Originally published in We Got Another One

Peter Venkman woke up feeling really good. No dull ache in his shoulder, no weariness from a sleepless night, not even a reluctance to get out of bed. "Egon, I've gotta tell you, you did good," he announced as he reached up to remove the helmet that had connected him during the night to Egon's alpha wave enhancer, or, as Peter liked to call it, the 'good dream machine.' After a fall on a bust a few days ago had dislocated his shoulder, Peter had found it hard to sleep a night through because the blasted thing ached whenever he changed position. It was healing and while the doctor didn't want him to wear his proton pack quite yet he was well enough to go on busts, take P.K.E. readings, man the traps, and generally put in his two cents worth when the guys missed their targets or did something dumb. Last night, though, his complaining about his shoulder had caused Egon to wheel out the sleep enhancing device at bedtime the night before.

"You may as well wear this, Peter," he'd suggested, proffering a helmet. "It will allow you to program your dreams and you'll have a relaxing night. You'll wake up twice as refreshed."

"Couldn't we go for maybe four times as refreshed?" the weary Peter had asked hopefully, taking the helmet and holding it. "I was awake every hour on the hour last night, and I've gotta tell you, Slimer makes horrible slurpy noises when he dreams. Every time I'd nearly get back to sleep, he'd do it again. I swear I would've blasted him if I could wear a pack."

"Twice as refreshed as usual, Peter," Egon had pointed out pedantically. "Though with the dreams I imagine you'll program, you may wake up even more tired." His eyes twinkled with amusement.

"Egon, is that a value judgement?" Peter queried suspiciously. "Are you implying that I'm going to spend the entire night dreaming about romantic liaisons?"

"Well, aren't you, Peter?" asked Winston from the doorway, unbuttoning his shirt in preparation for getting ready for bed. "I remember the last time we got a look at your dreams with this machine."

"I wonder what they call people who snoop on other people's dreams?" Ray asked cheerfully from his own bed, where he'd been chuckling and gasping his way through a new comic book.

"They call them nosy," Peter said with great dignity, settling the helmet carefully upon his head. "Egon, this isn't going to give me a bad hair day tomorrow, is it?" he queried suspiciously.

"It's going to give you a very relaxed sleep, Peter. Your alpha waves will be programmed as you sleep and the device will pick up your neural impulses and feed the images you choose back to you in the form of dreams. Lie down and I'll make the final adjustment. I've configured it for one sleeper."

"Just so nobody breaks in on my sleep," Peter had said as he settled himself against his pillow, wincing a little as the movement reminded him of his healing injury. "I catch any of you guys snickering and making snide remarks tomorrow, you'll pay. I'll get you for it, and remember, I know all the best ways."

"We wouldn't do that, Peter," Ray said with complete sincerity. Peter gave him a highly suspicious look. Ray treated his friends well, but he had a mischievous streak and wasn't above pulling a stunt that he thought hilarious--and the victim didn't.

"Yeah, and who was teasing me about Kim Basinger last time, Stantz?" Peter asked.

Caught out, Ray blushed. "Well, it was an interesting dream, Peter," he pointed out. "A person could learn a lot from dreams like that."

"You're too young to even know about dreams like that," Peter retorted good humoredly, adding quickly before Ray could offer a hot protest, "If you spy on me, I'll know. Now let me sleep."

Egon switched on the machine and the others went about their business. For a few moments he could hear them moving around quietly, then a sense of delightful lassitude crept over him and he slept. His dreams were wonderful.

Now it was morning and he felt incredibly good. Lifting off the helmet, he glanced over at Egon, who was already awake and dressed and who was tidying the pile of reading material on the table beside his bed.

He smiled with satisfaction, unsurprised that his device had proven successful. "I told you it would work, Peter. How's the shoulder?"

Peter moved his arm cautiously. "Hey, great. It's not too bad today. I think it's about time you patented your gizmo. Big bucks and everything. I feel terrific."

"You'll feel that way for at least several more hours," Egon remarked, glancing at his watch. "It will take your alpha state that long to return to normal. I'd like to get some P.K.E. readings on you before it wears off completely."

"No way, Egon," Peter cried, bounding out of bed with renewed vigor. "Not before I've had my breakfast. After that, I'll be a slave to science, but not before I eat."

"Then I suggest you eat quickly," Egon urged, gesturing him toward the shower. "We're wasting valuable time."

"I could be down there quicker if you'd make my bed," Peter wheedled, batting his eyes hopefully at Egon, who gave a little amused snort and set off for the lab, leaving Peter's bed unmade.

Shaved and dressed, Peter wandered down to the second floor where Ray was engaged in washing dishes. When he saw Peter, he grinned. "I've got your omelet ready, Peter. Egon said you were up and that he didn't want to waste much time so he had me get it ready. How's your shoulder?"

"Better. I'm gonna make Egon patent his Alpha wave thingie. We'll all be rich."

"You mean Egon'll be rich," Ray said, grabbing a spatula and ladling Peter's omelet onto his plate. "There you go. Want orange juice?"

"You're going to make some woman a wonderful wife one day," Peter said cheerfully, taking the plate. "Are you being a martyr to science for Egon too? He does tend to make people run around and do things they wouldn't do otherwise when he gets fixated on something."

Ray grinned and shook his head. "Not really, though he suggested it. It's only because of your shoulder. When you're recovered you can fix my breakfast."

"Or Egon can fix both of ours. At least the Spud isn't here to steal it." With a smile Peter sat down at the table and forked in his first bite. Before he could begin to chew it, the alarm rang downstairs signally a Ghostbusting job. "Story of my life," he grumbled around his mouthful of eggs. "No sooner do I get started doing something I like and the alarm goes off."

"You could stay and eat it," Ray offered with the generosity of spirit he managed better than any of the others. "You can't wear a pack anyway, and--"

"I must've looked horrible last night," Peter hazarded with a quick glance at Ray, grabbing another quick bite before he climbed to his feet. "You guys are being too nice to me. My naturally suspicious nature--"

"Come on, Pete," urged Ray, waving away any suggestion of a conspiracy to baby Peter while he recovered. "I bet it's something interesting. You did look terrible last night, but you sound like your old self today. Much more of it and you'll fix your own lunch," he concluded threateningly, still looking amused.

Egon and Winston slid down the fire pole from the top floor just as Ray and Peter arrived at the foot of the steps opposite Janine's desk. Their secretary had written out the work order and jumped up to pass it to the blond physicist, a distressed look on her face. "It sounds awful, Egon," she burst out. "There's some kind of horrible entity in Herald Square and people are dropping like flies."

"You mean dead, Janine?" Ray blurted out in shocked disbelief. "The ghost is killing people? Gosh, we'd better get over there right away!" Most of the ghosts the four men busted were nasty, and some of them were dangerous, but they rarely caused deaths, for which all of them were grateful.

"The person who called said there were bodies all around him but he could thought he could see somebody breathing. He was at a pay phone in Macy's and sounded scared to death. He said there were sales people all through the store toppled over their counters and when he'd gone back outside there were cars up on the curb and some had hit each other, and pedestrians were strewn around everywhere flat out on the pavement."

"Gosh, that sounds awful," cried Ray, his eyes rounding in alarm. "We better get over there quick."

"We better find out what we're up against first," Winston said, offering a note of caution. "We need a plan."

"We need to find out what it is?" Ray returned. "We can check Tobin on the way and see if we can come up with anything. Maybe we better take the atomic destabilizer."

"Did he see the entity?" asked Egon as he fetched the modified thrower that could temporarily transform solid manifestations into ectoplasmic configurations so the traps would work on them.

Peter worked his way into his jumpsuit, not quite as easy as usual because of his sore shoulder. This one sounded bad. No way would he let his buddies take it on without him, even if he couldn't wear a proton pack. He could have one of them help him into it. Reinjuring his shoulder was a small price to pay for stopping this kind of wholesale destruction.

"He said it was some kind of a big snake," Janine replied. "He was too scared to talk much. Oh, Egon, be careful. The rest of you too." She gave Egon's arm a squeeze before he freed himself and headed for Ecto-1.

"I don't like this," complained Peter as he climbed into the 'shotgun' position in the front seat as Ray slid behind the wheel. "I'm gonna go in armed, no matter what the doctor says. Snakes that zap people are my least favorite kind, not that I like them anyway. Indiana Jones is right. Why did it have to be snakes? Any ideas, Spengs?"

"Hmm," said Egon as he and Winston got into the back seat. "Without further information it's not possible to pin it down, though there are various serpent entities that could be nasty." He was busily running the pocket computer program, cross referencing snakelike entities with the ability to zap people in mid-stride. "There are a number of different snake ghosts, many of them dangerous, but this level of destructiveness isn't common. I wish we had a more thorough report. Winston, why don't you contact the police and emergency services and see if they can give us any further information?"

Zeddemore leaned over the seatback and snagged the mobile phone, punching in the numbers quickly. He identified himself and described the call they'd received, and then was silent for a long time, punctuating it with little "uh huhs," and an occasional, "Got it." When he hung up, he looked worried.

"This sounds like a nasty one, guys. They've had a bunch of 911 calls already and the area is being cordoned off. They'll let us through. They say there have been only two actual eyewitness accounts--the guy that called us called the police next, and a cop in a patrol car called it in--only he went quiet in the middle of his report."

"I don't like the sound of that," Peter said unhappily. "Egon, how are we gonna protect ourselves? We won't be much use to the City if we get zapped the minute we get there."

Ray frowned. "It sounds tricky. We won't know how to take care of it until we see what it is, but it might be too quick for us. We'll have to count on our throwers. Have you got anything yet, Egon?"

The physicist shook his head. "The reports are too varied to pin it down. There's been no actual report of energy blasts or physical attacks. The entity may even exude a gas which stuns its victims."

"So we go in wearing gas masks," Peter said encouragingly. "I'm sorry my asbestos suit is at the cleaners." This didn't sound good at all.

*****

When they reached Herald Square the damage was easy to see. Several blocks back they'd started encountering police vehicles who were putting up barricades around the area, but they'd waved the Ghostbusters through. At the actual scene, several paramedic teams were at work, checking out people in cars that had crashed into each other. Pedestrians lay sprawled around on the pavement and Ray's face whitened as he saw them. "Gosh, it looks awful," he blurted out.

"We're here now, we'll take care of it," Peter said with forced brightness. The sight of all the bodies bothered him as much as it did Ray but they couldn't let it get them down. They had a job to do. When they pulled into a no-parking zone and climbed out of the car to don their proton packs, Ray paused first to kneel beside the nearest body.

This wasn't something that Peter would stand on the sidelines for, even if his shoulder hurt. Ignoring Egon's frown, he grabbed his own proton pack out of the back of Ecto. "I have to," he explained quickly. "It might need us all." Egon nodded reluctantly. Easing uncomfortably into his pack, his shoulder aching, Peter took Ray's pack by the straps in his good hand and knelt opposite him.

The victim was a little girl, maybe ten years old. She lay unmoving, her eyes wide open and staring, but there seemed to be no awareness looking out of them. Ray had stiffened, stunned horror written on his face as he reached out to take her pulse.

"Is she . . . " Peter prompted, unwilling to speak the final word.

Ray's head lifted and his eyes met Peter's. "She's alive, Peter, but her pulse is slowed way down. It's like she's in some kind of stasis. I've never seen anything quite like it."

"A coma?" Winston asked from above them, his thrower gripped firmly in hand. "Come on, Ray, put your pack on. This looks nasty."

