sayit3x

[sayit3x]

Mrs. Bea Juice’s Journal #24

While attending Harvard for so many years, we made the trip back and forth between New York and Massachusetts during breaks. That meant Betelgeuse and I had to pass through Connecticut many times. There must have been something he admired about the little towns we’d pass on our way through the state, as I often found him gazing, almost longingly, out the train window during our trips. Maybe something about the quaintness and quiet of it all reminded him of our tiny Italian village centuries ago. Maybe living in the hustle and bustle of European, and now American big cities for centuries was finally starting to lose its appeal. But I couldn’t say I was shocked when he finally settled down in the small town of Winter River, Connecticut decades later. The circumstances were a bit peculiar, but Betel’s afterlife was always a little strange and unusual, even for a ghost.

Betel continued his studies at Harvard even after 1939 when World War II broke out. Since the United States didn’t jump into the conflict right away, he saw no reason to interrupt his curriculum until he absolutely had to. After the Great War only a few decades prior, we knew it was inevitable that America would get involved in this second global battle, so he just focused on school right up until the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. He finished the semester, but Harvard was already planning changes in response to the war, so we moved back to Neither-New York and rejoined Nat and Donny.

But between the draft, a sudden ramp up in war-related production, and massive government spending, World War II pulled the United States out of the Great Depression. Which meant more families, minus the men overseas, were able to transition out of homeless shelters and “Hoovervilles” and back into houses that may or may not have been haunted. And with the front lines thousands of miles and an ocean away, ghosts gradually became more interested in terrifying their new live tenants. Initially, Betel jumped at every opportunity he had to scare the living again. But that blind enthusiasm didn’t last. 

One night, he was called upon to “evict” a few live ones who’d recently moved into the home, but suddenly materialized in our living room not long after the job began. Without a word, he grabbed Donny and I by the hand and teleported us back to his client’s house. We found ourselves in the dark, empty living room of the client’s house, with a clearly confused and frustrated ghost pacing in front of the fireplace. 

“Thank goodness you’re back!” the ghost exclaimed, “What do we do now? They’re still upstairs.” The client’s eyes darted to Donny and I. “Who are they?”

“Coworkers,” Betel said flatly without a hint of sarcasm or humor in his voice. 

Something was wrong, and Donny and I glanced at each other briefly, knowing not to correct Betel’s fib.

With an edge to his voice that meant he was not to be disobeyed, Betel ordered his client, “Stay here,” before meeting my gaze and gesturing with his head upstairs. 

Betel turned and floated up to the second floor, with Donny and I silently following a moment behind him. Betel led us to a closed door, where he paused. 

Knowing Donny wasn’t practiced in telepathy like he and I were, Betel turned to him and whispered, “Don’t let ‘em see or hear you.” 

A moment later, he phased through the door. Donny looked at me with a face full of questions, but I took his hand and followed Betel’s lead, walking through the closed door. Inside the bedroom was a young woman in a long nightgown who couldn’t have been older than 25, and, despite fiercely clutching a baseball bat in her hand, she was trembling like a leaf. Her breath was ragged with fear-soaked adrenaline, eyes wild and locked on the closed door ahead of her, as if expecting something dangerous to burst in at any moment. As centuries old ghosts, we could make the living see us if we wanted them to. Yet, like us, Betel stood by, invisible to this living woman. She was already clearly terrified, so Betel had obviously been doing his job very well. And, still, his client was unhappy and Betel seemed, well, bothered. But a single word stole our attention from the woman to the space behind her.

A child’s tiny, quivering voice cut through the strained silence like a knife, pleading, “Mommy…”

My eyes widened and I gently tugged on Donny’s hand, pulling him with me towards the woman to look behind her. Clinging to the back of the young lady’s nightgown, was a little girl, maybe five or six years old, trying her best to be brave while she trembled and cried.

The woman steeled her resolve, tightening her grip on the bat. “It’s ok, baby, I won’t let anything hurt you,” she whispered to her daughter.

My head whipped to Betel and, meeting his gaze, I immediately understood. Seeing this mother determined to protect her child, he’d been reminded of that night before we died hundreds of years ago, when we fought terror and danger to save each other. And now, Betel was hesitating, stuck between a terrified mother and an angry client. Donny’s gaze flitted back and forth between Betel and me, recognizing that there was information he was missing, but knowing better than to ask. We’d never told Donny or Nat about that bloody, fateful night, and we never would. 

I pulled Betel and Donny back through the door and into another room, making sure we were far enough from the stairs that the client below couldn’t overhear us.

“What do you want to do, Betel?” I whispered.

“Go back in time and not take this job,” he lamented sarcastically.

I tilted my head and glared at him, saying without saying that now was not the time for jokes. “Why is Donny here then?”

Betel sighed. “He does healing stuff, right? I was hoping he could, I dunno, wipe their memories or somethin.’ Make ‘em forget this ever happened.”

I let slide that Betel was talking about Donny like he wasn’t even there, despite being within arm’s reach. But now wasn’t the time to debate fair family dynamics. 

I scoffed, “Donny can’t do that…” I turned my attention to Donny, whose eyes were wide and mouth hung agape. In that heartbeat, I realized that I wasn’t actually sure about the range of abilities my youngest son’s protective magic afforded him. “Can you?”

Donny blinked and snapped out of his shock. He shifted on his feet and glanced down while his brow knit, as if seriously considering the question, which was in itself a surprise. But then, despite their strained relationship, Donny still would do anything for his brother.

Finally, Donny replied, “Not exactly, no, but we might be able to convince them it was all a dream.”

Betel actually looked at his twin this time and questioned him directly, “How?”

“Well, I can put them both to sleep. We put them back in their beds and I can manipulate their dreams so they’ll both have nightmares.”

I interjected, “Won’t they think it’s a little odd to have exactly the same nightmare?”

“Sure, but I can make them different enough that even if they compare notes, any similarities will seem like a coincidence, rather than a shared memory.�� Donny’s gaze snapped to Betel, suddenly serious. “But I need to know exactly how you scared them. The more detail you can tell me, the better.”

Betel took a deep breath as he stared back at him before ultimately saying, “I could tell ya, but how about I just show ya?”

Donny furrowed in confusion until Betel took Donny’s face in his hands and carefully pressed their foreheads together, like they did when they were children. Betel closed his eyes, trying to concentrate, while Donny’s eyes blew wide immediately and his breath caught. I, too, had to fight to control my reactions and stay as neutral as possible at this massive turning point.

“Don’t make it weird,” Betel said to his brother firmly, eyes still closed.

With a tiny shake of his head and a small, bittersweet smile, Donny closed his eyes and tried to calm himself, still caught off guard by this deeply nostalgic moment that seemed to put the fight between them temporarily on hold. Donny’s face contorted in Betel’s hands, grimacing and whimpering at what he saw, as Betel played the memory for him. Finally, Betel opened his eyes, released his brother, and took a small step back.

Donny blinked his eyes open. “Wow… you really are terrifying…” he muttered in a way that could have been admiration or dismay, perhaps both.

With the tiniest smirk, Betel chortled, “Thanks. Got whatcha need?”

Donny nodded, trying to regain his composure, and they turned to me, ready to give this plan a shot. We phased back through the bedroom door to find the woman still on guard, gripping the bat. Donny brought me right next to the child before raising his hands, one in front of each of the living.

“Sleep,” he quietly, yet firmly, commanded.

Their eyes closed immediately and they dropped like ragdolls. I caught the little girl while Donny caught the mother, whose bat slipped from her grasp and I kicked it under the bed. Donny put the woman back in her bed, tucked her in, and put his hand on her forehead.

“This is gonna take a few minutes,” he said to Betel and I. 

We nodded and Betel opened the door for me while I carried the child out of her mother’s room. He helped me find her room, and I tucked the little girl into bed. As we stood there watching her sleep, Betel quietly spoke.

“I didn’t know.”

He could have meant he didn’t know the mother and daughter were alone and that much more vulnerable by default. Or that he didn’t know the child was this young. Or that scaring them would get under his skin in a way he wasn’t prepared for. Maybe all three.

“Her father is in the war?”

Betel nodded. “Client said they’d just moved in, then he shipped out a week ago.” He paused. “I hate when kids cry.”

“That’s understandable… though I’d hazard a guess that it never used to bother you before?

He deflected, “Don’t usually get kids this young. And they used to be made of tougher stuff back in the day, anyway.”

Now he was just making excuses, and we both knew it.

“It’s not the middle ages anymore, and we adapted to survive. Children shouldn’t have to develop resilience to trauma.” I paused and looked directly at my son. “People are allowed to change, Betel,” I said gently.

Perhaps I was referring to him, perhaps people in general. I let him decide that on his own. I watched his face as his eyebrow knit, weighing my words.

“Maybe all those psychology classes were a bad idea,” he replied. “I can’t afford to go soft, Ma. We’ve already got Donny for that.”

I scoffed. “First, soft doesn’t mean bad. Second, it’s not about whether you’re soft, Betel. It’s about whether the Neitherworld thinks you are. You can manage that perception without compromising what you want or don’t want to do. Reputation intact.”

He studied me like I’d just solved an impossible puzzle. “Holy crap, that’s smart.”

I chuckled, “You’re not the only one who went to Harvard.”

“Touché, mademoiselle.”

Donny found us then, having set up the dreams for the mother, and proceeded to do the same for the daughter. He made sure to chase the bad dreams with pleasant ones, in hopes that they’d be so positive that the nightmares, blended with the truth, wouldn’t even be worth remembering.

We went back downstairs and I took the lead talking to the client with an angle that hadn’t been attempted before – trying to convince a ghost to let their living tenants stay. Apparently, the ghost had been in that house on their own for the entire Depression and had just gotten used to the quiet. Luckily, their motivations were flimsy enough that it wasn’t a Herculean task to change their mind about playing host to the little family. Betel became more selective about the jobs he took after that. He scoped the house first, observing the living residents for a few days, and reserved the right to turn down hauntings that didn’t meet his secret criteria. His reputation as the best bio-exorcist in the business never wavered.

It wouldn’t be the last time ghosts were convinced to coexist with their living residents. In a haunted house on a hill overlooking a little town in Connecticut, a teenage girl would create a similar truce in 1988.

This journal dovetails into a Beetlejuice fanfiction epic that I'm posting chapter by chapter every week here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63522586/chapters/162777649

Chapter 23 "The leg in the jungle" is now up.

