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"Look at it this way," Ray suggested, holding the door for Dana. "At least this time, the damage to your apartment was minimal." He stepped through after her; Egon was already pacing down the short hallway, thrower in one hand and PKE meter in the other.
"It wasn't the building this time," Egon commented from the doorway to the nursery. "Dana, the only room that's showing significant residual readings is the bathroom. I think you're going to have to replace the tub. Other than that, you should be fine."
Dana squeezed Peter's arm, the one she was leaning on, and gently sank into an understated upholstered chair. "Thank you. I just wish I understood why all this kept happening to me."
Peter shrugged. "Louis is probably asking himself the same question. I mean, he got caught up in all this again, too."
"But he wasn't involved from the start, either time," Dana objected. "Zuul showed up in my refrigerator long before anything happened to Louis."
"Again, that was the building, not either one of you two," Egon corrected, holstering his thrower and focusing on the meter. "You just happened to be living on Ivo Shandor's old floor. Zuul made her appearance in your refrigerator because it was blocking the stairs to the temple on the roof. The stairs on the other side had been partially removed, but their original exit would have been into Tully's bedroom closet." Egon tapped a rheostat on the meter and ran it over Dana and Oscar; it showed no reaction. "The real question, for me, is how they knew a person of the appropriate gender was occupying each apartment."
"Maybe it didn't matter," shrugged Ray. Egon surreptitiously ran the meter over him, as well. Dana winced inwardly. She only intermittently remembered what being possessed by Zuul had felt like, but what she could recall was bad enough; now Ray had gotten a taste of the same thing, and it was, while not her fault, immediately traceable to her having asked Spengler for help. Ray continued, "Maybe the, uh, ritual, um, would have worked no matter what the actual physical genders of the participants were."
Peter gave Ray the 'shut up' glare. Dana shook her head. "I don't think so. I mean, I don't really remember very much of . . . that part . . . but I got the distinct feeling that Zuul and Vinz needed the different - I don't know what word I want here."
"Polarities?" offered Egon.
"Yes, that's close enough." Dana lapsed into silence for a moment, as Oscar made bubbling noises and waved at Peter. Peter waved back, a goofy smile gracing his face. She looked up at Spengler again. "But that doesn't answer the question of, why me in particular, this time? I'm not the only mother who works at the museum, or even in the restoration department."
"Because Johnny noticed you were hot stuff, and he was the one giving Vigo a brush-bath," answered Peter, taking a break from making funny faces at Oscar. "Nothing supernatural about that."
"That doesn't explain the runaway baby carriage, though," mused Ray, glancing out the window.
"Sure it does," Peter warned, his voice carefully neutral. "Viggie set his sights on him, and stuff started happening."
"But that happened before Janosz started working on Vigo's painting." Dana's eyes widened, and she turned towards Ray. "They'd only just brought it out of storage. Didn't Janosz say Vigo didn't start speaking to him until later?"
"I, ah, I don't really remember that part too well," Ray admitted, flushing slightly. He'd still been under the influence of half a tank of positive mood slime when they'd debriefed Poha.
Egon, however, remembered quite clearly. "That's correct. According to Mr. Poha's timeline, Vigo didn't contact him directly until the evening of the day you met with me at lunch."
"Assuming Johnny was telling the truth," added Venkman.
Ray shook his head. "You can't lie when you're coated with that stuff, Venkie. It wouldn't even occur to you to try."
"It didn't occur to you to try, Ray, because you're one of life's innocents." Peter raised an eyebrow at his younger partner. "Trust me, if it had been me, I could still fib with the best of them."
Ray opened his mouth to continue his protest; Dana stopped him with a raised hand. "So, if it was me, how could we find out?" She shifted Oscar's position on her lap; he made an unhappy noise and tried to crawl over the arm of the chair.
The three scientists exchanged a look. Almost imperceptibly, Peter shook his head; Egon raised one eyebrow. Ray tightened his lower lip and nodded, more obviously than Peter. Egon raised the other eyebrow. Dana had enough time to wonder how he did that before Spengler turned to her and said, "It's possible, although improbable, that some action in a previous incarnation has resulted in spectral phenomena being attracted to you. In order to test that hypothesis, we'd have to do a past-life regression on you."