Ray bit his bottom lip, then he straightened the child's fallen body and got up, taking his pack from Peter and putting it on, his mouth drawing into a tight line.

Egon was already taking P.K.E. readings, frowning. "This is interesting," he said but his usual fascination with the spirit world sounded dampened by the carnage around them. "The entity would appear to be a Class 6 but there are power peaks that indicate it might actually be somewhere in between a 6 and a 7, a class-crossing entity."

"And that's bad, right?" Winston asked, his eyes never ceasing their scan of the square as he watched for the entity to appear. Of all of them, only Winston was combat-trained, and he didn't forget it when they came into a situation of this magnitude. He dug in the storage area in the back of Ecto and produced gas masks. All four men put them on. They might not prove necessary, but it was better to be safe than sorry. They could talk while wearing them, but they were awkward, and Peter hoped that Egon would soon discover they wouldn't be necessary.

"Very bad," Egon agreed. "The entity is still present in the area, within the range of the meter, but it could be in Macy's." He pointed to the big department store. "That's where we have to go."

"And I left all my credit cards at home," Peter lamented automatically.

"Ray is right," Egon continued, pointing his meter at the little girl. "The condition approximates a form of stasis. There may even be a level of consciousness tied to an inability to react. We can't tell yet if it will wear off automatically. There are no obvious wounds, and no evidence of anything in the nature of an energy burst or electric shock. It's as if they just stopped, frozen in time."

"Egon!" cried Ray, staring, "Maybe they're not frozen. Maybe they're slowed way down. Maybe time is passing at a different time for them than it is for us."

"Yeah, but why would they keel over?" Winston asked. "If they were frozen in time like that, wouldn't they still be standing there? We'd come back in an hour and they'd have taken a step or something?"

"That would be one way," Egon replied. "These readings need study. I--" He broke off as a tapping noise began to intrude on the four men's consciousness, lifting his head from the device.

Peter half-expected to see the snake creature approaching them, radiating the power that had stunned the people around them, but instead, a blind man came around the corner from 34th Street, his cane tap, tap, tapping as he felt his way. When it touched the body of a burly man, he stopped abruptly, probing and testing with the white cane, trying to assess what it was that blocked him.

Ray hurried toward him. "Stop," he called out. "Ghostbusters! There's a dangerous ghost nearby. It's stunned a lot of people."

The cane withdrew abruptly and the man turned his head in Ray's direction. "I heard it," he said. "I'm trying to get out of here, but there are bodies everywhere." A shudder ran through his slender frame. He looked about twenty-one and very frightened. "I stopped calling out. I was afraid it would find me and do whatever it did to them."

"We'll get you out of here," Peter assured him, glancing around and spotting a nearby paramedic. "Yo, medic. Can you take this man out with you when you go?"

The medic looked up from the bandage he was attaching to a head wound. "Bring him over to the unit. I'm going to transport in five minutes."

Egon put out a hand to halt Ray before he could lead the man away. "Wait. You say you heard the entity. What did you hear? You're our first conscious witness."

"It flew," the blind man explained. "It had wings. I could hear them flapping, and it made a kind of wailing noise that passed over me a couple of times. I heard people falling all around me, but I was pressed up against the side of the building just inside an alley to get out of the way when I heard everybody start running around, and it must have missed me."

"Did you hear anything that sounded like shooting or laser weapons or zapping of any kind?" Ray asked.

"No. Nothing like that at all. Just the thing swooping overhead and people dropping."

"Did you smell anything like gas?" queried Winston, exchanging a doubtful glance with Peter.

"No. Nothing unusual or distinctive. Believe me, I was trying to figure out what was going on, so I concentrated hard." He frowned. "The people didn't even have time to cry out. I heard yelling and it broke off in the middle a couple of times, but there was never anything I could say that came after it did whatever it did."

"Can you think of anything that might help us?" Peter pressed him. It was bad luck that their only eyewitness couldn't give them any visual assistance. He was a good witness as far as it went, but he hadn't seen what had happened and his other senses couldn't entirely compensate in a situation so far outside his normal experience. The only good thing was it meant they probably didn't need to wear the gas masks. He raised his hand to take his off but caught Egon's eye and the physicist shook his head warningly. Probably didn't think they had enough information yet. Still, if there was gas, it hadn't lingered, and it wasn't affecting the paramedics.

The blind man frowned and then shook his head. "No, just people screaming, probably when they saw other people falling. Oh, and I heard a couple of fender-benders, and somebody around the corner must have hit a fire hydrant because I could hear water under pressure and the pavement was wet. I stayed in the alley until it was all quiet, and then I thought I'd better see if I could do anything. I found a few bodies quickly. They're alive. They're breathing and they've got a heartbeat, but it doesn't feel normal. I was trying to find a telephone so I could call for help, but then I heard a lot of sirens and I realized people knew." He sighed shakily. "I just want to go home," he breathed.

Egon lowered his P.K.E. meter, shaking his head when Peter shot a questioning look at him. "There's a psi residue on you, as if you'd been in contact with the entity," Egon explained to their witness, "but it is already fading. It won't present any problems. Ray." He nodded to the occultist to take the man to the paramedics.

"So what have you got, big guy?" Peter demanded as soon as Ray returned. "Trouble?"

"Major trouble, Peter. The cross-reading is the most perplexing. But even worse, it's moving again. We've got to stop it before it expands its range and does any more damage."

"Presumably before it does any damage to us," Peter repeated. "We might not be as lucky as that guy to find a handy alley."

Egon took still further readings. "I'd like us to wear the masks anyway, even though it likely won't make any difference. The gas may dissipate immediately when in contact with the atmosphere, only present in doses strong enough to affect people when the creature is actually present."

"Come on, Egon, that guy was right next to Ol' Snake Eyes and he didn't keel over," objected Peter. "I hate this gas thingie." He tugged at the strap of the mask. "Makes me feel like I'm ready to take on the Blitz."

"Would you rather be in a coma, Peter?"

"Well, if you put it like that . . . "

"Come on," Ray urged, leading them in the direction Egon had indicated, toward Macy's, lowering the ecto-scopes over his eyes for a better reading.

The entity met them in the doorway, swooping out of the store and shrieking with rage as it saw them. Peter gulped at the sight. It was a huge, scaled creature, golden and glittering in the morning sunlight, wings beating the air as if it were a physical, corporeal entity rather than pure ectoplasm. It had huge, lashed eyes, a couple of shades lighter than Ray's, so that they nearly matched the color of its scales. Peter met the look head on, sensing both malice and frustration in the creature's stare. It was aware of him and his friends, and while it might not know who they were, it resented them.

"I don't think Mikey likes us," Peter cried, his fingers tightening around his thrower as the huge winged beast dove for them. "Come on, guys, let's blast him."

"Right with you, Peter!" answered Ray eagerly, his thrower humming to life along with Peter's as they fired in unison at the flying serpent. The two streams missed by inches as it did an abrupt bank and roll, circling overhead and vanishing around the corner into 34th Street.

"Get him!" hollered Ray, turning to pursue the creature, then he stopped so abruptly that Peter crashed into him. "Oh, no!"

"Oh, no what, Ray?" Peter asked uneasily, resting his chin on Ray's shoulder to look past him. As he did, his stomach twisted at the sight of Egon and Winston, sprawled unmoving on the ground at Ray's feet. They looked just like the other victims, eyes open but empty of awareness, as if they were dead. Peter shivered.

"It didn't do anything," Peter shouted accusingly at the sky as if that would change what had happened to his friends. "It didn't shoot energy or even touch them. Ray?" he questioned as Ray flung himself down beside them and checked their pulses. "You've got an answer, don't you? Tell me you've got an answer."

"It's the same as the others, Peter," the occultist said, lifting the ecto-scopes from his eyes and pulling off the clearly-unnecessary gas mask to stare unhappily at Peter. He reached down gently and turned Egon onto his side so he wasn't lying like an upended turtle on his pack. Peter bit his bottom lip and knelt to join him. Behind his glasses, Egon's eyes were blank and staring, like a corpse's. Winston, curled up on one side, looked like it would take a quick shake to awaken him, and Peter tried just that, kneeling between them and gripping Winston's shoulder.

"Yo, Winston my man," he urged. "Get up. There's work to do. Egon, wake up. No lying down ont he job. C'mon, Spengs, wake up . . ." His voice trailed off as neither man responded. Not by so much as a flicker could Peter sense response in them. He yanked free the hated gas mask and sagged back on his heels.

Ray caught Peter's arm before he could shake Egon. "I don't think they can hear us, Peter," he said unhappily.

"Yeah well, we don't know that." Peter let his hand fall on Egon's shoulder and knelt there a minute, frowning. This was crazy. All it did was fly over and half the team was out of action. What could it mean? "Okay, you boy genius, it's time to think," he said, though he would have been happier charging after the serpent and blasting it like crazy. Maybe if they trapped it they would put an end to whatever spell it had cast over the people it had zapped so mysteriously. "It's not some kind of--of spell, is it?" he asked, as he 'heard' what he'd just thought.

"I don't think so, Peter." Ray moved Egon's arm as if he thought it would make him more comfortable. "Egon was taking a reading when it came out, and I think he would have said if the power shifted."

"If he had time to say anything," Peter reminded him. "Maybe it's something to do with this different class thingie. What would make a creature register that way?"

"Well, there are a lot of things, Peter," Ray said, taking out his own P.K.E. meter and studying the results. "Wow! It could be a hybrid ghost."

"Okay, I'll bite. What's a hybrid ghost?"

"You know, a neither fish nor fowl kind of thing," Ray explained unhelpfully as he made adjustments to the meter and studied the readings he got. "Something that's part one thing and part another, or even an amalgam of two ghosts. This one looks like it's part snake, part dragon. Class 6's are mostly animal spirits, but while we can tell it's partly animal, I think there's more to it than that. I think I understand what it might be, but I need to take another reading up close so I can be sure, because this isn't quite the response I'd expect."

"Up close!" wailed Peter. "'Up close' just cost us Egon and Winston. I don't think 'up close' is one of your best ideas, Tex. If we go down, there'll be nobody to stop it, and nobody to bring our buddies back."

"We can't stop it until we can figure out what it is, Peter."

"We can stop it," Peter disagreed, hefting his thrower purposefully. "Just one clear shot. That's all I ask, one clear shot at the thing. It'll be sorry it ever messed with Mama Venkman's little boy." His eyes shifted uncomfortably to his two unconscious buddies. If it could take them out just like that . . .

"Peter," cried Ray sharply, leaping to his feet. "It's coming back."

"Good. I want it to come back. It better be ready to eat protons!" Peter jumped up and leveled his thrower in the direction Ray pointed, sensing rather than seeing Ray coming to stand beside him. The minute the entity swooped around the corner both men fired.

The snake was fast. The streams tracked it as it did a series of loops through the square that were worthy of the finest barnstormer in the history of aviation. As the two remaining Ghostbusters fired at it, it wove in and out between the streams, but it never seemed to take aim at them or shoot fire or do anything else that might cause unconsciousness. Ray hollered encouragement to Peter as they worked it, trying to pin it down and capture it with their blasts. Once Peter got a glimpse of Ray's face and saw it was frowning and abstracted as he tried to reason out what it was about the creature that had caused it to take out the other two but not him and Peter.

Then the serpent swung around and dove straight for them. Peter braced himself, took careful aim, and fired, catching the entity full on in the stream. "I got him! I got him!" he bellowed gleefully, fighting the pull of the nasty gooper as it struggled to break free. "Come on, Ray, let's put this puppy to bed."