[sayit3x]

Mrs. Juice's Journal #37

With envy in his eyes, Betelgeuse watched as, for the first few years, Lydia, Astrid, and Richard were a blissful little family. Initially, Lydia split her time between working on Ghost House and being home with her husband and daughter. New York had enough haunted spaces that Lydia could film on site or in the Manhattan studio during the day and be back at the house in time for dinner. But as the show's popularity rose, demand for more episodes further and further away began eating into Lydia's family time. Richard had been happy to watch Astrid after daycare, but the longer Ghost House stayed on the air, the more he was frustrated when he couldn't be on the ground with the other activists as much as he used to. He did his best to stay engaged in environmental causes, leading through phone calls, emails, and video conferences, but to him, it wasn't the same.

 Betel suspected that, because Richard didn't actually believe Lydia could see ghosts, he resented that she was spending time on something that, in his mind, didn't actually matter. Not compared to being with him and Astrid, not compared to the environmental causes he fought for, to preserve the planet for their daughter. Meanwhile, Astrid was growing up, spending time with her dad when filming demands kept Lydia away more and more often. Even then, Astrid already sensed the emotional distance growing between her parents and began pulling away from her mother. Eventually, tension and outright fights between Lydia and Richard became inevitable.

Throughout, Betelgeuse experienced every emotional up and down of Lydia's rollercoaster of conflicting feelings. Her doubt that she was doing the right thing, worry that she was being a lousy mom and a bad wife, fear of disappointing everyone, guilt that she was selfishly flaunting and profiting from her power to help ghosts, relief that her family wasn't struggling financially anymore, pride that she was providing for them with her unique skills, rage that some people (including Richard) didn't believe she could see ghosts at all, anxiety at feeling trapped in every direction and not knowing when it would end, and finally sadness and frustration that she couldn't make everyone happy, least of all herself.

Betel felt it all, even when it was unwelcome and overwhelming. Until he met Lydia, he'd spent centuries barely feeling anything beyond pride, anger, exhilaration, lust, schadenfreude, and, occasionally, peace and joy on outings with me. He'd just been acting on his impulses, embracing the chaos that came with being a ghost tasked with haunting the living, selfishly prioritizing his desires, focused only on having a good time, whatever form that took. 

But to be empathetic enough to be Lydia’s friend when she was a teen, Betel had to overcome a steep learning curve of emotion, even when it was frustrating, awkward, and uncomfortable. Now that they were estranged, her memories of their friendship lost, his prior discomfort was suddenly dwarfed by the torture of experiencing her emotions directly. So many of her feelings were novel to Betel, and even some of the familiar ones had long been stale within him, untouched since he'd been alive and struggling nearly 700 years before.

On days where it was too much, we went to the Neitherworld quarry. He talked and I listened while we sparred, the best kind of multitasking. I always asked if he wanted solutions, support, or a sounding board, and usually he just needed an ear or perspective, especially from a woman who was a wife and a mother. Naturally, he tended to align with Lydia whenever she and Richard had an argument, but even Betel could see that in relationships, things were seldom as black and white as the striped suit he always wore. 

Once again, he was evolving before my eyes. Even though Betelgeuse and Lydia had been wrenched apart, with their psychic connection forcing her emotions onto him, she was still helping him grow. And even more surprising, he didn’t fight it. He could have kept their connection closed most of the time to preserve himself, but he kept the channel open, trying to understand her, to stay close to her in any way he still could, even when it hurt.

After watching a particularly charged fight from beyond the veil, Betel sensed it the moment it hit Lydia. The sudden, undeniable recognition that though she and Richard were still married, their relationship was ending. Whether the point of no return had just passed or was years behind them, she didn't know, but she knew at that moment it was already too late. She mourned their marriage silently, crying when no one was looking, trying to play it off as if nothing was wrong. As if being with Richard, loving him as best she could, was still enough. But Betel felt it, her sense of loss, like their romance had been a living, breathing thing, and it no longer walked the Earth. For years, Lydia and Richard stayed together for Astrid’s sake, but the relationship was over a long time before the accident in Brazil that took Richard across the veil. 

When Richard died so suddenly, Lydia and Astrid were both utterly devastated. Lydia’s bottomless sorrow, guilt, and regret hit Betel like a freight train, and for him, it was like experiencing the night of my death all over again. But he wouldn’t leave her. Just out of sight on the other side of her mirror, he heard every wailing sob she poured into her pillow, watched every tear fall in the darkness when she cried at night.  Refusing to let Betel relive such excruciating loss alone, I stayed by his side, comforting him as best I could, as he and Lydia mourned.

Richard’s death shattered Lydia's already fragile world, and, if not for her need to be there for Astrid, Lydia may have very well tried to “get in” like she wanted to decades before. Thankfully, with help from Delia and Charles, Astrid and Lydia got through the immediate aftermath of Richard's death and survived the worst of their grief. But the brittle bond Lydia and Astrid had, clinging to each other in their sadness, broke when Astrid learned Lydia hadn’t seen Richard’s ghost, and didn't believe for a second that it was because he simply wasn't there. 

More anxious than ever, Lydia was medicating herself heavily just to get through the days, and Betel suspected it interfered with her abilities. After all, the living often can't see ghosts because they ignore the strange and unusual, and Lydia seemed to turn away from her gift when it became clear Richard wouldn’t be coming home to haunt her. As if she believed she wasn’t worth the effort and that, even in death, Richard had chosen to leave her to pursue something he cared about more. Nothing could have been further from the truth. How could she know that he had been conscripted into service in the Neitherworld’s immigration department? Or that, even when he found his way home, he hid from her, even when she wasn’t drugged up, believing a reunion would be too painful for her to endure. 

But for Astrid, it was the confirmation she needed that her mother's gift had been an act for money all along. Now a feisty teenager, she resented when Lydia eventually resumed filming Ghost House. Astrid’s rage only deepened when Charles convinced Lydia to send her off to a private boarding high school as Lydia’s filming schedule became unmanageable. At that point, Lydia was barely hanging on, only leveraging her abilities for work, otherwise suppressing them with her medication and a blind eye to anything that wasn’t her all-consuming depression. It was no wonder Rory latched onto her at the survivor’s retreat Lydia attended, spewing nonsense about his own false grief and loss. Betelgeuse saw through Rory’s act instantly, but, at the lowest part of her life, Lydia couldn’t see she was being manipulated. 

This journal dovetails into a Beetlejuice fanfiction epic I’ve written here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63522586/chapters/162777649

[sayit3x]

Added 2 illustrations for this entry where, after having a mental breakdown from losing Lydia, Betelgeuse wakes in the family safehouse beneath Japan. I did a version in the Japanese woodblock print style of Hokusai's "36 views of Mt. Fuji." I also added a more realistic painted style inline at the appropriate part in the entry. I wanted to capture a daybreak for the ghost who's no doubt seen thousands of sunrises that could still take his breath away.

Mrs. Juice’s Journal #33, part 2

When we disappeared from the quarry and materialized in a dimly lit bedroom, Betel's legs buckled. After spending so much magic, he was passing out in my arms. We were both still dirty from the conflict and soaked through from his hurricane, so it was no wonder he began shivering. I snapped my fingers and replaced his clothes with warm, clean, striped pajamas, his suit appearing in a laundry hamper, boots by the closet. I guided him to the bed where the covers magically pulled back, and tucked him in under a soft, heavy comforter. He tried to sit up, but I gently yet firmly pushed him back down.

“Ma…” he whispered.

“Shhhh… Rest now, Betel. We'll talk later.”

“But–”

So stubborn. 

“Sleep,” I commanded, waving a hand over his face and, with a little magic, he was out like a light. I was glad I asked Donny to teach me that one, though if Betel hadn't already been so depleted, that little trick probably wouldn't have worked.

While he slept, I took the time to ready our new home away from home. I'd furnished it years ago, but the house had never truly been used and everything was hidden under sheets, not to mention a thick layer of dust. I snapped the sheets away and made the house tidy itself, with brooms, dusters, and other cleaning tools floating around, doing their duty. While they were busy, I traveled topside to gather ingredients to make us a proper meal whenever Betel woke. 

He’d already been asleep for hours by the time I decided it was safe to pop home for a visit. I was eager to apologize to Nat and Donny for what happened at the quarry. I set up a spell like a baby monitor to tell me if Betelgeuse woke, and teleported into my living room, where Nat and Donny were already talking. They immediately rose when I appeared, and I threw my arms around both of them. While Nat embraced me, I felt Donny freeze, still unsure what to make of me after what he'd seen.

“I'm sorry, my dears. Both of you have been so patient with Betel and me. We don't deserve it, but we couldn't get by without it.”

Donny burst into tears then, and pressed his face into my shoulder, hugging me tight.

“Mama, I… I don’t know what to think,” he sobbed. “How could you do something like that to Betel?”

I sighed heavily, already weary of the conversation we were about to have. I pulled back from them and looked Donny in the eye, cradling his face. I didn't have to worry about Nat. I was confident that even if he didn't understand my exact actions, as a parent he understood my intent. 

“Let's talk,” I said gently. I took a seat, and didn't speak again until they joined me. 

“Donny, do you have any children running around that I don't know about?” I asked calmly.

He blushed violently and fiercely shook his head. Though that strong reaction made me wonder about his relationship experience, I tabled that line of questioning for another day.

I continued, “Then you've never been a parent. You don't know what it's like. To want what's best for your children, even when it hurts them sometimes. To struggle when you don't know exactly what “best” means, especially when it clashes with what they want. But you do what you can to be their ally, stay in their corner, and understand them, even someone as complicated and haunted as Betelgeuse.”

“Haunted?” Donny asked, confused and concerned.

I raised my hand to interrupt his train of thought. We didn’t have time to pull on that particular thread, and it wasn’t my story to tell.

I continued, “Today, you saw me do what was best for Betel. To stop him before he hurt people he cared about, which would put him at risk for the Fires of Damnation. Were there other things I could’ve tried? Yes. But I wasn't sure they'd work, and I'd lose the element of surprise if I failed. As much as I've practiced to keep up with Betel over the centuries, he’s so powerful that I don't think I'd beat him even in a fair fight. And you know Betel isn't above fighting dirty if he has to. He wouldn't mean to hurt me, but he was so swept up in his own pain that he couldn't even see me.”

Donny mutely nodded, trying to wrap his head around my words. But it was clear he was really struggling to reconcile the shocking act he’d seen with his own optimistic ideals about what “good” and “best” meant. Maybe it was time to try another approach.

