"This," said the ominous voice, "has gone on long enough."

"Why?" asked his companion without much display of interest. "Do you care what happens to other ghosts? I know I don't."

The two spirits had met in the empty observation tower of the Empire State building in the middle of the night when none but cleaning personnel might be in the building and if they came here, they had been and gone. The first speaker looked roughly humanoid in shape, though bigger than a human being. He was, in fact, a spirit from the Netherworld, rather than a human, though once coming here he had decided to assume the general form of the natives of this dimension. He could never have passed for one of them in a crowd, even if he could present a less transparent look.

The second spirit didn't look human at all. He had eight legs and vaguely resembled an octopus, though they did not usually come in Day-glo yellow. Unlike an octopus, though, he had a much more human face than his companion, a rather beautiful face like something from a classical painting, creating the opinion of wisdom and sincerity. Since he possessed neither of those particular qualities, he had learned to make full use of them since his arrival in New York.

"Of course I don't, except on general principle," the first specter replied. "But I do care what happens to me. I was nearly captured yesterday and only escaped through sheer luck. This realm has become dangerous for our kind, and I don't like it, Malkizah."

"Go back to the Netherworld," said the second easily. "No one will trap you there, Raputis."

"And fall under the sway of some demon or other? I think not. Here I have freedom--except for the threat of the Ghostbusters."

"Then leave New York," suggested the octopoid ghost. "No one forces you to stay here. Then I won't have to listen to your complaining any longer."

"No one is making you listen now," snapped Raputis in exasperation. "Yet you're still here. I tell you, I want to stay here. I like it here. It fascinates me, all this humanity in one gob, all at once; I like the lights, the colors, the smells, everything about this place. It almost makes me feel, dare I say it, alive. But the Ghostbusters almost caught me yesterday, and I won't let that happen, not when it would be so easy to do something about it."

"Is this the point where you ask me to exert myself?" The beautiful face made a moue of distress as Malkizah shrugged its whole body in lieu of shoulders.

"I expect nothing from you except irritation," snapped Raputis. "Besides, you would not serve my purposes. I can find another who will do it better than you, and if the initial plan does not work, there are others. I must stop the Ghostbusters, but I must make it appear a natural end. If the city believes them killed by ghosts, there would be a great outcry, and others would come to take their place, determined to end the 'scourge'. These may be the only Ghostbusters now, but should a ghost end their lives, others would come, other scientists, vigilantes, the army, who knows what kind of threat. But should it be an accident, a regrettable twist of fate, perhaps there would be a grace period. Possibly others would come, but they would not come in a great crusade, hot and angry and ready to war upon ghostkind and they would not come immediately."

"I admit it would be better to know the Ghostbusters were gone," the octopoid responded thoughtfully. "Do you plan to take over the city?"

"No. Why bother with all that exertion. I don't want the city. I only want peace. I plan to do what I do now. Enjoy it. I have no complaint against humans in general--I find them interesting. Just those four men. So I shall draw them to their deaths and none but us will know the 'tragedy' had anything but accident in it. I even know how I will do it. But I will require one ally."

Malkizah drew back fastidiously.

"Not you. You do not fit into my plans at all."

"Except as someone to listen while you boast of them?"

"Maybe that." Raputis chuckled. "This will take a little time. But," and he gestured at the sleeping city spread out below them, "time is not a problem for our kind, only for theirs." He laughed. "I simply invite you to view the fun. For I hope it will be fun. I will show myself very clever, creating several back-ups to my plan. And there might be one other thing. You've ranged further abroad than the city, haven't you?"

"I have explored, yes. I've seen far more than you."

"Then perhaps you can help me after all. Find me a haunted house, not just your run of the mill spook shop but someplace intriguing, someplace with a history, someplace where I can egg the owner on to call the Ghostbusters, someplace out of the city. Find one that's either currently occupied or about to be occupied. Then, we'll see what can be done. This is what I need..."

"Wake up, Peter. Rise and shine." Ray Stantz's good-natured voice caused Peter Venkman to groan and pull the pillow over his head, curling up under his covers. He'd never quite gotten the hang of mornings, especially since the other three Ghostbusters tended to be insultingly cheerful in the mornings and the four of them shared a dormitory bedroom. Getting in that sack time took skill and devoted effort in the mornings at Ghostbsuter Central.

Abruptly Peter felt the pillow yanked away and Egon Spengler bent over him expectantly. "If you will attempt to engage your brain before you drink your coffee, Peter, you will remember this is the day we've scheduled to make a visit to the Children's Hospital. So no more lying around wasting time." He grasped Peter's arm and pulled him up inexorably. Peter allowed himself to be pulled. He couldn't disappoint those kids--but someday soon he'd find out who had scheduled the visit for nine in the morning and coax Slimer to thoroughly slime his bed, clothes and the insides of all his shoes.

"Shower," Winston Zeddemore instructed Peter, pointing in the direction of the bathroom. "Now."

"Is that a personal comment?" Peter asked, taking a surreptitious sniff at his armpit. Maybe Winston had a point, but why did they all have to be in such a hurry? Peter could have gotten away with at least ten more minutes of sack time.

"No, it's a way to wake you up," Ray put in as he finished making his bed and set his Stay Puft Marshmallow Man doll on the center of his pillow. He looked as cheerful as he sounded, and ordinarily Peter liked that, but not before eight in the morning. A guy had his priorities after all. Clad in a tee shirt that read in big, bright, red letters, "Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good proton pack on your back," Ray looked ready to don his weapon of choice and march out to confront hordes of nasty ghosts--before breakfast. Peter essayed a pitiful whimper.

"I was out late last night, guys. Have mercy."

"That's hardly our fault, Peter." With nary a shred of sympathy Egon gestured him toward the shower. "You knew today's schedule as well as we did."

Heaving a heavily-put-upon sigh, Peter dug in his drawer for clean underwear and headed off to the bathroom, pretending high dudgeon. After he was fully awake he'd plan his revenge. A shower would feel pretty good, after all.

It did. The water was hot and plentiful, and Slimer was mercifully absent. Peter lathered up, raising his voice in what he--and evidently he alone--considered tuneful song. If the other guys didn't appreciate it, well, they were simply tone deaf, that was all. Besides, Egon liked opera. That proved it. No accounting for taste, Peter thought as he warbled cheerfully away.

A sound like a squish and slurp began to issue out of the drain, and Peter left off singing to listen. That sounded like the spud sneaking up on him through the water pipes, one trick Slimer had learned and never forgotten. Peter didn't mind sharing a shower with his current girlfriend, but sharing it with a slimy little spud who undid all the good of soap and water went beyond the acceptable. "Slimer, if that's you..." he muttered under his breath.

Whatever it was started to ooze up out of the drain and Peter jumped backward because it bore no resemblance to Slimer. It was green, but it was a darker shade than the spud, scaly like a trout, but, as it expanded into its normal shape, far bigger. Its body was almost half head with a huge, toothed mouth, and it blew steam at Peter through protruding nostrils like an angry bull's. It had a sharp, curving horn between the nostrils, little stubby arms just beyond the ends of the cavernous mouth, and a bulbous body that tapered into a dolphin-like tail, complete with three sets of stubby little legs that didn't mean it was confined to scuttling along on the ground. It hovered in mid-air in front of Peter, its mouth opening as if to take a bite.

"YAAAA!" screeched Peter at the top of his lungs, backpedaling wildly and coming up against the side of the tub. Grabbing frantically at the shower curtain to prevent his inevitable fall, he felt himself tipping backwards as the curtain tore loose, unable to support his weight. "EEEEGONNN!" he screeched as he fell. A voice in his mind intoned soberly, 'the worst accidents take place in the bathroom.'

The ghost let out a shriek even louder than Peter's and dove past him. Peter's arms windmilled as he made a vain attempt to catch his balance, then in a tangle of shower curtain, he went over backwards, and hit the floor hard, knocking the breath from his body. As his head slammed backward toward the floor, the ghost cried out and dove, sliding to a stop just beneath the falling man. Peter's head impacted with the ghost instead of the hard floor, and though it slimed his head completely, the entity broke the worst of his fall. Peter wheezed, trying to get his breath.

"PETER!" The guys appeared in the doorway. He saw them upside down, staring at him in utter horror. "Peter, get away from it. We'll trap it," Winston urged, vanishing again, evidently to fetch a proton pack.

The ghost evidently understood English because it oozed out from beneath Peter, wrapped stubby arms around the supine man's neck and hugged him frantically. "Save me, Peter," it moaned pleadingly, big tears oozing from its eyes.

"It talks," blurted Ray, eyes widening. "Peter, can you get away from it?"

Peter was still trying to catch his breath. He made wild gestures, mouth opening and closing as he attempted speech.

"Are you injured, Peter?" Egon asked, as he realized the ghost wasn't actually hurting his friend. He squatted down beside Peter and put a hand on his shoulder, evidently to keep Peter from moving until he could be examined, concern in his eyes, but also, unfortunately, amusement at the sight of the affectionate ghost.

Peter gasped and panted, still too shaken to take exception to Egon's look. "Breath...knocked outa me..." he wheezed.

"We gotta wrap up this nasty gooper and then we'll listen, Pete." Winston returned wearing a pack and toting a trap in one hand, his thrower in the other.

Peter shook his head, trying in vain to push the overly affectionate monster away. "...came up the drain..." he gasped. "Made me trip."

"Did he hurt you, Peter?" persisted Ray, while Egon pointed his ever-present P.K.E. meter at the clinging phantom.

"No." Finally catching his breath, Peter sat up, shoving the ghost off. It backed off a little and hovered, watching Peter closely, luminous blue eyes turned hopefully toward the downed psychologist. "When I fell, I was gonna whack my head on the floor. He broke my fall."

"After he made you fall in the first place, Peter," Egon pointed out, his meter still aimed at the anxious ghost.

"True, but I don't think he meant to." Peter felt no fondness for the ugly little spud, but he was basically a fair man.

"Didn't mean to hurt Peter," the little ghost agreed quickly in a piping voice that was about as piercing as Slimer's but a lot more understandable. "Wanted friends."

"Aw, he wants to be friends," said Ray, smiling at the little ghost then reaching out to help Egon pull Peter into a sitting position.

"Ray, in case you have forgotten it is our job to bust ghosts," Egon said, shaking his head as he watched Peter to make sure the movement hadn't caused any pain. "This is a Class 5 free roaming vapor. He belongs in the containment unit."

At those words, new tears welled up in the spirit's eyes and ran down its despondent face. "Wanted friends," it repeated. "Didn't want to hurt Peter. Saved Peter."

"Yeah, he did," Peter agreed without enthusiasm. He didn't like the ghost--those teeth were nasty as was the tusk and as he watched the entity blew steam from his nostrils. But the thing had saved him from a possibly severe injury. He knew a guy who had fallen in the shower and hit his head, and the guy had had grand mal seizures ever since. "Besides," he continued hastily, "Nobody's paying us to bust him. Waste of power, isn't it? We'd only have to recharge the packs and use up a trap. He doesn't want to hurt anybody. He can always go back down the drain again and save us the trouble."

"Hmm." Egon's very knowing gaze lingered on Peter. "Perhaps another ghost to study for a time might be useful. Slimer won't always sit still for the tests I wish to perform." He turned to the ghost. "I am a scientist. I would like to do some experiments on you."

The ghost stared back, two pairs of blue eyes meeting and considering the offer. Then the monster edged back to Peter and wrapped a stubby arm around his neck. "Okay. Want to stay with Peter."

"Aw. He likes you, Peter," said Ray, smiling a little too broadly. "So is it okay, guys? Can we keep him?" he pleaded eagerly like a kid trying to wheedle his parents into allowing him a new puppy.

Peter's idea had been more intended to urge them to send the little monster someplace far away from New York, like possibly the Aleutian Islands. "On one condition," he said sternly. "Long as he doesn't keep sliming me. Bad enough the spud does it. I don't want this little wiggler to get in the habit, too. Hear me, ghost? I like hugs when they come from gorgeous females. I do not like to be hugged by ghosts. Back off, okay?"

The ghost obeyed instantly, withdrawing to a discreet distance. "Okay, Peter," it promised solemnly.

Egon grabbed Peter by the hand and pulled him to his feet. "Sure you aren't injured?" he asked, his fingers lingering on Peter's wrist as he checked the psychologist's pulse. "Any pain?"

"I'm not hurt," Peter said, ruefully rubbing his bottom. Realizing he was stark naked as well as soapy and wet, which was a condition totally brimming with indignity, he added, "I'm gonna finish my shower. How about giving a guy a little privacy here? And that means you, Jack," he added, pointing at the ghost.

"Liked singing," the ghost confessed with a sigh of pleasure at the memory of it, but he swooped obediently toward the doorway. "Came to hear pretty voice."

"At least he's got good taste," Peter muttered as he grabbed the shower curtain and held it before him in a futile attempt to regain his lost dignity.

Grinning, Ray and Winston removed it from his grip and began to hang it up again. Egon smiled at Peter's abortive gesture to get it back. "You've got water everywhere, Peter," he called over his shoulder as he waved the ghost toward the door, pausing to gesture at the water that had run down the fallen curtain to puddle everywhere and squish under the clothed Ghostbusters' boots. "I trust you'll clean it up before we have to leave for the Children's Hospital."

Peter stood clutching a corner of the shower curtain while the shower continued adding to the water on the floor, and heaved a frustrated sigh at the way his morning had begun. It wasn't even eight o'clock yet. How bad was this day going to get?

The gig at the Children's Hospital could have gone better, but on the other hand, it could have gone a whole lot worse. Slimer had returned from his morning trash-can foray shortly before they were to leave and discovered the new ghost ensconced in the lab while Egon ran tests on him. Peter, just lacing up his boots, heard the spud's outraged screech and hurried across the hall to the lab to investigate, prepared to be entertained. Slimer was gesticulating wildly and sputtering protests, the gist of which was that Ghostbuster Central was Slimer's place and he didn't like other ghosts being there. Ignoring the little spud's complaints, Egon adjusted equipment, Ray attempted to reason and sympathize with Slimer, and Winston stood back, arms folded across his chest, grinning in amusement at all the excitement.

"We're going to run tests on him, Slimer," Egon explained reasonably. "You won't sit still for all my tests any more. I need backup."

"Slimer be good," the little green spud vowed, casting a baleful look at the intruder. "Egon do all kind of test and Slimer like it. Promise."

"Like Slimer," the new ghost volunteered. "Like Egon, like Ray, like Winston. Love Peter!"

Slimer's eyes narrowed at what he must consider an infringement on his territory. "Go 'way," he cried, flinging a dramatic hand in the direction of the nearest window. He would have pushed the other ghost right through the glass if he hadn't needed to go through Ray to do it. "Don't need you here."

"Hey, Pete, the spud's jealous," Winston said with a grin, noticing Peter in the doorway and beckoning him in to share the fun.

"Great, just what I need. Ghosts fighting over me," murmured Peter without enthusiasm as he ambled into the lab. "Don't worry, Spud. I don't like him. If it comes to that I don't like you either."

"Aw," wailed Slimer, shooting a hugely reproachful look in Peter's direction. "Peter hates me."

"He doesn't hate you, Slimer," Ray said quickly, anxious to reassure the little green ghost. "He's just grouchy in the mornings. You know how he is. He can't sneak you popcorn at night and chase away that nasty gooper that tried to dive bomb you yesterday and then say he doesn't like you."

Peter winced. He didn't like to seem soft around the spud, and Ray's encouraging words were certain to inspire Slimer to all kinds of bad habits, even if the occultist was right. Slimer irritated Peter like crazy, but he wasn't quite as bad as he had been at the beginning. Better to believe the spud had improved than to admit he'd developed a tolerance of him, because if it were true, Peter didn't want to admit it. He'd never live it down.

"Hmmm," said Egon, his tones deeply significant. "I hadn't considered that fact before, but Peter, considering their reaction to you, you may somehow be a natural ghost attractor."

"I thought you said there wasn't any such thing as a ghost attractor, Spengs," Peter reminded him hastily. He didn't like the possibility of Egon's new theory. True, Slimer tried to hug him and smooch him all the time but he did it to the other guys and Janine too, and it wasn't really that much worse than having an affectionate dog licking one's face. But Peter did tend to get slimed a lot on busts. More than the others, he was sure of it, at least it felt that way. Could Egon mean something about him caused it, that it would go on happening forever? He'd half suspected he got slimed the first because he always plunged into any new bust, partly because if there was going to be heat he wanted to protect his buddies. Ray was so gung ho that danger never occured to him and Egon got caught up in all the technical aspects and could walk in front of a bus if he was concentrating on the readings of his P.K.E. meter. Peter didn't often acknowledged the thought consciously, and he wasn't overtly--or overly--protective of the guys on busts, but a part of him suspected it was true. If Egon was right, it might mean the ghosts would find him anyway, even if he hung back the way he sometimes pretended to. Now there was a disgusting thought.

"I said we couldn't build one," Egon replied. "However, there's no question some people appear to experience significantly higher contact with the spirit realm than the rest of the population. I have done little research into this particular subject yet, though I have always meant to." His gaze traveled consideringly over the reluctant psychologist. "Today might be a good day to begin."

"If that means you want me to sit around all afternoon with electrodes stuck to me while you play mad scientist then today is not a good day to begin," argued Peter just as Slimer stuck out his tongue at the new ghost and gave him a dramatic raspberry.

"Cool it, Slimer," Winston put in, patting the green ghost on the back. "Think of it like this. You'll have somebody to play with when we're gone."

Slimer didn't look like he derived any pleasure from the idea, even when Ray said encouragingly, "It'll be fun, Slimer. You can teach him all sorts of things and show him what he's not allowed to touch. We'd never manage without you."

"What things?" Slimer asked suspiciously, narrowing his orange eyes as he sneaked unfriendly looks at the new specter.

"Probably how to slime my boots," muttered Peter, giving the new little ghost a dark look. He had to admit it was a lot more polite than Slimer. It hadn't retaliated to the spud's overt dislike, instead simply hanging politely in the air near Egon, his little feet making small stroking motions like a dog-paddling swimmer attempting to remain in place.

Ray leaned in, interested, as always, in any new phenomenon. "What's your name, little guy?" he asked. "We can't keep calling you, 'him', or 'hey you'."

"Muz," said the ghost obediently. "Name is Muz."

"Short, but not sweet," said Peter. "Slimer, we've got that gig at the Children's Hospital. Your job is to look after Muz and make sure he doesn't scare the kiddies. You got it?" And when the other three looked at him in astonishment that he would permit the new ghost to come along, he shrugged. "Leave it here where it can get into all kinds of trouble? Janine would probably quit if we tried to get her to babysit a ghost again. You know how she goes on about what's not in her job description? Course you might get around her, Egon," he said, waggling his eyebrows suggestively at the blond man. It was common knowledge Janine had the hots for Egon. Egon's reaction to her was known only to Egon.

"I think it best to keep our eyes on Muz, too," Egon replied immediately, ignoring the latter half of Peter's remarks. "He appears harmless, even quite friendly."

"The kids'll love him," enthused Ray, getting into the spirit of things. "He's cute."

"Yeah, if you like monsters with big teeth," grumbled Peter.

Janine Melnitz gaped at Muz when he bobbed down the stairs after Peter, ignoring Slimer's attempts to crowd in between. "What is that?" demanded the secretary, eyes wide.

"New toy for Egon to play with," Peter said wickedly. "He came out of the bathtub drain when I was taking a shower."

"Is that what all the noise was up there? I never know if you're being killed or if you're playing touch football or what. Most of the time," the redheaded woman added darkly, "it's better not to know." She eyed the new ghost skeptically. "And I'm not gonna watch him while you're gone."

"Told you!" Peter elbowed Egon with a wicked grin. "Don't worry, Big J, we're taking him with us. Though medical science may never forgive us."

"I'm not sure I will either, Dr. V," she called after him.

"Hey, Melnitz, what did I ever do to you?"

She folded her arms and looked at him consideringly. "Well, let me see. Do you want a list?" She smiled suddenly. "Go on, get outa here. I've got work to do. And don't get in trouble, Dr. V."

"We won't," said Peter pointedly as the four men and two ghosts headed for Ecto-1.

Actually medical science had nothing to complain about. The kids liked Muz as much as they liked Slimer and reveled in a chance to play with both ghosts. Slimer had his routine down pat in which he pretended to be a nasty ghost while the guys chased him around the ward and pretended to miss, causing the children to laugh uproariously. When Slimer had finally been trapped, and then freed, Peter gestured the other ghost forward and the kids were fascinated.

"They know we won't let anything hurt them," Ray told one of the nurses. "Slimer's been with us a long time and Muz is protective of humans. He saved Peter from getting hurt when he tripped in the shower this morning."

"Well, if you say so," the nurse replied uneasily. "It's just that they're both so ugly."

"Very different from you," Peter told her with a smile. "They're harmless--unless you count getting slimed harmful."

"I don't think I'd like it," she said doubtfully. "You're sure it won't hurt the children?" She pointed at Slimer who was hugging a little girl in a wheelchair. In spite of the goo in her hair, the child looked rapturous with delight and was hugging him back with all her strength.

"It never hurt me," Peter said. "Annoyed me, maddened me, messed up my hair, but it never hurt me."

"And Peter should know," Egon replied. "He is often a ghost's first target when we go on a bust."

Peter straightened up, threw out his chest, sucked in his stomach and struck a pose. "It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it."

"Yeah, that's why we keep him," Winston chortled. He ducked away before Peter could retaliate, joining Slimer and squatting down to speak to the child. Ray was already circulating, showing his thrower to the children and explaining it in a way they could understand.

The nurse followed Peter's gaze and smiled a little at the sight. "He's very good with the children."

"Yeah, Ray's just a big kid himself," Peter said fondly. Realizing Ray was getting good press here while Peter himself was just standing around, he stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. "Yo, Muz. Front and center." The ghost complied immediately, even sketching a half-salute.

"Aye, aye, Peter."

The kids loved that. Peter grinned. "Okay, Muz, you're the world-champion air swimmer. Let's show these kids how great you can swim across the room--and you don't even need a pool."

The ghost instantly poised himself like a fish and went off across the room, legs paddling, stubby little arms cleaving the air, tail wiggling back and forth, up and down, controlling direction and pitch. It was a comic sight. The kids shrieked with delight and applauded, and Muz beamed. He swam from child to child, giving each one of them a big, sloppy kiss.

"He's worth his weight in PR," Peter muttered to Egon. "I was pretty smart when I said we should keep him."

"You? I seem to remember you wanted to shove him back down the drain and forget about him," Egon reminded him, controlling his amusment at Peter's attempt to save face. "Perhaps a series of television ads might be beneficial. You know there is a certain segment of the population who considers us cruel for busting every ghost we see. It might please them to realize we don't do it automatically."

"We don't bust 'em all," Peter argued as if to convince the pretty nurse. "Some of 'em, we talk into going away, some we help disperse peacefully. Some we vaporize because they need it. We only bust the bad guys."

"And this will convince people that's true," Egon replied. "We'll take Muz with us on some of our busts. He could be very useful."

"Yeah, and he's got great taste, too," Peter put in. "He even likes my singing."

"Well, yeah, no accounting for taste," Winston called over his shoulder. The older kids chuckled knowingly at this and even the younger ones giggled a little. Peter pretended to be hugely distraught, which caused the children to roar with laughter, especially when Muz swooped over to Peter and patted him on the back with his little hands and his two front feet with enough force to make Peter stagger. He cast a baleful glare at the little ghost, which the children took as part of the performance, and Muz, full of his own importance, swooped around the room giving some of the children high fives. The little ghost was definitely a scene stealer. Noticing this, Slimer sulked, and Ray coaxed the green ghost down from his hovering position near the ceiling. Slimer made him work for it but then he finally came down and threw his skinny arms around Ray's neck, to applause from all the children.

All in all, it was a highly successful performance, and Peter could tell as he was signing autographs for the children that their spirits had been raised by the Ghostbusters' visit. He thought back to a hospital stay of his own when he was a kid, once when he was sick enough that his father, the roving con man, had actually shown up and sat with him, and imagined how he would have received something like this. Of course by then he was old enough to have started to develop a layer of cynicism, but he suspected no child could have resisted this performance; certainly none of the children in the ward had.

He looked around for the nurse who had seemed impressed earlier, determined to see if he could gain something from the experience, and found her talking eagerly to Ray. Peter had been upstaged a few times by Egon--the tall physicist seemed to attract women without trying and Peter was used to that--but Ray didn't generally try to upstage Peter with the fairer sex. Edging closer, Peter discovered they were talking enthusiastically about comic books. Ray had found a fellow comic fan. Peter backed off. A little female companionship would be good for his buddy. He grinned proprietarily, as if he had planned it that way.

Egon was engaged in conversation with a doctor, a woman of much Egon's age with her hair pulled back severely in a bun, wide blue eyes nearly concealed by horn-rimmed glasses. An expert in female appearance, Peter realized she would be spectacular if she took her hair down, not that she was anything but beautiful now. He eavesdropped a little. Egon was speaking, enthusiastically and with gestures.

"...with an adjustment to the proto-ectoplasmic resonator--"

"Fascinating." The doctor's eyes widened. Her glasses slid down her nose much the way Egon's always did. If that kind of talk fascinated her, it looked like a match made in heaven.

Peter turned away, and came face to face with their new ghost, who embraced him heartily and slurped a long purple tongue from Peter's chin to his forehead. He groaned and pushed the ghost away, which set the children laughing again. A showman the ghost might be, but he wasn't Peter's favorite companion. The other doctors in the room were male and the other nurses were old enough to be Peter's mother. He gave a sigh, resigning himself to the role of comic relief, at least for the remainder of the gig.

"Never mind, Pete," Winston consoled him, giving him a comradely slap on the back. "Does 'em good to get out of the lab once in awhile."

That was true. Peter looked at Egon and Ray and grinned broadly. Yeah, the two mad scientists needed a little female companionship, though Janine was certain to dislike the doctor on sight. Now if Peter could just figure out how to convince Muz that it was time for him to go back to wherever he'd come from....

Muz spent the next few days worming himself into the affections of Peter's fellow Ghostbusters. Even Egon, who claimed to serve the cause of science, rapidly warmed to the little ghost, who proved utterly helpful in the lab, determined to allow Egon to run every test known to humanity upon his ugly little person. Slimer had always run out of patience before Egon had finished, but Muz was willing to spend long hours there with the physicist, though he would pop away long enough to reassure himself that Peter had not run off in the meantime. He never wanted to come along on Peter's dates after the first time he asked, either, resigning himself to the company of the other three while Peter was out on a date. They had begun to grow quite fond of him, accepting him as a natural part of life around the firehouse. Only Peter was able to control his enthusiasm, though he could tolerate Muz, even if only because the new ghost was such an appreciative audience if Peter decided he wanted to sing or play music on Egon's keyboard, actions which usually reminded his three teammates they had urgent work elsewhere.

Slimer was the only hold-out, but after three or four days, even the spud started to warm up to Muz, who professed himself to like Slimer, even when the green ghost was at his most obnoxious. Muz finally offered, very sadly with huge tears, to go away, managing to create a thoroughly hangdog expression, and even Slimer felt sorry for him.

"Aw, poor Muz," he muttered to Ray and Peter, who had watched the new ghost's performance, Ray with overt sympathy and Peter in appreciation for a con man whose skills rivaled Peter's father. Muz wasn't particularly smart but he had great instincts. "Muz can stay," Slimer announced.

Muz beamed. With his huge mouth, beaming was quite dazzling, and all his teeth glittered. "Muz loves Slimer," he announced and embraced him. Slimer wasn't entirely sure he liked that, but he bore up with it, and returned it. After that, the two ghosts began to have fun together, sometimes planning joint attacks upon Peter, sliming him from two directions at once.

"Fascinating, Peter," Egon said after one such dive-bombing attack in which Peter was coated from head to toe in two shades of green ectoplasmic residue. "You do seem to be a natural target for ghosts. I think I should indeed run those tests. Can you give me an hour?"

Peter heaved a sigh. "Come on, Egon, I think I'd rather not know. After all, unless you can find a way to shut down my ghost-attractor pheromones, what good does it do to know about it. I might as well paint a bulls-eye on my chest and be done with it."

"You know very well a large part of your receptivity to being slimed is due to your gung-ho desire to lead the charge," Egon replied, though he was obviously intrigued by Peter's choice of the word 'pheromones'.

"Gung-ho, Egon?" Peter asked, lifting a haughty eyebrow. "That's Ray, not me."

Egon grew serious. "Peter, don't think I don't understand why you sometimes press to the forefront on a bust."

Venkman avoided Egon's eyes. "Well, maybe I just get carried away," he mumbled, adding brightly, "I live for my work."

"You have a large protective streak," Egon replied knowingly, his eyes warming. "Though it isn't necessary to shield us, I realize you do it out of genuine concern, and the rest of us do attempt to take up the slack."

Peter knew that. Whenever he charged into danger at the head of the group, he could always count on the others following him; he knew they did it out of the same concern that motivated him, and that their teamwork functioned so well because of their genuine friendship and caring for each other. They didn't trip over their own feet to protect each other, but they were there in a crisis. Never let it be said that one of the Ghostbusters could fall into danger because his buddies hadn't stood up for him.

A little embarrassed at where this subject was leading, since Peter had never been quite comfortable with overt declarations of affection, he said quickly, "So run your tests, Spengs. If there's such a thing as ghost-attracting pheromones, I want to know about it. Maybe I can change my diet or something so I don't have the knack any more."

"It would be a fascinating study," returned Egon, letting him off the hook. "Something does draw ghosts to you, and it works whether the ghosts love you or hate you. I'd enjoy clarifying the reason."

Peter grinned broadly. "Maybe it's the same kind of thing that makes women like me so much." He sneaked a considering look at his friend to see how well that had gone over, and noted the stern look in Egon's eyes. "So tell me," he prompted with a grin, "how are you and Dr. Levitt getting along?"

Egon reddened slightly. "She is an intelligent woman, Peter. She knows more about physics than I'd expect someone in another field to understand, and she is fascinated with mushrooms."

"In other words, a match made in heaven. What does Janine think about this paragon?"

Egon frowned. "Well, um, Peter, I think this is not the time for such a frivolous discussion. We have work to do."

Peter grinned. Egon was enjoying himself with the doctor, but he wasn't deeply smitten. Besides, her schedule was such that she had very little time for Egon. The romance would run its course and then fade away, but Egon might well enjoy the process and it would probably be good for him. He needed to get away from the lab more than he did, and Peter always encouraged him to go out on the town.

"Okay, Igor, bring on your electrodes," he conceded. "I'm ready to be the guinea pig. Or should I say 'victim'? Let's see why Muz--not to mention Slimer--find me so lovable. After all, Muz always comes to listen when I sing in the shower."

"Perhaps Muz is female, Peter, and simply enjoys watching you bathe out of some type of prurient interest," Egon said wickedly, his blue eyes twinkling with mirth at his suggestion.

Peter gaped at Egon, finding the idea a terrible one. What it if applied to Slimer, too? All these years.... He grimaced horribly, feeling his cheeks redden. "You're kidding, right? Please tell me you're kidding. The last thing I want in my entire life is to be a lust object for a six-legged wiggler with big teeth--or for any other little spuds, either."

Egon couldn't hold back his laughter any longer as he abandoned his teasing. "Don't be alarmed, Peter. As near as I can ascertain, Class 5 specters do not possess specific sexual characteristics, at least not as a general rule. Slimer might react when watching sexual scenes in a movie, but it is simply to copy human behavior. He doesn't do it on his own. I've noticed him drift away from the screen during love scenes on television and certainly Muz has shown no interest in that direction. We tend to refer to such ghosts as 'he' either out of gender stereotypes in the language or simply because their voices more often than not sound male."

"Well, thank goodness for that," Peter retorted with relief, embarrassed at the very thought. "The thing came up the drain when I was naked, for Pete's sake."

Egon's laughter intensified. "Don't worry, Peter. I doubt it was physical lust which attracted Muz. Perhaps he is simply tone deaf."

"I hope so. The last thing I want is something hanging around lusting after me while I'm in the shower. At least not unless whoever it is proves to be female and very much alive. Wait a minute," he added suddenly. "What do you mean, tone deaf!" He lunged at Egon, who jumped sideways to avoid being tackled to the ground.

The alarm rang.

"Saved by the bell," Egon said with an amused smile. "I'm afraid the electrodes will have to wait, Peter."

"So will your payback," retorted Venkman, grinning. "I'll try to contain my disappointment. Come on, let's go down and see what Janine has in store for us."

"Hopefully something interesting," Egon replied.

"Just so long as it isn't big and nasty with a lot of teeth," Peter said as they started for the stairs. "I get enough of that at home."

"It's a job Upstate," Janine informed the Ghostbusters when the four of them lined up in front of her desk, Winston wiping grease from his hands after emerging from beneath the hood of Ecto-1. Ray, who must have been working on trap maintenance had one in his hand that he was just finishing with, sealing the casing into place with a screwdriver.

"I hope it's exciting," he said with a bounce of anticipation. "We haven't had anything past a Class 2 or 3 all week."

"Muz come too?" asked the little dark-green specter, hanging in the air over Janine's left shoulder. "Muz help out a lot."

"We haven't taken him on a bust yet," Ray reminded the team. "It might be interesting to see what useful qualities he has. He might be able to sense other ghosts, and he does have a longer attention span than Slimer."

"Yeah, about five minutes longer," Winston reminded them, tossing aside the greasy rag. "He's hardly a Rhodes Scholar. But it wouldn't hurt, I guess. He's not always clamoring to be fed, either."

Slimer popped up out of one of the drawers of Janine's filing cabinet. "Slimer go too?" he beseeched the guys in hopeful anticipation.

"I'm not going if they both are," Peter said firmly. The thought of being slimed from two directions at once didn't appeal to him in the slightest, not when he was on a job.

"Slimer," Ray wheedled, realizing Peter meant what he said, "you have to stay and protect Janine, remember? Muz has never gone with us before. I think you two can take turns. This will be his turn. You can come next time, and that's a promise."

Slimer's yellow eyes rolled meaningfully. "Slimer doesn't like it," he muttered under his breath as if he were fighting massive disappointment, then he zipped over to Janine and embraced her around the neck. "Slimer protect Janine."

"Can it, Slimer," she urged, pushing him off. "Give me some space."

"Tell us about the job, Janine," Egon urged.

"Well, it was a guy who bought a big old house in a little village called Jonesville, and he wants to renovate it, but he says it's got a bad history. Mysterious things happen there and it keeps changing hands, though nobody will claim there are really ghosts. This guy's apparently a stubborn type and says that if there are ghosts, why not call in experts just like he would if there were termites."

"So we get to be the Orkin Man?" Peter asked, not quite certain if this was a slur on their profession or not, though they were ghost eliminators. Peter had always considered that a peg above run of the mill exterminators, but it was clear that some of their clients didn't have quite the elevated notion of Ghostbusting that the team did.

"That sounds about right," Janine said. "The guy, a character named Johnson, said he hadn't experienced much of anything himself though some of the painting crew he had in the house had, but he wanted the place checked out. He left a key for you under a brick beside the front steps. He says he's prepared four rooms. It will be night by the time you get there. He says there's a good restaurant in Jonesville and you can eat there, then head out to the house. He'll leave an ice chest there with some cold drinks and some thermoses of coffee or cocoa for you, and you can either bust the ghost tonight or sleep over and do it in the morning."

Peter brightened. It sounded like this client had their interests and their comfort at heart. "Won't he be there?" he asked in surprise.

The secretary shook her head. "No, he's a businessman and can't get away. He was up there a couple of days ago and evidently heard all the local dirt about the place and apparently had a 'close encounter' of his own, though he says he didn't actually see a ghost." She grinned suddenly. "Frankly I think he did experience something but doesn't like to admit it. You know the rational type--there are no ghosts, so obviously he didn't see or hear anything. Here's his phone number. You can call him if you have questions."

Peter smiled in return as he took the paper and shoved it into his pocket. "Too bad he won't be there, then, to see us in action. We work well for a skeptical audience." In fact, Peter liked to manipulate such busts to be even more convincing than usual if he could to prove how brilliant and talented the team was.

"Cheer up, Peter, he's paying us whether he wants to admit he believes or not," said Ray with enthusiasm. "How far is it? We'd better get moving if we want to get up there before dark."

The house in question was an old mansion over looking the Hudson River, reached by a journey down several back roads through a rather thick woods. It would prove for its owner an ideal retreat from civilization once it was de-haunted. In a contented frame of mind the four Ghostbusters, replete from a fabulous meal at the recommended restaurant, pulled into the long, curving driveway of the old place just at twilight. Peter's content was increased by the fact that Muz had been quiet in the back of Ecto and hadn't insisted in coming into the restaurant with them. In fact Muz didn't seem to eat at all, except for the odd bite Ray tended to offer him, which was infinitely better on their budget than Slimer's voracious appetite. Peter banished the memory of the sight of Slimer watching them with huge, betrayed eyes as they pulled out of the firehouse to head upstate. He didn't want to start getting sentimental over Slimer. There were enough problems in life without that. Egon and Ray wanted to test Muz's abilities to detect other ghosts and see if they could form any theories about ghostly receptivity to spirits. And at least Peter hadn't been slimed once on the journey. He still wasn't particularly fond of the little ghost, though.

The house was big and boxy, red brick and, in Peter's estimation, rather too overgrown with ivy and creepers. Some of the windows were blocked right up, as if the house had been abandoned a long time or as if the previous owners had liked living in a green-filtered, jungle-like atmosphere. The old place was ideal for ghosts. Anyone looking at the place would expect it to be haunted.

"Wow, it looks spooky," cried Ray, echoing Peter's thoughts.

"Not only does it look that way, it will indeed be a fascinating study," Egon replied. As they had pulled into the long driveway he had taken out his P.K.E. meter and started taking readings, and now the detection device had begun to react. As Peter watched, the antennae lifted slightly and the meter gave a faint beep.

"Residuals, huh?" asked Ray, glancing over, expertly gauging the level of readings produced from the meter's reaction.

Winston pulled Ecto to a stop in front of the wide brick steps that ran up to the front door. "Doesn't look too strong," he opined as he shut off the engine.

"On the contrary," Egon replied, "this is particularly interesting. I'm getting more than simple Class 3 readings here, which is what one would expect in a typical haunted house."

"More?" echoed Peter and Ray in unison, Ray's voice full of delight while Peter sounded less than enthusiastic. It wasn't that he didn't love his work, but the thought of spending the night in a haunted house didn't thrill him as much as it did the occultist. Peter remembered a few such instances where haunted houses had proven nearly too much for them, Heck House being a major contender, not to mention Mrs. Rogers' place, though the real problem there hadn't been the house but Mrs. Rogers herself. While this place couldn't be as heavily haunted as the late Jonas Heck's enspelled estate or compete with the threat of the demon Watt, the look on Egon's face convinced Peter there was more than a simple ghost present. "What do you mean, more?" Peter asked in dismay.

"I'm not entirely certain yet," Egon replied thoughtfully as he twiddled the dials. "It could be something as simple as a dimensional gateway, or something more complex. There appear to be no spirits currently in residence, but the house has patterns to indicate there has been more than one spirit here recently, and indeed that there have often been a number of them, yet I can't quite classify them. This is fascinating and will require a great deal of study."

"Hey, it's a ghost motel," offered Peter, to whom the word 'study' had never appealed. "Need a free night's 'rest' they come here. Maybe it's a ghost safe house."

"Now there's an interesting thought," Egon returned, opening the door and climbing out of the vehicle, his face alight with interest. While he probably didn't subscribe to Peter's off-the-cuff theory, he was still interested in the possibilities. "Unless we're dealing with multiple deaths on the site; say, for instance the hiding place of the victims of a mass murderer, I wouldn't get this kind of readings simply from Class 3's."

"Mass murderer?" echoed Winston, as he got out of Ecto, standing and stretching to relieve the kinks in his shoulders from the long drive up from the city. "You mean like that Daumer guy or that Gacy character? Somebody hiding his victims on the grounds or something?"

"It is a possibility," Egon replied. "It would certainly explain the high level of residuals I'm picking up. But I don't think that's it. We'd be getting Class 3 residuals if that were the case. Further tests are definitely called for."

Ray headed for the steps. "I wonder where the key is. There's a lot of bricks here. Oh..." His voice trailed off as he bent down. "I think it's here. Yep, here's the key." Holding it in one hand he bounced up the steps. "Come on, guys, let's take a look inside and get some readings before we bring our suitcases in." He fitted the key into the lock and it turned easily. The door swung open soundlessly on well-oiled hinges.

"Oh, Ra-ay," called Peter behind him. "Didn't you forget something?" He held out the occultist's proton pack by its strap. "If this place is hip-deep in ghosts or the latest cross-rip waiting to happen, I think it might be better to go armed."

"Oh. Yeah." Ray came back down the stairs, reluctant to delay his investigation, and slid into his pack, fastening the snap across his stomach. Then, drawing his thrower, he hurried eagerly back to the open front door and vanished inside, calling over his shoulder, "Come on, guys, this is really great."

Fastening on his own pack, Peter exchanged a quick glance with Egon and shrugged. "Into the valley of death..." he muttered. "Sometimes I think we ought to give that boy downers."

"No way, my man," Winston objected. "We just need a leash."

Peter chuckled as he hastened up the steps after Ray, just as lights flashed on in the entry hall of the house. "At least the electricity is on," he called back to the other two who were right behind him, Egon still shrugging his shoulders into the pack straps.

