His eyes snapped open and he gasped, filling his lungs with the acidic oxygen that surrounded him. He sat up, rubbed his head and blinked, yawning.
Suddenly Beetlejuice stopped. Where-…where the hell was he?
The walls were covered with colors that could never appear in nature. The harsh tones hurt his eyes, and he looked away. Along the wall, below the gauze-draped windows, were all sorts of electrical beeping things that looked extremely expensive. A stainless steel pole stood next to him, holding a bag full of a clear liquid that continued to drip into a tube that led down and fed into a pale arm…
Suddenly he looked down. He was floating over Lydia! Her inert body lay, still deep in sleep, tucked under the thin waffle-patterned blanket of a hospital. She wore one of those paper gowns, off-white and loose and slipping down over her shoulder. Her black hair was strewn over the pillow, mussed and bringing out the dark circles under her eyes.
He was…out!
Now, usually he'd go rushing off in glee, wreaking havoc and other kinds of mayhem without properly thinking this through. And while he certainly didn't plan on staying here for hours to muse over the exact physics of how he escaped her mind, he did know this required some thought.
Obviously she was still asleep. Probably not dreaming, however. Her eyes weren't moving back and forth in REM patterns; instead her breathing was slow and steady and her face did not look pained.
That was another thing that surprised him: seeing her face without all the cuts and bruises that he'd inflicted in the dreams. Her smooth, unmarred skin was pale and sickly, yes, but not broken and bleeding. It kind of pissed him off on some deep level. To find out that all his work was gonna go unnoticed.
Sniffing at this, he stepped down to the floor and blinked. Was that the time? A digital lime-green clock read that it was 2:14 AM, and he glanced to the dark window for closure. Yep. It was pretty early in the morning.
Suddenly a grin blossomed across his face. It couldn't get any easier. Lydia was out cold, it would be hours before anyone noticed she was missing, and it just so happened that he recalled that the Maitlands happened to have a door to the Neitherworld drawn on their attic wall. They wouldn't be able to put up much of a fight, not against the Ghost with the Most.
Assuming the drip was the only thing keeping Lydia unconscious, he carefully unhooked the bag but kept it upside-down as he rested it on her body. Carefully, he wrapped her tight up in the blanket, more out of assuring she wouldn't slip out or be able to kick or fight if she happened to wake up rather than trying to keep her warm. Finally, getting a good grip on the corners and hooking it over his shoulder, he pushed the window open with his boot, kicked out a hole in the screen, and flew out into the empty night with Lydia in tow.
"I wish they'd come home and tell us something, Adam," Barbara worried, pacing the floor and chewing on her nails. "I mean, this is driving me crazy! Poor Lydia's locked up in that…nuthouse at the Deetzs don't even call us to tell us what's going on? They know we're worried!"
"Barb, I'm just as concerned as you. But we have to remember; everyone's under a lot of stress right now and I don't think they're concerned with keeping us in the loop. They're more involved with being there for Lydia, which is more than we can do. All we can do is wait and hope they'll give us a call or something."
"Even if they did, do you think we can use the phone?"
He cocked his head. "I…don't know."
"It's just our luck; even if we could, we probably couldn't talk over it. Or we might come out all creepy and scratchy, like in those horror movies. That's all we need is to frighten people even more." She wrung her hands and stopped her pacing. "I wish they'd call!"
All of a sudden, as if God had decided to cut the Maitlands a break, the phone rang. They stared at each other for a moment before scrambling downstairs to get it. Adam got to the receiver first, fumbled with it for a second and finally placed it to his ear.
"Hello? Charles? Delia? Can you understand me?" he said in a slow voice, as if speaking to a child. Barbara hung on his elbow, leaning in, trying to listen to the conversation.
Something crackled before a voice came over the line.
"Yeah, everything's fine. We're in the room and Delie just went for coffee."
Adam froze. Never, not once, did he ever hear Charles refer to his wife as "Delie." "Charles? Is that you?" he croaked.
Suddenly the line disconnected, and all that was left was that suspenseful beeping that resounded in the kitchen. Adam and Barbara stared at each other before dashing upstairs, knowing instinctively that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
They both arrived in the attic just in time to see the brick door in the wall slam back into place, the green light dying away with the last echoes of a manic, triumphant laugh.