Dana's jaw dropped. If Ray had said that, she'd have brushed it off as one of his bursts of enthusiasm; if Peter had, it would have been a joke. But from Egon?
"Egon, that's a little outside of our current line of work," Venkman hissed.
"You've done this before?" Dana wasn't sure why she was shocked; Stantz and Spengler had suggested past-life experiences as a possible explanation for Zuul's initial appearance in her refrigerator.
"During Ray's master's research in parapsychology," admitted Peter. "But I didn't buy it then, and I still don't buy it now."
"I don't think I do either," Dana said cautiously, "but if there's any chance of anything like this happening again and hurting Oscar, I need to know about it."
"Well, we're sure as hell not gonna do it here," Venkman growled, glaring at Ray. "No spooky stuff around the kid, got it, guys?" Stantz and Spengler flinched at Peter's unusual protectiveness.
Ray held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. "Okay, not here, and not tonight. But I still think we should try it. At the firehouse? Dana, when could you get your regular baby-sitter?"
Dana glanced at the calendar above her phone. "She'll be watching Oscar until six on Friday anyway; let me see if I can get her to stay until nine that night."
"All right. We'll see you right after work on Friday." Ray smiled, and looked at the other two; Egon did a mental calendar-check and nodded. Peter still looked stormy, but his expression cleared as he babbled his leave-taking to Oscar and kissed Dana good-night.
---
"Heya, good-lookin'," Peter greeted Dana at the door. "You know, we could just blow this pop stand, take off, catch a movie, and let the geek squad do their research upstairs. Don't you agree, Winston?"
The fourth Ghostbuster shrugged. "On the one hand, I wouldn't really want to face the amount of equipment they have set up there, myself. On the other hand, I personally wouldn't want to sneak off on the two people who know how to set one of these things," he said, holding up one of the proton packs he was plugging in to recharge, "to explode."
"A very persuasive argument," laughed Dana. "Come on, Peter, we really don't want to disappoint Ray. He'd pout at us for weeks."
"Hmm. A pouty Ray and an Egon in a blowing-things-up mood. No, you're right, between the two of you, suddenly taking a long hike doesn't sound like such a good option." Peter looked resigned. "But don't say I didn't warn you. I strongly suspect this will be a big disappointment."
"I'm actually sort of hoping so, myself," admitted Dana as Peter followed her up the stairs. "I mean, first, I don't want to find out that what's happened has all been my fault, in a sense."
Peter shook his head. "I know karma's supposed to work like that, but I don't think it really does. I mean, I don't really believe in karma at all, but any system where you look at people who have been born into hell-holes and say they must have deserved it, for stuff they did before they were born, has something wrong with it."
That was actually a rather political statement for Venkman. Dana looked back at him in surprise. He shrugged, and gave her a crooked grin. "I'm just saying."
She smiled back. "And second, I'm not exactly a big believer in anything, really - we went to church when us kids were little, but Mom never sent us to Bible study or anything like that - but I think I'd rather believe that we get one shot at life, and then go on to Heaven, or pass to the next plane of existence, or something like that. It . . . I think it cheapens a human life if we just get another one afterwards."
"Like a video game, and you never run out of quarters," added Winston from behind Peter. "Yeah, I know what you mean."
"But that's not how it works," came Ray's voice from above them. "I mean, you only get each lifetime once, and you don't get to remember much except in the spaces between. Each transmigration is precious in its own right; it just means that we're never done with this plane of existence."
"You're all ignoring the fact that we have a tremendous amount of personal evidence that there are a great number of fates for human spirits other than the ones you're discussing," chimed in Spengler as Dana reached the third floor. "At least a significant fraction appear not to go anywhere at all."
"Until we take them somewhere," agreed Winston. "But sometimes they disappear from the containment unit, don't they?"
