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Tales of the Dark Children: Beetlejuice	By : Dthomin Category: 1 through F > Beetlejuice Views: 6434 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own the movie Beetlejuice, or the characters therein. This is a pure work of fan-fiction and I am not gaining any profit from this story.

Chapter List
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II: A Host, Wickedly

Lydia's insistence to keep the house as it was prompted her stepmother to humor her by hiring a paranormal investigator. Though offended, as she was all they needed if a mere investigation was what they wanted, she let it go, hoping her parents would take the matter more seriously if they heard the truth from someone else. Let that person tell them she wasn't crazy.
Waiting for the investigator, things moved as normally as they could in the Deetzes home.
Lydia wasn't quite sure how long it had been since the house was last occupied by the living, but one thing she took immediate notice of was the severe lack of bugs amiss all the many offending layers of dust. She was looking rather forward to seeing at least a few spiders, but there wasn't even a hint that spider web had the chance to be spun. Dust caked every inch of the house, yet there was no sign of a bug once crawling its way inside, not even so much as a dead carcass. It wasn't natural. And if even the bugs knew better...
These thoughts and more plagued her even weeks after moving, and she sat in her half-completed room surrounded by a few boxes still full of her belongings. The rest of the room, however, was complete. Amiss her stepmother's persistence, the ten year old fashioned her room to suit her dark tastes: every inch of the room was colored black with accents of dark plum-violet and sanguine here and there. Her curtains were plum with thin layers of curtain resembling black spider webs over them. Decorating was in her favor, as she made a great deal of the linens herself.
…The mirror the geist used remained on her wall, unmoved from its place. If she needed to contact it again, perhaps that was the best way…
As for the mechanics of the house, all was not so well. Aside from the fact that the stairway to the attic was freezing cold and she didn't feel prepared enough to confront whatever occupied that space, there were also the strange occurrences of things misplaced or tampered with within the house. To her greatest chagrin, her parents passed it off as simply "the house"…or her.
Her father, Charles, was a man easily startled. He was jumpy, nervous, and oftentimes forgetful of small things. Whenever something that belonged to him would go missing and reappear, if it reappeared at all, in a completely random location, he blamed his absentmindedness…or Lydia herself. Lydia worried about him most, though some certain geist didn't seem interested in him.
Her stepmother, Delia, however, was most definitely the least affected of all. Once, during the earlier days of their unpacking, she placed something on a shelf, only for it to fall each time she picked it up and replaced it. Her supreme persistence caused her to keep it up for nearly an hour until, frustrated and slightly dejected, she replaced the item with a different one instead. This time, it stayed. Delia was happy again. Perhaps the geist thought her as boring?
Lydia, of course, had it worst of all. It seemed as if the eternal resident, when acting as a poltergeist, adored playing tricks and picking on her. It had changed since she last spoke to it, now more playful in its twisted way and aiming to startle her. And it was working. Sometimes she would look in a mirror to find her reflection missing. She once finished stacking some of the freshly emptied and flattened boxes, and turned around to retrieve the last one, only see all of the other boxes unfolded, box-shaped once again, and painted black. Somehow, she managed to convince her father to take those out, too wary to touch them herself.
Surprisingly, being able to sense it alone was worse than most of anything else, something she considered everything short of a trick. It was such a frightening presence at times, overwhelming her with a horrible feeling of dread it was a fight to fall asleep at night. Sometimes she could feel it within her room, its presence flooding her small sanctuary, and would just…be, as if it was only watching her or testing her. It wasn't at all a comfortable feeling.
It was definitely on to her.
Thus it was great but strange relief when the paranormal investigator finally arrived.
The procedure was simple: the Deetzes would go visit family while the investigators surveyed the house for a whole night. This went well with the parents, as the house was a bit disorganized with the construction. They planned to be back by afternoon, allowing not only the investigators to conclude their investigation, but them to get some sleep and the carpenters to make the house a bit more presentable before the family came back.
Lydia just hoped the investigators would survive the ordeal.

A day and a half later, around one o'clock in the afternoon, the Deetzes returned.
And not a thing was amiss.
Lydia stared at the two men with a wide-eyed, furious expression after they told the family the results of their surveillance. Apparently, all was well. Granted, there were a few explainable reasons the house had some abnormal phenomena about, high electromagnetic fields and such, and the house was just old, which "clearly" explained the sounds, but all and all, no. The house was not haunted, they admitted confidently.