The entry of the house was a square room with doors off it to the left and right and a stairway rising directly opposite it that rose to a landing and then branched to left and right. At the landing, a triptych of stained glass windows caught the last of the daylight as the setting sun struck it full on, revealing a medieval scene with a castle in the background, an winged angel to one side and a dragon or some such mythical creature on the other. The reds, blues and greens shone brightly in the fiery rays of the sun.

Behind them in the doorway, Muz hovered making nervous little sounds. "Ghosts," he announced. "Bad ghosts," and shivered pathetically.

Ray turned quickly. "Where? Hiding here? Can you show us, Muz?"

The little ghost pointed in two directions at once, one hand stabbing upward toward the ceiling, the other waving around in a circle to encompass the entire house. "Up there, nasty," he announced.

"He's correct, Raymond," Egon said without lifting his eyes from the meter. "The concentration of spectral energy is indeed higher overhead. Hmmm. I would have guessed it to be beneath us, perhaps deep in the bedrock."

"Not if somebody got offed in one of the bedrooms," suggested Peter, prowling around investigating the entry hall. "Hey, here's a huge ice chest," he said triumphantly, opening it. "Full of goodies, too. I think Mr. Johnson is a class act. Here's a note. 'Thermoses of hot chocolate have been placed in each bedroom. The power works, and so does the stove if they need to be heated up but the furnace isn't connected yet. Light fires if it's too cold. I've left a Mr. Coffee machine in the kitchen and some rolls and doughnuts for breakfast.' This guy knows how to treat Ghostbusters, I've gotta give him that." He pulled out some liter bottles of soda and a few cans of beer. "All the comforts of home."

"Except a TV," muttered Ray as he switched the settings on his meter. "Egon, I'm going to take readings for negative valence and then head upstairs with the ecto-scopes and see if I can find anything unusual. These readings might be strong, but they're really only residuals. The ghosts or whatever aren't here now."

"Maybe because we didn't knock," Peter suggested mischievously, replacing the containers in the ice chest and setting the cover into place. He was still too well fed from his dinner to consider adding anything else, but the supplies would come in handy a few hours later while Egon and Ray brainstormed their findings, if the ghost or ghosts hadn't made an appearance by then.

Muz had overcome his initial distress and now hovered near Ray as if he had learned the occult specialist was the most likely of them to consider his wellbeing. Ray looked sideways at him. "Can you sense anything here right now?" he asked the ghost.

Muz concentrated. "No," he admitted at length. "Bad ghosts here before, not now. Peter protect Muz?"

Winston's elbow connected painfully with Peter's ribs as the black man encouraged him to answer positively. Venkman elbowed him back. "Sure," he agreed. "When the shooting starts, you can hover behind me. Fair enough?"

The little ghost brightened, and his tail wagged to and fro like that of an enthusiastic puppy. Abandoning Ray without a second thought, he drifted over to Peter and positioned himself at the psychologist's shoulder.

"He likes you, Peter," Egon said, maintaining a straight face though his statement of the obvious was matched by a wicked twinkle in his blue eyes.

Peter groaned. "If we're gonna start talking about me being attractive to ghosts and that kind of weird stuff again, I might go home. So tell me, Spengs," he persisted before the taller man could respond, "what kind of spooky doings have we got here? Anything interesting or just a run of the mill fixed repeater?"

"It's more than a fixed repeater, Peter," Egon replied, pausing as he heard his inadvertent rhyme and grimacing slightly.

"Repeater, Peter," echoed Venkman with a grin, stressing the inadvertent rhyme. "That's real catchy, Egon. Did you ever think you were wasted at this when you could have had a brilliant career writing jingles for Hallmark?"

"As I was saying," Egon began with deliberate sternness, "the readings do not indicate anything as easily categorized as a Class 3 or 4 repeater. Yet it doesn't seem powerful enough to suggest a demon."

"You think it might be a whole new classification we haven't encountered before?" suggested Ray, turning to stare at Egon in surprise. Since he'd already lowered the ecto-scopes over his eyes, he had to push them up on his forehead again.

Egon shook his head. "No, not that. I think perhaps we might have found a different type of gateway, perhaps one leading somewhere other than the netherworld or a ghostly realm."

"Leading where?" Peter asked, resting his elbow on the knob atop the newel post and regarding the two hard scientists expectantly. "Cleveland? The Hard Rock Cafe? Saturn?"

"No, that's not what I had in mind," Egon replied.

"In other words, you don't know yet."

"We just got here," Winston said pacifically. "How about we haul in our overnight bags and take a look at our bedrooms, then Egon can track down this doorway to who-knows-where and maybe we can find out what it's here for."

"Yeah, and it might open up and we'll be able to guess right away," agreed Ray hopefully. "I hope so. This is great!" He started for the door. "We can get settled in and see what we can find. I wish we had a history of the house. That might be helpful. Johnson gave us everything else we need. You don't think he left anything like that lying around?"

"We'll look when we've settled in," Egon replied, sounding quite content to spend days here investigating the unusual readings. "And we'll take Muz with us. He can serve as a canary."

"Oh no," objected Peter heartily. "He sings worse than I--I mean he's got a really lousy voice. We could use it to scare the ghosts away."

Ray chuckled at that. "No, Peter. He can go in first and we can monitor his reactions. They used to use canaries to test for bad air in coal mines. The bird would react quicker than the miners and when they saw its reaction they knew it was time to get out."

"Muz look for ghosts for Peter," the little ghost promised, draping one arm around Peter's neck.

"Great, but right now I gotta get my suitcase," Peter said, shoving him away. Why did it have to be ghosts who reacted to him this way? Why couldn't it be beautiful women and people casting around for someone to leave their fortunes to?

They carried the bags in and took it upstairs to choose their bedrooms. The house proved to be only partially furnished, some of the rooms holding a few chairs draped with Holland covers, others holding nothing at all beyond the inevitable dust balls and cobwebs, the latter of which made Peter shudder.

"I bet this place is just full of creepy crawlies," he complained. "Probably mice too. Just so long as it's not rats. If there's anything I hate more than rats and mice, it's mice and rats."

"Not to mention cockroaches," Egon offered, unable to hold back a smile. "Don't worry, Peter. I'm sure a thrower will chase away a mouse in a pinch." He checked his readings again.

"It's stronger up here, isn't it, Egon?" Ray asked, emerging from the bedroom he'd claimed as his own and pulling the scopes down over his eyes. "WOW!"

Peter deposited his overnight bag inside the door of the nearest bedroom and turned to Ray. "Wow, what, Tex?" he asked.

"There's a kind of weird overlay all over everything," he said. "Sort of a glitter around the edges. It doesn't really match the readings we're getting. I wonder if there could be some kind of paranatural entity here, like we encountered once before when we went to the Macabre house."

"These readings don't match the ones we got there," Egon replied at once without glancing up from his P.K.E. meter. "Though they do tend to shift in that direction. I suspect the house has somehow accessed an alternate dimension."

"Maybe it's ley lines," offered Ray enthusiastically. "This house could be an intersection node for power conduits."

"Ley lines are not exactly scientific," Egon objected. "They're generally discounted now, though part of that is because the whole concept was never completely established, or more likely, correctly established. To suggest the ancients created their monuments at positions of power might indicate that they were more in tune with the world than we are in our more modern age. We've lost the simplicity and contact with nature they had. But on the other hand, it may have simply been a coincidence, or perhaps the rites they performed might have imbued certain sites with a residue of power. In any case we have been in this general vicinity before and have never encountered anything to suggest ley lines."

"No, but maybe some kind of power nodes exist here. After all, we've run into that kind of thing before. Look at the New Jersey Parallelogram," Ray reminded him, determined to stick with at least part of his theory. "Something weird goes on in this house or people wouldn't keep moving away. Maybe the house rejects them."

"Well, I hope it doesn't reject us before we have a good night's sleep," said Winston. "That big meal made me sleepy. Are we going to do a lot more work tonight?"

"I want to go over the entire house with the P.K.E. meters," Egon responded. "Even if the gateway isn't open presently, I want to pinpoint its location."

"Pinpoint away," Peter agreed, smothering a yawn. "Just so long as it isn't in my bedroom."

Egon swung the P.K.E. meter in that direction, and nothing much happened. "No," he replied, continuing the motion to check each of the four prepared bedrooms. "It's not in any of them. "Mr. Johnson no doubt chose for us the only rooms remotely ready for inhabitation, but if the ghost is bothering him, even subliminally, I doubt he'd have chosen one of those rooms. I wish there was a telephone here. I'd like to call him and check out his feelings."

"We can use Ecto's mobile phone," Winston reminded him, "if the range isn't too far. He's up here for the night, not back in the city, right?"

"He's in the same town as the restaurant," Peter said, remembering Janine's scribbled notes and the number he'd brought. "He's probably out of his business meeting now. I'll go call him."

He returned from the trip to Ecto shaking his head, uncertain if the responses from Johnson were in any way reassuring, suspecting it could mean big trouble. Night had fallen abruptly and he'd hurried back to the house, though it was not exactly a place of safety. "I got him, guys," he said when he found the other three coming down from the attic. "He sounded pretty perplexed. He bought the house in spite of the rumors and didn't have any sensitivity to it himself at all, not while looking the place over or tracking around it with architects and painters, though he thought some of them were a little uneasy. Then one of them passed out cold. Guy built like a linebacker, in perfect health. Johnson tried to indicate something freaked the guy and he passed out, but I don't know. It was only in the last day or two while he's been up here doing some repair work that he's really felt uncomfortable. He kept feeling like he was being watched. Sometimes he felt like he was being touched, once he said he thought a cat had gotten in and was rubbing against his ankles but when he looked down, Tabby wasn't there. He didn't see any ghosts--he sounded like we should give him a reward for that--but he was so sure he was being watched that his first thought was local kids hanging out or burglars casing the joint. Then yesterday another painter had a dizzy spell and this morning the painters made a really flimsy excuse not to come back, and he realized what it must be. They were scared. That's when he called us. He doesn't want to believe but when he put everything together, he decided he'd better call us. He thinks whatever it was has been sleeping and now it's starting to wake up, and he doesn't want to share the house with it." Peter grinned. "Poor guy, he's as embarrassed as hell about it. He's going to come by in the morning just to prove how brave he is."

"It's not cowardly to be afraid of ghosts," Ray said with quick sympathy. "Some of them are dangerous."

"Thus speaks Mr. Fearless," Peter responded instantly. "The bigger and scarier they are the more you like 'em. Most people don't react like that. I remember how excited you were the time you thought there was a new demon in the sewers."

"That was different," Ray replied, a little embarrassed himself. "It would have been fun to bust it."

"So what did you find when I was out in the car?" asked Peter, grinning fondly at Ray's flustered face. "Any gateways to parallel universes? Doorways to the past or future? Teleport devices to the Enterprise?"

"Nothing like that, Peter," Egon replied pedantically. "I think there is a cross-rip here, but it may be cyclical. What intrigues me is that I don't believe it has any connection with any alternate dimensions we've encountered before. It's not to the Netherworld. The opening seems to be in the attic, and we found traces of a hexagram carved into the wood of the floor and painted as well. It was partially buried under old trunks and typical attic junk, but it was there."

"Hexagram, Egon?" Peter asked, lifting an eyebrow. "Is this one of those weird terms that you and Ray and maybe two other people in the whole world have ever heard of?"

"It's a shield of Solomon, Peter, sometimes called a macrocosm," replied Ray, happy to share his knowledge. "It's a Kabbalistic symbol and it can be used to call demons like a pentagram or to shield against things like fire, only instead of having five sides, it's a six sided star."

"Well, I'll buy that. Just so long as it isn't about hexing people. We've got enough trouble without that," Peter cracked.

"You know what I think?" Ray persisted. "I bet somebody in the past knew about the gateway and tried to close it off and used the hexagram though I'm not sure that's what I'd have used. I wish we had records of the house. I'd like to know how dangerous the gateway was, and whether anybody ever saw anything really unusual or died in the house."

"Somebody must have seen something if they were messing with things like that," Winston said, uncomfortable with the idea.

"Yeah, and I don't like this 'died in the house' routine," Peter said. "Johnson said there were a number of unexplained deaths here about a hundred years ago. Not just at the house but in the neighborhood. They found maybe half a dozen people dead, not a mark on any of 'em, and the doctors couldn't explain why they'd died. Some of 'em were pretty young and not likely to have died of natural causes, either. 'Course medical science wasn't the best in the last century, but I still don't like the idea of it. Anyway, I thought a six-sided star was a Star of David. You saying this guy was doing some kind of Jewish ritual?"

"It wouldn't necessarily be Jewish, Peter," Egon replied.

"Well, Solomon was," Peter defended his question.

"True, but you don't normally carve a Star of David into your attic floor," said Winston, shaking his head. "No, it wasn't like that. It was some kind of occult power thing. It had that kind of feel to it."

"I wish we had more information," Egon said thoughtfully. "It may well be an important clue. Either the cross-rip is indeed cyclical or the hexagram has prevented passage for whatever passes through it habitually, or has until now."

"Yeah, and whatever passes through it is really weird," agreed Ray. "I set my P.K.E. meter to pick up negative valences and that's when I got a reading unlike anything we ever encountered before."

"Like the Bogeyman?" Peter asked, remembering he had given off a negative valence reading, too. "Is something nasty going to come popping out of my closet when I'm sleeping tonight?"

"Possibly, Peter," Egon replied, looking a little amused. He shoved his sliding glasses back into place on the bridge of his nose. "But this is very interesting. We won't be trapping the Bogeyman again; as you'll remember, he's safely stowed in our containment unit."

"And he's a physical entity," Ray reminded Peter, holding up his meter as if to prove a point. "Mostly when we get a negative valence that's what we read. I bet if we ever encountered pixies or fairies or brownies they'd give negative valences, too."

"So would the men in white coats who would come to take you away when you claimed to see them," Peter informed him. He glanced up the attic stairs, shivering a little. The shadows seemed almost tangible up there as if they were alive. "So give, Ray. What are you getting and just how dangerous is it?"

"Well, whatever was here isn't really here right now, at least we can't prove it with any regular settings, but we're getting residuals as if it's been here really recently. Within twenty-four hours, I'd say. And it's not one something; it's a lot of little different somethings. They're not solid but they're not ectoplasmic either. It's like nothing we've ever scanned before. Wow, isn't it great, Peter? A whole new discovery. I bet this will really make parapsychologists everywhere sit up and take notice."

"Yes, it's great, Ray, and I can smell a Nobel with your name on it, but what do these little non-solid non-ghosts do?"

"I have a theory, Peter," Egon said, his face gone solemn. "But you won't like it. I don't like it myself."

"So tell, big guy. They eat Ghostbusters, right? Nibble off our toes and work their way up to the important stuff?"

"They aren't physical, Peter. They can't eat anything at all, let alone the 'important stuff'. But you yourself spoke of bodies that had been found dead with no evidence of a cause. I wish there was a way we could have taken readings of those bodies, because based on my readings, whatever has been here can feed on life energy. A little contact with it would make someone experience lassitude, unease, nervous tension, crankiness. A lot might make someone pass out."

"Like the painter?" Peter echoed. "Some kind of invisible whatsit that rubs itself against your ankles like a cat and draws away your life energy." He shivered involuntarily. Could even the Ghostbusters defend themselves against something like that?

"Or your soul," said Ray solemnly.

"I knew I didn't like this place," Winston said with dramatic certainty. His gaze drifted to the attic stairs too, and he looked like he wanted to slam the door and prop a chair against it, not that it would do any good against entities that weren't solid. Either they could zip right through the door like Slimer could or they could compress themselves and ooze through the keyhole.

"Hey, Muz," Ray said suddenly, turning to the little ghost, who had suddenly reappeared as if he'd been wandering around on his own. "Where have you been? Do you know what's here?"

Muz hesitated then chose to answer the second question. Peter wasn't sure how long his attention span was and suspected the ghost would always respond to the most recent question. "Shadows," he said, as if that answered it all, rolling his eyes and glancing at the attic stairs too as if the shadows there were alive and moving, like a dark army. "Too many shadows."

"Yeah, right," agreed Peter, controlling a chill that ran down his spine. "Anybody but me wish it was morning?"

"Tell us about the shadows, Muz," prompted Ray in an encouraging voice, leaning toward the little ghost and smiling at him. "You mean something specific, not just the ordinary meaning, don't you?"

That confused the little ghost. He paddled furiously with all six of his legs as he tried to reason out what Ray had asked him. "Shadows," he repeated, frustrated, as if he couldn't believe they didn't know what he meant. "Bad shadows."

"Are they real?" Egon asked, trying to clarify the question. "Not just the darkness where something blocks the light?"

"Shadows," moaned Muz. "Nasty. Muz protect you. Fight shadows for Peter. Muz loves Peter."

"Thanks, I think," returned Peter dryly. "So what do we do now, Egon? Please tell me you know what to do."

"Well, this is an old house," Egon replied, gesturing along the hallway. "I found some journals upstairs in one of the trunks and brought them along with me in case I should find something useful in them." He indicated a couple of small, leatherbound books poking out of the chest pockets of his uniform. "They seem to be from the period in question. I want to go over them and see if I can find out anything about what happened here. If we can't resolve it by tomorrow, we'll go to the local newspaper office and try to learn what we can about the earlier incident. What does disturb me is the fact that the 'entities', for want of a better word, may not react to our proton rifles. I suspect we can trap them if they pass over open traps, but the beams might be ineffectual against them."

"Oh, good," said Winston. "I really hate this, you know. We can't trap 'em, and they can suck out our souls. And they're shadows so even if they're conscious entities, they can hide in ordinary shadows and we can't see them."

"We don't know that they're conscious entities, Winston," Ray pointed out. "They might be, oh, like termites, for example. They eat what's put in front of them without any awareness at all, except of hunger."

"Great," said Peter with a shiver. "Somehow that makes it worse."

"Yeah," agreed Winston. "I just love living in a horror movie." He braced himself. "What about that library we saw downstairs. It looked like it had a lot of old books in it. I bet Johnson got them with the house. Maybe we should look it over, kind of check the place out for information."

"I wonder how much informed data we could find," Egon replied. "True, people had made studies of the paranormal in those days. But the Society for Psychical Research was only founded in 1882 and the American branch began three years later. It's possible someone from that organization had involvement here. I might make a few phone calls tomorrow, back to the city."

"I know a couple of the current members who could help me out," Ray said. "At least they'd have access to the Society's library and if there's anything we could find it there. We could drive into the village tomorrow and I could call them while you guys check out the local newspapers. I think this may be bigger than we thought it was."

"A lot bigger," agreed Winston. "What do you say I make a big pot of coffee before we check the library?"

Muz parked himself at Peter's shoulder and grabbed the strap of his proton pack. "Muz protect Peter from shadows," he repeated. "Peter protect Muz?"

"I thought we might get to that," Peter muttered. "Lead me to that coffee. I don't suppose we'll get much sleep tonight."

An hour later, Peter was sure of it. The library proved to be a fairly large room, with books on three of the four walls, the vast expanse of texts broken only by floor to ceiling windows and a huge fireplace on the wall opposite the door. In the center of the room, a grouping of a sofa and three soft chairs stood, bulky and white, under covers which Winston immediately hauled off. "If we're gonna read, I want to be comfortable."

Peter agreed and helped him, using his activity as an excuse to bag the sofa for his own, stretching out full length, his head resting against a throw pillow he'd found beneath the sheet. "Not bad," he remarked with a contented grin as he settled himself as comfortably as possible.

Egon promptly dropped four books on his stomach, causing Peter to wheeze and grunt, brushing them off with a sweep of his arm. "EEEEGONNN!" he whined. "No fair."

"Start reading, Peter," returned the physicist. "I think we have a serious problem here, more serious than we realized. If these so-called shadows can come through the cross-rip from their own dimension, and if they are, in fact, the entities that caused those unexplained deaths a hundred years ago, they may be back now. There are a lot more people around than there were then. I wonder if we went back two hundred years we would find other unexplained deaths. I also wonder what their range is. Suppose they could reach the City."

"They'd think it was one big smorgasbord," breathed Ray, eyes widening in alarm. He set aside a stack of books and stared at his friends, dismayed. "Gosh, we have to find a way to stop them. Egon, do you think there's any way to modify the throwers to do it?"

"I wouldn't rule out the possibility but until we've been able to take more than residual readings, I would doubt it." Egon frowned. "If we have found a gap between worlds through which a paranatural entity, or swarm of entities, can pass, we must seal it up again. It's possible we'll have to cross the streams."

"Great!" muttered Winston without a shred of enthusiasm. "I hate crossing the streams. Things always blow up, and one of these days it's sure to be us."

"Mr. Johnson's going to say we didn't help his house if we do that," Peter replied without sitting up. "Are you sure that's the only way, Spengs?"

"No," replied Egon unhelpfully. "I'm not even certain it would work in this instance. We might have to wait for the gate to open before trying it. I can take more readings, of course."

"Not alone you won't," Peter said, sitting up abruptly as if to grab Egon and restrain him if he took a step in the direction of the attic. "I'm not sure any of us should be alone in this place, even to sleep. In fact, I think it might be a great idea to track down a motel when we're done here if we haven't found the ghosts or the doorway hasn't popped open."

"I doubt there is one within ten miles," Winston reminded him. "Remember, we're at the back of beyond here, all those miles away from anything."

"Well, two or three miles away from anything," corrected Ray. "I remember seeing a truck farm right where we left the highway."

"Maybe three miles cross-country," Winston said. "This place is isolated. If these shadows are some kind of hungry monsters from Dimension X they might not have eaten very much just because we're cut off from most other places here."

"So we're the only targets. Today's Blue Plate Special," said Peter. "Good. Why are they always hungry? And if it comes to that, I'm hungry."

"After that big meal?" Egon asked in surprise. "Really, Peter, have you no idea of self-discipline?"

"No," said Peter immediately. "Tell me all about it. Besides, I'd rather have some of that hot chocolate. It might not be up to your standard, Spengs baby, but at least it will be warm and chocolate. Where did those thermoses go?"

"I get them," volunteered Muz eagerly and swooped out of the room. He returned after what seemed a long time but couldn't have been more than ten minutes with all four mugs clutched against his 'chest' and held one of them out to Peter first. "Nice chocolate," he said. In Slimer it would have been wheedling for a taste, but Muz wasn't interested in food as such. When Peter took the thermos, he zipped over to the others one by one and distributed their drinks too. Peter unscrewed the lid and sniffed it. "Nope, not up to your standards," he told Egon in disappointment but without surprise. "But it doesn't smell bad, and it's still hot." He took a sip. "Well, make it lukewarm. And it doesn't taste as good as yours either, Spengs. Too bitter." He drank some more anyway, feeling the slight warmth run through him. This was pretty decent after all, though he'd never found anyone who could outdo Egon at hot chocolate.

The others set aside what they were doing and sampled their drinks, not too dissatisfied. "At least it's homemade," said Ray, wiping away a chocolate milk mustache from his upper lip. "I wonder if there have been any mysterious deaths around here like those in the 1890's. Did Johnson say anything about it, Peter?"

"No, not a word, but then he might not know. He's only staying at a motel in Jonesville, and he's probably repeating legends the motel people have told him. Sometimes the locals like to scare off the newcomers. Remember that waitress back at the restaurant who encouraged us not to come out here."

"I thought she was encouraging you to go home with her, Peter," Winston teased him.

Peter frowned. "She was married, Zed. She had a wedding ring on. I know when somebody's giving me the rush, and she wasn't. She was only flirting to keep her hand in. Though she wasn't entirely impervious to my charms."

"'Impervious,'" Egon echoed, lifting his eyebrows. "I am impressed, Peter. "I didn't know you knew any words longer than two syllables."

"Smug, Egon," Peter told him. "I have a humongous vocabulary. I just try not to humble the lesser mortals the way some people I know do." He yawned. "Are we gonna play twenty questions all night. I wanna get some sleep."

"It's not much past nine o'clock, homeboy," pointed out Winston, checking his watch. "Maybe all this fresh country air is too much for you."

Peter lifted his nose from the thermos mug. "That's it. I'm too far from the city. My powers are draining. Hey, Egon, do you think it's safe to sleep here? Can I go up and crash or will creeping shadows sneak in and suck out my soul the minute my eyes are closed?"

"Entirely possible, Peter," Egon returned, but with amusement in his eyes. Peter grimaced at him.

"I'm going to rig a couple of meters to set off an alarm if anything comes," Ray explained, holding up a meter he'd been adjusting. "I've boosted the sound and if anything comes through, this will go off loud enough to wake us up. I don't want to go to bed yet. If the ghosts aren't very noticeable, if they look like shadows in the dark, then they probably come at night. I want to stay up till midnight, maybe with the lights mostly off, to see what we can see. We don't know they hurt anybody, after all."

"Yeah, right, Ray," said Peter. "That's why painters are keeling over left and right."

"Maybe it was just paint fumes in an enclosed place," Egon said practically. "I'm less inclined to discount the sensation something was rubbing against Johnson's ankles. In other words, there may be something here that drains people, and it may cause hallucinations, physical hallucinations rather than visual or auditory ones. Muz spoke of shadows and while he did not completely understand our questions, I formed the definite impression he was referring to something specific."

"Maybe these shadows aren't that common in our reality plane," theorized Ray with growing excitement. "Maybe they hang out in the Netherworld or other dimensions and only come here once in awhile."

"If they were here a hundred years ago, something sent them away," Peter reminded them. "There haven't been ongoing deaths like Johnson talked about since then or people would have noticed. Ray would have been talking about the Unexplained Death Incident of 1894 and making comparisons to ones in 1938 or 1957."

"No, they went back," Ray replied. "They came out a hundred years ago and went away again for some reason."

"Yeah, maybe they ate everybody they could find and decided this dimension wasn't the ideal feeding grounds."

"But there are a lot more people around here this time, Peter," Winston reminded him. "The population has exploded since those days and if they come out and find them, they might even be able to sense the City. Once they're loose there, we'll never stop 'em. Maybe they grow more powerful the more they feed." He rolled his eyes as if he didn't at all like the way his reasoning was leading him.

"Assuming they even exist," Egon replied. "We are postulating an entire species of voracious feeders on extremely limited information. We don't have enough information upon which to base a theory."

"And in English, Egon?" Peter said around another cavernous yawn. "Johnson said people died back then. Now he's got painters keeling over and things he can't see twining around his legs, and Muz babbled about shadows the way we might talk about--about--" His mind wouldn't make a comparison.

"A plague of rats?" Ray offered. "Only in this case it would be man-eating rats. Hey, Muz, do the shadows kill people?"

Muz bobbed rocked back and forth in the only way he had to nod. "Bad shadows."

"Are there any here now?" Winston asked, the whites of his eyes showing vividly as he turned his gaze toward the doorway. All the normal shadows in the room seemed to hold menace, as if they would thicken and move like coiling smoke, attacking in a concerted rush. Peter eyed a particularly dark one in the far corner of the room, staring at it so hard he was sure he had seen it move.

"Is there anything over there?" he asked.

Ray slid the ecto-scopes down over his eyes and studied the darker corners of the room. He was silent a long time, then he shook his head. "I'm still getting that kind of overlay. It could be what the shadows look like, but I don't think so. I think it's just a byproduct of the energy we've been reading. The scopes aren't designed to pick up paranatural entities anyway. If the shadows aren't ectoplasmic, they probably won't register with the scopes. I'll check again later."

Peter found himself only mildly reassured. He blinked hard a couple of times and it became an ordinary shadow again.

"Nothing now," Muz confirmed. "Guys sleep. Have nice dreams. Muz stand guard."

"Nice dreams?" echoed Peter sleepily. "Yeah, right. I might wake up with my soul sucked out through my nostrils, but I'm gonna have swell dreams first. Egon, are there really shadow ghosts here?"

Spengler held out his P.K.E. meter. "I'm reconfiguring the device to match the criteria we've theorized about," he explained. "If such an entity exists, it would meet certain guidelines, even if it is not a ghost as we know it. It would perhaps be a paranatural entity such as the one we encountered at the Macabre house, only of course, much smaller. That's why Ray isn't reading anything."

"The Macabre House. Oh, goodie," muttered Peter. "I didn't like that one."

"This would be different, Peter. That one was impossible to miss. These would be near-invisible, and I don't believe our throwers at the present configuration would have any effect upon them."

"But we could maybe adjust them," offered Ray. "We could correlate all the readings we've taken and compare them with the possibilities and postulate the entities' actual nature and maybe I could even adjust the scopes, but it might not be productive."

"Sounds like you've been taking lessons from Egon in talking technobabble," Peter observed with a crooked grin. He gulped down the rest of his chocolate and held up the thermos in disappointment when he realized it was empty. "Why don't you wake me when you've got it all figured out. I'll be saving myself for battle." He stretched out on the sofa and wiggled contentedly into the cushions, enjoying the lassitude that was stealing over him.

The thought of that roused him a little. Maybe the shadows were here and already sucking the energy out of him. He pushed himself up again and took out his own P.K.E. meter, adjusting it carefully while the others compared notes. Negative valences had a whole different reading, one he wasn't as familiar with as Ray or Egon was, but he knew how to adjust the setting. Taking careful readings, he then changed the setting again to reflect his own biorythms and compared the reading with the remembered figures. He wasn't being sucked dry, he reassured himself. He was just tired. Stretching comfortably, he set the meter back to the reading for the Shadow entities, assuming they even existed and lay it upon his chest still active before he closed his eyes. If anything tried to sneak up on him, he'd be ready for it. For awhile he heard the guys' voices, increasingly blurred and distant, then even that faded as he sank down into black, dreamless sleep.

"Look at him," Ray said fondly, sparing a glance for the slumbering Peter. "He can sleep anywhere."

"Even standing up," Winston replied, grinning.

"I even saw him teach a class at Columbia while three parts asleep," Egon remembered, smiling, too. He looked at the sleeping face, relaxed and innocent of its usual cocky good humor or amused mischief. Peter looked much younger asleep, almost innocent, though that was not a word Egon would have applied to Peter Venkman under normal circumstances. And for all he looked innocent, the activated P.K.E meter that rested upon his stomach proved he was cautious when necessary. The way it was set, it would go off like an alarm siren and make him jump straight up. Egon grinned at the very thought.

But there was too much to be done to spend time speculating about Peter. The more he considered it, the more Egon came to believe there was an entity, or even a swarm of entities, here. Maybe they weren't always here or maybe a few advance guards had already come through and tasted the painters to see if there was 'food' for them here. Egon knew, as many scientists did not, that other dimensions were a reality because he had been in the Netherworld and knew for a certainty it existed. His soul had once been lost in an alternate dimension as well, but Peter had come in after him and rescued him. There were other worlds that ran concurrent with their own, though different. If the worlds were different, then so were their denizens.

"Where did I put those journals?" he asked, interested. "I want to see if there is anything in them about what happened a hundred years ago. If Johnson's story can be verified, and what happened to him and the painters is real, then perhaps the other dimension is only in conjunction with our own at regular intervals. It need not be regular. A hundred years this time. Maybe more or less before. Maybe the entities found enough 'food' to last them before. Maybe they don't need much."

"I wouldn't want to assume that, Egon," Ray disagreed. "If there's even a tiny chance we're not going off on a tangent or letting our imaginations run away with us, we have to assume we've happened on something really bad, and we have to prepare for it. I'm going to take some more readings in the attic. You stay here and go over the books, and Winston and I will check the house from top to bottom again. Then we'll have more readings to correlate."

"Be careful Ray, Winston," Egon agreed. "And use the walkie talkies if you run into trouble. I'll wake Peter and we'll join you." He opened one of the journals and sat down in a wing chair across from the sleeping Venkman.

"You be careful, too, Egon," urged Ray. "Don't let anything sneak up on you."

"Peter designed himself a wake-up call if any shadows popped in for a visit," Winston remarked, pointing to the activated meter on the sleeping man's chest. "Keep an ear on that, Egon." He clapped Ray on the shoulder and steered him toward the door. "Come on m'man. Let's see what we can find. Do you suppose these nasties are resistent to light?"

"No," Ray replied, his voice fading as they left the library. "They came out when the painters were working and that was daylight."

"But they didn't kill them," argued Winston. "Just drained them a little. Maybe they're stronger at night."

"Wow!" cried Ray, excited at the thought, then their voices faded away. Egon began flipping pages in the journal.

He read for ten minutes without finding anything abnormal. The journal he read had been written by a Douglass Kingsley, who had evidently once owned this house. Kingsley was something of a latter day Renaissance man, scholar, architect, scientist. He enjoyed the physical sciences and spent whole pages describing experiments he had conducted, some of which seemed rather simplistic to Egon but which would have been groundbreaking in his day, especially for an isolated man who was not affiliated with a university or a science lab.

There was also an undercurrent that Egon picked up but couldn't put a finger on. Something about the writing made him uneasy, as if he were waiting for the other shoe to drop. On some pages of the journal, Kingsley made reference to 'the experiment' but didn't describe it. Often whole pages went by with the only words, 'No progress.' Interested, Egon skimmed ahead, looking for anything new or different, and finally stopped when he came upon something that interested him.

"Dear God, what have I done? How can this be? I acted in all sincerity, determined to expand the frontiers of science, to pass beyond those barriers that limit us and confine us. While writers such as Mr. Verne may spin tales of journeys to the moon and the bottom of the ocean, I, too, wished to touch upon other words. I have read many theories, but they were vague and unsupported. But such things have been known from the time of Plato and before. Other worlds, abutting our own, filled with people we did not know at all. Perhaps they are our counterparts, doppelgängers of those in our own world, perhaps they are hideous monsters or as beautiful as the angels. Such was my speculation, but now, I know that I was wrong, wickedly, sinfully wrong, and what I have done is opened the floodgates and allowed evil to come through. I do not believe I can stop it, for they will not stop with me. I did not understand, did not guess, not until I saw the darkness oozing, not until Fidelus, good Fidelus, barked and tried to attack it. Noble canine, he gave his life to save my own, but it was no good. I drove them back with fire, with a torch, but it was not a complete retreat. I know they will return, those mindless, formless creatures, determined to feast upon us all."

There it was before him, spelled out in black and white, proof the creatures did indeed exist, or had existed in the last century. "They're real, Peter," Egon said aloud. "They're real and they are dangerous."

Peter didn't stir. He made a faint interrogative sound but lapsed into sleep immediately afterward. Egon shrugged that away. There would be time to awaken Peter when he had learned all he could. Light drove them back. Was it the heat of the fire or the actual light that had done it? Shadow creatures would love the darkness, for the concealment it would offer.

Muz had vanished. Egon looked around, realizing he hadn't seen the ghost since the distribution of the hot chocolate. Picking up his thermos, he poured the rest of the chocolate into his cup and sipped it. It was scarcely warm now, and not as good as his own, but it was pleasant enough, scarcely bitter. Maybe Peter had gotten the dregs, though he had overcome his distaste and gulped it quickly enough. He always slept better after one of their midnight hot chocolate sessions, just as he was sleeping now.

Muz must have gone with Ray and Winston. He was in general a much less obtrusive ghost than Slimer, who forced himself upon one's consciousness and rarely gave ground. Muz, except for his obvious devotion to Peter, was much more self-effacing. He could blend into the group without disturbing them. It was clearly not a conscious choice, but perhaps it was a survival characteristic. Muz recognized the concept of shadows. Perhaps they came from his own dimension or had invaded it. The ability to avoid notice would stand him in good stead, especially since the shadows seemed to relish feeding on life energy, something different from the PK energy produced by ghosts.

It might be worth studying Muz when he returned, to determine whether or not the shadows would find him appealing. In the meantime, there was still information to be gained from Douglass Kingsley's journal. Egon turned the page.

The words scored deeply into the paper as if the writer had been in shock or anguish, and the text bore out that supposition. "OH, GOD, OH, GOD, what have I done!" The man had underlined that sentence so fiercely he had torn a hole in the paper, though it was a heavy parchment. "There are deaths! I am become a murderer, as black and evil as those fiends from hell I have summoned. There are deaths in the community, strange deaths. Dr. Brinker was the first of them, that old stubborn Dutchman unwilling to avoid the darkness, though I put it about that a wild animal had been spotted. He went to a call, a confinement, delivered the child and was returning. He was found in his buggy, dead without a mark on him, his horse the same. A panic has begun and I can only hope it will confine the villagers to their homes after dark. Whether that will be enough, I have no way of telling. There are other deaths, one a tramp, a harmless vagabond, roaming the neighborhood, doing chores in trade for food. They found him last night, lying in the path, as drained of life as Piet Brinker.

"As we have no doctor now and my scholarly interests are well known, I was summoned to examine the bodies. They are unmarked, though I searched every inch of their pitiful remains. The shadows must absorb their spirits through the skin, drawing away whatever it is that makes us live. There was no blood loss, no gaping wounds. Simply they lay down quietly and died.

"No, not quietly. They said the tramp lay twisted and curled, his fingers arched like claws, holding his pose through the stiffness that comes and goes after death. By the time they had called me, he was again flexible and I was able to manipulate him, but his fingers were still curled up. I found no residue beneath his fingernails, which I would have expected, had he died fighting an animal or even a human who set upon him in the night. But the shadows are not solid. They leave no residue. What I did find was the same sense of clinging cold, not the cold of death but the cold of creatures who come from a place beyond our world. I must stop them. I must not let them kill again. I must hide this journal, for no one must ever know. It is not that I would shun the blame that is mine. But there are unscrupulous people in the world, and it is from those individuals I must conceal my knowledge of the world of the shadows. Loosed upon a populous area, the death count would be staggering, and I will not permit that to happen."

Egon turned the page. "Six more people have died, though none further afield than five miles from my home. I have hopes the creatures can range no further before they must return to whence they have come. If so, I can but be relieved, but I cannot depend upon such good fortune. Therefore I have taken other action. Through my researches into the 'other side' I have learned many things, and though I have never been a practitioner of the black arts and despise those who have sold their souls to Satan, I realize some of those powers may be used for good. Perhaps I would sell my own soul to change what I have done, to draw back the evil I have loosed upon this world, but I will try other means first. I have put a seal around the opening," announced Kingsley in dark letters. "It is a six sided star, marked with Kabbalistic seals. I have learned much of the Kabbalah in my studies and rely upon my knowledge to assist me. Tonight I will go to the attics, where the doorway is, and I will complete my work. The seal may hold them, the hexagram may do its work. They fear fire. I will light fire in the center of the hexagram. It is a shield against such, and I can but hope it will burn there confined, and block the opening. I will spend the entire night guarding it. In the morning, I will report my findings."

There was nothing else written in the journal.

"How frustrating," Egon muttered in some annoyance. "But at least I've learned something. Peter, I think you should wake--"

"EGON!" Ray's distant voice echoed a near-subliminal alarm Egon hadn't realized he'd felt until this moment when he lifted his head and saw the air muted and transformed by a slowly thickening mist--no, it wasn't mist, it was smoke, its crisp, acrid tang stinging his nostrils.

"FIRE!" hollered Winston. "EGON, PETE, get out here."

"Come on, Peter," Egon cried and jumped to his feet, grabbing for the proton pack he'd shed when he sat down. As he ran for the door, he settled it upon his shoulders and secured it.

The smoke was thicker in the hallway, as if the fire, undiscovered, had smoldered for a time before breaking out into more noticeable proportions. The guys' voices came from the back of the house, presumably the kitchen regions which Egon had not as yet penetrated. He followed their voices and the thickening smoke, bursting into a room lit with dancing flames, though so far they were not very bright. Along the outer wall near an open doorway were piles of abandoned supplies, painter's drapes to cover furniture while painting, abandoned paint cans. So far the fire had not reached that, but when it did, it would blaze out of control in minutes. Right now it was smoldering among bags of more prosaic garbage next to the door, as if a prankster had opened the door and flung a match without looking to see what it would hit. As if they had sensed the danger, Ray and Winston had paused to drag away the painting supplies from the fire, though it meant moving dangerously close to the dancing flames that flickered and teased at the edges of the garbage.

Egon paused in the doorway, noticing Ray wincing as he got too near the fire and had to pause to beat out a sudden flame that leaped to the sleeve of his jumpsuit. He yelped, backpedaled furiously, and slapped at the fire with his other hand, suppressing it, though not without the risk of at least first degree burns. Egon grabbed a red-checkered cloth from the dining table, jerked Ray's hand away from the burn, and wrapped his arm in the tablecloth, smothering the flames. When he lifted it he could see charred fabric beneath, and through it a small reddened area that might blister. Ray winced but grinned gratefully.

"Thanks, Egon. Come on, if this other stuff catches..."

"You and Winston handle that, Ray," Egon instructed. They had no time to dress the wound. That would come later. Egon doubled up the cloth once, darted to the sink and ran water on it, then advanced upon the burning garbage.

It was very near to taking hold. Egon shivered at the sudden thought of how late it was, how easily they might have gone to bed and slept through it all, oblivious to the danger until it was too late. Already the air was thick with smoke, and smoke inhalation was more often than not the actual cause of death in fires.

Gripping his sodden cloth, Egon advanced upon the flames, holding his breath as he began to beat at them with the saturated fabric. The fire sizzled and crackled as he fought the flames. Ray and Winston were back in minutes, similarly armed, and fell in beside him.

The fire was resistant, the heat was terrific, and the smoke made their lungs ache, but it didn't take many minutes to reduce the fire to embers. Working as a team, they struggled to keep it from breaking out in several other directions, their only words to the purpose.

