He can hear Ray's voice like a bell, ringing out through the fog, clear as day, "it's funny, isn't it?" But it's only a memory, an out-of-place echo, rippling through space and time. Voices from the past-future, future-past. But here, beyond the veil, where spirits persist beyond their flesh, thought becomes real, and the metaphysical is made physical. A memory rises, and manifests, "it's funny, isn't it?" Ray says again and again and again.
He couldn't track his experiments anymore in the afterlife. Time ceased to exist in the conventional sense, he had to reinvent the scientific method for ghosts, make it immune to chronological progression. It would've been easier had Ray been there, but Ray had been, and had not been. Past-future, future-past, it all comes crashing down into the same thing here.
There will be much to discuss, and there has already been much discussion, once Ray gets there, and has been there. "It's difficult to describe," he hears himself say to the past-future, future-past, "As a ghost, time stretches and pulls, more like physical object than an abstract concept. There's a high-tide and a low-tide, happening all at once, forever."
That's why so many ghosts seem trapped in the time period of their deaths, they get stuck in the dead-time, the past-future, the future-past. It's easier to latch onto the familiar than open one's self to all-time. It was tempting, he would admit, to stay locked in 1984, where the events were neatly laid out before him. He could have haunted that Firehouse for all of eternity, but they had all promised, half-joking, in their old age, not to bust one another. It'd be a shame to put them in a situation where they would have been tempted to break such a promise.
So, he pulled himself out of the familiar, by his "boot straps," he hears Peter say, and he wanders the Earth attempting to translate his new state of being into words the living can understand.
He catalogues the ecosystem at first. Travels the dimensional ley lines. He spends much of his not-time those first not-years attempting to map the terrain, but finds it shifts and grows and decays instantly and unendingly. The dead-world is particularly sensitive, it would seem. And so, he turns his attentions to the flora and the fauna, the creatures that were once human, and the creatures that were never alive.
He finds himself pulled and tug through not-time, where the others have already died, but not, where they're there beside him in this not-space, and he's attempting to explain as plainly as he can how to die well.
And that's when he sees them, or rather "sees" them, beyond the veil, tugging on heartstrings made real, a family he'd nearly forgotten. His body had died, and his mind persisted into the next plane of existence, and he had so quickly recoiled into the familiar arms of 1984, in order to retain his sense of self, he had to let go of the latest developments. A family. A wife, a child, now grown, having children of their own.
In that not-space, made up of the living and never-lived, the past-future, future-past, Egon Spengler rediscovered his family.
"It's funny isn't it." Ray says, clear as a bell, sometime in the past-future, future-past.
They're on the roof of the Firehouse. Ray's smoking a cigarette. It is a summer night and the air is thick. Dana's come over; she's helping Peter scrounge together dinner in the kitchen. Oscar's nearly thirteen, doing his homework so he can play pool with his father. Winston's chatting up Janine, they're gossiping about Egon and his new lady friend. Louis is with them, out of the loop and struggling to keep up.
And Egon is only now becoming aware of his desires for children of his own.
"It's funny isn't it." Ray says flicking away some ash. "How legacies are like ghosts."
Poetics are not Egon's strong suit so he simply agrees, but Ray has a mischievous grin on his face, enjoying the fact that he's entered into territory Egon is so unfamiliar with.
"Something remains, generation after generation."
"I've considered investigating genetic memory in humans."
He remembers this moment, this summer night, this conversation. It's happened before, and is happening, and will happen. But then, the dialogue branches, Ray enters uncharted territory, saying something entirely new:
"You'll find your way back to them."
And the past-future becomes future-past, and Egon's ghost realizes this may be more than a memory made real.
"You'll see, how your legacy lingers and haunts their halls."
Confused, Egon's knee-jerk reaction is to disagree: "After a couple generations, families are just strangers." He feels this must be especially true of his own family, whom he struggles to remember in his current state.
"Maybe haunting's the wrong word. Maybe it's something else. What do we call it, when you need the ghost?"
"...They won't know me."
Ray only grins, like he's had this conversation a hundred thousand times before. "But they'll find me."