Chapter 6

Separated from his fellows by the nether-being, Egon fired a steady stream into its seemingly impenetrable hide, finally lowering his weapon as useless. He tensed, prepared to run for his own life, yet the entity totally ignored him, its sights set firmly on the fleeing Peter and Ray. Egon stopped, thinking furiously.

"This isn't working," he muttered, scratching his head. "Think, Spengler, think. What...?" He froze, inspiration softening the lines of his ascetic features. "Marie! The answer must lie with Marie."

He took off for the psych lab at a fast trot, heart pounding with fear for his friends and with the sense of time running out. The front door was unlocked as usual but the lab itself was secured, and Egon wasted several seconds striving futilely for entrance.

"Cage!" he yelled, slamming his fist into the steel barrier. "Cage, it's Egon Spengler!" No answer. Egon listened closely, hearing furtive steps from behind the barricade. He tried again. "Open the door now," he ordered rather more calmly, "or I'll blow it off its hinges." He listened again. The steps hesitated, then neared the door; the lock snicked. Egon didn't even wait for the door to fully open before he was through it and into the lab, glancing wildly around. Behind him the door slammed home.

"What's happening out there?" Cage's hair was a mass of gray tufts barely covering his shiny pate. Sweat misted his face and his eyes shone with fear. "Venkman said that, that ... monster...."

"It's after them now!" the physicist gasped, bunching Cage's shirt front in one fist. "I want to see your test subject and all pertinent notes." He gave the man a shake then released him. Cage dropped back a step, panting as though it had been he who had just run the distance rather than Egon. They studied each other several seconds; finally Cage dropped his eyes.

"This way." He beckoned the other through the connecting door to where Marie D'Loeffier lay still asleep. Her dark face was creased with a tension not normally associated with unconsciousness, and her body twitched spasmodically.

"She slipped into a disturbed dream cycle some minutes ago," Cage explained hurriedly. "She's also producing an increased psi wave output, if I'm reading your meter correctly."

Egon stared down at the woman, chewing his lip. "Peter said you're electronically stimulating the sleep centers to maintain her somnescent state? Low energy pulses?" Cage nodded. Egon bent to examine the electrodes attached to Marie's patchily shaved skull, frowned, then followed one electrode's lead to its source. "How accurate have you been able to map Marie's control centers?"

Satisfaction replaced some of the fear on the psychologist's pudgy features. "Better than any person alive. Marie and I have been working together nearly five years; the brain map has been an on-going project for four."

Egon crossed to the banks of equipment along the wall, then knelt to peer into an access panel near the bottom. At that last, however, he looked up with an expression of interest. "So you can locate the exact portion of Marie's brain which controls her present dream state?"

Cage cocked one bushy brow inquiringly. "Yes."

"Good." Spengler rose, dusting off the already filthy knees of his jumpsuit with automatically precise strokes. "What would happen if you were to use a low level current to disrupt Marie's dream centers -- without waking her?"

Cage's round face cleared. He hurried from the room, returning at once with an electronic probe. He then activated a computer screen against the wall and called up a complicated looking diagram. Egon moved to peek over his shoulder.

"Marie first came to me because she suffers from several extremely rare sleep disorders, one of them distinctly dealing with her ability to dream. I implanted several electrodes directly into her brain for experimental purposes. They're still there and easily stimulated by.... There!" Cage pointed triumphantly to a dark spot against what Egon now identified as a human brain, mapped and diagrammed on multiple graphs. "That's the one we want."

Egon followed the psychologist back to the bed. "Hurry," he urged, glancing at his watch. "Peter and Ray's lives are depending on this."

Cage pushed back some of Marie's hair, locating a tiny sliver of metal implanted directly into the woman's skull. "I don't know what's going to happen," he admitted. "You believe it will affect the creature somehow?"

"That," Egon returned grimly, "is what we need to find out. Hurry, please."

Cage inserted the tip of the little metal probe then pressed a button on its handle. At first nothing seemed to happen, and the two men waited, tense and frustrated. Then, with a suddenness startling in the security of the quiet lab, Marie D'Loeffier began to scream.

***