No second stream answered his. With a sudden, terrible premonition, Peter risked a quick, sideways glance and saw Ray sprawled on the pavement, eyes staring, face blank.

"Shit, Ray, it got you, too," he breathed, then his hand went to the dial on the thrower to up the power. He wasn't sure one stream would be enough to reel this sucker in. Before he could do it, the serpent shook itself out of the stream. For an instant, it hovered there, staring at Peter in wide-eyed disbelief, as if it had never seen a human before. Its eyes narrowed as it glared at him malevolently, and Peter could sense a fierce and angry awareness in the look, then, with a shriek of rage and frustration, it peeled away and went straight up into the sky, never stopping until it vanished from sight.

Feeling momentarily lightheaded, Peter shook away the sensation and flung himself down beside Ray. "Come on, Ray, get up. It's not nice to scare Uncle Peter like this."

The occultist was just the same as the others, unconscious, unaware, unresponsive. When Peter shook him lightly and called his name, he didn't react. Peter chewed on his bottom lip and stared at Ray a long moment, watching the slow, nearly imperceptible rise and fall of his chest. He was alive. He was breathing. But he wasn't responding.

Peter drew in a shaky breath and resorted to sterner techniques. "Sorry, Ray," he breathed, then slapped him across one cheek, wincing at the sharp sound of the blow. Ray's head rocked in response but nothing else happened except that Peter dropped his hand as he realized it was going to take more than that to restore his friends to awareness. He touched Ray's cheek more gently as if to apologize for the blow, and then steeled himself to go to work.

Peter snatched the P.K.E. meter that Ray had dropped and took a reading. The entity was gone. While the device flickered slightly, it was no more than it would demonstrate for residual energy, the lingering by-product of any ghostly encounter. The same thing registered when he pointed it at the limp body of Ray Stantz. Somehow the creature had affected him but how? What had it done to him? Peter had been right there both times and whatever it had tried on his friends should have affected him, too.

Peter sighed, worried. Leaving the meter activated as a warning in case the creature came back, he climbed to his feet. All around him, people lay sprawled in their peculiar stasis. Across the square, armed policemen moved among the bodies, pausing to examine them, while paramedics went from person to person.

"Shit," said Peter succinctly, knowing as he said it that it was a fierce understatement, and charged over to the nearest paramedic, a thirtysomething man with vivid red hair and enough freckles to qualify him for a permanent place in the Guinness Book of World Records. "Hey, guy," Peter said, gesturing around at the scene of devastation. "I'm Peter Venkman of the Ghostbusters. What are you reading with everybody?"

"Only a few of them are injured," the paramedic replied. "We've already transported them. The rest of them will be taken to the hospital and monitored. We're getting really lowered readings on all their systems. It's not normal unconsciousness or coma. I've never seen anything like it. It's as if the life energy has been cut way down."

"Will they die?" Peter asked. He hadn't wanted to ask that question but he had to know.

"None of the ones we've been monitoring has worsened since we started," the paramedic replied, gesturing to a walkie talkie he carried. "We've been checking with the hospitals. You and that blind guy are the only ones we've found who ran into it and walked away. I saw you and your buddies take it on from over here."

"Great," Peter muttered, seeing no common denominator between him and a blind man. Ray wasn't blind either but he'd stood up to it longer than Egon and Winston had, though he, too, had succumbed in the end. The police and paramedics had been further away, and not in the creature's direct flight path. Peter scrambled after an idea that flickered at the edges of his awareness and then away again.

"Sorry about your buddies," the paramedic said sympathetically.

Peter nodded, trying to fight the hollow feeling that had settled in the pit of his stomach. This was one fight he'd have to win all by himself. Sometimes he let the other guys, especially Egon and Ray, take the lead when it came to the theoretical side of Ghostbusting, but this time it would be entirely up to Peter. He'd have to find a way to bring the guys back to awareness, figure out why he and a blind man were the only two people who had survived a direct attack, and then come up with a means of defeating the entity and bringing his friends--and everybody else--back from stasis, and he'd have to do it alone. It wasn't going to be easy.

"The main problem with them," the paramedic said, gesturing at people who were being loaded into ambulances, "is that if the condition persists, they're going to need maintenance--you know, tube feeding, catheterization, range of motion, all that. Of course it might wear off now the ghost is gone or within a few hours. It's too soon to tell."

"I hope so," Peter agreed. "And I hope he's really gone. I had him pinned but I couldn't hold him. One thrower isn't enough to trap him. He isn't happy with me, either. He had that kind of a look in his eye, like he was mad as hell."

"I kind of figured that," the paramedic agreed wryly, raking a weary hand through his hair. "Look, we better haul your buddies in next, in case the doctors can figure out a way to bring them out of it. The city's gonna need them."

Peter started to agree, then he frowned. "No, I don't think that's the best thing, at least not yet. This isn't physical--at least I don't think it is, unless the ghost is a carrier of a disease, and I never saw anything that could cut somebody down in mid-stride, unless it's something like the Andromeda Strain, direct from another planet or dimension. A ghost shouldn't have alien microbes, though. This one was ectoplasmic, not physical, and we've never come across a single ghost that carried a disease." He thought furiously. "Ray said it was a hybrid ghost. I'm not sure anybody ever mentioned anything like that before. I've got a lot of research to do. What I'd really like is to take them back to headquarters--and have somebody with medical training come along just in case, with life support equipment. We've got instruments to test for anything to do with ghosts. The hospital won't have that, and some of the gizmos Egon and Ray have designed aren't exactly portable."

"It's a risk, Dr. Venkman," the paramedic said, pondering it. "But near as I can figure out, the doctors don't have a clue yet. All they'd do for your friends is run tests and hook them up to monitors."

"And all that life support stuff," Peter said. Was it crazy to think of taking the guys back to headquarters? Was he endangering them, even if he brought in doctors and equipment? And how could he find the common denominator that had prevented himself and the blind man from being affected by the ghost the way everyone else had been? Peter was sorry he'd thought of the movie, The Andromeda Strain, earlier. In that story and film, it had been the survivors' opposites which had kept them alive when everyone else in the town of Piedmont had died. Peter had seen the movie on A & E a few weeks ago and it was still fresh in his mind. If this wasn't something of the spirit world, he would be wrong to keep the guys from the hospital and he would be endangering their lives. Yet the specter had registered as Class 6 with Class 7 overtones. That meant it was the province of the Ghostbusters. Peter believed the guys had the best chance at Ghostbuster Central, with the scientific equipment Egon and Ray had designed and modified. For all his claims of ignorance when it came to tech talk, Peter knew a lot more about the equipment than he ever let on, and he was a trained parapsychologist. There were a lot of tests he could give right off the top without even resorting to the techie gizmos.

With a vast sigh, he accepted the heavy weight of responsibility. "I've gotta take them back to headquarters," he said. "I'm gonna need some help, so I've gotta call the mayor. He's a pal of mine. Look, will you see about taking the guys home by ambulance? Check with a doctor. I'll accept responsibility. I'll need someone who's got training, too."

"I'll volunteer," the paramedic said. "I've been working with these people since it started. I saw the thing five or six times and I'm still here. Sure it was from a distance, and the snake wasn't paying any attention to me, but maybe I'm immune, too." He grinned tiredly. "My name's Larry Callahan. I'll go clear it with my boss. We've got more ambulances coming in now that the thing looks like it's gone. We'll have everybody out of here within half an hour."

"Go for it," Peter said and went to the mobile phone in Ecto. Though the paramedics, rescue teams and police were working busily, there were still unconscious people on the ground. Peter's eyes sought out his buddies automatically, and he winced. Of all the crazy risks he'd taken in his life, this one was the worst. What if he did something to jeopardize the guys' lives? Getting medical support was the best he could do, short of admitting them to a hospital, but what if they needed a hospital?

No, they need Ghostbusting equipment, Peter told himself firmly and called the mayor.

What he wanted was simple. He wanted pictures of the creature on the news, and a few daring TV crews had hovered at the edges of the square, risking their lives for film. Peter wanted those broadcast as soon as possible. He wanted a center set up to take calls. While the entity had puzzled the Ghostbusters, it was possible some occult specialist or ghost fanatic had seen the creature before or recognized it. Any information Peter could get might benefit his friends. The control center would serve another purpose, too: a warning to the city. Maybe if people in an endangered area stayed in with the doors and windows tightly shut, they might not be zapped, not unless the creature invaded their apartments or businesses. Third, if Peter could find a way to bring the guys back, they would know where to go for a second round with the serpent. Peter wanted that second round. He wanted it badly.

Scenes of the chaos in Herald Square had already made it onto the local network affiliates and the Mayor was understandably upset. He agreed with Peter's ideas instantly and said they would be implemented right away. He was also arranging for the National Guard to be put on standby in case of further threats and a detachment was already on its way to the devastated area to prevent looting. This kind of thing could shut the city down, and it took a lot to do that. Eventually, if the beast rampaged unchecked, there would be more bodies than there would be doctors to care for them, or paramedics and ambulances to transport them, or hospital beds to contain them. Peter signed off with the Mayor and went in search of Larry Callahan.

*****

Janine and Slimer were waiting at the firehall when Peter pulled Ecto into the garage and climbed out. "It sounded awful on the news, Peter," Janine said, then, as she realized he was alone, her face whitened. "Where are the guys?"

"Yeah, where are the guys?" burbled Slimer, glancing nervously past Peter as an ambulance backed into the limited space behind Ecto.

"What's going on, Peter?" Janine asked.

"The guys got zapped, Janine," Peter said quickly. "We don't know what's wrong with them, but that ghost did something."

Horror shone from her eyes. "Not--not dead?" she faltered.

"No, but they're in some kind of stasis, just taking a little nap. Everybody who came up against the ghost keeled over right away, all except me and a blind man. I've got to figure out why." He frowned, one hand rubbing his aching shoulder. "I'm gonna have to figure this one out on my own, Janine."

She looked from Peter to the ambulance, where paramedics were lifting out a stretcher containing Ray Stantz, and she stiffened her shoulders. "No you're not," she said staunchly. "Tell me what to do and I'll do it."

"Slimer help too," offered the little ghost immediately, wrapping his skinny little arms around Peter's neck.

Venkman couldn't find the energy to push him away. "Thanks," he said wearily. "Come on."

*****

When the three unconscious Ghostbusters were placed in their beds and monitoring equipment attached, Peter, who had watched every movement, half afraid something would go wrong and the guys would simply stop breathing, straightened up and went over to stand in the middle of the floor between their beds. "Looks like it's up to me," he told them. "With you guys lying down on the job, I've gotta do all the work. Wouldn't you know it." He wasn't sure if they could hear him or not, but he had to act on the assumption they could. "I'm gonna check this hybrid ghost stuff first. Then I'm gonna pin down our little snake buddy. So you guys just kick back, take it easy, put up your feet. Some of us aren't lying down on the job." He gnawed his bottom lip and turned abruptly, heading for the lab fast, aware of Larry Callahan watching his back and Slimer curling up next to Ray as if the nasty, cold feel of concentrated ectoplasm would be enough to waken him.

"Peter?"

He stopped dead just within the lab but didn't turn around. "Yeah, Janine?"

"You'll figure it out, Dr. Venkman," she said, reaching up to pat his good shoulder. "I know you will."

"I'm glad one of us knows it," he said dryly.