But the girl could hold it in no longer, slamming her hands on the kitchen counter out of sheer disbelief. "You can't be serious!" she exclaimed.
"Lydia," her stepmother chided calmly, "these men are certified paranormal investigators. A dear friend of mine himself gave me their contact information and they took the time to come all the way out here. There is no way these men would lie to us. What they say is what it is."
Shaking her head, feeling betrayed, the turned around and stormed away. "Maybe you can live in a haunted house, but I can't!" she shouted as she ran upstairs and into her room.
She slammed the door behind her as she entered her room, stalking towards the mirror that rested on the wall. "You," she began bitterly, pointing at the offending wall piece as a low, gravelly chuckle echoed in her room. "You did that on purpose! Why?"
The voice was still laughing as the mirror misted over. 'I was feelin' lazy. Those guys weren't worth my time,' the geist responded in what indeed felt like lackluster energy.
With a cry of frustration, she flopped on her bed, but kept the mirror within her view. Pulling at her black locks, she lamented, "Now my parents probably do think there's something wrong with me…" With a glare at the mirror, her body tensing with resolve, she said, "I know you killed Mrs. Butterfield…Why?"
All was silent and the room remained chilly. The mist was still on the mirror, but nothing was being written. For a moment, she feared she had angered it, until words finally appeared on the glass. 'She took what was mine. Knowingly. Repeatedly. She had it coming,' it said. 'You don't enter a predator's territory without knowing the risks.'
And then the familiar laughter, as it had become familiar to her, reverberated in her room before the mist cleared from the mirror and the presence of the geist disappeared.

The very next day, sitting on the stairs to the second floor, she overheard her parents talking over her mental health. They were in the living room and unaware of her eavesdropping, though they tried to keep their voices low. She couldn't hear everything, but heard enough:
"She's getting too old to keep this up, Charles. I'm worried for her, and rightfully so. She's been going on about this ghost business ever since that...that incident, now five years ago!"
"I know...I just don't know how to confront her about it. She's so adamant, so convinced...I don't know, dear, I think we should let her use this to flush it out of her system."
"The next school semester starts at the end of the year! Do you really want her to have this happen even while she's at school?"
"...No."
"Then I know just the person who can help..."
With a soft sigh, she stood and returned to her room, closing the door gently. She rested against the door as she stared at her dolls, organized on the floor at a small tea table and moving on their own. One beckoned to her, and with another soft sigh, she obliged, sitting at the only free space between her Raggedy Ann and Scarecrow dolls. She took up her teacup, full of actual tea, and took a sip.
"I guess I'm going to have to stop talking about you for a while," she said in idle conversation.
Her vampire doll turned to her before it shook with laughter, the Raggedy Ann doll covering its mouth as it giggled. Her Cthulhu doll, however, took one of the teacups in its tentacles and simply took another "sip" of tea, the blackish liquid disappearing within the doll.
With a low grumble of disappointment, the girl closed her eyes. "You're not gonna make this easy for me, are you...?
Each doll shook its head, giggling in an eerie sort of synchronization, causing her to sigh yet again, finishing her tea.
She figured such.

Not even a week had passed before the Deetzes home was "graced" with the presence of a man named Otho Fenlock, a good friend of Delia's. Apparently, he was her contact that was allowing their house to be completed in what would still be nearly three months. Lydia didn't like him from the first glance. He was a pompous, pale and overweight man with an air of self-importance floating around him like dust particles, and highly eccentric. Eccentricities aside, he wasn't right in Lydia's book as far as a living person went.
However, the entire day, starting from the moment he arrived in the afternoon, was a fight for her to save face. The ever vigilant eternal resident of the house was causing her to be fidgety and distracted, somehow tickling her sides and causing illusions of things on the walls…
Otho joined them for dinner, where Lydia spent most of her time ignoring their guest and focused intently on keeping a straight face. At first it was difficult even for the adults at the table to see it, but the girl was trying to refrain from bursting into a giggling fit.
When she couldn't take it anymore, she finally burst into a heap of giggles, apparently embarrassing her parents, and most especially Delia. Unable to know what their topic of discussion was possibly about, she could only apologize, and slipped out how it wasn't her fault.
Nevertheless, she was sent to her room, but not before overhearing her stepmother explain to their guest that she blamed her actions on her "imaginary friend", putting the girl into a sour mood once the urge to laugh had passed.
