Chapter 5

Inside the basement of the house he ended up in, Beetlejuice continued to sleep, or at least he seemed to be sleeping, without noticing the passage of time around him.

As the sun was about to set in the horizon, the basement door was slowly opening to reveal two figures. They appeared to be feminine and once they entered the room, they quickly exchanged glances, but they were indiscernible under their hoods. The robes they wore were of different color, one light blue and one white.

The two young women then went on to sit in opposite directions, as if waiting for the prefect moment to strike on their prey. This particular prey, however, happened to be something beyond what people could call human, though it used to be one.

Not wanting to let silence completely fill the room, the one with the blue robe turned to the other girl's direction and asked what was in her mind, trying not to wake the poltergeist that was seated a few meters next to her.

''Well, what do you think of him, sis? Shouldn't we just wake the creep up and get this over with? I'm not in the mood of seeing him being more powerless than this. It almost makes me feel sad that I have to break in the bad news to him. Maybe we could, I don't know...give him a break?'', the girl with the blue robe asked her sister, removing her hood to reveal a young lady that seemed to be in her '20s, with shoulder-length brown framing her head, eyeing her nervously with her blue eyes.

The other woman didn't answer for a while, as if she was carefully thinking what she should say to her, fearing that she won't go along the plan Clotho assigned to them. With a heavy sign, the girl with the white robe took off her hood to reveal the face of someone who couldn't be past her late teens, with long brown hair caressing her back and she was staring back at her with her brown orbs, a smile starting to form in her lips.

''No, Lachesis, we have to stay put in here and tell him what is about to unfold. You wouldn't want our older sister become aware of the many times you tried to play with the Thread of Life itself, don't you? But rest assured, because when the time comes, you should be able to make more mature decisions over how mortal lives may go on or reach their end in this universe. Why we have to go over this any time we are in a mission like this? Can't you even comprehend what is at stake?''

Lachesis didn't really like the way her sister tried to reason with her, now producing a needle out of her right pocket, mockingly moving it around in her direction, as if attempting to make a decent threat with it, though she horribly failed at that.

''The truth, Atropos, is that I wouldn't hesitate to stick this little needle in one of your eyeballs if that would make you shut up for good. You think I didn't know the risks before I took on this job? I even borrowed one of your white robes to get a close look at the girl and I felt like she was gonna squash me like a little bug. And it would have happened hadn't been for this pointy thing you use to spun the damn thing and pinned the little bitch right at where it hurts, though I could do a lot more damage. You know, the kind that wouldn't even let her mother to recognize her, but...''

''That's always been your problem, Lach, you never listened to me once, so why don't you take a minute to think where your recklessness could lead you to, hmm?'', Atropos interrupted her, with a hint of concern lacing those words.

Lachesis, feeling that she might have offended her, she stopped her childlike antic and walked to her direction to give the little object to its rightful owner, only worrying if her footsteps would arouse the dead man from his slumber. Nothing disturbed the sleeping poltergeist, which filled the young woman with relief in her heart, for not making a serious blunder over this new affair.

Getting the needle back from her, Atropos looked momentarily at the sleeping form of Beetlejuice, and she turned her head to Lachesis' direction and try to explain her what their role would be by first illustrating why she still needed to be the one in charge of the thread.

''You see, it isn't really as simple as I make it to sound like, but it is still my responsibility to take on the fates of these humans, regardless of their innocence or guilt brought upon them by the very actions they caused in any lifetime they lead. Even I don't agree on aiding this man, but someone has to take the weight of that awful necessary crime, because I can't help but tr...trust Clotho's judgement on this one, no matter how strange it would seem to the both of us.''

Lachesis didn't comment on what she just heard, not really in the mood of displaying what she honestly thought of the situation. Maybe it was best she complied with Clotho's wishes for the man in question, with not much of an option than watching how all this would play out in their advantage.

Perhaps she was being immature when she was at the model and that she almost got herself in trouble, which could severely jeopardize the whole plan and that wouldn't be lead to anywhere close to a pretty end for the two of them.

It was only by fortune that Clotho intervened at that moment, drawing the attention of that girl towards her instead of the mysterious living figure that strolled the model town streets for reasons she couldn't even start to comprehend.

The minutes were flying by and as the sun was setting off in the distance, giving its place to the cool darkness of the night and the first stars to appear in the sky, Atropos stood up from her spot and walked towards the sleeping ghost, leaving her sister slightly confused, and filled with an unease feeling that came from the pit of her stomach.

However, she knew she had to have faith in Atropos' approach to these things, and shouldn't mingle with any of her methods at all. She only hoped she would do the right thing.

