Egon noticed another clue after lunch when a nurse changed the dressings on his upper arms, back, feet and hands: in among the delicate, blistered traceries of the Lichtenberg scars were two distinct handprints.
Small child-sized handprints.
"Ah-nee-yo anni!" Fingers stiff, Egon wrote it out phonetically on a notepad he found in the bedside table. When the ball lightning with a faint image of the number 8 on it rose up out from under his feet two days before, sending him sprawling, it wasn't the ball that knocked him down, but what felt like two hands pushing him out of the way.
He should have asked the intern administering the CT scan what the phrase meant.
Egon pulled the second burned telephone cord out of it's hiding place beneath his pillow and laid it beside the first, the insulation blackened and bubbled, and studied it.
The reading he remembered before the PKE meter shorted out in his hand, causing him to drop it, wasn't for one entity, but two.
Two.
One strong, chaotic, angry.
"Ah-nee-yo anni!"
One weak, but intensely focused.
"Ah-nee-yo anni!"
The phone cords.
The burns… the nightmares, if one could call them that, might not be influenza talking to him.
"Ah-nee-yo anni!"
Staring out at the heavy snow falling from a white sky, Egon made a decision and called the nurse on duty, complaining Peter Venkman style that he couldn't sleep: the pain was unbearable, the itching was miserable, his head hurt, and could he have something for it NOW?
An hour later, heavily sedated through a fresh I.V., Egon felt himself falling upwards even as the cord on the new phone beside the bed started to bubble and blister to the scent of burning insulation…