"Of course you will. The others are counting on you. You may laze around and pretend not to do any work and generally act like a major pain but I never once saw you let them down when they needed you, and you won't start now."

Peter turned slowly. Her eyes were full of fear but her face held confidence in him. He stepped forward and encircled her with his arms. "Hey. This is Dr. Peter Venkman. Of course I'll solve it. Any reasonably brilliant genius would do it." Then, when she hugged him back, he tightened his grip. "I didn't know you cared."

At that, she freed him with a little snort, half exasperation, half affection, and cuffed him lightly on the side of his head. "What do you want me to do?" she asked.

"Power up the computer and cross reference anything that looks like a snake or serpent," Peter instructed. "I never could get the hang of computers."

"Not much you couldn't," she said under her breath but she turned to obey. She'd done a lot of work with Egon to create various databases to categorize different types of specters, spooks, and nether entities, and it was this that Peter wanted her to check out. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to take some other readings," he said, gathering equipment. "We took P.K.E. readings out there but all that tells us is whether psycho-kinetic energy is in use. Egon and I did some work once on the possibilities of possession. Some of the ghosts we encounter like the idea of taking over a host body. I don't think that's what happened to the guys, but I want to check it out."

"Wouldn't a P.K.E. reading tell you that?" she asked.

"No. Not always. You see, sometimes when a ghost merges with a person, it can hide its own essence within the human and it confuses the readings. It can be sneaky. It's still a ghost, but it finds a way to mask the readings we'd normally detect. Egon gave me a big, long lecture about it." When Janine winced, he was sorry he'd reminded her--and him--of Egon's current state, and he jumped in quickly. "Remember that boy from Upstate who started throwing fits and talking in weird languages that nobody could understand--not even Egon. Everybody thought he was crazy but there were a couple of parapsychologists in the area that thought it might be possession. They tried what they could do and when it didn't work they called us in. They thought they could get the ghost to vacate him, but they didn't have the equipment to trap it, and they didn't want to mess with an exorcism ritual. I kept in touch with them because we came up with a process that works a lot of the time in cases of possession, as long as the entity in question isn't above a Class 6. You get much higher and you come up against big time trouble. Demons and such. Nasty stuff. Ray said this ghost had confusing readings. I've gotta check it out."

Janine looked at him with respect. "Why does it take something like this to show how smart you really are?" she asked.

Peter dropped his eyes to the equipment. "What? When I can usually pass the buck and do as little work as possible? Give me a break, Janine."

"That isn't why," she said under her breath as she started to run the program she'd called up.

Peter grimaced, and, arms loaded with gear, he started for the bedroom. "Janine?" he called over his shoulder.

"Yes, Peter?"

"Remind me to pay you sometime--so I can give you a raise."

She smiled. "Get out of here," she urged.

*****

"Find out anything?" Larry Callahan asked when Peter returned. The extra medical people had gone, and the three unconscious Ghostbusters lay on their beds, each attached to equipment that monitored their vital signs. The paramedic was adjusting a dial on the gear connected to Egon.

"I'm gonna check for possession before I do anything else," Peter explained. "For all we know, the ghost might be more than just a hybrid, whatever that is. It might be a colony creature. It might have taken over everybody--you know, sent little parts of itself to sublet people's minds. Some babies will do anything to avoid rent control. So I want to make sure little baby ghosts aren't growing inside the guys. I don't want to see ugly little snake thingies bursting out of their chests this time tomorrow."

Larry grimaced expressively. "I never would have thought of that. And I wish I hadn't even now. What will you do?"

"Well, Egon took recordings of all of us at a normal state," Peter explained. "We've used our own biorhythms to track each other down when one of us was missing and trapped or hurt, and unable to call for help. This device measures that." He held aloft the bio-regulator. "Egon and I dreamed this gizmo up--well, okay, it was mostly Egon, but I helped--and Ray built it. It'll tell us if there are any deviations from the norm. I got possessed once--and let me tell you, if you can pass on the experience, do. It was not up there in my list of favorite things to do. After that, I thought it might be nice if we could tell if anything like that was happening so we could zap it before it got a head start."

Bending over Egon, Peter activated the device and passed it over the supine physicist, his face taut with concentration as he read the screen, checking the motion of the needle.

"Well?" asked the paramedic anxiously, his eyes moving from Peter to Egon and back again.

Peter shook his head. "No. This shows that is system isn't normal, but it's more like something was taken away rather than anything added. That snake sucks away part of a person's life energy, I think."

"Hey, does that mean, if it doesn't come back and renew the process, that the person will eventually wake up on his own?"

"How do you figure that?" Peter asked, sternly squelching the hope that flared through him at the thought.

"Well, somebody gives blood, they're not permanently short of blood. The body replaces what was taken."

That was a good point, but it brought up another one. "Yeah, but usually somebody gives blood and they give him food and fluids to make up for it. These guys aren't taking anything in."

"I wonder if they can," Callahan said. "I wonder if they'd eat soup, for instance, if someone fed them."

Peter had a sudden image of Egon's mother descending on them, blender in hand, prepared to feed them all kinds of noxious cures, and that thought made him remember people who had a stake in this. Egon's mother. Winston's family. Ray's Aunt Lois. Should he notify them before they saw it on TV? And if he did, what would he say if they started insisting their relatives be placed in the hospital. Peter's shoulders slumped. This was harder than he'd ever thought it would be. He couldn't think of everything, second guess everybody. The only thing he could do was take it one step at a time.

"Well, we can try the chicken soup routine," he said, "but I can't spare myself or Janine to fix it and you need to be here."

"Slimer make soup," the ghost volunteered, bobbing up in front of Peter.

"Yeah, and eat it all yourself, spud. No, we'll hold off a little while and see if they start to come back on their own," he decided. "At least we know the guys aren't possessed. That's a start."

He ran every test he could think of, while Callahan checked his equipment. Within an hour of their return to headquarters, Dr. Labraccio, a physician who had worked with the Ghostbusters before, dropped by.

"Hello, Peter. I thought you might need some help. I saw it on TV. Have you found out anything yet?"

Peter heaved a sigh of relief at the thought of help from a real doctor. "Not yet, Greg. Come on in. I want you to check them out. That ghost thing seems to drain life energy from its victims. Maybe that's why my thrower couldn't stop it, because it absorbed energy from all those people--for all I know, it might even consider the proton streams a gourmet delight. Ray and Egon said it was a hybrid entity. Class 6 and Class 7 at the same time. Class 6's are usually animal ghosts, but Class 7's can be demons or demi-gods or other really nasty goopers. What I want to know is, if it sucked energy out of my buddies and put them out like this, will they bounce back on their own or should we be giving them something to speed the process? Have you been in touch with any of the victims or do you know anything about their treatment?"

"All I know is, there hasn't been any change in any of them," Greg Labraccio told Peter, running a frustrated hand through his dark curls. "I can give you an hour now and then come back late in the afternoon if you haven't got through it by then."

"Great. Come and check them out." Peter led the physician up the stairs to the third floor.

"Peter?" Janine called him as he started for the bedroom. "Take a look at this."

Waving the doctor toward the bedroom, Peter went to meet Janine in the lab, who gestured at the screen, where a winged serpent's picture was visible. It had a dragonlike appearance, much more so than the creature Peter had seen at Macy's, but this was an obvious picture from an old book, an image of something no one in recent times had seen. Sometimes medieval drawings just didn't cut it when it came to matching up with current nasties--and sometimes the goopers had mutated. Peter didn't think that was fair, but he knew it happened. "What is it?" he asked.

"It's a basilisk," Janine replied. "Does it look anything like your ghost?"

"Just the wings. The thing we saw was more like a snake. Basilisk, huh? What does it do? I've heard of it. That's the thing that zaps you just by looking at you, isn't it. One look and you're history. It's fatal, though. I know that much. Maybe this is its stupid kid brother or something."

"According to this," Janine said, scanning the descriptive passage beneath the picture, "A basilisk was a mythical serpent or dragon or snake. It could kill with its look or its breath. It's something like a cockatrice, too."

"What's that?" Peter asked. That one didn't ring any bells, or at least not very loud ones. Ray would know. Ray knew all this kind of stuff backwards and forwards. But Ray was down for the count.

"Another fabulous serpent who could kill with a look. Only it was hatched from a cock's egg."

"A cock's egg," Peter said wryly. "Riiight. Kills with its look or its breath. That's taking halitosis one step too far. Anyway, nobody's died." And they better not start now or I'll take Mr. Basilisk or whatever he is and turn him inside out and tie him in knots.

Janine didn't say anything, but both of them could hear her unspoken, 'yet.'

"Nobody's gotten any worse, Janine. Maybe this is just an apprentice basilisk and it only knocks people out. Maybe it's an underachiever."

"It was the blind man," Janine said, seemingly at random. "I was thinking about it, and then this came up. He couldn't be killed--or even stunned--if he couldn't see the basilisk, could he?"

Peter pulled up a chair and sat on it backwards, folding his arms across the backrest and dropping his chin on his forearms as he stared at the screen. "Good point. You mean it isn't the look itself. It's the person seeing the big ugly. Suddenly, their eyes meet across a crowded room--and one of them keels over. I bet he doesn't get a lot of dates." An idea came to him. "Hey. Hey. First time it flew over us, when Egon and Winston got taken down, Ray had on the ecto-scopes. Maybe they protected him somehow. If that's the case, I can go after him as long as I'm wearing them." It wasn't a risk he wanted to take, unless maybe the lenses could be polarized in such a way that they'd shield against the effect. They might have given Ray protection temporarily but whether they'd work long term was a moot point. Peter would have taken the risk for himself, but if he got scragged, then there'd be nobody left to resurrect his buddies.

Peter knew he needed to find out a lot more. Egon thrived on this kind of stuff. He had the kind of brain that put information together quickly, drew conclusions from data at high speed, and came up with reasonable scientific theories based on what he'd seen. Ray was inclined to leap from point A to point B and then to point Q, with intuitive skills that made for an imaginative scientist. Peter's mind worked differently. When he came up with ready solutions, they were usually based on his knowledge of human nature (and by extension ectoplasmic nature, since ghosts often displayed motives not unlike those of human beings.) Peter was used to approaching Ghostbusting from the soft science side of things though he'd had enough of the scientific method drilled into him by Egon that he had a good idea how to conduct this kind of investigation. It wasn't his usual method, but he could do it if he tried.

"Besides," he added, "I wasn't wearing ecto-scopes, and I'm sure not blind. I didn't have any protection and I'm the only one walking around. We start talking random immunity and we're really getting in over our heads." He tilted his head so he could see through the door and across to the bedroom where Dr. Labraccio stood at the foot of Ray's bed in earnest consultation with the volunteer paramedic. That kept striking him, that he was the only one left. What if nothing worked? What if the guys never woke up? What if he was the last Ghostbuster left?

Janine must have guessed what he was thinking. She knew him and the others very well. "Then it's lucky you're so good at what you do, isn't it?"

"Come on, Janine. Egon would be a better choice. He'd probably have thought of a basilisk right away--at least if it is a basilisk. Ray sure would, once he put our clues together."

"Why don't you check it out in Tobin's," Janine urged. "You're not doing them any good sitting around worrying about what might never happen. If it is a basilisk, you need more information."