 “What’s the lesson from Robin Hood?” I asked him.

He blinked, dumbfounded. “Steal from the rich and give to the poor?”

I chuckled quietly at how my boys were more similar than they realized. “You're thinking too linearly, Donny. The lesson is that sometimes doing the right thing means doing it the wrong way, at least by society’s standards. That doesn't mean the way you do things, the way you think about things is bad. It's just different from what I do. And my way is different from your brother’s.” 

He stared at me, face scrunched up in thought, still wrestling with questions he couldn’t resolve.

“I just feel like I don't even know you, Mama,” he finally said.

My sweet Donny, always so honest, so forthright. I took his face in my hands again. “Then we can work on that, starting right now.” 

I looked in my youngest son’s eyes and began. “I'm the woman who bore you both in a field, by our little house on the edge of the village, under a clear night sky in summer. The same one who told you stories and tucked you in when you were young. Who raised you alongside your father and sent you away to keep you safe, because I love you that much. I’m the woman who then tended to Betelgeuse, and after my death, watched him grow up and struggle to survive alone. The one who sought you and your brother out after you died to bring you back to our family, because I was worried about both of you. I’m your mother, Donatello, just like I’m Betel’s. And I’ll do what’s necessary, like I’ve always done, even when I wasn’t proud of it, to keep you two safe. If you and your brother are on opposite ends of the spectrum, I'm somewhere in the middle, like a bridge between you, trying to keep our family together.”

He was crying now and even as I wiped his tears away with my thumbs, it was hard to keep up with them, to catch his sadness in my hands.

“Mama… “ he choked out. “Do you love Betelgeuse more than you love me?”

That raw question, which may have plagued him for centuries, broke my heart. If he thought that, even for a second, then I’d failed as his mother.

“Donatello, listen to me carefully. I’d rather tear myself in half trying to save you both than lose either of you. I love my sons, even if that love is expressed differently for each of you. I’m so sorry I ever made you think for a moment that wasn’t the case. You are so deeply loved, mio figlio, and I promise to do more to prove it to you.”

He exhaled a shaking breath of relief, and finally smiled weakly. “It’s ok, Mama,” he sobbed. “I love you, too, and I’m sorry I doubted you.”

Then before I knew it, I was quietly weeping. I let his face go to wipe my own tears away. “I shouldn’t earn your forgiveness so easily, Donny. You're always so kind and polite, so positive, trying to see the best in others, even when they don't appreciate you. I don't know how you do it.” I paused to shake my head gently. 

Still crying, Donny chortled and shrugged. “I don’t either, it’s just what I am. Sometimes I wish I could be more like Betel.”

I took his hands then, squeezing them firmly. “The way you see the world, especially someplace as dark and twisted as the Neitherworld, is a gift. You see the potential for goodness all around you. Betel has learned to see the opposite. Bearing either outlook is a painful way to exist. You risk heartbreak if people don't meet your hopes for them, and Betel is just as frustrated when his suspicions about the worst in people are right. You’re twins, the Gemini, two sides of the same coin, and you’re more alike than you know.”

My words seemed to comfort him, like they gave him hope that he could still have a relationship with his twin. The flow of his tears began to ebb.

“I want to know… I envy you, Mama. I want to know my brother better, like you do, but I don’t know how.”

“Then when he gets home, you should start by telling him that and hear his story from him, not me. Don’t give up, Donny.” 

He nodded, squeezing my hands, and I took that as my cue to hug my youngest son. My poor boys. It’d been such a difficult day for everyone. Just then, I felt the tug of my spell, alerting me that Betel was stirring. It was time to go. I looked at my husband and son, already feeling guilty for leaving Donny when he’d been feeling more vulnerable than I’d ever recognized.

“It seems Betel is waking up. He collapsed as soon as we left the quarry, he’s been out since. I should go,” I said hesitantly.

Donny nodded and his expression softened. “Take care of my brother for me,” he said gently, every word sincere.

The three of us stood and Nat took my hand. “Darling, Juno was here. She wanted to return this,” he said, and pulled Betel's contract with The Worsener from his back pocket, along with a note, which bore just two heavy words: “I'm sorry.” 

It meant there was nothing Juno could do to break the contract and she’d found no extraordinary loopholes that would help Betel weasel his way out of it. If there was a way Betel could stay in Lydia's life, it was already there, captured in otherworldly ink. I looked up at my husband, tears pricking at the corners of my eyes. 

Sniffling, I said, “I just want to do right by my children… but I feel so helpless.”

Nat wrapped his arms around me, tilted my chin up and looked at me gently, reassuringly, in the way he always did when I felt lost, when I needed his comfort to right a world that felt like it was tilting off its axis.

“You, my love, are the least helpless woman I know. You’ve always guided this family, even when it hasn’t been easy, and this time isn’t any different. Betelgeuse is probably falling apart, and, right now, the only person who can help him is you. Whenever you two are ready to come home, we’ll be here. So, go put our Betel back together.”

Always preoccupied with providing for our family, Nataniele was a man of few words, but when he found them, they were often exactly what I needed to hear. Confidence restored, I looked at my husband lovingly before kissing him goodbye. I hugged Donatello one more time, resolving to renew my bond with him once we got through this crisis. And with a thought, I disappeared from my home, reappearing at Betel’s bedside. 

He was tossing and turning with sweat on his brow, beginning to thrash more violently. With Lydia’s name on his lips, he reached out, trying to grab hold of something that was eluding him. Finally, he bolted upright with arms outstretched, yelling, “NO!”

In an instant, I sat next to him and held his shoulders, trying to wake him and calm him down. 

“Betel!” I called, not knowing if he could hear me.

His eyes snapped open, confused, trying to process that he was now awake. 

I persisted, gently soothing him, petting his head as I said, “It’s ok, Betel, it’s alright. It was just a dream.”

“Not a dream,” he panted out, still trying to catch his breath. “A nightmare.”

He had a nightmare? Him?

I studied his face and hesitantly asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”

He stilled, thinking, deciding, and finally began, “I was back in Winter River, but I was a giant snake again… You know the one. She was terrified, worse than when she first saw me. Hysterical, clawing at the door to get away. I tried talking to her, but every word was a hiss. No matter what I did, it just scared her more.” 

He paused, took a shuddering breath, and continued, “‘She panicked, ran… and fell down the stairs. I tried to catch her, but I didn’t have hands! When I reached to grab her with my tail, she recoiled, like she’d rather die than let me touch her. I heard so many bones break. She was dead by the time she hit the first floor… I couldn’t stop it.”

He was shaking, nearly in tears, so I carefully put my arms around him and rubbed his back. I needed no translation to understand what his dream meant. If the Ghost with the Most was having guilt-ridden nightmares about hurting his best friend, “killing” their friendship, his recovery would be a long and difficult one.

I spoke gently, “Lydia is alive now, because of you. You kept her safe, Betelgeuse. And she'd hate to see you beat yourself up like this.”

He whimpered, “She'd hate me, period. She doesn't know me anymore.”

I pulled away and stroked his wild mane, now more unkempt than usual from his restless sleep. “The Lydia Deetz we know and love is locked away with The Worsener somewhere. She's not dead. And this new Lydia can still learn to trust you when you meet again 30 years from now, just like she did before. All is not lost, mio figlio. We just need to figure out what to do in the meantime.”

Betel looked at me in wonder.

“I wish I’d introduced you two… before everything went to shit.”

I tilted my head. “Introduced me to who?”

“Lydia's stepmom, Delia.”

Ah, yes. His moment of hesitation at the quarry, what he wouldn't say about Lydia's stepmother in front of everyone else. 

“I have questions about that, but we'll come back to it. C’mon, get up and join me for breakfast.”

“Breakfast?”

“You were out for hours, Betel. It's nearly dawn.”

I led him through the house, and his eyes wandered over the architecture, taking in the look and scent of the wood and exposed beams, the straw mats under our feet, the paper stretched over sliding door frames. We arrived in the living room, where I had Betel take a seat on a cushion on the floor at the table.

“Ma, where are we?” he asked cautiously.

“A safehouse.”

“Oh…kay. But where exactly?”

I got up, walked to the sliding door that led out to the yard, and pushed it open dramatically to reveal a view of a lake next to the afterlife’s equivalent of Mt. Fuji.

“The Neitherworld beneath Japan. Fujikawaguchiko, specifically.”

“Japan?” He stared at me, incredulous, with eyebrows as high as they could lift. “And you have a safehouse here? Why?”

“After Leo X’s stupid attack, I started to worry you might have more enemies in the future. I needed a place no one knew about, where they wouldn't think to look, in case we had to take the family and run.”

His eyebrows gradually made their way down his forehead. “But why run when we could fight? Between the two of us, we could probably handle anyone.”

“Not every problem can be solved with violence, Betel. If they got to Nat or Donny first, they'd have leverage and we’d be compromised. Some things are just more complicated, they need time, strategy. Remember when Scuzzo framed you for stealing bad jokes and they jailed you in The Big House?”

“Yeah… they wouldn't listen. It wasn't ‘til Lyds…” his voice trailed off. He closed his eyes, took a breath and continued, “She found proof it was Scuzzo and got the Governor to pardon me.”

I nodded. “But that was just for a small crime. What if you'd been framed for murder? You know they don't waste time with The Big House or Oilcatraz for serious charges. If I couldn't get there in time to defend you, they'd send you straight down to the Fires of Damnation. And I wouldn't even get an apology if I proved they'd been wrong.”

He blinked.

 I shrugged and let my arms flop to my sides, resigned. “I'm the mother of two of the most notorious ghosts in the Neitherworld, even if they're on opposite sides of the spectrum. I've had nothing but time to plan how to protect them. We needed a safehouse, I got one. That's it.”

Betel gaped at me, blinking like he’d just snapped back to himself. Finally he spoke, his brow furrowed. “But we don't speak Japanese!”

“We'll learn. And anyone seeking you out would probably assume we’d run to a country where we're already fluent. Besides, I've been picking up the basics during my visits when I was scouting for a place.”

He shook his head. “You could've picked anywhere in the world. Hell, we could be colder than a witch’s tit with Santa in the North Pole right now. Why Japan?”

“For a while, I considered South America since we already speak Spanish and Portuguese. But when you were constrained to graveyards in the 80’s, I needed a place with plenty of cemeteries, just in case. Japan has lots of them. Many are beautiful, some are private, some are public. They're all over the country, so we have options. Here, I’ll show you.”

