A.N.: Same warnings abound for language, sci-fi violence, and intense situations. And I still don't own the characters (see chapter 1 for full disclaimers and credits).
6
"Worth the Fall"
Setting the trap turned out to be harder than the Ghostbusters anticipated.
Menken had taken Holtzmann into emergency surgery. It was dangerous in her current condition, but with her spleen about to rupture, he had no choice. The surgery would take several hours, he'd said. That turned the entire surgical ward into the most likely place for Arthur to next manifest. There were two floors of patients directly above the surgical ward.
Luckily, there was also a basement directly below, with several feet of solid concrete isolating it from the rooms above. Decades ago, in the age of the arms race, it had been a public fallout shelter. It would be enough to shield the upper floors from the effects of their weapons. It was the best the Ghostbusters could have asked for in these circumstances.
Menken had still insisted on evacuating as many patients as possible to other hospitals or to the rooms farthest from the surgical ward. He was not thrilled with the idea of remaining in the fight zone, but he had a patient who needed him and that took priority over his own personal safety.
They weren't worried about finding Arthur; he was sure to come find them. All they had to do was wait.
Still, there had been debate among the group. It seemed obvious that, as Artie's body was still alive, if they put him in the trap, his body would die from the instant disconnection from its soul, just like Holtzmann almost had.
"I'm going to play devil's advocate: Are we just going to shove Artie into a trap knowing it's going kill him?" Patty felt the question needed to be asked.
Abby had been doing the same soul searching…and not just since the incident at the firehouse. The first moment she'd gone to Holtzmann's apartment and found her friend half-dead on the bathroom floor, she'd been wrestling with the instinct to hunt down this ghost and wipe it off the face of the earth. She knew she was capable of holding a grudge, but until yesterday she had not known she was capable of those depths of anger.
She did comprehend the depths of hate that could exist within the undead, however. Rowan had possessed her; she'd tasted his madness, the same madness she imaged held Arthur Klein in its grip now. That kind of madness did not stop. You couldn't reason with that kind of madness. It had to be terrifying to lose your grasp on your sanity to the point where you can actually hate and even harm someone you're supposed to love. She was less optimistic that Artie's ever going to give up or settle for crossing over. Much as she pitied him, Abby would have no qualms about putting Artie through the ghost chipper if that's what it would take to protect her friend. He wasn't taking Jillian.
So, she was blunt: "Not to sound like a complete bitch, but why the hell not? We've had to kill ghosts before. What other options do we have? We have to treat Arthur Klein as if he were any other ghost. We can't leave him running loose to do whatever he wants."
"It's easier when we don't know the ghost personally," Erin said. The only thing she knew for sure was that, if and when that time came, she'd be the one to put Arthur in the trap. Patty and Abby were both right: They had killed ghosts before, and no, this wasn't just another ghost. They knew his name, his history, his family. If they had to end his existence, they would have to live with it.
Erin knew how it felt to be responsible for ending another life. She'd done it when she opened a ghost trap on Martin Heiss. She would do everything possible to spare her friends from having to live with that feeling, especially Holtzmann. Artie had been her friend, after all.
That decided, Erin strapped on her proton pack. "Kevin, stay as far back as possible. Do not touch the weapons. Your job is only to relay anything Holtz says. Understood?" She didn't like their receptionist being there for a ghost hunt.
Kevin gave her a jaunty salute.
"Good." Erin pulled on her Ecto goggles. The blue energy signature that was Holtzmann was standing by the basement stares. "You ready, Holtz?"
Holtzmann figured she was as ready as she would ever be…
...well, except for one little adjustment. She concentrated until her overalls (psychic impression or not) morphed into her familiar orange-striped jumpsuit and her yellow-lens goggles.
"She's ready," Kevin grinned.
"Reel him in, baby. You point, we'll shoot," Patty told her.
Abby thumbed a remote in her pocket. The strains of Cat Stevens' 'Wild World' boomed from the hospital's p.a. system. "That song is going to give me the creeps for the rest of my life," she grumbled.
Holtzmann waited for him at the top of the staircase.
She knew that Arthur could have found her without the music. The tune was nothing but an opening salvo signaling him that she wanted to talk, an open door. Still, as the specter appeared at the end of the hallway, it took all her will power to keep her hands at her sides instead of attacking. Her instincts warned of danger, urged her to strike. She supposed it was no different for him, for he approached cautiously.
"Jillian," he said.
"Artie."
His hands trembled, she noticed. She wondered how long he was going to be able to hold it together until Monster Artie came out to play.