"Well, it would probably explain those weird P.K.E. valences," Peter mused. "Ray said it was neither fish nor fowl. It's a creature out of a legend. We've encountered a few things like that before, so I can't laugh it off. Maybe it's part ectoplasm and part corporeal. I'll check Tobin. Proving this is it is only the start, Janine. Once we know what it is, then we figure out how to stop it. I'm just glad it isn't out there blasting the city." He straightened up and stretched, biting his bottom lip when the movement sent flashes of pain through his healing shoulder.

"You ought to rest, Peter."

"Sure. My buddies are zombied out so I take a nap. Yeah, right."

"You could think better if your mind was clear. Egon said he used that dream gizmo on you last night. Couldn't you put a helmet on and catch half an hour's rest?"

"I will later. Right now I want to go through Tobin and some of those other moldy old books of Ray's and see what I come up with."

He lugged the books back to the bedroom and stacked them on the foot of his bed, then he pushed his pillow up against the headboard and leaned against it, sitting cross-legged on the bed and laying the heavy tome across his knees. Finding the page, he started reading.

The doctor was still there, correlating readings with Larry Callahan, but Peter lost himself in the text. He was still cross-referencing, pretty sure that Janine had hit it dead on target with the basilisk, when the secretary appeared, wheeling out Egon's alpha wave generator.

"No way, Janine. I'm not gonna take a nap now."

"I was thinking, maybe you didn't have to. I wonder what would happen if you wore it while you stayed awake. If it controls your dreams, maybe you could make it control your thoughts! Maybe you could come up with some good ideas how to stop it."

"What if it puts me to sleep?" Peter asked, eyeing her suspiciously. He glanced over at Greg Labraccio, who was checking readings on Egon. "Yo, Greg. If this baby knocks me out, I want you to shake me awake, right?"

Labraccio studied Peter thoughtfully. "An hour's nap wouldn't hurt you, Peter. You look washed out. In fact, I want to take a reading on you. You were exposed to the thing. Did the people who set this up run tests on you?"

"I don't have time for tests, Greg," Peter denied, patting the stack of books at his side. "Come on, the guys are counting on me."

"And you'll be a helluva big help to them if you keel over." Labraccio snagged a blood pressure cuff from the table, stuck the earpieces of his stethoscope in place, and gestured Janine to help roll up the psychologist's sleeve. Silently fuming, Peter permitted the doctor to take his vitals, but he grimaced expressively when the doctor approached him again to take a blood sample.

"Turning into a vampire?" he asked.

"No. I'm getting readings that imply you're a lot more tired that you ought to be, and those big circles shouldn't be under your eyes if you slept with this gizmo on last night." He gestured to the machine. "Egon showed me this. You should still be feeling good. It's only mid-afternoon. You shouldn't be this tired yet."

Peter glanced past him to the three sleepers. "Sure, doc. I feel wonderful. My buddies are down for the count and we don't know how to stop the thing that did it, let alone bring them back. I feel so good I might get up and do a dance." The anger in his voice startled him and he fought to hold it back.

Labraccio smiled at him. "Sorry, Pete. I know you're worried about your friends, but this is more than that. This is a physical response. I don't think you're quite as immune to that big snake as you thought you were. It affected you. It just didn't affect you enough to zap you." He daubed alcohol on and deftly extracted a blood sample from Peter's arm, then put a cotton pad over it and folded Peter's arm over the pad. "Hold that in place a few minutes. I'll test your blood and have the results when I come back. I sent Larry down to make some soup and we're going to try spoon-feeding your friends and see if they'll take any of it. I don't want them to lie her too long without doing something about it. If they aren't out of it in twenty four hours, I'm going to insist they go to the hospital."

"Hey, come on, Greg, I've gotta . . . "

"What? Save the day single handed? They won't be much use to you if they need to be hospitalized and you don't let them go."

Peter looked around at Janine for backup, but she was standing with the alpha wave generator's helmet in her hands. "Come on, Peter. Put this on. Nap for an hour. I won't stop checking things out and if the basilisk comes back, I'll wake you up. That's a promise."

If the doctor hadn't just insisted he'd been affected by the big nasty snake, too, he probably wouldn't have given in, but a part of him remembered that euphoria he'd felt when he had awakened this morning. If he could recall that, he'd be in a better state to solve everything, and if the thingie came back, he'd have a better chance of taking it on. So he nodded in acquiescence. "Okay, Janine, but I'm gonna keep reading with it on."

She grinned wryly and settled it into place.

Though Peter tried his best to keep checking the research texts, he was asleep in five minutes.

*****

The wake-up call wasn't the best he'd ever had. Someone shook him roughly. "Peter. Come on, Peter, you're needed. Wake up." At first, the voice didn't even sound familiar, and he wondered if he'd drifted into a less than friendly dream, then he remembered Larry and his eyes snapped open to find the paramedic removing the helmet, his face grim and worried.

When he saw Peter was awake, he gave him a sympathetic smile. "I hope you feel better, Pete, because we've got trouble."

"The guys?" Peter cried, jumping up and looking around the bedroom wildly as if he expected the life support equipment to have flatlined while he slept.

Larry clapped him on the arm and shook his head reassuringly. "No. There's no change in them. It's the monster. It's back."

"Yeah, and it's here," Janine cried, leaning past the paramedic, her mouth drawn in a tight line. Slimer, who had been hovering overhead and looking at his friends with sorrowful eyes, shrieked and vanished beneath Ray's bed, peering out uneasily. "Even worse, it's really pissed off," continued Janine. "It wants you, Peter. It said so."

"Oh, great." He struggled to collect his thoughts, still scrambled from the too-brief nap. "Ecto-scopes!" he burst out, exploding past the other two and scrambling for the lab. "Come on, guys, you're gonna have to back me, and I can't risk anybody else going down."

"I got a couple of pairs out," Janine called after him as she followed him into the lab, taking the pair he passed her and heading for one of the proton packs stacked there.

"Hey, I don't know about using one of these things," Larry said hesitantly, ecto-scopes in place, his face scrunched up in nervous anticipation as he grabbed the straps of the proton pack Peter held out to him. "I never handled anything like this before."

"So it's not in your job description, pal," snapped Peter, grabbing his own equipment and pulling on the pack so quickly that his shoulder twinged painfully enough to make him grab the affected area and rub it. "Big deal. Do the best you can. It beats comatose--or dead." He shot an involuntary look into the bedroom where his three friends still slept (Hang in there, guys, he thought) then he turned and headed for the stairs. "Come on, team. Where is it?"

"It's out in front," Janine said. "It demanded we send you out."

"It--it talks?" he burst out in surprise, pausing halfway down the spiral stairs to look at her over his shoulder. "It never talked at Macy's." He felt that the creature had tricked them all. "How'd it know who I was?" he continued as he started going down again.

"Probably saw you on TV," Larry volunteered, struggling to fasten the last catch on the strap that ran across his stomach as he started down after them. "There have been endless broadcasts about it, and it could have seen it in a store window TV display if nothing else."

"Maybe it can sense you," Janine offered, a theory Peter didn't like one little bit. "Maybe it tracked you down because you stood up to it and didn't go out for the count."

"Great. Just what I needed. 'Hey, Ma, it followed me home. Can I keep it, huh?'" He made a face. "How come whenever it's really big and mean, I'm the one that has to go make nice with it? Where does it say that in my contract?"

"You can do it, Dr. V," Janine encouraged him.

"Yeah, it didn't zap you before," Larry said in heartening tones. "Besides, even if it's not in your job description, it beats comatose--or dead." He sounded scared to death. He had probably seen all kinds of horrors in his job, things that would likely turn Peter's stomach, but he clearly didn't like the idea of the basilisk. Peter reminded himself they still didn't know if it was a basilisk or not--but he was about to find out.

Pausing at the double doors that led to the street, he opened the smaller door set inside the larger one and stepped outside. One quick glance showed him the basilisk, hovering just across the street, wings moving lazily to keep him aloft. Cars had evidently screeched to a halt at the first sight of the golden serpent, and some of them were abandoned, proving that its attention had wavered long enough for some of the drivers to flee, but in other cars and on the street were several sprawled bodies. Down at the far corner, a police car sat, lights flashing, and a cop stood behind it, a high-powered rifle in hand, ready to fire at the entity if it made any moves in that direction.

"YOU!" the creature bellowed the moment Peter stepped out the door. "You have come!"

"He's got a good grip on the obvious," muttered Peter under his breath. "Yeah, I've come." He touched the ecto-scopes to make sure they were properly adjusted on his face then renewed his grip on his thrower, leveling it at the beast. "So what's your problem, Jack? You trashed my buddies. You're not getting away from me this time."

"Your puny weapons are ineffectual against me," the creature returned, gesturing with one wingtip. "And your allies are inexperienced." How'd he know that?, Peter wondered.

"Wrong," he called defiantly. "Janine has fought ghosts with us plenty of times. So what do you want with me?"

"You stood up to me. This cannot be."

"Wrong again. I did it, so it looks like it can be." Peter was sure baiting the monster wasn't the answer, but he needed to learn more before he tried anything with the thrower. He was out here cold, without Egon to figure the best means of blasting the creature or the best thrower settings, without Ray to come up with odd bits of esoteric knowledge and to lead them eagerly into the fray, without Winston to suggest strategy and to provide the best backup on the planet. He was just Peter, parapsychologist, psychologist, and very scared man, not quite sure what he was supposed to do next.

"All fall before my glare," the creature announced. It sounded like a bit of self-promotion. "None may meet my gaze and live."

"Yeah, yeah, that's what they all say. Besides, all don't, buddy. I'm still here and so's my team." He gestured at the two who stood, one at each shoulder, behind him.

"I am a basilisk. All die when I cast my eyes upon them."

So Janine had called it right on the money. Peter turned quickly and curled thumb and forefinger into an 'okay' sign at the secretary. "Nice going, Janine, honey," he said quietly, and then, raising his voice, he called, "We figured that already. And nobody's died. You might stun people, but you don't kill 'em. What are you, the discount model?"

The basilisk roared in fury and swooped down upon them before they could dart for cover. "All die before my glare!" it insisted, hovering directly before Peter and glaring at him, just as it had done outside Macy's, amber eyes glittering with hatred as they locked with Peter's green ones. "You may shield yourself, but you will still die." Before Peter could raise a hand to protect himself, the creature swatted him with the very edge of his wingtip and the ecto-scopes went flying. Peter cringed, half afraid he couldn't resist the creature a second time, but he didn't pass out. The creature's golden eyes bored into his, and when Peter remained stubbornly on his feet, it gave a dreadful howl of rage and swooped around again to face them in a confrontation position.

"You must be immune," Janine said beside him, passing him back the goggles. "But I think you better wear them anyway."

"What about you guys?" Peter said as he slid them on one-handed, refusing to loose his grip on his proton rifle. "Are you hanging in there?"

"Just looking at him up close like that made me sleepy," Janine admitted in an undertone to keep the basilisk from hearing her. "Not out of it, just sleepy."

"Yeah, me too," the paramedic admitted. Peter spared him a look and saw him clinging to the thrower with a white-knuckled death-grip. "A long nap sounds real good right about now."

"Well, we're not gonna give him that satisfaction," Peter shouted. "Hey you, Basilisk, baby." Securing the ecto-scopes into place he turned to face it. He was feeling tired again, too, not sleepy, but worn down as if the best thing he could envision was a huge dinner and a lazy evening around the TV. It didn't help that his shoulder ached so much--hey, wait a minute? Could it be that? Could the injury, something about the pain of the injury, have nullified the effects of the creature's lethal stare? He didn't think it was likely, but it was the only difference he could think of, unless he was naturally immune. And if that was the case, how could he ever find a way to bring his buddies back?