I pulled him to standing and snapped my fingers, teleporting us to the edge of the lake at Kogamasao Memorial Park, where the sun was rising, bathing Mt. Fuji in the pinks, oranges, and purples of daybreak. Betel’s eyes widened, tears gathering in the corners, and his breath hitched in his throat. Betel’s reaction was appropriate. The sight really was breathtaking, and I felt his shoulders relax beside me, the tension leaving his body. This was exactly why I’d chosen Japan. 

So many cemeteries and memorial parks in Japan were absolutely stunning. Even when they weren’t abundant in natural beauty, these resting places were carefully manicured, reflecting the deep respect the Japanese people held for their dead. If Betel was going to recover from the impact crater of losing Lydia and figure out what his afterlife looked like now, he needed the peace and equanimity to do it. Japan, with the tranquility and freedom its cemeteries provided, could give him that.

I stayed silent, letting Betel absorb the views in the morning light. Minutes passed before he took a big breath and let it out. Finally, he spoke, his gaze still fixed on the sunrise. 

“Ma… Thanks.” 

“You’re welcome, Betel.”

He went quiet again and I let him take his time, gathering his thoughts.

His voice broke when he said, “I dunno what to do, Ma, I… I feel so… powerless.”

I could only imagine. To be the Ghost with the Most, arguably one of the strongest, most feared ghosts in the Neitherworld, and yet totally paralyzed, shackled by the contract, unable to fix anything. 

“Then we’ll figure out the rules in this–” I produced his contract in my hand. “–and what you can do to get some agency back.”

He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Are you sure you and Delia haven’t been talking? Cuz she said nearly the same damn thing. Did I miss a conference call or a meeting or something?”

“About that. You started to say something about her stepmother, then changed course.”

He huffed. “Nothing gets past you, does it?”

I smirked. “I learned from the best.”

He managed to give me a weak smirk. “You know how sometimes I'd turn into Lydia's best friend from school, Betty? Delia knew it was me the whole time.”

My mouth fell open. “But you'd been using that Betty disguise for years.”

“Yeah, she knew about that and all my other disguises. She just acted like she had no clue to… keep things simple. She'd supported us being friends, trusted me to keep Lydia safe. She's the only one alive that knows about the contract with The Worsener.”

“Not even her father, huh?”

“Nope. Chuckie definitely couldn't handle it if he knew. He’s still in the dark.” He paused a moment before continuing. “Delia told me to look for loopholes in the contract, ways to help Lydia from behind the scenes. To get my act together, bury the hatchet with my enemies, gather resources so when the 30 years are up I’d be ready for her.”

I raised my eyebrows, impressed. “That’s very strategic advice. Delia sounds like a shrewd businesswoman.”

“She’s an artist, but shrewd is dead on.”

Silence fell over us as we watched the sun continue its climb over the horizon.

“I'm not sure I can do this, Ma…” Betel finally said. “Tryin’ to help her without her seein’ me.” He shook his head. “I’d dive into the Lost Souls room headfirst if I got her killed…”

That got my attention and I turned to face him. “Betel, after everything that’s happened, there’s nothing wrong with just waiting out the 30 years. We all adore Lydia, but you don’t have to spend three decades in agony, afraid of hurting her while you try to walk the line of that contract to help her.”

He shook his head and turned to me with a look in his eyes that I’d never seen before. “I couldn’t walk away even if I wanted to. I always figured she’d… move on someday. Go find the things she couldn’t get hangin’ around with a dead guy all the time. College, a career…” He paused and took a breath, his voice cracking. “A boyfriend… husband… kids…” He blinked back the tears threatening to fall. “When I decided I didn’t care about breakin’ the curse anymore, I knew that meant lettin’ Lydia go. Even if we stayed friends, I couldn’t give her the life she deserved… But I still want to see that life play out. I wanna watch her first day at college, try her first beer and hate it, get stoned and love it, fail a test, argue with a professor, graduate with honors. I wanna see her bomb an interview and nail the next one. I wanna see how nervous she is on her first day at a new job, make friends at work, find her path… Fall in love. Get her heart broken… And finally find the lucky guy who marries her. I wanna watch her be a kickass mom to spooky kids that grow up to be just like her. And hopefully in 30 years, I’ll get a chance to tell her how much I’ve missed her.”

He took a breath and when he couldn’t hold his tears back anymore, I knew what his next words were going to be before he even said them.

“I love her, Ma. And I want to watch her be happy.”

I wept as my heart swelled. Bless Lydia Deetz. Betel had come so far in such a short time, all thanks to her. God, we were going to miss her so much.

Even as he wiped his tears away, they wouldn’t stop falling. “But it’ll be more than just watching. I can feel her in my head,” he sobbed.

Feel her? That… wasn't normal, not even for Betel. He'd been using telepathy for years, but only with very few people, like me and Juno, and to my knowledge, he’d never tried it with Lydia.

“What do you mean?” I asked cautiously, stemming my own tears with my sleeve.

His breath shuddered. “I don’t know what’s going on, or why, but right now, I’m feeling relief and I know it’s not mine. It’s gotta be Lydia, and it’s freakin’ me out.”

I studied him and thought for a moment. Since I was practiced in telepathy, perhaps I could tap in and help Betel understand whatever this was.

“I’d like to try and take a look, if you’re up for it,” I offered.

He nodded, so I took his face in my hands and brought his forehead to mine. I closed my eyes and concentrated, sensing his mind and what looked to my mind’s eye like a red thread extending from him out into the ether. When I touched the thread with my consciousness, it was like instantly traveling along a fiber optic cable. When I found myself at the other end of it, I felt Lydia’s mind and saw what was happening. They’d released her from the hospital and her parents had brought her home. They must have just walked in the door as Charles was still taking his coat off and Delia was walking Lydia upstairs to her room, presumably to rest. Lydia was relieved to be home, that’s what Betel had felt. I brought my consciousness back along that thread to Betel and finally back to myself, gently pulling my head away.

“Betel, I think she can do more than just see ghosts. She's probably a medium. And after being together so long, she probably made this bond with you herself and didn’t even realize it.”

“Ok… that actually makes sense… She did end up literally inside my head once. But why haven’t I noticed it until now?”

“I’d be guessing at this point. But why would you need a psychic connection to keep you two together if you saw each other everyday for three years?”

“So it was like… a lifeline? In case of emergency, break glass and unconsciously activate a soul bond with your dead best friend?”

“Like I said, it’s just a guess.”

Betel nodded, closed his eyes and sighed. Opening them, he took one last long look at the sunlight shining on Mt. Fuji and turned to me. “Let’s head back. Somebody promised me breakfast.”

I snapped us back to our safehouse, made us breakfast, and showed him around our new home. After we explored a few more nearby cemeteries, we slept in the same room on tatami mats on the floor that night. There were western style beds available in other rooms, but sleeping on the tatami mats reminded us of home. Not the home we knew stateside in the Neitherworld, but the little house we shared when we were alive, now dust in the earth. Back then our mattresses, if you can call them that, were just patchworks of cloth stuffed with hay, laid over a hard wooden frame and barely softer than sleeping on the floor. But I hoped that these tiny, gentle reminders of better times would help ground Betel as he worked through his grief. 

And his grief was staggering. Most nights were plagued by disturbing dreams where he lost Lydia in some dramatic and traumatizing fashion, over and over. I woke him from every nightmare he had, just like I did when he was a child. But even those nightly horrors of self-inflicted torture couldn’t keep him from wanting to protect and help Lydia in any way he still could. Between his promise to Delia, this weird tie binding him and Lydia together, and the abyss of his own guilt, Betelgeuse resolved that he wouldn’t leave his best friend’s life. So, once he recovered from his breakdown enough to function, we poured over the contract and started strategizing his options. He still had a lot of work ahead of him to prepare.

In the meantime, we explored the vast array of Japanese cemeteries, taking in the beauty of the country, and it went a long way to helping Betel heal. And even though it wasn’t easy, we learned Japanese. Betel never quite got the hang of speaking it fluently, but he muddled through by understanding others perfectly well. Gradually, he got comfortable enough navigating the language and the customs to even take on a few bio-exorcism jobs, though the demand was definitely limited. Japanese ghosts were in a league of their own and didn't typically need help haunting the living. Most of Betel's jobs were for Western ghosts who'd emigrated to Japan and would benefit from Betel's intervention. Occasionally he'd be summoned for jobs back home, but he was quick to return when the job was over.

We stayed for nearly a year, far longer than I expected. By the time we finally returned home, he’d calmed down dramatically and was generally less chaotic, more focused on his goals. Sometimes we returned to Japan when he had setbacks, like when Lydia got her first boyfriend in college, but they weren’t as bad as his initial breakdown and he recovered more quickly. He’d also learned to ride the wave of their psychic connection and could find Lydia anywhere in the world. Between that and secretly keeping an eye on Lydia through her mirrors, he became the shadow in her life she never knew was there, protecting and loving her from afar. His 30-year vigil had begun.

This journal dovetails into a Beetlejuice fanfiction epic that I'm posting chapter by chapter here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63522586/chapters/162777649

Chapter 32 "Across the threshold" is now up.

[sayit3x]

Mrs. Juice’s Journal #36

**Trigger Warning** 

This journal entry contains references to suicide, which may be a difficult topic for some readers. You’re not alone, and help, hope, and healing are always possible. If you or someone you care about is struggling with thoughts of suicide or a mental health crisis, please reach out through these confidential resources. There are compassionate people ready to listen and support you right now:

National Crisis and Suicide Lifeline:

Call or text **988** anytime in the US and Canada. In the UK, you can call **111**

Crisis Text Line:

Text **HOME** to **741741** from anywhere in the US, anytime, about any type of crisis

The Trevor Project for LGBTQ youth: 

Call **1-866-488-7386** or text **START** to **678-678**

Astrid's birth in 2007 was the catalyst for a new direction in Betelgeuse and Lydia’s futures, specifically their careers. After Delia's wise advice back in 1991, Betel knew he had to expand beyond freelancing as a bio-exorcist. He’d been gearing up for a while, and once Astrid arrived, it was time to put his plan into action. But it all hinged upon the slow-turning ship of Neitherworld bureaucracy.

Cruelly, suicide victims are compelled to become civil servants somewhere in the afterlife’s administrative process, as receptionists, guides, or other roles across many departments. With service durations of a millenia or more, caseworkers like Juno are among the oldest ghosts in the Neitherworld, having climbed the ranks for an absurdly long time. After all, they had to learn the ins and outs of the afterlife and demonstrate that they knew the Handbook by heart. That being said, caseworkers have always been overworked.