"Jillian, I'm so sorry…please believe me, I only came here for your help. I didn't mean for all this to happen," he said.
"What is it you want me to do, Artie?" she asked.
He was moving closer. She forced herself to stand her ground. His hand reached out tentatively, wanting to touch her-
Her fingers twitched. Arthur saw that and paused, pulling away. He was scaring her again, he realized miserably.
"Make it stop," he answered.
"I don't know what that means."
He shook his head, slumping to the floor. "You feel it, too. The rage. The madness. Perhaps just a little bit, but you still feel it. Believe me, it gets worse…so much worse…knowing you can never wake up, you can never go back. Yes, I know what happened to me, Jillian. I heard the doctors."
She kneeled and hesitantly reached out to lay one hand against his cheek.
Arthur felt it. He couldn't recall the last time he'd felt the sensation of touching anything. It nearly undid his tenuous control of his sanity. He dared not move. "Tell me what to do," he begged her.
Holtzmann faltered.
There were only three options…
Get him back to his body…
Get him to cross over…
Contain him.
Contain him…which would kill him.
"I want to go home," he said. "I want to hug my son. I want tell him how sorry I am for everything he must have gone through. I want to make it right. Tell me how to do that."
"I don't know."
Arthur let out a scream; Holtzmann scrambled away from him, bracing for an attack.
"You don't know?!" he snarled, eyes beginning to glow red. "You mean Jillian Holtzmann doesn't know something for once?"
She backed down the staircase; he followed.
"I can let you go…you can go back to your body…you can try again," she said.
"I've been trying for three years! Do you think I'm a complete git? I've been wandering the halls of that damn hospital for three years! Listening to the doctors tell my family that I'm never going to wake up! Watching everything." Arthur felt his control slipping away, his ghastly countenance twisting as Holtzmann kept backing into the basement. "How do you think I knew where to find you? Ghost precognition? I saw you on t.v., you and your little friends, those Ghostbusters. Are you telling me that the Ghostbusters can't help-?"
He raised clawed fingers to strike.
Holtzmann struck first.
With a wave of her hand, boxes overturned, spilling bits of packing foam, paper, broken glass, and cardboard swirling like a small tornado around Arthur, lighting him up like a bulls-eye.
"Holtzmann, move!" she heard Erin yell from behind her.
Jillian feinted aside, passing through the wall to give them a clear shot at Arthur. He was caught unprepared as a stream from Patty's accelerator restrained him. "That is Artie, right?" she shouted to Kevin. She hadn't actually tried snaring an invisible ghost before.
Arthur snarled at captors who could not perceive him, much less hear his cry. The humans flanked him; one held him ensnared with her weapon, the other two with weapons at the ready. The dark-haired woman who had sat with Jillian in the hospital room was now approaching with some cylindrical device that had to be one of those 'ghost traps' he had seen on the news reports.
On the other side of the wall, in one of the basement storage units, Holtzmann felt it the instant the proton accelerator flared. She was prepared for the sensation of the proton beam draining her energy even though she had distanced herself behind the wall. It was what she had designed the accelerators to do—zap the fight out of malevolent entities so they could be contained. Knowing it intellectually and experiencing it first-hand were two wildly different things.
She rallied herself, moving back to the main section of the basement. The closer she got, the greater she felt the instinct to flee, to rip the proton wand away from Patty.
She had to fight the rage.
"Holtz is back," Kevin told them.
"We see her, Kev," Erin acknowledged, not at all pleased. "Holtz, this was not the plan." She was supposed to bring Arthur down here, a safe enough distance from the O.R. where Dr. Menken was trying to save her life. Then, she, in turn, was supposed to get a safe distance from Arthur.
"Jillian…this is not a good idea," Abby said. "You know what the streams can do to you."
Holtzmann wouldn't have answered even if they could hear her.
She owed Arthur Klein nothing.
But he had been her friend once.
She would not send him into the trap-possibly to his end-without knowing she had tried her best to save him.
She could not let him face his end alone.
Arthur glanced balefully at her. He could see the slightest tension in Holtzmann's stance, telegraphing the same weakness, the pain that burned from the stream into his soul. In a moment of lucidity, it occurred to him that he was still hurting her, despite being restrained. Briefly, the human bubbled from beneath the monster.
"Is that for me, Jillian?" He nodded to the trap Abby wielded. "Are you going to 'bust' me, too?"
"I can't wake you out of your coma, you must have known that," she told him. Hells bells, she couldn't even figure out how to get herself back to the land of the living. "Let me tell you how this works, Artie: If I put you in that trap, you'll die. We're guessing it's because body and soul can survive on two separate dimensional planes. Your body will die, your soul will be stuck in the trap. Maybe you'll cross over, maybe you'll be inside forever. I don't know. I'm kind of spit-balling on this one; these are uncharted waters we're dealing with."
