The Real Ghostbusters/Doctor Who crossover

A Rift in New York

By TimeLordParadox

(aka Ross Pickering)

Prologue,

June 1991

Noon, just another hour before lunch, Donald Hinton thought as he passed his flashlight over cold, grey cement walls. He was starving but he had to get this last job done first. This building was way overdue for some maintenance to its basement and that's what he and his work colleague, Russ, were here for. But first they had to fill out a safety inspection before any such work could move along.

There had been reports of water seeping through minor cracks in the walls, which is something they had to investigate for safety reasons. Unfortunately it also called for the electricity to be shut off, to prevent the possibility of electrocution. This plunged the entire basement into darkness. The residence of this multi-storey apartment building would no doubt complain that they can't watch TV or something like that, but this had to be done to maintain the building.

The two of them made their way slowly across the black corridor, the only light coming from their torches and the only noise they could here were their footsteps as their boots made contact with the floor and echoed all around the long empty corridor. It was odd but the deeper they went the more it felt like they were entering a labyrinth of some sort. Unlike Theseus, however, they did not need a ball of string to find their way through this place. They had blue prints for the building, but they had been walking for a long time following its directions trying to locate where these reported 'cracks' were.

"Are you sure we're going the right way, Russ?" he asked his colleague, a round man with a thin moustache.

"It's clearly marked out, Donald" he said tapping the blueprint and traced his finger around it. "We took a first left and second right." Donald lent over to get a better look at where Russ was pointing.

"These blueprints don't make sense." Donald said as he took one half of the paper from Russ so they could both see it. "Why is the basement shaped like this?"

"Don't know." said Russ, a slight ache escaped his stomach, he was obviously waiting for lunch time too. "I've never seen anything like it either, but that's what it says, and that's what we gotta follow" his words seem to echo around the corridor.

"Who the heck was the architect, Picasso?" It might as well have been, the higher floors including the ground floor were all shaped logically for an apartment building, but the basement looked like a winding twisting mass of confusion. The building was very old, and so were the original blueprints which they were currently using, a name on the bottom said who the architect was. It read, Ivo Shandor.

"Sounds like a painter to me." He said as they continued walking down the corridors which seemed to narrow as they moved through it.

Squelch, squelch, squelch! They both stopped and looked down. They had just stood in something squishy and by the sound of it moist. Their feet were standing in some sort of liquid. It was a pale shade of pink, though in places it had spots of a purplish blue, and he just registered that it stank like rotten eggs. He passed his flash light further up the corridor; it was all over the floor ahead of them as the corridor disappeared into darkness too far for their flash lights to penetrate.

"What on Earth is this stuff?" asked Russ as he knelt down but made sure not to stick his knee in the stuff. "Is the water contaminated?"

Something dripped away in the distance and Donald passed his light down the corridor again. A long stream of thick gunk was stretching down into the sludge below and began to pool on the floor creating a little clump of the stuff as the thick stuff slowly began to flatten out. Donald flashed his light upwards to see were the goop was coming from. His jaw dropped open. The entire ceiling was also covered in this stuff, so were the walls, all the way down this one corridor.

"Hey, is this that stuff that started coming out of the drains on New Years Eve a few years ago?" Russ asked, as he scooped up some of the liquid in his gloved hand and tried to lift some up to take a look at. It did actually look like that slime stuff from a few years back. The stuff had been all over the news because 'strange things' started happening as soon as it turned up. But that stuff was a bright shade of pink, this stuff looked pale as if it was dying.

He was starting to get an uneasy feeling. Donald knew whenever this stuff crept up somewhere bad things seem to happen. There was a story only a year ago about some of this stuff, which started bubbling up to the surface from the Hudson River. When it did a ship coming into dock passed over it, got some stuck to its hull and somehow caused the crew to lose control. The ship struck and sank several small boats before ploughed into Liberty Island. Again, a few months before that a subway train had some of this stuff caught on its wheels. Control was lost and it sped through the subway completely out of control, even when the power was cut. It still kept going until the very last minute when the emergency brake was switched. He remembered reading that despite the brakes being on the wheels were still desperately trying to rotate forwards as if they were possessed.

"Russ." he said trying not to let the rising panic within him escape through his voice, but unfortunately it did. "I think maybe we should get out of here and call in some 'specialists' to take a look at this stuff." He put emphasis on the word 'specialists' because he didn't want to use the word he wanted to use. He didn't believe in the supernatural but after seeing this very stuff mentioned in the papers again and again over the years since the incident at the New York Museum of Art he was starting to reconsider.