"Winston, look out!"

"Get those sparks before they start it up over there!"

"Careful, Egon, it's trying to get behind you!"

Once the top bag crashed through those below it, sending up a huge bellow of fire and sparks that made them leap backward out of range and spend precious moments slapping at themselves where the sparks had landed to make sure they didn't catch fire. Then they circled around, Egon reaching out to slam the outer door and shut down the air that was feeding the fire. The open door had acted as a funnel, channeling fresh air, and once closed, the Ghostbusters found it easier to beat down the flames. Taking turns, they re-wet their cloths, stooping to slap at the retreating fire, then backed away to give the next man a chance. Finally, as the glowing flames shrank down and dwindled to simmering embers, Ray filled a huge pitcher of water and upended it upon the remains of the fire. Sizzles and hisses heralded a rise of steam, and they drew back from it, Ray darting to the sink to get more water. After five or six jugs of it, they kicked their way through the charred rubble, looking for any traces of life in the blaze. Finding none, they heaved sighs of fatigue and disgust, and gathered together the charred garbage in one big heap while Ray opened the back door again and ventured outside to find a clear place to abandon it where it wouldn't spark to life again.

"There's a trash area out there, paved with concrete," he reported back a few minutes later. "We can lug it out there and it won't matter if it burns again." He hesitated. "Guys, I think that fire was set."

"Vandals?" asked Winston as he pushed a button on the hood over the stove to turn on the exhaust fan and draw the smoke out of the air. He paused to cough heavily. "Man, oh man, I feel like somebody sanded my throat."

"The entities?" Egon ventured, shaking his head immediately. "You can't mean them, Ray? I read in the journals that they hated fire."

Ray frowned. "Maybe. I don't know. But when we came out here the door was open and for a minute I got a trace of a Class 5 reading. We haven't had anything like that before, because I've filtered out Muz so he won't corrupt the readings." His fingers plucked at the charred edges of the hole in his sleeve. "Gosh, that hurts."

"How bad is it, homeboy?" asked Winston, grabbing the torch off his belt and shining it directly on the small injury. Even though the lights were on in the kitchen, the slowly diminishing smoke had made it hard to see and he must have thought they'd need the extra light.

"I think it's just a first degree burn," Ray said, looking at it. "Though it might blister later. It's not that bad. We can get the first aid kit from Ecto and put some ointment on it and I'll be fine."

"And we should report this to Mr. Johnson," Winston agreed. He looked up at Egon from a careful study of Ray's burn. "He's right, Egon, I think it's only first degree and small at that. We've all probably got a little of that, though this is the worst of it. Man, I think somebody did set this fire."

"Presumably not the Class 5 Ray mentioned," Egon replied thoughtfully. "That would be most peculiar. While ghosts can manipulate the physical environment--witness Slimer's usual actions--I can't imagine why one of them would want to start a fire."

"To get rid of us," Ray said positively. "Ghosts must just hate us, except for Slimer and Muz, of course. They'd want to do us in if they could. Wow! Do you really think some ghost just tried to murder us, Egon?"

Egon hadn't seriously followed the implications of his words until now, but it did make a kind of sense, though it seemed an added complication. Was the Class 5 working in conjunction with the shadows? Apart from them? It was obviously not Muz, though the dark green ghost was also of that classification, because Ray had adjusted the meter not to read him. If a Class 5 had started the fire, there was even more of a problem here than Egon had believed. Though they could easily trap such a ghost, Ray was detecting only residuals now. It was gone, but could return and cause further havoc.

"Where is Muz anyway?" Winston asked with the dawning of suspicion. "I haven't seen the little ugly since we started searching the house."

"Did you find anything else of interest?" Egon asked as he opened cupboards one at a time until he found a supply of Tupperware tumblers and hauled down four of them. That was when he stopped in astonishment, two of the glasses held out as he registered that the fourth member of the team was not here. In the urgency of the fire, he hadn't stopped to count heads, but now, looking back, he realized Venkman hadn't followed him from the library. "Peter?" he asked blankly.

The other two looked around in stunned surprise. "Where's Peter?" Ray asked. "He didn't come with you, Egon. Didn't you wake him up? Didn't he hear us yelling?"

"Man, we've been yelling loud enough to wake the dead," Winston said, then caught himself as if he realized how infelicitous his words had sounded. "I don't think even Pete could sleep through this."

"Something must be wrong," Ray cried. "Another fire? That Class 5 sneaking back through another door? Come on!" He led the way from the kitchen as fast as he could, his burned arm totally forgotten. The other two were right behind him, the three of them charging through the house like a trio of maddened bulls stampeding. Egon felt alarm rise up into his chest because now, casting back his memory, he could recall the counterpoint to his reading, the very slowness of Peter's breathing. His subconscious mind had dismissed it as deep sleep, but in retrospect a number of connections were occurring to him. Peter's ready sleepiness, his complaint that the lukewarm 'hot' chocolate was bitter, the way he had sunk down so readily into sleep. Had the drink been drugged? Had Johnson planned all this to do away with the Ghostbusters and if so, why? He would have to be in league with ghosts to do it, with the shadows from the gateway in the attic, with the Class 5 who must have lit the fire. But why drug only one Ghostbuster's drink? All of them had downed the contents of their thermos bottles, yet only Peter had fallen asleep. That randomness made no sense and would not have been a logical part of a plan to do away with the Ghostbusters. Even assuming Johnson was in fact a sorcerer or Satanist whose business with 'the other side' made him regard Ghostbusters as his enemies, he had brought them here in such a way as to allay suspicion and had left plenty of food and drink. If so, why tamper with just one thermos? Why put anything in a hot drink in any case, since the heat might well render impotent the effects of a drug?

They reached the library then and threw wide the double doors, Ray stopping dead at the sight of Peter Venkman, and Egon and Winston colliding with him, though both men were tall enough to see over his shoulders. They hung there arrested in the doorway as if caught in suspended animation, staring at Peter.

He lay partly turned on his side, his face rolled toward them on the throw pillow, eyes closed, mouth a little open, his breaths long, slow and very shallow, his face a little livid, as if deep blue shadows had gathered in the hollows beneath his cheekbones and all around his eyes. His closed eyelids rose up out of those shadows, shielding his eyes from knowledge and awareness. He looked helpless, innocent, and somehow very pathetic. Egon's heart slammed into overdrive as he stood there.

Then the momentary suspension passed and they lunged at him, all three of them, each man knowing something was very wrong, that this was not a normal sleep. Their only certainty in all of this was that he was breathing, though his chest rose so shallowly Egon feared there was little to encourage him to continue doing so. Certain drugs affected respiration. If there had been something like that in the chocolate, it was imperative to monitor his respiration and be prepared if--if it stopped. Egon shuddered, but there was no time for reaction if they were to save Peter's life.

"Winston. The mobile phone. Call 911. We don't dare transport him ourselves, not until we've rid him of whatever he took, or as much of it as we can." How long had they fought the blaze in the kitchen, and how long before that had Egon read, oblivious to his friend's slowly worsening state? Surely it was less than an hour. Had it been more than thirty minutes? There was no time to dwell upon guilt at his monstrous oversight in failing to notice the change in Peter's condition, but the time mattered. How much of the poison had been absorbed into Peter's system? And was it really poison? Might it have been some kind of sleeping pill? An over the counter sleeping dose? Whatever it was, it had apparently been hidden in the chocolate and they had to get it up again.

"Bring the first aid kit," Egon called after the already departing Winston.

He called an acknowledging, "Yo!" over his shoulder as he ran to let Egon know his instruction had been heard.

"What can we do, Egon?" Ray asked, agonized.

Egon curled his fingers around Peter's wrist, feeling for the pulse there. "I'm not yet certain, Ray. Inducing vomiting while unconscious is not wise; it could choke him, and in some instances it's worse than others to even try. We don't know what was given to him. There is no evidence of burning around his lips, so I assume it wasn't a corrosive. I'd be inclined to suspect he was given an overdose of sleeping pills or possibly an opium derivative, or any drug that induces sleepiness." Grabbing Peter by the shoulders, he shook him. There was no response except that Peter's body bounced limply against the pillows.

"Opium?" Ray asked, eyes widening in horror. He squatted on the floor next to Peter's head and gazed at him in alarm. "That sounds terrible, Egon."

"I know, but it affects respiration and can induce a stuporous or comatose state," Egon replied. He had read that somewhere and it came back to him clearly, a fact for which he was very grateful. "I don't know what he's been given. If there were any burns around his lips we should not induce vomiting, but there are none. I think we may have to even though he's unconscious. It's been more than half an hour since he had that drink, and we're remote here. Do you know how to induce vomiting?"

Ray thought a second. "I think so. Salt or mustard in water? Ipecac? Though I don't think you're supposed to give somebody that if they're unconscious. Isn't there something about using activated charcoal as a kind of antidote? I read that somewhere. We can burn some toast, and maybe I can find some milk of magnesia. I'll get right to work, Egon." With an agonized look at Peter's face, he fled the room, his footsteps fading away in the distance as he hurried toward the smoke-filled kitchen. Egon could only be glad the house was not entirely empty. The cupboard with the glasses had contained other things, including spices and herbs, some canned goods. It was possible there might be various medical supplies and if not there was milk of magnesia in the first aid kit. Egon didn't remember if there was a supply of the Ipecac, but since Winston had set about to make the kit as complete as possible, it was likely there would be. They would do what they could here, then transport Peter as soon as they could.

All this passed through Egon's mind in a flash. He knew the most important thing right now would be to keep Peter alive, to try to rouse him out of the coma into which he was sinking; it would be safer to induce vomiting if he were even semi-conscious than to try it now, and Egon had to make sure he didn't sink any deeper under because it would be all too easy for him to slip away. Bracing himself for the task at hand, he grasped Peter by the shoulders and shook him harder than he had the first time. Peter's head lolled against the throw pillow, limp and unresponsive, and not even a faint moan of protest emerged from his lips. He jerked so much under the shaking that Egon stopped, afraid he would do some other damage in the process.

"Peter! Wake up, Peter. Listen to me. You must respond." He made his voice sound urgent, desperate, knowing it might take the belief his friends were imperiled to cut through Peter's state of stupor. But he was deeper under than even Egon had thought for the frantic sound of Egon's voice had no power to rouse him. His breathing faltered slightly, caught again when Egon shook him once more, and steadied. But that momentary pause made Egon's stomach clench.

Egon rolled Peter over onto his back then dragged him up by main force to sit propped against the armrest of the sofa, though Peter at once slumped forward into Egon's waiting arms. Bracing him upright with one arm across Peter's chest, Egon steeled himself for his task and then slapped Peter across the face, lightly, judging response. When there was none, he hit him again, wincing at the sound of the blow, the crack of flesh against flesh, aching for what he had to do but knowing it was necessary. He wasn't sure Ray could harden himself to do this, so it fell to him. Not that he would delegate Peter's care to another, until the paramedics came and replaced him. When that blow didn't evoke a reaction, he did it harder still, again and again, though there was no reaction at all except that Peter's cheeks began to redden under the force of the blows, replacing the beginning of blueness that had gathered there in the hollows beneath his cheekbones. It was Egon who suffered the blows as though they struck his own flesh, but Peter never reacted at all.

This wasn't working. Egon glanced around, seeking out something to assist him until the other two returned. His eyes fell upon something white against the carpet, something that shouldn't be there, and he stretched out a long arm to snatch up the tiny item, realizing it was a pill, a round white one a little smaller than an aspirin. He studied it carefully. One side of it had the writing P/F and the other MI on top with 15 below it. He wasn't familiar with all types of medication, and he couldn't identify it instantly or even guess from the legend what it might be. How had it gotten into Peter's drink? If the thermoses had been doctored, they hadn't been tampered with down here unless Muz had done it, and that seemed unlikely. He wasn't intelligent enough to have passed it off so casually unless he'd been deceiving them from the start, and Egon couldn't believe that.

Setting the tablet aside for the moment on the table at the end of the sofa, Egon looked again for assistance, and his eyes fell upon the ice chest. Bracing Peter into the corner of the sofa so he wouldn't fall, he grabbed for the chest, flung it open. As he had hoped, the ice had melted almost away, leaving water still icy cold and flecked with chips of ice. With triumph, Egon scooped up a double handful of the liquid and flung it full into Peter's face.

That won a reaction, though it was so slight Egon could not be certain if he had imagined it or not. It seemed that Peter's mouth twisted and quirked and that his eyelashes flickered as if he had tried to squeeze his eyes more tightly shut against the unexpected invasion. Peter gasped faintly, barely a deeper breath, but something Egon could genuinely believe was a reaction. Feeling a great surge of relief that Peter was not entirely beyond his help, Egon plunged his hands again into the icy water and splashed the lax face once more, this time grabbing up chunks of ice and rubbing them along Peter's cheeks in hopes the shock of the frigid touch would stir him one step closer to consciousness. Peter's flesh seemed to retreat from it but again it was such a tiny reaction that it could be but wishful thinking.

"You will not die, Peter," Egon said forcefully. "I have no intention of letting you die." Only when his voice caught on the last word did he allow himself to acknowledge how tightly strung were his emotions at this crisis. "You're going to live," he instructed tightly through clenched lips, to hold back his fear. Once again he grabbed for more icy water and anointed Peter's face with it, tender and fierce at the same time.

This time, the slow, shuddering rhythm of his breathing faltered ever so slightly, caught in what sounded like a gasp of shock, then resumed, steadied. He was close enough to the surface to feel the cruelties Egon was inflicting upon him, though he didn't understand or know what they were. He was far from consciousness, but if he could react at all, that gave Egon a flare of hope, and it was almost joyfully that he flung water into Peter's face again, pausing once again to slap the slack cheeks with the same steady rhythm as before.

Behind him there came a choked cry of horror, then Ray lunged forward to grab at Egon's arm, jerking him around. "What are you doing!? Egon, what are you..." His voice trailed off as if he had realized the necessity, and he swallowed manfully and started to loosen his grip.

"Let him be, Ray, he's doing what he has to." Winston's voice was very grim as he pulled Ray's hand completely free, and the reason for that followed instantly. "Egon, we've got real trouble. All Ecto's tires are slashed; we're not moving out of here. And somebody wrecked the mobile phone. We're cut off." He held out the first aid kit. "Man, he looks bad. Think we should risk making him vomit?"

"I think we may have to if we can't get him out or get help in," Egon replied, pausing only long enough to once again bathe Peter's face with icy water. "It's dangerous to induce vomiting in an unconscious man and I'm worried about his breathing. Anything like that could choke him, and that could be the worst possible risk, but we might have no choice. And one of us must go for help."

"I'll go," Winston volunteered immediately. "I'm fastest. I'll go cross-country and head for that farm we spotted about three miles back. If nobody's there I'll break in and use their phone to call for backup."

"Take a look at that pill on the end-table," Egon instructed him as Ray grabbed the huge first aid kit with relief and flung it open. "Did you ever see anything like that?"

Winston picked it up and rolled it between thumb and forefinger. "I'm not sure. Doesn't look like a sleeping pill. I think we'd have different symptoms if we went into anything else. You're right. Vomiting's risky; he could choke. But we have to get it out of him before his system absorbs any more, especially since we can't get help right away. And we've gotta get him up and moving and keep him from going into shock and monitor his breathing." He returned the pill to its place; they could bring it with them when they finally got Peter to a doctor.

"Here, Egon," Ray said with triumph, looking up from the kit. "I couldn't find anything useful in the kitchen but we've got some Ipecac with us. I'll get it ready."

"Yeah, we need an emetic," Winston agreed. "And then we're gonna have to get fluids down him. Epsom salts in water, that's what they said in my last first aid class. We've got epsom salts in the kit. We can mix it up and have it ready for him after he throws up."

Ray halted in the doorway, his face as white as paper from the shock of it all and his overwhelming worry that anything they might try wouldn't be enough. "I'll get him something to throw up in," he said and vanished.

"Kid's pretty shaken," Winston remarked as soon as Ray had vanished. "That's why I said I'd go for help, that and the fact that I'd be faster. Alone out there in the dark, he'll imagine all sorts of things."

"The reality won't be much better," Egon replied grimly. He'd forced himself to put his worry for Peter to one side so he could deal with the crisis; Peter deserved that. But it wouldn't stay buried. Egon could function around it because he had to, but deep inside he felt sick, frightened and gravely worried. Someone was trying to kill them and it wasn't simply the shadows. They didn't need this kind of attack. Slashing tires and setting fires wasn't their way. They would just come, overwhelm any human they encountered and drain away their life energy. This was a more active malevolence, and while it seemed to be directed at Peter, who scarcely responded to the repeated doses of cold water and Egon's rough handling, he might be simply the first one to win the concerted attention of their enemy. Egon watched Peter's face, hoping for some kind of response, knowing the longer they waited the more chance Peter would have of absorbing too much of the drug to survive. The unconscious man did react to the cold water now, his body quivering, his face twisting, but he hadn't come any further back from the depths of unconsciousness than that and, each the moisture warmed on his face, he sank back into his lethargy and it seemed as if his breathing caught again. Egon slapped him once more, hard, and Winston, his face grim, leaned in and braced Peter's shoulders during the process, recognizing how necessary it was. Peter flinched with each blow but the minute Egon let up, his face slackened.

"We don't have time to wait for an emetic," the physicist decided abruptly. "We have to get the rest of it out of his system." He looked up at Winston, eyes wide and urgent in the hope that he was doing the right thing. "I can't let him absorb any more of the drug." There was an easier way to induce vomiting in the absence of such remedies as salt or mustard in water or Ipecac. Egon shifted Peter's position again, turning him so he would not swallow and choke, and once he was ready, he forced open Peter's mouth and put his fingers down the unconscious man's throat. It took more resolution than he had expected, but he knew from first aid classes that one of the quickest and easiest ways to induce vomiting was to tickle the back of the patient's throat with his finger. If Peter was close enough to the surface this would work.

Peter gagged involuntarily, then his whole body quivered, went taut. Egon carefully shifted Peter again, hanging his head over the edge of the couch so it would be lower than his hips and hopefully prevent anything from getting into his lungs. Winston jumped around to the back of the couch and grasped Peter's shoulders to hold him steady, and Egon got his hand across Peter's forehead. Ray arrived then at a run, holding a pitcher and a huge metal bowl he must have found in the kitchen. Realizing what had already been done, he thrust the bowl beneath Peter's head just as the first convulsions of nausea racked the psychologist's body, then he came around to join Winston, bending over the back of the couch so he could help to hold Peter. The occultist's eyes seemed lost in shadows, not the deep, alarming blue that surrounded Peter's but a darker kind brought on by certain knowledge about how easy it would be for Peter to slip away in spite of all their efforts. They had to watch his breathing; they had to make sure he didn't choke. That knowledge was reflected in Stantz's eyes, clouded by his fear that it might not work no matter how careful they were.

Seeing that expression on Ray's face, Egon lowered his eyes immediately, remembering how he had sat here beside the steadily worsening Peter without realizing it. That Peter could sleep at the drop of a hat in the middle of a crisis was a given, but the clues had been there all along and Egon had missed them. The sound of his breathing alone should have alerted Egon to the developing crisis but he had been lost in his reading until the urgent shouts had pulled him away from the library to deal with the fire. If Peter died, Egon knew he would always hold himself responsible for the outcome.

Once begun, the vomiting process seemed to go on forever as waves of sickness rocked the drugged man's body. At one slow point, Egon asked for the emetic and propped Peter up enough to swallow it just to make certain after making sure that Peter's breathing was steady, that it hadn't weakened. They lowered him into position again and waited, and after a few minutes, he heaved violently and was sick again. Egon held Peter's head, one hand stroking the sweat-dampened hair, the other firm against his forehead, and he talked encouragingly to Peter, a stream-of-consciousness babble of concern and affection mingled with stern orders to wake up and respond, though it was evident the unconscious man heard none of it. Between bouts of sickness he lay so limp Egon feared the very violence of the heaving would be too much for his system and would carry him over the edge into death.

Peter seemed to struggle to breathe during the worst of the paroxysms but as more time passed healso seemed closer to consciousness, and Egon could feel tightening of muscles under both hands as he braced himself against the sickness. This was not in simple reaction to Egon's actions as the earlier responses had been; this was Peter reacting on his own, though the signs were small enough that the blond man refused to allow himself the luxury of believing in them.

Then, finally, Peter hung there limp and unmoving, having rid his body of everything it was possible to bring up. He was breathing slightly better. Egon wished he had a stimulant to administer to Peter, but in the absence of one, and not even certain it was the right thing to do, he planned for coffee, and gave him epsom salts in water. Peter swallowed it, sputtering a little, and for a moment it was touch and go whether it would come up, too, then Peter heaved a sigh that sounded real and deliberate and not simply another weak, shaky inhalation of breath. When Egon knelt beside the davenport and lifted up his head to look at the prone man's face, Peter's eyelids fluttered and for a moment there was a brief flash of green as they half opened. They didn't quite focus on Egon; he wasn't completely conscious, but there was a momentary gleam, not of real awareness but of doubt and confusion. Then he heaved another sigh and closed them again, settling himself against the couch as if sinking into a deep sleep.

"Oh no you don't, Peter," Egon said, forcing sternness into his voice to replace the anxiety and pity that would have filtered to the surface at the sight of his shadowed face and the wry and bitter twist of his mouth. He put his hand on Peter's forehead again and, with a half-sigh, Peter pressed his head against Egon's palm. Whether he knew who it was or not was open to question, but that momentary pursuit of and relishing of comfort was the first real sign Peter wasn't really gone, that he might well come back. He'd always been a sucker for comfort when he was sick, reveling in the attention, sometimes prolonging the care past the time it was really needed. Egon didn't mind if he did that now, so long as he made the choice with awareness. He stroked the hot forehead gently and said, "It's all right, Peter. Don't go to sleep on me now."

"Now what?" Winston asked. "I go for help?"

"Now we get him up and moving," Egon insisted. "We can't let him sleep now. It would be the worst thing for him, and far too easy for him to sink back into coma. Help me lift him up, guys."

Winston and Ray were there instantly pulling the lean form upright, though Peter muttered in vain and wistful protest without forming actual words. Ray offered encouragement at once.

"You have to get up, Peter. You can't go to sleep. Stick with us. It'll be all right."

"I think some nice hot coffee would be helpful," Egon decided. "Ray, would you make it? A huge pot of it, please? We'll all have some."

"But shouldn't I..." Ray began wistfully, looking at Peter with shadows in his brown eyes. Clearly he didn't want to let Peter out of his sight until he was sure the psychologist would recover, as if afraid Peter would slip away the minute his back was turned.

"Winston and I are both taller than Peter; it will be easier for us to walk him," Egon explained reasonably. "Once he's closer to consciousness, Winston will go for help, and you can take Winston's place. By then, with luck, he'll be more alert and the height difference won't matter as much. Come on, Peter, it's time to get up now." He snapped that last sentence at the slumping man in much the same tones he used of a cold morning in the firehall when Peter was curled contentedly in his blankets and prepared to stay there come hell or high water.

The tone got through even if the words didn't. "Don' wanna," came an answer, faint as a breath, though they heard it because they were straining for any response from him, however slight. Ray's eyes brightened, glittering a little in the light as if he were on the verge of tears, and Winston grinned in a relieved flash of white teeth. The sound of Peter's response shot relief through Egon, too, but he knew how precarious their position still was. Sitting beside Peter, he pulled the man's limp arm over his shoulders, and Winston, recognizing the movement's purpose, sat on Peter's other side, and copied him. When positioned, Peter could not have held the pose on his own; his arms would have dropped away had not each man grasped a wrist to hold them in place.

"Now," said Egon, and they rose, bearing Peter's weight with them. "Come on, Peter," Egon encouraged. "We're going for a little walk now. Ray, the coffee."

With one anguished look at Peter who stood, his head slumping against Egon's shoulder, his feet dragging on the carpet, Ray bit his bottom lip hard over words he couldn't allow to escape, then he nodded and fled.

"Better he has something to do," Winston said understandingly. "Because this is going to be a time-consuming process. I just hope those shadow things don't choose this moment to break through."

"The shadows," Egon gasped, remembering. "Winston, you can't go for help. It was always the solitary traveler who died, according to Kingsley's journal. We'll have to wait until first light, unless it looks as if there's no other chance for Peter. We can't risk your life."

"I can risk it for Pete," Winston argued stubbornly. "It's my choice. I'll have my thrower. Come on, Egon, you know Peter needs more than we can do for him. They need to find out what that pill is, and there might be things that need to be done that we don't have a clue about."

"Perhaps," Egon replied. "That concerns me too but what good can you do Peter if you're attacked by shadows? We can't risk two of you. We'll take readings when the time comes. It isn't just the shadows, though. It's whoever put that stuff in the chocolate and set the fire. The shadows couldn't have done that."

"And they messed with Ecto," Winston concluded resentfully. "Would Pete have brought his allergy medicine with him, do you think? It couldn't be that?"

"Perhaps. He knew we'd be in the country. But he wouldn't take an overdose. He wouldn't take any at all except as a last resort and he had no symptoms of hay fever this evening. Besides, this isn't what I'd expect if he'd had an overdose of antihistamine, and that doesn't look like one of his allergy pills. He'd react differently. Yes, he'd be sleepy, but I think he'd have different problems. He complained about the taste of the chocolate. Someone put it in his drink; someone wanted him to die." Egon's voice was hard and steely; had the perpetrator been before him, Spengler might have had trouble keeping his long fingers from closing around the enemy's throat. "He tried to kill Peter, but Peter's still alive. He's coming back to us."

It was an ambitious statement, considering the way his body hung slack between them, his boot tips dragging on the carpet; his feet not even simulating the motions of walking. Winston didn't call him on it, though he shot one quick, knowing glance at Egon over the bent head. Then he fell into step with Egon and they began to make circles of the room, round and around again, dragging Peter with them.

At first, he didn't respond at all. His head had slid sideways to Egon's shoulder and with a sigh of relief he let it lay there. Egon knew that wouldn't help, and he hunched his shoulder, jolting Peter's head up again and winning a faintly protesting noise in response. He did it again, and Peter moaned and tried to shift away from the painful jarring. He sagged toward Winston, who hunched his body and rammed his hip against Peter to keep him alert.

Ray was back quickly. "I turned on that Mr. Coffee machine, but this is instant to go on; it's faster. At least it'll get something into him now." He looked at Peter, who had allowed his head to sag against his chest, and said with as much brightness as he could manage, "Coffee, Peter. Time to wake up." He waved the cup under Peter's nose the way he might have done at the firehall in an attempt to awaken him for a bust. Peter's nose wrinkled slightly but that was all.

They let him sit on the sofa again and Ray held the cup to his lips. He closed his teeth against it, the cup chattering against them, but he was too weak to resist them as they belabored him with words, and gradually he managed to swallow most of it. The rest wound up on his face and down the front of his uniform. Ray eyed it guiltily.

"You'll look spiffy on the cover of GQ like that, Pete," Winston chided as much to provide Peter with the sound of familiar banter as to reassure Ray, who looked like he needed it very badly. "Open up, now. Big boys don't spill."

Peter groaned, "Wanna sleep..." his voice trailing off in exhaustion.

"Later," said Egon relentlessly, warmed and gratified by the petulant note in Peter's voice. At least it was a sign of response, a sign their treatment had been the right thing, a sign that Peter could react with awareness to what was happening to him. "Come on, up again. Bring another cup, Ray." He caught Ray's gaze and tried to share an encouraging look, but Ray's eyes looked a little reddened as if he'd shed some tears in the kitchen out of worry for Peter and he wasn't encouraged, his look sliding away. Egon glanced sideways at the face that lay against his shoulder. Peter didn't look as still and unresponsive as he had earlier and his color was better. His breathing was steady again, but he was vastly different from the usual cocky Peter, his head bent as if it was too heavy to lift, his whole body slack and spent as if simply breathing used up his last reserves of strength. His responses might be partly conscious now instead of purely involuntary but he had a long way to go.

"We'll take care of him, Ray," Egon encouraged as firmly as he could. "It's all right. Do you think I would allow anything more to happen to him?"

"I know you won't." Ray knelt in front of them and reached up to touch Peter's cheek. "You'll be okay, Peter," he vowed solemnly as if pledging an oath. "Egon's right. We won't let anything happen to you. Hang in there. Please..." Drawing back, he scrambled to his feet again. Peter made a faint, fretful sound, as if something had reached him, but something he didn't yet recognize and identify. He wasn't consciously aware of them as individual people, as specific people, but his subconscious knew they were here. Egon had to believe that because it was what gave him hope. Peter knew inside that they were here and trying to help, even if he didn't understand yet. Understanding would come later. It had to.

Egon nodded to Winston and they hauled Peter to his feet again and started in on the procession around the room once more. This time Peter's feet made feeble walking motions, though he wasn't getting it quite right yet, and he wasn't supporting his own weight. The attempt to do it was encouraging though, and Egon saw Ray realize it before he vanished in search of more coffee.

Again, Egon wouldn't let Peter sag against him, though it hurt to be forced to jolt his head away when the weary man tried to lean on him. Being cruel was the only way to help now, forcing Venkman up and down the floor, refusing him the rest he had begun to plead for. Egon wasn't sure Peter had a remote idea what was happening or who was denying him the sleep he wanted so badly, but at least he was responding to something happening to him instead of flinching involuntarily.

Ray returned with a second cup of coffee and they allowed Peter to sit down long enough to drink it. He sagged in relief, though he tried to resist the drink. They cajoled him, wheedled him, pressed the cup to his lips and gradually the hot liquid went down. Peter gasped and sputtered but he drank.

"C'mon, wanna sleep," he moaned piteously, trying feebly to struggle against the hands that dragged him unmercifully to his feet again and made him walk and walk. "...so tired.... lemme sleep...." They didn't yield though, and he had to obey them, follow them. His feet still didn't support his weight but they moved and found the floor and tried, only because the others reproached him if he stopped.

Egon made his voice stern, commanding, Ray urged and beseeched him earnestly, Winston was practical and matter of fact, but none of them would yield. While Egon and Winston guided Peter round and round the library as if to wear a path in the old carpet, Ray snatched up a P.K.E. meter and took readings in the doorway at Egon's command so the shadows wouldn't come upon them while their every attention was focused on Peter. But Ray boosted the sound on the device so it would give him warning at the slightest reaction; while his ears paid dues to the meter, his eyes never left Peter.

They walked him, then they fed him coffee, then they walked him again, lugging him through the room with brute force. When finally he began to react with more awareness, though not enough to identify his torturers as his friends, they used words to pull him along. "That's right, Peter, come on, Peter, we need you, keep moving, Peter," putting urgency into their voices, letting him hear their need, knowing Peter would respond to it even in a state of semi-consciousness. He tried, moaning when they turned him too quickly, gasping out need for rest, but bracing himself when Ray walked backward before him asking him to come, because he needed help. Peter would try to straighten up then, going automatically toward the voice, even though he wasn't entirely capable of supporting his own weight yet. Egon would challenge him, insist he needed him, and Peter's head would turn jerkily to the sound of the physicist's words, reacting by instinct alone. It wasn't Peter's way to let down his friends when they needed him, and now, weakened and confused as he was, he still responded to their insistence of need.

His color was better, too. The translucent blueness had fled from his skin, leaving him white with exhaustion, his eyes half open and still unfocused but reactive to light. They paused near one of the lamps and he flinched from the brightness, squeezing his eyes shut, only to open them when Ray called his name urgently.

More coffee, more walking, more coffee, until Peter closed his mouth against the cup and groaned something about floating away if they didn't stop. So they dragged him to the bathroom, stood him up while he responded to a call of nature, then gave him more coffee and walked him around some more. The P.K.E. meter never reacted, and no ghosts appeared, not even Muz, who may have fled in fear when the fire started. Later on they would have to look for him, but it must wait now until Peter could safely be allowed to rest.

Egon began to sense a growing awareness in their patient, as if he was starting to realize who his tormentors were, not why they did what they did but as if his conscious mind was coming to identify them as themselves instead of simply anonymous voices and shapes that moved him about like a marionette. When next they gave him coffee, he lifted his head without being told to do so and muttered muzzily, "This coffee sucks. Ray made it, right?"

"Yes, Peter, Ray made it," Egon responded, holding his voice steady with an effort. "Look at me."

The command in his voice made Peter turn his head toward the sound. His eyelids lifted a little more, not quite all the way but perhaps three quarters. The green gleam held intelligence, near-awareness. "Gonna get you guys for this," Peter muttered before the lids sagged shut.

Egon's own eyes stung at that evidence of conscious reaction, but he pressed the cup against Peter's lips the harder. "Drink, Peter," he insisted. "It's important."

Long years of trust and friendship made Peter obey the voice, but after he'd swallowed most of the cup, he leaned against Egon's shoulder and closed his eyes. "God, Egon, lemme sleep. I can't...do this."

Egon curled his fingers around Peter's wrist and felt for the pulse there. It was stronger, but Egon wasn't quite ready to trust it to continue on its own even though his breathing was so much better. "Not quite yet," he said, nodding at Winston to rise yet again.

Peter cursed them, heat flaring into his voice. "Damn it, Spengs, cut it out!" he snapped, anger and adrenaline giving his voice the most strength it had displayed yet.

"I need you, Peter," Egon said unanswerably, half in command to make Peter respond, half because it was true; he wasn't prepared to let Peter die even if the cure made Peter hate him for the moment. The worry must have crept into his voice more strongly than before, because Peter once again lifted his head as if it were strung about with weights and tried to focus on the physicist.

"'m here, Egon," he responded, his words deliberate if fuzzy with exhaustion. "Wh'never you need me... 's a promise...."

"Yes, and I need you to stay here," Egon replied, forcing down his own fatigue, but letting the truth of those words shine out.

Peter's eyes opened all the way and he said in a much more normal, though still slightly slurred, voice, "Yeah, and if I ever figure out wha's so importan' you gotta...keep me walkin' all night..."

"We need you, Peter," Ray cried, rushing forward, meter still in his hand. He put his palm flat against Peter's chest. "We need you to be here for us. Always..."

"Hi, Ray," Peter mumbled, his head turning in the direction of Ray's voice, squinting at him as if nearsightedly, finally focusing. His mouth quirked crookedly in a vain attempt to smile.

"Gee, Peter," began Ray, his eyes much too bright with relief. "You scared us really bad."

"You sure did, homeboy," Winston concurred, his voice a little roughened with emotion. "You gave us a lot of bad moments."

"You did indeed, Peter," Egon admitted. He bit his lip over his voice's tendency to quiver. Peter was coming back to them and Egon wanted nothing so much as to fling his arms around him and hug him with all his strength, but instead he kept them walking, round and round the library.

Peter received those declarations in silence, then he said in a puzzled voice, "Wha's wrong wi' me?" It was even more reassuring than his last comment, which he might well have produced when half asleep. Peter was alert enough to realize there was a problem and to ask about it.

"Somebody drugged you," Ray explained.

"Didn' take anythin'.... Don' like drugs," Peter muttered. It was true. He didn't even like to take aspirin, and getting him to take prescription medication had never been easy, other than obvious antibiotics and his hay fever medicine, and he even hated that, complaining it made his head feel fuzzy and avoiding it when at all possible. When Peter was in his first year of teaching at Columbia, a favorite student had died of an overdose and ever since then Peter had been particularly leery of drugs. He did public service announcements for the TV networks' anti-drug campaigns and from time to time would donate time, the odd Sunday afternoons, to counselling at drug addiction clinics. It would never for a moment have occurred to any of the other three that Peter's overdose was self-inflicted.

"No, I know you don't," Egon reassured him. "We think it was in the chocolate."

That cut through to Peter more sharply than anything did, and his eyes opened fully as he realized someone had deliberately tried to end his life. "J-johnson?" he ventured. "Tried to kill us?"

"No, Peter, we don't know if it was Johnson or not. Besides we all drank the chocolate," Egon explained, suspecting he would have to tell this story again in the morning, when Peter really woke up for good. "It was only in your drink."

That brought forth a wail that startled all of them, and even made Peter jerk with awareness and Ray shoot a hotly betrayed look at the P.K.E. meter, only to relax as he realized the sound had been made by Muz, whose frequency had been fed into the meter to keep it from going off whenever the little ghost came to close to it. Returning from wherever he'd disappeared to earlier he swooped down and hovered before Peter, who put up a feeble hand to fend him off.

"Peter sick?" the ghost demanded in horror, eyes huge in his ugly, fanged face.

"Peter sick," confirmed the psychologist wearily. He wasn't fully conscious even yet, but he was alert enough to respond to obvious questions. He tried to force himself more upright, his feet flat against the floor, but there was still a lot of weight dragging down on Egon's shoulders.

"What happened to Peter?" demanded the ghost, his face full of fear.

Ray explained it to him. "Somebody put something bad in Peter's hot chocolate and it made him very sick."

Muz burst into loud wails and beat against his chest with his closed fists. "Not give nice dreams?" he demanded urgently. "Make sick?"

That made Egon freeze. "You know about this?" he demanded, glaring at the entity who hovered guiltily in the air before them.

The little ghost's body bobbed up and down in a shamefaced nod. "Bad ghost give pills. Say give to all guys, make nice dreams. Muz wanted Peter have best dreams, give all to Peter. Love Peter."

They stared at him in disbelief. Peter groaned and shut his eyes. "Love hurts," he muttered fuzzily with a wry twist to his mouth. "C'n do withou' too much."

"Where did he get the pills, Muz?" Egon demanded firmly before anyone else could speak. That was more important right now than motives.

"Bad ghost bring," Muz explained. "Bad ghost come, played nice, made me come to firehall, found Peter, Muz want to stay. Bad ghost come here, make nasty, scare men, make call guys. Guys come. Bad shadows here, bad ghost not know. Bad ghost say give guys nice dreams, little white pills. Put in chocolate, make Peter have wonderful dreams. Peter sick. Bad ghost really bad."

"Did you know all along he was a bad ghost, Muz?" Ray asked gently so as not to scare the specter and lose them the opportunity to find out all they could.

"No, thought was nice, but he's bad, make me give bad dream pills, make Peter sick. Muz sorry. Never hurt Peter on purpose, never hurt guys."

"He got conned," Winston realized, shaking his head. "Man, oh man, I should've known something was up. Ghosts don't usually come up the drains and want to make nice with us. It was a setup from the beginning."

"Muz loves Peter," wailed the little ghost, gazing at the sick man in horror. "Never hurt Peter on purpose."

"I think he means it, Egon," Ray said. "He was used. He's not clever enough to figure it out on his own." He turned to the little ghost again. "When did he bring the pills, Muz? Is he here now?"

"Came in when guys searching basement, brought pills in little bottle, give pills to Muz, said put in chocolate. Told Muz make good dreams, then go away again." Big tears oozed out of his eyes. "Thought pills were for dreams. Muz not know."

"Do you know what an overdose is, Muz?" Ray asked gently. The little ghost made a negative gesture and muttered something about big words. Ray patted him gently. "Overdose means too many pills. Too many of a good thing can make people sick. Too many of those pills can kill somebody. We found out in time and we've saved Peter, but it was touch and go." Peter reacted to that, his eyes widening a little, and he turned his head to stare at Egon and then at Ray as he slowly made sense of the crisis. Ray continued talking to the ghost. "Your bad ghost is really bad. Did he make the fire, too?"

Muz nodded. "Uh huh. That's when Muz knew he was bad. Did nasty things to tires, everything."

"Muz, you've got to help us," Egon said, making a quick decision. "I want you to go to Janine right away. Can you find Janine?"

"Muz nodded. "Been to Janine house. Go again now, go quick."

"Good. You tell Janine about the overdose. Tell her to call the paramedics and send them to us as soon as they can get here. Can you go quick and avoid the shadows?"

Muz nodded. "Shadows near ground, Muz go high. Go to Janine quick, quick."

"Write it down." The blurred mutter came from Peter, another sign he was coming back to awareness. "He'll only...mess it up if he tries t' remember. Write down..." He paused to draw in a great, shuddering breath. "Tell what pills, all that..."

"We will," Ray cried. "Muz, I'll write a note. You go to Janine, wake her up and give it to her. Peter needs you to do this. You won't stop on the way? You won't tell the bad ghost?"

Muz shook his head. "Muz never want see bad ghost again."

"Write the note, Ray," Egon instructed. "Find out what the bad ghost looks like. We'll take Peter around the room a few more times. Not long now, Peter, and then we'll let you rest."

Peter leaned his head against Egon again. "Wanna rest," he said, his voice aching with tiredness. "Sleep now, Egon, you c'n...wake me up...through the night 'stead'a walkin' forever. C'mon, wha' you say?"

"Soon, Peter," Egon promised. "Soon."

They walked him around the room a few more times while Ray scribbled a hasty note for Janine, gave it to Muz, and repeated the instructions carefully, then asked a few more questions of Muz about the entity who had caused all the damage.

The little spook described the ghost, though it wasn't a helpful description. The ghost almost looked like a live person, according to Muz, but was bigger and nobody would mistake him for a live human. A ghost like that should be easy to spot. From Muz's babbled description, Ray finally said it sounded like a Class 5, and set his meter accordingly before he finished scribbling the urgent message to Janine. Finally, clutching the folded note in his little fist, the green ghost vanished out the library window that Ray opened for him, and zipped away, all six legs paddling as he started back to the city.

