The topic of conversation in many homes was ignored, though, in a remote and isolated Staten Island mansion that sat on a hill overlooking its lesser neighbors. Behind pulled drapes, light flickered and gleamed mysteriously, as if the fictional Martians were making a sneak attack now, when no one was willing to give credence to them. The neighbors, remote as they were in that wealthy neighborhood where houses stood in spacious grounds blocked off from nearby houses by banks of trees, only shook their heads, ignoring anything strange from the mansion on the hill that was distantly visible from the road below. That house, they thought, shaking their heads in familiar scorn, and went their way without looking back. They were long used to ignoring strange lights and noises coming from the tower room and since none of the lights and noises had hurt anyone, the neighbors were inclined to put it down as one more stunt from Crazy Cletus and to ignore it as such.

None of them visited the Vanderbergs any more, never mind that Cletus Vanderberg's parents had once been the cream of New York society, that an aunt of his had survived the Titanic carrying all her jewels in a sack taped to the inside of her bloomers and created a scandal over it, that his great uncle had invented some railway train device that had more than doubled the family fortunes back in the 1880s. Cletus Vanderberg was a strange one. He'd belonged to some cult in the City in the 20s when other men his age had been pursuing flappers and going to speakeasies. There had been an even bigger scandal than the jewel story when something mysterious and unreported had happened and some of the cultists had died. After that, Cletus Vanderberg had seemed a little more normal, especially after he met and married Anne Portman, eldest daughter of a wealthy Long Island family. When she died tragically however, Cletus, though still a young man, had come back to the family home and shut himself up in the south tower, where strange light leaked out to scandalize the neighbors, causing them to speculate he was calling up demons and consorting with Satanists and witches.

Cletus Vanderberg had always felt an obsession with the occult. His letters to a few cronies, some left over from his Oxford days, had spoken of seances, demon summonings, pentagrams, mediums, summoning of ghosts, and joining a cult right after Oxford that worshipped an ancient Sumerian god. Whether it was the failure of the cult or the loss of Cletus' wife in the riding accident that changed him from an outgoing and enthusiastic pursuer of the strange into a dark and brooding man who shut himself away with musty old books and esoteric relics, the man withdrew entirely from society shortly after her death in 1927. Cletus often buried himself in old and mysterious texts, grimoires, ancient and musty tracts located at no little expense and delivered to him from the four corners of the globe. Cletus had joined the Society for Psychical Research while up at Balliol College and had remained active in otherworldly affairs ever since to the annoyance and embarrassment of his more conventional parents who found his pursuit of ghosts, demons and specters embarrassing. They died together in 1930 in an automobile accident that some folks said was not an accident at all, though nothing was ever proven to indicate Cletus might have arranged their deaths. The neighbors shook their heads, giving him a wide berth when they encountered him on the street. They would have felt smug and self-righteous and secure in their Christian beliefs were it not for the uneasy conviction that Cletus was laughing at them, watching them and smiling oddly, as if he knew something they didn't. It might have been an act, but the otherworldly air about him wasn't disguised by the untidy clothes, the shaggy mustache or the cloth cap he wore when he appeared in public. He would sit in the streetcars scribbling notes whenever he went into the City, and even those who didn't know him avoided him uneasily, sensing something strange and possibly dangerous about him.

Either the Stock Market Crash and Great Depression had managed to avoid taking a bite out of the Vanderberg wealth, or the wealth was great enough to withstand the losses on the Market without depleting the man's resources enough to make him abandon his expensive hobbies. Cletus began buying even more exotic items than before; a huge mirror with an elaborate brass frame, arcane books and manuscripts, weird statues, all carried up the sloping driveway and vanishing into the huge Tudor house with the mismatched Victorian towers. Cletus paid no attention to appearances. An old handyman still cut the grass, but no one trimmed the bushes and vines away from the windows, and no one cleaned the windows themselves, so the weird glowing lights that shone periodically from the tower appeared even eerier then they normally would.

Tonight, on this crisp Halloween night, the lights were stranger than ever, vivid and bright in ruby and emerald, as if he had set a bank of traffic lights in his high window to warn the spirits when to stop and go. Three neighbors came by--it was a Monday night--on their way home from their local tavern and paused as brighter light than ever stabbed the darkness, vivid as a beacon, shooting out in a streak of scarlet until it vanished into the trees across the road. Thunder crashed and rumbled, thunder that seemed to come directly from the tower, as if Cletus had summoned the storm and now orchestrated it in the privacy of his retreat. Above it and woven through it in terrifying counterpoint was a savage, muttering roar that almost sounded as if it came from a living throat, though none of the three men who stood transfixed had ever heard a creature who could make such a terrifying sound. Sharp with agony, a scream stabbed through the growling, and suddenly every window in the tower shattered outward as if there had been an explosion, though there was no fire, no smoke. Light blazed up in a blend of colors, catching the shards of glass as they spun down to the distant ground in revolving fragments, green, golden, red, blue, yellow, like the colors in a kaleidoscope, turning and turning, to land with a tinkle of sound in the dried autumn grasses. The scream was repeated, then actual words. "No! Stop. Go back!" followed by a desperate, "HELP ME!" Then, with a whoosh that disrupted the very pressure of the air around the three quivering witnesses, smoke and mist coalesced upon the shattered tower as if it had been sucked inside by a giant bellows, and all the lights in the entire neighborhood went out.

Even in their need to be blase after the Mercury Theater broadcast of the night before, this was too much for even the most intrepid of souls. The three men stared at each other speechlessly then with one accord they turned and ran down the road toward the village as if all the hounds of hell were hard on their heels.

From that day forward, Cletus Vanderberg was never seen again. When finally the police forced their way into the house three days later to investigate his absence, they found an empty room at the top of the tower, windows shattered, books scattered and ruined by the rain that had saturated the room. The faded remains of a pentagram that had been drawn in chalk against an earlier, painted version lingered, part of the chalk washed away by the rain, part scuffed as if someone had kicked it and dragged feet across it. Lying the its center was a medallion Cletus had been known to wear, bronze on a leather thong, with an eye on one side and lettering in an unknown language on the other. A black, slimy substance covered the medallion, a substance with a strange smell that was musty and fishy at the same time. The medallion proved so disturbing to the touch that no one would handle it, and later on, it was reputedly sent to a museum. The same substance covered some of the scattered books and a scientist who was called in later said it had a lot of the same properties as saliva, but if so it didn't match human saliva and it didn't resemble that of any known savage animals.

The tower door had been locked from the inside and the police had been forced to break it down. Cletus wasn't there. No blood stained the floor. Considering the broken windows, the police had gone outside again and searched in widening circles around the foot of the tower, half expecting to find a broken body tangled in one of the shrubs or bushes, but the body was never found. Whatever had happened to him, Cletus Vanderberg was never seen again.

For the first few months after his disappearance, people claimed to see strange lights flickering sporadically in the tower at night, not every night and not even every week, but periodic and intermittent. Whether it was simply the imagination of his neighbors or some remnant of whatever weird happening had caused the occult expert to vanish no one ever knew. Eventually the sightings grew more and more intermittent and finally stopped altogether. A year later, a distant relative moved into the house and renovated the tower, down to repainting the pentagram on the floor in an attempt to restore the place to the way it had been maintained before Cletus disappeared. Nothing bizarre or spooky happened to him, no lights showed themselves except for normal electricity and gradually people stopped talking as much, though everyone in the neighborhood had referred to the place as 'The Haunted House' ever since.

It wasn't until the 1980s that anything happened at all, and at first it seemed a by-product of the Ghostbusters' first big case, their encounter with the Sumerian entity Gozer. Those passers by who saw weird lights gleaming in the tower and reported it to their friends the next day were assumed to have bought into the ghost frenzy that had swept the area prior to and following the Big Apple's brush with the giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. There are those who will jump on any bandwagon, and ghost sightings had become fashionable even before the triumphant defeat of Gozer. When a few curiosity seekers eventually wandered by in the quiet darkness a few days later, there was no trace of anything mysterious, no weird lights, no strange noises, no shattering windows. The house was presently empty anyway, its current owner out of the country, but it stood peacefully on its hill, bland and undisturbed.

The current Vanderberg, grandson of Cletus' cousin Ralph and also known as Ralph was a rising light of the Diplomatic Corps and out of the country more often than he was in it. He was presently posted to Vienna and the house was left to the supervision of a caretaker who didn't live in but who came every few days to check on the place, a phlegmatic fellow named Darius Pettigrew, originally from Bangor, Maine. He was a laconic loner of late middle age who didn't often mingle with anyone else in the neighborhood except for the occasional visit to the local bar where he enjoyed himself by telling ghost stories to the other customers, delighting in his reputation as a crank. His wife was a bit of a gossip, but she couldn't report what her husband wouldn't tell her. She made up a few hopeful tales, but they couldn't be proven and no one ever took her seriously.

Over the next few years there were other sightings. Each time the lights were visible, people talked of them for weeks afterwards. They flickered dimly at other times, sometimes in a blaze of color but others just in an unfamiliar glow that seemed to limn the house in gold and then go away. These times no one measured or recorded. When people asked the caretaker about them during his several-times-weekly visit to the local bar, Darius Pettigrew chewed on his pipe stem and allowed that maybe lights were shining in the tower, but he didn't seem concerned. "Ayuh," he told one of the few men he drank with at the local tavern. "Lights. And what if they are? Don't hurt nobody, lights don't." He raised his glass and took a long sip of ale, the corners of his mouth curling into an amused smile beneath his salt and pepper bushy beard. For him, familiarity bred contempt. Lights had never hurt him so he didn't fear the thought of lights. "Not the same as footsteps, doors opening and closing, seeing things out of the corner of your eye, pages turning in books with no human hand to move them, the eyes of paintings watching you." He made his voice deliberately creepy, eyeing his crony speculatively over the rim of his glass. The bartender, who had been listening for all he was worth, realized Darius was pulling his crony's leg and winked at a customer further down the bar while Darius spun out his spooky tale. He wasn't afraid himself. He simply wanted to frighten others.

Yet three nights later the colored lights flared again, and the next morning Darius' wife arrived at the local police station to report her husband missing. "It was the ghosts that did it," she reported, her fingers tightening on her purse strap, her eyes lowered as if afraid she would see scorn in the faces of her audience. "He used to tell me there were weird noises," she insisted, annoyed at the policeman's lack of response. "Nobody believed me, because when he'd talk at all he made a big joke of it, but there were things. Noises. Lights. Lots of folks saw the lights. Try to tell me they didn't and I'll laugh in your face." Her accent was heavily Brooklyn but her voice was firm and determined. "Something's there. He wrote to Mr. Vanderberg to tell him about it. Got a letter from him yesterday." She stuck her hand into the cavernous bag and produced an envelope with a foreign stamp on it. "See?" She waved it under their noses. "I'm going to see the Ghostbusters next, but you mark my words. Darius didn't come home last night. The ghosts got him."

