Chapter Two: The Hunchback of New York

 

Chapter Two: The Hunchback of New York

Present Day

            The Ghostbusters were more exhausted than usual.

            With only three of them running the business at the moment, they had to put in more overtime. Such was the case of their latest busting job in Fort Lee, which lasted the whole night. Between the overnight hours and half-hour ride from Manhattan to Fort Lee, Drs. Natalie Venkman and J.G. Stantz, along with Jacqueline Zeddemore, were ready to sleep the entire day away.

            As the morning sun peeked through the distant skyscrapers, Jacqueline drove the Ecto-1 across the George Washington Bridge. J.G. sat up front with her and read his personal copy of Tobin’s Spirit Guide, while Natalie snored in the back. Albeit exhausted, Jacqueline was still a bit charged enough from the Fort Lee bust to spark a conversation with Stantz.

            “Hey, Jay,” she began, “do you believe in God?”

            “Still waiting to meet Him,” Stantz replied.

            “Well, I certainly do.” Jacqueline rubbed the fingers from her free left hand on the gold-plated cross she wore around her neck. “And I love Jesus’ style.”

            “That’s nice.”

            She noticed how deep his interest was in that chapter of Tobin’s. “What’ve you been diving into there?”

            “Oh, the usual – ancient history,” J.G. said. “Did you know the grisly murders of Fa Mulan and Taran of Prydain, while relatively unconnected, were committed by two unidentified specters from eras opposite of where they’re from?”

            Jacqueline snickered. “Even in the old days, people were susceptible to weird stuff. I’m tellin’ ya, man – it’s all part of the prophecy.”

            “What prophecy is that?” J.G. inquired, looking away from his Tobin’s copy for the first time during the entire car ride.

            “Wow, you really aren’t that religious, are you? I’m talkin’ about the last days when the dead would rise from the grave. I’m talkin’ about Revelation 6:12. ‘I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red’.”

            “Yeah, I remember now. Wasn’t there something about seas boiling and skies falling?”

            “Yep. And you know what they called it?”

            “Judgment Day.”

            “That’s right – Judgment Day.”

            J.G. shrugged, closing his copy of Tobin’s and tossing it onto the dash. “I mean, it really comes as no surprise at all, Jaq. Every ancient religion has its own myth about the end of the world.”

            “Myth?! Dude, it’s all happenin’ as we speak.”

            “I still don’t catch your drift.”

            “Jay, has it ever occurred to you that maybe the reason we’ve been so busy over the last six years is because the dead have been rising from the grave?”

            J.G. hadn’t thought of it that way before, and the very thought chilled him down to his core. So deep into Jacqueline’s words, he jolted when he heard the crackling of the Ecto-1’s dispatch radio right before the voice of Christina Melnitz spoke over it. “You guys there?”

            Unlatching the microphone from the dispatch, J.G. responded, “We’re here, Chris. Whatcha got for us?”

            “Oh, no,” Jacqueline muttered drearily. “Please don’t say ‘another call’.”

            “Ya’ll got another call – a complaint from the St. Patrick’s Cathedral about bells ringing on their own,” Christina alerted. From the corner of his eye, J.G. swore he detected Jacqueline slamming her head against the steering wheel. “I swear I considered not callin’ ya’ll about it, but the dude on the other line sounded really persistent.”

            “It’s O.K., Chris, you did the right thing,” J.G. huffed. “Let ‘im know we’re just a few minutes away.”

            “Ten-four,” Christina affirmed prior to hanging up.

            Jacqueline glimpsed out the driver’s side window. The sun was over the buildings now, bringing the morning along with it. So much for sleeping in, she thought to herself. She then glimpsed back at the snoring Venkman and consulted with J.G., “Should we wake Natalie?”

            “And risk ticking her off?” J.G. chuckled. “No, I think we can handle this one ourselves.”

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            Arriving at Saint Patrick’s, Jacqueline braked the Ectomobile a block away from the cathedral entrance, due to the massive gathering of a protesting mob on Fifth Avenue. The protestors were all of Romani heritage, branding signs that read “Get Claude Frollo Out Now!” and “Frollo Judges By Hate, Not Love!”

            “Who is Claude Frollo?” J.G. queried.

            “The justice minister who works at the cathedral…and a straight-up racist from what I’ve heard,” Jacqueline said.

            “Well, did he expect us to mow over this mob to get in?”

            They spotted Frollo himself standing at the cathedral steps, looking over the mob in disgust. Once his cold blue eyes noticed the Ghostbusters’ Ectomobile trapped behind the crowd, he ordered the police officers at the scene to permit the vehicle through. The police forced the Romani protestors to part like the Red Sea, allowing Jacqueline to slowly and carefully drive up to the steps.

