Ghostbusters (20 page)

“Oh,
good,
” Patty drawled.

“We'll get it. Don't worry,” Erin told her.
We are on a mission.

Abby nodded in agreement, then said, “One thing we might need from you, Jonathan, is some—” She glanced around behind him. “Oh, he's already taken off? Okay.”

Individually and collectively, the newly minted Ghostbusters took stock of what lay ahead. The halls under the old part of the theater split in three directions. Make that three gloomy, dark directions. They were much narrower and had lower ceilings than the subway tunnel, which meant less room to maneuver and less room for error. It looked a lot more dangerous. Were they up to it?

This is what we do,
Erin assured herself.
I am a spectral warrior. Patty is a metaphysical commando. Holtz is a proton wrangler. And Abby—

“All right, it could be anywhere,” Abby said. “Let's split up. Walkie if you see anything.”

Erin headed out. The proton pack hummed softly against her back—she couldn't hear it because of the noise coming from directly above, but she could feel it, and the power at her command boosted her confidence. She walked past a room filled with costumes and heads topped with wigs. Her peripheral vision caught something that wasn't right. The glaring wrongness of it startled her. As she whirled to face whatever it was, she pulled out her proton wand.

It was Holtzmann, standing statue-still and wearing a purple eighties glam wig she had picked up.

“Holtzmann, this is serious!” Erin complained.

“And I agree,” Holtz said convivially.

*   *   *

Patty was on edge, no doubt. As she cautiously advanced down a dark backstage hall, accent on spine-tingling with funky aromas, she kept shifting the nozzle of her proton pack, aiming at doorways right and left, sidling up to corners, then sweeping around them, low and fast, the way those adorable, stick-thin policewomen on TV did when they were investigating the bad guys in deserted warehouses or abandoned tenements. Only the proton pack weighed a ton more than a lipstick and compact, and any gangbangers she ran into down here were going to be unkillable—because they were already dead. But they were not unstoppable, if everything worked the way it was supposed to. A big “if,” from what she'd seen so far, but the pack was humming with power. Nuclear power, she suddenly recalled. At least there were no subway trains careening around corners around here, and she supposed there was something to be said about standing in the middle of ground zero.

“I thought this was going to be like a book club,” she muttered to herself. “You know, have a glass of wine, talk about ghosts, that sort of thing.”

She stuck her head into a room filled with blank-eyed, bald, naked mannequins. Her heart stuttered.

“Oh good. A room full of nightmares.”

Dolls and mannequins were two of the things that had always given her the creepy-crawlies, especially after she and her cousin Marcie had stayed up all night one night, taking turns staring at Marcie's dolls and convincing themselves that every time they looked away, the darn things moved. On top of that, Marcie owned a ventriloquist dummy, and no one in the world thought that puppets weren't disturbing. Untrustworthy, that was the word she was searching for.

Pulling the door to mannequin city closed, she kept walking, her proton wand primed and ready for action.

*   *   *

Behind the door, in the middle of the jumble of frozen figures, a mannequin head turned slowly on its molded plastic shoulders, following the direction the intruder had taken with painted-on eyes. Rage boiled inside its hollow skull.
This was an adversary
, it decided.
This was something that must be destroyed.

And it would be …

*   *   *

Abby walked down a cramped hallway, on guard for real, but hey, this was the adventure of a lifetime—of
ten
lifetimes. It promised payback for all those years toiling in the Higgins Institute's basement, enduring the jibes of her colleagues, peers, and students, and way before that, the nonstop bullying of the kids on the playground. Every drop of
I'll show them
coursed through her bloodstream. She was good to go. She gave her wand a little test goose, and a bolt of energy sizzled down the passage ahead of her.

Lock and load, hell yeah.

Beneath the bottom edge of a door in front of her a light flickered erratically. Taking a firm grip on the wand, she opened the door a crack and peered in—
oh double hell yeah—

A strange, bulbous device sat in the middle of the otherwise empty wardrobe room. It was sparking and humming, and an eerie green waveform emanated from it in all directions. She got a whiff of ionization so strong it made her choke.