The officer skimmed the letter. It reeked of skepticism, though it gave grudging permission for something to be done, for a visit from the Ghostbusters if that was what was considered necessary. Ralph Vanderberg III was clearly a skeptic. "If you are seeing ghosts, and you're not seeing them at the bottom of your beer mug, call the Ghostbusters if it will ease your mind and have them bill my office. But I doubt they'll find anything. I lived there nearly twenty years and nothing ever happened in all that time."

"He didn't," Mrs. Pettigrew said stubbornly, when the officer gave the letter back to her and remarked upon Ralph's lack of sightings. "Live there all the time, I mean. Oh, he lived there part of the time, but he was away at school. He went to Choate--same school where President Kennedy went--and then to Harvard. Every summer he went to Europe with his parents. They were a wealthy family. Yes, he was home part of the time but he can hardly speak for every second of every day. You mark me, horrible things are going on in that house. It's an evil place. You tell me why the maids would always quit and why Mrs. Vanderberg, that's Mr. Ralph's mother, Mrs. Ralph Jr., spent the last five years of her life in a mental home. They made excuses, called it a private nursing home, claimed she'd always had poor health. But the woman's hair turned white overnight. She saw something. You couldn't pay me enough to go in there. Not for a million dollars."

Her husband was truly missing. He hadn't come to the tavern after work the night before, and no one in the village had seen him. Vindicated, if not happy with the vindication, Mrs. Pettigrew set off in her little Chevette to catch the Staten Island Ferry and brave the traffic in Manhattan in her quest to find her husband. She had never liked Manhattan, but the Vanderberg offices were there. She bearded them in their den waving Ralph's letter, and the receptionist tried not to laugh in her face. But Ralph's word was good and Darius had been a faithful and hard-working guardian of the property. Eventually, determined to see it through, Mrs. Vanderberg headed for Lower Manhattan to hire the Ghostbusters.

The comfortable silence in the lab at Ghostbuster Central had been going on for nearly an hour, broken only occasionally by the sound of snoring from the bedroom across the hall where Peter was sacking out after his date of the night before. The other three had gathered in the lab, each involved in a particular project, sharing a bit of conversation every now and then, laughing over plans to go and drag Peter out of bed if he didn't get up soon and start doing his share of work, or just enjoying periods of friendly silence.

"I don't know how he can sleep like that," Winston complained, appearing a little aggrieved because he would have liked to sleep in himself. His date had ended earlier than Peter's had, but he had proven reluctant to roll out of the sack.

"He's tired," Egon said with a smile.

"Yeah," Winston retorted, remembering the almost smug grin on Peter's face when he'd drifted in and snapped on the light, rousing them all from their sleep. "Too much strenuous activity. Pete's not used to strenuous activity."

"Not even on his dates?" Ray asked mischievously, his eyes sparkling with amusement.

"You're too young to know about such things," Winston bantered.

Setting aside the magnetometer, Egon favored Ray with a curious glance. "Peter did have a successful evening," he said. "However, that snoring is beginning to distract me. Do you imagine a cold shower might be beneficial? Invigorating?" He lifted a questioning eyebrow.

"I'll go for it," Winston agreed. "It'd be worth it to see the expression on his face when that icy water hits."

"You guys are mean to him," Ray defended Peter, though he couldn't keep the wicked gleam of humor out of his eyes. "I'll go wake him up. Besides, if we do that, he'll get us back for it, you know he will. Short sheeting our beds or making Slimer sleep in your underwear drawer, Winston, or sending Janine flowers in your name, Egon."

Winston frowned. "You do have a point. Doesn't he have a point, Egon?"

"Hmm?" Egon turned on the P.K.E. meter that he checked every day at the same time when they weren't out on calls, and studied the readings thoughtfully, pursing his lips as he considered what he had seen. He didn't deliberately ignore Winston's question; it was simply that the readings distracted him from the silly conversation and he had honestly forgotten about it. Keeping track of the ambient ectoplasmic readings of the New York area was a job he'd assigned himself before the coming of Gozer, a job that had proven useful more than once since, and which might be beneficial again now. He pondered the readings, mentally compared them to the ones he had taken the previous day, and decided to voice his thoughts on the subject.

"This is interesting, Raymond," Egon said as he set aside his P.K.E. meter to chart his new data in a ledger that was propped on the table in front of him. "For the past few weeks the ambient energy levels of the city have been rising very slowly. If I didn't maintain a regular check we'd scarcely notice it, until it was too late." The last two words made Winston lift his gaze and regard Egon thoughtfully, even a little nervously, but it was the third member of the team who responded first.

"Wow, that's great, Egon." Ray put down the ecto scopes he'd been adjusting at the workbench across the room and came to peer over Egon's shoulder at the rows of figures he had copied there. Egon let him read them then turned to the already-activated computer, loading his data program and pushing keys until he had accessed a chart. "Look at this. You can see the increase has been very gradual. Last night there was a definite surge in readings, though it was not large. I noticed it after we'd busted that class two at the Lincoln Center."

"What would cause something like that?" Winston had been recharging and fine-tuning the proton packs, one after the other, checking the readings to make sure they were working right. He was on the last one now, just ready to test it to make sure it was fully charged, but his interest had switched at Egon's announcement. "I remember you looked at the meter funny then, but you didn't say anything."

"The reading dropped immediately," Egon explained, shutting down the meter and keying the new data into the computer.

"What do you think could have caused it, though?" asked Ray, wide eyed at the idea of a new challenge. Of all of them, Ray was the most eager to track down new and mysterious ghosts and he didn't fear the nasty ones either. Instead he regarded each new risk with the eager enthusiasm of a child at Christmas time. "A new demon, maybe? A major dimensional cross-rip? A plague of zombies?" he concluded hopefully.

"The ghosts are having a major party," Peter offered from the doorway. Egon had heard him stirring a few minutes earlier and then the sound of running water in the bathroom. Now Venkman stood toweling his hair dry, wearing his sweats and looking like he had barely managed to pry his eyes open. He yawned and stretched, his hair still rumpled and damp from the shower and ambled into the room. "And they didn't invite us. It's not fair."

"They'll invite us soon enough," Winston said darkly, glancing up from his work to grin at Peter. "They always do. Bout time you dragged yourself out of the sack, homeboy."

Peter made a face at them. "Just getting my beauty sleep. After all, that was a great party last night. No way I could tear myself away before three. We didn't have any busts scheduled, and this is supposed to be my day off."

"I wouldn't want to waste my day off lying around in bed," Winston argued, shaking his head. "There are too many things to do."

Ignoring Peter and Winston's exchange, the occultist grinned in delight, his finger tracing the rising line across the chart on the screen. "I can't wait to see what happens next. It's building up for something, that's for sure. When's the last time we had anything like that, Egon?"

Egon pushed his glasses into place on the bridge of his nose. "I believe it was right before Samhaine broke out of the containment unit. I'd have to check my files to be absolutely certain."

Winston abandoned his attempt to correct Peter's living habits and returned to the original discussion. "I know I'm not gonna like this. You said we wouldn't have to do any more gods, Egon."

"It's been some time since we've encountered anything as powerful," Egon recalled, spreading his hands as if in apology. "True, the Ghostmaster was powerful but he was not particularly bright. We were able to defeat him with sheer intellect and logic. Hardly even interesting." Egon had enjoyed the challenge all the same. He always enjoyed an opportunity to use his brain to solve a problem rather than simply blasting ghosts and sucking them into traps. That was a necessary part of the job, and it had its own particular fascination, but Egon enjoyed the more complex busts even more, though in a different way than Ray did.

"What about the time we went to Russia?" Peter put in, stretching like a cat and yawning widely. The effort seemed to wake him up a little more. "That was one of the primal gods, wasn't it?" he asked around the yawn. "It was powerful enough to nearly vaporize us all. I don't like that kind. I like the little cute ones who'll jump right in the traps so people can pay us right away."

"Yes, that was a powerful entity but the readings weren't that strong this side of the Atlantic," Egon responded. "I wasn't able to document a rise in the ambient psi before we left. I noticed them when we arrived but once I realized they had a copy of The Nameless Book, I believed that was the cause of the disturbance. No one in Moscow had been taking P.K.E. readings so there was no one who could have reported a gradual increase of ectoplasmic power."

"Wait a minute. Time out." Peter held up his hands one on top of the other as if he were in a ball game. "You're saying we get readings like this every time some of the Old Ones or Elder Gods or major demons try to break through into our world? And you never warned us? I don't like this. I think I'll go back to bed."

"But this is great, Peter!" exploded Ray, his face bright with excitement. "We haven't had anything really dangerous in a long time. I mean anything powerful enough to be a real challenge. If we don't take on something like this every now and then we'll get rusty, chasing class twos and threes and fives all the time. They're hardly even exciting."

"That class three that chased you down Broadway last Thursday had you pretty excited, Ray," Peter said with a huge grin, leaning against the door frame and folding his arms over his chest, his eyes sparkling. "I thought you were trying out for the hundred yard proton pack shuffle."

Ray's face turned red. "That was different," he defended himself, embarrassed at the memory. "He was shooting fire at me."

"Your primal gods tend to do that, too, Tex," Peter reminded him, almost with relish. For all Peter's complaining, he was a very good man in a crisis, though it would never do to tell him so. He'd be insufferable about it for weeks. "Hey, Winston," the psychologist said now, "you'd better get those packs charged in a hurry. I think Ray's gonna drag us out to find the source of Egon's readings--and on my day off, too. Fate is never kind."

"We should go searching for them," Egon said, rising and reaching for his pack. "Because we might still have time to close the door. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. I'm sorry about your day off, Peter, but I think you'd rather do this now than have to face another Gozer."

"Well, yeah," he acknowledged without too much reluctance. "But we don't know where it is. And remember this, Spengs. We're not getting paid for it."

"If we wait long enough for someone to pay us, it might be too late to stop the entity," Egon said reasonably. "The world as we know it could be destroyed, but of course a paycheck is much more important." His eyes twinkled behind his round-rimmed glasses and he lifted an expectant eyebrow at Peter.

"When you put it like that..." Peter conceded, grinning back. "Besides we can always bill the city after the fact. They come through in a crisis if we don't break too much of New York. I'll just get on the line to the mayor and remind him what might have happened if he didn't have the world's best paranormal eliminators right at hand."

"Oh, guys..." Janine Melnitz appeared in the lab doorway, trailed by Slimer, the Ghostbusters' resident spook. The secretary paused to stare at Peter. "Dr. V! You're up and it isn't quite noon. This is good. I'm not sure the world can stand the shock, but it's still good."

Peter made a face at her. "I'm up before noon a lot, Melnitz," he defended himself. "I'm just up here engaged in serious work, and that's why you don't know about it."

