Chapter 3
The garage was quiet when Peter returned early that afternoon: no ringing telephone, no clack-clack of the typewriter keys. He peered through the door cautiously before stepping inside, waiting until his eyes adjusted from the bright sun. "Janine?"
"Peee-terrr!"
A semi-transparent, distinctly green mass of ectoplasm detached itself from the ceiling and streaked earthward on a collision course with Venkman's head. He ducked ... to no avail, for the mass simply corrected its course, terminating its run with a loud Splat! against Peter's chest.
"Aaaagh!" Peter screeched, staring aghast at the front of his brown uniform. "Slimer! I hate that!"
Quite oblivious to censure, the little netherbeing threw his skinny arms around Peter's neck, kissing him soundly. "Peeeter's back!" he crooned, liberally spreading the ectoplasm to Peter's face.
"Yuck" Peter spat, scrubbing his mouth with his sleeve. "You know, Slimer, you make a good case for my profession, you know that?"
"I love you, too, Peter," Slimer returned equably.
Peter sighed.
"I see he got you again, Doctor V." Janine's giggle followed her words lightly across the garage. Peter disengaged Slimer's arms and crossed to her, scowling.
"It wouldn't be so bad if it was only once and awhile," he growled, wiping his dripping hands on the seat of his pants. "But the spud slimes me every single time I walk through the door!" He pulled his uniform away from his skin; fortunately since Slimer often neglected to solidify fully before touching them, ectoplasm evaporated quickly, disappearing with less residue than one might expect.
Janine giggled again, finding Venkman's predicament a source of endless amusement. "He loves you, Doctor V.!" She paused. "Of course there's no accounting for taste."
Slimer planted a kiss on the top of his head and Peter swatted him irritably away. "I just wish he'd slime somebody else for a change. Why does it always have to be me?"
"He hugs Ray almost as much as he does you." Janine leaned back in her chair, crossing her shapely legs at the knee. "You should have seen Ray this morning -- Slimer had him soaked from head to toe!" She laughed aloud at the memory. "He'd just gotten out of the shower, too; had to go take another one."
Even Peter had to smile at that. Although Slimer loved them all, even he had his favorites, those being Ray and Peter himself. Ray he loved whole- heartedly; Peter he worshipped and not from afar. That thought brought Peter back to the present and his own sticky state. "Wish he'd give Winston or Egon my share, then; he barely touches them."
Janine adjusted her short skirt minutely. "Winston sat down and had a long talk with Slimer once; that stopped it for him. And Egon...." She sighed, her eyes taking on the dreamy look they always did whenever the tall blond physicist was mentioned. "Egon just stares at him with those blue eyes of his," she sighed again, "and Slimer backs off."
"Yeah, yeah, I know all that," Peter harumphed, running his fingers across his raspy jaw. "And speaking of that bunch'a crackpots I'm associated with, where are they?"
"You're a fine one to talk about crackpots," Janine sniffed. "But if you're talkin' about Egon and Ray, they're in your office looking some stuff up."
"Got'cha." Peter rounded her desk, pausing at the small hand on his sleeve. "What?"
Concerned green eyes peered up at him from behind green-framed glasses, giving the woman a softer look than she generally permitted to show. "I was just wondering how Winston was. Ray was awful upset this morning and even Egon looked worried. Egon never looks worried unless it's serious."
Venkman patted her hand and she released him. "Winston's going to be fine," he assured her. "He woke up with the mother of all headaches, though. They'll be letting him out of the hospital in a day or two."
She smiled and he trudged wearily on past the reception area to the glassed- in office he had claimed as his own on their first day there. "Yo, dudes!" he called, kicking the door open with his toe. "Petey's home!"
Two heads rose at that -- one blond, one auburn -- but the expression on the dissimilar features carried the exact same note of exhaustion as was on Peter's own face. "Boy, you guys sure wouldn't win any beauty contests right now," Venkman remarked, pointedly ignoring his own less-than-dapper state. "I hope that means you found something."
