Chapter four
Well, it was high time those jerks down at City Hall treated him with a little respect, but he was damned if it wasn't paying off now. (He was damned either way, technically, but he didn't care to get bogged down in details.)
Rural Connecticut! Sure, it wasn't the mean old city, which meant it was severely lacking in the mean old distractions BJ loved, but it was still a pretty sweet gig. Just went to show that one of those pencil-pushers had some sense; that someone in the paperwork dungeons had finally spotted his potential. This was major WASP territory, full of the semi-retired, the professionally pedantic, the mid-level Master of the Universe. Prime scaring estate. And there was money in it, too! This was the break he'd been waiting for.
He had the whole of Peaceful Pines to play in, but his main base was the old Maitland place on the edge of town. He'd seen the Maitlands before, shuffling through the waiting room with their heads down, and a little bird (it had once been a mineshift canary) had told him they'd been sent to an abandoned hospital in the Midwest. Tough break. You'd only get kids in there nowadays, kicking about during the school holidays, and kids as a rule were much tougher to scare these days. BJ was happy to have avoided that assignment: he hated kids. Couldn't stand them. No respect.
The house was a doozy. Plenty of floor space, great location, and a general gothic vibe that was very amenable to BJ's plans. He received a dossier on its new living occupants: two yuppies and a daughter. Classy. A less confident ghoul would have changed into a new suit for this, but not BJ. He was the Ghost with the Most to begin with, and, well, chicks always dug confidence.
He couldn't make direct contact, though. There wasn't much he could do. Sconehead had clipped a novella of instructions to the Deetz file, along with a note cheerily informing BJ that sandworms found ghosts who couldn't follow simple rules to be especially succulent. It was a given, a rule as old as time, that ghosts could only reveal themselves on the rarest of occasions - that made sense even to BJ. The spirit world's greatest asset was its very implausibility in the living world - most living folk didn't believe in ghosts, despite several millenia of folk tales. You did get a few odd-jobs who made a living from the paranormal, like those dubious mediums (though BJ had made a deal with one or two of them in the past; shake a table or two, shout a few things through a paper cone, and if it's just shambolic enough it keeps the punters rolling in), or those jerks in New York who ran about wearing boiler suits and power packs, trashing hotels and pouring slime over each other. Most people, however, had no time for ghosts, and the Neitherworld had a strict policy of keeping things that way: if the truth became accepted the power of scaring would be lost, and those boiler suit guys would clean up, both financially and spiritually. So you couldn't reveal yourself to your victims unless they specifically summoned you and invited you in. That meant you mostly haunted by proxy, when the lights were out or in a room that nobody was in. You could manifest in the living world, but only for a short time - BJ likened this to lining up a shot in basketball. You got a few seconds to take your shot, and if you lingered too long you got penalised.
Beetlejuice had never been a fan of subtlety. Not for him the slow accumulation of dread, the sinister midnight whisper, the easily-missed movement in the shadows. That had always been his downfall when it came to haunting: no sooner had he found a decent place then he was in the form of a giant snake, or whatever else came to his mind, sending the poor marks running for their lives. It was just too damn funny. But he was aware of what a special opportunity he had in Peaceful Pines - but if he chased out the Deetzes, he could forget being summoned into the Outerworld. And then what? Then it was back to long winter nights in the Roadhouse, playing What's That Invertebrate? with Ginger. So, for possibly the first time in his death, BJ was playing it cool.
He'd soon worked out how to press the husband's buttons. Man, what a sap! The guy was scared of his own shadow - even before BJ had taken over his shadow and made it approach the poor sucker holding a knife. Even something as simple as juicing into the form of a whoopee cushion, and crying out whenever Deetz senior sat down in his lay-z-boy, worked every time. This was all fairly simple, low-grade haunting, but boy was it effective. Knock a shelf down; wait for Deetz to put it back up; knock it down again. Yeah, it was juvenile, but the guy fell for it every time. The only worry was giving the poor sucker a heart attack and having him cramp your style.
The wife had artistic pretensions. This was always good for a laugh: a few years back BJ had done a summer haunting internship at a gallery in Chicago (the Neitherworld board had pretensions of their own, don't you know). His Mona Beetsa was always a grin; his Scream was always a scream. And if somebody's camera went missing, they never suspected the statues. He was still experimenting with Wifey Deetz, but she seemed trickier than her husband - she was, well, kinda oblivious to everything. One time she was watering her plants and having a good old conversation, when an odd little weed with striking black-and-white petals - Beetlescum Nastivae - had called her a mad old windbag. She'd looked a little annoyed, sure, but like a dinner party guest who's just smelled a fart, her firm grasp of social etiquette kicked in as a self-preservation instinct, and she'd just laughed and continued the (one-sided) conversation. Her art was a more obvious point of attack, but man! BJ knew he was good, but even he couldn't make those funny little sculptures and psychotic painting much more horrific than they already were.
That just left the girl. He pictured her as some prim little missy, yucking it up half the year at lectures in some stiff liberal college somewhere, but one afternoon he'd poked his head around her room, and there were some promising signs. She was evidently some kind of morbid chick: her room was freak-chic, Munsters-meets-Madison-Avenue. A strange (and kinda annoying) sense of decorum stopped him from exploring too much, but he did find an interesting book beneath her bed, between a single abandoned plimsoll and a kooky spiderweb poncho. Praktical Magick? This yuppyette was into that kinda action? Well, wasn't that useful? All BJ had to do was find a way to make her say his name, and the show could really begin . . .