"Yeah, serious work," agreed Slimer, drifting over toward Peter as if he meant to hug him around the neck. Peter backpedaled.

"Do it and I'll never buy you another pizza, Spud."

"Aw." Eyes full of disappointment, Slimer drifted over to Egon and Ray and pretended to study the computer screen as if he could understand it. There were times when Egon wondered if he actually could, though such times were few and far between.

"Yeah, right, serious work," muttered Janine knowingly. Reluctantly she abandoned the teasing of Peter and some gravity came into her expression. "You guys have a client. You'd better try to be serious about it. Her husband is missing, and the last time he was seen he was going into a haunted house."

"I'm not sure we have time for haunted houses right now, Janine," Egon said with some regret. "We're postulating a major cross-rip."

"Yeah, Egon says we have to save the world first," explained Peter. "But I bet we can squeeze in one little haunted house first. Come on, Spengs, have a heart. Her husband's missing."

"Peter's right, postulate your cross-rip after you talk to Mrs. Pettigrew," Janine instructed firmly, folding her arms in determination to drag them downstairs by the hair if necessary. "Poor lady's upset, and that was before Slimer tried to comfort her. Besides, this might even be your cross-rip. She says the place has been spooky for decades, and Pettigrew isn't the first person to disappear there. He went to work last night and hasn't been seen since."

"Really?" Ray asked with growing excitement, abandoning the computer projections he'd been playing with and bouncing to his feet. "We'd better go see, Egon. It might be important. It might even tie in with that power surge you recorded last night."

Peter and Winston exchanged a glance. Disappearing people sounded bad to both of them, power surges or no, but Ray did have a good point. Though many haunted houses were not really serious problems, some of them tended to be very dangerous. "Are you sure this is safe, Egon?" Peter demanded as if he'd read Egon's mind--sometimes he could almost do that. He pushed himself away from the door frame. "I'm too young and gorgeous to die."

"We're not gonna die, Pete," Ray said with a big grin. "We're gonna have a great time."

"I think you've been sniffing your capacitors again, Ray," Peter told him sternly, shaking his head. "What do you say, Egon, you kidder you? Is this going to be fun?"

"It depends, of course, on your definition of fun, Peter," Egon said unhelpfully as he started for the door. He couldn't resist sneaking a sideways glance at Peter, and hid a smile when Peter's face fell. Sometimes it was simply too easy to tease his friend.

Peter shrugged and fell into step with him. "If I get killed on this bust, I'm gonna come back and haunt you," he teased, draping a casual arm around Egon's shoulder. "And don't think I won't enjoy it, because I will."

"Oh, good," interjected Ray, smiling and giving Peter a nudge in the arm. "That'll give us one more ghost to study."

Peter stuck out his tongue at him.

The guys were suitably serious when Janine introduced them to Mrs. Pettigrew, a little woman with greying hair pulled into an old fashioned bun on top of her head. Janine had seated her at the chair beside her desk, and the guys positioned themselves around her, Peter sitting on the edge of the secretary's desk while Ray dragged up another chair and Egon remained standing, taking a surreptitious P.K.E. reading of the woman. The device didn't react to her at all. "You've got to help me," she pleaded, holding out two envelopes to them. "My husband went into a haunted house and no one has seen him since."

Egon took the envelopes. "What's this, Mrs. Pettigrew?"

"It's a letter from the owner of the house, Ralph Vanderberg, and another from his office. He's out of the country, and my Darius is the caretaker of the Vanderberg house on Staten Island. Darius wrote to Mr. Ralph about the disturbances and Mr. Ralph wrote back giving Darius permission to check out the house, to stay in the house overnight if it was necessary to find out about it. Mr. Ralph thought it was someone breaking in, but he never believed it. After Darius disappeared I went to Mr. Ralph's office and got permission to call you in. That's what this is," she explained, pointing to the second letter as Egon opened it. "Authority to investigate the house. There's a key in there."

Egon retrieved the key and put it into the pocket of his jumpsuit before he studied the letter.

"Wow," Ray cried. "I've heard of the Vanderberg house. This is--" He stopped himself just in time from proclaiming it 'great' in the face of Mrs. Pettigrew's worry. "People have disappeared there before. Have there been lights in the tower, Mrs. Pettigrew?"

"Yes, just recently. At first they were small and people didn't notice them, but Darius did because he has to be on the property anyway. That's when he wrote. But they got worse all the time, and last night he went up to the tower. He told me he would. When he didn't come home, I knew something was wrong. The police didn't believe me. But you'll come, won't you?" She gazed at them desperately. "Darius wouldn't have gone away on purpose. I know he wouldn't." She began to cry.

Peter jumped up and went to her, putting an hand on his shoulder. "It's okay," he soothed reassuringly. "You've come to the right place. We'll go out there today and see what we can find. After all, we're the Ghostbusters."

She raised her eyes and smiled at him. "I know you will. Should I come with you?"

"No, it could be dangerous," Ray warned her. "We'd better go on our own. You can wait here or we can take you home."

"I have my car. I'll go home and wait to hear from you."

"Wow, the Vanderberg house," Ray breathed as Janine ushered Mrs. Pettigrew out. "This is really great. I've heard about it for years. Cletus Vanderberg disappeared there in 1938."

"Cletus Vanderberg?" Egon stared at him. "That Vanderberg. This casts an entirely different light on the subject. I should have realized."

"Who's Cletus Vanderberg?" Peter asked.

"He was a specialist in the occult, and a black magic practitioner," Ray replied. "Worse, he was once a member of Ivo Shandor's Gozer worshippers. When the cult disbanded, he retreated to his estate on Staten Island where he practiced a lot of weird rituals--until he disappeared on Halloween, 1938. People saw mysterious lights in the tower around the time of his disappearance."

"And now they're seeing weird lights again?" asked Winston. "This could prove interesting."

"Yeah, especially since it's not Halloween," Peter remarked.

"This might well tie in with those ambient energy levels I've been monitoring, Ray," Egon said thoughtfully. "Especially since the house has manifested before. It could be the nexus of the disturbance."

"And that's bad, isn't it?" Winston asked knowingly.

"No, it's good," Peter argued. "It means Ray and Egon get to chase their spooky readings and we get paid for it after all, out of the Vanderberg estate. Ralph Vanderberg is a big shot in diplomatic circles. Big bucks. This is great. Let's get out gear, guys, and head out there right away."

"Don't you love his priorities?" Winston asked as he started for the stairs. "Good thing I recharged all our packs. This sounds like we're gonna need them."

"It even looks like a haunted house," Ray opined as Ecto-1 pulled up at the end of the long driveway and he shut off the engine.

He was right. The house was old and huge, three stories high, with twin towers one at each end of the main wing, each rising another two stories above the level of the house itself. Ray had explained there was a wing heading backward from the left end of the structure. The building had a Tudor façade but the towers were mid-Victorian as if the house had been minding its own business when a different architect had come along and played with it. Shrubbery crowded close around the house and vines grew up along the walls, shading some of the windows.

"Which tower is it, Ray?" Winston asked as he got out of the car and stood looking up at the house.

"That one, I think." Ray pointed to the south tower. They all stared at it expectantly, but aside from creating a shadow where they stood that blocked the afternoon sun, it appeared quite normal, if ivy-shrouded. The lower windows had blinds pulled across them, or curtains, and only the windows on the top floor were open to the sun.

They had stopped at the police station on the way to the Vanderberg house where they had learned two police officers had gone through the house earlier but had found no trace of Mr. Pettigrew. The younger of the two men had insisted he heard noises in the house but his partner had laughed it off and claimed it was the result of a too-good imagination. "The house has been shut up," he said. "Furniture draped in dust sheets, that kind of thing. I've gotta say it looks spooky enough, and it's got plenty of atmosphere. Jasper here always did have a good imagination."

Jasper scowled. "Give me a break, Mick," he had argued. "I did hear something, but I don't know what it was, a kind of weird rumbling like a distant thunderstorm, muttering away in the background."

"Sure, when the sky's clear? You expected to hear things, so you did." Mick folded his arms across his chest. "The place hasn't been dusted in years but you could see where Pettigrew walked when he made his rounds, regular tracks in the dust to check on every room, make sure kids or transients weren't breaking in."

"Did he go up to the tower, the one where the lights are supposed to appear?" Ray had asked eagerly.

"Tracks in the dust up the stairs, all right. No way to tell if he went up and didn't come down, but there's nowhere to hide up there."

They had speculated about what might have happened to Pettigrew all the way to the house, and unless he'd been secretly having an affair and had used the mysterious old place as an excuse for disappearing abruptly, nothing came to mind. Ray theorized he'd been sucked into a parallel dimension, but they couldn't prove any such thing one way or another until they could go inside and take readings.

Now they stood in the shadow of the tower adjusting their proton packs on their backs while Egon activated his P.K.E. meter. The antennae stirred slightly and the lights blinked, but with no more reaction than a normal residual reading might have given them. "Hmm," said Egon, moving the meter to and fro while he stroked his chin thoughtfully with his other hand. "I'm picking up the same overlay I had in the city, but it's stronger here. Perhaps this is the center of the disturbance."

"Wouldn't it be reacting a lot more strongly if this was the center of the disturbance?" asked Ray in some disappointment.

"Not if the nexus were cyclical," Egon responded. "We'd receive stronger residuals in between. I believe this house is reputed to experience only nocturnal manifestations."

"The nexus is cyclical," Peter repeated. "I like it. Egon, you talk better gibberish than anyone I ever heard." He grinned. "So we have to wait until the next time it manifests; and that means we stay overnight. Well, I always wanted to stay in a mansion, though a haunted one wasn't my first choice."

"We might not have to do that," Ray replied. "Let's go in and see. Maybe the readings will be stronger in the tower." He bounded up the steps, with Egon right behind him. The physicist passed the key to Ray.

"Slowly, the door creaked open upon the house from hell," Peter said in an eerie voice. "Little did the doomed trespassers realize...aw," he concluded in disappointment when the door swung open soundlessly and efficiently, revealing a tidy entry hall.

"Kind of mundane," Winston remarked as they went in. "I thought spooks would be lining up to greet us, and the head spook would announce us, like a butler."

"Yeah," said Peter wryly. "Or even better, a real butler. I'm gonna write Ralph a protest letter." He edged over to Ray, who was busy taking readings. "Anything, Ray?"

"No, just residuals like Egon got." He closed the door, casting them into shadows, though enough light filtered in from outside to keep it from being dark.

They stood at the foot of a flight of curving stairs that circled up to the second floor where a balcony ran a third of the length of the house. A suit of armor stood on either side of the stairs, one holding a lance and the other a broadsword. Peter ambled over to the one with the lance and lifted the faceplate. "Nobody home," he reported. "They were little guys, weren't they?"