"You are becoming a serious annoyance," the basilisk snorted. "Soon I will crush you. I will wear you down."

"Well, I think you've got problems, bunky," Peter responded. Maybe if he got it mad, it would lose control and they could sneak it into a trap. "You've been giving people the evil eye for so long you're worn out. Maybe you're like one of those batteries that keeps on going but you've kept on going so long that you're starting to run down. Ever think of that? Even the Equalizer runs out eventually." He wriggled his shoulders within the straps, wincing, hoping that if there was anything to his half baked theory about his injured shoulder, it would prevent him from succumbing to the effects of the creature. If nothing else, the pain gave him a focus, something to concentrate on besides the hypnotic yellow glare of the monster.

"YOU LIE!" Fury rang in the entity's bellowing tones, but there was also the slightest element of doubt, and Peter heard it. He plunged on with determination.

"Hey now, pal, maybe you've just outlived your usefulness. Maybe there were times when it was handy to zap a bunch of people all at once. Maybe you hired out to invading armies or something like that. These days we use high tech for that. You're out of date. What say you consider retiring--maybe upstate somewhere, settle down in a little house over the Hudson and write your memoirs? Next thing you know you'd be doing the talk show circuit. Rapping with Leno and Letterman is lot more fun than flying around zapping people. I should know. I've done it. Better to quit while you're ahead. Much more of this and insomniacs will start hiring you to get a good night's sleep. You don't want to come to that, do you? Of course not. It undignified. Better go out in a blaze of glory than turn into something to scare naughty kids."

"You are a silly human," the basilisk snorted, but it hesitated, wings beating, hovering in place as if it were pondering Peter's words. The psychologist didn't really think he'd go for it, but it was worth a shot.

"Whatever you say, Jack. Come on, tell me, how'd you do it? What do we do to get my buddies back?"

"They will never come back," the basilisk snarled. "They will die. They simply die more slowly in this accursed technical age. Your gadgets affect my power. But hear me, mortal. I am still more powerful than you can imagine. You cannot entrap me, and you cannot destroy me--and your friends will never awaken!"

Peter's throat closed up and he blinked hard a couple of times as he pondered the creature's heartless words. "Now you're trying to scare me. It's not nice to do that." He had a horrible image of the guys never reviving, kept alive through the miracles of modern medical science, gradually growing old, still in a somnolent state, while Peter himself had to carry on all alone, visiting them every Sunday and hoping against hope. It didn't bear thinking about. But instead of letting himself get depressed, he allowed anger to flow through him. Maybe the adrenalin would keep him going long enough to figure out how to stop the nasty gooper.

"Wrong," he snapped, his voice taut and furious. "You said high tech messed you up. Well, it'll get my buddies back, see if it doesn't. They can run tests on me and find out why I didn't keel over, and go from there. Besides, think how much better you'd feel if you'd go somewhere remote, far away from all our modern gadgets, where you'd be strong again. Give me my friends back and go, and we won't track you down." After all, he'd let Nexa go, hadn't he? Why not this baby, too, as long as he could make a deal?

The basilisk was silent a long time. Then, with a terrible roar, he dove for them as if he meant to crush them with wings and claws.

"Heat 'em up," Peter called over his shoulder, hearing Janine relay hasty instructions to the newest Ghostbuster. "Let him have it!" bellowed the parapsychologist, taking aim and pressing the trigger with his thumb. "Eat protons and die!"

They fired as one, Larry letting out a surprised yelp as he felt the pull of the thrower and struggled to keep his proton stream on track. The streams were a lot stronger than the lay person thought and it took training to handle them well. Then Larry gave a cry of eager enthusiasm and his proton beam stabilized. All three hit the basilisk dead center--Peter realized Larry must know something about weapons because, even though he was scared, he was handling himself, and the thrower, better than Peter, Egon, and Ray had done at the Sedgewick. Of course they'd been college profs, not the most daring of occupations, except when dealing with the dean and the board of regents. If Larry was good with guns, it might give him a head start.

Pinned in the streams, the basilisk stopped dead and began to thrash around, wailing and screeching threats at them. It had broken free easily at Macy's, but it was evidently finding it uphill work now. "Pour it on, guys!" Peter hollered, sensing that he'd hit it dead on target when he'd talked about drained batteries. The first encounter with the Ghostbusters must have weakened the creature enough to make it harder for it this time. "He's losing power. I think it's weakening him."

"He's gonna break loose," Janine cautioned, crowding up beside Peter and holding her weapon firmly in place. "Look out!"

"We're taking full streams here!" Peter exulted, turning up the power on his thrower. As Janine copied him, the creature gave a particularly powerful thrust and yanked away from the proton streams. It shot up to rooftop level where it hung, panting and batting its wings with considerable effort as if it would have been happier landing and catching its breath. Breaking away had taken a lot out of the ghost.

"Full streams, Larry," Peter urged. "Yeah, that's the control. Dial it as far as it will go. He's weakening. I was right before. Either the high tech drains him or simply getting zapped does. I bet eye contact with our big buddy up there used to deep six everybody right on the spot. Now it just puts them to beddie bye. He's trying, but he can't keep it up. He should have taken the talk show offer. It's the best one he's likely to get."

"But he said he couldn't bring Egon and the guys back," objected Janine, a thread of worry in her voice. "He said they'd die."

"Maybe he can't bring 'em back, but we're gonna do it just fine," Peter said with a lot more bravado than he really felt. "If high tech wears him down, it's gonna wear down the side effects, too. Count on it. We've probably got every doctor and scientist in the city at work on it, and one of 'em's sure to find an answer before much longer. The Mayor'll make 'em. Let all those registered voters die? No way." He shoved the image of years visiting his friends while they lay comatose in the hospital into the darkest reaches of his mind. "Let's get him again before he gets his strength back." Raising his voice, he bellowed, "Yo, Basilisk baby. Only a coward would hang around up there. C'mon down here where the action is. You wanna renegotiate the freedom bit, or you wanna take a nap in a trap?"

"You will never trap me!" Goaded into a suicide dive, the creature swooped down at them, eyes locked on Peter, putting all this remaining strength into the fury of his stare. Even with the protection of the ecto-scopes and his own natural immunity, whatever it was, Peter could feel the strength of the basilisk's glare. He rocked back on his heels, suddenly woozy, and it took an effort to power up. Behind him, Janine gasped, and Larry gave a choked cry, but they were not the focus of the creature's attention, and the ecto-scopes protected them. Once again the three streams shot out and caught the basilisk, stopping it in mid-swoop. It screeched and batted its wings so wildly Peter felt his hair whipping about in the artificial breeze.

"Yahoo! We got him!" cried Peter, sheer adrenaline giving him the strength to hold out against the enervating force of the basilisk eyes upon him. As the creature writhed and twisted in an attempt to break free, it was forced to turn its attention to its struggle for freedom. With the intense amber stare turned elsewhere, Peter shook his head and managed to keep to his feet with an effort. "We got him this time!" he caroled. "Trap, Janine."

"Coming up!" That squeaky voice was Slimer. The little green ghost must have gathered enough courage to emerge from his hiding place under Ray's bed, and now he pitched a ghost trap forward. The trap spun out at the end of its cable, coming to rest directly beneath the twisting golden fury. Peter found the trigger near his foot and he stomped down on it with as much rage as if he'd been stepping on the basilisk itself.

It shrieked again, a long, drawn-out wail, then it elongated, stretched and twisted out of shape, and, still howling, zipped into the trap as easily as if it had been a Class 2. The doors snapped shut over it and it was over.

Peter powered down and reeled backward, struggling for balance. It took him a minute to regain his equilibrium and ship his thrower, grateful when Larry steadied him for a minute, the red-haired man grinning like a kid who's just been given a new toy. The next moment, Janine had flung herself at Peter and hugged him fiercely. "You did it, Peter!"

"No, lady, we did it." He turned to include the paramedic in his smile. "All three of us. Bunky in there helped a little, too," he added, nudging the trap with his toe. "I think he didn't like being a cut-rate basilisk. Maybe he was just old and his time was past. Who knows." He freed Janine and looked up to see the police converging from both directions, and a few cautious people emerging from buildings to cheer.

In better circumstances, Peter would have reveled in the attention, but he knew it wasn't over. The guys were still out of it--unless zapping the basilisk had revived them. "Come on," he said, snatching up the trap and heading back for the firehouse. "Let's take a look at the rest of the team. Janine, fill in the nice policemen, will you, then come and help us out."

*****

Egon, Ray and Winston were still sleeping. There didn't seem to be the slightest change. Shucking his proton pack and reverting to his true job, Larry checked all the readings and took pulses, then he looked up and shook his head. "No change."

"Now what, Dr. V?" Janine asked, joining them as the redheaded man finished his examination. "I told the cops the danger was past and to clear everybody away. It's a medical problem now."

"You're right. I want to talk to Dr. Labraccio. Why don't you stick Mr. Evil Eye in the containment unit while I phone him. I've got an idea."

But Labraccio debunked Peter's injury theory immediately. "It shouldn't make any difference that you had a sore shoulder, Peter," he said regretfully. "We've got people hospitalized who already had broken legs or arms before they were hit, and several other people who had existing injuries. It didn't make any difference at all. I can hardly believe it was a basilisk. If it weren't you who was telling me, I'd laugh in your face. You Ghostbusters have expanded my view of the possible. I'd like it better if I wasn't left to pick up the pieces."

Peter grimaced. This wasn't working. "You can handle it, Greg," he encouraged the young doctor. "And you've got all kinds of help. The mayor's gonna go all out on this one, and I bet there isn't a hospital in the tri-state area that isn't trying to solve it. So what chance is there that it will wear off?" he asked hopefully.

"It may wear off eventually," Labraccio said in the tone of a man offering remote possibilities. "We're running all kinds of studies on them. It's not normal unconsciousness, and it's not normal sleep. It's somewhere in between. We hope to get more information by morning, but right now, tests are still being made and some of the results aren't back yet. Instead of an improvement there seems to be a very slight decline, as if the affected people don't have the strength to come back on their own. Even with medication, full life support, IVs and feeding tubes, they're losing energy. If your friends haven't revived by morning, I'm afraid we'll have to hospitalize them, too. You can't keep spoon feeding them and give them enough nourishment to sustain them. I'm not even sure we can. I'll have your test results back shortly," he concluded, his voice full of regret that he'd had to give Peter bad news.

"Yeah," Peter agreed reluctantly. He knew that already. There had to be an answer soon. If there wasn't, he'd lose control of the situation entirely and the guys could get a lot worse faster without a hospital setting. "Thanks, Greg. Stay in touch." With a sigh, he hung up.

Janine must have guessed from the look on his face that the medical side of the team hadn't produced results yet either. She didn't comment on that, though her eyes moved past Peter to Egon, lying quiet and unmoving on his bed. Unwillingly he told her the results on the hospitalized patients. She bit her bottom lip, then she shook her head, closing it away because there was nothing she could do about it. "If you feel as tired as I do from the residual effects of that monster, you need a big meal, Peter. I'm going to cook something. At least we have ways to build our strength up again, and the guys are gonna need us in top form. You check everything you can up here. Larry, if the guys can wait, come and help me."

The paramedic nodded. "I've charted everything. If there's any change, contact us, Peter." He followed Janine out. Slimer cried, "Oh boy, fooood!" and swooped after them.

