17
A baleful moon peeked through the star lit skylight above the restoration studio in the near- deserted museum as Dana Barrett cleaned off the last of her brushes and began to put away her supplies. She was bone-tired. It had been a busy day. On the plus side, she had managed to clean a small Renaissance painting. That wasn't bad for a day's work.
Across the studio, the mighty head of Vigo of Carpathia shimmered to life. His eyes lit up as he watched Dana walk past his oil-colored feet.
Dana stopped in her tracks. Someone was watching her. She felt it. Yet there was no one else in the studio. She glanced up curiously at the titanic portrait of Vigo. A chill crept through her. She was just being silly, she concluded, and continued to walk toward the exit.
Vigo's thick neck pulsed to life, allowing his head to follow her toward the door.
Dana spun around and caught the movement of the one-dimensional piece of art.
Tensing, she edged back toward the exit door and scrambled through it, slamming it securely behind her.
She nearly ran out of the museum. It would be good to be home with little Oscar, safe and secure in her apartment.
Within two hours Dana had chalked up the entire incident to her nerves. She had been on edge since the baby buggy had gotten away from her. Long hours. Seeing Venkman again. The last two weeks had been a whirlpool of conflicting feelings.
She cradled a cooing Oscar in her arms and carried him into the bathroom. She lowered her child into his bassinet, and wrapping her bathrobe around her night gown, she bent over the old claw-foot bathtub and turned on the tap.
"Bath time," she called over her shoulder to Oscar.
The water gushed out of the faucet and into the tub. Dana carefully stuck her wrist under the stream of water, checking its temperature. She then turned to Oscar and, bending over the bassinet, began to undress her child.
"Look at you." She smiled adoringly. "I think we got more food on your shirt than we got in your mouth."
The baby clapped appreciatively at his mother's wit.
Behind Dana, the water gushing from the faucet slowly changed into shining, shimmering slime. The slime hit the gathered water in the tub with a resound ing plop and settled itself at the very bottom of the tub. Both of the spigots on the tub began to spin wildly as more and more slime burrowed beneath the surface of the water.
Dana, unaware of the change in the tub's attitude,
routinely reached over to a shelf and squirted a stream of bubble bath into the water.
She returned her attention to Oscar. The rim of the tub puckered up like a clamshell and its sides convulsed as the newly animated piece of porcelain sucked up the bubble bath.
Belch.
Dana proudly picked up her beautiful baby boy out of his bassinet and held him above the tub.
"Bathies," she cooed.
She lowered Oscar toward the waiting tub. Without warning the tub began to shimmy and shake before her, its sides rising up like a gigantic, snapping clamshell, poised to snap up the boy and drag it down to the awaiting layer of glop.
Dana screamed and raised her baby.
The bathtub snapped at her.
Dana clutched Oscar to her chest and slowly backed away from the convulsing tub. Creak. Creak. Creak. The tub's stumpy legs slowly began to creep across the tile floor toward Dana.
Dana turned and ran out of the bathroom.
The tub made an attempt to dash after her but , found the doorway too narrow a passageway to clear.
The tub growled in anger, vomiting up buckets of creeping, crawling slime.
Dana dashed through her apartment. She grabbed her keys and headed for the front door. She had to find a safe place to hide. A place no spirit would dare invade.
Peter Venkman lay sprawled upon the floor of his apartment, sound asleep. He was still fully clothed and had not quite made it into his bedroom, nodding out some three feet away from its entranceway.
Venkman's loft apartment resembled the site of a
recent spate of tornadoes. Tattered, mismatched pieces of furniture were covered with old magazines, books, newspapers, videotapes, and a few very ripe pieces of half-eaten pizza.
Venkman's eyes fluttered as his front doorbell chimed.
He slowly got to his feet, and trying carefully not to step on any debris that would either break under his weight or stick to his shoes, he zigzagged sleepily to the door.
He eased the door open.
Outside stood Dana, wearing her short nightgown under an overcoat. Baby Oscar was in her arms, naked but for a baby blanket hastily wrapped around him.
"I'm s-sorry," Dana stammered. "Were you on your way out?"
Venkman looked down and saw that he still had on his coat, scarf, and hat. "No. I just got in ... a couple of hours ago. Come on in."
Dana entered the messy apartment. Venkman gazed at her nightgown. "Are we having a pajama party?"
"Peter," Dana blurted, "my bathtub tried to eat Oscar!"
Venkman stared at Dana. So young. So beautiful. Possibly so nuts. He thought a moment. "You know, if anyone else told me that, I'd have serious doubts. But coming from you, I can't honestly say I'm surprised."
"I must be losing my mind," Dana said, near tears. "At the museum today I could have sworn that terrible painting of Vigo moved and looked right at me!"
"Who could blame him?" Venkman shrugged. "Were you wearing this nightgown?"
"I don't know what to do anymore," she said with a moan.
"I'll get Ray and Egon to check out the bathtub. You better stay here."
Venkman trotted off to his bedroom. Dana glanced around the loft. She was amazed at the disorder. It looked like Hiroshima after the A-bomb blast. Venkman jogged back into the room, carrying an old football sweatshirt. He gently lifted Oscar from Dana's arms. The baby's blanket fell away.
"Now this kid has a serious nudity problem," he surmised.
He spread the sweatshirt out on the sofa, placed Oscar on it, and began tying it around the child like a diaper.
"This is Joe Namath's old number, you know," he informed the baby. "You could get a lot of chicks with this. Just don't pee in it."
Dana stood, trembling. "Peter, what about the bath tub?"
"We'll take care of that," he said, reaching for a phone and dialing. "Ray? Pete. Listen. Get over to Dana's right away. Her bathtub pulled a fast one. Tried to eat her kid."
"It was full of this awful pink ooze," Dana offered.
Venkman nodded, still cradling the phone. "Sounds like another slime job, Ray. No, they're both all right. They're here now. Right. Let me know."
Venkman hung up the phone. "They're going over there right now. You might as well make yourself at home. Let me show you around."
He carefully walked into the kitchen area. "This is the cuisine de maison," he announced.
The kitchen looked worse than the living room. The sink boasted a mountain range of dirty dishes, and the counters were stacked with all sorts of rotted food and crunched TV-dinner boxes. Venkman smiled suavely
and pulled a colossal trash bag from a drawer. He tossed it onto the floor and started stiff-arming trash off the counter into it.
He glanced at the junk-coated dishes in the sink. "Umm. We may have to wash some of these if you get hungry."
He stumbled toward the refrigerator and eased open the door. A horrible stench emerged. He slammed the door shut. "But... there's no real food, anyway, so forget about it. I have all kinds of carryout menus if you feel like ordering."