"If these are genuine, then they would have to be, Peter. We would have been giants in the middle ages, you know."

"I always wanted to know that, Spengs. Thanks for the tip." Peter wandered to the nearest door and peeked in. It was obviously some kind of salon, because sheets swathed chairs and sofas, and, on the far wall in front of a big window, a grand piano. Paintings adorned the walls that were either genuine or very good copies, but Peter suspected the latter because no one would leave really valuable artwork in a house that was unoccupied nine months out of twelve. There had been a security gate, of course, but any high tech crook could have had it down in no time at all. He frowned, considering the possibility that Pettigrew hadn't fallen afoul of ghosts but of art thieves who had been systematically exchanging the originals for fakes, but there had been no evidence of a break in that he could see.

"Let's explore the tower first," Egon suggested, catching Peter by the shoulder and giving him a push in the direction of the stairs. "It's supposedly the site of the manifestations. If the readings are stronger there, we'll know there's a paranormal explanation, at least for the lights people have seen."

"People disappear from the tower," Peter said in an aside to Winston. "Are you sure that's where we want to go?"

"I'm sure I don't," Winston agreed, but he fell into step anyway.

When they reached the second floor, Egon halted long enough to point his P.K.E. meter in both directions, frowning. It gave a slightly higher reading when pointing south, so Egon fine-tuned the device to shut out extraneous readings and tried again, and this time, he got a stronger reaction from the direction of the tower.

"Come on," urged Ray, heading for the next flight of stairs. "Let's get up there and see what we can find."

Peter trailed the others up the stairs, pausing abruptly halfway up to the third floor. He'd just had the uneasy feeling there was someone behind him. He thought he could feel eyes boring into the middle of his back, never mind that his proton pack rested there. He turned quickly, but no one was there. Frowning because he didn't usually hype himself into expecting trouble when there wasn't any, he sneaked out his own meter and took a cautious reading of the stairs behind him. Nothing. Yet when he pointed the meter in the direction of the south tower, the detection device functioned normally.

"Trouble, Pete?" asked Winston, hanging back to wait for him.

"No, just a case of the creepy-crawlies," Peter admitted reluctantly. "That young cop was pretty good at creating an atmosphere."

"Yeah, he and his partner probably set us up. Figured they'd have a good joke if they could spook the Ghostbusters." Winston shook his head. "Nobody here, homeboy."

"There could be somebody here," Peter persisted, climbing again. "It doesn't have to be ghosts. Check out this place. A thief would have a field day. Heck, my dad would have a field day. Last I heard, robbers didn't register on a P.K.E. meter."

"Good point." Winston unshipped his thrower and took it firmly in both hands. "Just in case," he explained when Peter lifted an eyebrow. "I don't have to neutronize them, just scare 'em a little."

"You won't get any argument from me," Peter reassured him, halfway wanting to draw his own thrower. He decided to wait. If Old Pettigrew suddenly stumbled out after taking a long nap under one of the sheets that covered all the furniture, he'd look pretty silly confronting the guy with a proton rifle.

The house must have been spectacular in its prime, Peter thought as they reached the third floor and wandered around exploring the place. He peeked into one of the bedrooms just to see. There was a smaller and much less fancy structure behind this one, on the other side of what had been the kitchen gardens in the days when someone had troubled with such things. Egon had pointed it out as they came along the road heading for the driveway. The servants had lived there in the days when even the mildly rich had kept an army of them, and the Vanderbergs had become mildly rich only after the Crash of '29. Before that they had been fabulously rich. The bedroom Peter saw now was sheer luxury, even in Holland covers, with carved panelling on the walls and a spacious window that looked out over the curving driveway. The bed was a four poster with a canopy and Peter decided he'd bag this room if they wound up staying the night.

"It will not be yours."

Peter glanced at the doorway quickly to see which one of the guys wanted to dispute him for possession, but they weren't there. He poked his head out and saw them moving on toward the door at the end of the hall that must lead to the tower. "It will, too," he called after them.

"It will too, what, Peter?" asked Ray, peering back over his shoulder.

"This is my room, if we stay overnight," he insisted.

"Nobody's arguing with you, Peter," Egon added, putting his hand on the door handle, then jerking it back abruptly as if it had stung him.

Abandoning the room without a second thought, Peter rejoined his buddies in two quick steps. "Problem, Egon?" he asked, as Egon raised his hand, palm upward, and stared at it before holding his P.K.E. meter up and running it over the doorknob.

"It was cold," Egon exclaimed, touching his palm with the fingers of his other hand. "The doorknob was cold, like ice." He studied the readings and his eyebrow lifted in a superb Spock imitation. "There is strong power here, though it has faded again."

"Really?" Ray's eyes widened in intrigue and surprise and he reached out to touch the knob himself without a thought to the danger he might be risking.

Peter batted his hand away before Ray could risk freezing his fingers. "Ah, ah, ah, Ray. Wait until Egon figures out what's going on here. Maybe the nice nether entities don't want us to go in the tower."

"That's odd," Egon mused, raising his eyes from the meter, intrigued. "The readings are now normal."

"Let's see." Peter stretched out cautious fingers and brushed them against the doorknob to test how 'normal' it was, prepared to pull back at the first sign of trouble. Trouble wasn't long forthcoming. Peter squawked, yanking back when flames shot out of the keyhole at him. "Yikes," he cried, blowing on his fingers then popping them in his mouth. The flames subsided the minute he let go, leaving no trace of charred markings on the wood around the doorknob.

"Fascinating." Egon moved his meter closer to the doorknob. "It reacted when you touched it, but the readings vanished the minute you pulled your hand away, Peter, as if whatever causes the heat and cold can come and go at will. Did you injure yourself?"

Peter pulled his fingers out of his mouth and studied them consideringly. "No, but it was close. You said it was cold," he accused, rubbing his fingers against the front of his jumpsuit then waving them around to finish drying them off.

"It was," Egon replied, catching Peter's wrist and turning his hand palm up to check for burns. Other than a slight redness that was already fading, there was no trace of injury. "Winston, you try it," urged the physicist, releasing his grip on Peter and leveling the meter at the doorknob.

"Not me, man." Winston retreated a step, shoving his hands behind his back. "I don't want to be barbecued. Something's in there and it doesn't want us going in."

"I bet this'll work," Peter said, taking out his thrower and activating it. "Stand aside, guys. Fastest lock-pick in the Tri-State area." Adjusting it for low power, he aimed at the doorknob and fired just as Egon said:

"That might not be a good idea, Peter."

A wailing shriek tore the air around them but the doorknob sizzled away and the door swung open. Involuntarily, all four men stepped backward at the moaning sound, but it faded immediately. "It's as if the door could talk," breathed Ray, his eyes round as saucers in his excitement. "We don't get talking houses very often."

"Thanks, Ray, now I feel like a butcher," muttered Peter, though he didn't mean it, not after the doorknob had tried to fry his fingers. He poked at the door with the tip of his thrower, pushing it open, revealing the start of a narrow spiral staircase and an archway to the right of it that must have opened into the third floor tower room. "Anything, Egon?" he asked, trying to peer sideways into the room.

"Yes, Peter. The readings went off the scale for a moment there, when we heard the scream. I'm getting higher readings now than we had before, but it's back to residual level and fading again."

"What would make that happen?" asked Winston, glancing up and down the corridor as if he suspected whole hordes of ghosts were creeping up on them.

"Perhaps the ghost is confined in the tower," Egon replied thoughtfully, rubbing his chin as he considered the possibilities. "It didn't want us here yet it was easily defeated. I find that intriguing."

"It might have sent out a fragment of itself into the structure of the house," theorized Ray happily, delighted at the possibility. He liked a nice, complex problem to solve and new types of ghosts always appealed to him.

"You mean the whole house is a ghost, Ray?" Winston asked, eyes narrowing. The glance he cast over his shoulder was not a happy one. "We're not talking about moving walls coming together and crushing us and all the outside doors locking so we're trapped forev--ulp, mpmrh!" he concluded as Peter clapped his hand over Winston's mouth.

"Now, now, Winston, let's not give the nice house any nasty ideas," Peter chided. "I'm sure it's entirely capable of thinking up its own nasty tricks and it doesn't need any help from us."

"You think it's listening to us," asked Ray, grinning, "so it would know if anyone came in? It could have been watching us and when we tried to reach the tower, it could have intensified its strength in the door to keep us out."

"And we just made it mad," Peter pointed out, going to the heart of the matter. "Something's up there waiting for us and it's ticked off, right?"

Egon stretched out his arm and held the P.K.E. meter in the stairwell. "I would say so," he agreed as the readings intensified slightly at the change in direction. "What we have here could well be much stronger than a class seven."

"Could be?" asked Ray, waving his own P.K.E. meter around. "That's weird. I'm still detecting only residual readings even if they're strong. As if it were mostly quiescent but there's some class three in there too."

"It's hiding out," suggested Peter. "Waiting to jump on us." He made spooky gestures with his fingers. "Oooh--oooh," he breathed in a poor imitation of a Hollywood ghost.

"It may be an unconscious entity," Egon replied, ignoring Peter's antics entirely. "Aware when we hurt it, but only partially. It may be quiescent as you said, Ray, coming to awareness only at certain times. When you blasted a fragment of it just now, Peter, it might have rolled over in its sleep, so to speak."

"Then how about we tippy-toe out of here and run like crazy before it finishes its nap and starts hunting around for dinner?" Peter asked hopefully.

"We can't do that, Peter," Ray reminded him. "Mr. Pettigrew is still missing--besides, we're being paid to find him."

"You do have a point," agreed Peter, smiling at the thought of payment. "If he's up there, he's probably waaaay beyond anything we can do for him, though." He poked his head through the doorway very cautiously. "Yo. Mr. Pettigrew!" he called. "Are you up there? If you can't talk, pound on something or give us a sign." He waited, listening. There was no response.

"Well, he's not up there," Winston murmured, shaking his head. It didn't seem like it would take much for him to shrug his shoulders and call it a day.

"Unless he's unconscious," argued Ray. "I wonder if the police really went into the tower like they said they did."

"Come on, Ray, they still have all their fingers," Peter reminded him. "Betcha they wrote it off as locked and that was that."

"They would have told us if it had fried or frozen them," Winston put in, becoming interested in the problem. "So either they didn't search the house very thoroughly or the place has got it in for Ghostbusters. Oh man, I should've listened to my dad and kept working construction. Worst thing that could happen to you there is falling off a beam when you're a hundred and fifty feet off the ground."

Peter shuddered. The idea of working construction in a high rise ranked somewhere down there below confronting Gozer all over again. He'd never been very happy with heights.

"We're going to have to go ourselves, whether they went or not," Egon decided. "We'll never solve this unless we do." He reached out and flipped a light switch, turning on the lights in the stairwell. They promptly went out.