She marched straight to her room, aiming to give the geist a piece of her mind, to retrieve the skeleton key she kept in a keepsake box. Hiding it in the palm of her hand, she left her room and continued her intended march to the entrance hall of the attic, the only space no one had touched.
Approaching the hall, she wasn't surprised to find it abnormally cold, enough for her breath to show in the air. Gathering her courage from multiple past encounters with the unknown, she placed her foot on the first step and continued upwards. Once she reached door, she placed her hand on the knob, again, unsurprised to find that it was locked. Swallowing, she fit the key into the keyhole, and turned it, opening the door without a sound.
The wooden door creaked noisily, causing her to slightly cringe. With wide eyes, she noticed immediately the room was covered in more dust than what her family had cleaned out of the rest of the lower floors, as impossible as that seemed. With great care in her step, she walked over to where faint outside light was entering from an old cloth draped over a window and unhooked it from the rusted hooks, letting it fall slowly in hand instead of having it fall and bring up more dust. With some of the last of the outside light entering the room, she took a good look around.
The walls, an old, yellowing-white color, were cracked with age and peeling enough to pull the walls right down. They seemed to have suffered from all sorts of damage, including fire and water, and Lydia was surprised the entire floor hadn't caved in from the poor condition of the wooden floors. Though there was too much dust to see them, as she walked around, loud and not too assuring creaks emitted from below. Every upper corner of the room had a hole in it, showing the inside of the wall beyond. And still, not a remnant of spiderweb could be seen.
From the extreme differences, the entire floor seemed not to exist within the modern, pristine house below.
Amiss the condition of the walls, some old pictures were haphazardly placed, or still managing to remain up, on some of them. They were, however, timeworn and too weathered to see any detail, but if she had to guess, the pictures were over a hundred years old. Hesitantly, she approached them across the creaky floor and gently fingered their wooden frames, in awe to be touching something so ancient. Glancing down, she noticed, hidden within the dust, were some other framed pictures that looked to have fallen from their places on the wall.
She reached down and lifted one into her hands, brushing the dust off gently to uncover the grayscale picture of what seemed like a field and a dark, lifeless tree at the top of a small hill within. With a small smile, she placed it back on the floor, against the floorboard, and then turned to the only piece of furniture within the entire room.
In the center of the floor, the low rectangular table showcasing the dusty old model town seemed to beckon to her.
Perhaps it was in there, now, possessing it. Perhaps that was why she couldn't sense it? With a wayward thought, Lydia wondered if it couldn't be sensed if it possessed something…
She was so very tempted to approach it…
So she did.
Interestingly, the floor wasn't creaking or groaning as she neared it, leaning forward to get a better look at its every little detail. Immediately, she recognized the hill overlooking the rest of a rural town, the house placed upon it a near exact replica of the very house she was in. Eventually her curiosity got the best of her and she crossed over to it in quick, short steps. Up and close to it, now, she could indeed feel something strange about the model. Some sort of energy…
The details of the model were phenomenal. Every blade of faux grass seemed meticulously lifelike, the small trees' leaves as well, and Lydia couldn't help but feel as though she was a giant looking down on the small deserted remnants of an old town. Though it was obvious from the general layout of the town the model was of an earlier version of the town she now called home, but she couldn't help but feel as if not a thing around the hill, or on it, had changed. Comparing the model town to the town of today, each and every building, every house, even some of the greenery seemed to have changed over the years. But not the hill. Not the house.
…The graveyard, however…
Moving to the side of the model so she was looking directly over the space where, in present time, was the WinterRiver cemetery, she looked upon a single grave over a small hill and under a lifeless tree. Though she was looking at it from a completely different angle, she recognized it immediately as the same hill and tree within the picture she found on the floor.
Suddenly a greenish hue began to emit from the model, as if it were a mist. The presence of the poltergeist jumped at her, so close to her and overwhelming, and she stumbled back in shock. The familiar faint black and white swirl began to rise from within the model, from where Lydia was too surprised to recall, and suddenly felt as if it was looking down at her.
Blinking, remembering her reason for coming up in the first place, she crossed her arms. "You owe me an apology," she said calmly, tapping her foot. "I've only been trying to help you and you're just getting me in trouble."