"You mean the Ghostbusters?" Russ asked.

"Exactly," Donald said as he turned to leave the way they had come, only to find themselves facing a solid wall, a wall which hadn't been there a moment before, and it was covered in this pink slime.

"What the frig?" Donald said as he shone his light to see if he had just tried to walk into the wall, but no.

"That wasn't here before," Russ said as he took a step back. The squelching noise his boot made in the gunk just served to remind Donald this slime was all around them.

"Okay, now I'm really going to say it." Donald allowed the panic in his voice to show this time. "Call the Ghostbusters" Russ quickly looked at the map, despite the coldness of their environment, sweat was starting to appear on his brow.

"Okay, if we go along here," he indicated with his torch deeper into the darkness "We should come to a communication point."

Great Donald thought, but there was still a sense of dread that they had to continue through this stuff which stuck to all the walls like… like, he didn't know what like but it coated every surface. As they proceeded down the corridor the stuff squelched under their feet, Donald got the uneasy feeling that this place looked organic, like it was alive, like they were walking into something's digestive system.

A white mist passed in front of his face and he nearly jumped when he saw it, but then he realised it was just condensation from his breath. It was cold and he could feel that it was getting steadily colder as they went on. He wrapped his jacket more tightly around him trying to trap some of the heat.

Finally they found a square box bolted to the wall, a telephone. Donald went up to it and making sure his gloves were securely on his hands he wiped away the slime from the receiver and pressed down on the handle to make sure it was working. He got the satisfying mono tone of a connection. He didn't know the number of the Ghostbusters, he'd never had to call them before so he decided to get in touch with the help desk at reception so they can call them in.

Someone picked up.

"Hello, reception?" He blurted out, he stopped to compose himself before he continued. "This is the safety manager Donald, we're in a bit of a situation down here. Can you send help? Also you might want to consider calling the Ghostbusters." He said calm and collectively but made sure he got the message across to 'actually' call them. But no one was answering. He pressed down on the handle to check the connection.

"Hello?" he said into the receiver.

"He is returning." came a voice, a soft spoken, spooky female voice.

"Who is this?" he asked "Whoever you are, call the Ghostbusters will you?"

"He is returning." the voice said again.

"Who is returning? What are you talking about?" he asked, an uneasy feeling creeping into his stomach. The voice didn't answer for a while and during that time Donald felt the temperature had dropped more and was still falling. When the voice did decide to speak again it said.

"Have a nice day" in a creepy cheery voice, then the phone hung up.

Donald pulled the phone away from his ear and look at it in confusion. He replaced it on the stand and waited a few seconds before picking it up again. But now there was no tone to the phone, there was nothing, it was completely dead.

Dead? Not the right sort of words he wanted to choose right now, he decided as he replaced the phone on the hanger.

"Is there a phone somewhere that actually works, Russ?" he asked. But Russ remained silent, "Russ?" Donald said. He turned around to face Russ, he was gone! "Russ?" he said spinning around to see if he was standing somewhere else, but there was no sign. He shouted his name but still got no answer, but the echo of his own voice, which rang back and forth along the pitch dark passage covered in pink slime.

He took a step forward and his feet squelched as his boots sank into the slime again. He suddenly stopped moving, he couldn't lift his other foot. He looked down to see if he had caught it on something, and what he saw sent a shiver up his spine, and his heart leapt icily into his throat.

It was a hand! A pink, fleshy, skinless hand that was coming up from that thin layer of slime like it was a deep ocean! He tried to pull himself free but the hand remained tightly gripped to him. It wasn't letting him go and it was tightening its grip as he continued to struggle. He gave one great heave to break free but he slipped and fell backwards. The flash light left his hand while he was in mid air and he slammed down on his back into the thin film of slime. He heard the flash light clatter to the ground somewhere and all light suddenly became extinguished, replaced by nothing but blackness and silence, and the cold.

Donald tried to get up and reach for his flash light, but that vial hand still had hold of his ankle and as he tried to get up he felt something grab his other leg, then his left wrist, then his right one. He screamed, god he screamed as he felt more hands reaching up out of the slime and clamp down all around him holding him down. The more hands held him the more difficultly he had actually moving. He screamed so loud he felt his mouth become horse, but his screams were silenced when a slimy, cold hand clamped down over his mouth.

To Be Continued...

Author's notes: Cue Ghostbusters or Doctor Who theme tune whichever you prefer ;)

This story is going to feature 'The Real Ghostbusters' from the cartoon and the Seventh Doctor.

More to come soon...