"Too bad. Bulb burned out," said Ray in mild disappointment.

"I don't think so. All of them at once?" Egon pointed to the light switch. It was now in the 'off' position.

"Bad switch?" Winston volunteered hopefully though he rolled his eyes nervously at Peter.

"I wouldn't count on it." Egon turned the lights on again and this time kept his hand on the switch. Peter could see his muscles tighten as he braced himself, pitting his strength against...something, then he relaxed and lifted his hand away. The light stayed on.

"You just have to teach it who's boss," said Peter with a grin. "Light switches can be really stubborn."

"Come on, then," Egon urged and stepped into the tower.

The door slammed shut behind him.

"Egon!" Ray grabbed for the door, only to have flames shoot out the hole where the doorknob had been.

"Stand aside. Door taming is my specialty." Peter adjusted his thrower and ran the beam over the door. The flames died, and Peter wedged his fingers in the hole and pulled.

Egon stood there unhurt and unalarmed, eyes on his meter. "This is indeed intriguing," he remarked as if he had been in no peril at all. "I'm still not entirely reading a conscious entity."

The lights went out.

"No, but Sleepy's got a really high nuisance value," Peter muttered. He edged carefully through the doorway to join Egon. "We'd better move or he'll wake up," he suggested, glancing up at the circle of dark stairs overhead.

"Good point," Egon agreed. He led the way up the stairs while the other three fell in behind him. Light filtered out from the openings above, so that the stairs were not in darkness even without the electric lights. The top tower room had been open to the light, and the late afternoon sunlight must have illuminated the room at the top of the stairs. "Watch out for trouble," Egon called over his shoulder. "It doesn't want us up here. It may well--yeaaaaah!" His arms windmilled as the step beneath his foot collapsed inward beneath his weight.

Peter let his thrower go and grabbed the stair rail to brace himself, his other hand thrust against Egon's proton pack to help him keep his balance. "Grab on, Egon," he warned, feeling Winston bracing him from behind. Egon's grasping fingers caught hold of the railing, too, and he steadied himself, his foot feeling for the next step until he regained his balance.

"This house is nasty," Ray volunteered from behind them. "Isn't it great?"

"Egon wouldn't have thought it was great if he wound up in traction," Peter pointed out, giving Egon one further push before letting go and taking a grip on the other railing in case another step bit the dust. "Okay, guys, listen up. Something up there doesn't like us and he's making it hard for us, so double check everything, okay. Test each step. And watch each other."

"Got it," agreed Winston.

Stepping over the broken stair tread they made their way up to the fourth floor tower room and paused there to investigate. It proved to be a near-empty room with only a couple of straight chairs against the far wall. The window blinds had been drawn and thin strips of sunlight made a complex pattern on the floor. Egon and Ray took readings but nothing registered except the same residuals as before, slightly higher than previously as if they were closer to the center of the disturbance but no more than that.

They came out of the room and peered up the last flight of stairs. Ray waved his P.K.E. meter around. "Whatever it is, it's centered up there," he reported. "Let's go."

Peter caught his shoulder. "Watch your step, Ray," he reminded him.

Ray nodded. "Sure, Pete. Come on, guys," and he plunged up the stairs, meter in one hand, thrower in the other.

Peter fell in behind him, gripping his own proton rifle, and as he did a weird groaning sound shook the entire house. "This sounds bad," he quipped. "Like the house has indigestion."

"A giant burp?" Winston asked. "Like it just--had dinner?"

Peter grimaced. "You had to say that, didn't you?"

The stairs to the top floor remained firm, and the light grew brighter as they circled up to the room with the unshaded windows. Peter checked each step before he put his weight on it, but that made him lag behind Ray who raced up eagerly, full of enthusiasm for the bust. He didn't stop until abruptly they heard a voice speaking.

"Help me. Help me."

It sounded faint and distant, breathless and shaken, and it came out of the very air all around them, not from the tower room above. "Wow," breathed Ray, then raised his voice. "Where are you?"

No answer.

"Could you tell where that came from, Egon?" asked Ray.

"Not precisely. It seemed to come from everywhere."

"Spooky noises courtesy of Dolby Sound," Peter volunteered, glancing uneasily over his shoulder. "I don't think I like this place."

"It was obviously a product of unusual acoustics," Egon offered. "It may have been Mr. Pettigrew, trapped somewhere nearby, perhaps in a concealed panel."

"Mr Pettigrew!" yelled Ray again. "We're coming! We'll find you." Again, no reply. Ray hurried up the last few stairs, weapon at ready, and vanished through the doorway. "Oh my gosh," he blurted in surprise. "You guys have got to see th--" He broke off in mid-word as a burst of golden light blazed within the room as if the sun had suddenly shone through an open window.

"See what, Ray?" Peter asked quickly, following him through the arched doorway and stopping so abruptly Winston collided with him and Egon plowed into him so they all staggered forward. Peter grabbed the back of a sofa to stop himself before his feet could land within a pentagram that had been drawn on the floor with fading red paint. Faded Victorian furniture crowded into the spaces between the windows; opposite the door a huge mirror in an elaborate brass frame embossed with cabalistic signs reflected Peter's impromptu dance as he fumbled for balance.

A table with a design not unlike an Aztec calendar carved into its top stood to one side of the mirror, a huge book lying open upon the table, its pages stirring as if in a breeze, though the windows were all shut. As Peter stared at it, several pages flipped over, deliberately, one at a time, and a red silken bookmark fluttered up to dive into the book and mark the pages. Peter stared at it in disbelief, his mouth dropping open at the sight.

Bookcases blocked two of the windows, bookcases jammed with huge old tomes, jars holding mysterious liquids in brilliant colors and dry ingredients labeled in an old fashioned hand, two human skulls, an astrolabe, sealed tins with poison symbols or foreign words inscribed upon them, several mounted and stuffed small animals, one of which was a rat with eyes that glowed red in the beam of sunlight that struck it. What little wall showed between the multitude of windows was covered in patterned Victorian wallpaper, and the lamps that sat here and there on stands were double-globed glass with flowers and vines painted upon their amber surfaces.

Lying on the table next to the open book, was Ray's P.K.E. meter, activated, its antennae extended to their full extent. It was beeping shrilly, the sound beginning to fade even as they watched it.

Ray was nowhere in the room.

"Ray!" bellowed Peter in alarm, spinning around in a slow circle and scanning every corner as if he had managed to overlook the occultist in the small room.

Winston pushed past him and checked behind the wing chair near the small fireplace just beyond the mirror, shaking his head in confusion and disbelief when he didn't find Ray there. "Ray, where are you? Come on, guy, give us a sign here!" He listened carefully, but there was no reply, not even when Winston raised his voice and added it to Peter's as they tried again. "RAY!"

"Don't anyone move," Egon commanded, his voice abrupt and meaningful, and Peter froze like a statue before his foot could come down on the small throw-rug in front of the fireplace. "And don't touch that pentagram, Winston," Egon added. He edged past Peter and whipped up the throw rug. Beneath it, a white circle had been painted on the floor. Egon pointed his meter at it and the device reacted, beeping more loudly than before in counterpoint to the fading beeps from Ray's abandoned meter.

"I don't know what that is, but that looks bad," said Winston with a shake of his head.

"I shudder to think what might have happened if you had stepped into the circle, Peter," Egon confirmed Winston's unease with the painted circle. "This may once have been protection for a magic practitioner. I suspect if we analyzed the paint we'd find it contained salt, often used to block the way of powerful entities."

"Can I move now?" Peter asked uneasily, tired of balancing on one foot. When Egon nodded, he set his foot down very carefully outside the circle and turned to face the physicist, squaring his shoulders for what was to come. "All right, Spengs, where's Ray? Did that flash of light have anything to do with this? How do we get him back?" he demanded.

Egon's answer was the only possible one right then, but Peter didn't like it. "I don't know." Egon moved very carefully through the room, watching not only the markings on the floor but the furniture itself. "Touch nothing," he added. "Check under chairs before you sit down. Trust nothing here to be what it appears. I'm reading an unfamiliar kind of power. The meter isn't precisely designed to interpret it but it's close enough to normal psycho-kinetic energy for it to stir the meters. So be very careful."

"Never mind all that, Egon, we're going to be cautious as hell, but where's Ray?" Winston added his question to Peter's. "He walked in here and there isn't a door, and from the layout of the walls, there's not a secret door either. There was a burst of light but he couldn't have been vaporized without his pack taking out the entire tower. So where is he?"

"A very good question. I think perhaps we have found our first clue into the disappearance of Darius Pettigrew."

"And maybe Cletus Vanderberg," Peter reminded him, sorry he'd thought of that. Cletus Vanderberg had never been seen again. "But Vanderberg was messing with things he shouldn't, from what you and Ray said about him in the car, and Pettigrew didn't know what he was doing. Ray had his meter and it's activated. He wouldn't have stepped on the pentagram. And even if it did, it couldn't have, uh, vaporized him, like Winston said, because his pack would have gone up like a bomb." He wanted that made very clear, that Ray hadn't been neutronized, and he wanted to hear Egon say it. He needed to hear Egon say it.

"No. He wasn't vaporized," Egon said hastily, his face reflecting alarm at the very idea. "Don't worry about that, Peter. It didn't happen. There would be telltale readings to account for something like that, and it would have been painful. Ray would have had time to scream. This was instantaneous."

"Thanks, Egon, I sure appreciate that." Peter gazed down at the big pentagram, uneasy to see it there. You'd think after all this time the Vanderbergs would have removed it, but maybe there was a good reason they hadn't: perhaps Cletus had left papers warning them not to upon pain of death--or worse. It wasn't as if the room was in regular use. Dust motes hung in the sunlight and dust lay thick on all the furniture except the surface of the mirror. "That isn't drawn in blood, is it?" he queried nervously.

Egon shook his head, pointing his meter at the pentagram and studying the readings, which were faint but steady. "Blood would have turned brown by now and likely flaked away. That's paint. It may well have had blood mingled with it or salt or some other substance when it was painted there. Without a chemical analysis, it would be impossible to tell. Ray is well versed in occult lore. He would have known better than to step in it no matter how excited he was. I surmise Cletus stood in the circle and summoned up spirits, confining them in the pentagram. A remarkably dangerous practice for the layman--or even for an expert."

"Well, Ray must have stepped in something," argued Peter, unconcerned with Cletus and his habits while Ray was missing and possibly in major trouble. "And did you catch that book, Spengs? Pages turned and then the bookmark jumped into place, with nobody touching it. Think it could be a message from Ray?"

"Pages turned?" Egon's eyes lingered on the book with interest. "Intriguing. No, I didn't see it and it may well be connected with Ray. I'll have to study it. One other bit of advice. Don't look directly into the mirror. Do not meet your own eyes in the glass."

"Why not?" asked Winston suspiciously.