Egon removed his glasses, laying them carefully in his lap. Then he used both hands to rub at his eyes, leaving them even redder than before. "Not much," he admitted, leaning back. "The police delivered the autopsy reports on Policewoman Hernandez this morning." He waved vaguely towards a sheaf of computer print on one corner of the desk. "The coroner discovered decayed vegetable matter in the wounds along with several bone chips probably belonging to a small animal of some kind."
"Peter?" Ray interrupted his older partner before Spengler could launch into full lecture mode. "What about Winston? Is he going to be all right?"
Egon looked surprised for a moment, then cocked one inquiring brow in Peter's direction. "What about Winston?" he echoed. "Did the hospital tell you anything?"
Peter shoved aside the police reports to perch himself on the corner of the desk. "Hospital wouldn't tell me anything," he grumbled, crossing his arms across his chest. "But they did call Winston's father in -- consent forms and stuff."
"What about Winston?" Ray demanded, clutching the heavy book he held tight in both hands.
Peter shrugged. "All things considered, he's doing terrific. It took a couple of stitches to close that cut in his head and he's got a concussion, but he should be out of the hospital day after tomorrow."
"Thank goodness!" Ray exhaled softly, laying the book back onto his lap. "I was afraid...."
"We all were," Egon acknowledged, returning his glasses to the bridge of his long nose. "There was quite a bit of blood."
"Not all of it was Winston's," Peter remembered aloud. He reached out to tap Ray's auburn head with his knuckles. "What about it, fly-boy? How's the back?"
Ray smiled shyly up at him causing Peter to smile back. "I'm all right, it just hurts a little is all."
"I'll bet it does," Peter snorted, eyes drawn irresistibly to the line of bandages just visible through Stantz' light blue shirt. "You looked like a cross-stitch pattern."
Ray blushed and changed the subject. "Do you want to hear what we found out?"
"What there is of it," Spengler interjected sourly.
"Sure." Peter turned back to the tall blond and winked. "Floor's all yours, Professor Spengs, baby. What did you find out?"
Spengler cleared his throat and stood, the ideal picture of the college lecturer. "As I mentioned earlier, there was decayed vegetable matter and bones in the wounds of Sgt. Hernandez corresponding to similar traces in at least two previous victims. These were submitted for analysis." He sorted through the reports Peter had so cavalierly shoved aside, selecting one and proffering it to the lounging psychologist. "A botanist has identified it as a type of vine native to the Caribbean -- found no where else, in fact.
Peter chewed his thumbnail thoughtfully. "The Caribbean. You mean like Haiti?"
"Yes, why?"
Peter shook his head. "Maybe nothing. Go on."
Egon regarded him steadily for a moment before he continued. "Ray and I scoured our references, paying particular attention to the superstitions indigent to the Caribbean peoples. Tobins revealed nothing; as a matter of fact, none of our more reliable references mentioned this particular nether- being at all."
Egon held out his hand and Ray handed him the leather tome he'd been clasping. Gold lettering winked dully in the fluorescent lighting as Egon thumbed it through. "What we came up with I won't even dignify by calling a superstition -- a fairytale, perhaps, designed to frighten disobedient children."
"We've come up against those before," Ray reminded him gently.
The blond flashed a smile. "Yes, I know. But I will never understand why parents will do that to their children. Terrifying them into obedience can not be good discipline."
"Actually, it stinks," the brown haired psychologist of the group stated flatly. "But we're not gathered together to do the Doctor Spock routine, are we, dearly beloved?"
"No." Gathering his thoughts, Egon located the proper page, then passed the book across. "This is by noted anthropologist Jorge Jiminez. He spent several years documenting the lore associated with the Caribbean sugar plantations."
Peter spent several minutes staring at a rough pencil sketch vaguely resembling the unearthly obscenity they'd fought early that morning. "M'Tumba," he pronounced, scanning the page. "The text is in Spanish."
"You speak Spanish," Ray pointed out with charming innocence. "Better than either of us." He pointed ruefully to the two Spanish-English dictionaries scattered among the books on the floor, smothering a yawn with his free hand. "A lot better than me, anyway."
Green eyes glinted with boyish mischief but Peter's expression was solemn. "But I'm sure you've already done a complete and professional translation. Since time is of the essence, I think it would behoove you to...."
