Dedicated to Winona Laura Horowitz
Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz
Lydia Deetz and the house´s ghost
Chapter 2: The Maitlands
Several weeks passed and my mistress was immersed in reading the strange manual, I lost count of how many times Lydia had already reread it from beginning to end. However, the amount of information in the book was incredible, it was the Grail!, the Necronomicon of the occult world! and best of all, it was authentic! However, no matter how much I listened to my mistress with all the attention and concentration possible whenever she reread the manual aloud in her room, I didn't understand almost anything, even she with how intelligent she was (she liked to read), she just understood every aspect of the book at the second reading of it.
Change of coordinates, latitudes and longitudes each time the soul of people tele-transported from one place to another, or when they passed through a particular geographical area, etc., etc., etc. Understandable reading only for someone dedicated to theoretical physics as my mistress told me. And the most frustrating thing of all, whoever wrote the manual, did it in such a way that they seemed to think: "let's write a manual of what happens after death, but let's make it as complicated as possible", since the manual didn't seem to have a basic structure or "skeleton" at the time of its writing, lacking footnotes, summaries, indexes,"facts" of any kind or any other help for readers that any book is supposed to have.
At first I was a little restless about the book, but then I was thankful that my mistress was obsessed with the manual, since it was surely this one that kept her sane. The noise in reconstructing the house was insufferable, and when that work was finished, Delia devoted herself to creating her works of art, which involved the same noise and nuisance. The woman thought she would be the cultural center of the village, but the exhibitions of her artwork were the mockery of the locals. My mistress as her insufferable stepmother have a macabre taste for art, but the artistic aesthetics of my mistress is Gothic and elegant, while Delia's is "modern and contemporary" as Lydia says, and in spite of it she was the laughingstock of the "Miss Shannon Girls' School" (which was in the upper class area of town called Peaceful Pines) from day one.
Somehow (suspected by magic), my mistress had managed to make her room not be decorated by Delia or Charles and look like the dreamy little house of Barbie or the sweethearts. For my part, after a couple of days I again felt the sensation that a strange presence was hanging over the house. Fortunately, a few rooms of the house did not suffer Delia's artistic intrusion, among them the attic (again I suspect the use of magic by Lydia), it is unfortunate that my mistress had this room locked for most of the time, so I had to resort to extreme measures, suffice it to say, that the local population of rodents (no longer rabbits, only mice and rats) decreased in numbers (it was either that or to kill also birds and fish of the place).
This time the supernatural energy source came from the impressive model of the village, but every time I jumped on it, the strange presence disappeared, even using my "Sneak" magic, which allowed me to walk on people or animals without disturbing their sleep. Whatever was circling the model were not the ghosts of the previous owners, no, it was something more cunning and evil. I had to neglect my mistress several hours a day and stand guard in place, always attentive and with my tail moving nervously from side to side (unlike dogs, we cats move our tails from side to side when we are upset). I guess during those hours when I was absent, Lydia used magic from the supernatural manual to protect the privacy of her room and attic.
The only thing I could find was an old steering wheel underneath a broken piece of furniture, I couldn't read it, I only saw the strange figure of a creature, it looked like an anthropomorphic beetle.
I was exhausted from several nights of vigil, so I went to my mistress' room to take a break. The Gothic decoration of the room was not to his parents' liking, but I must admit that it was comforting to assume personal contemplation or of any other nature and then give in to sleep.
I only slept for a few minutes as I was woken up by blows and discovered that my mistress screams in anger.
“Cut it out, there are children present!” My mistress holds her camera with determination and leaves the room. What happened afterwards was so absurd that I could not react properly.
Ghosts! Ghosts making ridiculous howls and covering themselves with sheets. All my senses were disconnected except the sight. Only when my mistress approached the ghosts without showing any fear, I could react, I began to move forward with a little hissing.
“The night of those who!” cried a man's ghost as he took off the sheet covering it.
“It's a horror movie,” said my mistress, then the other ghost took off the sheets and turned out to be the ghost of a woman. Would the ghosts of the previous owners be, however they didn't emanate an evil aura or else my mistress would detect it.
“At your age a ghost would have frightened me,” said the ghost woman strangely.
“Can you see us without the sheets?” the ghost asked her.
“Yes, I can do it,” said my master.
“And how can you do that?” the ghost interrogated her again.
“I read the "Manual of the Recent Deceased", it says: "The living ignore the rare and unusual", I myself am strange and unusual” claims my mistress with a disturbing tranquillity.