When our family died in the middle ages, Earth’s population was around a mere 350 million people. It had been higher, but the devastation of the black plague killed nearly a quarter of everyone in Europe. Back then, caseworkers already struggled to keep up with demand, especially when wars, famine, and other mass tragedies regularly plunged a huge number of newlydeads into the Neitherworld at once. Yet, the struggle of daily life was so challenging that it didn't take much to push regular people past their breaking point, leading the unfortunate to voluntarily leave their mortal coils behind.

Such a choice meant there were often new civil servants cycling in and being trained to help handle the unending barrage of paperwork. Therefore, the ones who'd been around a while could start training to become caseworkers. The bureaucratic engine of the afterlife was brittle, yet functional for the population at the time, even if it sadly depended on a steady stream of incoming suicides. But by 2007, the living population had swollen to 6.7 billion people, nearly 20 times what it'd been a mere 650 years before. As such, waiting room delays got longer and longer, to the point that what used to take months in the 1980’s could now easily take a year. And, from a purely bureaucratic point of view, things were only getting worse for the dead even if they improved for the living.

When suicide prevention measures were implemented topside in the 20th century, dedicated resources, hotlines, and better psychological support caused suicides to (thankfully) fall. However, at the dawn of the 21st century, in certain regions (like the US) suicides actually began increasing. Many factors contributed to this shift, but, frustratingly, suicide rates rose fastest among marginalized communities and adolescents. Most were impossibly young to work in administration, let alone hang in there long enough to be caseworkers. Not that the powers that be didn't at first try to force them to work, but the results were always disastrous. Children, no matter the era, shouldn't have to grow up so fast or shepherd adults, whether that's in the living world or the Neitherworld.

The afterlife’s perpetual labor shortage was probably why the powers that be never invested in addressing their dirty little secret – mislabelled suicides. They needed the manpower and dug their claws into whoever they could get. They even started conscripting those who'd died far from home, trapping them with the promise of shorter services than typical suicides and relocation back beneath their cities of origin. Newlydeads were no longer safe from government work, even if they didn't take their own lives.

But even changing the rules didn't fix the backlog. Caseworker strikes became common, but things rarely improved and the threat of longer services typically brought the rebellious back in line. Some ghosts could clone themselves to try and fill the gaps, but those who could were few and far between, and such heroics take a lot of magic, followed by a lot of rest, to maintain. They needed another solution and the ever clever Betelgeuse had a proposal up his sleeve.

Betel was the one who pitched the idea of the Afterlife Call Center in the first place. As a former guide himself, he knew that many questions from newlydeads weren't important enough to warrant a visit with a caseworker. Most of the time, fresh ghosts just needed a not-so-gentle reminder to “read the damn Handbook” where they’d find answers to most of their beginner questions. But as attention spans shrank (thanks, Internet), people’s disdain for reading instructions grew exponentially, and they just wanted to ask questions instead. The Call Center became Tier 1 support for fielding questions, only filtering ones worth a caseworker’s time up to the right person. 

At first, Betel just cloned himself to man the phone lines, but that barely lasted a week before he reached his limit, getting into screaming matches with stubborn newlydeads. After that, he hired shrunken head men, or “shrinkers,” to man the phones. He initially turned to shrinkers because they couldn’t talk back to him with their lips traditionally sewn shut. But Betel had spent so many centuries learning new languages, he couldn’t help but understand them over time, even when it just sounded like wordless mumbling to everyone else. He definitely developed a favorite, Bob, who became his loyal assistant manager.

While on the surface, the call center served to help the bureaucracy, in truth, it was the heart of Betel’s growing bio-exorcism business. Newlydeads would call complaining about their circumstances and with Betel's excellent hearing, he'd pick out the conversations that interested him and offer his services as a bio-exorcist instead. It was a win-win-win. The call center gave the powers that be a pressure release valve for the caseworker shortage, and Betel got the stability of a desk job (just like Delia suggested) as well as a regular flow of potential clients for his bio-exorcism business. And, soon, it proved to be a way to help Lydia, too.

Before Lydia was far along in her pregnancy, her freelance photography helped her and Richard maintain a comfortable, though far from lavish, lifestyle. Now with Lydia at home watching baby Astrid, they were relying on Richard's work as an environmental activist to make ends meet. But being a new parent is expensive, and Lydia was frequently turning to her parents to fill in the gaps. Her parents were happy to help and certainly didn't suffer for it, especially when Delia's career as an artist was finally starting to pick up. Yet Lydia was embarrassed, not wanting to get comfortable accepting their generosity and set a less-than-ideal example for Astrid. She longed to do freelance photography again, but couldn't travel like she used to with Astrid in tow, and scheduling conflicts with Richard often kept her home. Even when she stayed local to capture images of New York rallies, she struggled to reclaim her notoriety as a photographer in a landscape where nearly everyone now had a camera in their pocket. The world was going digital and competing with the speed of the internet, even with Lydia’s undeniably higher quality shots, was a disheartening challenge.

Betel saw how frustrated Lydia was that she couldn't return to what she loved, though she never blamed Astrid or Richard or loved them any less. She just seemed unfulfilled in a way that the rewards of motherhood couldn't touch. It was like she needed something that was purely hers, and an idea hit Betel like lightning. He'd noticed that the most challenging cases that came into his call center were from new ghosts who waffled in their motivation to haunt, unsure what to do with their above ground tenants. And Betel knew just the woman who wanted the living and the dead to get along and had even found a loophole that helped two newlydeads move on. Lydia was the perfect person to help these wavering ghosts and Betel just had to find a way to funnel them to her.

Luckily a little intervention from Delia solved that problem. As one of the few people who knew Lydia could see ghosts, it was Delia's idea to film her mediating with one that was haunting a Manhattan gallery Delia was trying to land. It made for quite a riveting video, with the ghost throwing paintings and sculptures across the room until Lydia finally talked him down. Though Delia promised not to post the footage on her own Facebook feed, she did post it to Lydia's. And that was all Betel needed, along with his compellingly written pitch for how a full-blown show could work, to get the attention of the man who would become Lydia's producer on Ghost House. 

After that, Betel quietly sent call center cases he personally screened to the studio, and nothing dangerous ever made it to her producer’s desk. Suddenly, Ghost House was a success and Lydia and Richard’s financial troubles were solved. As it turns out, Betel reaped rewards, too. Between his desk job, bio-exorcism gigs, and rewards from ghosts who mediated with Lydia, he finally saved up enough to outright buy the plot of land his Roadhouse sat on from his landlord. And just like that, he, Jacques, and Ginger would never have to pay rent again, and Lydia would always have a safe place to come back to if she ever returned.

This journal dovetails into a Beetlejuice fanfiction epic I’ve written here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63522586/chapters/162777649

[sayit3x]

Finally getting around to adding illustrations for these journal entries, starting with Betelgeuse's (and Donatello's) births in 1313 and Betel's death in 1350.

Mrs. Bea Juice's Journal - #1

When Betelgeuse was born, I knew he was going to be a handful. Too small, so pale, and struggling to breathe. Life would not be kind to him. The midwife we scrimped and saved to afford didn't think he'd last the night. Nat was beside himself with worry, practically mourning already. But I also knew, with every fiber of my being, my Betelgeuse was a survivor. And, despite his little body trying to defy him, he lived. His soul burned with the brightness of the star he was named for, and nothing would dim it.

Even years later, after I was already long dead, holding my son's sweating, emaciated hand through the veil, rubbing it like I did so often when he was sick as a child, I knew he'd survive. The black death that was ravaging our village and so many others tried to take him. I'd already been gone nearly 20 years by then, but I couldn't leave my first born's side. I'd watched the years of his solitude, his struggle since being isolated by my death, everything horrible he'd had to do to stay alive in a time and place not meant for children. The cruelty of it tried to consume him, tried to break him, but it couldn't. It only further broke and hardened his already shattered heart.

So when he was on death's door again, fighting the plague that had taken his neighbors, his whores, the people he'd cheated at cards that he knew weren't his friends, I took his hand again, like I did so many times when fever tried to kill him as a child. And I gave him the same massage that always pulled him into sleep so he could rest enough to break the fever. The fevers were so overpowering when he was young. He was never conscious, always groaning, unseeing, unable to hear my reassurances that everything would be alright. But I knew he could feel my hands, strengthened by the labor that had always fed us just enough, touching his, willing him to pull through one more time. He always did, and he would again.

But the plague ravaged him worse than the years of drinking, stealing, and fighting ever did. It was agony watching my beautiful boy retching up blood with so many of those boils bursting open on his face and body. My adoring Betelgeuse, aching, weeping, and alone. But, like on the night he was born, he fought to survive against impossible odds. And he did.

He was such a good survivor, he might have ended up a village elder, were he not poisoned by his own desperation to be loved. I'll be first to say, I didn't enjoy watching him chop up that soul sucking witch with that axe. But I was glad my boy killed his murderer so I didn't have to. I never liked violence, and watching the things my son had to turn into made my heart bleed for him every time, but I understood it. I understood what it takes to stay alive in a dog eat dog world eager to crush you underfoot. I held his hand while he was dying, too, though that time, I don't know if he could feel it. His poisoned death throws were so violent. But, even still, I think he knew I was there. Because his last, sighing word on this earth was, "Ma..."

This journal dovetails into a fanfiction epic that I'm posting chapter by chapter every week here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/63522586/chapters/162777649

[sayit3x]

Mrs. Juice's Journal #35

In 1995, Betel secretly watched Lydia graduate from college, ready to pursue a career in photography. Although she still loved fashion design and returned to it occasionally for fun, her camera had always been closer to her heart. Delia agreed with her decision, knowing Lydia could start getting freelance work right away, rather than face the uphill battle of breaking into the competitive world of fashion. It didn't hurt that Delia wanted to be Lydia's first client, and paid her handsomely to photograph her art. Photography was the right call for the person Lydia had become without Betelgeuse. This "new" Lydia struggled with anxiety, and the high pressure environment of fashion would have only aggravated it. After The Worsener took her memories of their friendship, Lydia didn't know that as a teen she'd already opened a clothing store with Betel that ultimately found roaring success in the Neitherworld. The old Lydia could have thrived as a fashion designer, whereas this new Lydia would have drowned.