Once she was a few meters away from Beetlejuice, Atropos reached her left hand to touch his forehead and closed her eyes, as if putting herself into some form of a trench. Under any circumstances, the poltergeist should have woken up by the footsteps of anything that was near him, but for some reason, the woman's movements were so delicate even for him to sense anything, despite some of the noise of some of the floorboards.

After she was over with what she was doing, she started to remove her hands away from his head, now chanting a rather odd charm in a language that seemed to have its origin in both Latin and some ancient Irish dialect that was forgotten by the passage of time itself.

Lachesis was still standing in her place, with a confused expression over her face and not really knowing what Atropos was trying to achieve by this random incantation of hers. But once the charm reached its end, Atropos opened her eyes and she momentarily lifted her hands up in the air.

She then screamed something in archaic English, and the man was still undisturbed in his sleep, almost miraculously some might say, the notion that there at last the persons who would have put the self-proclaimed '''Ghost with the Most'' right beneath it's nose, in an odd sort of way.

Atropos moved backwards and silently, more concerned about her spell being more successful than her little chat with her younger sibling. As a smile was slowly forming in her lips, she crossed both her arms and waited for the response she was eager to get out of all that strange ritual of hers.

Sure enough, the dead man slowly started to mumble something, and then, he woke up with a scream that was uncharacteristic of him to do. With a look of dread spreading throughout his facial features, Beetlejuice looked shocked from whatever he was dreaming about, or whatever imagery the young woman had projected into his consciousness in the form of a dream.

He turned his head around, seeing that night has fallen, and the room was now illuminated by the shafts of light the full moon was casting down upon the earth. He tried to calm himself, but he started feeling a bit panicked when he finally spotted the two women staring at him. If these two were behind the shit he had just seen in his sleep, he would try at the very least how scared he was when he laid his eyes on the rather horrible sights he witnessed.

The last thing he remembered from those visions was a distant scream that was echoed thought the old Maitland house, and he was outside the attic door when he heard it. Rushing down the stairs that lead to the living room, he was met with something that didn't make sense even to him.

The walls of the living room were filled a strange lettering written in red paint. Unfortunately, the longer he stared at the writing on the wall, the better he come to realize that the paint wasn't an actual paint, but something that looked close to...genuine human blood.

The worse was yet to come, when he saw that almost all of the writings would end up signed with his name. It was both in the name of the star he was named after and the mispronunciation that most people spelled his name out, which was the same thing that almost set him free the night he first encountered her.

Sure, he wanted to avenge her for never really keeping her side of the bargain, and sometimes he thought he knew in his gut that if the Deetz brat would go anywhere far from annoying, he could simply snuff her out for good. Maybe appearing in the waiting room and not having the chance to get laid or married and have kids with some unspectacular guy she would wind up meet during college, or after it, at the start of her professional career as a free-lance photographer, if that was what she wanted in her life.

He drew to that conclusion from that three month period the Maitlands weren't around, and he always noticed from his hideout in the model cemetery, or within one of the model buildings, how the young girl made a habit to visit the attic close to four, five times a week, and she would always carry that little Nikon camera with her, hanging from her neck. She was very rarely without the wide-brimmed hat, and when she did, raven-black hair were framing her head, making her look so different from the other girls he had heard about, with her paleness only accentuating an aura of mystery and beauty that he had yet to found in a living person. But he couldn't forget what he was there for,

Speaking of that, he recalled a few incidents during a particular evening when Lydia was laughing at something she found in the very Handbook the deadbeats forgot to bring with them when they left to get some help, only to get a taste at the merciless treatment the waiting room bureaucrats would give to anyone who dare ask for their assistance.

He was at one of the buildings, and it must have been either the replicant of the church, or a building that looked like a mondo mall and was three or four stories high. He was at the top level, dressed in his ''Guide'' attire, getting a good look at the teenage girl, who got tired from reading the manual and put it down beside her. Then she slowly stood on her feet and when he saw what appeared to be her waist covered in this huge black fabric, he thought it was his time to retire and get ready for the next day she would come up here once again, so he turned his back to leave this crappy excuse of cardboard construct, if not a decent model building.

However, by the time he turned his back on the window that allowed him that day's great view, as though he was at the movies and he was lucky to afford for a better seat at the far end of all these rows, the girl only walked around the model and then he saw her waist looming in front of him.

She took a few steps back and lowered her head to take a good look at the model creations, and he could tell that it was today that she started marvelling at the work that went on these little houses. She run her fingers on the streets that were near her, and suddenly she stopped to examine the very building he was in. The only fortunate thing about the top floor he was in was that it had only one window, and that was the one in front of him, even though he didn't know why it was built that way.

