Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice

Chapter 9: No One Asked

   "I'm going to have a good bruise there." Lydia thought to herself and she walked on unsteady legs to the living room. She didn't exactly remember how she got to the hallway but she put that down to the concussion... 
Tentatively she pressed on her forehead with two fingers but to her surprise felt no tell-tale twinges of pain, no bump and no blood. "Maybe I just got lucky." She reasoned. But all the same she thought she had better check in out and turned to face the living room mirror.
For a moment she thought her vision was playing up or that her mind was tricking her, but after several minutes of studying the glass closely the realisation that she really didn't have a reflection hit her like a ton of bricks and she felt her hair stand on end. 
"No, no, no, no, no..." She stumbled over her words as she ran from the room. She swung around the bannister and flew up the stairs, right across the landing and nearly tripped on the laundry from earlier. 
Lydia wasn't prepared to see herself.. her body at least... lying at the foot on the attic stairs in it's own blood. A large, deep cut stretched from her hairline on the right to just in between her eyebrows and it was still bleeding. She hadn't been dead long. When she reached down and touched her own arm it was still warm but cooling quickly. 
She grabbed her wrist and felt for a pulse, desperately fumbling around the joint with shaking hands. Nothing. 
Tears were quick to follow, prickling in the back of her eyes and threatening to spill over but she was damned if she'd let them. She blinked them back and took in a deep breath to ease the sickness in her throat but nothing she did would stop her from shaking. 
She recalled the story of Barbara and Adam's death.. in their car... in the river... at least they had been spared the sight of their own dead bodies, evidently she was not so lucky. 
  Her mind raced with thoughts of Katrina and Beth coming home to find their own mother in that state and she couldn't comfort them because they wouldn't see her. 
"I've got to get rid of you." She said to her own corpse. A very strange feeling. 
Half an hour of struggling went by before Lydia managed to get her body up the stairs and into a small cupboard in the attic. 
"This is the first time in my life that being so tiny has come in handy." She mused as she forced the door shut and slumped to the floor with a sigh. 

  At 4:00 on the dot the front door opened and two shrill voices called out to her in unison, "Mom, we're home!" 
Lydia hopped down the stairs. For hours she had been practicing how to ease into the subject as sensitively as she could. At first she had been worried that her daughter's wouldn't know she was there, but she remembered that Beth had seen Barbara and Adam...so surely she could see her too. 
It was immediately evident which girl could see her and which could not. 
"Hi sweeties, did you have a good day." Lydia breathed, trying to keep it as normal as she could for as long as possible.
"Great, thanks!" Beth chirped. Her sister gave her a strange sideways glance. 
"What?" 
"It was a good day." The younger one repeated. 
"No one asked." 
Beth looked up at her mother, standing halfway down the stairs with a hand resting gently on the bannister. She could see the sadness in her eyes. 
Lydia was not under any illusions; her daughter was intelligent and she knew it. 
"Mom?" The wobble in the little girls voice was what broke her. Lydia couldn't stop the tears this time, they came on suddenly and choked her so that she could barely speak. 
Beth, for her part, wanted to scream. It hadn't taken her long to put two and two together. 
"What's going on? Mom's not there!" Katrina took her sister's shoulders and gave her a little shake. "Beth?" 
"It's mom..." Guilt. She felt it. Overwhelming guilt. "She's dead... she's dead." 
"What are you talking about?" 
"She's right there, Katrina!" Beth yelled, pointing to the stairs. "And you can't see her, just like you couldn't see Barbara and Adam. But I can.. I can! And she's dead." 
Katrina went pale and silent, drawing her bottom lip into her mouth with her teeth. "Are you sure?" 
"Well can you see her?" Beth turned back to her mother. "What happened?"
Lydia wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, watching Katrina with a careful eye. The poor girl looked like she might throw up. Eventually she turned her gaze back to Beth and said steadily, "Beetlejuice."