"Oh, do shut up!" Egon snapped tiredly. "I'll tell you what it says."
Peter folded his hands in his lap and fixed Spengler with such a fatuous expression that the older man grinned despite himself. "M'Tumba," he began without preamble, "is a legend which can be traced back to the west African coast approximately four hundred years ago but no farther than that. It crossed the Atlantic on the early slave ships, apparently dying out completely in its native land but experiencing a brief resurgence among the voodoo peoples of Hispaniola." He pulled off his glasses again and began to polish them absently on his cuff. "The text makes reference to the 'unspeakable abhorrence which is M'Tumba' and of its unquenchable hunger for human flesh. And that," he concluded, redonning his glasses, "is all there is."
"Not too much," Peter remarked soberly.
"Not much at all," the physicist agreed. "From what little effect our proton beams had, I'd say this M'Tumba -- if that's who we truly fought -- is as powerful as anything we've faced before. I also believe Ray was correct when he said it was at least partially corporeal."
"We've faced corporeal beings before," Stantz protested, his boundless zeal on another uphill swing. "The Boogieman, for instance! All we have to do is break out the molecular destabilizer we used on him...."
Egon stemmed the occultist/engineer's always-enthusiastic, rarely-practical strategy by laying a hand on the young man's uninjured shoulder. "Don't get over-confident, Raymond; this isn't the same thing at all. My instruments registered neither enough PKE nor enough substantiality to resist our weapons the way M'Tumba did. At a guess, I'd say it was drawing on another source of power, but what that could be, I cannot imagine."
Peter's eyes softened, taking on a far away look. "Hispaniola," he muttered. "Haiti. Hmmmm."
"You have an idea!" Ray accused, poking the psychologist in the thigh. "What?"
The green eyes sharpened again. Peter cast a look at his wristwatch, then studied his friends' faces grimly. "Look, guys, I've got a crazy theory to try out on you, then I think I'd better go have a talk with our old friend Sam Cage. If I'm right, he just may hold the key to the whole dirty mess...."
***
The garage was quiet when Peter returned early that afternoon: no ringing telephone, no clack-clack of the typewriter keys. He peered through the door cautiously before stepping inside, waiting until his eyes adjusted from the bright sun. "Janine?"
"Peee-terrr!"
A semi-transparent, distinctly green mass of ectoplasm detached itself from the ceiling and streaked earthward on a collision course with Venkman's head. He ducked ... to no avail, for the mass simply corrected its course, terminating its run with a loud Splat! against Peter's chest.
"Aaaagh!" Peter screeched, staring aghast at the front of his brown uniform. "Slimer! I hate that!"
Quite oblivious to censure, the little netherbeing threw his skinny arms around Peter's neck, kissing him soundly. "Peeeter's back!" he crooned, liberally spreading the ectoplasm to Peter's face.
"Yuck" Peter spat, scrubbing his mouth with his sleeve. "You know, Slimer, you make a good case for my profession, you know that?"
"I love you, too, Peter," Slimer returned equably.
Peter sighed.
"I see he got you again, Doctor V." Janine's giggle followed her words lightly across the garage. Peter disengaged Slimer's arms and crossed to her, scowling.
"It wouldn't be so bad if it was only once and awhile," he growled, wiping his dripping hands on the seat of his pants. "But the spud slimes me every single time I walk through the door!" He pulled his uniform away from his skin; fortunately since Slimer often neglected to solidify fully before touching them, ectoplasm evaporated quickly, disappearing with less residue than one might expect.
Janine giggled again, finding Venkman's predicament a source of endless amusement. "He loves you, Doctor V.!" She paused. "Of course there's no accounting for taste."
Slimer planted a kiss on the top of his head and Peter swatted him irritably away. "I just wish he'd slime somebody else for a change. Why does it always have to be me?"
"He hugs Ray almost as much as he does you." Janine leaned back in her chair, crossing her shapely legs at the knee. "You should have seen Ray this morning -- Slimer had him soaked from head to toe!" She laughed aloud at the memory. "He'd just gotten out of the shower, too; had to go take another one."
