shouts emerged from deep beneath the city streets.
"Whooaaaah!" Stantz exclaimed.
"What the—" the Con Ed man had time to offer before, one by one, all the lights on the street flickered and then went out.
Then all the lights in the neighborhood followed suit.
The cops, the Con Ed man, and the two Ghostbusters watched in awe as, neighborhood by neighborhood, all of New York was plunged into total darkness.
From deep within the earth came a feeble voice, the voice of Ray Stantz.
"Sorry," he said.
10
The lights flickered out all over New Y ork City, Dana Barrett suddenly found herself engulfed in darkness. Always prepared, she felt her way around the living room, lighting various candles she had left out for just such an occasion.
Locating a small transistor radio, she turned it on and tried to find a special news report.
She had tuned in too quickly.
Most of the radio stations in New York were still scrambling to turn on their emergency generators.
Dana suddenly felt the overwhelming compulsion to check on little Oscar.
Grabbing a candle, she began to tiptoe toward the nursery when she was interrupted by a pounding on her front door.
Candle still in hand, she walked cautiously to the door and, leaving the guard chain on, opened it a crack. Outside, the hallway, eerily lit by a dim red emergency spotlight at the far end of the corridor, offered a visitor.
A hyper, wiry man.
"Janosz?" she asked.
Janosz smiled at her. "Hello, Dana. I happened to be in the neighborhood and I thought I'd stop by to see if everything was all right with you. You know, with the blackout and everything? Are you okay? Is ... the baby ... all right?"
Dana felt a chill insinuate itself down her spine. She put up a nonchalant front. "We're fine, Janosz."
The minion of Vigo tried to stick his head farther inside the chained door, hoping to scan the apartment. "Do you need anything?" he said, still grinning. "Would you like me to come in?"
"No," Dana replied a little too quickly. "Everything is fine. Honestly. Thanks, anyway."
Janosz took the refusal in stride. "Okay. Just thought I'd check. Good night, Dana. Sleep well, don'
t let the bedbugs bite you."
"Good night, Janosz," Dana breathed, easing the door closed. She stood there, panting. There was some thing about Janosz. He had always been weird, but now he struck her as being weirder. She quickly double-locked the door.
She stood in the middle of her candlelit apartment.
Very alone.
Very afraid.
Outside Dana's door, Janosz smiled evilly at the closed portal.
Closed doors didn't bother him.
Locks meant nothing to him.
He had a job to do, and in time he would do it.
Janosz turned and gazed down the darkened corri dor. Blackouts. Hah! He reached deep down into himself
and touched the power within. Slowly his eyes began to flicker ... then to shine brightly.
Small beams of crimson-red energy lit up the hall enough for Janosz to walk down it without stumbling.
It was good to have a friend.
And Vigo was his best friend, ever.
11
By morning, New York City had its power restored, and Spengler, Stantz, and Venkman had their hands full.
They sat in a courtroom, sharing the defense table with Louis Tully, C.P.A., perpetual target of a bad haircut, former demonic possession victim, and now lawyer extraordinaire, thanks to a quick course in the Famous Lawyer's School and Dry Cleaning Emporium.
Louis Tully pushed his glasses higher on his nose, which in turn made his nose run. He pulled out a hankie from his badly cut suit, which caused the plastic pen holder to tumble out of his pocket onto the floor.
"S'cuse me." he muttered to the three Ghostbusters as he stooped to pick up his pens, nearly knocking over a pitcher of water on the defense table.
Across from him, the prosecuting attorney, an at tractive young woman who seemed to want to see Spengler, Stantz, and Venkman hanged, glared at Louis.
Louis quickly straightened himself and began por-
ing through an avalanche of law books he had gathered for the occasion.
"All rise," the bailiff said.
Everyone in the courtroom stood as Judge Roy Beane strode into the room. A compact, balding man with the deep eyes of a ferret and a small, neatly trimmed mustache, the judge gaveled the court into session.