Arthur chuckled. "You? 'Spit-balling'?"
"I'm known to do that from time to time," Holtzmann let out an involuntary gasp as a snap of energy from the beam snaked out to strike her arm. She backed off a step.
In the O.R., Dr. Menken froze as the monitor bleeped a familiar warning. He cursed.
The two blue blurs of energy had not moved. Arthur still struggled against the hold of the stream, nearly tearing Patty's proton wand from her grip. "What, are they catching up on old times? Holtz, I don't know what y'all are talking about, but I can't hold this creep forever!"
"That's the only option left? Imprisonment?" Arthur asked.
"Or cross over," Holtzmann answered.
"I've tried. I don't know how," he confessed.
Artie contemplated the trap and wondered what awaited inside. From the morbid expression on Jillian's face and her hesitation, it must have been rather akin one of Dante's circles of hell.
Abby knew this was going on too long, but she didn't dare set the trap—Holtz was still too close to Arthur. "Jillian, hurry!"
Arthur made a noise at the bothersome humans. With a flick of his hand, he sent the trap flying from Yates' grip. It clattered to the floor between him and Holtzmann. The foot trigger deployed, ready.
Erin didn't know which one of the come specters had summoned the trap, but she knew what would happen if it opened right then. "Holtz—get clear! You're too close to the trap!"
No kidding. Like the agonizing snaps of energy telegraphing from the beams around Artie to burn her as surely as if she were flesh and blood weren't a clue. As soon as the trap opened, the pain was going to increase tenfold. Jillian had already been inside the trap once. She had no desire to go back.
That was kind of the problem-she had no real desire to send Artie in there, either.
"I altered your specs for the LHC. The linear particle accelerators, the super proton synchrotrons," Arthur told her. "I rewrote the program chips. I didn't tell you because I needed your help assembling them and…well, quite frankly you're terrifying when you're angry." He wondered if knowing that would make it easier for her to do what she had to do next. He regretted that she'd spent years already believing the accident had been some failure of her own engineering.
Holtzmann didn't bat an eye. "I know."
Arthur froze. "You what?!"
"Like I wouldn't know every wire and circuit board in my own machine? I went back and looked at the linear accelerators after the accident. I figured out what you did."
"Why didn't you tell Globaldyne or CERN?"
Holtzmann looked slightly guilty at that question. "I never told anyone. Not even my best friends." It was true. She had lied to Abby, her best friend, and to her mentor, Dr. Gorin. She had never told the story to Erin or Patty at all. She couldn't-they would have demanded she tell Globaldyne the truth in their concern for clearing Holtzmann's name. If she refused, one of them surely would do it for her sooner or later.
Globaldyne had kept Artie on their employee roster and paid his medical insurance for the three years since the accident to help his surviving family because Artie was the "hero" who had prevented a catastrophe in Switzerland and proved that the work at the LHC was still quite safe. A glitch, they'd called it. A few magnets damaged nothing more. Moreover, after Arthur's sister threatened a lawsuit, they paid the premiums for the fat life insurance policy that Harry would inherit when his father finally passed away.
All of that corporate generosity towards its fallen hero would go away the instant Holtzmann revealed that Arthur Klein was the cause of his own accident.
So, she figured let them blame her. She could handle the disgrace, and she had handled the disgrace. She had handled quack psychiatrists branding her 'crazy'-hell, she rather found the label to be liberating once she embraced it. She had handled being broke and homeless in a train station for those few months before Abby had rescued (she'd survived being broke and homeless before, after all). She could take the hit.
Harry was a teenage boy who had already lost one parent and had another parent in a coma. He deserved every penny that could be squeezed out of Globaldyne. He deserved a family name not tainted by Arthur's mistake. He deserved a chance to go to college and have a good life, not to sink his every dollar into medical bills—and eventually into funeral expenses-until he ended up an orphan on the streets.
Arthur tried to process that. "I-I-don't understand. Why would you do that for me?"
"I didn't do it for you. I did it for a kid in London."
Artie glanced down at the trap, still struggling to hold the beast at bay. "Jillian-I-tha"
"Jillian!" Abby's voice reached her through the haze of pain. She was holding out the PKE meter, which spiked a warning as Artie writhed against the beam.
"Whoah…that guy is going full on postal again!" Kevin said, miming claws with his own fingers.