Even Peter had to smile at that. Although Slimer loved them all, even he had his favorites, those being Ray and Peter himself. Ray he loved whole- heartedly; Peter he worshipped and not from afar. That thought brought Peter back to the present and his own sticky state. "Wish he'd give Winston or Egon my share, then; he barely touches them."
Janine adjusted her short skirt minutely. "Winston sat down and had a long talk with Slimer once; that stopped it for him. And Egon...." She sighed, her eyes taking on the dreamy look they always did whenever the tall blond physicist was mentioned. "Egon just stares at him with those blue eyes of his," she sighed again, "and Slimer backs off."
"Yeah, yeah, I know all that," Peter harumphed, running his fingers across his raspy jaw. "And speaking of that bunch'a crackpots I'm associated with, where are they?"
"You're a fine one to talk about crackpots," Janine sniffed. "But if you're talkin' about Egon and Ray, they're in your office looking some stuff up."
"Got'cha." Peter rounded her desk, pausing at the small hand on his sleeve. "What?"
Concerned green eyes peered up at him from behind green-framed glasses, giving the woman a softer look than she generally permitted to show. "I was just wondering how Winston was. Ray was awful upset this morning and even Egon looked worried. Egon never looks worried unless it's serious."
Venkman patted her hand and she released him. "Winston's going to be fine," he assured her. "He woke up with the mother of all headaches, though. They'll be letting him out of the hospital in a day or two."
She smiled and he trudged wearily on past the reception area to the glassed- in office he had claimed as his own on their first day there. "Yo, dudes!" he called, kicking the door open with his toe. "Petey's home!"
Two heads rose at that -- one blond, one auburn -- but the expression on the dissimilar features carried the exact same note of exhaustion as was on Peter's own face. "Boy, you guys sure wouldn't win any beauty contests right now," Venkman remarked, pointedly ignoring his own less-than-dapper state. "I hope that means you found something."
Egon removed his glasses, laying them carefully in his lap. Then he used both hands to rub at his eyes, leaving them even redder than before. "Not much," he admitted, leaning back. "The police delivered the autopsy reports on Policewoman Hernandez this morning." He waved vaguely towards a sheaf of computer print on one corner of the desk. "The coroner discovered decayed vegetable matter in the wounds along with several bone chips probably belonging to a small animal of some kind."
"Peter?" Ray interrupted his older partner before Spengler could launch into full lecture mode. "What about Winston? Is he going to be all right?"
Egon looked surprised for a moment, then cocked one inquiring brow in Peter's direction. "What about Winston?" he echoed. "Did the hospital tell you anything?"
Peter shoved aside the police reports to perch himself on the corner of the desk. "Hospital wouldn't tell me anything," he grumbled, crossing his arms across his chest. "But they did call Winston's father in -- consent forms and stuff."
"What about Winston?" Ray demanded, clutching the heavy book he held tight in both hands.
Peter shrugged. "All things considered, he's doing terrific. It took a couple of stitches to close that cut in his head and he's got a concussion, but he should be out of the hospital day after tomorrow."
"Thank goodness!" Ray exhaled softly, laying the book back onto his lap. "I was afraid...."
"We all were," Egon acknowledged, returning his glasses to the bridge of his long nose. "There was quite a bit of blood."
"Not all of it was Winston's," Peter remembered aloud. He reached out to tap Ray's auburn head with his knuckles. "What about it, fly-boy? How's the back?"
Ray smiled shyly up at him causing Peter to smile back. "I'm all right, it just hurts a little is all."
"I'll bet it does," Peter snorted, eyes drawn irresistibly to the line of bandages just visible through Stantz' light blue shirt. "You looked like a cross-stitch pattern."
Ray blushed and changed the subject. "Do you want to hear what we found out?"
"What there is of it," Spengler interjected sourly.
"Sure." Peter turned back to the tall blond and winked. "Floor's all yours, Professor Spengs, baby. What did you find out?"