Peter complained the whole way around the library, insisting he was fine now, he was okay but he wouldn't stay that way unless he could sleep. His voice sharpened a little but not very much because he was so tired, so worn out by the events of the evening that he wasn't bouncing back. He needed the sleep, but he couldn't be allowed to sleep unsupervised. They would monitor him carefully, watching his respiration. Egon meant to do it himself, to make up for his failure to notice Peter descending into unconsciousness earlier.

Finally they let him sit on the couch again and he sagged back into the corner, his eyes easing shut. "Wanna sleep," he muttered again, but after a minute, he cracked his eyes open a little and sought out Egon. "'s it okay, Spengs?" he muttered wistfully, catching and holding Egon's gaze. "C'n I sleep now?"

"Just a minute, Peter." Egon took Peter's pulse, compared it to his own and to Winston's, and nodded. It was much closer to normal, though fatigue twisted Peter's face. A movement at Egon's side proved to be Ray, still holding the P.K.E. meter, kneeling beside the couch. He caught hold of Peter's hand and squeezed it.

"We had to be sure you were all right, Peter," he said, his fingers tightening.

Sensing the grip, Peter tried to squeeze back though his fingers moved feebly and didn't close completely. "'s okay, Ray," he said faintly. "Y'c'n tell me all 'bout it t'morrow."

"I will," promised Ray. He surged up and hugged Peter hard, and it was a sign of his weakness that Peter only brought up one arm in an attempt to enclose Ray, his head bowing forward against Ray's shoulder, eyes closing again. He was nearly asleep again, but this time it wasn't the drug that did it but sheer fatigue. Egon knew he'd have to check Peter periodically through the rest of the night, or at least until the paramedics came and the task could be assumed by competent professionals. He hoped Muz would get through without encountering his 'bad ghost' on the way.

Which, of course, reminded Egon they faced double danger, not just Kingsley's shadows, but an actively malevolent spirit who had tried already to rid himself of the Ghostbusters with several different long-range plans. Equal doses of the medication in the chocolate wouldn't have put any of them in as much danger as Peter had been in, but it would certainly have made them sleepy, possibly too sleepy to rouse while the fire blazed out of control. The ghost had been fortunate that they had adjusted their meters to read entities with negative valence or they might have picked up its presence when it came close enough to start the fire. Egon doubted Muz could have been convinced a fire would aid Peter or the rest of them. No, the entity had done that itself, just as it had deflated the tires and damaged the mobile phone in Ecto. It was a thorough and farsighted ghost, determined to stop them. Whether it was in league with the shadows or apart from them, it was still dangerous, as dangerous in its own way as the shadows, which may or may not be ready to break out completely.

Ray freed Peter and eased him back into the corner of the couch, and Peter's mouth curled in a faint smile. "Glad you guys're here," he managed to say.

Egon felt the words tug at him, and he copied Ray's gesture, leaning in to embrace Peter. "No," he said with a ferocity that half-surprised him. "We are glad you are still here, Peter." Venkman leaned into this hug, too, and managed to get his arms up around Egon's neck, nestling his face into Egon's shoulder with a sound of weary contentment. The warmth of the weight against him reassured Egon more than anything else had that Peter was here to stay, and he bent his head over the tousled brown hair and closed his eyes tightly. He'd needed to be strong and determined for so long it hurt him to relax, and a sob caught in his throat as he clutched Peter to him like a hard-won trophy. "You don't know how glad..."

Winston's hand descended upon his shoulder and squeezed, and Ray murmured, "Oh, Egon," but it was Peter who helped slide Egon's world right side up again.

He lifted his head with a real effort and looked Egon right in the eye. His eyelids might have still been at half mast but the green glow behind them was very much aware. "What, and give up Ghostbusting?" he demanded, forcing vitality into his voice with every ounce of his remaining strength as if he knew he had to break the tension. "Wouldn't be nearly so much fun...on the other side." He leaned into the embrace again, muttering, "C'mere," as he tightened his grip once more around Egon. "'s okay, Egon. I promise."

The physicist groaned and closed his eyes, holding Peter with all his strength until he felt the psychologist's body relax into sleep, then he drew back and made a great show of lowering Peter into a supine position on the couch and positioning him as comfortably as possible. "We need blankets," he said sternly. "We must keep him warm. We can't have him going into shock after all our hard work." His voice was steady only with an effort, and the hand he used to smooth back the lock of hair that had fallen forward into Peter's eyes quivered in spite of his efforts to steady it.

"You okay, Egon?" Ray asked anxiously, eyeing him in concern.

"I don't think Peter's the only one in shock," Winston said sympathetically. "Or at least reaction. Get some blankets, homeboy. Hurry."

Ray looked at Peter's sleeping face, darted a worried glance at Egon, and dashed to obey. Winston then grabbed Egon by the shoulders and pulled him to his feet, guiding him over to the wing chair he'd sat in earlier and forcing him down in it. "Egon, m'man," he said in a firm yet reassuring voice, "first of all, none of this was your fault."

"How did you know..." Egon began involuntarily then bit his lip over the betraying words.

"Used to it, with Ray. I know what you're gonna say, that you sat right here and watched him go into a coma, but you didn't. You thought he was asleep and had no reason to think otherwise. With Pete, a drug overdose is the furthest thing from anybody's mind and we didn't know we had a spy in our midst. Poor Muz, he didn't know what he was doing. I bet he feels bad, too. Listen to me, Egon. None of that matters. The only thing that matters is that we saved Peter, and that was all you."

"You could have done just as well," Egon returned. "Either you or Ray."

"No way. Peter would listen to you, especially when you took that tone with him, before he'd listen to anybody else. I don't want you thinking about noticing any sooner that anything was wrong, because I don't think there was anything to notice. You weren't alone with him all that long anyway. If the fire hadn't hit when it did, I think you would have noticed. But it did. We couldn't save Peter if we turned into crispy critters ourselves. Now we know there's a homicidal ghost running around we'll be a lot more careful. I saw Ray checking his meter as he went out of here. He'll be prepared for that kind of danger. Soon as he gets back with Pete's blankets, he and I are gonna throw all that burned crap and those paint supplies out of the kitchen and then we're gonna check the house all over again. You'll stand guard over Peter because I suspect we'd need levers to pry you away right now. And that's fine. He needs someone to watch him. Once we've checked the house, we're all gonna camp here until the paramedics come. But none of this is your fault and I want you to know that. Thanks to you, we haven't lost Peter. That's what matters."

Egon shuddered, knowing it was reaction but unable to control it. He remembered how he'd tried to hide his shock when he'd fallen from the World Trade Center, and knew he'd done worse damage than if he'd admitted his fear. This time, he could admit it here, now, to Winston, who would understand. "I wasn't sure...we could save him," he faltered, then he pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes as tears stung them. "I didn't know if we were in time."

"None of us did," soothed Winston. He put his arms around Egon and gave him a tight squeeze. "It's okay to be scared, homeboy, because we all were. Hang in there because the last thing we need is Ray starting on with what might have been. Pete's okay, and knowing him, he's gonna capitalize on this like crazy the minute he starts feeling a little better. He's gonna have us fetch and carry for him for probably a whole week, and we'll get so fed up with him we'll probably sick the spud on him in self defense."

The picture Winston conjured up was so familiar, and suddenly so dear to Egon that he shivered into laughter that brought with it a quick and healing gush of tears. The two of them clung together a moment longer, Winston patting his back and muttering quiet, understanding words, then Egon collected himself, feeling his normal control begin to reassert itself. He was still shaken by the experience, but he could deal with it. They all could.

When Ray returned clutching an armload of blankets, Egon rose to take them from him, and together they tucked Peter in, watching the sleeping face as Peter sighed in sheer contentment and pulled the blankets around himself without waking up.

"Gosh, I was scared," Ray admitted, smiling down at Peter with open fondness. "I'm really glad he's gonna be okay. Look at him. Betcha he's got us waiting on him hand and foot by this time tomorrow." He grinned, the smile spreading across his face. "And we'll do it, and he'll push his luck once too often and then we'll get him." His eyes sparkled a little too brightly, but it was sheer joy that shone there. "I--gee, Egon, I can hardly wait." Then he smoothed a corner of the blanket into place and straightened. "I took readings for that nasty ghost Muz told us about. There weren't any ghosts around at all, just those weird negative valence residuals. I wonder if they only come out at midnight. It's not even eleven o'clock yet."

Egon frowned. It had seemed much later as if they had spent the entire night walking Peter round and round the library. "Possibly, though I do not understand what significance midnight would have to entities from another dimension who may have entirely different time measurements. Let me tell you both what I learned from the journal of Douglass Kingsley," Egon said to them. "We may have greater trouble than we knew. I wish we had obituaries for the man, because I suspect he may have been one of the victims in the 1890's." He related the information gleaned from the old journal, and the other two listened, Winston with a grim and worried look on his face and Ray with growing excitement.

"Wow, Egon," he said. "Nameless horrors from another dimension. This is great!"

"This is not great," corrected Winston, gripping Ray's shoulder and shaking him lightly. "These things kill people, and it sounds like they're nearly impossible to see and maybe as impossible to stop. What's more, they can come out in the daytime, not just at night, or those painters wouldn't have keeled over like that."

"But that could have been paint fumes, not the shadows," corrected Egon. "We don't yet have enough information to know whether or not it was the shadows, but there's enough of a possibility that we must be on guard at all times. I wish the two of you would check the house, and see about putting that burned garbage outside in case there's still a spark lingering. Keep your meters set, one for the shadows and one for more conventional ghosts. Peter set his meter for the shadows, and it's still here somewhere." He dug it out from beneath the blankets tucked around Peter's booted feet--they'd left him fully clad in case he would have to be awakened to fight later, though none of them cared for that possibility. Producing the still-activated meter, he set it on the round table near his wing-chair on top of Kingsley's journal and picked up his own, which he proceeded to adjust. "Check the attic again, too," he recommended, "but if the readings strengthen, don't go up there without me."

"What are we gonna do, Egon?" Winston asked in the tones of a man who is quite certain he will not care for the answer. "Cross the streams?"

"Possibly, but we can't do that unless the gateway is actually open. Then we can use it as a focus and try to force the shadows back the way we did with Gozer."

"Great," said Winston a notable lack of enthusiasm. "I didn't like it then and I don't like it now."

"Then we'll figure out another way," offered Ray brightly. He drew his thrower and, clutching it in one hand and his meter in the other, started toward the door. "Come on, Winston. Let's check this place out." Before he left, he darted one quick glance at Peter, who was sleeping deeply, even starting to snore a little. Ray's face warmed at the sight and he left still smiling. Winston followed him out the door.

"I think you must be a magnet for trouble, Peter," Egon said quietly to the sleeping man. "If you do indeed possess pheromones that attract ghosts, some ghosts must be immune." Most of them, actually. Though Peter got slimed the most on their busts as a general rule, the majority of the goopers and spuds that dive-bombed the psychologist didn't do it out of anything resembling affection. But it was to Peter they usually went first. Even if they felt a pull, they didn't necessarily like humans, so Peter made a good target. Egon hoped whatever it was that caused the phenomenon, if it weren't simple mischance, wouldn't extend to shadow-entities from parallel universes. The thought of the shadow creatures curling up around Peter and draining his already-depleted energy worried him greatly. He wondered how long it would be before they could expect rescue from the paramedics. Would they even listen to Janine at first? Was the village big enough to have any EMT's in the first place?

Dragging the wing-chair over beside the sofa and pulling the table with the lamp at the end of the couch a little closer to him, he sat down, took out his thrower and lay it across his knees, prepared to guard Peter while he was helpless against whatever dared threaten Egon's friend.

Ray led the way up the stairs, rubbing his sooty hands on his uniform one at a time so he wouldn't have to let go of his thrower. He'd stuck the P.K.E. meter in his front pocket still activated while the two of them worked, the antennae rising up from the pocket's opening. He and Winston had dragged outside not only the burned garbage pile but all the paint cans and tarps, placing them on bare ground and concrete where a new fire wouldn't threaten the house. That didn't mean the ghost wouldn't try again, but now they were ready for it, meters set to monitor the first evidence of the spirit's presence.

"I don't like this attic," Winston said as they climbed. "Makes me nervous. I don't know if we can really read these shadow things. Maybe the negative valence you're getting on the meter is just the gateway itself."

Ray narrowed his eyes as he considered that possibility. "It could be, but I think the gate would register differently, not necessarily negative like that. I think they've started to come through, but not all at once. We'll probably get a few first and then, what really worries me is that they might all come at once in a swarm. I wish I knew what Kingsley did a hundred years ago to stop them."

"I wish we knew if he'd survived the experience," Winston said as they reached the third floor and halted before the stairs to the attic. The door was shut, but he reached out and opened it, darting in a hand to flip the light switch. When the light came on, bright and reassuring, he heaved a sigh of relief. "That's cool. I don't see anything."

"I'm not sure we can see them," Ray returned. He pointed his meter at the attic stairs, gesturing for Winston to do the same. Neither meter reacted strongly, though Ray's, which had been set again for the negative readings, stirred slightly, although no more than it had earlier. Ray watched the normal shadows on the steps, eyes straining to see the slightest unnatural movement in their depths, as if the entities were crouching against the risers of each step, shielding themselves from the light. He remembered he'd once seen a political cartoon when the first spaceship had landed on Mars looking for traces of life. The cartoon had shown the Viking 1 lander, camera pointed out while, pressed behind each rock and boulder, tiny Martians hid in desperate concealment. The shadows might well do the same thing. The odds were the creatures wouldn't set the meters to frantic beeping in any case.

Ray slid the Ecto-scopes down over his eyes again and studied the stairs. Again he had a sort of glittery overview and, in the heart of it, the shadows seemed to coil and bunch. Frowning, he yanked off the scopes and adjusted them before settling them back over his eyes again. He could see the same effect, but it was fairly constant, and he wasn't sure if it were a by-product of the entities or just a fluke, since the goggles were not designed to read this type of entity. The motion hurt his eyes, but it didn't clarify anything. Either the stairs were full of shadows or there was simply an energy overlay. Since Ray assumed they were unhappy with light, he'd have expected to see the greatest concentration in the darker areas, but the scopes didn't clarify that. Heaving a frustrated sigh, he pushed them up on his forehead again.

"No luck?" asked Winston, hand tight on his thrower.

"Not really. I'd have to do a major readjustment to pick up the kind of energy Egon and I have been postulating and I'd need my tools. I'll do it if we need it, but it would take a long time." Back at headquarters, he could have done it much more easily but he hadn't expected to need to adjust the goggles on this particular bust. "What we've got to do," he continued thoughtfully, "is keep monitoring ourselves. Those painters might have felt a little woozy and covered it up, you know, a macho thing. If we feel the slightest symptom that might be more than normal tiredness, we need to tell each other." His eyes ached from staring so hard at the shadows witht he scopes on; he had focused so tightly he couldn't help imagining movement now, as if the darkness churned with alien life, but when he took his belt flashlight and aimed it into the shadows, they vanished entirely, and nothing stirred.

"If these are shadow ghosts, wouldn't light itself bug them?" Winston wanted to know as they started up the stairs, side by side. "You know, rig something with our throwers to shine the kind of light that would bug them most, ultraviolet or something."

"That's what we'd do if we found vampires," Ray returned. "It's not a bad idea; something like that might work. Only we'd need a lot more information before I'd want to change the settings of the throwers. If it didn't work, we'd have useless throwers, and even if they might not be much good against shadows the way they are, they'd sure stop the ghost who drugged Peter."

"Yeah, and stopping him is right up there at the top of my priority list," Winston agreed. He gestured in the direction of the library. "Egon's taking it pretty hard."

Ray looked at him in surprise. "We all did, but Peter's going to be okay." Then he realized what Winston meant. "He can't hold it against himself that he didn't notice anything before the fire. Peter must have sounded like he was just sleeping deeply and we're all used to that. By the time we got back from the fire, he didn't sound so good, but if he'd been like that before Egon left, he'd have noticed. He should know that."

"I've heard you take blame when it's not yours, Ray," Winston reminded him with an apologetic grin. "So you ought to understand it when somebody else does. I think a lot of it is we're not used to seeing Peter so completely helpless. Even when he's normally sick or hurt, he's still got more energy than a lot of people, even if half of it's a defense mechanism."

"Defense mechanism?" Ray echoed as they reached the top step and paused to scan the shadowy room with meters and eyes. "You mean because Peter hates to be really vulnerable?"

"Got it. He doesn't mind so much with us; he knows he can trust us. But I think for years he had to be on top and let everybody know it because that way nobody could get to him. So even now, when he's not too sick, he fusses like a kid because he knows it'll bug us and we won't believe a bit of it, and when he's really sick, he shuts up. You never hear him complain when it's really bad, do you?"

Ray shook his head. "I know. When he started complaining he wanted to sleep and we should stop dragging him around, that's when I knew he was going to live." He smiled, his whole face warming at the memory. "But--well, when we were in college and first getting to know each other, It took awhile to figure out where he was coming from. We all sort of balanced each other out. I was pretty shy and didn't know my way around, and the other two turned into my cheering section. I needed it pretty bad back then, coming from Morrisville where they thought I wouldn't amount to much. Peter, you know what Peter was like; he's still like that a little, creating an image of himself so nobody would see the little boy inside who didn't have any security. He got his security from Egon and me. Different kinds of security, but once he started to trust us, he didn't put on the act with us any more, at least not for real. Egon--well, he was all for pure science and he buried himself in the lab. His dad had raised him to think of nothing but his work and his studies, and Egon could have turned into a lab rat with no life outside. Peter dragged him into 'life' with a capital L. Egon had no idea people like Peter even existed before they met. So in his own way, Peter and Egon gave each other a kind of balance. They're so much more opposites than I am to either of them. When they'd fight--and they used to a lot at first--I could always see both their points of view. I got to be mediator, and it pitched me right in. I learned to stand up for myself pretty fast, let me tell you," he said with a chuckle at the memory. "But Peter and Egon were so different I wasn't sure they'd ever be friends; they had to work hard for it. But when they finally realized how important that friendship was to them, well, it gave them balance. So I think in some ways it hits them harder when something happens to the other one. There's the normal worry any of us have when one of us gets hurt, but there's also that balance. Am I making any sense or am I just babbling?"

"I think you're making a lot, homeboy. Egon was too close to it all just now. He was there and didn't notice what was going down, and he needs Peter being a smartass just for balance, like you said. I almost plowed in and took over; thought it might be easier on Egon, then I realized how much he needed to be in charge, not for ego but because he really needed the control it gave him. You were just honestly worried about Peter like I was, but Egon--well, if it had gone the other way, he'd've had a heck of a time coming to terms, not only with the loss but with himself."

Ray nodded. It made perfect sense. Winston was good at figuring out things like that; he had a real feel for people and the common sense to go with it. They'd been lucky to get him when he joined the team. "We'd have all had a heck of a time," he said. "I can't imagine what it would be like without Peter."

"Don't try," Winston said with sudden firmness. "Because might-have-beens are a real waste of energy. Instead, tell me about this hexagram thing. We usually run into pentagrams, don't we? I remember a few of them, including one you said chased you across the floor."

"That was because a demon was controlling it," Ray said reminiscently. "That wasn't fun. This hexagram is different. It's calling upon a different power. And it's usually supposed to be a protection against fire."

"Didn't do us much good before," objected Winston, hunching one shoulder in the direction of the stairs.

"Well, it wasn't down there, it was up here," Ray reminded him. "This is a pretty powerful thing. A lot of magic practitioners use a pentagram as a way to confine demons. But this one would have a different purpose. I've done a lot of research on this kind of thing. I did my parapsychology master's thesis on magic. I wouldn't have expected to find this kind of design here, but it encloses the dimensions of the gateway. This kind of thing can be used to summon spirits, too. Maybe Kingsley put it here and tried to summon a spirit that could defeat the shadows."

"What kind of spirit could do that?" Winston asked in surprise. "And how would Kingsley have controlled anything that powerful?"

"I don't know. Maybe a fire elemental? The hexagram would seal it up and the light it produced might drive the shadows back." Ray shrugged. "I need a lot more information. They call this kind of design a macrocosm; that could be a symbolic representation of, well, everything, the universe. I wish I knew what Kinglsey meant. Even if we only found out his plan didn't work that would mean we wouldn't have to waste our time trying it again."

"So what do we do now?" Winston asked, glancing around the attic as if he expected shadows to sneak up on him. Ray looked too, his gaze lingering in the corners where the normal shadows bunched, turning his flashlight here and there as if to catch a quick glimpse of a retreating spirit. Nothing moved under his direct stare, but it seemed there was constant movement out of the corners of his eyes. He couldn't tell if he were imagining it or not, but the meter didn't respond. Ray let himself focus strongly on one corner, the light beam stabbing there, then, very slowly, he turned his eyes to one side without moving any other part of his body.

The shadows writhed.

He jerked the light around in that direction, but again there was nothing. His meter wasn't reacting either. Frowning thoughtfully, Ray lifted the meter and twisted several dials, attempting to compensate. The antennae stirred slightly but the device didn't beep and the lights at the ends of the antennae quivered but didn't blaze to brightness. Ray pursed his lips as he considered it.

"Anything, m'man?" asked Winston, who had evidently seen nothing.

"I'm not getting any real readings," Ray replied, shaking his head. "If anything was here, I think it's long gone." He pitched his voice slightly above normal in hopes the entities, if they were really here, would hear him, understand, and lower their guard. Yet when he turned his eyes carefully toward other shadowy corners, the darkness seemed alive, until he shone his light into it.

Ray didn't know if it were a natural reaction to staring too hard coupled with uneasiness and lingering traces of smoke from the fire. They had been so absorbed with rousing Peter they had paid no attention to the smoke that lingered, thick and acrid, thinning out as a result of the exhaust fan. The smoke would have risen, and now that he concentrated on it, Ray could smell it here, taste its astringent tang. It probably hadn't helped Peter any, but there hadn't been a great concentration of it in the library. There wasn't any obvious smoke here now, at least not that manifested itself to his vision, but he knew his eyes were a little irritated. They'd all breathed too much smoke, too. Couple that with eye irritation and the intense stress of nearly losing Peter and it was a wonder Ray wasn't seeing pink demons out of the corners of his eye.

Unless he could determine a new configuration for the meter though, there was nothing he could do up here to detect the entities, and he didn't know how to close the pending cross-rip. They had long speculated about the possibility of tracking down as-yet-unopened gateways to the other side and closing them before hordes of ghosts came through, but it wouldn't always work. Some of those openings were created by the advent of powerful beings like Gozer. Patchwork sealing around the edges of such a rift would only hold until the entity came through. In this case, there wasn't a single entity weakening the boundaries of the darkness. If the horde Kingsley feared were really a swarm of mindless devourers, they weren't powerful enough on their own to do more than wear away at the cracks, the way a trickle of water wears down a dam. Ray might plug the hole temporarily with his thrower, but such finger-in-the-dike treatment wouldn't last forever. There had to be an alternate solution, one that closed this portal permanently.

Ray had heard various theories of parallel worlds, alternate dimensions, and knew that while some of them, like the Netherworld, was always close, just beyond his own earth's normal boundaries, open to any ghost or demon who chose to cross, other dimensions drifted like planets in orbit and only opened to this world at times the two were nearest. It was possible the alternate dimension had a hundred-year cycle and was now approaching its 'perigee'. If so, it might be far easier for the shadows to drift across the barrier between worlds. What had happened already might simply be the advance guard for the horde that might follow.

They weren't ghosts, either, not ghosts as Ray knew them, not like the ghosts for which he and Egon had designed weapons for trapping and containment. But there were always ways. Egon's atomic destabilizer could make physical entities shift their structure to more closely resemble ghosts, so they could be pulled into traps. In this instance, they were dealing with something with less structure than ghosts, because most ghosts, even the shape-shifters, had a cohesion; their ectoplasm bound them. These new shadow entities must have a binding unless there was no solidity at all, just a mass of darkness, drifting, invisible to the eye, cowering in the shadows. If they didn't, how could the throwers pin them, how could the traps suck in more than tiny, random fragments of them?

The atomic destabilizer.... Ray frowned, his brow puckering as he considered the possibilities.

"Come on, Winston," he said with sudden urgency. "We've got to get downstairs again. I want to haul in the rest of our equipment in case that Class 5 messes with Ecto again, and then I want to run some theories past Egon."

"You've got a plan, homeboy?" asked Winston. He had stood, solid and foursquare while Ray pondered, his pocket flash's beam raking the attic from one end to the other. Light might not stop the entity (entities?) altogether if they could venture out in the daylight, but Ray was pretty sure they didn't like it as much as the darkness which concealed them.

"Not yet. But I'm starting to get some ideas."

"Great. First let's check those bedrooms for any traces of shadows, and see if we can find any more of those pills or a prescription bottle. The thermoses were in the bedrooms, after all. Muz said he had a bottle and he might have dropped it somewhere. We could take it with us to the hospital."

Ray nodded. "Good idea." He led the way to the stairs. "He's gonna hate going to the hospital," said Ray with certain knowledge. "He'll fuss and insist he's fine." Glancing over his shoulder as they reached the third floor, he eyed the attic stairs uneasily. "Leave the light on, Winston. Every little bit helps."

"Did you see...anything...up there?" asked Winston, his voice uneasy as if he hoped Ray would respond with a loud, resounding 'no'.

"I don't know. I kept thinking I did." Ray closed the attic door very carefully, and both he and Winston let their gaze fall to the bottom of the door as if they expected a dark fog to roll out from beneath it and drift along the floor like a hungry and tenacious tide.

Winston nodded. "Me too. I sure didn't like it."

"We'll put on every light in the house," Ray decided. "Anything we can do to even the odds, we're gonna do it. I wish we'd brought more than two traps apiece."

"Even if we can trap it, we probably can't trap it all," Winston said, lowering his voice automatically as if he suspected the shadows were listening and fluent in English. Ray doubted they were conscious enough to speak and even if they were, their language wouldn't be English. What he did dread was the possibility they could sense moods, emotions, that they could read the fear of human beings.

When it became clear that nothing visible meant to ooze out from beneath the attic door and swarm around them, Ray gave a halfhearted little shrug. "Come on," he said and started for the stairs to the second floor and their bedrooms, flipping on lights in every room he passed. He let his conscious mind drift for a moment on the off chance he could sense something with a subconscious awareness, a resentment of the light, a fear of the brightness. He felt nothing at all.

The bedrooms had been searched; that was obvious at first glance. All their suitcases had been opened and someone had pawed through them. They went to Peter's room first and looked around for any kind of prescription medicine. The only thing they found was a small box of Benadryl, which Peter had probably brought in case the country air triggered his hay fever. It hadn't been tampered with, and the picture on the box revealed the medicine to be pink and white capsules rather than round white pills. So that hadn't been the substance taken; besides Ray was sure that while it might make Peter drowsy it would have caused him to react differently than he had.

Ray ran the P.K.E. meter over Peter's open suitcase carefully, nodding as the readings were confirmed. "It wasn't Muz," he said. "It was that other ghost who snooped in our stuff. I'm only getting residuals now, but he did touch the fasteners and left a faint slimic residue. Peter will hate that." He grinned lightly "I think I've got enough to identify his frequency." To confirm it, he held the meter over the suitcase's contents, the strewn pajamas, underwear, clean clothes for tomorrow. The readings strengthened. Yes. Ray grinned widely. "I've got him. Let me key this into the memory, and if he comes back the meter will tell us." He sat on the edge of the bed that would have been Peter's, and adjusted the device. "That's one thing we can deal with. Only I think we're going to have to take turns sleeping, Winston. I'd get right away from here if I could, for Peter's sake, but we'd only have to come back and close the door. I wonder when those paramedics are coming. I wish I'd have had Janine tell them to bring tires for Ecto."

"Assuming the nasty gooper didn't mess with the engine," Winston replied, his voice still full of resentment at the outrages perpetrated upon his beloved Ecto-1. "When I get him, I'm gonna figure out how to do worse than trap him." He looked around Peter's room, frowning at the clothes strewn everywhere. "I bet he did this to all our stuff," he added in disgust. "Come on, let's take a quick look."

He was right. Every suitcase had been opened. Ray's Ghostbusters boxer shorts adorned the chandelier, Egon's nightshirt was half buried under a throw rug, Winston's electric razor was in the sink, completely submerged in water. When he saw that, the fourth member of the team so far forgot himself to curse--loudly--revealing a veritable genius for the art form. "When I get my hands on that gooper...." he gritted out through tightly clenched teeth.

Ray couldn't help smiling, then his good humor faded. "Razors and clothes are one thing," he said more seriously, "but he tried to kill Peter. I mean I know he meant to kill us all, but--well, you know what I mean."

"Yeah, homeboy." Winston fished out his razor, shook it hard, sending water cascading out of its innards in all directions, and deposited it on the lid of the toilet tank. "I know what you mean. It was a brand new razor--but I can always get a new razor. No way we could get a new Peter Venkman. They broke the mold when they made him, didn't they?"

"They sure did," agreed Ray, smiling fondly. "He drives us crazy, but where would we be without him?" He cast a quick glance at the still-dripping razor. "Maybe it'll be okay when it's dry," he offered without much hope his words were true. "Come on, let's head downstairs again and haul in our stuff, make sure Egon's still okay--and be sure Peter is."

He started for the stairs and Winston fell in behind him, pausing to glance over his shoulder.

"Did you see something?" asked Ray, staring in the direction Winston had turned. The hall was brightly illuminated now, but there were still shadows, behind a table that held a truly ugly vase in dreadful shades of purple, under a ladderback chair that stood against the wall near the far end of the corridor. Ray couldn't get the image out of his mind of little shadow specters clinging to the shadows, just out of sight, avoiding a direct glance. Then too, he realized, there were entities in the shadowlands that couldn't be seen with a direct glance. The 'other side' was a wide and wild place, and some of its denizens had been proven to exist, scientifically, with the Ghostbusters' own detection equipment. Ray remembered once coming face to face with a tiny, wrinkled little man that came no higher than his kneecap while on a busting job in Ireland, but the little sprite had vanished before Ray could do more than let his jaw drop in astonishment. Their amused employer had informed them with certainty that they'd encountered a leprechaun, but since Ray hadn't had time to take readings, he couldn't verify it. Even before then he'd been willing to grant at least some credence to the creatures out of legends, knowing that while part of them had been invented to explain scientific principles as yet understood by primitive man, others might have a more solid basis in reality. After all, no one had ever been given genuine proof of ghosts until he and Egon had started designing equipment to measure ectoplasmic energy, even though many people habitually saw ghosts and dutifully reported them.

If ghosts and leprechauns could be real, not to mention vampires, werewolves, imps, goblins, demons and other entities from beyond the veil of so-called tangibility, then maybe there were no limits. Shadow creatures from other dimensions were as valid to Ray as vampires were--he'd met vampires more than once and knew they existed. Whatever was here existed, too. Their inability to measure it accurately didn't deduct one iota from its reality.

"I don't know if I saw anything or not." Winston was beginning to sound peeved. "Man, I like things I can get a handle on, things I can blast. Show me a nasty gooper and I'll go after it and zap and trap it. What I don't like is things sneaking around I can't really see. How do we know they're not already sapping our strength?"

"Because I've been concentrating hard on that ever since we came up here," Ray replied, delighted to have a positive answer for something. "We're beat. It's nearly midnight, and we need to sleep, but we're going to have to take turns, keep at least one of us awake at any given time. If Muz has had any luck getting help, then we ought to expect reinforcements soon. If there isn't room in the van for all of us, they'll have to take Peter and come back for the rest of us."

"If they can get through," Winston replied sourly. "I remember that doctor and his horse that Egon told us about. Unless the paramedic van can outrun the shadows, what better chance do they have than the doctor did?"

"Well, nobody's been killed yet in this time period," Ray said stubbornly. "Janine will warn them. I put it in the note. Come on, let's head downstairs." Still gripping his thrower in one hand and P.K.E. meter in the other, he headed for the stairs. "I want to haul in Tobin's Spirit Guide, too. I think we've got a copy in the car. I want to see if we can find anything that works the way these shadows do. If there's anything similar, it might give us some good ideas. I bet we can figure out something to do." Full of eager enthusiasm, Ray clattered down the stairs, Winston hard on his heels.

Ray wouldn't have been quite so excited if he had known what had happened to the carefully composed note he had labored over, all the more determined to convey to Janine all the information she needed to start the wheels of their rescue. Muz had left the house determined to go straight for Janine, and his resolve hadn't weakened. But he had been no further away than a mile from the house when he had sensed big trouble coming right for him.

Quivering in panic, he had darted into the shadows at the base of a fir tree, wrapping stubby arms as far around the branches as he could reach. When he peeked out uneasily through the pine-scented branches, he had spotted the bad ghost who had made him hurt Peter, and with him a second ghost with nasty squirmy tentacles topped by a face so beautiful that Muz could only gaze at it in wide-eyed rapture. He had never seen anything so beautiful before. The sight of the second ghost didn't inspire him with the courage to emerge from his hiding place, but he watched them for a long time until they had vanished in a sweeping circle heading for the house. The bad ghost was clearly angry at the failure of the fire and Muz heard himself reproached and vilified by the angry specter and knew he had to hide until the two spirits had passed.

When they had finally vanished from sight, the little ghost shook himself uneasily, slime flying in all directions the way a dog sheds water, then he zipped out of his hiding place and flew as fast as he could toward the city.

Behind him, at the base of the pine tree, lay Ray's note, crumpled, dirty and near-illegible, where no one would ever find it.

Egon jerked his head up, struggling for alertness. He wasn't sleeping; his mind was too full of thoughts for that, and his body was still winding down from the tensions of the evening. Besides, the compunction to guard Peter's sleep was so strong it would have taken more than a little quiet time on his own to put him to sleep. But his thoughts had been far beyond the confines of his immediate surroundings. As he watched Peter, Egon remembered all the years he'd known the other man, all the complexities of their unlikely friendship. True, they had few actual interests in common; those who did not know them well might have said they were too different to get along. Egon had thought that in the very beginning, but as he had come to know Peter, he had begun to discover something that intrigued and surprised him. For every difference between himself and Peter, he could find a similarity. Peter might like rock and roll while Egon preferred opera, but Peter could happily listen to music for hours on end just as Egon could. Peter might pretend never to crack a book while Egon pored over his at any hour of the day or night, but Peter absorbed what he read with the consistency of a sponge and didn't forget; he was remarkably quick witted. Peter's humor might seem heavy handed to outsiders, but the subtlety beneath it matched Egon's own. Once they had realized how similar was their sense of humor nothing could hold them back. Even Ray, whose humor was quite different, could sit back and chuckle at their banter, joining in when he felt the urge.

Oddly enough, it was when Egon realized he could be quiet with Peter, and not have to talk at all, that he had begun to realize what a deep, yet undemanding friendship they had formed. Peter finally decided he could lower his guard with Egon, and he came over to Egon's college apartment a lot, to study there where no one would call him an egghead or a brain or a geek. He and Egon could sit for hours, each with his nose in a book. As far as Egon knew, Peter had never done that with anyone else, unless he found the odd date he was comfortable with. Put all the guys around him and Peter automatically became the life of the party. It wasn't that he had to pretend with Ray or Winston, because he didn't, except purely for fun. But the times when Egon and Peter spent together, often in quite serious conversation, had come to be particularly valued by both of them.

Now Egon and the others had almost lost Peter forever. It stunned Egon that it could have come so easily, right under his eyes. Peter's sleep, he had to admit, had seemed normal at first, if deeper than usual, and Egon was forced to concede he had nothing with which to reproach himself. Had he stayed out here a few minutes longer, he would undoubtedly have realized what was happening and taken action. That didn't make him feel any better about it, but it allowed him to function more normally and to realize what had made him rebuke himself so harshly was strictly fear, the frantic dread that Peter would be taken from them. It hadn't happened, and now Peter was sleeping naturally, clinging to it with fierce relish, worn down by exhaustion and the trauma of the experience, but sleeping so normally and peacefully that Egon found himself smiling whenever his eyes fell upon Peter's face.

When Ray and Winston had first left to search the attic, Egon had made himself walk around the room, checking the books on the shelves, seeking more information, anything that might lead them to a clue about the danger presented by the house. He wasn't nearly so concerned about the ghost who had tried to kill them, because now that they knew of its existence, they could take the proper precautions. Before, they'd been so caught up in the mystery of the shadows they hadn't considered the possibility of more conventional ghosts. Now they knew there were several different dangers.

Egon yawned so widely he felt his jaw pop. Taking off his glasses, he rubbed his aching eyes, knowing they were probably a little inflamed from the smoke, though the exhaust fan had cleared the place out quite well. His lungs ached slightly, too; they'd probably inhaled enough smoke that oxygen wouldn't have hurt them at all. Egon would have liked to open a window, but he didn't dare, for fear it would expose them to the shadow entities. It was a crisp evening for late spring in any case, and the colder air might not be good for Peter, who, even if he was recovering, would be bound to have a lower resistance than normal.

Egon slid his glasses on again, pushing them into place with his forefinger. He ached with tiredness, as if it would take a colossal effort just to stand upright.

The realization of that made him jump up as if propelled by rockets. It might be a normal tiredness, but his energy had seemed to sap so quickly it could have been the shadows, creeping around in spite of the fact that every light in the room was blazing brightly. Egon had seen nothing, and, worst of all, the P.K.E. meter set to negative valences had not reacted at all, even though he had boosted the sound level to the maximum. Grabbing for his thrower, Egon powered it up, set it carefully to a low power and directed it all around himself and Peter, being careful to strike neither of them.

The sense of grinding exhaustion retreated.

Egon upped the power fractionally and repeated the action, driving his beam across the floor toward the door in sweeping motions. Amid the sizzle and glow of the energy streams, he thought he saw unexpected outlines, not visible normally but standing out as if silhouetted against the light. They were long and thin streamers, but they twisted and writhed as if they were alive, vaguely resembling sooty ferrets. He thought he could make out distinct heads, narrow as the rest of the slender bodies but able to twist in more directions as if positioned on articulated necks. Yet he had to squint fiercely to be sure he was seeing anything at all. The proton streams didn't seem to hurt the shadows, but they weren't fond of the effect because, for a moment, he saw them scurrying ahead of the light, vanishing out the double doors that led into the hall.

"This is not good," Egon said to himself. He played the beam around the room once more, sweeping it under the sofa where Peter slept, walking around behind it to check there for lingering shapes. Peter's breathing hadn't altered; his respiration was deep and regular, the sound of normal deep sleep, though Egon didn't want to take it on faith. The near-invisible entities might have been feeding on him, too. Powering down the thrower, he bent over Peter, dropped a hand on his shoulder and shook him gently. "Peter? Come on, Peter, answer me? How do you feel?"

For a seemingly-endless moment, just long enough to twist Egon's stomach with nerves, there was no response, then the deep breathing stuttered into a gasp and a groan. Peter opened his eyes and glared balefully up at the physicist, lines of fatigue etched upon his face, but awareness shining out of his slightly-blurry eyes. "Geez, Egon, let a guy sleep, willya. It's the middle'a th' night." He stretched so hard Egon was afraid he'd dislocate something, clearly reveling in the motion, then slid a hand out from beneath the covers to pull them around himself more comfortably, and his face relaxed into a look of sheer contentment at the warmth of his nest. "Gotta say--on a scale'a one t' ten, this hotel rates a minus ten." His eyes opened a little wider and he regarded Egon with a slightly lifted eyebrow. "Did I hear a thrower?" he asked a little more coherently.

"Yes. I think there really are shadow entities here. The streams didn't hurt them but I broomed them out the way I would a nest of cockroaches."

"Cockroaches? Where?" Peter shuddered elaborately and half sat up only to ease down again as his mind backtracked Egon's comment and informed him there were no roaches nearby. He squinted at Egon as if having trouble focusing, then slid out his hand again and knuckled his eyes one at a time. When he blinked at Egon again he could apparently see more clearly. "I feel like shit," he said bluntly, his voice still weak and thin, but as if he were starting to think and reason. "Stomach hurts, feel like somebody punched me out a few times. Feel like I've been slapped around. Muscles all ache. Kinda queasy. Mouth tastes like...floor of a taxi."

"I don't wonder," Egon said, sitting on the edge of the couch next to Peter and smoothing the covers. He held his thrower in his other hand, thumb poised over the trigger button. "It's been--a hell of a night."

That made the eyebrow lift a little higher. "Doesn't...sound like you," Peter informed him.

"It sounds the way I feel," Egon replied. "Peter, are you alert?"

Venkman's head moved up and down. "Yeah. Only wish I wasn't. Really tired, Egon."

"I know you are, and I'll let you sleep in a moment when the others return. But we have a serious problem here."

Peter yawned gapingly, then heaved a sigh and tried to force himself into a sitting position. Egon slid his hand down to rest on the middle of Peter's chest. "You don't need to move yet. Rest."

"Okay, big guy, if you tell me why you look so awful."

"I'm not the one who isn't well, Peter."

"No," said Peter squinting at him consideringly. "But there's something in your eyes I don't like." He was growing more alert by the minute, the sight of Egon's face giving him the adrenalin boost he needed to focus himself. "It's been rough on you, whatever it was." He pondered that. "Kinda remember something about...overdose? Somebody drugged me. You said...a ghost?"

"It seems we have acquired an enemy, Peter, and a very ill-timed one at that. I suspect it precipitated the original hauntings here in order to lure us to the site and isolate us. Unfortunately, because I think it's coincidental, there is a slowly-opening cross-rip here, through which dangerous entities are beginning to trickle. They suck away the life essences of humans. I felt it happening to myself just now."