"Their energies dissipate. They don't disappear. PKE can no more be created or destroyed than any other kind of energy." Egon frowned. "And we don't know why they lose cohesion, or what that represents. It might mean that they've 'moved on,' as Ray puts it, and passed on either to an otherdimensional afterlife or to another incarnation. It might also mean that they've committed the spectral equivalent of a prison suicide." His brows furrowed and his voice grew even deeper than normal; the latter possibility had been clearly been bothering him of late, although of course, being Spengler, he refused to admit that to anyone.
"Could we not talk about depressing crap right before we try and put my girlfriend in a highly suggestible state?" Peter asked, addressing the question to the ceiling as much as to Spengler or Stantz.
"Sorry," Ray apologized immediately. Egon sighed, but then inclined his head towards Dana in what might also have been intended as a gesture of apology.
Ray waved her towards one of the overstuffed chairs they'd dragged up from the rec room. "Spengler and I are going to do video, audio, and PKE recordings while Peter talks you through the regression. Just make yourself comfortable."
Dana sat down and sank several inches into the chair. It was soft enough, but the springs were clearly starting to give out. "I thought you were going to be doing the regression, Ray."
"Oh, no, I put myself to sleep whenever I try and induce a trance state in anyone else," Ray replied. "Egon's done it a few times, but Peter's much better at it."
"Speaking of which, Ray, how are we going to keep you from going under when I induce Dana?" Venkman hunted around in the equipment piled on the table that served them as the dining room and came up with a small vinyl case. He opened it and withdrew a faceted crystal teardrop on the end of a short silver chain.
"I won't watch," Ray shrugged.
Peter shot him a wry look. "Ray, some of the post-hypnotic suggestions I gave you twenty years ago in undergrad still work."
Zeddemore chuckled. "If that's true, Ray, why don't you have him put you under and tell you to stop smoking?"
Ray paused in his work with the video camera and rubbed his chin. "That's actually not a bad idea, Zed."
Egon rolled his eyes. "I'll poke him if he looks like he's going to lose useful consciousness, Peter. I don't think there's anything we can do to keep him from going into light trance if he can hear your induction at all."
"And how about you, Spengs?" Venkman met the physicist's eyes as he dragged a wooden chair over from the table. Dana blinked; surely someone with a mind as strong as Egon's wouldn't be susceptible to hypnosis, would he?
"I need a visual focus, remember?" Spengler answered. "As long as I can't see the pendulum, I'll be fine."
Winston looked skeptical now. "You guys are making Pete sound like some sort of Svengali, here."
"Oh, no," Ray laughed, shaking his head, "it just that we've done this with each other so many times, we sort of developed shortcuts."
"That, and Ray here is just about the most easily hypnotizable person on the planet," snorted Peter. "No wonder Vigo got his hooks into him so fast."
"I really am sorry about that," Dana murmured to Ray as he hooked up a small metal object to the arm of the chair. He waved one hand. "Don't mention it. Occupational hazard."
"Last chance to back out," Peter offered, settling into the chair right in front of Dana.
"No, if you guys think there might be useful information we can get this way, I have to do it, for Oscar's sake." She glanced at the rest of the team for support. Ray nodded; Egon checked a monitor wired in to the PKE meter he was holding. Winston gave her a half-grin and a shrug. Only Peter seemed to be pessimistic, raising both eyebrows and giving her an earnest look.
Winston asked the question she wanted to. "Hey, Pete, is there a reason you keep trying to talk her out of it? I mean, if you don't think it'll work, sure, it's a waste of time - but you keep acting like something worse is gonna happen than us all being half an hour late to dinner."
Venkman glanced back over his shoulder. "Any time you put someone under, you run a good chance of knocking stuff loose from their subconscious. People keep crap in there for a reason."
Egon managed to target both Peter and Winston with a warning glare. Dana was trying to figure out what he meant by that when Ray piped up, "Oh, you're afraid she'll remember what happened when she was poss-"
"Yes, Ray. Now shut up." Peter closed his eyes in a sort of slow-motion flinch.