Thankfully, the economy was booming by the time Lydia graduated, and freelance photography opportunities were plentiful. The variety of the work helped sharpen her eye further and demand for her skill grew. A steady flow of clients allowed her to live in New York, rather than move back in with her parents in Winter River. Success also let her be more selective about the clients she took on, which publications she’d sell her prints to, and what subjects she covered. Still the noble girl Betel remembered, Lydia photographed rallies for causes she cared about, like humanitarian efforts, animal rights, and environmentalism, and her camera took her all over the country capturing protests on film. But sometimes rallies could become unruly, even dangerous, when tensions with police or counter-protesters flared, and Betel worried. He knew that if something happened at a rally or anywhere else, The Worsener’s contract prevented him from directly stepping in to protect Lydia if she needed it. His concern was suddenly validated on a crisp, fall morning when America was collectively traumatized.

Lydia was in her Manhattan apartment, finishing her morning preparations and about to leave for the day, when the first plane struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex on September 11, 2001. Back then, news about death on that scale traveled faster in the Neitherworld than in the living world, and the moment Betel heard about the first tragedy seconds after it happened, he called me and we raced to Lydia’s apartment. Trying not to panic, Betel reluctantly stayed on our side of the veil, watching me go topside invisibly through Lydia’s mirror. Although he couldn’t risk directly interfering with Lydia’s environment, I was bound by no such restrictions, which is exactly why he’d brought me along. 

I stayed invisible and broke the lock on Lydia’s front door, effectively trapping her inside. Not yet knowing what dangers were so close, she yanked and pounded on the door, screaming for help from her neighbors. Unbeknownst to her, I muffled the sound of her cries so they never reached beyond her apartment. I couldn’t afford a neighbor breaking down her door and releasing her into the wild. When she stormed to her windows to climb down the fire escape, I locked those down tight, too. She yelled in frustration, still unaware of the catastrophic historical event taking place in her city.

When she got on the phone to call her landlord, I turned on her television and the local news came on right away, already showing footage of the first devastating crash into the North Tower. She stilled and sat on the floor in front of the TV, appalled and riveted, and it seemed to dawn on her that a spectral force was keeping her inside for her own protection. But as a successful photographer who'd made a career out of news, it was obvious she still wanted to escape, not wanting to miss capturing history with her camera. While her dedication was admirable, there was no way I was letting her out until we knew what was happening. And if danger came for her, Betel and I agreed I’d get her to safety somehow. I’d planned to whisk her back home to Winter River if necessary, but was prepared to bring her to the Neitherworld if I had to, even if that meant risking punishment for breaking the rules.

When the second plane struck the South Tower, not even seventeen minutes after the first crash, Lydia's hands flew over her mouth. Watching the fire and smoke consume the buildings on her television, she was understandably now less eager to leave her apartment. And when the towers came down, she was freshly horrified, and wept. Though phone lines were quickly getting overwhelmed, Delia’s call from Winter River managed to come through and Lydia was immediately relieved to hear her stepmother’s voice. She told Delia about how she’d been trapped in her apartment, how she thought that the Maitlands were protecting her somehow, even though she’d helped them move on when she was a teen. Delia, being the only living person who knew about Lydia’s friendship with Betelgeuse and the contract with The Worsener, probably guessed that it was Betel protecting Lydia, just like he’d promised when they said goodbye in 1991. But as agreed, Delia kept their history a secret from Lydia, and just went along with Lydia’s assumption about the Maitland’s intervention instead.

After the danger of the devastating attack had finally passed and I released Lydia from her apartment, she immediately went home to Winter River. She stayed for weeks, grounding herself with her family and memories of the Maitlands, while Betel remained on our side of the veil, not wanting to risk her somehow finding him in the model. Luckily, the years that followed weren’t anywhere near as eventful, and Lydia resumed her photography, traveling where her camera led her as soon as she learned about a rally online. 

Even after the dot com bubble had burst, the internet was becoming more widely accessible, and suddenly the pace of life began changing rapidly. After Facebook was founded in 2004, "social" started to mean something different than it had for hundreds of years. The hyper-connected future was on the horizon and racing towards humanity fast. But platforms like Facebook made it easier for Lydia to keep an ear to the digital ground about upcoming protests and events, so she was often first on the scene to get the best shots.

It was at such a rally that she met Richard, an activist passionate about fighting climate change and preserving the environment, who’d helped organize the event. Apparently, Lydia had been something of an environmental activist herself when she was a teen. According to Betel, she’d once tied herself to a gnarly old tree (that she’d lovingly nicknamed Spooky) to block the town from cutting it down to widen the road. Ultimately, Betel brought the tree to life so they could escort it on a walk to the park, where it rerooted itself. 

So it was no wonder that she and Richard hit it off, especially when they discovered their mutual love of classic horror films. Betel felt Lydia’s joy and relief at finally finding someone who shared her interests, someone who really cared about her. Richard wasn’t put off by Lydia’s strange and unusual nature, even if he didn’t necessarily believe she could actually see ghosts after she finally shared that detail with him. He loved and supported her just the same. And this time, Betel’s sense about people didn’t trip any alarms when it came to Richard. It became clear how much the man cared about Lydia, and Betel resolved not to get in the way of her happiness, though it gutted him watching her walk down the aisle and into Richard’s arms. Needless to say, after Lydia’s wedding, Betel and I returned to Japan for a few weeks as he reconciled wanting the love of his life to be happy, even if it was with somebody else.

When Lydia found out she was pregnant, Betel knew before Richard did. He felt her joy, her exhilaration, and after her bliss passed, her trepidation and fear about whether she’d be a good mother. Her own mother had left her and Charles when she was still young, and it took a long time before she formed a bond with Delia, so she didn’t exactly have the best examples growing up of what stable, nurturing motherhood looked like. Concerns about whether she could even carry the baby to term further fueled her anxiety. Knowing she would be giving birth at 35, she worried she was bordering on too old to have children and was running out of time. Betel, on the other hand, had no doubt that Lydia would be a great mom and his only worry was about Lydia’s health and the health of her baby. When she got pregnant, he started researching pregnancy and all the things that could go wrong, to the point where he was asking ghosts who’d died during childbirth about their complications. 

He and I talked a lot about Lydia’s pregnancy as it progressed, as he was feeling more and more of not only her emotions, but also her physical state. Her morning sickness hit him particularly hard. Betel had always been proud of his ability to negotiate hangovers without tossing his cookies and yet found himself praying to the porcelain god frequently until she was safely in her fifteenth week. He found her cravings for bizarre food combinations surprisingly odd, which was really saying something for a guy that eats bugs at the drop of a hat. By her ninth month, he may as well have been pregnant himself for all the discomfort he felt through her. Then, the day finally came in 2007 when Lydia’s water broke during an all-night Mario Bava horror fest in the middle of “Kill, Baby… Kill!”

As soon as he felt Lydia’s adrenaline racing when her water broke, Betel called me and we followed them to the hospital, where Betel and I observed from the other side of the mirror in Lydia’s room. Delia and Charles were traveling, so we knew it would be just Richard at Lydia’s side. When Lydia’s contractions started, Betel was initially just breathing through it, as if it were any normal cramp. But by the third hour, he was on the floor in agony, feeling Lydia’s pain as it grew. Thank God he’d been watching her through her birthing classes and at least knew how to breathe properly. If my son weren’t writhing and yelling through gritted teeth, I would have found the whole situation, a man intimately understanding what labor was like, amusing. He held my hand tight as he lay on the floor, shaking and sweating as he suffered through each excruciating contraction, knowing Lydia was feeling the same. The longer it went on as the hours passed, the more anxious Lydia, and therefore Betelgeuse, became, worrying something was wrong.

“Why is this taking so long?” Betel gritted out.

“It takes as long as it takes, Betel. Stay calm, keep breathing.”

“Uggghhh! How long were you– Christ!” he clenched his teeth at another contraction until he remembered to breathe. “...in labor, Ma?”

“We didn’t exactly have the means to tell perfect time back then, but I remember it was summer. My water broke in a field in the morning, and by the time you and Donny were born, the stars were out and Orion shone above us. I focused on your star, which had only recently been named, as you came into the world.”

“As– aaaack! …beautiful as that story was, that still means you were doin’ this for over 12 hours!”

“Well, there were two of you, as much as Donny was a surprise.”

“Wait, wha–!” He choked on his question as another contraction hit.

“Mmhmm. I wasn’t as big around as you’d expect for someone having twins, probably because you were so small when you were born. So we didn’t know until Donatello arrived that he was even there. That’s how he got his name, “little gift,” since he was given to us unexpectedly.”

“Huh… I always wondered why our names were so– gaaah! …different.” He paused, trying to breathe through the pain. “How long’s it been now?”

“Only 10 hours. This could go on for a whole day, maybe more.”

“A day?!” He looked at me like I’d just told him the world was ending. “Ma, she’s already terrified. Didn’t those Lamaze weirdos say stress makes this take longer?”

“Yes, it can. They’ll probably give her an epidural if the pain is making her more stressed.”

“She won’t take it. She’s afraid of needles–aaaAAH!”

Hearing that, I had to control my reaction to keep Betel calm. Lydia could still get through labor without an epidural, but it would be more challenging if her pain, and therefore her stress, were drawing the process out. I’d noticed her disproportionate discomfort when they put in her IV, but hadn’t thought much of it. The longer her labor continued, the more she probably thought they’d want to give her an epidural, which probably made her that much more anxious. It was a vicious cycle of pain and fear, spiraling into a longer labor. There were only so many safe alternatives that didn’t involve needles, and I wasn’t sure if Lydia was aware of her options. 

“Ma, something’s wrong. Now she’s even more scared. I think she’s alone.”

I left Betel’s side for a moment to peek through the mirror into Lydia’s room. I could hear Richard’s voice drifting away beyond the door, having just left to take a call from Delia. Lydia needed reassurance and I had an idea.

“Betel, Richard’s outside on the phone with Delia. I’d like to go talk to Lydia.” I snapped my fingers and my outfit changed to that of a nurse. “She won’t know who I am, I can just be a nurse who died of a heart attack on the job.”

“GO! I’ll be fine!” He let out another grunting wail.

I scoffed with a smirk. “As if I’d leave you like this.” 