"So why didn't you zap and trap 'em, Spengs?" Peter demanded, lifting a a questioning eyebrow at him.

"I would have greatly preferred to do so, but they are resistant to the throwers." Egon rested his hand on Peter's forehead to test for fever. There seemed to be a little, but nothing alarming. Peter grinned at the touch.

"Doctor Egon," he muttered fondly, then added in a much more serious voice, "You saved my life, didn't you?"

"After first endangering it." Egon didn't know where the words had come from; he had already reasoned past that particular bit of blame, but now he heard himself continuing, "It was in your chocolate, Peter. I sat here beside you while the drug did its work on you and failed to notice."

"Notice what?" Peter asked in perplexity, grabbing Egon's wrist when the physicist would have pulled his hand away. "Come on, Spengs. I'd just've been sleeping deeper, wouldn't I? You're used to me asleep. It's one of my favorite hobbies."

"Still, if I had paid more attention...."

Peter's eyes narrowed and he stared at him as if trying to judge just how seriously Egon meant his self-reproach. "What were you doing that was so important anyway?"

"Learning about the shadows," Egon replied without hesitation. "I had found a journal written a century ago which proved most informative."

"Well, then, don't you think that was pretty important?" Peter persisted, concentrating very hard on sounding alert and normal. When Egon nodded reluctantly, Peter said with a grin, "Thought so. Listen to me, Spengs. You had to learn that and I didn't start thrashing around or anything, or stop breathing, least I don't think so. I was just asleep, and you musta figured it out in plenty of time, 'cause I'm still here."

"It was...very close, Peter," Egon replied, avoiding the knowing green eyes. His voice quivered slightly, but he steadied it at once.

Peter fumbled with the blankets, struggling weakly to sit up. "Egon..."

"Yes, Peter?"

"C'mere. Too tired t'come t'you." Peter reached up, grabbed Egon around the neck and hugged him with all his strength, which wasn't much at the moment. He pulled the physicist down so abruptly Egon had to struggle to adjust his balance, though he didn't try to pull away. Peter's arms closed around him tightly and he tucked his head into the hollow of Egon's shoulder and held on for a long moment. Egon slid his arms under Peter and drew him up into the embrace, grateful for the touch, because the peril had been so very close. He could feel Peter's shaky breathing, the warmth of his body, and the way his arms tightened around Egon with a desperate intensity. Egon's eyes closed as he held on, his eyes stinging with the emotions of the moment.

Peter's strength didn't last very long, his arms loosing their grip, and at that Egon lowered him to his pillow again and set about straightening the blankets over him with great care. "Lie there and rest," he instructed. "You're not ready for acrobatics yet."

Peter was silent a moment, his eyes glowing with a combination of sheer affection and delight, then he said firmly, "I c'n always count on you, Egon. Know that." Egon's whole body warmed at the words. Peter yawned again, but tried to swallow it, continuing, "You never let me down. What'd you do, belt me around and make me barf?"

"Something like that," Egon replied dryly. "It was necessary, Peter."

"Hey. I'm not complaining. I like it better'n the alternative." He tightened his grip around Egon's wrist for a moment, favoring him with a dazzling smile. "I kinda remember walking around this room eighty million times."

"More like a hundred million," Egon replied with forced lightness. "I expect Mr. Johnson will complain about the path we wore in the carpet."

Peter chuckled gleefully. "Carpets! This place is in lousy shape anyway." A pucker appeared between his brows. "Don't mean to complain about your, uh, medical treatment, Spengs, 'cause it obviously worked, but--why are we still here if I'm in such lousy shape?"

"You mean why didn't we put you in Ecto the minute we knew you were going to live and head for the nearest town?" When Peter nodded he replied, "Because, unfortunately, we are cut off here." He explained what had happened while Peter listened, yawning from time to time and poking in a sleepy question or two.

"So lemme get this straight?" Peter asked when Egon had finished. "You guys sent Muz for help, after he popped all those pills in my chocolate? You think he'll actually get to Janine?"

"He was devastated that he'd hurt you, Peter. I am quite convinced he honestly had no idea what he was doing wrong. He is a particularly innocent spirit."

"Yeah, with all the IQ of a turnip," Peter responded roundly. "Come on, Egon, he'll forget halfway there. We're not gonna have paramedics beating on the door any time in the next century." The threat of danger and the unlikelihood of rescue seemed to have acted as an adrenalin booster to Peter. He looked fully alert now, if weary. In better circumstances, Egon would have preferred him to sleep but the danger was too real to allow that. He wouldn't again be deceived that Peter was sleeping normally when a new threat might sneak up on him and suck away his life essence. Egon had been prepared and it had crept up on him unawares. It might even now be creeping back.

"You may be right," Egon replied. "But if true, Mr. Johnson was supposed to come in the morning with the painters, and if nothing else he will have a vehicle in which we can transport you to a hospital."

"No hospital," objected Peter with his usual stubbornness at the introduction of hospitals into the conversation. "Gonna be okay."

"I know you are, but I want you examined anyway." When Peter opened his mouth to protest, Egon said with a flash of near-anger, "It's not open to negotiation, Peter."

"Chill, Spengs. I'm not gonna croak on you." Peter slid his arm out from under the covers again and dropped his hand on Egon's shoulder. "I promise."

"Then I hope with all my heart it is a promise you mean to keep, but I still want you examined. Our treatment was rough and ready and we couldn't be sure everything we tried was the right thing. There may even be ways to make you more comfortable or necessary follow-up treatments of which we are in ignorance."

"Well, I'll buy that." Peter stretched again, wincing slightly. "I feel like somebody picked me up and wrung me out. It's not my idea of a good time. It's about as far from a good time as I can imagine, short of being buried alive in a pit of cockroaches--or having it happen to one of you guys." He was deadly serious. Egon had always known one of the reasons Peter tended to be slimed more often than the others were was not because of some mysterious ghost-attracting pheromones but because Peter was and had always been protective of his friends, to the extent of becoming a more obvious target than they were if he felt they might be in jeopardy. It wasn't that Peter consciously took risks instead of letting his buddies take them because he always complained like mad about having to do more work on a bust than anyone else, but often he'd divide up the chores so his was the more dangerous one, and then pause to cry, "That didn't come out right." His subconscious protected his friends, though, and Egon knew why. He'd grown so close to them he wasn't about to let anything happen to them if there was any way to stop it. It didn't mean Peter took stupid risks or plunged headfirst into danger in the heat of the moment. That was more Ray's province, and only because he got so carried away he didn't stop to think there might be danger. Egon found himself smiling. His own downfall had always been his scientific curiosity. He could become so fascinated with a particular scenario danger simply did not occur to him.

"I suspect we all tend that way," he said now, realizing the truth of it. Considering how dangerous their job could be, that innate concern for each other had undoubtedly saved their lives more than once.

"Well, yeah. Ray's gung ho and you're a mad scientist," replied Peter, proving he'd been able to read Egon's thoughts easily because they knew each other so well. "So Winston gets to pick up the pieces."

"Not an unmixed blessing," Egon replied with amusement. He reached out and rumpled Peter's hair affectionately. When Peter grimaced, the blond man shook his head. "Don't become alarmed. I'm doing your hair more good than harm."

At that, Peter's hand shot up to explore the ruin of his normal hairstyle, and he gave a heartfelt groan. "I can't go out in public like this and have people see me. Spengs, you gotta get me a comb right away."

"Never mind that now, Peter," replied Egon with a smile. "We have a strategy to plan."

Peter considered that. "Okay. I'll lay here on the couch and play the part of a strand of limp spaghetti. But if you give me my thrower, I'll be ready whenever you tell me to fire, okay? You did say these shadow things didn't like the throwers, didn't you?"

"I said they ran before the beams," Egon replied. "But they weren't hurt by them. They simply find them unpleasant."

"I find eggplant unpleasant but I don't run away when I see it," muttered Peter. "So okay, you boy genius you, why don't you start experimenting on finding a frequency that will knock 'em out or something? If they don't like it, you can boost it so they really, really hate it, right? Where's that brilliant mind? Do I have to think of everything here?"

Egon grimaced at him, holding down the delighted smile that wanted to plaster itself across his face. Peter was starting to sound like himself again--and he was right. There had to be a way to adapt the throwers to meet this new challenge. The shadows hadn't liked what he'd done before. So it was Egon's job to reason what they would like even less. Had it been the light that disturbed them? Would shifting the throwers to produce ultraviolet light affect them? No, not if they could come out in the daylight and suck away the painters' essences. They might not like light, but Egon had no reason to believe altering the light frequency of the throwers would change anything. Muz had provided the term 'shadows', and Muz was no threat to Professor Einstein. Light might make them uncomfortable, but they came out in the daytime and had entered the library when all the lights were blazing brightly. No, it was more complicated than that.

"You do have a point, Peter," Egon remarked. "Perhaps the time has come to run additional tests, using more than just the P.K.E. meters. Will you be all right if I run out to Ecto long enough to bring the rest of the equipment in?"

"Beat you to it, Egon," Ray said, standing in the doorway, his arms full of supplies. "We've been checking things upstairs and I've got a couple of ideas. I think we can do some cross-referencing, and I've got Tobin's Spirit Guide so we can check in there, too. I just know that hexagram was there for a reason, instead of an ordinary pentagram, and--Peter! You're awake! This is great!" Abandoning the equipment without a backward look, he charged over and gripped Peter's forearms, squeezing them happily. His grin broadened, spreading from ear to ear. "How do you feel?"

"On a scale from one to ten, somewhere in the one or two range," Peter confessed, with a dramatic sigh. "I feel like I've been on a two week binge only I didn't get to enjoy the process. It's not fair." He used his elbows to slide a little more upright, and Egon, resigning himself to the inevitable, assisted Ray to help him up, propping throw pillows behind his back and saving the fluffiest of them for his head to rest upon. Peter sagged back against them and closed his eyes, a sign of how ill he still felt, though he gestured Egon away when the physicist would have helped him lie down again. "So how much more of this endless fun have we got to go through yet?" he demanded.

"You're not getting through any of it," Winston chided affectionately. "You need to rest, that's what you need. After all our hard work, the last thing we want is for you to have a relapse."

"Does this mean I get to be waited on hand and foot again?" Peter demanded, the corners of his mouth twitching with ill-suppressed mirth.

"Well, maybe," conceded Ray. "But we really do have a lot of work to do. You can watch, if you want to."

"Goodie," muttered Peter. He opened his eyes again. "Just what I love, watching you guys play mad scientist."

"We have more work than you think, Ray," Egon put in. "The shadows are actually here. I just chased a swarm of them out of the library with my thrower."

Ray's eyes grew wide and he glanced around the room uneasily, peering into corners as if expecting to find them lurking everywhere. "Did you actually see them?" he asked eagerly. "What do they look like?"

"I could see them in the proton streams but not otherwise," Egon replied and gave a pithy description of the little ferret shapes. Peter shuddered quietly at the image that produced but didn't comment. "There was something in the streams they found unpalatable," the blond physicist continued. "I'm not yet certain what it was, but I want to run further tests and see what happens when we use the aurascope or the spectramater on the entities."

"I love it when you talk like that," Winston said with a grin and handed Egon an armful of equipment.

Janine Melnitz turned over in bed and gave her pillow a savage punch, then stretched out on her back and closed her eyes without much hope of sleep. She had a bad feeling and until she resolved it, there wouldn't be much she could do in the way of falling asleep. She didn't get such feelings often when the guys were on a bust, but they came occasionally, and quite often she was right. She'd felt uneasy when the guys had gone off with Alice Johnson and wound up swallowed by Nexa and there were other times, quite often not very serious, when she'd felt a sense of disturbance while the guys were out on a bust. She had learned to trust the feeling, and to try to judge how strongly she felt it. Janine had told Egon very early in their acquaintance that she was sometimes very psychic, and while that had been an exaggeration, partly to gauge the reaction of the blond physicist whom she'd found attractive the minute she had seen him, it was also occasionally true. Tonight when she couldn't settle down to read a good love story by her favorite author and wouldn't let herself be distracted by her friend Gloria's long involved story about how her boyfriend was two-timing her with a redhead who worked the perfume counter at Bloomie's, she began to suspect that latent talent was once again trying to tell her something.

There was no way to reach the guys. They were staying at the haunted house, a plan that had very little to recommend it, now that she thought about it. The place was in the process of renovation, probably what had disturbed its ghosts in the first place, and the phone was not yet hooked up, though there was supposed to be electricity. She couldn't call them on the mobile phone because they were too far away, and she couldn't call Johnson either because she'd left his number back on her desk at headquarters. Retrieving it meant driving back there at midnight or risking the subway so late. Neither idea appealed to her, and she couldn't call Slimer and coax him into reading it for her because the answering machine was on and Slimer never paid any attention to it when he was there alone. More likely he was out prowling the neighborhood, snooping through people's garbage bins for a late snack. It had taken all her diplomacy to keep the little spud from coming home with her since the guys were away, and now Janine had begun to wish she'd permitted him to come after all. She could then send him back for the number or, even better, dispatch him up to check on the guys and find out what, if anything, was wrong.

Her premonition, if that's what it was, hadn't faded when she tucked herself into bed. If anything it had grown stronger, and now she lay staring blindly up at the ceiling, convinced it was time to take action. She doubted the local police up there would believe her if she told them she was sure something was wrong. Most likely they would discount her story and rate her as a ditzy female who was suffering from an overactive imagination and the pangs of unrequited love.

She rolled over and pounded her pillow again with both fists. "What are you doing up there?" she demanded of the absent Ghostbusters. "I know something's wrong." Closing her eyes, she tried to concentrate, focusing on Egon, but the feeling was too nebulous to crystalize into reality. She sensed trouble, and she didn't understand it.

Maybe she should go up there herself. The notion appealed strongly, though driving up there in the dark wasn't one of the best ideas she'd ever had. If they were in trouble right now, she would arrive on the scene too late to deal with the crisis, maybe too late to help at all. Sitting up in bed, she drew up her knees and rested her elbows against them. "If you guys are in major trouble..." she told her absent employers through clenched teeth.

"Janine! Janine. Helphelphelphelp!" A dark green blob came squishing through her window without breaking it, and a vaguely fishlike shape hovered in the darkness in front of her, tail wiggling to and fro, little legs paddling to hold him in place. "Gotta get help, Janine," Muz wailed, anguished. "Gotta get pyramid, come right away."

"Pyramid?" she echoed doubtfully. That was a new one. "What do you mean, Muz?" she asked, trying to sound patient and reassuring. She got up, reaching for her robe. Muz wasn't as bright as Slimer, which didn't say a lot for his intellect. He was good hearted and much more patient than the spud and didn't slime them as thoroughly, and he sat still for Egon's experiments, but in the long run, he was basically pretty boring, or so Janine had come to think. He even had the bad taste to adore Peter's singing. But now he was desperate, eyes huge and glowing with worry, gibbering with his anxiety, hopeful she would be able to do something to make it all right.

"Take it slowly," she encouraged. "Tell me what's wrong."

"Peter," wailed the ghost. "Peter very sick, nearly die, throw up long, long time. Muz SORRY. Didn't mean it. Didn't mean kill anybody. Meant give good dreams."

"Is Peter dead?" Janine demanded, her heart slamming against her chest wall with sudden agony, while her fingers curled up into fists. Though she and Peter often argued, their spats had gradually come to be of the sibling variety. Although she wouldn't admit it out loud, she loved Peter like a brother and would be devastated if anything happened to him, not to mention how it would tear up the guys. Egon would be beyond consolation, and poor Ray....

"Nonono, not dead," Muz said, wringing his hands together in a graphic demonstration of his anguish. She caught her breath in relief at that reassurance. "Nearly," he said. "Guys saved him, make him throw up, nasty, icky, drink coffeecoffeecoffee. Walk and walk."

Janine considered that, trying to put together the clues in her mind. "He had some kind of drug overdose?" she ventured. "But that's crazy. Nobody hates drugs more than Dr. V."

"Muz did it," confessed the ghost with a hangdog air. "Didn't know make sick. Bad ghost say make nice dreams, give some to all the guys. Wanted Peter to have best dreams of all."

"So you gave them all to Peter." Well, there was a feeble kind of logic to that, a ghost's logic. Muz wanted Peter to be happy, and his kindness for the psychologist must have nearly killed him. "Is he in the hospital?" she asked. "Do the guys want me to come."

"No hospital. Get pyramid, make pyramid come," insisted Muz, grabbing her shoulders and shaking her with his urgency. "Need pyramid quick."

"Pyramid? That's what you said before. Muz, listen to me. I don't know what you're talking about. What is a pyramid, other than those places for mummies to sleep in?"

"Don't know," confessed the ghost. "Ray, Egon said get pyramid, come, take Peter to hospital. Ecto tires all flat."

"Take Peter to the hospital?" She frowned in concentration, then it dawned on her. Muz had been exposed to a word he didn't know and had substituted one only marginally more familiar. "Muz, think! Did they say 'paramedics' instead of pyramid?"

"Sure, pyramidics," agreed Muz happily, if inaccurately. "Janine get pyramidics for Peter?"

"They need medical help--but Ecto's tires are flat? All of them?"

"Bad ghost cut with big knife," Muz replied.

"Oh, great, they're stranded there. Why don't they use Ecto's mobile phone, you know, the telephone in Ecto?"

"Bad ghost break," Muz explained. "Can't go for help, can't call for help, need pyramidics right away. Peter sick, sicksicksick."

"And instead of one of them going cross-country to the nearest house they sent you here?" It seemed like one of Egon's weaker plans.

Muz puzzled over the question a minute to make sense of it, then he snapped his fingers in great triumph, sending slime against her sheets. She winced but ignored it as the ghost shivered dramatically. "No, can't go out in the dark. Shadows suck their blood. Kill them in the dark, sneak up on them in the house."

"More bad ghosts?" Janine asked, concerned about the introduction of a new threat into the ghost's incoherent tale.

"Nonono, not real ghosts," Muz insisted, gesticulating wildly as if to mime a threat he only partly understood. "Shadows. Come across the dark to human world, suck away human life, eat human life, leave empty body. Shadows come to Netherworld once, demons drove away. Big fire, big explosion, big trouble. Muz scared. Muz decide one day come to human world, no shadows come back. Now shadows here, too." He began to blubber unhappily. "Muz scared, Janine."

Janine didn't blame him. The shadows didn't sound like her all-time favorite entities either, but rather something the guys might be hard put to defeat, especially with one of their number down. She raked her fingers through her hair as she thought about all she'd heard. "Muz, is the bad ghost who drugged Peter one of the shadows?"

He wiggled his whole body from side to side in vigorous denial. "Not. He a ghost. Come to Muz, say find new home, go up drain, meet guys who like ghosts, let Muz stay. Found Peter, love Peter, pretty music, want to stay. Bad ghost come around, ask Muz questions, send beautiful ghost look for haunted house, get guys out of town, hurt guys. Muz didn't know. Peter gets sick, throws up, nearly dies, Muz know now bad ghost is bad. Muz scared of bad ghost, hurt guys. But not as scared of bad ghost as of shadows."

"Did the bad ghost lure them up there to hurt them?" Janine asked, trying to make sense of the ghost's less than perfect use of the language. Her nephew Victor had made more sense than this when he was three years old but Janine was a secretary and it was her job to produce order out of chaos. She could usually cut to the heart of any confusion.

"Uh-huh," agreed Muz, relieved to find himself comprehended.

"Is he working with the shadows?"

Muz hesitated, perplexed. "Muz not think so. Think bad ghost doesn't know about shadows."

"So he's not likely to call a truce to fight a common enemy. More likely he'll try to zap the guys while they're fussing over Peter. This is terrible. I've got to get up there right away." She flung herself out of bed and switched on the bedroom light. "I'll stop by headquarters on the way and get a couple more proton packs, and I'd better call the paramedics up in Jonesville and tell them to get out to the house right away. And I'd better warn them to watch out. Will the shadows leave the house and attack the paramedics?" she asked Muz as she flung open drawers and her closet, looking for jeans and a shirt.

"Attack anybody. Egon said killed doctor and horse."

"And a horse?" she echoed blankly. "Doctors make house calls on horseback Upstate?"

"Hundred years ago," Muz explained, making her wrinkle her nose in perplexity. Muz might have the time frame wrong, but maybe the shadows came around once every hundred years. Or had the house renovations and the presence of the 'bad ghost' roused them from a hundred-year slumber? It was anybody's guess. She didn't like it one little bit, but now she had something concrete to do. Those paramedics better rouse out and help her employers or they'd have to face the wrath of Melnitz.

"Let me get this straight, lady?" the dispatcher from Jonesville asked Janine over the telephone in a voice that reeked of skepticism. "You say a ghost told you the Ghostbusters need help out at the old Kingsley place that the city fella Johnson is fixing up, and somebody slashed their tires and they don't have a phone, so you want us to go out there and rescue them?"

"That's about it," Janine replied impatiently. "Ask anybody if the Ghostbusters are up there. Call Mr. Johnson if you doubt me. He called them in because there was trouble in the house he bought. They took one of our tame ghosts with them on the journey and when they couldn't get away from the house, they sent the ghost to warn me. I don't know how long it took him to get here; he's not very bright and might have been distracted on the way. But that only makes it more urgent. You've got to get out there and rescue them right away. Peter's very sick."

"Is this a hoax?" asked the dispatcher in a voice pregnant with heavy suspicion. Janine could almost feel his urge to hang up on what he fully believed was a crank call.

"No, this is not a hoax," she snapped hotly, her fingers drumming on the surface of the telephone stand in a combination of worry and exasperation. "I'm Janine Melnitz; I'm the Ghostbusters' secretary. What I'm saying is that they're in bad trouble and one of them needs medical treatment right away." She controlled her temper; such a call in the middle of the night would bear the stigma of a hoax, especially if the recipient of such a call had no regular dealings with the Ghostbusters. He wasn't from the city, either, but from Upstate. He didn't see the guys going about in Ecto the way people did in the Big Apple. "Call Mr. Johnson if you don't believe me. He'll tell you there were problems in the house and that he called in the Ghostbusters. Just get out there, but be careful."

"I did kinda hear the Ghostbusters were coming, but I thought it was one of those weird rumors, y'know." He was silent a moment pondering her story. "Okay, lady, but you better be on the level. We can't take the chance this is serious, but we don't like hoaxes. Give me your telephone number and I'll call back to verify it."

Janine gave her number without hesitation and the man called her back in moments. She knew he'd wanted the number in case she was trying to perpetrate a hoax, but that didn't matter. Only the guys' safety mattered. "I'm coming up there," she insisted. "And if you haven't helped them, I'm going to make sure everybody knows you wouldn't answer a distress call. I've got contacts with a lot of major newspapers."

"Look, lady, I believe you," the poor man defended himself. "But ghosts aren't usually messengers. Are you sure this isn't a hoax?"

Janine hesitated a moment, caught up short at the very reasonable question. Then she shook her head. "No, it's not a hoax. Muz may not be very bright, but he was frantic, and I know he couldn't be that good an actor. Don't sit there arguing with me. Just get out there and save them."

"Okay, lady, you're on," the man replied as he came to a decison. "We'll do it."

"Finally." She hung up and heaved a sigh of relief. Rescue was on its way; she'd done all she could from this end. Now it was time to head up there herself. First she'd stop at the firehall and collect equipment, then she'd be on her way. She only hoped when she arrived it wouldn't be too late.

Peter had drifted off to sleep again once the conversation grew technical, and Egon insisted they take his pulse at regular intervals to make sure he was sleeping normally rather than fading away under the assault of invisible shadows. The physicist made himself concentrate at regular intervals on the sound of Peter's breathing to make sure it never faltered or grew stuporous. In spite of the fact that light didn't entirely seem to daunt the creatures, they'd carried in lamps from other rooms, including a sunlamp they'd found in one of the rooms where the painters had been at work. It attached to a mounting support with a spring device, and Egon had insisted on setting it up on the back of a ladderback chair and positioning it so it shone directly on Peter, who couldn't defend himself while sleeping. Maybe it would give him that extra edge needed to protect him while he was helpless.

After a few minutes, Peter roused with a groan and pushed away his blanket. "Too hot," he complained, squinting against the light. "'sides, I don' wanna work on my tan right now."

"It's to keep the shadows off you while you sleep, Peter," Ray explained earnestly, attempting to draw up the covers again, though Peter feebly batted at his hand and shoved them off again. "We have to do a lot of research and we don't want something sneaking up on you while we're concentrating so hard."

"What, they don't like the smell of sweat?" Venkman asked, tugging at the zipper of his jumpsuit. "This thing feels like a blast furnace."

Egon folded up the blanket and hung it over the back of the sofa. "If you feel the slightest bit chilled, I want you to bundle up again, Peter. I don't think you'll go into shock at this late date, but we don't want to take chances. You're still weak from your experience."

"No shit," muttered the psychologist, scrubbing at his forehead with the back of his hand. "But that doesn't mean I want to be baked, broiled or microwaved either."

"Well, you're gonna be, so shut up," Winston informed him in the tone of voice that brooked no denials. "Come on, Pete, it's the brightest light we've got. We're going to make sure the shadows can't get to you without our noticing."

Peter yawned. "Well, okay, but I don't hafta like it," he said, and went back to sleep without the slightest effort. Egon reached over and took his pulse again, smiling when he verified it was reassuringly normal. Now if only Peter could sleep the rest of the night through. He needed it. He probably needed nourishing food, too, but there wasn't anything nourishing in the place, and when they'd offered him sandwiches, he'd grimaced and declined, muttering something about not being hungry. Egon had offered instead to find and prepare the concoction his mother had always prepared when Egon was ill as a child, but Peter had declined vehemently, pointing out with triumph that they didn't have a blender. Now he was sleeping again, and if there were shadows under his eyes, they were there because he'd been through such an experience, because he was exhausted from it, because he couldn't help but feel ill after all he'd been through. It didn't mean he was having a relapse.

"Man, he looks so innocent when he's asleep," Winston said with an amused grin. "You'd never realize how ornery he is if you only saw him like this." He smiled down at the sleeping Peter.

Ray stood beside Winston, his face full of affection for the sleeper. "I wish I had a camera," he muttered. "He'd hate it if we took a picture of him when his hair was messed up like that."

"Since we don't have a camera," Egon said dryly, though he understood and shared the emotion that motivated the other two, "I suggest we apply ourselves to our task. I've been attempting to reconfigure my meter. Simply adjusting for a negative valence isn't good enough. Since it's clear the shadows can't be neutronized--they weren't hurt by the streams, only irritated--then our normal readings are useless against them. The meters were never designed to detect anything like the shadows. True, they can detect physical entities, and even record our own biorhythms but that's because we designed them to be as open-ended as possible. When we first conceived them, we hadn't even seen a ghost yet and while we'd postulated the range of energy we might detect, we hadn't been able to verify it empirically at that time, so we wanted to allow for as wide a fluctuation as possible. I had a meter at the Public Library when we saw our first ghost. It did affect the meter right in the center of our range, which proved we'd been on the right track. But these shadows aren't ghosts, even though they are not physical. So unless we can hypothesize more accurately about their physical composition, the meters might not prove very useful. All they can tell us is that there is a localized disturbance, but the readings don't seem to intensify with increased propinquity. The readings we get may not even be from the shadows but from the cross-rip, though they aren't normal for such a disturbance."

"So in other words, we might only be picking up the energy from a localized and unusual gateway," Ray countered in his usual and automatic attempt to translate Egon's theories for the other two. He picked up the spectrameter and adjusted it. "And I don't think this is going to do much either. I'm going to adjust it beyond both ends of the visible spectrum and boost the ectoplasmic vibration detectors, and see if we're dealing with something that functions in the infrared or ultraviolet range." He did it quickly. There was nothing in the infrared. He couldn't get the trace of a reading as he shifted the device, pointing it to the darkest corners of the room. The monitors didn't so much as quiver.

"Wait, Ray," Winston said abruptly, holding up a hand to keep Ray from moving. "Stay just there. Egon, look. Over there."

Egon followed Winston's pointing finger and frowned. The black man indicated the furthest corner of the room, where shadows had gathered at the edge of one of the bookshelves behind a small table. The shadows there churned and roiled as if they were alive, shrinking back as Ray took an eager step in that direction.

"Wait," Egon called, and he switched on his thrower, setting it at a wide angle level of dispersion but at low power, raking it across the corner.

In the crackling light, the shadows bunched, coiling in tight upon themselves, long and lithe but full of desperation as if they were suffering. No sound emerged from the intangible beasts but their frantic discomfort was obvious in spite of their silence. Egon began to narrow the focus of his beam, and suddenly the shadows elongated and began to shoot through the wall in a long stream, one by one, zipping to safety. In moments they had vanished entirely.

"Wow," breathed Ray, eyes wide in surprise and fascination. "They were right here in the room with us. But they weren't visible under infrared, only in the thrower. Some kind of energy there brings them out and lets us see them. What would do that, Egon?"

"I don't know yet. Perhaps the beams simply vibrate within their infrastructure. I want to run further tests. Try the ultraviolet range, Ray." Egon picked up his P.K.E. meter again and played with the dials, considering the results they had achieved so far.

"Maybe they just don't like the streams," Winston said, shaking his head. "And they don't like the spectrameter either. Why don't we just leave it powered up. At least it'll make them hold their distance."

"We don't know that," Ray argued. "They might have gone for help. It depends on how many of them there are. I wish we knew what had happened to Kinglsey. Whatever he did must have worked, because it worked for a hundred years. At least it doesn't sound like there are any records of unexplained deaths up here. Something strange like that, I bet I would have heard of it, but I never did."

"I hope what we do works better and lasts longer," Winston replied. "Not much point in driving them away if they're only gonna come back in another hundred years. We'll be a little old to go out busting ghosts then." He bent over Peter, checking his pulse again. "I want to close up this doorway for ever. Can we do that, Egon?"

"I hope we can," Egon replied. "I'm going to run a comparison study of all the properties of the proton streams and then factor them out one at a time."

"And we can correlate it with the spectrameter," Ray agreed eagerly. "Because once we find out what they have in common, we'll have the factor we need, and we'll be able to use it to stop the shadows. If we can drive them back through the gate, we can close it, even if it means crossing the streams."

Peter mumbled, "I hate that," without fully rousing.

"Can't say I like it either," Winston replied. "Crossing the streams is one of my least favorite things."

"But it might be necessary," insisted Ray. "Gosh, I wish those paramedics would get here. It's getting late. I wonder how long it took Muz to get to Janine."

"I hope he did get to her," Winston replied, stretching and yawning. "That little spud might have got lost. For all we know he's wandering through the streets of Albany trying to figure out where Janine is." He yawned again. "Sure feels like the middle of the night. I could go down for the count without a whole lot of trouble." He knuckled his weary eyes and continued, "Well, one thing we forgot is the 'bad ghost' who gave Muz the drug to put in our drinks. Who's to say he isn't out there on patrol? He might have stopped Muz. I think we have to assume we're on our own until morning."

"And not just then," Ray said soberly, his eyes wide with alarm. "The shadows can come out in the daylight, too, remember? Maybe they're just stronger at night. Maybe the painters just fainted because it was daylight. Maybe if the shadows had fed off them at night, they'd have died!" He stared at Egon. "But I think it means we can risk going for help in the daytime, don't you?"

"Yes, Ray," the physicist replied. "But I really would prefer Peter to be seen by a doctor before morning. He seems to be recovering, but I don't want to take any chances. His system did absorb some of that drug, after all."

Ray turned to stare at Peter. "I think he's okay, Egon. I really do."

"Yes, so do I, and I don't honestly believe there should be any unpleasant side effects. He's too alert, and the symptoms he has now are precisely what I should expect to result from such an experience. I confess I would simply feel happier if I knew Peter was under expert medical care. He's not yet strong enough to fight the shadows, and if it comes to a major battle, we won't be able to protect him. We can only hope the bright light will do that. I used the sunlamp because it approximates daylight."

"And in daylight, the painters only fainted," Winston replied.

"The painters hadn't just been inflicted with a drug overdose first," Egon reminded him, taking off his glasses to massage his aching eyes. "Peter is weak right now. What made the painters faint might well kill him. Though he's regaining his strength, only time, proper nourishment and possible medical treatment will bring it back completely. We don't have appropriate food, though by morning he may want some of those sandwiches. Sleep is good for him now, physically, but the problem is that he is not alert. He can be attacked without us knowing it. In fact, so can we. The shadows nearly got me earlier though I was alerted to the possibility already."

"But there are three of us here now, Egon," Ray reminded him, bouncing up to look behind the couch as if he expected shadows to lurk there hoping for a chance at Peter. "We can watch each other."

"We'll have to. Unless they make a concerted rush, that should be sufficient. Now I want to get to work. I want to run tests. Ray, you feed me the figures, and I'll see what I can make of them." He put his pocket calculator on the table beside him, next to his P.K.E. meter, and punched in the first numbers Ray gave him. Already he was developing theories. "Run those ultraviolet tests now, Ray, and we'll correlate those readings with the infrared ones we took. Then I want to scan the entire room with the aurascope. And what I really want to do is put in some time in the attic with the gateway. As you both know, dimensional gateways have always been a particular interest of mine."

"Yeah, the dimensionometer," Ray remembered. "But your devices always controlled the portal so nothing could get through--"

"Unless shut down," Egon replied, remembering with a shudder the time a gateway in the lab had been shut down in the lab and a terror dog had come through. "It's possible I could design a 'door' for this gateway, too, but it would take weeks. There must be a quicker method. Have you adjusted to study the ultraviolet range?"

"Just getting it," Ray replied, his fingers busy. Then he grinned and nodded. "I can do it now." Activating the device again, he moved it slowly and carefully around the room, pausing when it pointed at the doorway. The spectrameter projected a wedge of energy that rendered what it was studying momentarily visible. Nothing had showed up under infrared, but this was different. Curling around the edges of the door were vague, insubstantial shapes, elongated and ferretlike, heads raised as they 'stared' back at the three Ghostbusters. Their faces were featureless, indistinct, but they didn't use eyes to see or ears to hear. Whatever sensory equipment they might have was clearly not recognizable to the Ghostbusters at a glance. "Look, Egon!" he blurted out in alarm. "They're back."

"Intriguing, Ray. They're visible in ultraviolet, yet they're not reacting to the device at all. Fascinating." He leaned over Ray's shoulder and studied the precise setting, then went over and punched numbers into the calculator. "Hmmm."

"Does that mean you've got an idea, homeboy?" Winston demanded, his eyes never leaving the twisting shapes in the doorway. "Somebody better get one quick, because I think they've figured out where to find the main course."

"They're attracted to us," Ray said. "They're hungry and they want our life energy, but something's holding them back. The light might do the job and I think they're scared of our equipment. Egon, power up your thrower again but don't fire at them."

Egon complied, suspecting he understood what Ray was working for. The thrower hummed as he hit the trigger with his thumb.

In the doorway, the shadows backed off, swooping around the edges of the doors and vanishing.

"They're afraid of the throwers," Winston said in delight. "That's great."

But Ray shook his head. "No, I don't know, Winston. I have a bad feeling. I think they're learning. Just turning on the thrower didn't make the ones in the corner go away. This time, they went as soon as it came on. Egon's used his thrower on them twice now, and they're starting to realize they don't like it. I wonder if they have a kind of hive mentality, each of them a part of a collective whole. What do you think, Egon?"

"Intriguing. But that doesn't make them intelligent, Ray. Bees have a hive mentality and appear to know things, such as where they can find food without an actual language. But they are not intelligent."

"That doesn't mean they aren't dangerous," Winston argued, gesturing at the doorway. "Even if they aren't intelligent, if they all know what one knows, they might learn how to get around us before very long. They tried to sneak up on Egon. They want what we've got, our life energy and they're gonna try to take it."

"True, but what was to stop them from zapping us the minute we got here, then?" asked Ray. "No, something holds them back. We're not their usual food, after all. Maybe the reason they come here is because they eat everything in their home dimension and then have to come out to find something different. Maybe it's like when somebody's lost in the woods. They have to find things to eat that aren't their normal fare. Nobody likes to eat slugs they find under a rock, but when somebody's starving they can nerve themselves up to eat anything. They don't do it right away, though. The thought is disgusting, and they have to work up to it. But rather than starve to death, people will eat anything, so maybe these things will, too."

"So you're saying we don't taste good but they're so hungry they'll eat us anyway, eventually?" Winston asked as if he hoped Ray would correct him and, when Ray didn't, his face fell. "Ah, man, I hate this."

"And not just us," Egon replied, his face drawn in grim lines. "Eventually they'll go further afield. They tried to do that a hundred years ago, but Kingsley found a way to stop them. Now they're back, hungry again, and it's up to us to solve the problem."

"Yeah, but this guy didn't have our high tech equipment," countered Ray, his face thoughtful. "How could Kinglsey figure out something when we can't?"

"He had longer to figure it out than we did," Egon said, then shook his head as he realized the argument might be fallacious. Kingsley would have been as vulnerable in the night as they were. The minute he fell asleep and could no longer defend himself, he would have become a target. What would have been different then, what would have held off the shadows then that didn't hold them now? True, Kingsley was something of an occult expert, but surely he didn't know more than Ray Stantz. What would have been different in the 1890's, what would have delayed the shadows from killing Kingsley?

Egon couldn't think of anything, but part of that was simply fatigue. It was late; they'd had a long day and a very strenuous and emotionally draining evening. It was a wonder any of them could think at all. He tried in vain to smother a yawn, wishing it was closer to morning, wishing it wasn't so chilly in here. That couldn't be good for Peter, but he seemed comfortable, though he'd turned his face away from the glare of the sunlamp.

It was time to take Peter's pulse again. Egon did, stepping into the glow of the sunlamp, relieved when the pulse beat normally beneath his fingertips. Peter hadn't fallen victim to the shadows. Automatically Egon curled his fingers around the sleeping man's wrist and gave a gentle squeeze. It had been so close, they'd come to near to losing Peter that he was unusually precious to them at the moment. Egon lifted his gaze to the others. "He's all right."

Ray's eyes were sympathetic, understanding. "Yeah, and in the morning, he's going to start making a pain of himself," he replied around a weary yawn, though, like Egon, he was willing to take out a moment to reflect upon how close it had been and how lucky they were to have saved Peter. Now if they could just get through the rest of the night.... Egon freed Peter's wrist, tucking his arm comfortably across his chest, then rested his palm against Peter's cheek. He didn't seem feverish, though he was warm from the light. Egon decided he didn't need the quilt quite yet, though in the really chilly hours before dawn he'd cover Peter again. If the heat woke him, then he could sleep again. Peter could sleep anywhere.

Moving away from the couch, he returned to the chair and sat down again, picking up his calculator. Ray had set the spectrameter on the floor aimed at the door and positioned himself cross-legged behind it, though they'd had a clear indication the shadows could pass directly through walls. The spectrameter's uses were limited; it could not be altered to project its reading in all directions. Ray had modified it to give as wide an angle's reading as possible, but it was barely wide enough to cover the door. Yet the shadows were not physical entities. Like ghosts, they could pass through solid matter without effort.

There was also the threat of Muz's 'bad ghost' too. Egon hadn't forgotten that. He'd set one of the P.K.E. meters to detect the presence of normal ghosts and boosted its gain so it would alert them at the first instance of the ghost's return.

Egon smothered another yawn. If only he wasn't so tired.... It was hard enough to reason out complex problems when he was fresh and wide awake, but in the middle of the night, in a desperate crisis, and following the utter dread that they would lose Peter, Egon was surprised he could think at all. He yawned again, lifting his head to study the others. Ray was still sitting cross-legged at the spectrameter and Winston had dropped into another chair. Wearily the physicist knuckled his eyes.

"Wake up, guys," Egon urged, starting to feel alarm.

Ray's head drooped lower toward his chest.

Winston's hands slid away, his head rolled back against the chairback, his mouth dropping open.

"RAY! WINSTON!" It took every ounce of Egon's strength to shout their names. Both of them responded, but slowly, sluggishly, as if struggling up through molasses. Just as slowly, the attempts to react faded, as they sagged back again.

Egon could scarcely make sense of it. Suddenly it was as if every ounce of energy was being sucked out of his body, and he knew with helpless clarity that the shadows had come, sneaking up on them in quiet twos and threes, circling around to avoid the threat of the thrower and the spectrameter. Gazing blankly down at himself, Egon saw vague blurred outlines as shadows drifted in front of him, attaching themselves to his body like lampreys. They were so insubstantial that the ones that must have fastened themselves to Ray and Winston remained invisible to him in spite of the short distance that separated them from each other.

"N-no," gasped, Egon, struggling in vain to brush them away. His hands passed through them as if they were not there, but Egon knew they were there; he could feel them, feel his life being drawn away, leaving him stretched thin and vague as they fed.

Yet they were not happy feeders. They would edge forward, latch themselves to his body, draw forth energy, then dart away again. It reminded Egon of the time he'd watched a dog attempt to drink from a glass of soda. Drawn to the scent, the dog had been intrigued, but the bubbles weren't to its taste, and time and again it would retreat as it felt the effervescence against its nose only to return and try again. This time it wasn't effervescence that gave the shadows a distaste for human energy, but something Egon hadn't yet conceptualized. Now he never would.