Clearing her throat, Abby clicked on her walkie-talkie and spoke into it.

“Guys, I found another device.”

*   *   *

On legs that wobbled at the hips and threatened to buckle, the mannequin lurched for the closed door. It couldn't move its fingers because they weren't articulated, so it trapped the knob between immovable hands and leaned, turning the knob just far enough to open the latch. Using the brittle form of the life-size doll as both shell and camouflage, the ghost stepped into the hallway, and turned stiff-legged to follow the tall intruder.

*   *   *

Patty caught Abby's walkie alert and stopped in the middle of the hall. The blast from the subway device was still fresh in her mind. “I had a good job,” she recalled wistfully. “Not a great job, but it was a job.”

She heard a noise behind her—a squeaky sound like rubbing a thumb across the skin of an inflated balloon. The hair rose on the back of her neck and her arms as she looked over her shoulder.

A mannequin was standing in the hall. It stood rooted, stock-still, while Patty studied it, her heart thumping fast.

“That wasn't there,” she said. She knew she had just walked over that same ground—so how does a mannequin get from point A to point B? She took a step toward it. A Holtz joke, maybe? That girl was such a kidder …

Keeping her distance, Patty more closely examined the placid doll face. It wasn't a high-end dummy. She stared hard into the blank eyes, searching them for an explanation. The thing about mannequins was, you never knew what they were thinking.

Then, with a loud balloon squeak it broke free of the floor and power-rushed her. It was coming right for her—

“Oh, hell no!” Patty cried as she turned and ran for her life.

*   *   *

Erin and Holtzmann met up with Abby at the wardrobe room where she had found the device. When they looked in it it was still sparking away. Erin was taken aback by the visible wave energy flowing from it. It looked like a sickly green searchlight cutting through a fogbank—it appeared to have
texture
. The ionization was off the charts massive, which meant the little package had a matching power source. Erin had to wonder about the mind that had created it. Who was he or she? What was their training? How had they come up with the design? From the way it was freely arcing, finish work was not the builder's forte. The much more disturbing question was why would anyone smart enough to build it want to use it to lower the barrier and let in demon ghosts?

“It's definitely the same device we found in the subway,” Abby said.

“This is some sort of hyperionization device,” Erin said. “Somebody's really trying to energize—”

Patty burst into the room and slammed the door behind her. Before anyone could speak, she threw her back against the door, digging the heels of her shoes into the floor. Panting for breath, she looked half crazed with fear.

“I think I lost it,” she gasped. “Please don't tell me that thing is unrelated to the ghost that we're looking for. I can't handle two things.”

Patty wasn't making sense. “What thing?” Erin asked her.

The answer arrived special delivery. Patty screamed as a bare leg kicked through the middle of the door, splintering the wood beside her. Erin gawked as the limb hung there, half in, half out of the storeroom. There was a bare foot and ankle; it was shaped like a human leg, but there the resemblance ended. The splintered edges of the hole had gouged furrows in the surface from ankle to shin, and the leg shed curls of white plastic instead of sprays of bright blood. Patty looked at it and screamed again, spinning away from the door.

The leg withdrew and a second later its owner smashed through the weakened door, showering the retreating Ghostbusters with woody debris.

There was only so far to retreat in the little room. Erin backed away with the others until she hit the sewing table on the rear wall. The mannequin stood before them, growling. At a signal from Abby, they all fired up their proton packs. The combined noise in the closed room made it hard to think.

“I'm sorry,” Holtzmann said to the dummy. “Is this your dressing room?”

Abby was stunned
and
delighted by the thing. “Full paratransferral embodiment. Erin, all our theories on spectral possession are true!” She gave Holtzmann a sidelong look. “Someone owes me a dozen Krispy Kremes.”

Holtzmann was equally jubilant. “Ecto glazed or plasm filled?”

Unable to restrain themselves, the two gamblers broke into their elaborate high-five routine.

Patty and Erin didn't take their eyes off the mannequin, and their wands were locked on it in case it made any funny moves.