I quickly cloned myself, splitting my consciousness between the me that would go to Lydia’s bedside and the me that sat back down on the floor and took Betel’s hand again. The second me crossed the veil and entered Lydia’s room, knowing she would be the only one who saw me whenever Richard returned. Her eyes were clenched tight when I materialized, so she hadn’t seen me arrive so suddenly. After I cleared my throat, she opened her eyes. Seeing my nursing scrubs, she seemed relieved, perhaps that she wasn’t alone anymore, and her shoulders relaxed ever so slightly. I approached her bed and knelt to be eye level with her.

“Good evening, dear,” I began. “It seems you’re having quite a day. How are you feeling?”

She winced, as did Betel on the other side of the veil, at a (thankfully) small contraction. “Great,” she gritted out and resumed breathing.

Lifting an eyebrow at her, I tilted my head with my best sarcastic skepticism, and she seemed to know I didn’t believe her. I let my face show my deep care and concern as I said, as sincerely as I could, “You don’t have to be brave for me or anyone else. I’ve had two children, I know how hard this is. Please, be honest. How are you really?”

She paused, still breathing, but she blinked rapidly as tears began to form until they were spilling down her cheeks. “I’m so scared,” she whispered, and her words tumbled out as she breathed through her pain. “Everything hurts and it’s taking so long, but I don’t want an epidural and…” 

I could tell another contraction was coming on and I offered her my hand, which she took and squeezed just as Betel squeezed the other me’s hand across the veil. When her contraction passed, I met her gaze and made my expression gentle and reassuring.

“You don’t have to have an epidural. Laughing gas would take the edge off and it’d be safe for you and your baby.”

Lydia’s eyes widened at the sudden hope on the horizon. Whether she’d learned about laughing gas during her Lamaze classes or not, she’d clearly not been thinking about it as an option.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

I smiled softly. “You’re welcome, dear.”

Just then, Richard walked in and Lydia’s face lit up. The other me saw the relief in Betel’s expression that was rushing from her to him.

“Man, I don’t know where Delia is, but her reception is terrible,” Richard said as he took his seat next to Lydia’s bed opposite me.

“Richard, this great nurse just reminded me–” she grunted through another contraction “–I could get laughing gas instead of an epidural.”

“Oh, that’s right! How’d I forget that?” Richard began. “What nurse? I must’ve missed them.”

“She’s…”

Lydia’s face fell and her head whipped to me, but I smiled reassuringly with my finger over my lips, signalling this was a secret between us. Realizing I was a ghost, Lydia understood and her face calmed as she changed course.

“She was only here for a second and got called away. Could you go ask for the laughing gas, please?”

“Sure, sweetie. I’ll be right back.” 

Richard rose again and left the room, on the hunt for a (living) nurse. Once he was gone, Lydia’s gaze met mine. 

“You’re dead?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

Thankfully, I’d become a better liar as a ghost than I’d ever been alive. “Mmhmm. You’d think having a heart attack in a hospital would make me a shoe in for survival. Didn’t pan out that way, unfortunately.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and another contraction made her and Betel clench their teeth until they both breathed through it.

“Don’t be. It was nobody’s fault, and now I get to watch the miracle of life happen every day.”

She smiled weakly, exhausted from hours of discomfort. Richard returned with an actual nurse in tow, who had the laughing gas and mask prepped for Lydia. Inhaling her first breath, she was immediately less anxious, and her grip on my hand loosened while the medication took the edge off her pain. Even some of Betel’s tension started to leave his body. 

Richard’s phone rang again. It was Delia calling back, so he stepped out of the room to give her an update now that Lydia's pain seemed more manageable. The nurse followed him out, leaving Lydia and I alone again. She was almost euphoric with the laughing gas, and for a moment she stared at me, seeming puzzled.

Her voice was soft when she said, “You look so familiar.”

Uh oh. I knew there was no way she actually remembered me, so I wasn’t sure where this was going. Thank goodness my poker face was well honed. 

“I get that a lot,” I casually replied, still gently smiling.

“No… you look like him.”

I stilled slightly, but carried on as if her observation hadn’t caught me off guard. “Like who, dear?”

“You wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

I leaned in, wearing a gentle smirk, trying to convey my confidence that nothing she could say would possibly disturb me. “Try me.”

She took a breath in her mask, taking in more gas. “You remind me of a ghost I met once.”

Ah. She was noticing the family resemblance. That was easy enough to play off and feign ignorance, so I smirked and chuckled softly. “I don't know whether to interpret that as a compliment.”

She was suddenly flummoxed and tripped over her words when they all tried to come out at once.

“No, I didn't mean– You're lovely, it's just–  He was… dirty and there was moss and…” She was getting agitated trying to explain herself and stress was the last thing she needed.

I smiled at her reassuringly. “It's alright, dear, it’s alright. I think I understand. I'll take it as a compliment.”

That seemed to calm her. “Only my parents know. I've never told anyone else about him.”

“Why not?”

“He tried to marry me when I was sixteen.”

I raised my eyebrows in a convincing enough expression of surprise. “There must be quite a story behind that. He sounds like quite a scoundrel.”

“He was…” She paused, but after another inhale of the gas, continued, “...but he kept his word.”

Again, I had to control my face, trying to contain my joy at the implication of my eldest son’s honor. As Betel’s mother and witness to the person he’d become by Lydia's own influence, I felt the urge to defend him and explain his behavior, but I dared not. This conversation was beginning to dance into dangerous territory. Although I didn't want to stop her from talking, I had to be mindful that she was heavily influenced by the nitrous oxide. And I couldn't risk warming her up to Betelgeuse before the thirty years were up when we were only halfway through. If she found the courage to summon him early, she'd be back in coma, with The Worsener’s contract violated, and would likely die. Instead, I'd have to do the opposite and reinforce her wariness of him in a way I knew would stick. Motherhood.

“Even if it’s as you say, you’ll be a mother soon. The world will feel much scarier when all you care about is protecting your child.”

Her eyes widened slightly, and I continued. “Are you having a girl or a boy?”

“A girl.”

“Even more so, then.”

Another contraction hit her and she grimaced, clutching my hand tight, and when it passed, she looked at me.

“Will you stay?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

If the laughing gas weren't doing such a good job, I doubt she would have asked me to stay with her. But I smiled and nodded, not about to turn her down in her time of need. “I’ll be here for as long as you'd like.”

Suddenly, her contractions increased in intensity and frequency. Luckily, Richard returned, taking her other hand, as the nurse and doctor came in to check her progress. But there was a problem. After an ultrasound, they determined the baby was turned the wrong way and they'd need to physically rotate her to get her in the right position. If they couldn't, a C-section would be necessary and the thought made Lydia's anxiety soar, even with the laughing gas. The doctor manipulated the baby through her belly, which was clearly uncomfortable for Lydia, but couldn't get the baby in the “launch position” properly, and gave up. They left the room to get everything they'd need for a C-section and Lydia began to squirm.

“Ma, she's tryin’ not to freak out, but she's right on the edge of a panic attack,” Betel told me, wide eyed as his anxiety shot up with hers.

Watching Lydia's heart rate and blood pressure climb on the monitors, I could tell Betel was right. Richard was gently telling her to stay calm, but when has that ever worked?

“Do you really not want a C-section that badly?” I asked her carefully.

Rather than talk to me in front of Richard, she shook her head violently as a “no” and clenched her teeth through another contraction. I suddenly flashed to the day Betel nearly scared Pope Leo X to death with a heart attack in 1515, and how I coached him through squeezing the man's heart in his chest until it beat properly on its own. 

I took a breath. “Lydia… there's something I could do to help so you could still give birth naturally.”

She looked at me with a question in her eyes, desperate.

“I could… pass my hands through your belly and turn the baby. It'll probably be just as uncomfortable, but more accurate than the doctor could ever manage.”

Her eyes went wide. To her, we were strangers and she had no reason to trust me, whether I was supposedly a nurse or not. I wouldn't pressure her either way, but quietly hoped she'd let me help her. Finally, she gave me a tiny, inconspicuous nod.

“She'll do it,” Betel said to the other me. “She's scared, but she wants to believe it'll work.”

I nodded back to Lydia. “Remember to breathe and take as much gas as you need,” I told her as I let her hand go and rose to my feet. 

Reaching down, I phased my hands through Lydia's belly until I felt her little girl, definitely turned the wrong way. Lydia's eyes clamped shut and she bit back a wail as I gently, carefully rotated her baby. Richard noticed the shape of Lydia's belly change like it did when the doctor made their doomed attempt, and his eyes got a little wider watching their baby seemingly turn on its own. Finally, she was facing the proper direction, ready to launch. I removed my hands cleanly and Lydia panted with relief.

“What just happened?” Richard asked hesitantly.

Lydia managed to choke out, “Baby turned, she's ready,” before her contractions started in earnest again. It was time.

The doctor and nurses returned, confused as to how the baby had managed to rotate, but were just as happy not to have to do a C-section. Meanwhile, Betel wailed and Lydia took heavily to the gas, breathing through the worst of it, until she felt the need to push.

“Holy SHIT!” Betel yelled. 

“Dammit, Betel, breathe!” I snapped back, gripping his hand as Lydia gripped mine. My encouragement to Lydia was much more polite.

“I hate Richard so much right now!” he barked.

“Is that how you feel or how Lydia feels?” I asked sarcastically.

“BOTH! AAAHHH!”

Luckily, for both Lydia and Betel, it wasn’t long until another cry filled the room, and little Astrid was born. When the nurse put her in Lydia’s arms, Betel was overwhelmed with the astoundingly deep adoration she immediately felt for Astrid. With tears in his eyes, he suddenly understood how a parent’s love for their child was profoundly different than anything else he’d ever experienced. And when I saw Astrid for the first time, with a tiny tuft of midnight fuzz on her head, I flashed back to a morning subway ride in 1973, when Betel and I encountered a sleeping woman and her baby, also with raven black hair, who saw Betel perfectly and adored him immediately. 

The me at Betel’s side softly gasped. “My word…” I whispered, still holding his hand. With such startling evidence at how small the world had suddenly become, perhaps there was such a thing as destiny after all.

“What?” Betel whimpered, wrestling with tears of joy and relief now that Astrid had come into the world. 

“I'll tell you later,” I answered, while the me at Lydia’s side congratulated her and took my leave.

Luckily, that was the only time Betelgeuse felt Lydia’s physical state or shared her pain, though we never understood why it happened in the first place.

This journal dovetails into a Beetlejuice fanfiction epic here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63522586/chapters/162777649

The final chapter, "A new afterlife" is now up.