Peter! Egon hadn't fought so hard for Peter's life only to have him sink down into death under the hunger of the shadows. As he had fought for Peter's life then he would fight now, and he forced himself to his feet, though it took every remaining shred of energy he possessed. The minute he was up he realized it would have been smarter to go for the thrower, but now it lay on the floor at his feet, miles and miles away, too far for him to reach. Reality dipped and swung, distorting, and even Peter seemed to have retreated to an unbridgeable distance. His face turned away from the light, he seemed to be sleeping normally, his breathing deep and regular, but the shadows would find him next.

And it was then, in that moment before he sank helplessly down into the gaping void that Egon realized what it was that protected Peter, what it was that made the shadows so reluctant to feed upon humans in spite of their energy, why the daylight was safer than the night and what had, in all probability protected Kingsley from the entities. He opened his mouth to speak, to cry a warning, but the darkness overwhelmed him and as he fell he was still struggling to convey his discovery and warn his friend.

"PETER!" The name echoed down into the darkness with him, a charm against the darkness. "PETER!" The sleeping man's eyes opened and he blinked dazedly at Egon as the physicist fell. "Peter... fire... heat...." he mumbled dazedly, though the words he'd labored so hard to say blurred and confused him and he wasn't sure if he'd managed to blurt them out aloud or not.

And then there was nothing at all.

Peter Venkman stretched in deep contentment, caught up in the dreams that had come, dreams with beautiful women in belly dancer costumes, dreams of pizza, dreams of lazy days dozing on a riverbank, dreams of his buddies around him in good companionship. He felt a quiet satisfaction, contented with his life, knowing from the frantic concern they'd shown him, the desperate measures they had taken to save him how much his friends cared about him. They wouldn't give him up; Egon had even blamed himself for failing to notice Peter's decline into coma, though there would have been nothing to notice, just a sleep that deepened so slowly the change wouldn't have been apparent to someone there the whole time. No, they'd fought hard for him, just as he'd do for them if they needed it, and while the experience had not been one he cared to remember too fondly, he could remember their part in it without hesitation.

He was half awake when Egon curled investigative fingers around his wrist to check his pulse, then touched his forehead to test for fever. There was quiet strength and unhesitating reassurance in the big hand and Peter smiled to himself, not quite awake enough to comment or encourage Egon but alert enough to relish the friendship and concern he felt in Egon's presence. He knew he was a lucky guy.

He was drifting back toward sleep again, warm and comfortable, not to mention getting a heck of a tan, when he heard Egon blurt out the names of the other two. Half-rousing but too sleepy to open his eyes, Peter waited to see what would happen. Probably more of those shadow things hanging around the doorway. Great. If he wasn't so tired and so comfortable, Peter would have dragged open his eyelids and taken a gander at them himself. Instead he thought he'd have a little nap....

And then Egon screamed Peter's name, the sound desperate and frantic, slicing through Peter's doze like a sword blade, jerking him abruptly and irrevocably into consciousness.

As Peter's eyes snapped open he saw Egon take a staggering half step toward him, one hand stretched out as if in appeal, his face white and desperate--if one could be desperate and half-unconscious at the same time--a sense of pulsing darkness surrounding him like a shroud, then he pitched forward to the floor where lay unmoving in a tangled heap, his hand reaching for Peter. "...fire...heat..." he mumbled in one last attempt at communication, then his body relaxed and went so still Peter felt a knife of anguish jolt him at the thought that Egon might have just died. His throat tightened as he struggled to push himself up.

Behind Egon's unresponsive body, Ray sagged forward over the spectrameter, his chin against his chest, his whole body suggesting deep unconsciousness, and to the other side, Winston was limp in his chair, his arms trailing down beyond the armrests, his head thrown back, mouth open.

They were all unconscious! At least Peter hoped agitatedly they were only unconscious. He couldn't bear to imagine anything worse. The shadows! They had managed to get Peter's friends.

Peter himself felt tired and weary, but he knew it was caused by the same source as the queasy hollowness in his stomach and the aching of his every muscle, a by-product of the near-fatal poisoning. He hadn't been attacked by shadows, but all three of his friends had. They were dying before his eyes, if it wasn't already too late, and he didn't know what to do, didn't know what had protected him from the threat that had taken the others.

"EGON!" Peter yelled as he forced himself into a sitting position, balancing there, shaky with the effort. "Egon, get up, right now! Ray, come on, wake up. Winston, talk to me!"

Nothing. Still dazed from sleep, Peter sat there a second longer, hot and uncomfortable but unconcerned with his own physical discomfort in the face of the tragedy that was developing before him. "Oh, god, Egon," he said and slid off the couch, scrambling forward to kneel at Egon's side, feeling for a pulse. It was there but weak, way down from normal. Egon was alive, but the shadows wouldn't allow that state to continue. In the glare from the sunlamp behind him Peter could see vague dark outlines writhing against Egon's body as if they were feeding upon him. He couldn't see them on the other two but they were not in the direct light either. Though the shapes were too amorphous for him to make out actual details such as mouths or teeth, each of the wiggling shapes had pressed one end against the physicist, and Peter knew they were drawing away his energy, weakening him, draining him toward death.

"Stop it, you nasty creeps," Peter spat at them, making wide, wild brushing movements in a vain attempt to detach them, grasping at things that wouldn't be grasped, his stomach twisting when he realized the attempt had failed. He forced his palms flat against Egon's body and ran them down his shoulders, moving around and across the proton pack he still wore--and which the shadows seemed to avoid--following the curve of his spine to his waist, but he could feel nothing, and his weary eyes let him see the shadows as his hands passed through them without feeling them.

The very attempt weakened Peter, and he jerked his hands away, not because he wasn't willing to risk himself for Egon and the others but because he could do nothing for any of them if he died, too. He had felt the shadows, felt their sapping energy begin, and involuntarily he jumped backward as if the couch would shield him from their voracious appetite long enough for him to reason out a way to save his teammates. He had to save them. He couldn't cower here in dubious safety while the shadows sucked the life from his three best friends.

As soon as he was on the couch again, the ones that had tried to follow him in delight at the prospect of a new meal shrank away, gibbering to themselves. He couldn't really hear the sound, but he could sense it subliminally as if they were vaguely telepathic, or at least had the ability to project basic feelings, It was as if they hated the couch so much they would allow Peter to sit there in safety while they hungered.

"Weird," he muttered, trying frantically to reason it out in time to save the others, then Egon's words hit him with the same force as Egon's earlier blows had stung when they attempted to rouse him from his drug-induced lethargy. What had he said? "Fire? Heat?" muttered Peter aloud, then his eyes fell upon the sunlamp. It was hot! Could the answer really be that simple? Maybe the shadows hated heat. Perhaps that was why they only killed at night, when it was colder than in the full glare of the sun. Possibly that was why they had attacked the other three while Peter slept in protected safety full in the glare of the sunlamp. Peter knew it had been set up because the others thought the light would hold the shadows off him while he was helpless, but what if it hadn't been the light at all, but simply the heat that went with it? Proton beams were hot, too. They could set fires. Egon had tried at low power, driving them back from an unpleasant sensation, but not at full streams. Would that zap and fry them? But anything hot enough to zap them would kill his buddies, and now that they were down and weakened by the sapping pull of the leechlike shadows, even a low powered blast from the thrower might kill them.

The sunlamp! Powered by adrenalin alone Peter lunged up to compensate for his lingering weakness, and snatched up the sunlamp by its base, disconnecting it from the chair in a sweeping gesture and bearing the lamp down toward Egon as he half-fell from the couch again and landed on his knees at Egon's side. He ran the lamp along the prone body, from his head to his toes, as if anointing him with light and heat, hoping like crazy the extension cord was long enough to reach and not come unplugged. If that happened, there would be no second chance. But it had enough play for Peter to move the lamp in long, sweeping motions.

The gibbering sounds that had been echoing in the back of his brain turned into a fierce array of shrieks that would have hurt his ears had they been audible. Instead they hurt his head, as if the creatures communicated by a weird form of mental communion that bled over to him because he was so close, or even more likely, because they'd drawn human life energy from Egon, Ray and Winston and made themselves more accessible to him. The near-invisible mass of roiling energy that had hovered over Egon withdrew in a great cloud, rising up and away, and dove, shrieking, for the door.

Peter ran the light over Egon once again for good measure, then reached up and grabbed Winston's dangling arm, yanking him down beside Egon, wielding the sunlamp over him as well, causing a second protesting retreat. There was no time to straighten Winston's body out. Half-stumbling over the two still forms, Peter caught Ray by the shoulders and dragged him backward toward the other two. It took every ounce of Peter's depleted strength to tug Ray into place so the light could drive away the shadows and shield him, too, and he was gasping for breath, trembling and chilled with a cold sweat by the time he had pulled Ray in close beside the other two.

When the shadows that had attached themselves to Ray like leeches, had vanished with mind-splitting screeches, Peter drew his three friends together, lying them flat on their backs, side by side, then, pausing as he realized the entities might come up through the floor under them. They weren't solid; they could probably pass right through walls and other solid objects the way ghosts could. Better to get his teammates up on the couch, using the light to protect them all, since it stood on wooden legs, the space open beneath it.

He snapped the sunlamp into position on the chair again, and began the laborious chore of shifting the three men to the couch. Their bodies were limp and unresponsive, and he was still weak, so it took all his strength and more to maneuver them, especially since he didn't want to take their packs off. They might need those weapons the minute they revived; something about them seemed to defeat the shadows, or at least to deter them. He had to half drag each man up, forcing floppy arms up over his shoulder and gripping the trailing hand, then boosting them up with agonizing slowness until he could deposit them, one by one, on the couch. He put Winston in the middle and leaned Egon against him from one side and Ray from the other to balance them in place full in the light. It was an awkward positioning; he had to slide them a little forward on the couch because otherwise their packs would pitch them to the floor, but finally he finished; they slumped against the back of the couch bathed in the full glare of the light, for the moment safe. The gargantuan effort made his breathing grow labored, forcing him to pause frequently to draw great, shuddering gasps of breath that racked his whole body. Sweat stained the armpits of his jumpsuit, ran down his back, and trickled annoyingly into his eyes. He felt cold and weak, his arms and legs trembling with reaction when he finally had the three unconscious men in position. With the sunlamp shining upon them all, the shadows had given ground so he could not feel them in the back of his mind any longer. He knew they weren't gone, just temporarily fended off, and realized he had to make alternate arrangements and make them fast. They couldn't sit here helplessly all night getting more and more sunburned. Already the side of his face that had been closest to the light felt sore and dry; he'd been sunburned there and too much heat was bad for people. For his friends, already weakened by the shadows, it would dehydrate them much more quickly than normal.

But first he did what he should have done right away, what he'd held off doing out of fear of what he might find. He checked each man's pulse, holding his breath as he strained to feel the feeble beat beneath his fingers. "Come on, guys, you're not gonna go off and leave little Petey on his own," he reproached them, heaving a great sigh of relief when he realized Egon's pulse had already strengthened a little and felt more normal than it had when Peter had first got to him. He hadn't lost any more ground and, away from the shadows, his energy was returning, though slowly. "All right, Spengs," he lauded, his mouth stretching in a broad grin. "Way to go!" Egon was going to make it, and Peter couldn't hold back relief so intense it threatened, in his weakened state, to overwhelm him. But Peter couldn't let that happen, couldn't pause one moment longer. He still had work to do.

Winston's pulse was weaker than Egon's had been, but it had beat steadily beneath the seeking fingers. He'd make it, if Peter could use the heat to shield him until he figured out how to get rid of the shadows altogether, short of burning down the house. Maybe it would even come to that. Hadn't Ray said something about that hexagram thingy in the attic being a defense against fire?

"Way to go, Zed," Peter praised him, clapping a reassuring hand on his shoulder and squeezing. "Hang in there, I'll get back to you." Pulling back, he clambered awkwardly over the black man's outflung legs to grasp Ray's wrist. "Come on, Ray, don't let me down," he breathed, his voice almost a prayer. Ray had been very limp when Peter moved him, as if the stuffing had spilled out of him, leaving him a hollow shell. None of them had helped Peter but the psychologist had sensed returning life in Egon and felt momentary tension in Winston's body. With Ray, there had been no such encouragement, and Peter was frightened about the outcome of this test.

At first he could find nothing at all, no evidence of a pulse, and his heart began to thump in his chest with great, agonized beats. Ray had been furthest from the sunlamp, the easiest target; the shadows would have attacked him first. It had been so quick he'd probably had no time to cry out, yet the shadows had still been feeding when Peter had driven them away. That meant there had been something left for them to devour, some spark of life. There had to be, that was all there was to it, there had to be. "God, Ray, don't do this," Peter moaned, agonized. "Don't do this. Come back. You've gotta come back."

His whole body was shaking with strain and exertion and he felt so weak and lightheaded he wasn't sure he could feel the pulse, even if it was there. Shifting from Ray's wrist, he pressed his fingers up against the side of his neck, closing his eyes and concentrating upon what he was seeking to the exclusion of everything else. "Damn it, Ray...."

Then there it was, the faintest of feeble beats, again, again. Peter concentrated on it, the relief so strong he had to slide in beside Ray and just sit there for a moment until he could collect himself. His eyes burned with relieved tears he was still too weak to hold back, but after a minute he lifted a hand and dashed them away. Tears were a luxury for when the crisis was over. Right now he was at bay, weak and sick himself, and the guys' only defense, because who knew how old the sunlamp was. It could burn out at any moment. The thought chilled him in spite of the heat.

So how had that old guy, Kingsley, stopped the shadows? He didn't have sunlamps and throwers and high tech equipment. He had what any late Victorian had in the way of scientific equipment and skills, which wasn't much. But he had--he had wood fires burning in his bedroom at night. Candles and flaming torches and other means of producing heat, all things that a self-respecting shadow would hate and fear. Even if there had been electricty (and Peter wasn't quite sure when a remote place like this might have had electric power though he knew it had been invented earlier) there would be cold spots in the house of an April night. But the bedrooms, especially the master bedroom, would have blazing fires and replacement wood to stoke them as one slept. Tonight the Ghostbusters had an empty house, with electricity but without the central heat, so this particular April night was cold and the house itself was chilly. The guys had been comfortable enough in their jumpsuits, sure, but they weren't really warm, and Peter had been grateful for the blankets they'd piled over him when they had finally let him rest. The sunlamp had been a little too hot and was again now, but Peter was glad of it. He was willing to swelter through a summer heat wave if that was what it took.

Maybe that was why the shadows hadn't instantly devoured them, too. The human body maintained a normal temperature of 98.6. Maybe the energy they got from humans was hard to take against such heat. Hard, but not impossible. Yet the shadows had fled before the sunlamp. Peter had no idea how hot it would be, though he was sure Egon could tell him to the nearest tenth of a degree. He smiled fondly at the thought of receiving one of Egon's pedantic lectures. It was up to Peter to make sure he had the chance to do so.

Yet now the shadows had come suddenly. Why? What had prompted them when they'd had chances before, times when the guys had been split up into teams, when one or the other of them had been alone? Maybe the shadows had meant to take them while the slept, but it was possible they had realized somehow that the Ghostbusters were a threat. The fire earlier, the one that still left a slightly acrid tang to the atmosphere, might have frightened them away for a time. Then Egon had used his thrower on them, and from the position in which Peter had found Ray, huddled over the spectrameter, maybe he'd found a way to use that against them, too, or at least to produce heat with it. Whether or not the shadows were intelligent, they certainly possessed an animal cunning. Maybe they'd just decided it was better to attack now and thus prevent the threat against them. Or maybe they'd been afraid if they waited too long the Ghostbusters would figure out a way to destroy them.

Peter wanted to destroy them, he wanted it so badly he could taste it. They'd nearly killed his friends. He looked around the room, saw his own discarded proton pack half under the edge of the sofa. That was a start. The thrower Egon had used must have driven the shadows back because of the heat associated with the beam. It was such a simple explanation now that he had the clues for it. Egon, of course, would have expected something wonderfully complex and esoteric; that was his way. But in spite of the complexity of the physicist's brain he'd figured it out just in time for Peter to use heat as a means of driving the shadows back. In essence, Egon had saved his own life. "Way to go, Spengs!" Peter grinned, looking over at the unconscious physicist. He had shifted position slightly, his head sunk down against Winston's shoulder, but his breathing was deep and regular.

Peter's eyes roved further and he noticed something he'd failed to observe before, taking it in without thought and then forgetting it. The fireplace. If he could get a fire started there it would be an excellent way to watch their backs until the guys woke up. And if something should happen to the sunlamp... Were the shadows smart enough to knock over the chair in an attempt to shatter it? He didn't think so, even assuming they had a way to impact on the physical world short of sucking away energy from living creatures. No, that wasn't the threat, but there were other dangers; power failures, burned out bulbs. Peter wanted a fire; he needed one. It was the only way to assure their safety until help, or morning, came.

Digging in his pockets he produced a book of matches and a cigarette lighter. That would get him started. He couldn't help chuckling to himself at the thought that the nasty ghost who had overdosed him had started a fire that might have put an end to the shadows without even realizing it. That nasty ghost was still here, too. "Great," he muttered. "All I wanted was a simple little ghost to bust, but nooooo.... Instead I've gotta drag myself up from a sickbed and fight nameless horrors from Dimension X. This isn't fun. Can we go home now?"

Peter didn't have any plans to burn the house down, but he had to figure out how to get a fire going without endangering himself. If he walked out of the circle of heat produced by the sunlamp, they'd probably be all over him in a minute. Unless he used the thrower...

Peter edged in front of the guys and sat down beside Egon, who was closest to the abandoned pack, resting for a minute before picking up his portable nuclear accelerator and wiggling his arms through the shoulder straps. It weighed a ton, far more than usual, he was sure. "No fair," he muttered to the recalcitrant pack. "You're supposed to be on my side."

At his words, Egon made a faint, querying sound, not as if he were conscious yet but closer to it than he had been before. Much encouraged, Peter slung an arm around his shoulders and gave him a quick squeeze. "I've got 'em on the run, Egon. I just wish running wasn't such an uphill battle."

Egon didn't reply, but he did lean into the circle of Peter's arm. Peter chose to take that as a very good sign. He wasn't sure how long it would take the human body to replenish what the shadows had stolen, and whether it was even possible without food and fluids to aid the process. Too bad about the chocolate; it would have been a lot better than coffee, but once he got the fire going, he'd see if he could fire up that coffee pot, too. It was bound to be good and strong by now and, since it had been made by Ray in the first place, it had been too strong all along. Peter rather relished the idea of forcing the thick, black coffee down the guys' throats in return for all the coffee they'd made him drink earlier.

Peter wasn't sure what to burn in his fire. There was a small, neat stack of cut wood in a rack beside the fireplace, but it wouldn't last more than an hour or two. The last thing Peter wanted to do was venture outside alone, leaving the guys unprotected, to track down a woodpile, even assuming he had enough strength to lug a fresh supply of wood into the house. "I knew it would turn out this way," he muttered to himself. "Science stuff, fine, but when it gets down and dirty, who has to do the job? Dr. Venkman, that's who."

He had hoped for a response from that, but his friends were still unconscious. Heaving a sigh he decided he'd burn a chair or two if it came to that. But first to get a fire going. Hadn't Ray once shown him how to set a fire with his thrower? If he had just paid more attention... Closing his eyes in an attempt to remember, he opened them again immediately and looked around the room, suspicious. Had any of the shadows tried to come back?

The fireplace had a few logs stacked in it already, unburned. One of them was a nice big one that, once started, would give off good, steady heat for a fair time. Peter smiled, adjusted his thrower and fired at it.

After a seemingly-endless moment in which he thought he'd had the wrong setting, there was a little sizzling sound and a puff of smoke, and flames started. Peter braced himself, holding the thrower ready to repeat the process if the fire didn't catch. But it did, and the blaze began to spread, the familiar and comforting crackle and snap of the fire echoing through the room. Peter listened to it for a long moment, so weary the pleasant, reassuring sound could have put him to sleep if worry for his friends hadn't been right on the surface of his thoughts. He couldn't sleep even though his body cried for it, because they were depending on him.

Heaving a sigh, Peter looked around the room for anything that could aid him. His eyes fell on the ice chest, shoved just beyond the circle of light. With his thrower still powered up, he edged closer, grabbed the chest, and yanked it back to fetch up beside the couch. Opening it, he found a packet of sandwiches, well wrapped and intact, a roll of salami and a hunk of cheese, equally wrapped, a few cans of beer, two liter bottles of Coke and a couple of cans of soda.

Alcohol was probably the last thing he needed right now, but maybe the caffeine in the Coke would keep him awake. He unwrapped one of the sandwiches; it was bologna and cheese; and took a big bite of it. His appetite had not yet returned, but he had to eat to get his strength back. Doggedly chewing the food that tasted like cardboard in his mouth, he washed it down with repeated swallows of Coke, thinking wistfully of a big bowl of soup, steaming hot and topped with crackers. It would be better than stale sandwiches, that was for sure, though he would probably have enjoyed them a lot more if he hadn't had to endure the amateur equivalent of a stomach pump first.

"I presume you're enjoying your meal?"

Egon's voice in his ear made him jump and spill some of the Coke on his already-stained jumpsuit. "Don't do that," he said involuntarily, then he slammed the can on the end table with the sandwich and looked around to see the blond man massaging his temples as he watched him weakly, eyelids at half-mast.

"You're awake," Peter cried delightedly, his grin splitting his face. He grabbed for Egon and hugged him hard, feeling Egon's arms come up around his shoulders and return the embrace.

"I know I am, thank you," said Egon in return, but amusement threaded through his voice. He squeezed Peter more tightly for a moment, then he sat back, leaning, awkwardly because of his pack, against the back of the sofa.

"If you three ever scare me like that again," Peter began, but he had to stop because his voice was shaking. He cleared his throat awkwardly and tried again. "Spengs, I--"

"You, Dr. Venkman, are very quick on the uptake for a sick man," Egon returned, his own voice a little shaky. "Ray and Winston?"

"They're alive," Peter reassured him. "Ray had it worse than Winston did--I think he was closer to the door and easier for them to get; and he was further from the sunlamp. We're sure lucky to have that. I think we'd all be shadow-bait without it."

Egon turned and stared at the other two. Winston's face had a slightly greyish cast to it, and Ray was too pale, his flesh like parchment, but the other two could see their chests rising and falling steadily with each breath. For a long moment, they watched their two unconscious colleagues, then Peter grinned. "Don't they look cute?" he teased. "I heard you guys saying stuff like that about me when you thought I was out of it; now it's payback time." He laughed, but the laugh was still a little unsteady.

"Honestly, Peter, this is a crisis," Egon said, but he didn't sound as if the reproach were seriously meant.

"I know it is, big guy," Peter responded, his voice quite serious. "You guys scared the hell out of me. How do you feel?"

"Apart from the possible queasy stomach I suspect you've got, I would assume we feel much the same."

"Oh yeah? Like a strand of limp spaghetti?" Peter asked. "Like walking all the way over to that door would make you wheeze like an asthmatic? Like you wanted to curl up in your own bed and sleep for a week or two without interruption?"

"Exactly like that," Egon replied, amused, "though I suspect my energy will return more rapidly than yours will."

"Figures," returned Peter wryly. "My usual luck."

"However, that doesn't mean we won't have to stop the shadows, though," Egon replied. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, yawning prodigiously. "I reasoned just before I lost consciousness that heat was the factor for which we had been searching. I tried to communicate that to you."

"And you did. You told me, and I figured it out with my usual brilliance. It was the sunlamp that kept 'em off me, and when I grabbed it and held it over you, they took off, screaming like babies."

"They actually made sounds?" Egon asked, fascinated. In spite of his temporary weakness, his scientific curiosity was at full strength.

"Well, not real sounds," Peter admitted. "I could hear them inside my head. I don't know if it was because they'd been feeding from you three and that made me receptive to them because it was you guys's energy working or because they might have an empathic/telepathic kind of communication. They didn't convey anything in words," he added hastily when Egon's eyebrows shot up and his mouth opened as if to frame a question. "They just screamed. I think the heat of the sunlamp burned them. Like they'd need a 600 strength sun block just to pop out the front door on a sunny day. That's why I started the fire. A second line of defense."

"That was well reasoned, Dr. Venkman."

"Course it was, I'm a genius too." He glanced over at Winston and Ray. "I wish they'd wake up. I think we need to make some serious plans here. I've been trying to reason it out. Ray said something about that hexagram Star of David thingy in the attic, that it shields against fire. Well, how about this? Kingsley drew it up there, and enclosed the gate with it, and then he started a fire right inside it. So it wouldn't let the fire go any further, but it would fill their door with horrible heat. Think that could have been how he got them?"

"Entirely possible," Egon replied. "Though what happened to Kingsley after that is another story. Was he overcome by smoke? Did he have to stand within the circle himself to close the gate with fire, and if so, was he consumed by it?"

"I can't say I think much of either of those theories," Peter replied with a wry grimace. "I've been baked enough for one night." He rose, prepared to edge past Egon and Winston again. "Just gonna see how Ray's doing. The shadows had more time with him than with you or Winston." Gesturing at the ice chest, he added, "Have a sandwich. They taste a little like cardboard and they're kinda soggy, but if you ignore the fact that they're dripping in fat, sodium and cholesterol, they just might help build you up again."

Egon grimaced but he took a sandwich from the chest and began to unwrap it, though his eyes followed Peter.

As he stepped over Winston's feet, the black man jerked them back automatically, nearly tripping Peter, who grabbed Winston's shoulder to steady himself. Zeddemore came up swinging, catching himself just in time. He looked around wildly, recognized Peter, and said, "Sorry, m'man, but I thought the shadows had me."

"They nearly did," Peter told him, smiling with relief. He tightened his grip on Winston's shoulders and squeezed, grateful to have him back again. "How do you feel, buddy?"

"You don't want to know," replied Winston positively. He propped himself up a little more comfortably and shifted his pack. "Any reason why you want to bake me like this?" he asked with a gesture at the sunlamp.

"Because the shadows hate it," Peter informed him. "I had to fight 'em off and it was what they hated most. Before I thought of it, I couldn't get rid of 'em. My hands just went right through 'em when I was trying to get 'em off Egon, and they were still there." He shuddered at the memory. "You got drained pretty bad, Zed. So just sit there for awhile and get your strength back. Have a tacky sandwich. Give him one, Egon. I'm gonna check on Ray."

"Ray? Egon?"

"I'm awake," Egon said quickly, passing Winston a bologna sandwich. Winston took it automatically, listening. "Ray was attacked first, so he was drained the worst."

"You okay, Egon?" the black man demanded, staring at the physicist. "You've looked better. You do look better than Peter, but that goes without saying. Are you all right?"

"Yes, but Ray's still out."

Peter reached Ray and sat down beside him, feeling again for a pulse. This time he had no difficulty finding it. Grinning broadly with relief, he said, "He's doing better, guys. You hear that, Ray? You're doing better. Don't you ever scare Uncle Peter like that again." He lifted one of Ray's eyelids to study his eye, though he wasn't sure what it would tell him.

Ray shifted under the touch and tried to pull away, which made Peter smile and say, "Easy, Tex. I'm not one of the shadows," as he drew his hand back.

Ray's head sagged, then he lifted it with a considerable effort. "P-peter?"

"Yahoo, he's back," exulted Winston, dropping a hand on Ray's shoulder and gripping tightly.

"Raymond?" Egon asked, his concern evident in his voice as leaned forward to look past Winston at Ray.

Peter threw his arms around Ray and hugged him exuberantly. "Listen to me, Ray, you do that again and I'll personally slice up your Mr. Stay Puft Doll and feed it to Slimer," he threatened.

Ray chuckled. "The guys wouldn't let you. Gosh, Peter, my head aches and I feel like somebody did a number on me with clubs or something. Did they sneak up on us after all?"

"They did indeed, Ray," Egon told him. "You were their first victim; that's why it took you longest to wake up. We were able to understand what holds the shadows at bay--"

"It's heat, isn't it," blurted Ray, his eyes widening as he heard the theory his subconscious mind had put together instinctively. Though he was still too pale and there were lines on his forehead put there by pain and weakness, his eyes were bright and aware. He detached himself from Peter's hug and looked around. "I figured it out just before they got me. They don't function in the infrared end of the spectrum at all; they ran because infrared light gives off heat! That's it, isn't it? That's why the sunlamp keeps them away. I bet that's how Kingsley did it and why he used a hexagram because it shielded against fire."

"Give the kid a gold star," Peter lauded. "He's right on the money. I guess I have to admit it, great minds do think alike." He glanced over at Egon, whose 'great mind' was in deep concentration. "So come on, you geniuses, now that you know what the shadows hate, how do we use that to send them back where they came from?"

"Obviously heat is the important factor," Egon replied. "And we'll have to do it soon. They eventually overcame their reluctance to our body heat in order to feed on us. They can do it; they did it before, if that doctor and his horse are any indication. I don't believe they ate Kingsley. I think he burned to death in the fire he used to close the gateway."

"There wasn't any trace of burning on the attic floor," Ray argued. He drew his legs up on the couch and sat there cross-legged, rubbing his temples, and Peter left him to it long enough to fetch him one of the stale sandwiches and a Coke, giving Winston a can of soda as well.

"I know it's not gourmet fare," he confessed, "but it's better than Ray's cooking."

"Come on, Peter," Ray protested, taking the sandwich and unwrapping it with every evidence of hunger. "I'm not that bad. At least I don't make sweat sandwiches."

"Those sandwiches were highly nourishing," Egon defended himself with mock hauteur, then he held up a hand for silence. "However, we have far more important things to discuss than food preparation. I believe I can adjust the throwers to create a heat shield around the cross-rip gateway which will close it down, and once it's closed, we can seal the gate in one of several ways. We can cross the streams, which I would choose as a last resort."

"I hope so," Winston said around a mouthful of bologna and cheese. "That's always my last resort."

"You bet," Peter replied. "After all, I don't think Mr. Johnson would like it if we destroyed his house or even just the attic, and I know I wouldn't like it if we did any more damage to ourselves. When we get home, I'm gonna take off for a whole week, put my feet up, let all my girlfriends come and visit me, feed me peeled grapes, stroke my fevered brow." He saw Egon's look of growing impatience and knew he couldn't trade off his condition any longer, at least not until the crisis was resolved. Then he would sleep for a week. "Anyway," he concluded, "we should be okay for now, as long as we stay in the tanning booth, right?"

"Yes, Peter. But we'll have to move eventually and we can hardly take the sunlamp with us without a very long extension cord. I think our throwers will have to protect us as we go to the attic."

"Walk up all those stairs," mourned Peter, who found the idea about as possible as climbing the Matterhorn. He wasn't sure he could climb one flight, let alone three. The sandwich he had forced himself to eat hadn't done much to help him regain his strength; he could feel it lying uneasily in his stomach, reminding him unpleasantly of his earlier bouts of vomiting. Firmly putting aside those thoughts, he looked over at Egon. "So what have you got in mind, Dr. Einstein?"

"I thought I could adjust a trap," Egon began.

"A trap?" Winston echoed in surprise, pushing himself into a straighter position and rubbing the back of his neck. "How do you mean?"

"I mean it might be possible to create a feedback loop and use it to seal the way. If I can reconfigure the trap just right, and toss it into the opening at the exact moment it seals, the trap will, in effect, draw the opening inside and lock the way forever as it implodes. That is, of course, an extreme simplification of the actual process," he said, eyeing Peter.

"So what you're saying is that I'm not smart enough to figure it out?" Peter said with pretend offense.

"No, Peter, I'm saying you're not a physicist," said Egon in reasonable tones. He pulled the trap off his pack and set it down on his knees. "Ray, have you got your tool kit on you?"

Ray pulled out a small packet from an inside pocket of his jumpsuit and passed it over, and Egon began to extract esoteric small tools from it. Peter switched position again to retrieve his can of soda and sat beside Egon to eat and watch the process.

"They may have been lucky so far," said Raputis, Muz's 'bad ghost', hovering outside the library window. "But they won't be lucky any longer. I have another plan."

His octopoid friend, Malkizah, shook his head. "Another plan? I fail to see how you can do anything more. Or even why you should. Your whole purpose has been in vain. Should you kill them now, ghosts will still be blamed for it, and there will be a great outcry against our kind."

"The shadows are not ghosts," snarled Raputis. "Nor can they harm ghosts. But they will harm humans, and if we destroy the Ghostbusters, not only will I have my revenge but I will loose the shadows upon humanity. Say not that I seek petty revenge. Say rather that my scope has unexpectedly broadened. You see before you a superior and brilliant mind. I have no doubt I will be lauded by ghosts everywhere for my selfless devotion to our kind."

Malkizah made a rude noise. "They'll call you pompous if anything. Not that they care. If ghosts shared anything but ectoplasm, it would be different, but you know few of us care for anything but themselves. Otherwise the Ghostbusters would have been defeated long ago. All other attempts to unite against them have failed."

"That was because they didn't have me to aid them," insisted Raputis with egotistical certainty. "Now that I can score a great victory for ghostkind, they will unite under me. It will be wonderful."

"It will be the same as all the other failed attempts. Yes, they might value what you do for them, but they will go their own way as always. Personally, I don't mind the Ghostbusters. They have never harmed me, nor will they, because I don't engage in foolish haunting to call myself to their attention. I have no ego to feed, and I don't care if no human sees me or fears me. I can fade to invisibility long enough to take my pleasures at the theater, and I can go to the library when it is closed if I choose to read. I am content to be an onlooker."

"You are content to be a nonentity," snarled Raputis. "I don't know why I bothered with you. I don't know why I bothered with that stupid little ghost, either. That plan clearly failed. He was to drug them all, so they would sleep through the fire. Instead he nearly killed one of them, and put the others on their guard. Had they not been so alert, they would most likely have failed to recognize the threat of the shadows." An idea occurred to him. "Tell me this, Malkizah. Did you know of the shadows when you selected this house for me to 'haunt' and thus bring in the Ghostbusters?"

"I knew they had been here before," replied the octopoid. "I could sense it. But they did not seem to be here now. Perhaps had I known I would have chosen a more conventionally haunted place."

"No matter. The shadows have done us far more good than harm. And now I will do them good. Come with me. I will give them the Ghostbusters for their dinner. My new plan is foolproof." He circled away from the library window and drifted around the corner of the house and Malkizah shrugged his many 'shoulders' and followed, complaining.

"I know I'm not going to like this...."

"There, I believe I have it." Egon lifted his head and smiled in triumph, holding out the reconfigured ghost trap. "Take a look at it, Ray."

Ray and Winston had switched places so he could give input into the altering of the P.K.E. meter and now the occultist took the trap from Egon and bent his head over it, tracing Egon's adjustments with sensitive fingers. "I think you have it, too, Egon," he said admiringly. "I don't think we could better the setting. My only concern is any shadows that might be left behind."

"I don't think any will be left behind," Egon replied with certainty. "They have an affinity to the gateway. I think they will come when it is threatened and the minute we try to close it, they'll attempt to go back to their world for fear of being left here."

"All of them at once while we're up there without a sunlamp?" Peter moaned, shifting uncomfortably against his pillows. "I didn't think I was going to like this--and I was right."

"Our throwers will help," Egon replied. "It will be risky, of course, but--"

"We're talking risky?" Peter asked, his voice rising to a squeak on the last word. "Just how risky did you have in mind, Egon?"

"Anybody here call for paramedics?" demanded an unfamiliar voice from the doorway.

Peter jumped; he couldn't help it. Tensions were strung tight and he didn't like people sneaking up on him. He gaped at the two uniformed paramedics standing in the doorway, a young man with white-blond hair who looked young enough to have just completed his EMT training and a tall, elegant redheaded woman about thirty with horn-rimmed glasses and a figure to die for. Peter began to smile. There was a god after all.

"Come quickly into the light," Egon insisted in a firm and rational voice with so much compulsion behind it that to refuse or ask questions would have been the height of folly. Without stopping to demand explanations the two of them surged forward to stand directly in front of the Ghostbusters, while Egon continued, "There is a great danger here. Yes, we do need paramedics, and we're grateful for your arrival, but we'll need to protect you until we can--"

Every light in the house went out.

In the flickering darkness that was lit only by the dancing glow from the fireplace, Winston's voice rang out. "Oh, shit!"

"Quick everyone, to the fire!" shouted Ray, and so commanding was his tone that the paramedics joined the Ghostbusters in front of the flames without pausing to ask questions, though they were bound to have a number of them as soon as they thought about it. They were quick on the uptake, though they didn't yet understand why they were being shifted around the way they were.

Peter found himself face to face with the tall woman. They were nearly eye to eye. He liked that. He'd always had a thing for tall women.

"Would anyone mind telling us what's going on?" she asked tartly. "I didn't come all the way out here to get ordered around--or to toast marshmallows."

"That wasn't why we sent for you, not that toasting marshmallows with you wouldn't be a good idea, sometime when we don't have to save the world first," Peter assured her with his best smile. He was very pleased to see an answering gleam in her eyes for a moment before she made an impatient gesture and banished it.

"I admit you don't look particularly well," she said, "or all that steady on your feet, but will someone please tell me what is going on here."

Egon assumed that task, explaining concisely to the two EMT's what had happened that night; the attempt on Peter's life that had been meant as a way to render the Ghostbusters unconscious long enough for the fire to take their lives (he took the time to retrieve the one pill they'd found in spite of Peter's yelp of alarm as the physicist left the fire, and the woman put it into a pocket out of the way so it wouldn't be lost), their gradual discovery of the shadows and the threat they posed, the team's attempts to reason out ways to stop them, the attack of the shadows, and now the removal of their best safety feature.

"You think the-the ghost put out the lights?" asked the young male paramedic, his eyes wide in the firelight as he glanced uneasily over his shoulder. He looked as if hordes of advancing ghosts wouldn't surprise him in the least, though the idea was clearly not particularly appealing. He'd probably grown up hearing haunted house stories about this place.

"Very probably," Egon returned. "I should have considered the possibility of danger from the ghost who caused Peter to be drugged. For all we know, it could be very near, and I'm convinced it is functioning separately from the shadows. We were concentrating so entirely upon the shadows we might well have missed the ghost."

"The P.K.E. meters wouldn't have missed him," Ray reminded them, gesturing at the detection devices on the end table. "I suppose the ghost was outside listening to us talk and figured out turning out the lights would get us if anything would. What with the shadows and all the equipment and everything, that might not have picked them up. I'm going to boost the gain on the meters again." He darted away from the fire.

"Get back here, Ray!" Peter bellowed in alarm, grabbing for his thrower, but Ray made the trip to the end table and back without incident, grinning at Peter as he crowded in next to the roaring blaze.

"They're not that fast, they didn't get Egon," he justifed himself.

"The fire keeps these shadow things away?" asked the woman as if determined to have it all clear. When Peter nodded, she leaned over to the stack of firewood and grabbed a log, thrusting it purposefully into the heart of the blaze. Paramedics had to be trained to face the unexpected, and she was obviously a quick study. "Just so it doesn't go out." She captured Peter's wrist in her hand and began, very professionally, to take his pulse.

"If it's tumultuous, it's because I always react that way to the presence of beautiful women," he informed her with a wide eyed grin.

She gave him a light swat on the chest. "I've heard about you, Dr. Venkman," she said knowingly. "My sister works in the city, and she's told me all about you Ghostbusters. She had a friend who dated you once, so I'm wise to you. Just be warned."

"But I mean it," Peter said with all the sincerity he'd learned to project from his father, even when he didn't mean it. This time he did, of course, but he could sound just as genuine even when he didn't.

"Oh, I know that, too. But you see, I'm on duty, and so are you. So let's get down to business, shall we? Roll up your sleeve if you can. I want to take your blood pressure." She removed a stethoscope from her bag and hung it around her neck while she fastened the blood pressure cuff around Peter's arm. "You seem to be recovering," she said as she pumped it up. "However, I think we'll transport just to be safe. I want Dr. Winkle to have a look at you and make certain. Be quiet now while I take the readings." The cuff was tight around Peter's arm while she studied the readings, then it loosened. "Not bad," she said. "In fact, very good. Now open up, I want to take your temperature." Deftly she removed the thermometer from its paper container and inserted it under his tongue. "Don't talk," she said firmly.

"Hey, there's a great idea," said Winston. "I never thought of that, a way to get Pete to shut up. I love it."

Peter glared at him in frustration.

"The rest of you don't exactly look well either," she said, tilting her head to consider them.

"No, the shadows zapped us," Ray explained. "I'm Ray Stantz, and these are Egon Spengler and Winston Zeddemore. You've already met Peter."

"Clary Kinsett," she replied, gesturing then to her partner. "And this is Max Van Houten."

"Hi," said the younger paramedic, who was busy taking Egon's pulse. "Gosh, you guys all look like you've been through the wringer. I wonder what it is they drain away from you. It'd be great to run some real tests. I have a feeling Dr. Winkle's gonna love you."

"Who is this Winkle character?" asked Winston.

"Local G.P. He's a kind of local renaissance man," Clary explained. "He knows something about everything. He's a superb doctor, and he plays the piano well enough to appear on the concert stage. He speaks at least a dozen languages and can read some of the ancient ones."

"Indeed?" said Egon with quick interest.

"He has degrees in several other things besides medicine, and he used to play minor league baseball," Max finished up. "He's a great guy. He came and gave a talk to my high school class and when he was done I decided to get into this line of work. I've got six older brothers and there's no way I'd ever inherit the farm, so this was just the thing."

"What's more, he knows a lot about this house," Clary finished. "I told the dispatcher to call and tell him we were coming out here. I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't show up himself or at the very least corner the four of you after we transport you. I think he knows about your shadow things."