Peter stood in the center of the room, revolving slowly so he could see each of his buddies, taking new P.K.E. readings and comparing them to the earlier ones, then studying each man with various other equipment, trying to figure if there was a psi residue he could pull off with the throwers, as if they were possessed. The equipment didn't confirm that, and in their drained state, it would probably do far more harm than good. With a sigh, Peter set aside the equipment and looked at his friends, heaving a huge sigh. They looked so peaceful lying there, as if they were asleep. A reluctant thought intruded into his mind. 'Don't they look natural?' It was a line often spoken at funerals by people who stood gazing down uncomfortably at the deceased. Truth to tell, dead people never looked natural; they just looked dead. His buddies didn't look natural, lying there, either, unnaturally pale, abnormally still, but at least he could see the slow rise and fall of their chests as they breathed. They weren't dead, and he was going to make sure they stayed alive if it took every bit of knowledge, skill, determination and just blind pigheadedness he possessed.

"You hear me, guys," he said softly. "You're not gonna die. I won't let you die. Ray, come on, wake up, Tex." He reached out and shook Ray's arm as if he were trying to awaken him on a normal morning. "Come on, buddy, if you can hear me, give me a sign. Twitch your nose, move your little finger, shake your head, something. Just let me know you're still in there." Ray only lay breathing, his body completely lax. Peter shivered. He rested the palm of his hand against Ray's cheek and held it there a minute. "I'm gonna get you back, Ray. If you can hear me, believe that. I'm not going to leave you trapped in there, and that's a promise from Dr. Venkman."

The utter blankness of the face that was usually so animated stabbed at Peter and he pulled his hand away reluctantly and went over to Egon. Clasping the physicist on the shoulder, he shook him, too. "Egon, buddy, wake up, or I'm gonna let Janine read your diary. Boy, will she be steamed." When that produced no response, Peter sat down wearily on the edge of Egon's bed and looked at him. "Egon, you've gotta come back," he said with complete sincerity, no trace of the glib flippancy he liked to practice in his voice or on his face. "You guys can't leave me here alone like this. Come on, big guy. I need you."

Nothing. Egon's face didn't change. All Peter needed was the slightest hint his friend could hear him but there was nothing at all, no response, no change in the slow, deep breathing, no flicker of emotion on the inanimate face. He watched Egon carefully, hand still clasping the rather bony shoulder, checking the way he breathed, looking for the slightest flicker of difference. Still nothing. If only Egon's calm, phlegmatic voice would tell him not to be an idiot because everything was fine . . . But Egon didn't stir, and Peter pushed himself to his feet again, scrubbing his eyes with his fists when he felt them burn, and looked at Egon's face.

"Well, I hope you're having nice dreams, pal," he said softly, reaching out to tweak the lock of blond hair out of Egon's eyes. He paused, staring, watching his eyes, a slight frown twisting his mobile mouth. Egon wasn't dreaming anyway. At least he wasn't in REM sleep. REM stood for Rapid Eye Movement, and it should be visible if it were taking place even with his eyes shut. Without REM sleep, a person got no real rest, and that might explain why none of the patients were reviving, though it was probably too simplistic an explanation to be a solution.

REM sleep? Dreaming? Wait a minute! With a frown, Peter got up and walked over to the Alpha Wave Enhancer that still sat in the middle of the room. "No dreams?" he said aloud, a frown wrinkling his brow. "Egon, you kidder, I think you've got it." He walked all around the device and picked up one of the helmets. "I thought it was my shoulder that made me different, but Greg says that's not it. So maybe it was this. Maybe since this works on a sleep state, and I'd just come from it, maybe I was immune. You said I was in an abnormal alpha state or something like that when I woke up this morning. I had it on again just now." He started pacing the room, thinking furiously. Had Egon's gizmo granted him at least partial immunity to the entity? Had the enhanced alpha state been enough to nullify the effects of the basilisk's evil eye. Maybe what the basilisk did affected the same part of the brain that the machine did. If the entity had truly been weakened by the technology of the 1990s, maybe something like this was enough to prevent unconsciousness. Whatever the case, Peter had worn this before both encounters with the golden nasty and that had to mean something.

The question was, could it bring the guys back? Peter frowned. If they were aware in there, perhaps they could program their dreams, and eventually wake up, just by wearing it. If not, Peter didn't see how it could possibly hurt them to try it on them. It wouldn't drain them of energy. It didn't work that way. It had made Peter feel better, given him strength. It was worth a try.

Which of them to try it on? Would it even work without awareness of the process? Should Peter try wearing a helmet himself and going into the guys' dreams and awakening them? That had worked the other time, when they had been unable to wake up because of the three green pizza nuts invading their dreams, but this was different. Peter sighed, then he carefully settled the helmet on Egon's head.

"I'll try it with you first, big guy," he explained to his unresponsive comrade. "Because if it works, we're gonna need you to tell the doctors how to wake everybody else up, and this device is your baby." He looked down at Egon, then he reached out and turned on the machine. It was still configured for one, but Peter knew how to adjust it. If there were any changes, any signs that it was working for Egon, Peter could change it quickly enough to include Ray and Winston.

Dragging up a chair, Peter plopped himself down in front of the screen that showed Egon's dream state, and prepared himself to watch it. The screen flickered to life, but at first, Peter thought something was wrong with it because instead of a picture, he could see only a solid greyness devoid of form or shape or color. He leaned in closer, and as he did, objects began to appear slowly as if emerging from a very thick mist. If Egon was controlling this dream it was not a dream Peter would have chosen. Perhaps his strength was too low to control it fully.

Eventually the mist rolled back, revealing a barren valley, with stark crags in the middle distance and a lowering sky of banked black clouds. No grass grew, not even in the more sheltered reaches behind boulders, and there were no trees. Dry, brittle branches of barren undergrowth spouted here and there, and the dry bed of what had once been a stream traced a jagged line across the countryside, rocky and dry.

On the nearside bank of the stream, Egon Spengler lay sprawled as if he had been cast aside like an abandoned toy, arms and legs flung about, his head lolling to one side. His glasses were gone and his mouth hung open. He looked dead.

Peter flinched. The entity's evil eye couldn't make Egon dream he was dead, could it? And if it did, would that kill Egon in this world? Peter wondered if boosting the power would rouse Egon or if a longer exposure would have any effect. But as the moments passed, nothing changed at all, except that a wind must have sprung up, tossing Egon's hair about wildly.

Peter couldn't sit here and wait. Whatever patience he had was long gone, and he'd never been one to sit back in safety while his buddies were in trouble. He went out to the steps and bellowed down them, "Yo, Spud, get up here. Now!"

Slimer was at his side in seconds. "Guys wake up?" he asked hopefully. When he saw the dream machine parked beside Egon's bed and the screen lit up, he zipped over and peered at the sprawled body displayed there. "Oooh, poor Egon. Nasty place," he wailed.

"Look, Spud, I don't know if it's the right thing to do, but I'm going in there after him," Peter said. "You did something to the machine last time to change us from one dream to another. I want you to do that again. Can you do that? There'll be extra pepperoni pizzas for you for a month if you do it right."

Slimer nodded earnestly, his eyes lingering unhappily on the screen. He didn't even respond to the promise of pizza. "Okey dokey, Peter," he promised.

"And if we aren't out of there in an hour, I want you to tell Janine to call the doctor and have him come over here," Peter insisted. He didn't want to wait for Janine and the paramedic to return because he was halfway afraid they would stop him, and he wasn't prepared to let anyone cast obstacles in his path, not when there was something he could do to try to bring his buddies back.

He switched a couple of dials, setting the device to function with two sleepers. Egon had pointed out how he'd done that and Peter had remembered it; now he was grateful because he hadn't realized how useful it would prove to him. Settling his helmet on his head, he lay down and closed his eyes.

For the first few moments, he was in his own dream, one in which he was again fighting the basilisk, and he blinked in confusion, not quite alert enough to program the dream to his liking. Then, the pavement opened beneath his feet and he fell through, into the threatening landscape of Egon's prisoning nightmare.

"Yes!" exulted Peter. "Way to go, Spud." He gave a hasty thumbs' up, hoping Slimer would see it on the screen, then turned to look for Egon.

He found the physicist sprawled just as Peter had seen him in the projection screen, whipped by a nasty chill wind that tore at Peter's hair and flapped the collar of his jumpsuit. Shivering against it, he flung himself down on his knees beside his friend's body and gathered Egon up against him, trying to shake him awake. The physicist was cold, but not as cold as he would have been if he'd been dead. "Egon," he breathed. "Listen to me, big guy. It's time to wake up. Can you hear me? Can you feel the alpha wave enhancer bringing you back? Come on, Egon, it's time to rise and shine."

The blond's head lolled against Peter's shoulder, his body slack and boneless, his face vacant. Peter's heart twisted and he cradled his friend closer, trying to warm him up. Maybe if he could get him warm--

Wait a minute! This was a dream, and he could control it. Closing his eyes, he concentrated, and the next moment a blazing fire danced and flickered at his side. He turned Egon in the circle of his arm so that the heat from the flames would warm the lax figure and bring some life back to it. Further concentration produced thick, fleecy blankets, which he tucked around his friend, settling him once more against his chest and shoulder in hopes that his body heat would provide an added warmth. What else? Something hot to drink. A thermos of coffee followed, and he poured some of it into the cup and held it to Egon's mouth. "Come on, Egon, take a drink. It'll warm you up. You're gonna be all right. You better be. This is Peter talking to you, and I'm not leaving you alone in here. Drink it. Damn it, Egon, will you drink it?"

At first Egon's mouth resisted the cup, then, suddenly, a slight tremor went through his body. Peter gave a triumphant cry that echoed off the spires of the distant peaks, and tipped the cup a little closer. "That's right, Egon, come on, take a drink," he urged.

The lips parted. Peter eased a tiny amount of coffee into Egon's mouth, and Egon swallowed it. Probably a reflex, like the soup earlier, but it was progress. "That's right, Spengs," Peter urged, presenting the cup again. "More. Good, isn't it? A Venkman special. Bet you didn't know I could make such good coffee, did you. And you complain about my cooking!" The second swallow went down a little easier.

But then Egon turned his face away, resisting. Peter took his pulse. He wasn't sure how that worked in the dreamscape, but it didn't feel good. It fluttered against his fingers, but far too weak, as if Egon were on the verge of losing his tenuous hold on life.

NO! Peter wouldn't let that happen. He shook Egon fiercely, dismayed when the taller man's head rolled back and forth against his shoulder. "Egon, come on!" Peter blurted out, horrified. "You've got to wake up. Come on, more coffee! Do it for Peter..."

The swallow went down, but Egon was rejecting it and when Peter tried again, it dribbled out the corner of his mouth. Peter heaved a huge, helpless sigh, wiping his face with a corner of the blanket. What next? Should he get Egon moving, walk him around, try to revive him that way? The fire must be helping. The waxlike look had vanished from his face and there was a trace more color there, not enough for him to look well, but at least more than there had been at the beginning. Peter coaxed more coffee into him, hoping the warmth of the fire and blankets would help the inner warmth and bring Egon back to consciousness.

For a long time, nothing happened, nothing except that Egon took tiny swallows of the coffee, and Peter coaxed him with soft words and impatient ones, then, finally, he began to stir on his own, to make faint, moaning sounds. He turned his head away again, breath sighing through his lips. "N-no," he whimpered.

