by Ed Naha
Another detective sighed and shook his head. "Wait a second. You say the park bench was chasing you? You mean someone was chasing you in the park, don't you?... No, the bench itself was galloping after you. I see...."
He raised his eyes to heaven and pushed the hold button on his phone. He called to his lieutenant, "Sir? I think you better talk to this guy."
The lieutenant faced the cop. "I have problems of my own."
"What's up?"
"It's some dock supervisor down at Pier 34 on the Hudson. The guy's going nuts!"
"What's the problem?"
"He says the Titanic just arrived!"
"Car 54 is in the area, isn't it, Lieutenant? Can't you just have him check it out?"
"Good idea."
Moments later two uniformed patrolmen and a very
stunned dock supervisor stared out at the Hudson River. There, moored to a dock, was an ocean liner bearing the name R.M.S. Titanic The gangplank was lowered and hundreds of long-drowned passengers disembarked. They were sopping wet and drenched with seaweed. Behind them, cadaverous porters off-loaded waterlogged baggage.
"I don't believe this," one cop said to another.
"And look at the water," the dock supervisor said. "It almost looks solid. It's spooky, Officers. Damned spooky!"
"Who're we gonna call?" the second replied.
"The lieutenant!" the first cop declared.
He ran to his squad car and began dialing the precinct. Beyond him, all hell was breaking loose in New York City.
... and that was just for starters.
26
D ana sat, curled in the couch before Venkman's battered TV set, watching a Star Trek rerun. Janine and Louis continued to munch popcorn. Every so often the network would interrupt with a local bulletin announcing that nobody in New York—or America, for that matter—knew what the heck was going on in the streets outside Dana's window.
"Mass hysteria" was how one wild-eyed reporter phrased it.
Dana grew uneasy as she watched the television. She should have heard from Venkman by now. The sky outside the window was dark and foreboding.
Without warning, a howling gust of wind blew open the French windows in Venkman's living room.
"What the... ?" Louis yelped.
Dana heard the baby cry out. A sense of alarm welled up within her. Oscar!
She hurried to the bedroom to check on her son, a frantic Louis and Janine trailing behind her.
The bed was empty.
Oscar was nowhere in sight.
The windows to the bedroom, however, were open.
Dana, Louis, and Janine ran to the window and peered outside.
"Oh, my God," Janine said, pointing.
Dana glanced to her left. On the ledge, towering above the busy streets of lower Manhattan, crawled little Oscar.
He knelt on the very edge of the ledge at the corner of the building, some fifty feet above the ground. The baby seemed calm, almost expectant.
Dana took a deep breath and climbed out onto the ledge, bracing her back against the strong support of the building. She daren't look down. She was afraid of losing her nerve. Slowly, cautiously, she inched her way along the eight-inch-wide ledge.
A bubbling light flared up in the sky above her, causing her to stop in her tracks.
An apparition was forming.
Something straight out of a fairy tale.
A sweet, kindly-looking English nanny formed in the sky, pushing an old-fashioned, albeit transparent baby carriage. The woman was strolling on thin air toward the ledge, dozens of feet above any solid matter.
The woman was smiling.
Dana gaped, recognizing the smile and trying to place the face.
The airborne nanny marched through the sky directly toward little Oscar. She extended a strong hand and deftly snatched up Dana's baby.
The nanny drew a delighted little Oscar into the transparent carriage, turning and smiling at a startled Dana.
"No!" Dana screamed.
She watched in helpless horror as the nanny soared
off into the darkened skies, little Oscar huddled securely in the ethereal baby buggy.
The nanny chuckled.
Dana snapped to. She recognized the smile. She recognized the chuckle. She recognized the face!!!
"Janosz!" she breathed.
Louis and Janine helped Dana back inside the apart ment. She headed straight for the door. "Louis, you have to find Peter and tell him what happened!"
"Where are you going?"
"To get my baby back," Dana said, slamming the door behind her.