"Because it is obviously more than a normal mirror. Sometimes a large mirror can serve as a dimensional conduit or function as a scrying glass or be used in a number of dark practices. I'm not picking up anything but residuals from it now, but they are very high. Higher than they would be if the mirror were not involved in Ray's disappearance."

"Listen to me, Egon," Winston said, shaking his head in disbelief. "You telling me Ray walked over and jumped into the mirror without a word to us and the glass didn't even break? I don't buy it."

"Neither do I," Peter agreed, grabbing Egon by the straps of his proton pack and shaking him lightly. "Come on, Spengs, give us answers here. Who knows what might be happening to Ray while we have our little chit chat."

"I didn't say the conduit was voluntary," Egon remarked, his mouth drawn in a tight line. He uncurled Peter's fingers from the straps, gripped his wrists a moment in reassurance and let go. "And the so called chit chat is very necessary if the rest of us aren't to vanish as well. We might find Ray only to find we have no way back. It's important to discover how to bring him safely home. Until then, heroic rescues would be a case of jumping the gun."

"Gotcha," said Peter reluctantly. He wanted to jump into the mirror, if that's where Ray had vanished, and drag his friend back in triumph, but giving Egon two people to rescue was stupid, even though he wanted to do it very badly. He couldn't help Ray if he didn't know how to bring them home afterwards. "So put a little speed on it, Egon," he encouraged. "We don't know if Ray's in danger but I'd bet the longer he's in there the bigger the risk."

Egon was still engrossed in his readings though his face tightened when Peter mentioned danger, proving he was as worried as Peter and Winston though he wasn't as prone to showing it. He glanced up from the detection device and met Peter's eyes levelly. "I'm picking up residue here that reads class three or four as well as a much more powerful overlay. At some point in the past an vastly powerful entity was here, one I would theorize was higher than a class eight. It was so powerful that a residue from its presence still lingers. It may have been what killed Cletus Vanderberg. The class three residue may well be Cletus Vanderberg. It seems to have permeated the house. I'm not certain there is a conscious entity here, unless perhaps it is the house itself. The powerful entity is dormant right now. We must move carefully because if it wakes, our throwers will be no match for it."

"You're just full of good cheer, aren't you." Peter gave him a sour smile, then shook his head apologetically, knowing none of this was Egon's fault. "Sorry. Hey, Spengs, I'm not so sure about Cletus Vanderberg. Remember, they never found a body. They don't know if he's dead, though if he snuck off he's probably bought the farm by now. Maybe he hopped into the nexus and is cavorting around in the Netherworld. Is that where Ray is? Because I'm tired of talking about it. I want to get him back."

"Any attempt to retrieve him without further information would only lead to additional disappearances, Peter," Egon insisted stubbornly. "I want to find Ray and bring him back safely as much as you do, but we can't try jumping into the mirror until we know exactly what is going on here. Obviously we've managed to disturb great power. It's not entirely awake yet, and I'd as soon not awaken it if we can free Ray quietly first, but it will come."

"Oh, good," grumbled Winston, bending to peer into the fireplace and examine the chimney in case Ray had decided to secrete himself there for a mysterious reason of his own. "Bad enough Ray decided to pop over to the next dimension for a visit. Now we've got company coming, the kind that isn't welcome. We talking something like Gozer here?" The look in his eyes pleaded for a negative reply.

"Possibly. I'm afraid Cletus Vanderberg was playing with powers way over his head. By all accounts he was exceptionally well read on the subject of the occult. I think he'd gone beyond the simple. Seances, table tipping, even demon summoning probably had begun to bore him. I think he wanted something more."

"More?" echoed Peter in dismay, hearing his voice crack on the word. "What kind of 'more' are we talking about here, Egon?"

"I'm thinking of something like the Old Ones, the primal gods, the ancient ones--"

"You mean like Cthulhu? Like Nexa? Like that thing that nearly got summoned when we went to Russia?" Winston squawked in alarm, eyes widening. He abandoned the fireplace as a lost cause and stepped carefully around the circle to join the other two. "This is bad, isn't it?"

"Very bad, Winston. Because whatever it is has been asleep for a long time. Every now and then it stirs in its sleep. It's stirring now. I'd like to correlate previous reports of disturbance here, anything since Cletus Vanderberg disappeared, and see if they tie in to any of our own cases, such as the encounter with Cthulhu."

"You mean it might have tried to wake up when there was a disturbance of that magnitude?" Winston asked in dismay. "Like what you were talking about this morning?"

"I don't know. I am, of course, theorizing without full data, but these readings indicate great power. What we have to face is the possibility that any action we take in this house will only further serve to rouse the beast."

"We're not leaving Ray trapped here," Peter insisted fiercely, planting himself in front of Egon. "I don't care if we have to fight five Cthulhus to do it, but we're getting Ray back."

"Of course we are," agreed Egon, as if it were a foregone conclusion. "But we have an advantage Pettigrew didn't have. Ray knows many of the same things Cletus did. Wherever he is, he can help us."

"Wait a minute, Egon." Winston folded his arms across his chest and matched Egon stare for stare. "Cletus knew this kind of stuff backward and forward, and he never came back."

"He never had the Ghostbusters on his team, either," Peter reminded Winston quickly so he wouldn't have to dwell on Winston's words. "Ray might not have his P.K.E. meter, but he's got his thrower." He didn't want to think about Ray all alone with only one thrower against something as powerful as Cthulhu, even if it was still mostly asleep. Ray wouldn't have a prayer unless they yanked him out of whatever hole he'd fallen into before the Old One came to full awareness. "And he's got us on this side with all the resources we can muster. We'll get him back. You'll see. We'll get him back."

"What about that book?" suggested Winston, stabbing a finger in its direction. "Maybe Ray was trying to tell us something."

"You think Ray turned the pages?" That hadn't occurred to Peter, but he edged over to the book, avoiding furniture and marks on the floor, even some that were obviously scuffmarks from someone's heel. He bent over, reaching for the pages.

"Don't touch it." Egon batted Peter's hands away, his tone sharp as he voiced his caution. "Let me test it first. The book itself might control the nexus. Ray may have seen the pages turning and touched it out of curiosity and been drawn in."

"Ray didn't have time to get all the way over here before we came in," Winston reminded him. "And he sure didn't have time before that light flashed."

"Sure he did. He left his meter on the table," Peter reminded him.

Egon moved the detection device along the open pages of the book very carefully. The meter reacted, though not strongly. "Hmm." Frowning thoughtfully Egon lifted the device away from the book and made adjustments on its setting, changing the frequency with care, then he tried again. This time it reacted a little more strongly. "I thought so," Egon said. "It's registering Ray's biorhythms, though faintly. Ray touched this book, but according to the meter it was a long time ago."

"It couldn't have been that long ago, my man," Winston disagreed, shaking his head. "We've only been in here a few minutes."

Egon pursed his lips thoughtfully. He fiddled with the dials again and took another reading, with much the same results. "It makes no sense," he agreed. "These readings are very weak, much weaker than normal residuals."

"What would make them so weak?" Peter asked. He wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer, any more than he wanted an explanation for Egon's contention that Ray had touched the book a long time ago. Weak readings might mean Ray was--dead, and Peter wouldn't accept that. Egon would figure out something any minute now and then Peter could go into the mirror and haul Ray back.

"I don't know." Putting aside the meter, Egon bent over the pages, pushing his glasses into place with his thumb. "This is in Latin," he remarked.

"Oh, good. Can you read Latin, Spengs?"

"Can I read Latin?" Egon began rather haughtily, and Winston nudged him with his elbow.

"Yeah, underwater in your sleep with the lights out. We know, homeboy."

"Do you know Latin, Winston?" Egon challenged him.

"Sure. Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo. Oremus," volunteered Winston with a crooked grin. When Egon narrowed his eyes, he shrugged. "Altar boy. What can I say?"

"Let me study this," Egon said thoughtfully. "Peter, you witnessed the pages turning. Did it look deliberate? Could the wind of whatever happened to displace Ray have done it?"

Peter shook his head. "I don't think so. The curtains behind it weren't moving. Nothing was, just those pages. So what does it say, you linguistic genius you?"

Egon studied the text on the two pages exposed. One of them had very little writing, though it did have a carefully drawn rendition of a creature that resembled a mutated giant insect. Its two forearms reached forward toward the readers ending in four-fingered 'hands' with long, curving talons that narrowed to evident razor sharpness. Its face had a fanged mouth protruding in a snout and filled with rows of teeth. It slavered and drooled as if it had just spotted its dinner. Shadowy in the darkness, another pair of legs arched up, jointed almost like a grasshopper's hind legs, powerful legs that would allow it to spring upon its prey. Huge black bug eyes regarded them intently, protected by heavily browed ridges, and between them, where human eyebrows would begin, rose two horns. The creature's hide was rough and scaly and protruded with jagged ridges like those along a dinosaur's back, except these went side to side instead of back to front and arose at irregular intervals. The monster gave the appearance it was about to reach right out of the book and snatch the reader. On the facing page was what might be a poem, consisting of short lines with a title in bigger letters, surrounded by decorative designs. Peter leaned over Egon's left shoulder and Winston leaned over his right to study it.

"See." Winston pointed to the caption underneath the drawing. "I told you I knew Latin. There's the word 'Dominus'. It means 'lord'."

"The Devourer, lord of the caverns," translated Egon. "It refers to some kind of underground monster, perhaps."

"This ugly dude?" asked Peter with a gesture at the bug-eyed monster. "Hey, maybe it's what got Cletus Vanderberg."

"You had to say that," muttered Winston.

"Then what's it doing showing up for us?" Peter asked without enthusiasm, as he realized it could well be what had got Ray. He didn't like that at all. "So what's the poem say, Egon?"

"It is not a poem. It's a prophecy," Egon corrected him. "It's very obscure."

"You mean you can't read it?" Winston cocked an eyebrow at Peter behind Egon's back.

"Of course I can read it. I simply cannot yet fully understand its meaning," Egon replied. "Take this line, for instance. Loosely translated, it reads, 'First, the watcher at the gate, the one who called the voyager'."

"Yeah, I see what you mean," replied Peter thoughtfully trying to grasp what it meant and failing completely. "Okay, go back to the top and start there. We need a translation of the whole thing. Maybe it doesn't mean anything, but in case it does, then we better figure it out. If three brilliant and clever guys can't make sense out of it, then nobody can. Right, Winston?"

"You got it, man. Come on, Egon, what does it say."

Egon hesitated, then he read aloud, slowly.

This is the way the chosen shall come when the defender has great need.

In the time of peril when the Devourer shall awaken:

The danger shall be reflected.

First, the watcher at the gate, the one who called the voyager.

Next, the guardian of the land, who repelled the sleeper with tamed fire.

Third, the speaker in the night, who alone defied the drifter.

Last, the final chosen, who defeated the immortal with the power of the ages.