“That's great,” Patty said to no one and everyone. “Can we shoot it?”

“There's a ghost inside that thing and I want it,” Erin shouted. “Let's light him up!”

The Ghostbusters powered up their proton wands and did the firing squad thing—blasting in unison. The sizzling energy beams hit the polystyrene mannequin, plowing right through it and the doorframe. It lit up with the same eerie light as Gertrude Aldridge and the ghost in the subway, then exploded with a sharp crack. A winged monster-ghost burst from it. It looked like the demons in medieval literature, almost dragonlike, not humanoid in the least. It flew down toward them, menacing them, then flew out of the room.

“We can't lose it! C'mon!” Erin cried.

“Wow, liking the fire,” Abby said. “You heard her. Move it!”

The hideous ghost flew down the cramped hall with Erin and the other Ghostbusters in hot pursuit. Patty huffed and puffed.

“If we live through this,” she said, bent over and wheezing for air, “can you make these packs lighter, Holtz? My kidneys are taking one hell of a beating.”

Erin jumped the stairs three at a time as Abby and Holtz struggled to keep up. She could hear their groans and the thud of their boot falls behind her. What had Abby said about liking the fire? Oh yeah, she felt the heat, all right. She was burning up the house. She was going to run this bad boy to ground and box it with a ribbon on top.

I am a Ghostbuster.
She thought it loud and proud.

*   *   *

BOOOOOOOOO!

Difficult to believe, but the irate shouts of the metalhead audience were actually drowning out the ear-blistering combined output of six Peavey 6505+ amps and a dozen double-stacked speakers. Front man and lead guitarist Adam was blazing through the crescendo in the band's first tune of the set, totally thrashing in the zone. The floor of the stage, the whole building was throbbing to the insistent, thunderous beat, threatening to split apart at the seams, but the crowd in the auditorium was having none of it. They were booing them as loudly as they could. It was his worst nightmare. But the show had to go on. He ended the tune with a leap in the air and a vicious downward slash of his midnight-black Jackson King V.

From hard experience he knew that to let the crowd see how rattled he was would only incite them to worse. Adam ignored the taunts and shouted into the microphone, “Thank you! We are the Beasts of Mayhem! And now let me ask you a question. Are you ready to
rock this—
”

The microphone squealed feedback into all their speakers. Equipment they had yet to pay for. All Adam's credit cards were charged to the max and he had been forced to move back to the basement in his parents' house.

“Oh, sorry about that, my bad,” he said.

From the crowd, a dude in a sour orange Mohawk yelled, “You
suck
!”

A fresh chorus of boos erupted as Adam started counting down the beat to the next song. He was covered in flop sweat. This was going so wrong.

A glowing figure rose right up out of the floor behind him and levitated into the air fifteen feet above the stage. It looked like a hologram, only it had a lot more moves and there didn't seem to be a start-over point in the digital loop. The crowd stopped booing and throwing things, and stared up at it slack-jawed. He looked up to the balcony, gave a thumbs-up to the light-board operator, and exaggeratedly mouthed the word “Ex-cell-ent.” The board op looked back at him, confused.

“It's not mine,” he mouthed back.

Meanwhile, Eugene, the passive-aggressive bass player, leaned in close to the drummer and shouted something in his ear. Adam heard it faintly in his headset:

“Damn, he really did spend some money. That's awesome.”

*   *   *

Metal music slammed into Erin as she reached the stage. It made her bones vibrate, and she had to pause for a second to regain her balance and mental focus. Wincing, she waved the Ghostbusters on. She weaved through the maze of pulleys and cables and towering curtains toward the light and found the wings of the stage. Clustered together, the Ghostbusters peered out around the edge of the main curtain as a tremendous roar went up from the audience. The band, framed in blazing spotlights, was blasting out mind-numbing, three-chord black metal, but the loud cheer had nothing to do with them. It was the demonic phantom. As Erin watched spellbound, it flew away from the stage and out over the bobbing heads of the audience. It slowly circled, eyeing the crowd like a box of chocolates as if trying to select just the right one.