The swirling mass suddenly disappeared from her view, causing her to sigh and look around. Abruptly, she was knocked off her feet as a low growl echoed off the walls. She hadn't even a chance to register what was happening as she felt herself dragged by her feet.
"Hey!" She pulled herself upright and twisted her body around so she was on her hands and knees. Somehow, she was let go, and sprung to her feet and turned around to glare at empty space.
A chuckle behind her made her turn back around, only to gasp as the room began to spin. Literally. Or rather, not the room, but the floor. How that could be was the last thing on her mind. After the initial shock subsided, she began to giggle, unable to help herself. It felt like an amusement ride: the wind whipping past her, flaring her black locks all about her face as she was pressed against the wall.
The chuckles grew into raucous laughter as her own giggles became thrilled shrieks. Though the room was spinning, the table the model house was standing on stayed unmoved, not even shifting in the slightest. It was so surreal…
All too soon, the room suddenly went still. The sudden slack in force was too abrupt for her, and she was thrown from the wall and fell to the dust-covered floor.
This time the guffaws were most definitely directed at her. Hoots and snorts were also heard, and she coughed as she raised herself off the floor, now covered from head to toe in decades-old dust. She glared at her appearance, wondering how she was going to explain it. Blinking, she suddenly realized the absurdity of the situation, and began to laugh, herself, along with the hoots and haws of the invisible geist.
A sneeze broke her out of her laughter, and she then calmed. It took a moment longer for the geist to calm, but it did, eventually. By that time, she was sitting on the floor and looking at the picture from before.
"…You're just having fun," she said softly, almost as if talking to herself. "Aren't you?"
There was no response, but she felt its presence nearby.
With a soft sigh, she traced the outline of the tree in the picture. "Guess there's nothing I can do to stop you from picking on me," she said, making a small frown as she received a soft laugh as an answer. "Thought so. But then again, I guess I don't have the right to be complaining…This is your house, after all…Probably your original home or something…"
She stood, placing the picture back on the floor. Brushing off her pants, now an ashy grey-lavender color instead of violet, she began to walk towards the alcove of the door. There was no response or so much as a peep of sound as she then opened the door, glancing back briefly. She said a soft goodbye before leaving the doorway and closing the door back behind her.
She managed to sneak downstairs, leaving a small trail of dust behind her, and quickly rushed into her room to collect a change of clothes. Cracking her door open, she peeked out and then ran to the bathroom.
The water was on and filing the tub in seconds. The dust was causing her to sneeze and itch profusely.
As she scrubbed herself clean, she realized with a small smile that…perhaps the geist wasn't all as bad as it seemed….
…even if it had killed someone.
"
That night, she lay in her bed, mulling over the eternal resident of her new home. It was strange to explain how she felt about it. Evidently, it was different from any specter, geist, or otherworldly creature she had ever encountered. Sometimes it felt malicious, and it had threatened to hurt her family. Yet she found herself finding comfort in its presence, able to talk freely with it amiss its rather aggressive tricks and antics, and though it could all be a ruse, it seemed to find her amusing and worth interacting with. Amiss everything, she remained aware this geist was not at all a very kind one.
If her deduction was correct, why wasn't it hurting them amiss its threats to keep the house in its original condition, something they obviously hadn't done?
She was just about to close her eyes and attempt to sleep when she sensed a familiar presence flood her room. She did a double-take, seeing words written through a fog on her vanity mirror instead of the mirror on the wall.
"Hiya," the words read.
She jumped from out of her bed and approached the mirror, her eyes wide. "…Hi," she said tentatively, not knowing what else to say.
The words disappeared, as if wiped away, before new ones fogged the mirror over again. "I like what ya did with the room, Lyds," they read.
It took her a moment to realize that the geist not only knew her name, but gave her a nickname as well. She blinked, making a small smile. "…Thank you," she said softly, sitting down at the stool of her vanity.
All was still and silent for a moment. She idly rearranged some of her jewelry on their torso stands as she struggled for something more to say, but the geist beat her to them.
'…You ain't half bad, for a human...'
The words stayed fogged on her mirror even after the geist's presence left, fading away. She slowly reached out to touch the glass, surprised at its cool feel. And though her fingers were over the words, they weren't wiped away, as if the glass was fogged from the opposite side. Removing her hand, she rested her elbows on the vanity and her head in her palms, watching the words disappear.
She couldn't stop the smile that spread on her face. "…Deadly-vu…"
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Tales of the Dark Children: Beetlejuice