Klein threw back his head and screamed against the rage. He squeezed shut eyes that he knew were dark as blood. "I-You can't let me go-Jillian-I'll come back. I'll kill you-them-I ca-I won't be able to stop myself…" He thrashed violently against the confinement of the beam. Patty stumbled, nearly falling, trying to hang on.
Holtzmann took a step back. "Artie—"
Erin saw a sliver of space between the blue energy signatures. "She's moving."
"I cannot hold this creep much longer!" Patty warned.
Abby unhooked her own wand. Her thumb hovered above the trigger. She watches the two forms through the visor. "She's still too close to him!" Abby tried to be patient; she understood this wasn't easy for Holtzmann. She wasn't sure if she could have done it, either, if she were in Holtz's place. "Jillian, please-get clear! We can't fire another beam when you're that close, we might hit you."
Erin saw the spike in the spectrometer. "Arthur's getting stronger…shifting out of the new parameters Holtzmann programmed into the accelerator." Erin had watched Kevin make the calibrations under Holtz's direction. She had picked up the gist of it. "I'm going to try to compensate, give me one minute."
Again, the proton wand was nearly ripped from Patty's hands. "Yeah, I don't think so."
Erin caught Abby's grim expression. They both came to the same conclusion, but Abby was the one to say it aloud: "Holtz's not going to do it."
"Abby, when I saw 'now', fire a restraining beam at Holtz," Erin ordered.
"Are you kidd-?"
Erin ran for the trap, and Abby figured out what her friend had in mind.
Arthur saw her coming. He whirled, still trying to twist out of the proton steam, brandishing claws and fangs at the human. Erin still saw only shapeless blue; she was unaware when Arthur freed one arm. He lashed out, intending to rip out her throat.
Erin couldn't see the attack, but Holtzmann did.
Feeling an anger that had nothing to do with 'ghost psychosis', Holtzmann jumped onto Arthur's back. She hooked one arm around his neck, pulling him off-balance. She bit her lip against a scream when her leg raked the proton stream and sent a fresh spasm of pain into her every nerve, concentrating on hanging on. With her free hand, she grabbed Arthur's outstretched wrist and yanked it away. The talons missed Erin's neck by mere inches.
Arthur reached over his shoulder and pitched Holtzmann to the floor. She landed on her back, staring up as he roared down at her, his face again distorted and unrecognizable. Inhuman.
Lost.
Erin saw the mass of blue energy separate into two distinct forms: "Now, Abby!"
Erin dove for sees the trap. Her foot stomped on the trigger in the same instant that Abby fired the restraining beam. The white light of the trap hit Arthur in the same instant that the proton beam latched onto Holtzmann like a lifeline. Abby felt it catch. She pulled with all her might, dragging Jillian away as the trap sprang open.
It was a very painful lifeline; Holtz let out another involuntary cry.
The pull of the trap is going to be more intense than Abby had anticipated (of course, she was usually trying to push the ghost into the trap, not playing tug-o-war with the box). It was going to be more power than the proton beam. She could feel its power dragging in Holtzmann.
"Erin, help!" Abby yelled.
Erin spun, drawing her own weapon. She saw the danger at once and risked firing a second beam around Holtzmann.
Holtzmann's senses were fully overloaded with the burning pain of the twin beams and the blinding light emanating from the trap. Distantly, she heard Abby yelling: "Just a couple more seconds, Jillian, hang on!"
Through blurring vision, Holtzmann saw Monster Artie engulfed in the light of the trap. She thought he glanced at her one last time.
Then, he was gone. The trap snapped shut.
The Ghostbusters cut the proton streams. The energy from the trap had overloaded their visors. They waited an agonizing few seconds for the goggles to reset.
"Jillian?" A called to the empty air. "Kevin—is she all right?"
Then the distortion in the visors readings cleared and they could clearly see one blue energy signature still there.
The trio looked to Kevin.
He gave them the thumbs up.
In the evacuated O.R., Menken and his surgical team had been hesitating as Holtzmann's vitals kept fluctuating. Several times, their patient had nearly gone into v-fib. The doctor reckoned that no amount of medical school could prepare one for trying to perform surgery in a hospital overrun by ghosts.
Finally, she seem to stabilize.
He supposed it was no coincidence that, only a couple minutes after she was back in normal sinus rhythm, three faces that had become all too familiar in the past thirty-six hours gathered outside the glass doors, peering through the window.
Six worried eyes sought Dr. Menken's with one unspoken question.
The lecture could wait until his patient was safely in recovery. For now, Menken settled for offering the Ghostbusters the slightest affirmative nod of his head.