On paths long chosen...'"

His voice broke off. "It continues on the next page. As yet, I am reluctant to turn the page. Does that make sense to any of you?"

Peter narrowed his eyes as he studied the words. "I don't know about you, Egon, but I'm not quite as up on my gibberish as I should be. I don't like that bit about the 'Devourer' awakening. I don't like anything with teeth that wants to make a meal of us."

"I can't say I am fond of the concept myself," Egon concurred. "Did you notice that there were four 'chosen' and four of us?"

"Yeah, I got that right away, and I don't like it. But where? The chosen shall come where? Where Ray is? And if Ray is first, what does it mean, the watcher at the gate? Is that what you said?"

"'Who called the voyager,'" Egon repeated. "I shall transcribe it." He drew a small notebook and pencil from his breast pocket and began to jot down the words.

"I wonder who the voyager is," Winston muttered. "It doesn't mean a whole lot, does it?"

"Not yet," Egon replied. "But it will. We'll make sense of it. I'd like to verify some of my translation as well. Perhaps a synonym here and there might make it clearer." He considered that as he scribbled. "There. Take a look at it, Peter." He passed the book over.

Venkman studied it. "No one's ever going to award you the Pulitzer for handwriting, Egon," he remarked then fell silent reading, mouthing some of the words.

"And here I seem to remember you giving Slimer trouble for moving his lips when he read," Winston teased.

Peter raised his head from the book, stuck out his tongue at Winston then returned to his reading. "I wonder who the defender is."

"Vanderberg?" offered Winston. "If his ghost is here...."

"Then his body should be here," Egon reminded them. "It was never found. Yet he could have been pulled into the same dimension as Ray was."

Peter's head came up at that, worry imperfectly concealed in his green eyes. "Yeah, and nobody ever saw him again. So make sense of this quick, Spengs, because you're getting class three readings from somebody, and it better not be Ray."

"It's not," Egon said hastily, as if he realized how his words might have been interpreted. "I know Ray's biorhythms. I haven't had the opportunity to research the subject but I believe there would be some carry over should a living person become a ghost. If we knew the biorhythms of that ghost when he was alive, we should be able to identify him though there would, of course, be differences. This ghost is unfamiliar, with no correlation to Ray. I'm sorry, Peter. I didn't mean to imply--"

"I know," Peter replied quickly, clapping Egon on the shoulder. "It's just, he's out there somewhere and so is this Devourer, getting ready to wake up. We've gotta get Ray back and quick because we're gonna have to take him together."

"How about we search the house?" suggested Winston. "Egon, you can be trying to figure out what the prophecy means and whether it really means us. Ray's the first to disappear but he wasn't the watcher at the gate or whatever it was that I can figure. And who's the voyager? Thing is, this mirror or whatever shifted him might have landed him in the basement or out on the grounds. He might have a twisted ankle or something and can't get back to us. So before we try anything else, how about we check what we know we can check first?"

"A practical solution. We'll do it," agreed Egon. Taking the notebook back from Peter he closed it and put it in his pocket. "Let's go."

Peter hung back, reluctant to leave the tower room. This was the place where Ray had disappeared. He didn't expect to find him in the basement or in one of the other rooms. But he wasn't here and Egon wasn't about to let any of them jump into the mirror after him. If the prophecy in the book meant anything, they were probably all going to disappear anyway in order to take on the Devourer, probably the sleeping entity Egon kept detecting, the one that must have devoured Cletus Vanderberg. But maybe if they left the tower no one else would disappear and they could take it on as a group. That sounded like a good plan to Peter.

He paused, then he spun back to the mirror before anyone could stop him. Drawing his thrower he stretched out with the very tip of it and touched it to the glass, tapping faintly. He'd half expected it to sink into the glass like a hot knife in butter, but it merely rapped against the hard, unyielding surface, refusing to give. The mirror might be a door, but right now it was closed. Peter heaved a sigh and replaced his thrower in its cradle, looking into the mirror sadly before Winston and Egon came up to him and pulled him back.

"Hang in there, Tex," he muttered to the empty air and followed the other two out of the room.

In the empty tower room, a misty figure emerged from the mirror, pausing to speak, though no sound greeted its words. It put away its thrower, called again then approached the table where the huge book lay. The spirit figure turned the page in the book and lay the marker gently in place. The insubstantial shape bent over the text and studied it for a long time. Then it spun around and crossed the room to the door, circling the pentagram automatically. If it spoke again, no sound emerged from its open mouth. As it stepped through the tower door, it vanished from sight.

Ray Stantz's eyes widened as he stepped into the tower room and he gazed around, enthralled. It was an occultist's treasure trove, full of things he would love to study. "Oh my gosh," he breathed in sheer delight as he skirted a painted pentagram on the floor and came up against a round table where a huge and ancient tome lay open. He deposited his P.K.E. meter beside it and reached out to turn the page. "You guys have got to see th--"

The transition was instantaneous. One second light pulsed brilliantly from the mirror, the next Ray stood in total darkness.

"--is," he finished, blinking. The light had been so bright. Was he blind now? He put up a hand to rub his eyes, then looked again, straining for any evidence of vision. "Guys?" he faltered pleadingly. "Guys, I can't see."

No one answered him.

Ray shivered, feeling cold and alone. "Guys? Come on, talk to me. This isn't funny. Answer me."

No one is here but you.

It wasn't a real voice, nothing he could hear, but the words rang in his mind, hollow and echoing. The guys would have answered him right away. They wouldn't let him stand here alone in darkness. Cautiously he put out his hands to feel for the table. Nothing was there.

This wasn't the tower any more. He knew that without explanation. He wasn't sure how he'd gotten here, but the mirror must have done it. It was some kind of transfer portal, bringing him from the tower to this dark place. Maybe this was where Cletus Vanderberg had been brought the night he disappeared.

But that had been in 1938. And he had never come back.

It had been over fifty years since Cletus Vanderberg had disappeared. He had vanished, just as Ray had, and he had been as knowledgeable in occult matters as Ray, perhaps even more so because he practiced them rather than merely studying them. If he had been unable to escape....

Ray sighed unhappily. This was not good.

Cautiously he took a shuffling step forward, trying to see where he was. If he had been transferred he was probably not blind then, just shunted to a place of darkness. His hand went to his belt where a pocket flashlight hung, and he detached it and switched it on. Its steady yellow beam glowed brightly and he heaved a great sigh to know he could still see, though the light was swallowed up by the vast blackness that engulfed him. He couldn't even see the ground beneath his feet, as if he stood suspended in nothingness.

The rumble of noise began slowly, subliminally, a mere background rumble, but it built, growing louder, thundering, pounding, slamming into Ray with an almost physical force. The light in his tiny flashlight dimmed as if the noise had beaten it into submission, and Ray shook the tiny light encouragingly, hoping it would brighten again. The batteries were new. He had replaced them only last week.

As he stared in dismay, the light flickered two or three times and went out. The noise gradually faded as if it had rushed past Ray and now the doppler effect made it echo more deeply as it faded. He waited, clutching the useless flashlight in his hand until it was quiet again.

Light is not welcome here.

Ray nodded, though he wasn't sure anyone--or anything--could see the gesture. "Sorry." He shuffled forward again, probing with his toe to get a feel of the mysterious black substance on which he stood. He wasn't sure where he was, whether he was in some mysterious Netherworld so black he couldn't even see starlight or if this were part of the transfer portal. He didn't know why he was here and without light he couldn't find his way out again either. Though there had been nothing close at hand when he had turned on the light, he spread his hands wide and moved them in circles in front of him as he moved.

"Can you tell me where I am?" he ventured. "Are the others here, too?"

You are alone, Watcher at the Gate.

"Watcher at the gate? What does that mean?" Ray asked, intrigued. He wasn't sure what was going on but it seemed like there was a purpose to it. Maybe he could figure it all out and rescue Darius Pettigrew in the process. "And where's Mr. Pettigrew?"

Even such as he may serve a purpose here.

"Am I here for a purpose?"

Oh, yes. A very great purpose. But I will not yet tell you of it. Go onward and discover it. Beware the guardian of the tunnel, who would strive to stop you.

The voice in his mind faded away leaving Ray full of more questions than before. He took another step, two, and saw something in the distance, a faint gleam of light, small and narrow, the light at the end of the tunnel? Tunnel? He had been warned. Uneasily Ray groped nervously over his shoulder for his thrower, grateful when it came to hand. He powered up, hoping whatever had taken away his flashlight wouldn't drain his proton pack as well. Half afraid that would happen, he hastened his steps toward the light, watching the opening grow bigger and bigger as he raced to meet it.

A deep growl echoed around him, low and savage like a hungry predator. Ray's fingers tightened uneasily on his proton rifle and he braced himself, muttering, "I don't like the sound of that."

The growl's owner came at him out of the light, giving him one hasty impression of a shadow against the brightness, before it became only bulk in the blackness, faintly limned in red. It was probably the size of Ecto-1, and he could make out a great, shaggy head, thick, bulky legs and a heavy body, yet for all its apparent size and weight it was as agile as a dancer. It circled him so quickly he had to whirl to keep it in sight, half afraid it would spring on him from behind. He fired once, a quick, short burst that made the monster roar in pain and rage and lunge sideways to elude the stream. The energy didn't confine it at all. Ray wasn't sure it was either solid or real, but that didn't stop him from taking aim at it and firing a second time. "This'd be fun if the guys were here," he said under his breath, ducking abruptly to avoid a lunging 'paw'. "Well, almost fun."

It roared again, shaking itself, and sprang, screeching painfully when the beam shot out at him. As he fired, Ray edged toward the light, determined to elude the guardian. It must be here to prevent him from escaping this limbo. Ray still didn't know what was going on, but he had an idea it wouldn't follow him out into the light.

Step by step he worked his way toward the opening, watching it grow as he drew nearer, but never turning his back on the savage guardian. As he neared the escape route, he noticed a curious thing. Light from an open door will spill into a dark room, illuminating everything in its path, but this light didn't. It was there, bright and real, but it didn't bleed through into the vast cavern of darkness. The line of demarcation was stark and distinct as the terminator on the moon.

With a savage growl the beast lunged at him. Even when it was between him and the light it didn't show up as anything but a shadow, an impression of darkness across it. Not one beam of brightness reflected off its bulk. Prowling back and forth like a great lion, snorting as it breathed, it tried to herd him away from the light, retreating only when he fired at it. But he didn't want to drain his pack to escape it. He had a feeling there would be need of his thrower for something a whole lot bigger before this was all over.

Finally he was near enough to run for it, and he did, racing backwards toward the light, sending out sporadic bursts of proton power as the creature darted at him. Each time he hit it, it backed off a little, but it always came back.

