SECRET OF THE MANDALA

CHAPTER I: You're Hired!

Monday, November 25, 1991

7:00 PM EDT

New York City, New York

Marty McFly stared up at the old firehouse, taking note of the giant plastic sign and the banner that hung over the huge double doors, originally designed to let a fully loaded fire engine out. But there were no firefighters here anymore. The sign featured the stylized image of a ghost, the classic bed sheet variety, trapped behind a NO logo, like no cigarettes, but no ghosts instead. The banner read, in block letters, GHOSTBUSTERS.

Marty reflected ruefully on the chain of events that had lead him here. A couple of weeks ago he'd begun to have nightmares after he had moved into his new apartment. It was always the same nightmare every time. He'd find himself alone in some place, such as a nightclub in the last dream. A beautiful, exotic woman would appear before him and shortly they would begin making out only to then be discovered by Marty's fiancée, Jennifer Parker. Jennifer would then turn into some kind of monstrous creature and that would usually be when Marty would wake up screaming his head off. The nature of the nightmares had derailed an otherwise perfect engagement. Marty and Jennifer had been set to have a big Thanksgiving wedding with their families and friends in Los Angeles but the anxiety of the dreams and the pressures of work and preparation for the wedding drove Marty almost to the breaking point. He had become halfway convinced that the dreams meant that he and Jennifer were going to break up or that he really would end up cheating on her. Things had gotten to the point that Jennifer had then called on Marty's old friend and mentor, Dr. Emmet L. Brown. Doc Brown had assured them both that they were together and happy, the last time he'd checked on them in the future. That hadn't been quite enough for the stressed out musician so Jennifer and Doc's wife Clara finally convinced Doc to take the couple into the future for a very quick check on the state of their marriage. Marty, Doc, Clara and Jennifer had hopped into Doc's steam locomotive time machine and headed off to the future. But something had gone horribly wrong. Instead of arriving in Hill Valley California, 2015, they ended up several months ahead in 1991 and three thousand miles away in New York! Whatever had happened to disrupt their transition had shorted out and destroyed several of the train's vital systems. Only quick action on Doc's part and the Emergency Landing System saved them from becoming a smear on the Manhattan cityscape. Thus trapped, they were presented with two problems. The damaged time machine required massive repairs and equipment they didn't have money for and Doc was very worried about what he called a space/time anomaly that was supposedly responsible for their crash-landing.

In order to try and solve both problems, Doc and Clara were watching over the train and trying to effect what repairs they could while Doc tried to figure out the cause and source of the anomaly while Marty and Jennifer were sent out to try and earn some money to pay for equipment necessary to repair the machine.

And now here he was, about to become a Ghostbuster. Nobody had been more surprised than him, after answering the ad in the paper and then actually being called up by THE Ghostbusters. Marty remembered when the Ghostbusters had first showed up, a little over a year before that long weekend he and Doc had spent time travelling in1985. The stories had been a fantastic and Marty had of course gone to his mentor to ask about them. Doc had been fairly amused.

Speaking of the Ghostbusters, they were probably waiting for him. He took a deep breath and grasped the handle of the man-sized door that had been built into the bigger doors, opened it and stepped inside.

"Well, here goes nothing," he muttered to himself as he stepped into the fire hall. The first thing that caught his eye was the Ghostbusters' famous car, the Ecto-1. It was once a 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor combination ambulance and hearse, but the Ghostbusters had gotten a hold of it back in '84 and transformed it into their personal ghostbusting vehicle. Now it sat there in front of the doors, silent, the pulsing emergency lights still.