In order not to be discovered by Delia or Charles, they decide to go up to the attic, I of course accompany them. Lydia tries to break the ice by praising the work that the ghost man did with the model and the good choice of wallpaper that made the ghost woman. My mistress is very clever, she did an investigation about the previous owners of the house and found out their tastes and so on. Both ghosts were the Maitlands, the man's name was Adam, and the woman was Barbara.
It turns out that the ghosts hated the way Delia destroyed the interior decoration and replaced the rural furniture that they loved so much, and accepted with boldness that they wanted to expel the Deetz.
Charles called my mistress, and she told them that if they wanted to expel her family, they would have to think of something else than cover themselves with sheets, and she said goodbye with a smile because of the absurd concept of ghosts disguised with sheets.
“And you kitten, will you help us too?” Adam said to me in a joking tone.
“Never more,” I said.
The ghosts jumped out of fear, as cats aren't supposed to talk.
“The cat speaks Adam!” Barbara shouted, holding tightly to the man's arm.
“Can you understand us?” Adam asked.
“Never more” I replied amusingly, trying to torture them in the same way as Alan Poe's The Raven (My mistress is a Poe fanatic).
The ghosts kept trying to communicate with me and I kept responding to them in the same way over and over again. I wanted to play the game until they got mad, but the ridiculousness of the situation won me over, and in the end I couldn't stand the laughter.
“My ribs are going to break, stop putting on those faces! You’re killing me...”
“Hey, you can speak correctly," cried Adam between angry and perplexed.
I cleared my throat to let the laughter go.
“Of course I can speak and fluid, I am not a foolish dog” I said looking at them with the most severe look I could give them.
“Oh, we're sorry," said Barbara, "we've never seen a cat talk before... And what's the name.”
“You mean "what is YOUR name," ghost woman," I replied petulantly.
“Hey, My wife has a name and so do I," said Adam.
“I don't care what you're called, for me you're ghost man and she's ghost woman, that's enough," I said rudely. “I don't give a damn about Delia and Charles Deetz, but they are MY humans, they belong only to me, they are nobody else's, and I won't let a bunch of lame phantoms try to drive the Deetz out of this house. Besides, my mistress Lydia is comfortable in this place and that's all I'm interested in.”
Adam was furious, but Barbara tried to calm the situation down.
“How is Lydia your mistress and not the Deetz?” She asked me.
“The cats have no owner, it is the humans who belong to us, and Miss Lydia, well, she is a noble exception to the rule, and I would ask you and the ghost man to stop calling her so casually, you must tell her "Miss Lydia" or "Mistress Lydia", you can tell me " Noble keeper Percy”” I ordered them with a sarcastic smile.
“Oh, I see,” said Barbara, frowning her eyebrows and then going forward to Adam, she grabbed me from behind the neck and lifted me up to her face.
“Now you listen to me, you arrogant bastard! You either fix that attitude or I swear to you... Ouch! Adam he scratched me!”
As I fell to the ground, I arched my body and began to hiss menacingly. The ghosts were frightened, seeing that their bodies could be wounded.
“Listen well ectoplasm snacks, now you are simple ghosts lacking all rights, or line up or you will find out what it feels like to come out for my damned rectum,” I said, with the most threatening tone of voice possible.
I immediately erected all the hairs on my body, they went to the ceiling and fell down again with force to the floor, nailing themselves into it as if they were metal needles thrown from the roof of a building of more than one hundred floors.
The ghosts, seeing themselves in this deadly rain, ran frightened to a wall that opened and disappeared over there. You may believe that a cat (even one with magical powers) might not be a threat to two adult ghosts, but in reality cats are accustomed to fighting and devouring evil entities (boggins) that threaten the psychological health of our humans. I also remembered the passage my mistress read in the manual and clearly stated that if cats and ghosts shared the house, the cat had complete and absolute power to decide whether or not the ghosts stayed in the house.
"Good thing it worked," I thought to myself. "It's not good to use" Rain of Needles ", since it's useless, almost all "needles" never hit the target, it's just only good to scare."
Lydia was surprised that the ghosts weren't in the house the next day, but she couldn't do much because she had to help her stepmother for a dinner she was preparing for guests coming from New York.
To be continue...
This fanfic was translated from Spanish into English using the DeepL program, and my knowledge of English. Forgive any grammatical and punctuation errors.
ns 15.158.61.20da2