"I wish we'd known about him before we got here," said Ray as Clary checked the thermometer. "We could have conferred with him and we might have been ready for the shadows." He gestured at the thermometer. "How's Peter?"

"His temperature's up a little, but that's to be expected. "I think you've been very lucky, Dr. Venkman, all the more so because your friends knew how to help you."

"Couldn't you make it Peter?" he asked hopefully. "All beautiful women can call me Peter."

"I could and probably will," she replied, "though you needn't read anything into that but a naturally friendly nature." She turned to Ray. "You look under the weather too, Ray. The shadows did this?"

Ray nodded. "But we're okay. Sure we're tired and want to sleep, but we have to close that doorway first. I think we should get up there and start. You'll have to either stay here at the fire or come up with us."

The two paramedics exchanged wary looks. Max was a little more eager than Clary, but neither of them seemed to find the idea appealing.

"Guess I'm not the only one who can't always get a date," Peter pretended to console Ray.

"No, we'll come," Clary decided abruptly. "I hate the thought of standing down here by the fire, not knowing if the world's about to end. If it's going to end, I'd rather be there and know it and maybe try to help you put things right."

"You're a very brave lady, I like that," Peter told her earnestly.

"And you have the tongue of a con man," she replied. "I'm not sure if I like that or not. Do you think you can get the power restored?"

"Probably, if the ghost simply threw the switch," replied Winston, "but what's to stop him from throwing it again the minute we turn our backs? Light alone won't keep the shadows away, though they don't like it."

"I don't suppose they do. There's heat even in the smaller watt light bulbs," Clary replied. "Will your--your pack thingies fend them off, or will we get our life energy sucked out in the process of all this?"

"I'm not sure what it is they draw off," Egon replied. "The body requires various types of energy, but I won't know what it is they draw without further study. I would assume medical testing could tell that, once this is over. The deaths in the last century might be on record somewhere."

"Dr. Winkle knows about them," said Clary. "He said something about it, about more deaths and he didn't want you Ghostbusters to be more statistics. He said he was glad you'd been called in and he hoped somebody could finally take the, er, blasted hoodoo off this house."

"Blasted hoodoo, I like that," said Peter with a big grin. "Well, Spengs, shall we adjourn to the attic?"

"I thought you couldn't make it up three whole flights, Peter?" Ray asked, cocking his head at the psychologist, his eyes alight with amusement.

"Well, to protect the human race I can probably drag myself up there," he said, valiant in the face of adversity, "at least if somebody follows me up and gives me the odd boost every few steps."

"I think it's fortunate you arrived when you did, Clary," Egon told her. "Peter might malinger, but never in front of beautiful women."

Her face warmed at the sincerity of the unintended compliment. "Why, thank you, Egon."

Peter eyed Egon narrowly. "You're a dark horse, Spengs, do you know that?"

Egon favored him with a rather smug smile. "Some of us have it, Peter, and some of us...don't. Who's got the prepared trap? It's time to go to the attic." Ray held it up, then slid it into position on his pack.

"Will those shadows try to stop us?" asked Max nervously, glancing over his shoulder at the double doors.

"They're not really intelligent," Ray replied. "They might defend the doorway up there, but they never tried to stop us before. Unless they have some kind of group awareness, we'll be as safe as we've always been."

"In other words, not very," said Peter. "Come on, troops, once more into the fray. Oh, hey wait. Don't we have an extra pack here somewhere. Either of you two medical people have an urge to play Ghostbuster for awhile?"

"Are you certain that's a good idea, Peter?" Egon asked.

"Well, even if they can't hit a target, waving a thrower around at low power isn't that tough," Peter reminded him, "and it might help keep the shadows away. If we were going after normal ghosts, I wouldn't suggest it except as a last resort, but this shouldn't be too hard."

"You do have a point, Peter."

"Yeah, at the top of his head," muttered Ray, winning a look of delighted affront from Peter.

"And this after I rescued you, Stantz. I'm crushed, completely crushed."

"You only rescued us. We had to clean up after you when you barfed," Winston reminded him. He retrieved the other pack and returned to the fire unharmed. "So who gets to wear it."

"I will, I'm senior medic," Clary replied, and shrugged her shoulders into it. Her face fell as she felt its weight. "You guys run around with these things on your backs all the time?"

"Anything to protect humanity from ghosts." Peter pasted on a look of heroic nobility. "Up and down stairs and five or six blocks at a run. You're not seeing me at my best tonight, but ordinarily--"

"Ordinarily he's fairly insufferable," Egon interjected.

"Don't you mean 'incredible', Egon?" asked Peter.

"Isn't it amazing what a showman Peter can be?" Winston asked Ray in an obvious undertone.

"Hey, I learned from a master," Peter replied. "Come on, guys, let's get moving."

"Then everyone power up." Egon took out Clary's thrower, made several adjustments to it, and handed it to her. "You switch on this button. I've adjusted it for the level of power best suited to keeping the shadows away. It won't damage the house and if it should brush against a person, it will sting a little, but won't do actual harm at this level, not unless you maintain fire. At maximum power, of course, it will cause a human's molecules to separate at the speed of light."

"Oh. Thanks," she replied darkly, gripping the thrower with both hands as if she expected it to explode the moment she let go. "And to think I could have taken Bob's Saturday night shift for him and missed all this riotous fun."

"All together now," said Ray in the tones of one directing an orchestra. "Switch on, everybody. Don't point the throwers at each other."

"I kinda figured that." Peter grinned. "You up to this, Ray?" he asked softly. "You were hit pretty hard by those shadows."

"I'm kinda tired, but I can do it," Ray replied immediately. It took a lot more than this to daunt the engineer. "Don't worry about me. You're the one who's gonna have a rough time of it."

"You mean because my knees have about as much starch in them as wet washcloths? Never mind, Ray. I'm prepared. Besides, it won't look so good in the papers if I spend the rest of the bust lying down."

Ray eyed him knowingly, recognizing the fact that nothing short of a broken leg or unconsciousness would have kept Peter from his teammates' side as they faced the threat. Peter hated the idea of being the only surviving Ghostbuster, and he would make it up those stairs if someone had to get behind him and push him every step of the way. His determination must have shown in his face, because Egon slid in beside him.

"If you need a hand, Peter, you have only to say so," he informed the psychologist in an undertone.

"Thanks, Spengs. I just might take you up on that." With a grin, he pointed his thrower ahead of him, watching the nebulous shadows scatter as it cleared them a path across the library, then he braced himself and started across the room toward the door. The other three Ghostbusters were right behind him, bunched around the unarmed Max, with Clary in between Winston and Ray, her thrower firm in her grip, though it jerked a little more wildly than any of the Ghostbusters' did as she gradually learned how to balance it properly.

They crossed into the hall in a bunch, the only light that of their flashlight beams and the glow from the throwers. Egon had directed the settings to reflect a wide angle, so each of them had his thrower pointed down and a little away to avoid catching their feet in the sizzle of power. It created a wide aura of illumination, not as bright as normal electricity, and not as even, but bright enough to allow them to see the shadows that coiled and bunched just beyond the line of demarcation that separated the energy field from the darkness. Stabbing through it, the flashlight beams were vivid and distinctive, revealing the remnants of smoke that still lingered and bunched in the hollow of the stairwell like low-lying mist, now that the exhaust fan on the stove was no longer running. The odor of burning was sharper here than it had been in the library, and Clary wrinkled her nose at it.

"Did I miss a barbecue?" she asked.

Peter grinned. She was scared but not so much that it would hold her back, even though she couldn't help seeing the writhing ephemeral shadows with every movement of her proton stream. They darted closer, squealing into Peter's mind--and presumably the minds of the others, though no one mentioned it--then jerked back as if stung. Egon had altered the equipment to produce more heat than usual and to spread it over a wide beam the way he had done when Peter, Ray, and Peter's father had been buried in the avalanche the time they had gone to Alaska to investigate Charlie Venkman's claim of finding Hob Anagarok and it had been necessary to melt the snow in time to save them.

"No, the ghost tried to barbecue us," he reminded her. "He's not particularly friendly, but then it's a funny thing. Most ghosts aren't."

She shuddered elaborately as if for show, though he could tell she wasn't enthusiastic about a vicious ghost lurking in the background. "So you haven't caught this one yet, am I correct?"

"Not yet, but we will as soon as we've got the shadows shut away," said Ray with eager enthusiasm. Though he looked weary and his feet lacked their usual bounce, his spirit hadn't been dampened one iota by his encounter with the shadows. He was still eager and enthusiastic about the challenge they faced, and if Peter had mentioned it he would have exulted, "Isn't it fun." Peter prompted him expectantly and he did say it, making the psychologist grin. Peter didn't know if 'fun' was precisely the word he would use. In his own way he relished the challenge of ghostbusting as much as Ray did; all of them felt that way or they wouldn't have been able to continue taking the risks day after day. But Peter got a real satisfaction out of it he would have been hard put to explain. He'd gotten into psychology because of a genuine interest in people as well as a knack for manipulating them that he'd learned from his con man father. In Peter's case, the interest had won out over the manipulation, and he found he genuinely enjoyed helping people get rid of ghosts. It wasn't something he ever talked about, and even with the guys he spoke of the fame and glory, two other things he enjoyed a great deal. But underneath them all, there was a satisfaction he couldn't have found in a less challenging line of work.

What made it even better was the presence of the rest of the team, the best friends a guy could ever hope to have. When Peter was growing up he hadn't believed he'd ever find friends like these. Even now it surprised him to realize that most people went through their entire lives and never knew such a close and satisfying friendship.

"Well, Tex," he said now, fondness seeping into his voice because of the direction his thoughts had taken, "I don't think I'd call it 'fun' to get overdosed with mystery pills and spend half the evening barfing, and then having to go out and close dimensional gateways."

Ray's face softened at once. "Are you okay, Peter? Do you need a hand up the stairs?"

"I'm not on my last legs yet," Peter said, though when they started up the second flight, he wondered if maybe he might be. His legs quivered with the simple effort of climbing, and he felt himself break out in a cold sweat. Deep down he knew he wasn't really recovered enough for this, but he wouldn't admit it, wouldn't let the other three--and two rank amateurs--face the shadows without him, even if he could do more than sit down and call out warnings when they got there.

The stairs ahead of them were packed with shadows, thicker now as the Ghostbusters moved toward their gateway into this world. The flashlights picked them out unerringly now, as if they had gained more solidity or as if the energy from the proton streams made them briefly visible in its glow. Heads writhing like stubby snakes, the ferretlike shadows gave ground before them, tightly packed together, the 'sound' of their cries louder and louder in Peter's head.

"Anybody but me hear them?" he wheezed breathlessly as they reached the third floor and stood in the hallway gazing down across the shadow-laden darkness that led to the separate attic stairway.

"Hear them?" cried Max. "Is that what that awful wailing is? It isn't real sound, is it?" His eyes were open so wide they showed white all the way around the irises, and his mouth gaped a little, too. His vision of the world was being cracked and broken by something he had not really believed was real. "When I was a kid, my mom used to say, 'Don't go out at night or the shadows will eat you.' I thought it was just like the stuff about the Bogeyman, not real, but a way to make kids be good. I--I guess I was wrong, wasn't I?"

"The Bogeyman's real, too, kid," Peter informed him. "We've got him in the Containment Unit back at headquarters."

Max received this piece of information in silence, his face blank as he tried to digest it. He said, "Nah," as if to refute the possibilities, his face falling when all four Ghostbusters nodded.

"The world is stranger than we are capable of understanding," Egon told him sympathetically.

"So how do we get past all those--those shadows?" Winston asked, gazing down the hall. "I don't think they want us to go up into the attic again. I don't like this. Now that it's dark in here, they're out in force."

"No, I think the gateway is finally fully open," Egon replied. "The shadows may not be intelligent individually, but I think we were right; they do possess a rudimentary hive mentality. They can recognize a threat just as animals can. A mother bear will kill before she'll allow anything to find her cubs or her den. I think the shadows will do anything to stop us from closing the gate."

"What if we close it and all these things are still loose in our world?" Clary asked. "If you can't trap them all, will they keep growing and feeding? Do they breed?"

"Man, I didn't even want to think about that," muttered Winston unenthusiastically.

"Keep moving," Egon said sharply. "They may try to break through to us if we stand still." He leaned closer to Peter. "Are you up to this?"

"I have to be, don't I? I can't stay here alone or I'll get pulled down so quick there won't be anything left of me. I'm with you, Spengs. Lead on."

It grew even harder to walk down the corridor toward the attic door; it was like wading through knee-deep snow, as if the bunched mass of the shadows could bounce them back as they tried to push into it. Yet the throwers did make them give ground; those in the forefront would slip off to the sides, leaving still more of the barely-seen forms to crowd in from behind. It wasn't that they didn't fear and hate the heat from the throwers, just that there were so many of them it was hard to gain ground.

"I want to know about Clary's question, too," Peter voiced as he plodded forward, almost grateful for the slowness of their advance because it gave him time to catch his breath from the fierce exertion of climbing the stairs. "Are we gonna be hip deep in these little wigglers once the gateway's closed?"

"I have a couple of theories," Ray offered, his enthusiasm muted by the sheer bulk of the shadows. "I bet they need the gateway open to survive."

"You mean if we close it, they'll shrivel up and blow away like dust?" asked Peter, brightening at the idea.

"Well, it is one possibility," Egon replied. "We don't understand their basic make-up, but they need energy to survive. While we know they can feed on living things in our world, the body heat of their victims holds them off for a time. We are not ideal fodder for them. Perhaps they would draw energy more successfully from cold blooded creatures. Maybe their normal food in their own domain is of that type. It's possible they have come here because of a food shortage; maybe they break into other dimensions regularly as the worlds abut at cyclical intervals. It is simply our turn again."

"Too bad our turn couldn't have been last summer during the heat wave," Ray offered. "I wonder if it was warmer when they came through before."

"I bet it was," Peter replied around a weary yawn. He would have liked to head for one of the bedrooms and catch a nap because he ached with tiredness, but adrenalin kept him going. "Because I don't think there was much of a spread, and for all we know after Kingsley closed the gate, they didn't break out again. So maybe they do need the gate."

"We don't know that for certain, Peter," Egon reminded him.

Peter shook his head. "I think we do. Because if they'd kept on feeding up here it would have made a lot of newspapers and Ray would have been talking about the Jonesville Incident of 1894 along with all those other weird events he's always telling us about. We didn't know anything about this and there's nothing in Tobin's Spirit Guide even though we've got the updated edition and everything. I think whatever Kingsley did closed the gate and if any of the shadows were left they didn't survive without it." He was convinced he was right.

"What you say makes a great deal of sense, Peter," Egon replied. "But it's still a theory. I suggest we proceed and close the gateway and then we will know if it's right or not. At least if we close it we will know nothing more can make it through."

"And if I'm right, I'm gonna tell everybody," Peter announced. "It's gonna look soooo good in the headlines."

"Is he always like this?" Clary asked as they reached the attic door.

"He sure is," agreed Ray, grinning.

"But we've learned to live with it," added Winston.

"We occasionally enjoy it," added Egon, favoring Peter with a smile. "But it's time to be serious. We have important work to do." He ran his thrower over the door before reaching out to grasp the doorknob and turn it, throwing the door open wide.

The attic stairs were thick with shadows, gliding down the steps in a tide like lemmings racing for the sea, only to halt abruptly in gibbering terror at the heat and glow of the throwers. Peter didn't dare look behind him because he knew the shadows had closed in around them and only the power of their particle accelerators kept the entities from closing on them in a mass and drawing out their life essences in mere seconds. There would be no surviving for anyone who fell victim to this many of the shadows. Peter had been horrified, frantically trying to scrape away the mere dozens that had attached themselves to Egon. This time, there were hundreds of the monsters, maybe thousands, pouring through the gateway into the world, in search of sustenance.

"Oh, god, there are millions of them," Clary cried, her voice quavering. Peter could understand that. He felt the way she sounded and suspected all of them did.

"And there'll be more if we don't stop them," said Max, sounding like he wished he had a thrower of his own. He was very young and even more gung ho than Ray was.

"We couldn't turn around and run very very fast?" Peter asked, knowing there wasn't a possibility but hoping to ease Clary's tension, and also the tension of the rest of them.

"I doubt you could run ten steps," said Egon knowingly. He shifted position so that he was beside Peter again, and when they started up the stairs, he slid the arm that held his flashlight around Peter's waist and helped to boost him up the stairs.

Afterwards Peter knew he would never have made it up that final flight without Egon's help or the sudden feel of hands against his back, holding him upright and giving him a push every time he tried to drag his weary, aching body just a little higher. It was Max, the only one whose hands were free, helping out the only way available to him, and Peter was grateful for it.

Of course his three buddies weren't a lot better off than he was, though they had bounced back quicker. Ray's face reflected the strain of trying to work so hard while he was still recovering from an experience that had almost killed him. He was in the lead, but he wasn't bouncing up the stairs. Plodding would be a more accurate description, though his will hadn't suffered any diminution of energy. Ray's heart wanted to fling him into the battle, but his body made him lag a little on the stairs.

"We can make it, we can make it," Winston muttered behind Peter, fighting the rear guard against the shadows that came back up after them, determined to feed on the smorgasbord presented by six humans. They might not be the shadows' favorite dish but they were still food, although hard to get at.

When they reached the top of the attic stairs, they bunched there, unmoving for a few moments, partly for Peter to catch his breath and regain what little strength he had left and partly to assess the situation. Ray and Egon passed their flashlights to Max as they bent over P.K.E. meters and studied the sight that was suddenly revealed to them.

At first Peter could only stand there, his head hanging, his hand with the flashlight in it draped across Egon's shoulder just to hold him upright. When this was over, he would sleep the clock around, he vowed to himself. He would enjoy it. Then the others' exclamations roused him enough to force his head up and look at the gateway.

It was wholly visible now, a narrow yet widening rift that bulged widest at the middle, like a hollow in the bark of a tree. It was six or seven feet high already and growing as they watched it. Through it poured more of the shadows, leaking out into the attic in a veritable flood of alien monsters, all of them much more clearly defined there in the opening than they had ever been, even in the light of the throwers. In their own world, it seemed, they had solidity, and it was possible to tell they were furred beings. At the end of each snakelike head was a round mouth with a circle of very sharp teeth and just inside them a row of suckers like those on the tentacles of a squid or octopus. The teeth clutched the victims, while the suction pads drew out the food the alien entities sought. Peter wondered in horror if his buddies had little, invisible wounds all over their bodies. He shuddered at the very idea.

Beyond the entities was a trace of the shadow world, a dark and melancholy place lit by the pale and faded light of a dying sun. Nothing seemed to grow there, and it was easy to see why the entities swarmed through the gateway in hopes of finding fodder for themselves, for their own world could hardly support them. They came pouring across the dimensional opening because they were starving, and humans were the handiest prey they could find here.

As the shadows passed through the dividing opening, their solidity seemed to disappear and they turned into the transparent outlines the Ghostbusters had been seeing all along as if they were not entirely real in the humans' dimension. Yet they were real enough to feed off physical beings here and that was the whole problem.

"All right, everyone," Egon said firmly, clearing his throat before he took charge as if the sight had disconcerted him as much as it had Peter. "Now that we're here, we'll have to work on the gateway. Everyone boost your throwers to level three. Ray, show Clary, if you will."

"Sure, Egon," agreed Ray. Of all of them he sounded the least daunted, but he was also the only Ghostbuster who reacted with pleasure to the thought of confronting new demons and frightening monsters. With the right weapons in his hand, Ray was a born adventurer, undaunted following a childhood of watching horror films without fear. The Indiana Jones of Ghostbusters, thought Peter fondly, watching Ray instruct Clary on how to set her thrower just right. Though Ray was usually shy around new women, he didn't have time to be shy now, and Clary was watching him with considerable respect as if she had realized there was more to him than met the casual eye.

"Okay," Peter said when everyone's thrower was adjusted properly to produce the ideal combination of heat and power. "So what do we do, Egon, each take a section and try to close it."

"Precisely," he said. "Ray and I will take the top and bottom, you and Winston each take a side, and Clary, I want you to fire directly through the opening, if you can hit that target."

"I'm pretty good at trap shooting," Clary responded. "I think I can make it. Just say the word."

"Very well," Egon replied. "Max, I'll expect you to help, too. Ray is wearing the modified trap on his pack. Do you see it?"

"Sure, Dr. Spengler," agreed Max.

"Very well. When I instruct you, I want you to throw it directly into the opening. Have you got a fair aim?"

"Pitched a no hitter my last game in high school," Max replied proudly. He lifted the trap off Ray's pack and slid into line with the others. "I'm ready," he said, sounding determined to be brave in spite of the creatures that pressed ferociously against the edged of the thrower's range.

"We'll have to be quick," Ray offered, his face eager and anxious at the same time. "Everybody ready?" Heads bobbed up and down all along the line.

"Then GO!" commanded Egon, and as one, the throwers came up and fired directly into the designated spots. This removed the protection the throwers had given them directly and focused it onto the rip in the air of the attic instead.

Peter cringed, expecting to feel the hungry little mouths attaching themselves to important parts of his anatomy, but instead the attic resounded with a howling, shrieking sound as loud as the scream of fighter jets on a strafing run and every shadow in the room stiffened as if it had been struck by the streams. With wails of torment, the entities closed on the expanding opening and began to dive through it so fast they blurred before Peter's aching eyes. The rift itself bucked and pitched with the force of their swift passage back through the opening, and Peter did start to feel them as they pushed past him, none of them stopping to feed, making him stagger for balance even though they were too insubstantial to knock him out of position. There was a wind created by the shadows' transition that ruffled his already-matted hair and tore at the sleeves of his jumpsuit as more and more of the shadows dove frantically through the gap between worlds.

"It's working!" Egon shouted, bracing his feet a little apart and clinging tightly to his thrower as he tried to direct the bottom edge he controlled, guiding it steadily upward to meet the streams the other three used to maneuver. "Up the power to level 4."

The other three Ghostbusters complied, and Clary glanced uneasily down at her thrower, not sure how to do it. Egon saw her difficulty, and said, "Don't worry about it; it's more important we up our levels than for you to do it. We'll have you shut down soon anyway. Stand by, but don't stop until I tell you to."

"Okay," she agreed, holding the thrower in a two-handed grip, her knuckles whitening as she maintained her hold.

Peter's arms ached and trembled from supporting his own weapon; he knew he wasn't up to this, but he couldn't stop. If they didn't do this just right, the opening might get away from them again. So he stood there fighting against his body's weakness and the fierce wind of the shadows' passage as they plungeed through the ever-shrinking portal that took them home again.

"You okay, Peter?" Ray called anxiously as if he'd been able to sense Peter's increasing weakness and guess he was on the verge of collapse.

"Sure, Ray," he called back, trying to strengthen his voice, "if you count feeling like the near-dead as okay."

"It won't be long now," Ray encouraged him. "Just hang on. Look! The flow is slowing."

Peter had barely noticed, but the vast bulk of the shadows must have retreated to their own side of the doorway because they were slipping past in much smaller numbers now, a dozen or so here, a score there, five or six in a bunch and then in frantic trios and pairs, hurrying, hurrying, as if the group intelligence knew that to be cut off from their own dimension meant their deaths. Not long now, Peter, he encouraged himself, surreptitiously flexing the fingers of one hand then the other, biting his bottom lip with the effort to keep firing. Hang on just a little longer and then you can let go. The opening was very small now, hardly big enough for the last few ferret-shapes to squeeze through in unison.

"Now, Clary, shut down!" Egon instructed and she flicked the trigger to 'off' and let her weapon sag, her arms aching from the unfamiliar effort, and backed away from the narrowing portal.

"Max," Egon said without turning. "Toss the trap into the opening. Don't stomp on the trigger until I tell you to. Throw it--now!"

The young man let fly the trap hitting the tiny hole perfectly. "Yahoo!" cried Max in triumph, eyes alight, his foot hovering over the trigger pedal.

"Shut down the throwers now," Egon directed. "Go, Max!"

Peter lifted his thumb from the power switch and let the thrower slide from hands too weak to go on holding it while the other three cut off at the same moment. Suddenly the room was in near darkness, lightened when Winston and Max switched on flashlights and aimed them at the portal. Max hit the trap's trigger with his foot and the trap opened, releasing a brilliant wedge of light. With a whoosh of sound the opening collapsed into a tight round hole barely big enough to enclose the trap, then for a moment it seemed the whole attic turned itself inside out. Peter blinked, his eyes streaming at the glare of the trap, then the light sucked backward into the containment device, the portal with it, drawing it down into an ever decreasing pool of light, narrowing still further until the brightness was no bigger than a pinhead yet glowing as brightly as before.

The air in the room seemed to stand completely still, then it swirled toward the lingering brightness in a savage eddy, tearing at everyone's hair. Peter's collar whipped around his neck and his sleeves flapped. The trap turned itself inside out in a dazzle of colors, the air rushed inward toward it and then back again, whipping against the six with the force of a hurricane, then, astonishingly, it stopped altogether. Peter had to swallow fiercely to make his ears pop but a second later, the place felt completely normal. Dust motes danced in the beams of the flashlights as it slowly settled to the floor.

Of the hexagram carved by Douglass Kingsley, there wasn't a trace.

"There's no evidence of a gateway now," Egon said, raising his eyes from his P.K.E. meter's screen. "No negative valences, nothing, not even residuals. It's as if there was never a cross-rip here in the first place."

"Wow, Egon," said Ray, shipping his thrower and edging closer to the now-empty spot on the floor, his own meter in hand.

"Well," said Peter with forced brightness, "that was interesting." His voice faltered as it drew the last of his strength. The need to hold on was gone now and total exhaustion swept over him with the speed and explosive force of an avalanche. "I-I think I'll...take a little nap now," he managed to mumble, then the floor lunged at him, and the last thing he remembered before the blackness closed around him and swept him away into blessed unconsciousness was the feel of Egon's arms as he caught Peter and broke his fall.

"He'll be all right," Clary said ten minutes later when the other three weary Ghostbusters had directed Max to carry Peter down to the first floor where they established him on the library couch again for the two paramedics to check out. "He's simply exhausted. He hadn't really recovered enough from the overdose to do anything as strenuous as busting those shadow things. Let him rest while Max and I check out the rest of you, and then we'll transport him. I think he ought to have some tests just to be absolutely certain there are no side effects, and once the actual drug is identified, there will likely be a specific course of treatment that will make him much more comfortable."

Peter hadn't reacted to her examination at all. He lay limp and spent on the couch, but it hadn't taken Clary long to realize he wasn't exactly unconscious; he was just sleeping. His face was too pale and the shadows had darkened again beneath his eyes, but that was merely the result of the strain he'd been through, not an unexpected worsening of his condition. Egon sat on the edge of the couch beside him; he'd supported Peter and raised him up for Clary to check his breathing with her stethoscope, and now he eased him down against the pillows again and spread the blanket over him with a gentle protectiveness. Ray and Winston stood as close as they could, their concern only slightly eased by Clary's reassurance. In the dim light from the fire and the beams of three flashlights, Peter looked so awful Ray couldn't help worrying all over again, even now the gateway was closed and Peter could be transported safely to the nearest hospital. Stantz had known Peter wasn't up to walking up all those stairs, let alone closing a dimensional cross-rip; there had simply been no other option.

"We're just exhausted." Egon ran a gentle hand across Peter's forehead to smooth away the tangled hair and test for signs of fever, although Clary had already done that. Ray suspected Egon didn't even realize he was doing it; he wasn't given to casual physical displays of affection as a rule, though he tended to fuss when one of the guys was sick or hurt. He noticed what he was doing, but instead of pulling his hand away he let it rest there a minute longer, smiling down at the sleeping man. Then he lifted his head to the others and Ray realized how tired Egon was. His face was lined with weariness and soot from the earlier fire, and with his glasses hanging at the tip of his nose the way they were, the unsmoked area around his eyes stood out as too white against the dirt on his face, making him look vaguely like a raccoon in reverse. He braced himself and added, "But we're not finished yet."

Ray heaved a weary sigh. This was turning into one of the longest and most stressful nights he could remember. Peter's faint had frightened him, though he should have expected it. People didn't usually get up from sickbeds to deal with crises as drastic as that of the shadows, but Peter would never have stayed behind while his friends faced danger without him, even assuming it would have been safe to leave him alone. Besides, all of them had been needed to stop the ghost. Clary and Max together wouldn't have made up for Peter, as inexperienced as they were, especially when the other three Ghostbusters were dragging their butts the way they were. The thought of more work to do made Ray cringe. This was one time he didn't want to plunge into his work. He just wanted to lie down someplace where he could curl up comfortably and keep an eye on Peter while he slept, letting somebody else do all the work for a change. But as Egon spoke, he realized what the physicist meant.

"The ghost who set the fire and gave Muz the drugs for Peter," cried Ray. "He's the one who must have cut the power. That means he's still around. We've got to stop him now because he's one of the most dangerous ghosts we've faced."

"More dangerous than those shadow things?" Winston asked in disbelief. He flung himself into one of the wing chairs and propped his feet up on the nearest footstool, reaching up his left hand to massage his right shoulder, then reversing the process. "Oh, man, I hurt all over."

"We all do, Winston," Egon reminded him, shoving his glasses clumsily into place with a hand that quivered a little as a sign of his fatigue. "But Ray is right. A ghost that can attempt poisoning and set fires, and one who realized what a danger we would face without the sunlamp is one I don't want to leave untrapped any longer than I must. He will only plan new threats for us." He stretched out a long arm and scooped up one of the P.K.E. meters from the end table, twisting the dials. "I'm setting the detector to react at a far greater range. If the ghost is on the estate at all, this will pinpoint him. We can't leave him loose. While he seems to have it in for the four of us, he could as easily turn on someone even more unprepared than we were. Ah!" This as the meter started beeping wildly. "He's very close. All right, men, set your throwers back to normal."

"Shall I..." Clary began, pointing to the thrower she had shed with obvious relief the minute she'd come downstairs. The offer was reluctantly made but Ray was pretty sure she'd don the portable accelerator again if she had to. She was that kind of lady; she didn't back down from challenges, not when something important needed doing. Ray liked her, and the last thing he wanted to do was demean her offer.

He lifted an eyebrow at Egon. "What do you say? We need all the help we can get."

"Remember Janine's first bust?" Winston reminded him, his eyes closed as he dug his fingers into his temples in an attempt to work the headache out that lingered there. "She nearly took out Peter. And the first time you guys faced down a ghost, you trashed a ballroom." His mouth curled into a grin as he remembered Peter's melodramatic description of the Ghostbusters' assault on the unsuspecting Sedgewick Hotel.

"Clary's handled a thrower before," Ray reminded him, grinning at the paramedic. "And I think Max can handle one, too. Paramedics have to be ready to take on any kind of crisis. They can back us up if we need it anyway. Besides, one of us should stay with Peter."

"You stay, Winston," Egon decided. "I want someone skilled to remain with him, and I don't think you're quite as drained as Ray right now. Everyone else, get your packs ready." He adjusted Clary's thrower while Ray helped Max slide his arms into the straps of Peter's proton pack.

"Any kind of crisis?" echoed the young man, running a hand through his blond thatch. "I don't think they had this in mind when they trained me. Dammit, these things are heavy." He eyed the Ghostbusters, including the sleeping Peter, with new respect.

"Ready?" Egon asked, gesturing to one of the long windows. "I think he's out there. Not close enough to overhear us, but close. If we're lucky perhaps we can sneak up on him."

Ray concealed a smile. It was hard to imagine this exhausted bunch getting the drop on anyone tonight. Most likely they'd fall over their own feet and make as much noise as a herd of trumpeting elephants and the ghost would take off before they could get a lock on it.

But everyone moved quietly. Pulling his chair closer to Peter, Winston unshipped his thrower, activated it and lay it across his knees, prepared to stand guard until the others returned.

It was very dark outside, and the air was chill. Maybe it was the crisp April weather that had tempted the shadows, since they didn't care for heat. If the Ghostbusters hadn't been here tonight, the shadows would probably have spread out across the countryside until it would have been impossible to pull them back.

This far from the city, the stars shone brilliantly overhead, the Milky Way a glowing band across the dome of the heavens. Ray stood staring up at it for a moment, remembering cherished moments from his Morrisville boyhood, before he'd moved back to New York where only a few bright stars were ever visible. A hasty, whispered, "Ray," reminded him of his mission and he hurried to catch up with Egon, shivering a little. The grass was wet and dewy, and his boots left a visible trail behind him.

"It's not moving, Raymond," Egon breathed in his ear, materializing beside him. "Do you have a trap?"

Ray nodded. "I took Winston's. And Clary and Max have them, too. We're all set."

In the distance, an owl hooted, and nearer at hand, all around them, came the chirp of crickets and hum of cicadas, but the steady roar of vehicles, so familiar at home that they scarcely noticed it, was absent here. The land sloped down away from the house, toward a grove of trees, but Egon pointed away from that, toward the corner of the house. "This way," he urged. "Everybody ready?"

He was answered by a series of nods as they reached the corner and hesitated there while Egon hastily adjusted his P.K.E. meter so it wouldn't make any noise to give them away. Ray edged forward and peered around the edge of the structure, freezing when he saw not one ghost but two. One of them was shaped like an octopus with a very beautiful human face, and the second one was much more human in its general shape, though more like a parody of a human than an actual Class 3 would be. They were talking together, and Ray froze as he realized he could hear them and make sense of what they said.

"You made another mistake, Raputis," the bright yellow octopoid spirit was chiding the other. "In spite of all your bragging, the Ghostbusters are still alive and the shadows are gone. All your talk about destroying the Ghostbusters was just that, talk."

"You underestimate me as always," returned the humanoid ghost. "I have additional plans. They will not escape me. If this plan fails, it is because you selected a haunted house for me that was not appropriate."

"You said earlier I'd made a wonderful choice," argued the yellow spirit. "You said the shadows would destroy humanity starting with the Ghostbusters, but only the shadows were destroyed. I'm tired of your ego and your excuses. I never wanted to help you anyway. This is your problem, and I have to say I hope the Ghostbusters trap you so I won't have to listen to any more of your ineffectual bragging." With a snort, he drifted away, down the long, sloping lawn toward the river, never bothering to look back. He wasn't attempting to be wooed back to help. He was genuinely fed up and meant to keep right on going.

"I don't need you," shouted the humanoid ghost. "I don't need anyone. I'll destroy the Ghostbusters without any help from you. Come back, you coward, Malkizah."

Malkizah snorted and kept on going. As the yellow specter disappeared into the distance Ray found himself grinning broadly. When he'd realized there were two ghosts he'd expected a conspiracy but not like this one. Holding up his hand, he gestured his companions forward, powering up his thrower and shouting, "Now!"

"NO!" bellowed Raputis, trying to zip straight upward out of range. The streams missed him by a fraction and the angry ghost kept on going straight up. Max wailed in protest, and Clary stared up into the starfilled sky in sheer dismay.

"He's getting away," cried Max. "Stop him! Stop him!"

"What do we do?" demanded Clary, the tip of her thrower tracking the vanishing shape.

Then the ghost dove back at them, circling around from an angle and swooping low, just over their heads, causing Clary and Max to duck involuntarily before they caught themselves and joined their fire to that of Egon and Ray. Again the streams pursued him. The ghost laughed and sent back a taunting cry, swooping around to dive at them again.

"Here he comes, get him, get him!" screeched Max, his eyes huge as he watched the ghost racing toward them, and it said a lot for the young man's courage that he braced his feet and didn't run, though he looked as if he really wanted to sink into the ground out of range of the ghost.

Ray couldn't spare their inexperienced companions more than a glance. He braced himself, too, eyes following Raputis's trajectory as the ghost zipped past overhead, Egon's stream missing him by inches. The physicist muttered something under his breath that might be profane and stopped firing, watching the ghost, too. Max sent an angry stream after him that missed by yards, but Clary held her shot as if waiting for somebody to yell, 'Pull!'

The ghost went high again, nearly vanishing against the sky, then he started another dive straight for them as if he meant to grab them or hurt them in some way. Even Clary shivered at the sight of the specter approaching as fast as an express train, but Ray and Egon had too much practice for that kind of escapade. They fired in unison, their proton streams sizzling out, both of them finding the target in one easy motion as the ghost flew right into them. If Peter had been here he would have waited until the last moment and popped his trap, letting momentum suck in the ghost. He loved pulling that particular stunt and gloating about it afterwards.

Raputis struggled furiously, strong enough to make the throwers buck in the two weary men's hands, the expression on the hapless ghost's face one of utter disbelief; he had thought himself too clever to be captured. Ray had seen it before in overconfident ghosts. If he'd kept on going the first time, he could have escaped and come back later to plague them when they weren't expecting it, but he'd been determined to show the Ghostbusters how remarkable he was and in doing so he'd proven himself no different from any other ghost they'd ever caught.

Seeing what was happening, Clary jammed her thumb on the trigger and fired. For the first moment she nearly lost control of her thrower because the power was so much higher than before, but she caught on fast and controlled it, though it took a lot of effort. Struggling against the bucking of the proton rifle, she directed her stream in the right direction and latched onto Raputis too.

"I got him! I got him!" she blurted eagerly. "Come on, Max, do something. Blast him! Blast him!"

"Throw out a trap, Max," Egon corrected hastily, and the younger paramedic tossed it out beneath the struggling Raputis as if he'd been doing it for years. His toe found the trigger without hesitation and the light of the trap shot out to envelop the fiercely struggling Class 5.

"No. You'll pay, you'll pay," bawled the ghost as the trap drew him inexorably down. "You'll pay. I swear it. You'll be sorrrrrreeeee...." His frantic cry died away as he vanished into the trap and the doors snapped shut over the sound, cutting it off as if it had been snipped with a knife.

"Well, gee, that wasn't too hard," said Ray, almost disappointed, though he was really too tired to have waged a much longer battle. "Should we go after the other one?" He had to break off in the middle of the question to yawn.

"I don't think he'll cause us any further trouble," Egon replied, yawning in response as he shipped his thrower and simply stood there as if it required all his strength to go on standing up. "It was this one's plan from the beginning. It sounded like that one was recruited much against his will. In any case, we are all exhausted. I doubt I have enough strength to chase a taxi let alone a speeding ghost." He took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

"It's out of range anyway," said Ray regretfully, knowing he would have found the strength somewhere if it had decided to come back. He stared off after the long-vanished spirit, then he shrugged his shoulders, surprised at how much energy that simple gesture required. "We'd better get back to Peter," he said. "You can take him to the hospital and one of us will ride along; whoever goes can arrange replacement tires for Ecto so we can get out of here. I don't know about you guys, but I'd rather not sleep here if I didn't have to."

"We'll cram you all in," Clary said, shutting down her thrower and making a few stabs at shoving it into its slot before she got it right. "It'll be a tight fit, but it'll be worth it to get away from here."

"Amen to that," said Egon solemnly, staring up at the blocky outline of Mr. Johnson's house. "I hope I never have to see this place again." However as they dragged themselves up the sloping lawn to the huge brick edifice, Egon pulled out his P.K.E. meter and took readings from three or four different settings, solemnly studying his results.

"Well, Egon?" asked Ray as they reached the library windows. "What have you got."

Egon dredged up a smile. "This house is clean."

Peter didn't wake up when they told Winston the ghost was gone, but he did stir a little and make a few interrogative sounds when Egon and Winston carried him between them out to the ambulance. "Huh? Whazzit?"

"We got the ghost, Peter," Ray told him excitedly. "We're taking you to the hospital now."

"...hate hospitals..." Peter muttered automatically without opening his eyes.

"I know you do, but you are going, Peter," Egon informed him in the inflexible tones he used when Peter was at his most recalcitrant.

Peter leaned his head against Egon's shoulder as if he'd discovered a pillow, relaxing into the security he found there. "Y'like t'boss people 'round, Egon," he muttered and sank back into sleep.

"It is for your own good, Peter," Egon reminded him, looking down on the sleeping face with a gentle smile.

"He's okay," Winston said. "Soon as he wakes up, he'll be clamoring to be discharged anyway. You know Pete. Drives doctors crazy."

Egon's eyes glittered for a moment as he remembered their near miss and Ray knew he and Egon were thinking the same thing, that at least they had the opportunity to go on knowing him, exasperating and maddening as he could be. Ray reached out and patted Egon's other shoulder. "It's okay, Egon," he said gently. "Peter's gonna be fine. I know he is."

"I know it, too, Raymond," Egon replied. "Though when I get my hands on Muz..."

"Wasn't the little gooper's fault, Egon," Winston corrected as they loaded Peter into the back of the paramedics' van under Clary's direction; Peter didn't awaken at the process. "Cut him a little slack."

"Perhaps," Egon replied, his face still grave. "Though I shall have to lecture him most severely when we return to the city."

They rode back to town with three people jammed into the front seat of the paramedics' van with Egon and Max sitting guard over the still sleeping Peter in the back.

Ray didn't have to sleep in the house after all, but he dozed off during the drive into Jonesville and awakened to find himself slumped with his head against Clary's shoulder as the van pulled up at the hospital emergency room door.

"He'll be fine," the emergency room doctor, who introduced himself as Dr. Fratelli, told Egon, Ray and Winston an hour and a half later. He was a young man, fresh and eager about his work, smiling at them reassuringly as soon as he walked into the waiting room and found them dozing in uncomfortable chairs. As if pulled by invisible strings they had bolted upright at the first sign of him as if they had all been sleeping with one eye open and gathered around him to demand answers.