Meanwhile, seated silently around a table in Parkview's woo-woo ward dayroom, Venkman, Winston, Stantz, and Spengler carefully listened to the conversa tions offered by the newest members of the laughing academy.
The squinty-eyed shrink had his hands full. A well-heeled woman who claimed she was a guest at the Plaza Hotel was screaming at him.
"I'm telling you, Doctor, my mink coat bit me and ran off down the street!"
The doctor was clearly out of his league. He turned to a nearby nurse. "Where did you put the zookeeper who saw the pterodactyl?"
The nurse sighed. "He's in Room 5, and I have the three men who saw the Titanic in Rooms 10, 11, and 12."
She consulted her list. "The walking-dead witness is in 13, the strolling dinosaur skeleton is in 4. I seem to have misplaced the Elvis Presley spotter, though."
The doctor sighed. "I hate working on New Year's Eve. It really brings them out of the woodwork, doesn't it?"
"I think that eclipse thing has everybody spooked," the nurse replied.
"What about my coat?" the Plaza woman yelled. "Do you have any idea how much that coat cost?"
The Ghostbusters sat at the table, listening intently.
Venkman turned to Stantz. "You were right. The whole city is going nuts. If we don't do something fast, it's all going to go downhill from here."
Winston nodded. "Do you think all those predic tions about the world coming to an end in the 1990s are true?"
A Parkview patient with a face resembling a jack-o- lantern waddled up to them. "The year will be 1997. My dog told me."
"What kind of dog?" Venkman asked.
"Labrador."
Venkman shook his head sadly. "Habitual liars. They can't help it. It's in the breed."
The man nodded sadly and stumbled off. Spengler faced his colleagues. "Objectively speaking, all these apocalyptic predictions about the millennium make no sense at all. The year 2000 is a fiction based on a completely arbitrary calendar. The only thing that gives these predictions power is people's willingness to be lieve in them!"
Stantz agreed. "Sure. If everyone believes that things are going to start falling apart in the year 2000, they'll probably start falling apart."
Winston rubbed his chin. "Yeah, well, there are an awful lot of people out there who don't believe in the future anymore—their own or anybody else's."
"And that's where Vigo gets his power," Stantz deduced. "He's just been laying back, hiding in that jerky painting until enough bad vibes built up to spring him."
"I don't think there's any shortage of bad vibes in this town," Venkman replied. "This is one of the few towns where killing your landlord is considered a misdemeanor."
Spengler stared at his knuckles thoughtfully. "All Vigo needs now is a living human being to inhabit. He's had his eye on Dana, literally. So it's obvious that he's chosen Dana's child to make his reentry into our world. We all know that she has a psychic vulnerability to hostile entities. She's probably passed that onto her baby. Janosz Poha may be the human link between Vigo and Dana."
Venkman sneered. "I knew that guy was a wiggler the second I laid my eyes on him."
A thin Parkview patient leaned over the Ghostbusters' table. "Forget Vigo," he whispered confiden tially. "It's Hitler you should go after. I saw him hanging around the Port Authority."
"Where was he heading?" Venkman asked.
"New Jersey," the man said. "I think it was the 134 local bus."
"Thanks for the info," Venkman said, offering a crooked smile.
Downstairs in a Parkview examining room, Louis Tully was arguing with his cousin Sherman, a badly dressed and coiffed gnat of a man who defined the word "nebbish" almost as well as Louis did.
"Come on, Sherm," Louis whined. "You're my cousin. Do this for me. I'm begging you."
Sherman shook his head, flashing a superior smile. "I can't do it, Louis. It isn't ethical. I could lose my license."
"Why can't you just have them released? You're a doctor."
"I'm a dermatologist. I can't write orders for the psych ward."
"Sherman, I've done lots of favors for you, haven't I?" Louis wheedled.
"Like what?"
"I got you out of those bad tax shelters."
"You were the one who got me in."
"I fixed you up with Diane Troxler, and she put out, didn't she?"
Sherman thought hard about this. "Yeah, I had to give her free dermabrasion for a year too. Forget it, Louis. I could get in a lot of trouble."
