Venkman tossed on a Consolidated Edison hard hat and, his lips working overtime, executed a fine imitation of a typical New York Con Ed repairman.
"What's the trouble?" he groused, ambling over toward the squad car.
"What are you doing here?" the cop asked.
"What the hell's it look like we're doing?" Venkman spat.
The cop was dumbfounded.
"I tell you what the hell we're doing," Venkman continued. "We're bustin' our butts over here 'cause some nitwit downtown ain't got nothin' better to do than make idiots like us work late on a Friday night. Right, Rocky?"
He faced Egon Spengler. Spengler nervously raised a fist. "Yo!" he barked, stymied.
The cops in the car nodded, accepting the expla nation.
"Okay, boys." The driver of the patrol car nodded. "Take it easy."
The patrol car puttered away. Ray Stantz heaved a mighty sigh of relief, trying to get his heart to stop pounding through his work clothes. Taking a deep
breath, he hunkered over the jackhammer and began pounding into the street again.
Bzzzzark.
The jackhammer stammered to a stop.
"I've hit something, guys," Stantz called. "Some thing metal."
Spengler and Venkman used their picks and shovels to clear away generations of paving material. There, at the bottom of the hole, was an ornate iron manhole cover. Stantz stared at the ancient slab of circular metal. On its top was engraved a strange logo, along with the letters NYPRR.
Stantz squinted at the weird manhole cover. "NYPRR? What the heck does that mean? Help me lift this."
Venkman and Spengler picked up crowbars and removed the manhole cover from the bottom strata of street. Stantz produced a flashlight and peered down into the dankness.
"Wow!" he theorized. "It's an old air shaft! It goes on forever!"
Spengler pushed his head inside the hole, along with his Giga meter. The indicator on the meter nearly flew off the machine. "Very intense," he said thought fully. "We need a deeper reading. Somebody has to go down there."
Venkman smiled at Stantz. "I nominate Ray."
"I second," Egon blurted.
"All in favor?" Venkman injected before Ray could respond.
"Aye," both Venkman and Spengler chorused.
Venkman turned to Stantz and pumped his hand. "Congratulations, Ray. You are nominated. You're one lucky guy."
Stantz nodded sadly. "Thanks, boys."
Standing as forlornly as a child being snapped into a bulky snowsuit, Ray Stantz allowed himself to be strapped into a harness by Venkman and Spengler. A cable attached to a huge winch was secured to his back. Ray strapped to his belt a radio, the Giga meter, and a small extension hook with a scooping device.
He sighed and climbed into the manhole, his com panions slowly cranking him down into the darkness.
"Is that dedication or what?" Venkman said to Spengler.
"Keep going," Ray called from the shaft. "More. More. Easy does it."
Inside the seemingly endless air shaft, Stantz rappeled off the metallic walls, descending slowly into a land of total darkness.
Stantz, unable to yell up to the surface, grabbed his radio. "I'm okay," he reassured Venkman and Spengler. "Lower ... lower."
He flicked off the radio and gazed into the murkiness around him. "Gee," he concluded sagely, "this is really deep."
Suddenly he felt himself kicking against thin air. The long shaft had ended. Stantz found himself spinning wildly at the top of some titanic tunnel. Stantz felt like a yo-yo on its last big spin.
"Hold it!" he cried into the radio. "Hold it."
The cable stopped moving.
Ray pulled out the powerful flashlight from his utility belt and, flicking it on, aimed it at the vast tunnel below.
Ray suppressed a gasp. He was dangling near the top of a beautifully preserved chamber with rounded, polished tile walls adorned with intricate, colorfully enameled Art Nouveau mosaics. Ray felt as if he had just leapt backward in time. He trained the flashlight on a
finely inlaid sign that identified the location. van horne
STATION.
Ray whistled through his teeth, scanning the walls with his flashlight.
The place looked like a subway passenger's vision of heaven.
Smiling to himself, he raised his radio. "This is it, boys," he whispered reverently. "The end of the line. Van Horne Station. The old New York Pneumatic. It's still here."
Aboveground, Venkman shot a puzzled glance at Egon. "The New York Pneumatic Railway," Spengler explained. "It was an experimental subway system, com posed of fan-forced air trains. It was built around 1870."
Ray's voice crackled over the radio. "This is about as deep as you can go under Manhattan without digging your own hole."
Spengler cradled the walkie-talkie in his hands. "What's the reading, Ray?"
Belowground, Stantz shone his flashlight onto the Giga meter. The meter was going crazy. He whistled into his radio. "Off the top of the scale, Egon. This place is really hot. Lower me to the floor, will ya?"
Stantz felt the cable quiver.
Soon he was being lowered closer to the old tun nel's floor. He slowly scanned the area with his flashlight, eventually spotlighting the floor.
Stantz's eyes grew wide in terror. "Hold it!" he yelled into the radio. "Stop! Whoa!"
In the beam of his flashlight, Stantz saw not a solid floor below him, but rather a river of bubbling, pulsat ing, glowing slime. A torrent of disgusting ooze.
The cable jerked to a halt.
Stantz found himself dangling above the torrent of psychokinetic mucus.
He lifted his feet as high into the air as he could, to avoid the splats of slime emitted by the constantly churning river.
Sweat began to form on his forehead. Gradually he became aware of the sounds of the city echoing around him: engines throbbing and pulsing in the bowels of the city; water rushing through pipes; steam hissing through air ducts; the muffled rumble of the ever-grinding sub ways; and the roar of traffic high above.
What Ray noticed most, however, were the echoes of people in conflict and pain. Voices of citizens shouting in anger, screaming in fear, groaning in agony. Ray sagged under the weight of the sad and eerie chorus.
Suddenly Ray's walkie-talkie barked to life. "What is it?" asked Spengler from above.
Ray grimaced into the ooze. "It's a seething, bub bling psychic cesspool," he blurted. "Interlocked tubes of plasm, crackling with negative GEVs. It's glowing and moving! It's ... it's a river of slime!"
"Yccch," he heard Venkman comment from above.
Stantz gritted his teeth. He had a job to do down here. He unhooked a long, slender device from his utility belt and pulled a trigger on it. The device shot out a long, telescoping fishing pole with a plastic scoop on the end. Reaching down tentatively, Stantz scooped up a sample of the slime and carefully started reeling it in.
The ooze beneath his feet began to churn and turn.
Without warning, a grotesque arm of slime reached up toward Ray, extending its glistening, skeletal fingers in the direction of Stantz's dangling feet. Ray screeched and jerked his legs up high into the air as other hands of ooze bubbled upward, reaching for him, clawing at him. Ray found himself squirming at the end of the cable
in a near fetal position. He felt like a pinata from another dimension.