The three men faced each other, not knowing whether to feel relieved or terrified. On the down side, it was the end of the world as they knew it.
On the plus side, they'd be a lot safer in Parkview right now than anyplace on the streets of Manhattan.
25
W mile meteorologists, astronomers, and city officials tried to explain to a startled public exactly why New York had been embraced by the shadows caused by a total eclipse, the effect of Vigo's power began to make itself felt.
At a Hudson River pier, a leaky drainpipe suddenly began dripping shimmering, pulsating slime into the river near the Cunard Line docks.
Shortly thereafter, at the refurbished Central Park Zoo, the polar bears, lounging in their outdoor cage, lazily allowed a zookeeper to hose down their moun tainous terrain. The zookeeper put down the hose and started to sweep around the top of their cage. Unbeknownst to him, the water the hose was gushing grew thicker and stranger, sparkling and undulating. Slime. Lots of it.
By the time the zookeeper finished sweeping the upper reaches of the outside enclosure, he was vaguely aware that something was wrong. He turned to pick up his hose. There was no water running out of it.
It was bone-dry.
He heard a screech coming from nearby.
He spun around and jumped back in surprise.
A full-sized pterodactyl screamed at him and then launched itself up into the dark, cloud-laden sky.
The zookeeper made a beeline for the exit door.
The polar bears exchanged startled glances. New York sure wasn't like the Arctic!
At Fifty-ninth and Fifth, the massive fountain lo cated across from the swank Plaza Hotel suddenly began to change color. Instead of water zooming up out of its spout, torrents of psycho-reactive slime emerged, splashing, cascading, and oozing all over the surround ing sidewalk.
At the Plaza Hotel, a well-heeled man and woman emerged from a limousine. As they walked up the front steps leading to the hotel, a wad of slime landed on the woman's luxurious full-length mink coat.
As the doorman eased the front door open with a bow, the woman yelped in pain.
"Something bit me!" she said, glaring at the startled doorman.
The doorman looked curiously at her. He yelled in terror and leapt backward as the woman's slimed coat quivered to life. Small, ferocious mink heads popped out of the thick fur, snarling, barking, and yapping. Their sharp little teeth nipped at the air.
Reacting quickly, the doorman yanked the coat off the woman's back and threw it onto the sidewalk. He tried to stomp the coat to death, but the beady-eyed varmints in the coat were too quick for him.
As the doorman, the woman, and her husband looked on, flummoxed, the mink coat, its hydra-head of critters snapping and snarling, skittered off, trotting down Fifth Avenue with a vengeance.
The woman glared at her husband. "I told you we should have stayed in Palm Beach," she said, her face ashen.
At the Midtown North Police Precinct, a squad room filled with busy detectives noticed a change in the flood of calls they were receiving.
Initially they were trying to explain just what a total eclipse was and wasn't.
For the past hour, however, the calls had gotten a tad more, er, squirrelly.
"Look, lady," said one cop into the phone. "Of course there are dead people there. It's a cemetery.....hat?.. They were asking you for directions?"
"Was this a big dinosaur or a little dinosaur?" an other cop asked. "Oh, just a skeleton, huh? Heading toward Central Park?"
Another detective sighed and shook his head. "Wait a second. You say the park bench was chasing you? You mean someone was chasing you in the park, don't you?... No, the bench itself was galloping after you. I see...."
He raised his eyes to heaven and pushed the hold button on his phone. He called to his lieutenant, "Sir? I think you better talk to this guy."
The lieutenant faced the cop. "I have problems of my own."
"What's up?"
"It's some dock supervisor down at Pier 34 on the Hudson. The guy's going nuts!"
"What's the problem?"
"He says the Titanic just arrived!"
"Car 54 is in the area, isn't it, Lieutenant? Can't you just have him check it out?"
"Good idea."
Moments later two uniformed patrolmen and a very
stunned dock supervisor stared out at the Hudson River. There, moored to a dock, was an ocean liner bearing the name R.M.S. Titanic The gangplank was lowered and hundreds of long-drowned passengers disembarked. They were sopping wet and drenched with seaweed. Behind them, cadaverous porters off-loaded waterlogged baggage.
"I don't believe this," one cop said to another.
"And look at the water," the dock supervisor said. "It almost looks solid. It's spooky, Officers. Damned spooky!"
"Who're we gonna call?" the second replied.
"The lieutenant!" the first cop declared.
He ran to his squad car and began dialing the precinct. Beyond him, all hell was breaking loose in New York City.
... and that was just for starters.
26
D ana sat, curled in the couch before Venkman's battered TV set, watching a Star Trek rerun. Janine and Louis continued to munch popcorn. Every so often the network would interrupt with a local bulletin announcing that nobody in New York—or America, for that matter—knew what the heck was going on in the streets outside Dana's window.
"Mass hysteria" was how one wild-eyed reporter phrased it.
Dana grew uneasy as she watched the television. She should have heard from Venkman by now. The sky outside the window was dark and foreboding.
Without warning, a howling gust of wind blew open the French windows in Venkman's living room.
"What the... ?" Louis yelped.
Dana heard the baby cry out. A sense of alarm welled up within her. Oscar!
She hurried to the bedroom to check on her son, a frantic Louis and Janine trailing behind her.
The bed was empty.
Oscar was nowhere in sight.
The windows to the bedroom, however, were open.
Dana, Louis, and Janine ran to the window and peered outside.
"Oh, my God," Janine said, pointing.
Dana glanced to her left. On the ledge, towering above the busy streets of lower Manhattan, crawled little Oscar.
He knelt on the very edge of the ledge at the corner of the building, some fifty feet above the ground. The baby seemed calm, almost expectant.
Dana took a deep breath and climbed out onto the ledge, bracing her back against the strong support of the building. She daren't look down. She was afraid of losing her nerve. Slowly, cautiously, she inched her way along the eight-inch-wide ledge.
A bubbling light flared up in the sky above her, causing her to stop in her tracks.
An apparition was forming.
Something straight out of a fairy tale.
A sweet, kindly-looking English nanny formed in the sky, pushing an old-fashioned, albeit transparent baby carriage. The woman was strolling on thin air toward the ledge, dozens of feet above any solid matter.
The woman was smiling.
Dana gaped, recognizing the smile and trying to place the face.
The airborne nanny marched through the sky directly toward little Oscar. She extended a strong hand and deftly snatched up Dana's baby.
The nanny drew a delighted little Oscar into the transparent carriage, turning and smiling at a startled Dana.