"I'm telling you, Sherm, we're all going to be in big trouble if we don't do something fast. This ghost guy came and took my friend's baby and we've got to get it back. It's just a scared little baby, Sherm."
"Then you should go to the police," Sherman pointed out. "I don't believe in any of that ghost stuff."
Outside the window, shrieks and howls echoed through the darkened sky. The city seemed to grow darker and darker and darker.
Sherman faced the window. He could have sworn he saw a pterodactyl fly by.
"Do you believe now, Sherm?"
A half hour later the four Ghostbusters, in full uniform, stood next to EctolA, together with the Tully cousins. "Good work, Louis. How did you get us out?"
"Oh, I pulled a few strings. I wouldn't want to say more than that."
Louis winked at Sherman. "This is my cousin Sher man. Sherm, say hello to the Ghostbusters."
Louis leaned toward Stantz. "I promised him a ride in the car if he got you out."
"How bad are things getting?" Venkman asked.
"Real bad, Peter. You'd better get to the museum right away!"
"Why? What happened?" Venkman asked.
"A ghost took Dana's baby. She's gone to the mu seum to get it back."
Louis pointed to the EctolA. "I brought everything you asked for, and I gassed up the car with super unleaded. It cost twenty cents more than regular un leaded, but you get much better performance and in an old car like this, that'll end up saving you money in the long run. I put it on my credit card, so you can either reimburse me or I can take it out of petty cash."
The four stone-faced Ghostbusters, fully suited and well armed, dove into the EctolA and sped off, leaving Louis in mid-sentence.
Louis watched the car speed away. "Hey!" he shouted. "Wait for me."
The auto zoomed out of sight.
Louis sighed. "Okay, I'll meet you there."
Sherman stared at his cousin skeptically. "I thought you were like the fifth Ghostbuster."
Louis smiled smugly. "I let them handle all the little stuff. I just come in on the big cases."
27
Da na Barrett jumped out of her cab and rushed up the front stairs to the Manhattan Museum of Art. She flung open two large doors and dashed inside. The doors closed behind her with a resounding ka- thud. As the doors locked themselves shut, a deafening roar of thunder shook the sky. The ground seemed to tremble.
From deep within the earth beneath the museum, small, slender hands of glowing, shimmering slime reached up toward the building's walls.
The slime burst forth from the bowels of the city and crept and crawled up and over the building.
Within seconds the slime had completely engulfed the museum, effectively sealing Dana inside.
Two passersby stopped before the museum, a pair of old men out for an early-evening stroll.
"Now that's something you don't see every day, Mike," one said to the other.
"What's that, Al?"
"An ocean of goop scooping up and over a mu seum."
"Hmm." The second man nodded. "And it seems to be hardening too."
"Think we should call the cops?" "I dunno. What time is Moonlighting on?" "We got time. Come on, there's a phone booth over there. I used to walk my poodle there, until she got mugged by squirrels." "I hate rodents."
"Me too. I never even liked Mickey Mouse." "Me neither. Although I always liked Mighty Mouse. He has a great voice."
The two old men strolled to the phone booth.
By the time the EctolA screeched up to the curb across from the beleaguered museum, hundreds of spectators had gathered. They stood in awe, gawking at the slime-encased building. The four Ghostbusters leapt out of their vehicle and jogged across the street.
They stood spellbound at the sight before them.
The museum was now totally covered in a shell of psycho-reactive slime. City workmen and firemen were trying to cut their way through the hardened gunk with a series of blowtorches, jackhammers, and assorted power tools. Paramedics were on the scene, attempting to munch through the solid slime using the "jaws of life."
They couldn't even make a dent.
The Ghostbusters retreated to the EctolA and donned their proton packs.
"It looks like a giant Jell-O mold," Stantz breathed.
"I hate Jell-O," Venkman replied.
"I'm not even crazy about Bill Cosby," Winston said, grimacing.
The quartet strode across the street and ap proached the main entrance to the building.