            Some of the protestors believed the Ghostbusters were there to deal with Frollo, hence why J.G. and Jacqueline were cheered on as they exited their vehicle. It was quite the bizarre situation, which was an understatement in their line of work.

            “I must apologize this matter couldn’t be handled under better circumstances,” Frollo addressed Stantz and Zeddemore as they strapped on their equipment.

            “It’s no sweat, sir,” J.G. said. “We’re used to the adoring public.”

            Frollo didn’t necessarily appreciate Stantz’s sense of humor. “Yes, well…as I explained to your loutish assistant over the phone, I have a pest up in the bell tower that I need you to deal with.”

            “How big of a ‘pest’ we talkin’ about, Mr. Frollo?” Jacqueline asked.

            Shortly after posing this question, the bells of St. Patrick’s Cathedral unpredictably rang thirteen times. It prompted J.G. to check his watch. “There’s no thirteenth hour in the day or the night,” he noted.

            “Now you understand my dilemma,” Frollo uttered irritably. “I promise you will be handsomely rewarded for your services.”

            “That’s the only kind of way I like to be rewarded – handsomely.”

            J.G. and Jacqueline turned as soon as they heard Natalie’s voice speak out from behind them. She was already strapped with a Proton Pack with her hands resting on her hips, ready to go to work. She noticed the surprised stares from Stantz and Zeddemore and told them, “We’ll talk later about how you two nearly kept me out of the fun.”

            “We figured you’d be too pooped out from Fort Lee to handle this,” Jacqueline told her.

            “Me? Nah!” Venkman denied. “That nap did me a lot of good.”

            “Sure it wasn’t the Folgers you brewed before we left the firehouse?” J.G. teased.

            Venkman winked at him. “Well, it is the best part of waking up.”

            As the three Ghostbusters proceeded onward into the cathedral, Frollo gazed on Natalie in particular. There was a burning in his chest, stirred by feelings that he hadn’t felt in a long time. Was it revulsion? Was it seduction? He was drawn by her sweet scent as she brushed past him. Her smooth, toned skin was mocha, the same color as most of the Romanians protesting in front of the cathedral. Was she Romanian? She definitely reminded him of someone he once knew.

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            “Man, do I miss Spengs,” Jacqueline lamented, her voice echoing all over the cathedral’s massive interior. “It’s been over a week since he’s been gone.”

            “Oh! That reminds me…” J.G. reached into one of the pockets of his flight suit uniform, producing two sets of plugs that he handed to his two teammates. “You’ll need these if we’re going up in that bell tower. I’ve been carrying them around with me on every bust since the Howling Banshee we dealt with at the public library.”

            “Smart thinkin’, Jay,” Natalie complimented. “Anyways, you were saying about Spengs, Z?”

            “What?!” Stantz bellowed.

            Natalie jumped at his loud tone. “Jacqueline was just talking about…”

            “WHAT?!” Stantz yelled even louder.

            It was only after that second outburst that Venkman realized he had already put in his own pair of earplugs before they stepped foot in the cathedral. Of course, neither Natalie nor Jacqueline even noticed because he had grown his hair out to shoulder length, so his ears were basically unnoticeable.

            On that note, Natalie merely patted him on the shoulder and enunciated, “We’ll tell you later.”

            “O.K., but I don’t think now’s the time!” J.G. noisily remarked.

            Not bothering to figure what else he thought she said, Venkman walked ahead of him and moved in step with Jacqueline. “Jeez Louise,” she muttered and then said to Zeddemore, “Now, who were we talkin’ about?”

            “Spengs,” Jacqueline said.

            “Oh, right,” Venkman said. “He’s been down south in Nowhere, Alabama for the last month seeing relatives…relatives I didn’t even know he had.”

            “It was just last year I found out about Egica – the half-sister from out of thin air,” Jacqueline reminisced. “Seriously, you went to college with the man and never knew about sisters or cousins?”

            “I mean, he did talk about Egica and Callie a few times, but I always figured they were…”

            “Black?”

            Venkman paused, gazing on Zeddemore strangely. “I was gonna say ‘void of personality,’ but since you wanna get technical…yes, I thought they’d be black.”

            “Well, Egica seems to share his intelligence but thinks more with her heart than her brain,” Jacqueline analyzed. “What’s Callie like?”

            Natalie shrugged. “Never met her in person, but Spengs described her as the more straight-laced one and the oldest.”

            “So she’s not brainy or quirky? That just makes me want to meet her even more.”

            “Then there’s the nephew and niece – Trevor and Phoebe.”