It was the first real word he'd spoken. "Yes!" cried Peter in return. "Come on, Egon, wake up. No more slacking on the job. Can you hear me?" He nudged Egon's head with his shoulder, then gave an anguished cry at the return of pain. He'd never learn.

The sound startled Egon. His eyes didn't open but his lashes fluttered as if he were trying to wake up.

"That's my boy," Peter exulted, forgetting the throbbing in his shoulder completely. "Come on, Egon, rise and shine." Gently he chafed the unconscious man's face. "Wake up, Egon. Come on."

"Leave me 'lone," Egon whimpered, burrowing into the blanket and cuddling up against Peter's chest like a child, hiding his face in the aching shoulder.

"Forget it, pal. I'm not leaving. Come on, open those baby blues. It's not nice to scare Peter like this. Come on, Egon. Will you at least look at me. I'm not a basilisk. I'm not gonna fry you."

"B-basilisk?" the bass voice faltered, eyebrows narrowing in faint curiosity. "Mythical..."

"Yeah, right, and you and about two hundred New Yorkers are gone beddie bye because of Mr. Evil Eye. Come on, Egon, I think your Alpha Wave gizmo is going save the day. I told you you should have patented it. You're gonna be the big hero, buddy. Maybe there's even a Nobel Prize in this for you."

Egon shifted against Peter's shoulder and tilted his head back. His eyelids fluttered, lifted a crack. A dazed wedge of blue squinted at Peter. "Nobel Prize?" he whispered in confusion.

"I thought that would get you. Come on, Egon, buddy, it's time to wake up now. How can you save the city if you're snoozing the day away?"

"C-cold, Peter..." Egon's teeth chattered together. "C-cold."

"Yeah, I know you are. That's why we're baking beside this fire. You wouldn't drink my coffee. Think how sensitive I am about my cooking."

"C-coffee?" Egon's eyes opened all the way. He blinked at Peter a couple of times. "Where..."

"This is your dream, Egon. I always knew your dreams weren't fun. I mean, no dancing girls, no champagne." He shook his head with mock sternness, though his heart was thumping with relief. "So let's blow this pop stand. Come on, Egon, time to wake up."

Egon snuggled into the blankets again with all the uninhibited delight of a child and wrapped his arms around Peter's waist. "Wanna go home now..." he mumbled like a little boy. Then his whole body tensed. He was waking up with a vengeance. Maybe he had finally realized that he had solid contact with Peter, more real than he would have expected if he were still dreaming. His eyes were wide with shock as he squinted at Peter. It seemed he needed his glasses even in the dreamscape.

"Egon?" Peter queried in alarm. "What's wrong?" Automatically he materialized glasses for the physicist and held them out to him.

"Peter!" He sat bolt upright, his eyes wide with horror. "I was trapped," he confessed, his body shaking with reaction rather than cold as he remembered the experience. He was fully alert now but the memory of his contact with the basilisk was all too vivid. "I couldn't wake up. I knew something was wrong, and there were times I could hear you talking, but I could not control it." He relaxed again, though not completely, leaning back against Peter's shoulder again as if he knew it was safe to do so. He finally took the proffered glasses and put them on, so automatically that Peter realized that he was not quite with it enough to understand exactly where he was. "How...how did you wake me?"

"You're not awake yet, Egon, but you're in your dream, and you woke up there. I just hope it carries over when we get you home."

Egon's eyes widened and he relaxed again, the dark memories fading as he fully registered Peter's presence and determination. "I see. This is fascinating, Peter. But--where are the others?" He glanced around as if he expected to see them lying unconscious nearby.

"Ray and Winston are out of it, just like you were," Peter admitted. "I came after you first, big guy. We have to help them next."

Egon frowned. He was starting to sound much more like himself. "The alpha wave enhancer on its own should revive them, given time, but I assume we have little time. What of the creature? You called it a basilisk?" He settled his glasses more firmly on his nose.

"Yeah. Janine found it in a book and she was right. It's okay. We zapped him and he's safe in the containment unit. I've been trying to bring you guys back. Egon, can we adapt this thing so all those other people in the hospitals can wake up, too?"

"Entirely possible. I presume, since you had just received an alpha wave enhancement, you were able to resist the power of the basilisk?"

"Got it. Took me awhile to figure out why I was immune, especially since the ecto-scopes seemed to work, too."

"They would filter out certain elements of the creature's glare," Egon responded. "The polarized lenses would neutralize some of the creature's power. However, to revive the sleepers, a steady progression of alpha waves should do the trick."

"Then how about we go back to the firehouse and get to work on it, big guy?"

"You got it. And Peter?"

Venkman looked a question at him.

"Thank you."

*****

Peter awoke in his own bed to find Janine just removing his helmet. "If you ever do a thing like that again..." she burst out furiously.

"You'll do what?" Peter asked warily, noticing that, behind her, Greg Labraccio was bending over Egon removing his monitoring and life support equipment while Larry Callahan monitored the other screens on the dream machine. Peter blinked. Had he been in the dreamscape long enough to summon the doctor? It had seemed a long time to him, but dreams often passed in a few seconds.

"This," said Janine, bending down to kiss him full on the lips. Astonished, Peter tried to capitalize on the moment, encircling her with his arms and returning the kiss with enthusiasm, but she wiggled free easily. "Thank you, Peter. Egon's waking up," she said as she left him and went to stand by the next bed.

Nothing else could have prodded Peter to his feet as fast. He flung himself up and found himself bending over Egon, who was just rousing. The physicist blinked at his audience in surprise, then he saw Peter and smiled, stretching out his hand. Peter clasped it as Janine sat on the bed and threw her arms around the blond man.

"You came in after me," Egon said, remembering, warmth shining in his eyes. "Fortunately you identified the possible cure, Peter."

"You remember all that?"

"Of course. We controlled the dream. When that happens, the memory is clear, but, of course, there is a video recording we can play back if necessary. The machine makes a recording automatically." He stood up, catching his balance with help from Peter's steadying hand, and took his glasses from Janine and put them on.

There was no time for more of a reunion. Peter looked over at Ray and Winston, who were still unconscious, though each now wore a helmet.

"Janine called and said you were using that device to try to rescue Egon," Greg Labraccio told Peter. So he must have been in there a lot longer than he'd thought. It was dark outside. Probably only the fact that he was getting results had prevented the others from pulling him out of there. The doctor continued, "So I ran a test on a couple of patients to see if alpha wave stimulation would have any effect--I knew it would do no harm at that stage. Both patients progressed immediately to a lighter coma and are even now starting to awaken. I came right over. When I got here, I saw you'd nearly awakened Egon. Larry and I adjusted the device for your other two buddies, and have regulated the flow for them to a higher level so they can come out on their own. I'm already picking up REM sleep from them, and I've been monitoring the screens. Both of them are starting to wake up. This is going to work."

Peter and Egon bolted to the screens and stared. Ray and Winston had both been sprawled in wasted country, much like Egon's, but Ray's bore the look of a cartoon drawing; with carvings of nasty animated monsters on the faces of the nearby boulders, and Winston's wasteland was a jungle, full of thick vines and heat waves rising from the swampy landscape. Viet Nam? Peter speculated. As he and Egon watched, both men showed signs of returning consciousness.

"I boosted the output for them," Labraccio said. "We need a much higher dose to counteract the basilisk, though your process is as effective, Peter. My tests show that the creature's stare is still lethal. It just takes a lot longer to do its dirty work. Three days of coma and the person would just sink away into death, no matter what life support equipment we used. This is the only procedure that's worked so far, and we don't even understand why it does."

"I could produce some theories for you," Egon offered. "This is fascinating, Peter."

"Yeah, big guy. Think of this. You saved the world--and you did it flat on your back."

Egon stared at him strangely. "I? Saved the world? Nonsense, Peter. It's true I invented the device and made you wear it last night--it was last night, wasn't it?" When Peter nodded, he continued quickly, "But I wasn't the one who solved this. I didn't trap the basilisk. I didn't figure all that out, I didn't rescue myself, and I didn't reason that the alpha wave enhancer could restore people after the basilisk zapped them. This is fascinating, Peter. I should have theorized that basilisks were nothing but myth, yet, amazingly, one appears in New York."

"Hey, New York is a happening kind of place. Why wouldn't one appear here? Everybody else does eventually." Peter grinned. "Hey, look, Ray's starting to wake up."

It was ten minutes later when Ray finally blinked and opened his eyes, rousing more fully when Greg Labraccio unhooked him from life support. Stretching and yawning, he gazed up at Peter and Egon, who were bending over him anxiously, and smiled at them, winning a pair of relieved smiles in return. "Wow!" he burst out. "It got me, didn't it? I bet it was a basilisk, Peter. It got people when they looked it in the eye. That's why that blind guy didn't see it. Isn't it neat! Egon! You're awake again! Wow!" He sat up easily, rubbing sleep from his eyes. "How come it didn't kill us?" he asked as Peter and Egon reached out to steady him as the remnants of his weakened state affected his balance.

Peter burst out laughing. "That's our Ray all right."

Winston rolled over and squinted at them balefully. "Nobody ever said I had to fight basilisks," he griped, propping himself up on one elbow and rubbing his forehead with his other hand. "That's not in my job description." Larry disconnected his life support equipment, winning a surprised look from Zeddemore.

"And Gozer and the Bogeyman are?" Peter challenged, beaming at him in delight. He felt like he was riding a real high. His buddies were back again and all was right with the world. He pulled Ray to his feet as Winston climbed up, and the four of them patted each other on the back and gave each other high fives, relieved to be intact again. Slimer gave cries of delight and flung himself upon them, forcing the four men apart to wipe away liberal coatings of slime, and Janine slid under Egon's elbow and hugged him around the waist. He went so far as to drape his arm around her shoulders.

"Well, Egon," Dr. Labraccio said, "I'm going to need your help on the enhancer now. I want to correlate with you to find out the quickest way to implement the procedure on the hundreds of people still unconscious. You too, Larry," he added to the paramedic.

"Of course, Doctor." Egon stretched lazily, and Larry nodded with a big grin.

The telephone rang and Janine snatched up the extension on the table between Ray's and Winston's beds. "Ghostbusters!" She listened a minute, her eyes narrowing. "Egon," she said abruptly. "The press is downstairs. They want to do an interview with the hero who saved the day."

"Egon's busy," Peter said promptly. "He has to talk to Greg--"

Janine grimaced. "They don't want Egon, Dr. V," she declared. "They want you. Seems like somebody must have told them you figured all this out on your own and took down the creature single handed."

"Hey," said Peter, genuinely tickled. He loved being a hero. Then he shook his head. "No way, Big J. This was a team thing. Egon built the gizmo, and if Ray hadn't been wearing the ecto-scopes, we wouldn't have known about that, and you and Larry backed me up. You even figured out it was a basilisk. I didn't do it on my own."

"Sure, Dr. V, tell me another one," Janine insisted. "Much as it grieves me to pander to your ego, you did take it on. You almost talked it into going away but you found out enough that we knew we could trap it. You figured out about the alpha waves, too, and you're the one who saved Egon." That last fact alone would have been enough for Janine to view him in a more heroic mode than usual.

Peter eyed his buddies, alive and well, and in spite of the dull ache that lingered in his shoulder he felt really good. Standing up straighter, he heaved a pretend sigh. "Well, if I have to go play hero with the press I'd better get moving." He grinned ingratiatingly. "It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it."

The others groaned, "Peter," in chorus and dove for whatever weapons were handy, but he was quick and he ducked out before the first flung pillow could strike him.

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