Stantz walked up to a bewildered fire captain. "Okay, give it a rest, sir. We'll take it from here."
The fire captain was clearly skeptical. "Be my guest, gents," he said with a smirk. "We've been cutting here for almost an hour. What the hell is going on around this town? Did you know that the Titanic arrived this morning?"
Venkman shrugged. "Better late than never."
The workmen and firemen assembled before the slime-encrusted museum backed away as the Ghostbusters aimed their powerful particle throwers.
Spengler whipped out his Giga meter. He nodded grimly to his three comrades. "Full neutronas, maser assist!"
The four men adjusted the settings on their wands and prepared to fire.
Stantz gritted his teeth. "Throw 'em!"
The four men triggered their particle throwers and sprayed the front doors of the building with powerful, undulating bolts of proton energy. The energy beams bounced harmlessly off the hardened slime.
Venkman sighed and turned to a fireman. "Okay, who knows 'Kumbaya'?"
A few of the firemen and workmen tentatively raised their hands. Venkman grabbed them and lined them up at the entrance to the museum, assuming a drill sergeant's voice. "All right, men. Nice and easy. 'Kumbaya, my Lord, Kumbaya..."
Stantz, Spengler, Winston, and the firemen and workmen began to sing along.
Venkman forced them all to join hands and to sway back and forth while lifting their voices to the night sky.
Stantz ran forward during the folkfest and inspected
the hardened wall of slime that entombed the museum. Using his infra-goggles, he found that the singing had managed to produce a hole in the gunk barely the size of a dime.
Stantz sighed and turned to the assembled. "Forget it. The Vienna Boys Choir couldn't get through this stuff."
"Good effort," Venkman called to the hastily assem bled ensemble. He turned to his buddies. "Now what? Should we say supportive, nurturing things to it, Ray?"
Spengler, deep in thought, missed the sarcasm. "It won't work," he muttered. "There's no way we could generate enough positive energy to crack that shell."
Stantz wasn't convinced. Ever the optimist, he cried, "I can't believe things have gotten so bad in this city that there's no way back. Sure, it's crowded, it's dirty, it's noisy. And there are too many people who'd just as soon step
on your face as look at you. But there's got to be a few sparks of sweet humanity left in this burned-out burg. We just have to mobilize them!"
Spengler nodded in agreement. "We need some thing that everyone can get behind. You know, a symbol..."
Spengler's eyes accidentally fell on EctolA's New York State license plates. On the front plate was a line drawing of the historic Statue of Liberty.
He nudged Stantz. Stantz gaped at the plate. "Some thing that appeals to the best in each and every one of us," he babbled.
"Something good," Spengler continued.
"And pure," Venkman added.
"And decent," Winston concluded.
The four men were awakened from their reverie by a murmur in the vast crowd behind them. A limo screamed up to the site. The mayor of New "fork arrived
with a police escort. His limo pulled into a no-parking zone. The mayor and Jack Hardemeyer stepped out of the limo and marched up to the museum entrance.
Hardemeyer motioned the mayor back.
The top aide, with a small army of police body guards, ambled up to the Ghostbusters, confrontation clearly the goal.
"Look," the well-tailored Hardemeyer spat, "I've had it with you Ghostbusters. Get your stuff together, get back in your clown car, and get out of here. This is a city matter, and everything's under control."
Venkman felt his blood start to boil. He stared down the yuppie-pup. "Oh," he said with a sneer, "you think so? Well, I've got news for you. You've got Dracula's brother-in-law in there, and he's got my girlfriend and her kid. Around about midnight tonight, while you guys are partying hearty uptown, this guy's going to come to life and start doing amateur head transplants. And that's just round one."
The mayor traipsed forward. "Are you telling me there are people trapped in that building?"
Hardemeyer ignored the mayor. He turned to one of his flunkies. "This is dynamite," he said enthusiasti cally. "I want you to call AP, UPI, and the CNN network. I want them down here right away. When the police bring this kid and his mama out, I want to be able to hand the baby right over to the mayor, and I want it all on camera."