"It's okay, Peter. I think - I think I remember a little more now than I did right afterwards, anyway." Dana glanced back and forth between Venkman and Spengler. "Ever since this thing with Janosz and Vigo started, I've been having these strange dreams. I think some of those memories are coming back, at least the parts I can understand."
Peter sighed. "Yeah, well, maybe I don't want to remember. There were a couple of moments there - Zuul said you were gone, like she'd driven you out of your own skull completely. It was not fun, let me tell you."
"It happened." Egon's voice was flat, daring anyone to disagree with the simple statement of fact. "We all survived. If we can keep anything like it from occurring again, it would be irresponsible of us to avoid that responsibility." His eyes flicked momentarily to Ray, then to a memory, before lighting briefly on Dana and finally settling on Peter.
There was a brief silence; then Ray and Winston said in unison, "If we're gonna do it, let's do it." Dana nodded again and tried to relax into the too-soft chair.
"Okay," sighed Peter. He closed his eyes for a moment, and rubbed one hand down his face. The other hand brought up the crystal on the chain. "Okay, Dana, I want you to focus on the nice shiny pendant here, and on the sound of my voice. I'm going to count backwards from twenty . . . "
Egon carefully averted his gaze, watching the monitor in front of him instead, and helpfully jabbed one of his bony elbows into Ray's ribs every few minutes. Winston would have accused him of doing it to torture the poor engineer if Ray hadn't visibly jerked back to something resembling wakeful consciousness every time he did so. At any rate, Stantz didn't complain.
Peter slipped the pendulum into his shirt pocket as Dana's eyelids fluttered shut. "Okay, Dana, I want you to think back, past college, past grade school, past your childhood . . . If you can, I want you to remember the time before you were Dana Barrett. Can you remember anything?" His voice was low and soothing, a tone the others didn't hear very often. In fact, the only times Winston could remember hearing it from him before involved Ray or Egon - usually Ray - getting injured on the job.
"I - yes, I remember," breathed Dana, her eyes still closed. Ray grinned and focused the camera again. Egon snuck a glance to see if the pendant was still out, noted that it wasn't, and turned so he could see both Dana and the monitor.
It turned out that Dana was quite an old soul, at least by Ray's standards (Egon seemed somewhat less impressed). She recited the brief details of a life as a farm woman who died in the '30s, a society lady in Boston in the 1840s, a minor French noblewoman spared the Revolution by illness, and a dozen more. Most of her incarnations before that seemed to have been nuns.
They all had one thing in common, though. Every single one of them had been haunted.
"That's probably why they entered the cloisters," Ray whispered to Winston, leaning back so he wouldn't be caught on the tape. "They figured if any institution could protect them from psychic turbulence, it'd be the church."
"Doesn't sound like it worked," Winston observed, as Dana described a poltergeist that rang the nunnery's chapel bells at all hours. Each attempt at exorcism merely gave the abbess a respite; the spirit kept returning until that incarnation's death from an infected tooth in her early 40s.
The past life three nuns away from that one responded to Peter's questions in Koine Greek, although she appeared to still understand him. Egon had to translate her responses for everyone else.
Two incarnations further back, and the language changed again. It took Spengler several tries to recognize it.
"Hittite," he mumbled. "We seem to gave skipped a few centuries."
"And what happened in this lifetime?" Peter asked, shaking his head slightly as if he really didn't want to know the answer.
Dana uttered two mournful syllables, which Egon translated as "I failed."
"Failed at what?" Peter asked, curious despite himself.
The next utterance was harsh-sounding, with too many consonants. Spengler's eyes went wide.
Peter gave Ray an I-told-you-so look, and leaned in towards Egon. "Spengs, what did she say?"
Egon swallowed, his adam's apple racing the length of his throat. "She said, 'I failed the Traveller, the Wandering One who approaches and goes silent.' "
"Do what?" muttered Winston. Ray raised a finger to his lips to shush him.