Spengler cleared his throat and stood, the ideal picture of the college lecturer. "As I mentioned earlier, there was decayed vegetable matter and bones in the wounds of Sgt. Hernandez corresponding to similar traces in at least two previous victims. These were submitted for analysis." He sorted through the reports Peter had so cavalierly shoved aside, selecting one and proffering it to the lounging psychologist. "A botanist has identified it as a type of vine native to the Caribbean -- found no where else, in fact.
Peter chewed his thumbnail thoughtfully. "The Caribbean. You mean like Haiti?"
"Yes, why?"
Peter shook his head. "Maybe nothing. Go on."
Egon regarded him steadily for a moment before he continued. "Ray and I scoured our references, paying particular attention to the superstitions indigent to the Caribbean peoples. Tobins revealed nothing; as a matter of fact, none of our more reliable references mentioned this particular nether- being at all."
Egon held out his hand and Ray handed him the leather tome he'd been clasping. Gold lettering winked dully in the fluorescent lighting as Egon thumbed it through. "What we came up with I won't even dignify by calling a superstition -- a fairytale, perhaps, designed to frighten disobedient children."
"We've come up against those before," Ray reminded him gently.
The blond flashed a smile. "Yes, I know. But I will never understand why parents will do that to their children. Terrifying them into obedience can not be good discipline."
"Actually, it stinks," the brown haired psychologist of the group stated flatly. "But we're not gathered together to do the Doctor Spock routine, are we, dearly beloved?"
"No." Gathering his thoughts, Egon located the proper page, then passed the book across. "This is by noted anthropologist Jorge Jiminez. He spent several years documenting the lore associated with the Caribbean sugar plantations."
Peter spent several minutes staring at a rough pencil sketch vaguely resembling the unearthly obscenity they'd fought early that morning. "M'Tumba," he pronounced, scanning the page. "The text is in Spanish."
"You speak Spanish," Ray pointed out with charming innocence. "Better than either of us." He pointed ruefully to the two Spanish-English dictionaries scattered among the books on the floor, smothering a yawn with his free hand. "A lot better than me, anyway."
Green eyes glinted with boyish mischief but Peter's expression was solemn. "But I'm sure you've already done a complete and professional translation. Since time is of the essence, I think it would behoove you to...."
"Oh, do shut up!" Egon snapped tiredly. "I'll tell you what it says."
Peter folded his hands in his lap and fixed Spengler with such a fatuous expression that the older man grinned despite himself. "M'Tumba," he began without preamble, "is a legend which can be traced back to the west African coast approximately four hundred years ago but no farther than that. It crossed the Atlantic on the early slave ships, apparently dying out completely in its native land but experiencing a brief resurgence among the voodoo peoples of Hispaniola." He pulled off his glasses again and began to polish them absently on his cuff. "The text makes reference to the 'unspeakable abhorrence which is M'Tumba' and of its unquenchable hunger for human flesh. And that," he concluded, redonning his glasses, "is all there is."
"Not too much," Peter remarked soberly.
"Not much at all," the physicist agreed. "From what little effect our proton beams had, I'd say this M'Tumba -- if that's who we truly fought -- is as powerful as anything we've faced before. I also believe Ray was correct when he said it was at least partially corporeal."
"We've faced corporeal beings before," Stantz protested, his boundless zeal on another uphill swing. "The Boogieman, for instance! All we have to do is break out the molecular destabilizer we used on him...."
Egon stemmed the occultist/engineer's always-enthusiastic, rarely-practical strategy by laying a hand on the young man's uninjured shoulder. "Don't get over-confident, Raymond; this isn't the same thing at all. My instruments registered neither enough PKE nor enough substantiality to resist our weapons the way M'Tumba did. At a guess, I'd say it was drawing on another source of power, but what that could be, I cannot imagine."
Peter's eyes softened, taking on a far away look. "Hispaniola," he muttered. "Haiti. Hmmmm."
"You have an idea!" Ray accused, poking the psychologist in the thigh. "What?"
The green eyes sharpened again. Peter cast a look at his wristwatch, then studied his friends' faces grimly. "Look, guys, I've got a crazy theory to try out on you, then I think I'd better go have a talk with our old friend Sam Cage. If I'm right, he just may hold the key to the whole dirty mess...."
***