They smiled back, their relief plain.
"Right… I take it we're safe to continue then," he nodded to his own team.
They waited.
They did their best to be comfortable in the two stiff chairs and the tiny couch. They watched television, loaded up on coffee from the donut shop around the corner. They ordered Chinese food from their favorite restaurant and Abby complained about the ridiculous amount of wontons in her soup.
Kevin decided it was his personal duty to entertain 'ghost Holtzmann' since he was the only one who could see or hear her at the moment. He told her stories about growing up in Australia, and Holtz did her best to pay attention. He begged her to test her temporary telekinetic skills, but all he could think of for a game was having her float a deck of cards into a bedpan one at a time. He found an 80's station on his tiny portable radio.
She refused to talk about Arthur
They waited.
Holtzmann slept.
Ten more hours passed this way.
Dr. Menken would have loved to have thrown the whole lot of them out of the hospital (or better still have them arrested) for endangering his patient during her surgery. Ms. Lynch arrived with an envelope for Patty in time to overhear this last bit. She soothed his fragile ego with a reminder that being the doctor who saved a Ghostbuster's life would probably net enough donations to run the hospital for another year.
On his third trip to check on Holtzmann, Menken actually smiled. "She's improving," he informed them.
"Does that mean she's going to wake up soon?" Abby asked hopefully.
"If you can refrain from exposing her to any more of your high school science lab toys, I'm optimistic about her chances," he said.
"Whoah, what?" Holtzmann had been telekinetically stacking cards into a house and knocking them over. "What the hell did he just call my babies?"
"High school science lab toys," Kevin helped.
"What Kevin?" Abby asked from her spot beside the bed.
"Holtz is mad."
Erin glanced at the Holtzmann who was lying in the hospital bed. Sure enough, her face-slack in repose for almost two full days now-relaxed into a frown. The hand that Abby was holding twitched; Abby startled at the sudden movement. Menken had his back to the bed, his attention occupied by making notes on his clipboard.
Abby waved Patty over to the bed, gesturing to Holtzmann. "Watch," Erin mouthed to Patty.
Erin cleared her throat and addressed Menken: "Don't you think you're being a little ungrateful, Doctor? I mean, you did have a dangerous apparition loose in your hospital."
"Ungrateful? For what? I should have all of you arrested for putting the entire hospital at risk for radiation poisoning and whatever the hell other contaminates these contraptions are putting out-" he rambled.
Ghost Holtzmann was on her feet now.
In the bed, Holtzmann's brow furrowed.
Patty was about to say something, but Abby and Erin shook their heads.
"-and I asked you to keep your toxic tinker toys out of my hospital, not have a ghost fight in our basement." He indicated the PKE meter, which Abby had kept in the room just in case Artie really wasn't tucked away in the trap.
"Tinker Toys?" Ghost Holtzmann purred dangerously.
"He definitely said 'Tinker Toys'. You shouldn't be offended. People like Tinker Toys," Kevin said.
Holtzmann wasn't putting up with insults. "Oh. Hell. No." She made a beeline for the doctor. Kevin tried to intercept her, but his hands kept passing through the specter each time he made a grab for her.
Then, she was gone. One second, she'd been there, the next Kevin was staring, perplexed, at the space where she had only just been standing a moment earlier.
In the bed, Holtzmann's mouth had curled into definite scowl now. Menken was checking the monitors and still hadn't noticed. Erin, Abby, and Patty, however, were about to jump out their skin for excitement.
Patty egged on the doctor: "What do you think we ought to do with them, Doc?"
"Preferably take them to a hazardous waste facility-I'm going to have to do a full decontamination of this entire facility thanks to those pieces of junk-"
Whatever else he intended to say was muffled when a small hand seized hold of his lower lip and yanked rather viciously, pulling his face-and by extension, the upper half of his body-down to the bed.
He found himself staring into a pair of half-open blue eyes.
Jillian mumbled a groggy warning: "Nobody…insults…my babies…"
Holtzmann kept her grip on the squirming man's lips even as Abby carefully but joyfully wrapped her arms across Jillian's shoulders-mindful not to jostle her friend's healing ribs and stomach-and hugged with all her might. Erin wedged herself between Menken and the nightstand. She squeezed Holtzmann's shoulder with one hand while trying to extricate the doctor from her grip with the other. Patty also moved to help rescue Menken…mostly because he was blocking Patty's path to join in hugging her friend.
"Damn, baby girl," Patty said as she tried to pry Holtzmann's fingers away from Menken's mouth, "You are surprisingly strong for a woman who's been in a coma for two days…"