Dana was speaking again, in an agitated tone that belied her completely relaxed appearance. Egon waited until she finished, biting his lower lip slightly, and then translated, " 'The high priestess of Arinniti has come here to smash the altar of the Traveller; I cannot stand before her, for the sun shines about her shoulders like a shield.' " He paused, waiting for the next break. " 'I spoke to her, saying nothing is forbidden us, and she laughed at me; she says that neither do our people forbid her from protecting' . . . I'm sorry, I don't know what that word means . . . 'from the devastation of the Destructor and his minions.' "
The voice coming from Dana was lower and harsher than her normal one. "Guys, if this gets any weirder, I'm going to bring her out," Peter muttered. Egon held up one hand for silence.
" 'The high priest of Nergal stands behind her, and against them both I can do nothing; I am alone, the - captains? - of the Traveler have been turned to charcoal and dust, and I cannot fight both Heaven and Hell.' " Egon broke off, "That's probably not the best way to translate that idiom; I'll fix it on the transcript later." He returned to Dana's strange speech: " 'She strikes me down with the light of the sun, and pronounces upon me the sentence, that since I have allied myself with powers beyond the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth, that those powers shall follow me until I have made restitution to all three. Still I stand strong; I would rather die than bow to powers lesser than my Lord.' " Egon blinked; Dana had stopped speaking, and looked like she was asleep. "That's it."
Peter stirred slowly. "Okay, is there anything else you need to tell us?" Dana shook her head, very slowly. "I'm going to count up from one to twenty, and when I get to twenty, Dana, you're going to wake up, feeling like you've just had a refreshing nap. You won't remember anything that happened while you were under, unless I tell you to. One, two, three . . . " Ray and Egon exchanged a glance at the amnesia command; Ray shrugged at Winston, who looked uneasy.
" . . . Nineteen, twenty." Dana's eyelids fluttered open, and she blinked against the lights from the kitchen. "Hey, sweetie. You feeling okay?"
"I'm fine. Did . . . anything happen?" She looked at Ray, already knowing which of them would wear his reactions on his sleeve.
"Ah, um," Stantz started, before Egon broke in. "You started speaking Hittite. I need to check some translations; it's been a long time since I worked with it, and that was mostly written, not spoken."
"Oh." Dana blinked. "But I don't know Hittite at all."
"You probably don't know Greek, either, but we went through that, too," Ray added helpfully.
"And a little French. It looks like we may have something, but the two library bugs are gonna have to do some research. Could you go downstairs and wait for me while I figure out what I need them to look up for us? We'll go on to dinner in just a couple of minutes, okay?" Peter pecked her on the cheek and sent her down to the garage.
As soon as she was gone, he wheeled on Spengler. "You tell her any of that before we figure out what the hell it means, so help me, I'll - "
"Relax, Peter. I need to verify the accuracy of the translation before we do anything." Egon had a speculative look.
Winston turned to Ray. "What in the heck just happened?"
"It would appear that Dana is the reincarnation of a former priestess, or possibly priest, of Gozer, from one of the last times the cult was active before Shandor's revival," Egon clarified.
"And the priestess of some other goddess laid the whammy on her," Ray filled in. "It sounded like she's cursed to deal with things from Gozer's dimension until she apologizes correctly to the powers of this one."
"That's one possible interpretation," mused Egon. "We're going to need to do a great deal more research."
"Okay, just - find out, okay? I'm not telling her any of this until we know whether we can do anything about it, and if so, what." Peter ran one hand through his hair nervously.
"Maybe we should see if Louis has a similar link," suggested Ray; Egon nodded and began scribbling a list.
"You want me to regress him, too?" Venkman shook his head. "You're gonna have to schedule that one during office hours. Dana and I are going to go have a nice, quiet dinner, and nothing else weird is going to happen. 'Night, guys." Peter practically ran down the stairs.
"Let's start by looking up Arinniti and Nergal," Ray called, collecting books from one of the reference shelves. "And order something in. We can read and eat."
"Pizza, Chinese, or Mexican?" asked Winston, heading for the phone. This was going to be a long evening.