            “Yeah, Callie mentioned them in her letter. Anything on them?”

            “Nope. In fact, if it’s my best guess, Spengs is meeting them for the first time himself down there in…whatever that town’s called.”

            “I think the letter said its name was Summerville.”

            “Summerville? Really? I would’ve gone with ‘Nowhere’.”

            The casual conversation between the two women went on for as long as it took them to reach the bell tower. When the bells began to toll thirteen again, they sounded much more painfully deafening up close. Natalie and Jacqueline took it as their cue to put in their earplugs.

            Their proton guns primed, the three Ghostbusters took aim for their intended target: the mysterious bell ringer. He was a slender, muscular man with a deformed physique that included a large, curved hump on his back with his spine bones. They found him in the tower, ringing thirteen of the nineteen bells located in the tower, swinging effortlessly from one to another, until he landed with a heavy thud in front of Natalie, J.G., and Jacqueline.

            The three collectively gasped when they saw his face, not because of its deformity but for how recognizable it was.

            For St. Patrick’s mysterious bell ringer was none other than Quasimodo.

            “You’re Quasimodo!” J.G. said. “The Hunchback of Notre Dame!”

            Quasimodo cowered slightly from the three exterminators, who each removed their earplugs after the bells finished tolling. “H…H-How do you know w-who I am…o-or where I’m from?”

            “Dude, you’re famous,” Jacqueline told him. “They’ve made like a gazillion movies about you!”

            “This whole time, the legends have been true,” J.G. reveled.

            “So…is he a ghost or not?” Natalie pondered.

            “Oh, I-I’m very much a ghost,” Quasimodo confirmed. “A-And I’m one of the nice ghosts. I-In fact, t-that’s why I rang the bells. My friends told me to do it.”

            “Your…friends?” Jacqueline’s eyes searched about the bell tower, only seeing the bells and three stone gargoyles.”

            Those same three stone gargoyles Quasimodo went to and said, “Yes, these are my friends – Victor, Hugo, and Laverne.”

            Jacqueline, J.G., and Natalie stared on awkwardly.

            “Oh, right…those friends,” Venkman uttered stiffly. “I…hardly noticed them on the way in.” She then whispered to her teammates, “Poor thing’s been cooped up here way too long.”

            “I-I know it seems crazy, but they usually are more alive than this,” Quasimodo explained. “B-But they did tell me to ring the bells because they are coming and the city of New York must be warned.”

            “They who?” J.G. inquired.

            The hunchback hesitated to reply. “I…I-I cannot say. Master Frollo’s ears are everywhere in the cathedral.” He immediately got down on his knees and groveled at the feet of the three Ghostbusters, “Please! Help me and my friends out of this cathedral. It’s no longer the sanctuary it once was…and I’m afraid it won’t be for very long.”

            Venkman, Stantz, and Zeddemore pitied the ghostly bell ringer, who was more of a prisoner in the bell tower than the nuisance Frollo claimed he was. And if there was more that Quasimodo had to tell that he couldn’t with Frollo’s presence near, then it was imperative for the Ghostbusters to liberate him…and his three stone gargoyle “friends.”

            “Now I really wish Spengs was here,” Jacqueline huffed.

            “Yeah, so he can carry Moe, Larry, and Curly,” Natalie gestured to the gargoyles.

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            Using the Romani protestors as a cover, J.G., Natalie, and Jacqueline pulled off the cleverest ruse ever. First, J.G. placed some dry ice into a Ghost Trap to create the illusion that they trapped Quasimodo, as the vapor from the dry ice seeped through the crevices of the Ghost Trap. Second, they loaded Quasimodo and the gargoyle statues onto a long tray big enough to suit them and their equipment, the latter of which would be their excuse for using cathedral property, and hide them all with a black tablecloth.

            Finally, Jacqueline and Natalie would leave through the front of the cathedral with the decoy Ghost Trap and a bill for $50,000 for their services. Counting on Frollo being outraged by the outrageous total, they used it to distract him long enough for J.G. to roll the tray out and load Quasimodo, the gargoyles, and the equipment through the back of the Ectomobile.

            As soon as J.G. waved the O.K. to Jacqueline and Natalie, Venkman wrote out a real bill for Frollo, which included a $40,000 deduction. “Consider it a charitable donation from your friendly neighborhood Ghostbusters,” she told Frollo. “Pleasure doing business with you, sir.” She handed him the bill and rushed into the Ectomobile with Jacqueline.

            Frollo watched them depart, feeling a good deal of suspicion.

            Something about the whole scene didn’t sit well with him – and it wasn’t the $10,000 bill he held in his bony hands.