Her right hand reached in to touch this particular window, while her other hand was on the back of the building, but she had some difficulty to get closer as her camera wouldn't let her lean any further than this. In the meantime, while she was trying to lean further and take a peek inside, the diminutive Beetlejuice was mesmerized by the size of her fingers, each of them so elegant and almost looking like hungry dogfish who wanted to break the plate glass barrier that prevented them from devouring their prey. He was a bit scared of the way things got so messed that day, thinking that all his plans for getting out would fall to pieces if he were to show himself at that point.

The figures left their place in the glass so that she could take her hat off for a moment and get the camera off of her neck as well. Once she did all that, Lydia left the Nikon right next to the little table the Handbook stood by, running her hands though her hair and wiped some of the sweat from her forehead.

She put her black hat back to her head, and started leaning towards the window of that mall, hoping to see anything inside of it. To her displease, she couldn't see much in it. For his own part, Beetlejuice was able to look right back at her in her eye. In this case, he was staring in front of a gigantic brown orb, and he could have sworn that he could even see himself reflected in that brown poodle. Before he could come up with some logical explanation to himself, the glass was starting to fog up, and it was obviously a result of the girl's breathing.

The right eye he was looking at blinked several times, though he doubted if the kid really looked at him. Nevertheless, he enjoyed the sight of a pretty girl like her, and he wanted to take advantage of the overall situation to get a close look at her face from an angle like this.

Watching her from that perspective for those last few minutes, it somehow made him want to know her little better, not that she would like to go along with what he had in mind, but she would come to agree on his terms, one way or another.

Eventually, her head was lifted upwards and he could see the nose coming to his view, only to be followed by her lips, and her mouth was now covering the peripheral view of the window.

He could see the lips parting a bit, showing her front teeth, but the very next site was something that he would like to forget, though he can help it if he felt like something wanted him to stay in his place and enjoy this rather awkward show.

Because she was so tired and not much of the sleeping type, Lydia tended to yawn most of the times she spent her evenings studying the manual, or just killing time by lounging in a couch that wasn't that far from the model, and she could spend her time doing some of her homework over there.

It was different when he looked at her yawning from a distance, but this was way too much, even for him.

Lydia that day was more tired than usual, and when she opened her mouth to yawn, Beetlejuice then knew what it must have been like for the million insects he had consumed for more than an eternity. It almost made him feel sorry for all the ways he chose to torment and eat the little bugs he came across, especially since what he was looking at now, and had he been alive and at this size, his own blood would have frozen at the mere thought of it.

As Lydia was opening her mouth as wide as it could go, she tried not to open it in a way that could make any of her inner bones crack at the attempt and feel numb for an hour and a half. Little did she knew the impact it had on the dead man who was at the premises at that point in time.

And just as her lips were departing, they gave him an unobstructed view of a staggeringly vast mouth. Two rows of sharp, gleaming white teeth framed the entrance to this rather spacious cavern, with several thick strands of glistening saliva being stretched from floor to ceiling. Lydia's pink tongue undulated below in the dark, and in the distance, a rounded uvula was dangling above a gorge of blackness.

He had to admit, though, that under any other circumstance, that mouth of hers would have been a great slide ride, though he knew that as a tiny living person he wouldn't have made it out of it alive. His only destination would have been only one way, going the route through her esophagus and into the equally spacious stomach. There he would have been trapped within her belly, where he would be digested and dissolved by the stomach acids after a few minutes inside of it.

Even if he was accidentally swallowed in the dead form he had now, given that he could survive from the acidic onslaught, it would still be difficult for him to get halfway back into her throat, where he could irritate her to cough him up with such a force that she would have no choice than to spit him in almost no time.

All these prospects were something he wouldn't like to think at that moment, though it was somewhat impossible to do so when the sight of his gargantuan mouth was still in front of him.

The window was fogged up once more from the humidity of the girl's breathing, but it was cleared off by the moment she shut her mouth. It was left slightly open, showing her front upper teeth, getting a view of her jaw while half of her neck was visible.

The tip of Lydia's tongue darted out of the humid cavern and rolled around her lips, wetting them in the process. Before the tongue retreated back to where it came from, her mouth became wide opened. And all of a sudden, the first part of her tongue accidentally licked the glass surface of the window, prompting Beetlejuice to go back and cautiously waited for what was going to happen next.

The tip only licked that particular spot and it went back inside her cavernous mouth, living behind a slimy substance that could only be a speck of glob. It was falling upon the flat surface as if it was soap, and it seemed to stick for a while.

Perhaps the reason he was somewhat turned on by this, if he had a way to explain this to himself, then that would have been the element of danger and excitement it presented, the idea of trapped inside the jaws of this massive, though unbearably attractive for a girl this age, predator. It might have been a bit of a kink, but he would those chances if it came down to that.