"What about the drug, Doctor?" Ray asked anxiously. "It won't do any permanent damage, will it? What was it anyway?"

"It was a morphine sulfate, MSIR," Fratelli replied. "You say a ghost had it and slipped it into a drink? That beats everything. I was worrying about abuse of a prescription drug, though I've seen Dr. Venkman and the rest of you on those anti-drug ads on TV too often to want to believe anything like that of him. The paramedics explained what happened. Clary said the ghost wanted to kill you Ghostbusters and drugging you to make you sleep was part of the plan. Ghosts stealing drugs? I'll believe anything now." He shook his head. "It was concentrated in his drink, evidently."

"We don't know how the ghost got the drugs, Doctor," Egon explained. "But presumably getting into a pharmacy wouldn't be a problem for a ghost; it could simply go through the walls. Of course he could have found the medication anywhere, in someone's prescription, even in a hospital or a pharmaceuticals warehouse or manufacturing plant. We've trapped the ghost and will incarcerate him in our Containment Unit, so he won't be stealing drugs in future. What about Peter?" he persisted. "Morphine can have adverse side effects, can't it?"

"Yes, but from my test results, he was very lucky, and he's displaying none of them. If he'd had time to absorb much more of the drug, he'd have a harder time coming back from it, but you evidently caught him quickly. I've initiated the standard treatment and we'll monitor him through the rest of the night and morning just to be certain. He'll probably sleep through most of it. If he continues to progresses this well, we'll dishcarge him this afternoon."

"Morphine's addictive?" Ray began hesitantly, phrasing it as a question as if he didn't like to remind anyone of this particular problem.

"True, it can be. From overuse or for treatments over long periods of time, and it's carefully monitored when prescribed. However, from the limited amount Dr. Venkman was given and the quickness of your reaction in ridding him of what was left, I don't foresee problems in that area. From the way he complained while we were treating him, I suspect he doesn't care for medicine even when taking it is the appropriate course of action."

"He thinks he's invincible and doesn't need anything, except for the occasional hay fever stuff," volunteered Winston. "And he hates taking that; complains it makes him sleepy, so most of the time when he has a hay fever attack he just suffers. He's a stubborn man."

"I'll say," agreed Ray, relieved. His taut shoulder muscles relaxed, and with the threat of danger to Peter finally removed, he looked as if it would take a gentle breeze to blow him over and the mere closing of his eyes to put him to sleep.

The doctor smiled abruptly as if he could sense their concern for Peter and approved of it. "He's in no danger. I understand the rest of you were exposed to a problem with more ghosts, an energy depleting experience?" He shook his head. "Ghostbusters in Jonesville. I never thought I'd see it. You've been examined?"

Egon nodded. "They examined us while you were busy with Peter. There are apparently no side effects for what happened to us, except for fatigue. We were instructed to go to bed, and Winston rented us a couple of rooms at the motel across the street, but we couldn't leave until we heard about Peter."

"Now you've heard. You look like you need sleep very badly. Go to the motel. Dr. Venkman isn't to be disturbed until morning. Come back then and you'll be able to see him." He gestured toward the door. "Good night, gentlemen," he added and headed off down the hall without waiting to see if they meant to obey him or not.

"Come on, guys," urged Ray, grinning in relief. "I was sure Peter was gonna be okay, but it really is good to hear it officially. I think I'm going to sleep in tomorrow morning."

"You got that right," agreed Winston, falling into step with the occultist, pausing as he realized Egon wasn't following. He turned to stare at the physicist. "Egon, you coming, m'man?"

"I think I'll wait a little longer," Egon replied. He hadn't realized until he spoke that he meant to do it, but once the words were out, he knew he wasn't ready to leave yet. It made no sense; Peter was out of danger and sleeping, and Egon's presence could make no difference one way or another, but a part of him simply refused to allow him to walk away.

"They won't let you see Peter," Ray reminded him sympathetically. "I know what you mean; I wish we could camp in his room, too, but we know he'll be okay. You're tired, Egon. You need sleep as much as we do."

"I know that, Ray. I don't intend to stay long. It's possible Peter will awaken now that he's in a comfortable bed, clean and undergoing the treatment the doctor spoke of. He didn't wake up when we brought him in here. I'd like one of us to be on hand if he asks for us."

"Maybe we should all stay," Ray suggested, hanging back.

"No way, Ray. I don't even like the idea of Egon doing it," Winston argued, grabbing Ray by the scruff of the neck and propelling him toward the door. "But Peter's not the only stubborn member of the team. I'm too tired to drag you out of here, Egon. You stretch out on that couch," he instructed sternly. "If I find out you sat up or paced the halls and didn't sleep, I'm gonna be real pissed with you."

"I'll rest," Egon promised. "I'm too tired not to rest. Get some sleep. I won't wake you when I come in."

He watched the other two move away, their footsteps lagging with utter fatigue as they trudged down the hall. Stretching and yawning, Egon stood there for a few minutes after they had vanished through the swinging doors, then he headed for the nearest men's room, where he splashed water on his face, knuckled his eyes as if he could force awareness in them, then went in search of Peter's room. In the wee hours, the hospital was very quiet, and it was easy to avoid the hospital personnel as he reached the door of Peter's room and peered around it.

Venkman was sleeping naturally, his face pale even against the whiteness of the pillows. A dim light from the partly closed bathroom door traced a line of brightness across the bed, but it didn't fall across Peter's eyes. When Egon crept into the room, the sleeping man didn't stir, and even the faint noise of the chair Spengler dragged over to the bed, so he could sit down right beside Peter didn't disturb the sleeper.

"I'm here, Peter," Egon said in a voice little more than a whisper. He reached up and captured Peter's hand in a grip meant to reassure; if Peter had any traces of consciousness he would feel the touch and know he was not alone. And a side effect Egon admitted wryly, it would reassure him that Peter was alive and well, recovering. Sometimes one could know facts but not feel them inside. The touch of Peter's hand against his own dispelled all the inner doubts Egon seldom admitted he was capable of possessing.

Satisfied, he slid down in the chair, resting his head against its back and closed his eyes, meaning only to rest. He was asleep in moments.

When the doctor poked his head into the room ten minutes later, Egon was snoring softly, as deeply asleep as Peter. The doctor looked at him ruefully but without surprise, then he shook his head and left him there.

Janine arrived in Jonesville around four a.m. and went straight to the hospital in hopes of finding information about the guys. Instructing Slimer, whom she'd found at headquarters and who had insisted on coming along, and Muz to wait in her VW, she rushed inside and hurried up to the emergency desk. "The Ghostbusters... I'm their secretary, Janine Melnitz. Are they here? Are they okay?"

"Oh yes," the woman replied, snapping her gum. "You're here to see Dr. Venkman."

"What about the others?" Janine asked, alarm stealing through her.

"They were here and checked out by the emergency staff. They weren't admitted, but one of them is sleeping in the waiting room, I believe. They wanted somebody to be on hand when Dr. Venkman woke up. It was the one with glasses who stayed here, the blond one. Dr. Spengler?" Janine nodded, and the woman continued, "The others went to a motel. This isn't visiting hours, but we were told you were on the way up here. You can look in on Dr. Venkman if you promise not to awaken him."

"Is he okay? They told me a ghost gave him an overdose."

The receptionist frowned at her. "I can't give out information on a patient's condition." At the sight of Janine's instantly belligerent expression she added hastily, "But Dr. Fratelli did say he'd be fine."

"Where is Peter?" Janine asked. She'd check on him first and then find the waiting room.

She had to pass the waiting room on the way to Peter's room, and she paused at the doorway and glanced inside, looking for Egon. The only person there was a young man who was pacing back and forth, and who looked up eagerly at the sound of her arrival. "The baby?" he demanded, then his face fell when he saw Janine was not dressed as a doctor or nurse. "Oh, sorry."

"I was looking for one of my bosses," she said. "Have you seen..."

"There hasn't been anyone here since Nancy went into labor," the young man replied. "I've been here half an hour. It's our first."

Janine's experience told her that a first time labor usually took longer than half an hour. Her sister Gloria's had taken seventeen hours but she didn't think it would be fair to tell the young man that. "Congratulations," she told him with a smile and went along to Peter's room, suddenly positive of where she would find Egon.

Pausing in the open doorway, she began to smile. She was right. Egon hadn't stayed in the waiting room; he had come here as she might have known he would. He'd dragged his chair up beside Peter's bed, braced his feet in its under-structure and had slid down in the chair, head against its backrest. Eyes closed, he was snoring lightly, lost to the world in sheer exhaustion. His hand stretched out to clasp Peter's on the bed as if to reassure the sleeping man everything was going to be okay--and possibly to provide Egon himself with an equal reassurance. After such close calls, it was natural to be more possessive and fussy than normal, something even Egon was guilty of occasionally, though if accused, he'd probably come up with three scientific reasons for his actions in rapid succession. There was something about the set of Egon's jawline that informed Janine it would take more than doctors, nurses and orderlies to evict Egon now that he had come here. She would have liked to tell him she'd arrived, but he looked so tired she decided it would be better not to awaken him.

Instead she turned her gaze to Peter. He was sleeping with the utterly fierce intensity of the very young or the completely exhausted, his face lax yet strained from the experience of the overdose. There was an IV running into the back of one hand but there were no monitors attached to him. The IV might be for dehydration or to deal with a problem the drug had caused, and Janine suspected they'd most likely take it out in the morning. As if to confirm her amateur diagnosis, Peter was breathing regularly and deeply, the respiration of someone who has a very strong grasp on life and doesn't mean to let it go. She felt her lips curling up in a fond smile she'd never allow a conscious Peter to see. He exasperated her more than all the others put together, but somehow she always enjoyed their verbal spats and the knowledge that she could go to him with a real problem and have him help her without hesitation and keep it confidential if she asked him to. My big brother, she thought affectionately, a relationship she'd never admit aloud, even to herself, but one that pleased them both, even when they were fighting fiercely. His hand lay comfortably in Egon's and she suspected he'd fight to keep that grip even from the depth of sleep; he knew Egon was here. The Ghostbusters were all brothers, she knew, closer than those who had been born kin. Of course they wouldn't leave him here alone tonight, though if he had to stay longer, they would make arrangements and come and go as was necessary. Janine suspected Egon was here because Peter might awaken and fail to understand where he was--he might have been brought in while unconscious or asleep--and none of them had wanted him to awaken alone in a strange place.

As if he had sensed her presence, Egon stretched in the chair, yawned copiously and opened his eyes. Blinking in surprise he glanced in her direction, then he smiled and made a hasty gesture for silence, raising his free hand to put a finger to his lips. "Shh. What time is it?" he asked in a soft voice.

"After four. I just got here. How is he?" She gestured at Peter who hadn't stirred at the sound of either of their voices. He was fathoms deep and it would take more than a quiet conversation conducted in familiar voices to disturb him.

"He'll be fine," Egon said with considerable satisfaction, the relief evident in his voice and in his eyes. "We had to close a cross-rip, and needed Peter to help us, and he simply wasn't ready. He could barely climb the stairs, let alone fight entities from another dimension, yet he did both. But Dr. Fratelli says he's sleeping now simply because he's exhausted and that it's the best thing for him. I don't want to wake him."

"You look almost as tired as he does," she remarked pointedly, studying him up and down. "It can't have been easy for any of you. I can sit with him a little. I drank so much coffee on the way up here to keep myself awake that I don't think I could sleep if you put me to bed."

"No," Egon said abruptly and positively, then realizing how that must sound, he added, "Peter drank the overdose in his chocolate and I sat right beside him while he slept, getting worse and worse and didn't notice until it was almost too late." He shook his head. "I owe it to him to be here for him. He might have died while I sat beside him unknowing."

Janine was shocked, appalled at the sound of his self-reproach, though she could tell from the tone of his voice that he had almost come to terms with this subject and would most likely never mention it again unless Peter made him talk it out. Peter's survival had reassured him, and if she knew her Doctor V, he had probably lambasted Egon for it the minute he noticed. It would be hard for Egon to wait here in the small hours of the morning thinking about what might have been, and she was glad she had come to turn his thoughts to something more positive. "But he didn't, Egon. You realized in time or Peter wouldn't be here. Not only that, you saved him. I know you. I know that you took charge and not only did you do what needed doing but you were strong for the others, because you always are. You certainly didn't give him the drug. And to agonize over what might have been is something you've always cautioned the rest of us about. Many times." She tapped her toe on the floor, her arms folded across his chest. "Think about it," she insisted. "Because I'm not going to put up with any crap from you."

Egon smiled faintly at the sternness of her tone. "It's...somewhat different to remember my own advice when the shoe is on the other foot," he admitted around a yawn he tried in vain to smother. "I began to imagine what it would be like at headquarters without him, what it would feel like to go on busts without Peter...."

"Well, don't imagine it another second," she told him sternly, stabbing her finger at him and wagging it. "Because he's too stubborn to die and he loves being a Ghostbuster so much that when he gets old you guys will have to force him to retire, probably at the point of a thrower. And I'd bet my next three raises Peter won't hold anything against you, not for a second. He might take it out on poor Muz, but he won't blame you or the other two. That's not the way he operates. He might be the most exasperating man I've ever met, but I know that much."

Egon's face warmed and he smiled at her gratefully. "I know you're right, Janine. I suspect we'll all feel better when he wakes up and starts complaining about how terrible he feels."

"Because he doesn't complain unless he's starting to feel better," she said knowingly. "I figured out that little barometer to the health of Dr. Venkman a long time ago. Egon, listen to me. You saved Peter's life. You know that. He's going to be just fine; the doctor said so. Your problem is that you're sitting here in the dark letting yourself imagine things. I still think you should go and sleep and leave him to me."

Egon shook his head stubbornly. "No, I'll stay. I've been sleeping; I'm not just sitting here awake imagining terrible things." He managed a smile. "That isn't my way." Yeah, right, thought Janine, but she didn't call him on his obvious lie. "The reality was bad enough," he concluded, "And then there's Ray to think about. He fusses about us a lot when anyone is sick or hurt, and Winston just takes the extra weight we dump on his shoulders and never complains about it. I won't make it harder for either of them."

"I know." She crept closer and put her arms around him, and his free arm came up around her back and held her close. There was nothing of romance or passion in the embrace; they were simply two friends who had experienced a bad fright and who needed the warmth of human contact. She clung to him for a moment longer and backed away when he released her.

"We reserved a room for you at the Cloverleaf Motel," Egon informed her, degenerating to the practical. "It's right across the street from the hospital. They have your key at the desk. Go and rest. You couldn't have had as much coffee as we forced down Peter, and he's sleeping like a baby."

"He is, isn't he?" She grinned. "I hope the motel won't have fits, because I've got Slimer and Muz with me. I had a terrible time making them stay in the car. They wanted to come in here and check on Peter and I knew the hospital wouldn't go for that. Muz is pretty miserable. He's convinced Peter is going to hate him, and Peter will probably be rough on him. You'll have to watch him for it," she concluded knowingly. "You're the only one he'll listen to."

"We couldn't have done without the paramedics," Egon said thoughtfully. "I'll remind Peter we wouldn't have had them without Muz getting to you and giving you Ray's note."

"Note?" Janine asked blankly. "What note? He came screaming in, in a real panic demanding I get the 'pyramids'. It took awhile to realize he meant 'paramedics'. He didn't have any note with him. It would have spared me that game of 'twenty questions' we played."

Egon stared at her, wondering where the hapless little specter had left the message, then he threw back his head and laughed, a genuinely delighted sound, full of humor and relief.

Without fully waking Peter muttered something about noise and turned over pointedly, but not in such a way that he pulled free of Egon's grip. Egon and Janine smiled at him then at each other, then she bent forward, kissed him quickly on the cheek and hurried out of the room. Maybe the bed Egon had reserved for her would feel good after all.

Peter Venkman awoke slowly and languorously, feeling so much better than he had the last time he remembered anything that he wondered if he'd dreamed it all. Cautiously he listened to his surroundings, trying to figure out where he was. There had been various disturbances that had partially roused him, but none of them had dragged him fully from the depths of comfortable sleep. Now he stretched a little, and even that felt good, dispensing some of the lingering ache from his joints and muscles. His stomach had a hollow feel to it, not as if he'd been sick recently but as if it had been much too long since he'd been fed. He wasn't energetic enough to bound out of bed and go in search of breakfast, but he planned to wheedle a major feeding out of someone before much more time had passed.

Something touched his arm and he opened his eyes. A total stranger looked down at him, a short, barrel chested character in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck that indicated his profession, even if the nametag over his pocket hadn't read, 'Dr. K. Winkle.' He had wild tufts of red hair styled à la Einstein as if he spent a lot of time raking both hands through it in frustration or impatience, and a thick, bushy RAF mustache that quirked at the ends in a way that suggested its owner was prone to smiling a lot. Vivid blue eyes peered down at Peter from beneath shaggy red eyebrows.

"I thought you were awake," he said with considerable satisfaction in a rich baritone voice. "I sent your buddy Egon off to get some sleep a couple of hours ago, though he didn't want to leave. He sat up all night sleeping in your chair and the night nurses let him get away with it. Sentimental, I call it. Your pal will have a helluva stiff neck, I'll bet. He didn't want to go. He said you wouldn't know where you were if you woke up and one of your friends wasn't here."

"Sure I do, doc," Peter said with certainty, his heart warming at the thought of Egon camped out in the hospital chair, knowing how much he would have appreciated him if he'd awakened in the middle of the night and found himself in a strange place. "Hospital. They said they'd stick me in one. Is this Jonesville or back in the City."

"Jonesville," the doctor said. "I've removed your IV about an hour ago, and I want to check you over before I discharge you. How do you feel?"

"A little dragged out, but not too bad," Peter admitted. "A lot more human than last night. It was just last night, wasn't it?" When the doctor nodded, he forged on. "How are the guys? They got zapped a little, and they were pretty tired when I saw them last."

"They're doing quite well," the doctor replied. "No problems. A good night's sleep, a good meal and they'll be back to normal. We tested them all but didn't admit any of them. You're the one who scared them."

"At least I feel human again and not like some slug the guys found under a rock," Peter said thoughtfully. "Didn't mean to scare them."

"Hard to avoid, I'd think, a team like yours," the doctor replied. "The doctor on duty last night had to throw them all out, but Egon sneaked back in. A sensible man like that should know better." He shook his head. "Are you hungry, Peter?"

"I'm starving," he declared reproachfully as if everyone should have guessed. "I want my breakfast."

"It's afternoon, my boy," the doctor informed him. "It's lunch they'll bring you in a minute. By the way, I'm Kent Winkle. I hear you and your friends tried to make Ghostbusters out of a couple of my paramedics. Shadow creatures out at the old Kingsley place." He shook his head. "Now that's interesting. I told your buddy Egon when I sent him off to sleep that I wanted to meet with all of you before you left Jonesville. This isn't the first time there were shadows up there, though of course I doubt anybody but old Douglass Kingsley had any idea what they were."

"You know something about it?" Peter asked, interested. He suspected there was more to learn than they'd reasoned out unless Egon had learned more from those old journals than he'd explained when Peter was conscious, not that he'd enjoyed that state very much last evening.

"A little. I had an ancestor die of it, old Piet Brinker, my mother's grandfather. His sons did some checking and it's come down in the family legends. I've always been interested in the old stories." He turned to the door at a sound there and nodded to the aide who stood there with a covered tray. "Yes, bring in his meal. He's hungry enough to eat the tray along with it, I think."

The young girl deposited it on Peter's tray table while he straightened up and tried to look fairly presentable, a difficult task in a hospital gown. When she had departed, Peter grabbed for his fork, but the doctor forestalled him long enough to listen to his heart and lungs with the stethoscope and nod in satisfaction at the results.

"You keep 'em in the refrigerator, right, doc?" Peter asked, shivering under the touch.

"In dry ice," riposted the doctor without a second's pause. "I get complaints if they're too comfortable and don't wake up patients in the middle of the night. The AMA gets after me. We've got our standards after all." He chuckled. "Don't give me any lip, young man. I'm old enough to be your father."

"I give my dad lip all the time," Peter replied automatically around a mouthful of chicken.

"And anyone else who crosses your path, I'll wager." Winkle smiled. "Eat up, and when you're done, get dressed. Your friend Ray brought your clothes and they're in there." He pointed to the closet. "I'll be back in a little while to sign you out. I can't keep you here. You're as healthy as a horse."

Peter proved the truth of that comment by devouring everything on his plate and wishing for more. Then he bounded up and headed for the bathroom, emerging a while later showered and shaved, his hair damp but clean and styled, and put on clean clothes. Dressed, he decided to go and look for the doctor rather than waiting. He wanted to get out of here and find the guys. He was just starting for the door when it opened and the other three Ghostbusters and Janine came in.

"Peter!" cried Ray, who was in the lead, jerking to a stop at the sight of Peter up and dressed. "You look great!" He darted forward and threw his arms around Peter's neck, hugging him hard with delight and relief.

"Are you allowed up?" asked Egon practically. He still looked tired, but it didn't stop him from detaching Peter from Ray and grasping him by the shoulders, to study him consideringly. "Yes, you do look much better." He slung his arm around Peter for a moment and Peter looked up at him and grinned.

"You bet I do, and I feel better, too, thanks to you, good buddy. And you guys too," he added, looking past Egon to Ray and Winston.

"Hey, guys, I'm fine," Peter reassured them. "Really. The doc will be back to discharge me any second. Let's blow this popstand."

That made Winston laugh and step forward. Peter held up a hand. "I swear, Zed, if you mess up my hair when I just got it looking right again--"

Winston laughed harder and gave Peter a comradely squeeze instead. "Don't sweat it, Pete. Nothing's too good for you today."

"Then can we head out and get more food?" Peter pleaded, trying to look hopelessly pathetic and realizing from their broad grins that he was failing miserably. "I'm starving and they gave tiny little portions, and it's hospital food," he concluded reproachfully.

"He's okay," Ray told Egon. "I told you he would be."

"So it would seem," Egon responded, his eyes lighting. The tension in his shoulders slid away and he straightened up, looking much more like himself. "But remember this, Peter. You're fine. You said so. That means no drawn out convalescence when we get you home. Maybe no busts for a day or two, but we're not planning to cater to your every whim."

Peter's face fell so dramatically his three comrades couldn't hold back their laughter. They closed in around him, slapping him on the back and asking eager questions, and a smile of sheer contentment began to spread over his face.

They were still talking eagerly, regaling him with details he'd missed from the previous night when Dr. Winkle came to sign Peter out of the hospital.

Fortified with a couple of thick crust pizzas, the Ghostbusters and Janine presented themselves at Dr. Winkle's office in Ecto-1, the Ghostbusters' vehicle the proud owner of four new tires. Mr. Johnson, who had proven to be a kindhearted and good natured sort, had added the cost of the tires to his payment for services rendered, quite horrified to learn the nature of the threat the Ghostbusters had faced and relieved to think they had solved a problem he hadn't even realized he had. He also offered to pay for any of Peter's hospital treatment that wasn't covered by the Ghostbusters' insurance. Peter declared him a customer in a million and parted from him quite happily, the check in his pocket.

Slimer and Muz were not with them. Egon had noticed the way Peter's face darkened at the mention of their new ghost, no doubt remembering what Muz had put him through. Deciding this wasn't the time to go over all the details of that with Peter yet, Egon had taken Slimer aside and asked him if he would take Muz back to New York and keep him there. Slimer, predictably, hadn't wanted to do any such thing; he had never really warmed to Muz, the larger part of which was jealousy and a proprietary attitude toward the Ghostbusters, but Egon had said, "It's for Peter, Slimer. He's been really sick, and he's mad at Muz because of it. It wasn't Muz's fault, but Peter won't be ready to see that yet. We'll be back before noon tomorrow. Maybe Peter will be calmed down by then. This is important, Slimer. I'm relying on you."

Thus challenged, Slimer had puffed out his chest and thrown Egon an exaggerated salute. "You bet, Egon," he'd agreed, and darted over to Muz. Ten minutes later, both ghosts had vanished, so that when the team had left the hospital to go to lunch, Peter didn't have to face Muz yet, though he looked around through narrowed eyes as if he suspected the specter of sneaking up on him. Egon hoped his anger toward the little ghost would cool down but, knowing Peter, that wouldn't happen this fast. He'd see if there was anything he could do about it tomorrow.

Dr. Winkle's receptionist showed them into the doctor's office and fetched an extra chair so they could all sit down. It was a bigger room than they'd expected, a huge desk of gleaming dark wood dominating the room. The walls were designed with African tribal masks and primitive paintings, and a shelf behind the doctor held small marble sculptures that were extremely modern, yet didn't contrast unpleasantly with the masks. Instead of typical institutional furniture, big overstuffed chairs in soothing shades of green and blue jostled for space with bookshelves that held medical books plus various best sellers and classics and what looked like a complete and well read set of Shakespeare's plays. A disectable model of the human heart sat on a corner of the desk.

When they came in Winkle looked up from a chart in which he'd been writing and set it aside. "There you are. Sit down, everyone and welcome." He gestured them into chairs with an expansive motion of his arm. "I'm glad you came. The shadow incident from the 1890's has worried me a long time, though there was no evidence anything had happened after the death of my great grandfather and the others."

"So you knew something had happened a hundred years ago?" Ray asked excitedly. "How did you know the shadows came from the Kingsley house?"

"I didn't know exactly what it was, but I suspected it came from the house, and I'll tell you why. My grandmother and my great uncles were naturally upset when their father died; that was Dr. Piet Brinker, whom I believe you've heard tell of; and they were never satisfied with the coroner's findings, especially since there were a series of mysterious deaths in the immediate area, all solitary people who had died alone. When Kingsley died mysteriously so soon afterwards, they were certain something was wrong, something strange and unexplainable by ordinary standards, especially with the skills known to the late Victorians. My great-uncle Karl Brinker did a detailed study, questioning people in the neighborhood. He found several people who claimed they had seen vague, insubstantial shapes creeping along the hedgerows and fences, though most of them had been scoffed at for their claims. Several people reported feeling as if they had been drained of energy, though not enough to kill them, just to weaken them. Those reports all took place in the daylight hours. It was a cool spring, they say, just as this one is, and from what I've learned of your findings, heat was anathema to the shadows. I talked to Clary Kinsett this morning and she filled me in about what you experienced there. It ties in with my great-uncle's findings. Heat is what drives the shadows back. I understand you've sealed the gateway permanently and there won't be a recurrence a hundred years from now."

"That's right, we did seal it," Ray replied. "Egon adjusted a trap and it made the cross-rip, well, implode," he concluded, choosing as simple a way to explain it as possible, though Egon suspected Dr. Winkle might have understood a more complex explanation. "It was tricky and Clary and Max were a big help."

"You said Kingsley died mysteriously," Egon prompted the doctor, leaning forward with interest. "How, exactly? We found one of his journals and he talked about the shadows and a plan he had to defeat them, though he didn't go into any detail. He reported he would try that night, and that's where the journal ended. I theorized that he had succeeded, at least for a time, but that he had died in the attempt." He lifted a questioning eyebrow.

"It was a nine-days wonder at the time," Winkle replied, shaking his head. "He died in a fire in the attic of Kingsley House. It was a fierce blaze, and it killed him, burning him so horribly they would never have identified the remains except for the facts that he was not seen again alive and that the corpse wore a pocket watch Kingsley was known to carry. And of course it was his house."

"Works for me," Peter said brightly. "So they found a crispy critter up there and nobody saw any shadows again or reported any fainting fits, right?"

"Exactly. The average person in the neighborhood never realized anything was wrong, and the word went around that Kingsley had been killed by a freak fire, and my great-grandfather had probably died of a heart attack or stroke, though in actual fact there was no medical evidence to support either claim. No one could explain the other deaths but as time passed and there were no new ones, people tended to let the matter drop. Karl only persisted because of Piet's death."

"He got sucked dry," Peter said, "the way the shadows tried to drain the guys." He glanced around at the other three, a momentary flash of memory darkening his green eyes.

"Good thing you were on the job, Peter," Ray said quickly, winning a smile from Peter.

"Fastest sunlamp in the West," Peter responded promptly. "So there was this freak fire that killed Kingsley but it didn't burn the house down? Didn't anybody wonder about that? Or think maybe something weird had been happening?"

"A few did; there were some strange newspaper headlines. I wonder at it myself; evidently Kingsley was not recognizable, yet there was no evidence of burning in the attic itself."

"The hexagram," Ray said in triumph. "I knew it was important. It's resistent to fire, and I bet Kingsley set a fire in the center of it. It would have shielded the rest of the house. I don't know whether he felt he had to be there too or if the shadows managed to drive him into the fire. But once there was, well, nothing left to burn, the fire must have just stopped. Poor Kingsley. He didn't even know for sure if it would work. I hope he realized he was stopping the shadows before he died."

"I've got another question," Peter said quickly as if he realized this would not be a good subject to dwell upon. "Kingsley was pretty quick to realize what was going on and where, and he had a lot better idea how to stop it than most people would have had back then. So does that mean he's the one who opened the cross-rip in the first place? Was he messing with things he couldn't control?"

"I think he was, Peter," Egon replied. "His journal spoke of 'the experiment' and while he didn't clarify what it was, I suspect he wanted to find a way to seek out doorways to other worlds. I doubt he expected anything as dangerous as the shadows. He most likely thought he could cross over into various worlds, full of flowers and sunshine and strange beings with whom he could hold dialogues. Maybe he wanted to have more realistic seances. They were very popular at that particular time. Instead he got a mindless hunger he couldn't divert away. He must have studied very carefully and realized heat protected him. So he attempted to close the gate again and died in the process."

"Well, I have to say I'm glad to have some real answers after all this time," Winkle said, rubbing his hands together in satisfaction. "I worried when the house was finally sold. I don't think the door has ever opened again, but I think sometimes the shadows rattled it. No one has lived there for any length of time until Bob Johnson bought the place last fall. I went to him and warned him, but he scoffed it off until weird things started happening again. What puzzles me is that some of the things he described when he decided to telephone you don't match anything else I've ever documented."

"That's because of the ghost who wanted to kill us," Ray explained quickly, glad to make sense of the mystery. "We think he wanted to lure us away from the city and get rid of us, and so he settled on a recognized haunted house and proceeded to haunt it a little more. Between noises, sounds and misty shapes that he'd produce and the initial advance of the shadows, Johnson was bound to call for help, especially when some of his work crew started passing out. I don't think the shadows were harmful to ghosts; maybe they couldn't feed on ectoplasmic energy. That ghost was pretty nasty, but we're lucky he did what he did. I'd hate to think what would have happened if we hadn't been called in when we were. The shadows came out by the hundreds, maybe even thousands. They might have killed millions of people before anybody figured out how to stop them."

"Poisoned to save the world," Peter retorted with a crooked grin, striking a dramatic pose. "I can think of a lot better ways to be a hero."

"You didn't do too badly, homeboy," Winston reminded him. "You got to pull sunlamp duty after all."

"Yeah, all of us were great, including Clary and Max. I don't suppose you know Clary's phone number?" Peter asked Dr. Winkle hopefully.

"Uh, Peter," Ray said hesitantly. "I-I've got it." His cheeks reddened slightly.

Peter turned and stared at him. "You've got it?"

"Well, she's a Captain Steel fan," Ray explained as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "We talked a little on the way into town last night. She's coming down the weekend after next for that comic book convention. We're going together."

Egon and Winston made no effort to stifle their smiles, and Peter grimaced. "Wonderful," he groaned. "I love it. The famous Doctor Venkman, romantic hero, gets an ugly little ghost who likes to give lethal mickeys, and Mr. Bashful gets the girl."

"I think that has a pretty nice ring to it," Winston said to Egon, elbowing him in amusement. "What do you think, m'man."

"I agree," Egon replied, his eyes sparkling with mischief. He rose to his feet. "I'll write up a report on the shadows when we return home. Would you like a copy of it, Doctor?"

"Yes, very much. This has been a most interesting exchange. It almost makes me wish we'd have another ghost up here so I could talk to you about such things again." He bounced to his feet with zestful energy that wouldn't have been out of place in a man twenty-five years his junior and came out with them. "I, for one, am very glad you were here. You watch that hot chocolate, Dr. Venkman."

"I will," Peter said. "Especially when I don't know where it's been. Keep that little spud away from me from now on." Egon looked at him sharply, wondering at the bitterness that had suddenly slid into his voice. He had a fair idea that Peter was still annoyed with Muz, and Egon couldn't blame him for that, though the little ghost had been used, as they all had. Egon resolved to keep an eye on Peter when he next interacted with the ghost and see how the exchange came out. Peter often complained about Slimer, threatening to blast him, but it had been clear to the other three for a long time that he didn't mean it 99% of the time. This time, Egon suspected Peter would go after Muz if the ghost came around when Peter was armed and ready.

They headed out of the office with Peter still muttering dark things about Muz and the fate that had prevented a 'promising romance' between him and Clary, and climbed into Ecto-1 for the drive home.

Peter stretched out comfortably on the couch at Ghostbuster Central the following afternoon and snatched up the channel selector to find something more interesting to watch than a soap opera or talk show. The guys had decided that Peter was entitled to a day off once they got home, but they'd also decided they wouldn't fetch and carry for him or run his errands. He needed to rest, but he was certainly well enough to get his own soda and fluff his own pillows. Peter had agreed, although somewhat reluctantly. He'd been looking forward to such treatment, though he was willing to admit, at least to himself, that he really didn't need to be waited on. He just would have liked it. After all, he'd had a rotten time of it up in Jonesville. Not that he wanted to dwell on that particularly; what memories he had of the aftermath of the overdose had not been particularly nice. Better to lie back and enjoy being even this much of an invalid for as long as he could possibly get away with it.

Egon was sitting on the chair behind the couch, deep in the newest edition of Who's Who and What's That which had just come out, cross-referencing it with the old edition, and he hadn't been saying much for the last hour except to mutter, "Interesting," or, "I disagree," from time to time while Peter channel surfed. Peter didn't know if the other three had designated someone to watch him or not, but before Egon had come along with his book Ray had been here watching a couple of cartoons, and before that, Winston had brought up the mail and gone over it at the end of the couch, shoving Peter's feet out of the way so there'd be room to sit there, flipping envelopes in Peter's direction with a running commentary. Then there'd been the reporters who had come around to get the exclusive story of the Ghostbusters' latest case. Peter had loved that part of it. It always energized him to talk to the press.

Slimer had stopped by too, trying to snitch some of the popcorn Peter had made for himself about an hour ago, and Peter had given him a few handfuls before he finished up. He doubted Slimer had been here to 'babysit' but merely to eat because once the food was gone the spud had vanished again, not that Peter minded. He was surprised Slimer hadn't hung around longer, fussing over him the way he had when the team had returned home. Muz had been there, too, and Peter didn't want anything to do with that particular ghost. He'd fended both of them off, Slimer in the usual way and Muz with cool determination. If the guys had thought anything of it, they hadn't mentioned it and they'd better not. Peter didn't think it was fair that a ghost who'd nearly murdered him got any decent treatment from his buddies.

Pushing away his unpleasant thoughts about Muz, the pills, and the memory of that night, he settled his head back on the pillow again and closed his eyes. It was time to take a little nap.

Peter had been half dozing for no more than ten minutes when he heard a familiar burbling noise and opened his eyes. It was Muz, hovering over him, looking down at the supine psychologist, his eyes wide and uneasy. "Talk to Peter?" he asked nervously.

"No, you can't talk to Peter," Venkman replied coldly, glaring at the offending gooper through narrowed eyes. "I don't want to talk to you, I don't want to see you, and I'd like it a whole lot better if you'd just take off. Got it? I didn't ask you to stay here and I can get a trap in a minute. So bug off, willya?"

Muz whimpered, his whole body quaking with shivers. "Love Peter," he whispered, holding his ground and gazing piteously at him.

"It's not mutual. So beat it." Peter heard Egon's book close though the physicist didn't speak.

"Muz sorry," the ghost insisted.

"Yeah, and that really made me feel great when I was puking my guts up," snapped Peter. He had been fed up with Muz and ready to give him a rough time about it but his words half surprised himself, though he didn't call them back.

"It wasn't his fault, Peter," Egon said mildly, joining the conversation. "And you know it wasn't."

"Small consolation if I'd bought the big one. It's just not safe to have him around. Next time he might decide we're too cold and burn down the fire station or something else equally lethal."

Egon came over and sat down on the back of the couch, looking down at Peter. "He would never hurt any of us voluntarily. You know that very well."

"He doesn't have to do it voluntarily," Peter reminded him, sitting up and leaning back against the arm of the couch as if it would be easier to defend his position that way. He was even a little hurt that Egon should take Muz's side in the argument. After all, Egon was Peter's buddy and Muz had nearly killed him. "It's not worth it to keep him, and you know it. Whether he meant to or not, he nearly got me killed."

"Whether I meant to or not, I nearly helped him," Egon reminded him in an utterly reasonable tone, as if he refused to allow the conversation degenerate into a genuine argument. "You told me it wasn't my fault, as I recall. You got on my case about it."

"You hardly gave me a drug overdose, Spengs," Peter said, staring at the blond man reproachfully. "And you know it. There wasn't anything for you to notice; the change was just too gradual. We've been all over this a couple of times." Was Egon still blaming himself for something that wasn't his fault? Concerned, Peter studied his friend's face, looking for traces of guilt. He didn't see any; he was pretty sure Egon had worked through all that fairly quickly, and there had been no blame to begin with. Peter had told him so; Winston had told him so; even Janine had informed Peter that she had told him so.

"I was there, Peter."

"Yeah. Guilt by proximity? Give me a break. It's usually Ray I have to talk out of packing a bag for these little guilt trips. Get this clear, Spengs. It was not your fault."

"No, and neither was it Muz's fault," Egon reminded him. He reached down and clasped Peter's shoulder, squeezing the tensed muscles beneath his hand. "He was used, Peter. He was trying to do something very nice for you. He made a mistake, and he's sorry. I think you know that perfectly well. It isn't like you to be unfair to someone helpless."

Peter hated that. Egon was right; he always was when it came to something like this, but Peter didn't want to let go of his grudge. He had never talked about those first, blurred memories when he began to come back to awareness, wretchedly sick, utterly miserable, hurting, confused. His mind had not been clear; he hadn't understood everything, but he'd heard the frantic fear in his friends' voices as they worked on him. He'd known, known with utter certainty, that he was dying, and he wasn't even able to say goodbye. The fear that had consumed him at that moment still lingered at the edges of his mind; it had roused him in the middle of the night last night in a dream that had left him drenched in cold sweat, shaking and shivering, relieved that no one had awakened and realized it. Such moments of utter vulnerability Peter preferred to keep to himself.

Muz had given him that medicine, and it didn't matter that he'd meant it well. Peter shivered as he thought of those dark, fuzzy memories, the urgent command in Egon's voice, the strength he'd projected because if he didn't his own fear and worry would have swamped him, the sheer panic in Ray's tones, the deliberate strength in Winston's as they worked frantically together. They'd suffered too, and it was Muz who'd caused it, it was all Muz... Peter shivered again.

"Yeah, I know it, Egon, but I almost died, and I can't... I can't..." His voice quivered unexpectedly and suddenly Egon was sitting beside him, an arm around his shoulders. Gratefully Peter leaned against Egon, still shivering, turning into the circle of Egon's arm. It had taken a long time for the reaction to catch up to him, and he was glad Egon had been here when it did.

"We wouldn't have let you die, Peter. Know that, because it's true," Egon said, firm and determined as if he would stand against anyone who would challenge him. Peter bobbed his head against Egon's shoulder in acceptance of that fact but he didn't have any words to reply. It was enough to hold on and know he'd been as safe as his friends could make him, which was saying quite a lot.

For a long time they sat there side by side, neither man speaking, until Peter felt himself begin to relax, secure in the knowledge that Egon wouldn't have let anything happen to him; none of them would. Knowing the guys, they'd have probably have come into the afterlife in pursuit of him and dragged him back again if anything permanent had happened. The thought of them storming heaven--he wouldn't even consider that he'd go to the other place--made some of the coldness and tension warm and loosen until he regained control of himself.

"It's all right, Peter. You would never have died," Egon said, tightening his arm around Peter's shoulders in unconscious reassurance. "Dr. Winkle says you probably would have made it whatever we did; there wasn't quite enough to kill you. You'd have been awfully sick for days and still laid up without treatment, of course. But..."

Peter stared at him in blank surprise. "I didn't--didn't nearly die?" he asked blankly.

"He talked to me yesterday morning when he sent me to the motel to sleep," Egon explained. "He said you were fit and in good health to begin with and that the odds were in your favor. But he also said we did the right thing, in lieu of proper medical treatment though getting you to vomit when you weren't entirely conscious was risky. There's bound to be reaction; it was a frightening experience, for all of us. Ray was pretty shaky for awhile, but he's getting used to having you with us again. And you know Winston; he's always strong but it doesn't mean he doesn't feel it. You scared us, too. If it gets to you, let us help you. You may be our psychologist in residence, Dr. Venkman, but we've learned a little of the technique over the years from your example."

"Sorry," Peter muttered. "It kinda took me by surprise just now. I didn't realize it had gotten to me." He cleared his throat and glanced up at Egon a little shamefacedly. "Well, I didn't want to realize it. Kick me a little if I get out of hand again, willya?"

"With pleasure." When Peter jerked his head around reproachfully, he saw t