Then with a vicious howl of sheer rage, it pounced. Ray scrambled backwards, tripped over something and was pitched into the light, feeling one slash of claws across the bottom of his boot as he fell. The creature's fading roar cut off abruptly as Ray blinked against the sudden brightness and found himself back in the tower room.

"Wow! That was weird. Guys, you're not gonna believe--" He stared around at the room in blank disbelief. The guys were gone! The room was deserted and even his P.K.E. meter wasn't on the table where he had left it.

Ray stared in surprise, then he went over to the steps. He didn't know how long he'd been trapped in the dark limbo fighting the guardian of the darkness, but it could have been hours instead of the minutes it had seemed to him. The guys might be systematically searching the house for him. Standing at the top of the stairs, he yelled at the top of his lungs:

"PETER! EGON! WINSTON!" He stood there listening, but there was no reply, nothing to disturb the silence, nothing but the faint, subliminal noises common to any old house. Nothing but a quiet rumble in the distance and the flicker of yellow light that ran up the wall opposite him and vanished before he could decide it was real.

Ray retreated into the tower room again, frowning, careful to avoid looking into the mirror. Instead he went over to the huge book lying there and lifted the front part of it enough to read the cover. The words were in Latin, and Ray had learned Latin so he could read books like this. What he held was a copy of Necromancy and the Casting of Spells by Mordaunt Hays, a book he'd heard of but never seen. A dangerous book. A book that was reputed to contain prophecies about the fate of the world. He pulled his fingers back with some distaste as if he'd been touching something cold and clammy, though the cover was not really cold and the leather was smooth and dry beneath his fingers, and studied the page open before him, marked with a silken cord. As near as he could make out, it seemed to be saying something about the imbuing of inanimate objects with ghostly power. At any other time, Ray would have been fascinated. He'd seen that kind of thing happen before once or twice, once when a ghost had wound up in a pot of molten steel and had infested, at least in part, everything made from that metal.

He was about to turn away, when he frowned and glanced back. The book might well be open to this particular page for a reason. It might be a good idea for him to read about it before he went in search of the guys. He might learn something.

Rapidly he skimmed over the text. Hays had written in Latin, as various occult scholars had chosen to do because until fairly recently, learned men were at least exposed to Latin on a regular basis. But as near as he could tell, Hays had a florid style and was given to using ten words when two would have done.

"And it be said," Ray read aloud, working out the meanings of Hays' complex sentences with some difficulty, "that a ghost who has fled this earthly realm after the commission of great evil, evil so great that others, the innocent, must pay its price long after he has died, must make atonement, no matter how complex the task." He frowned. Had Cletus Vanderberg created that great an evil? Did the residual readings Egon found indicate a power as great as Gozer might linger dormant here, summoned by Cletus right before he died. If he had single-handedly loosed something so powerful on the world, then he might well have to pay the price for it. Maybe his ghost was here. Ray longed for his P.K.E. meter.

He was reluctant to touch the book again. That sense of power he'd felt when he'd lifted it to read the cover stood out in his mind, an unpleasant feeling as if he'd touched something nasty and evil. Instead he stood in the center of the room, avoiding the pentagram with great care and asked, "Did you do that, Cletus? Did you summon up something you couldn't control?"

It will be controlled.

He wasn't sure if he'd heard that at all, or whether he'd imagined the words. The 'voice' had been much clearer and louder in the darkness than it was now, though he could still sense it. Ray stared around the room with interest as if he could catch a glimpse of Cletus, if that's who was trying to communicate, out of the corner of his eye. Some spirits couldn't be seen head on, they had to be glimpsed sideways in passing and would slide away from a direct look into invisibility.

Nothing flickered except an edge of gold along the door frame, as if the house was charged with ectoplasmic power. When Ray turned his gaze in that direction it vanished entirely.

He concentrated on the book again. "The spirit may not rest until he has--uh, let's see--atoned for his wickedness," he read aloud. Well, that worked here. The house had been a center of disturbance for a long time, though not when the family lived here. The police had told them no Vanderberg had lived here since 1981 when Ralph III was first posted abroad. Before then, they lived here sporadically, generally spending several months here in the summer when not traveling abroad and the odd holiday. The manifestations had never been constant. Cletus must follow a kind of cyclic pattern.

Ray was engrossed in the possibilities. He loved a complicated job. His only worry now was that the guys were in danger without him. "I'll get back to you," he told the empty air of the tower room. "First I've gotta find my friends."

They are so far away you can never reach them.

Ray shivered. True, they hadn't answered his calls, but he'd just assumed they were simply in another part of the house, exploring the cellars, maybe, or going over the grounds. "What do you mean, far away?" he demanded, glancing sideways at the mirror in hopes of finding Cletus looking out of it. He got a hasty glimpse of a bulky shadow outlined in red hovering beyond his own reflection and turned his eyes away rapidly, afraid he would be drawn in again if he stared directly into the glass.

Reminded of the guardian, he lifted his foot and examined the sole of his boot, where the beast had clawed as he escaped. A deep score ran across the heel of his boot, nearly half an inch deep.

"Gosh, look at that," Ray breathed, shocked at his near miss. If it had hit him across the face or the stomach he would be in serious trouble right now. "I hope I don't have to go in there again."

He waited, holding his breath, to see if Cletus would tell him he did, but there was no answer. Cletus might be trapped but that didn't mean he had to cooperate. He hadn't been one of the good guys while he was alive. Ray wasn't sure being a ghost could change him, even after as long as this. He hoped so, because Cletus was a powerful ghost, if it were he who had drawn Ray into the mirror.

When Cletus didn't reply, Ray squared his shoulders and headed downstairs to find the guys. He called their names periodically, but no one answered. Without a P.K.E. meter he couldn't take readings to measure the increase in ambient energy or to track the guys by their biorhythms. Instead he was reduced to a physical search.

He started at the tower room below Cletus' workshop, pausing in the doorway when he saw a motion out of the corner of his eye. It had been a flash of blue, like Egon's jumpsuit, but when he stepped into the room, there was no trace of it. Ray frowned. "Egon?" he asked tentatively. "Are you there?"

No answer. He closed his eyes, concentrating. Did he hear his name, so faint as to be subliminal? He couldn't be sure whether he heard it or whether he simply wanted to hear it. "Gosh, Egon, where are you?" he demanded.

"Raymond?"

That was real, though it was so faint he had to strain for it. "Egon," he yelled happily. "Where are you?"

No answer. He took a couple of steps into the room, peering here and there. Egon couldn't be hidden here unless he had gone into the wall, and the only wall without windows was the one with the staircase.

"I can't hear you, R...." The voice faded entirely, and Ray knew without even calling again that he couldn't reach Egon now. Alarmed he raised his voice and bellowed.

"EGON! PETER! WINSTON!"

No one replied.

His shoulders rounding in disappointment, Ray tapped the walls beside the stairway in hopes of finding a secret panel, but the wall didn't sound hollow except where it obviously backed the stairs. Heaving a sigh, Ray left the room and went down to the third floor.

In the first bedroom, he saw a telephone on the night stand. He wasn't sure the phone lines were connected since no one lived here, but it was worth a try. He picked up the phone--yes, he had a dial tone--and called headquarters.

The line was busy.

He hung up and tried again. Still busy. It was possible Janine was comparing recipes with her sister or sharing gossip with a friend, but it could mean the guys had called to report him missing. He'd wait a little and try again. He didn't know how long he had been in the mirror.

That made him look at his watch, and then he frowned. It had stopped. The second hand wasn't moving at all, and when he lifted it to his ear, he could hear no ticking. So he picked up the phone and dialed a time and temperature report. It was 9 a.m.

It couldn't be. They had come here in the late afternoon. Had he been trapped in there overnight? No wonder the guys hadn't answered his calls. They'd probably stayed hunting for him for hours, stayed overnight even, but now they might have gone for help, though who could help them with a ghostly manifestation Ray wasn't sure. Nine in the morning? He had lost the whole night fighting the guardian. Yet he wasn't tired. He went over to the window and realized what he'd noticed without realizing it all along. The light was coming from a different direction. The machine was right. It was morning.

Time must pass at different speeds in the guardian's realm. That was the only answer.

Heaving a worried sigh he tried to call headquarters again and once more got the busy signal. The guys must be going nuts searching for him. If only he could call and let Janine know he was fine. Then she could call them on the mobile phone and let them know. But a third attempt only garnered him another busy signal.

Maybe he should leave the house altogether. That might do it. Once outside, he'd be out of Cletus' influence, sure to find his friends.

Eagerly he galloped down the stairs to the ground floor and crossed the entry hall to the door. If Ecto-1 was still outside, he'd know for sure the guys were still here. Hadn't he heard Egon upstairs after all? He put his hand on the doorknob.

Flames shot out of the keyhole and he yanked his hand back, copying Peter's move of before, sticking his fingers in his mouth to ease the sting.

"That's not nice," he mumbled around them, lifting his eyes to study the entry hall. "Come on, Cletus, I'm not running out on you. I just want to find the guys."

You must stay here now. The Devourer awaits.

"Devourer? Maybe I could pass on that one." He frowned. "Is that what Egon's getting readings of, what's trying to wake up?"

There was no answer.

"Well, I'm not gonna do it," Ray insisted hotly, pushed to anger at last. "Nobody tells me what to do, especially not a ghost." He unshipped his thrower, powered up, and fired at the door, all in one smooth motion.

The proton stream bounced right off the door, reflecting back at him as if he'd fired at a mirror, and he had to power down and jump sideways with a startled gasp or he would have been neutronized where he stood. His beam didn't even touch the door itself.

"Wow, a force field," breathed Ray as he picked himself up off the floor. He might be able to get out if he could find its frequency, but without his P.K.E. meter that would be a hit and miss proposition. "Okay, you've got me here. Suppose you tell me what you want with me."

The time will come.

Try as he might, Ray couldn't get a better answer than that.

"This is crazy, Egon," Peter complained as they gathered in the third floor hall. Peter now knew more about the Vanderberg house than he had ever wanted to, including the location of the thickest cobwebs and where the roaches liked to hide in the root cellar. He, Egon and Winston had covered every inch of the house, reduced to opening closets and peering under beds, all the while calling for Ray. They didn't find him. Aside from his abandoned P.K.E. meter, they could find no proof he'd even been here.

"Why crazy, Peter?" Egon asked, frowning. It was as if the P.K.E. meter had grown to his hand. He hadn't lowered it once during the search as if it would guide him to Ray. There had been a period of excitement when a search of one of the bedrooms, the one nearest the South tower, had given off faint readings as if Ray had been there. Egon shook his head. "Peculiar," he said. "The readings are too faint. Ray couldn't have been here today and left them. I should doubt he could have left them this week or even this year. And we know he's never been here before."

"You're sure he wouldn't read that way as--as a ghost?" Peter had asked unhappily, wanting to make certain it was clear that, wherever he was, Ray was still alive.