Having noticed that the teenager was nowhere around this particular building, he approached the window and touched the one spot where the spittle was still clinging to.

''At least, I didn't have to be a ''Crocodile Dundee'' for little Lydia Deetz. Well, kiddo has one hell of a tongue, that's for sure. Lucky old man, you weren't on the other side of the glass. Damn my luck. Could have used a little excitement myself. But then again, why bother endangering my tiny ass to satisfy the bitch's appetite?'', Beetlejuice mumbled to himself, putting his hand back in one of the pockets of his coat, only to produce a little notepad.

The poltergeist flipped through the pages, wondering if he should make a note of that, just in case he had the urge to indulge into this fantasy and ruin the only chance he would have to make her say his name three times.

The tricky part in all this was how he would help her guessed it right, and maybe a game of charades will do the thing.

Meanwhile, unaware of the scare she had given to the ghost by yawning in front of him, Lydia walked towards the table to retrieve the Handbook. Since yesterday, she was studying a peculiar segment that was about, according to the chapter heading, ways to make ''the dead rise again among the living''.

It wasn't really helpful in that matter, as it only listed a small number of poem-like charms that even she couldn't understand, and it gave her the feeling that this was perhaps the dumbest part in the whole book, so it was probably not a good idea to try to decipher the meaning of all twelve charms.

Nevertheless, she took the book and quickly flipped though to find something else that would help her pass the last few minutes she would spend in the room, waiting for her either her father or step-mother to call her up for tonight's dinner.

Once she realized that she had covered half the book, Lydia became increasingly bored with the thing and put it back to the table, taking only her Nikon in her hands.

She was too tired from helping her father out with some of Delia's sculptures, and she could pick it up tomorrow morning, in an attempt to see whether there were still a few parts that she could read over and have a better understanding of what they were actually saying about the deceased and their habits in the afterlife.

While she was heading from the door, Lydia felt a tingeing sensation coming from her stomach. And that's when she felt like she could use some of the meal Delia cooked and just try not to upset her dad with one of the comments she gave whenever the redheaded woman opened her mouth about the plans she had for bringing the aesthetics of New York life and art in the heart of this small town.

The only thing that mattered now was filling her empty belly, which signaled to her that she still needed to feed herself anyway that she can, regardless of what Delia was cooking at the moment. Anything that could fill her stomach would be good enough.

And as she was descending the stairs after closing the attic door behind her, the poltergeist had barely made it out of the mall's entrance in time, feeling rather sorry for not being able to catch her fleeting form and take one final look at her face.

Reminding himself that this wasn't the time to let any inner fetishes to get over his head, Beetlejuice headed back to his hideout in the Winter River cemetery, trying to think of a way to get the deadbeats that were known as the Maitlands to unleash him unto the unsuspecting family that currently resided in their house, maybe catching more glimpses of the teenager's face.

With the trip down memory lane coming to an end and not much to recall from that strange dream he had, the point where he couldn't remember any further than trying to locate the source of screaming and sobbing sounds after he spotted the blood-stained writing, Beetlejuice focused his attention towards the two female figures that were staring at him all the time they were in that basement.

Without losing his temper, though careful enough to conceal his panicked state, he tried to open his mouth, but he couldn't think of anything to say. The older of the two girls, however, walked a few meters in his direction and spoke in his place, with a devious smile framing her face.

''You probably don't know who we are, really, or what I do. But I have a feeling you had a run in with my little sister here, isn't that right, Lachesis?''

The young girl that was Lachesis only nodded her head, letting her silence confirm the older woman's statement. For his part, Beetlejuice did his best to master up all his courage to ask them one simple thing he needed to know.

''Will this damned journey ever end? When we're gonna get to the good parts, bitch?'', the poltergeist exclaimed with angry eyes pointed at the brunette woman, who never allowed the dread he was trying to bring up to her discourage her from what had to be done.

Reflecting the stare back with her blue orbs, the woman who was named Atropos restricted her answers to a handful of words that the man himself only got to use in occasions such as this, but the tables were turned for good.

''We are already there, big stud. It's showtime.''

From the way the older brunette used the one line that meant a whole lot of trouble for whatever living thing stood in his way, Beetlejuice knew that his problems were about to become a bit more complicated than before.

''Hope you give your best shot at this, babes, cos you ain't gonna a second chance, or even a third one. Just give it your best you can, that's all I got to say to you...bitch.''

Atropos, however, was still standing in her spot, her smile still curling in her lips, not frightened by the ghost's verbal threat. And she chose to respond to him once again in his own words, in a way.

''Like I said, my little big stud, the good stuff is about to start. So relax. Sit back and enjoy the show.''