[sayit3x]

Mrs. Juice’s Journal #34

When Betel missed our monthly outing, I knew something was wrong. Lydia had just finished her freshman year in college and was about to go back to Winter River for summer break. She’d been dating a boy for a few months, and Betel had handled that about as well as I expected him to. 

At the beginning of Lydia's new relationship, Betel and I went back to Japan briefly so he could take the time he needed to adjust. I suggested he consider journaling to give himself a safe space to unload all his feelings over the next 30 years. He initially scoffed at the idea, as if the Ghost with the Most would ever do something as pathetic as journaling, but I was certain there were things he wouldn’t talk about, not even with me, that needed to get out of him. Before I headed to the kitchen to make our meal, I left him in his room with a pen and an empty journal bearing an image of Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” on the cover. Later when I went to fetch him, the door was ajar and I thought I heard his pen scratching away at the journal's paper before I knocked. The journal was closed, pen down, when he answered the door, but I hoped he’d been exploring a new, healthy outlet. Perhaps he was, because this time it only took a few weeks before Betel got ahold of himself and we returned home.

Up to that point, he’d been watching Lydia balance her time on classes, trying to make friends, and gradually get closer to this boy that got her attention, until he finally asked her out. This new, Betel-less Lydia was so much less confident than she'd been before she lost her memories. She still loved the strange and unusual, with black still dominating her wardrobe, but she tried to hide her true self in ways that Betelgeuse could tell were crushing her. Enduring the sacrifices she made trying to fit in, she even pretended not to see ghosts when she'd occasionally encounter them on campus or in town. 

Her boyfriend was a pretty normal kid. Not a jock, not a fellow goth, just… average. Naturally, Betel immediately didn’t like him, but it went beyond simple jealousy. His instincts were screaming at him that this kid was no good. Luckily, not in the dangerous way that Henry (her first date in highschool) had been. But Betel’s heightened sense about people told him that this new boy wasn’t actually interested in her, that he didn’t really care about her. And it felt to Betel like Lydia was hiding who she was to keep his attention, the opposite of how she was with Henry before he gave her that life-altering concussion. She never talked about her spooky interests with her new beau and barely talked about her photography or fashion design classes. She just seemed to adapt herself to fit his interests, his hobbies, his goals. It was like she'd lost sight of who she was, or no longer had the confidence to unabashedly embrace what she loved in front of other people, not even her boyfriend.

Betel knew what Lydia was doing to herself was wrong, but he remembered how depressed she’d been when she was alone before they became close. How she'd been suicidal. How desperate she was to just be normal, to have friends. To not be lonely anymore. So he understood her decision, even if he fundamentally didn’t agree with it. But watching her silently clip her own wings like that killed him. Still, what choice did he have? Betelgeuse wouldn’t leave Lydia, no matter what.

But when he didn't show up on the day of our monthly visit, it was clear something had happened. Betel hadn't sought me out, so I knew it wasn't an emergency like that fateful day he signed the contract with The Worsener. By the next morning when I still hadn't heard from him, I went to find him, starting at the Roadhouse. But Jacques and Ginger knew nothing, nor did the Monster Across the Street. I checked in with Iyam in case Betel had gotten himself thrown in jail again, but they hadn't seen him either. Where could he have gone? I realized there was one place I hadn't checked – the model in the attic at the Deetz house in Winter River. 

I teleported to the graveyard in the model and floated down through the fake grass and cardboard to Betel's underground apartment. But I couldn't find him, even after a thorough inspection. Strange, I was so sure he'd be there. I closed my eyes and telepathically reached for him. I found his mind asleep, but waking, and I could sense he was close. I could even hear tacky music through his ears, playing in the background around him. Ah. If he was nearby and the music was this tasteless, I suddenly had a strong suspicion of where he was, and he hadn't been there in years. Oh dear.

I floated back up to the model’s surface and walked steadfast to Dante's Inferno. I'd never been there before, but had heard a few things from Betel. How it had just appeared one night during an argument with the Maitlands back in 1988. 

Once I stepped into the dimly lit space, I expected the girls to solicit me, to see me as a potential customer, but they left me alone. Oddly, they didn't even acknowledge when I walked into the building, like I wasn't even there. It was as if I were a ghost, even to them. It was peculiar to say the least. I went to the bar first and stood in front of the voluptuous bartender, who was cleaning a glass mindlessly, her eyes open but far away, unseeing. I tried to get her attention politely, but she ignored me. Finally, I waved my hand in front of her face, but her eyes didn't track the movement at all. She really didn't see me. It wasn't until another scantily clad girl came over that the bartender perked up and looked at the girl immediately. The new girl asked for the “hair of the dog” for their “favorite customer” and the bartender got to work right away. Even the scantily clad waitress didn't notice me at all, and once she got her order, she walked away with me a moment behind her. I had a good guess as to who their “favorite customer” was.

Walking through a beaded curtain towards the back, I found Betel hungover, but now awake, sitting on a stained, red velvet couch (ew) staring at the ceiling with girls fawning all over him. The waitress served Betel his drink and left, revealing me in her wake. In his hungover haze, he didn't even seem surprised to see me.

“Hey, Ma. Wanna drink?”

“It's a bit early for me, but maybe later.”

“Is it time for our visit?”

“I'm afraid it's morning, Betel. You missed our visit, and it doesn't look good on paper. The Ghost with the Most standing up his own mother to spend the night in a whorehouse.”

He shut his eyes, quietly cursed, and exhaled.

I continued, “I know that's not really you, so what happened?”

He paused, and finally opened his eyes. “Let's go outside.”

He rose and the girls whimpered pathetically, pawing at him not to go.

“Now, now, girls. The adults hafta go talk, so y'all stay put and don't get your pretty little panties in a twist,” he said.

Of course I was very aware of my eldest son’s notorious reputation with women, but I seldom witnessed it firsthand. Ew. That being firmly said, it was amazing to observe how differently he behaved with women he actually cared about, like Lydia and me. He led me up to Dante's balcony and plopped into an old lawn chair, snapping his fingers to bring a chair into being for me, and I took my seat across from him as he told me about the night before.

Apparently, Lydia’s dorm roommate had already gone home for summer break, and Lydia's boyfriend stayed over for the first time. Even though Betelgeuse walked away from the mirror, overwhelmed with sorrow and envy, he couldn't figure out how to shut down their connection right away. As Betel scrambled to put psychic distance between him and Lydia, the boy finally got Lydia into bed with him, and Betel had felt her excitement and fear at just the thought of her first time. Betelgeuse was finally able to shut their psychic connection down in time before the act itself took place, but it was enough that he knew where things were headed. And it brought him back to Dante’s, drunk out of his mind, brimming with desire and anguish, hating himself. Worse, when Lydia woke, she’d found the boy gone. Apparently, he'd snuck out of her room while she slept and now wasn't answering her calls. As the kids say these days, he'd ghosted her and Betel felt her deep sadness and self loathing, realizing how she'd just been used after giving this boy something so precious. 

Even though he knew it was impossible, Betel couldn’t help thinking how, if only things had been different, he would have treated her so much better. Needless to say, Betelgeuse was a mess. We resolved to head back to Japan, but Betel wanted another drink before we left. Wandering back downstairs, he led us to the bar and approached the bartender. Again, the young woman only had eyes for him and ignored me completely.

“Betel, I don't mean to sound indelicate and I'm definitely not interested, but… what's wrong with these girls?”

Betel gawked at me, wide eyed and shocked that I would say something so rude within earshot of the girls themselves. After a moment, he regained his composure and answered, “Well, probably a combo of poor life choices and daddy issues.”

I rolled my eyes. “That's not what I meant. They're not acknowledging me at all. It's like I don't even exist for them. Look!”

Again, I waved my hand in front of the bartender’s face as she stared lewdly at Betel. She didn't even flinch. Betel blinked, then squinted. Finally, he leaned on the bar, putting on a smile that was somewhere between flirtatious and outright lascivious. As if on cue, the bartender leaned towards him, bending forward unnecessarily low to show off her, ahem, assets.

“Hey Candy, where’d you say you were from again?” Betel said through his lecherous grin.

She coyly smiled back. “Does it matter? I’ll be from wherever you want, stud.”

I couldn’t help the eye roll that followed. Really? Stud? Ew.

Whether it was a genuine reaction or not, Betel chuckled and persisted, “If I wanted to send you flowers, like the gentleman that I am, where would I send ‘em?”

“Candy” batted her eyelashes at him and ran her fingers over his arm. “You'd send ‘em right here, handsome, and I'd say thank you in a very special way.”

Luckily, Betel stayed focused on his line of questioning because this conversation was getting nauseating.

“You don't ever go home?” he asked.

She didn't respond right away, the question seeming to stump her, as if she never expected him to care about anything outside Dante's. But she never dropped her suggestive smile, and finally purred, “Why? Wanna play house?”

By now, it was obvious even to Betel that she was being evasive. He switched tactics.

“Oh? Didja wanna be a housewife when you grew up? Tell Daddy.”

I nearly gagged as Candy answered, “I wanted to be whatever you want me to be right now, baby. We've got a lot of cute outfits in the back.” She wiggled in front of him. “I can be a sexy nurse and kiss where it hurts if you want. Or maybe I'll be a naughty cop and put you in handcuffs. Or–”

“Ok, honey, I get the picture,” he interrupted, a tinge of annoyance creeping into his tone.

He stood up, leaning back from the bar, and looked at me. “This is weird, right?”

“Undeniably,” I agreed. “But I’m guessing you don’t exactly come here for thought-provoking conversation.”

He scoffed. “That’s like buyin’ PlayGhoul for the articles.”

He questioned several other girls at Dante’s and found they all behaved the same way. None would answer questions about themselves meaningfully, not even to lie, and always pivoted the conversation towards something salacious, trying to redirect Betel to instigate a raunchy activity. Like that was their only goal. Not out of line with their job, necessarily, but that they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, talk about themselves struck us as bizarre. Betel had been to enough establishments like this, and been with enough prostitutes to know that this wasn’t normal. Even if they lied, women of the night knew to make pleasant conversation and answer a customer’s questions more directly. I hadn't intended to saddle Betel with a mystery, but it seemed to distract him from his melancholy, even if it did nothing but aggravate his hangover headache.

“So they don't know or care that you're here, they're one dimensional on paper, and that one dimension is me,” he said, arms crossed as he tried to figure out what it all meant.

“Well, you are the only one who would know to come here. And you said Adam built this place? The model is a perfect replica of Winter River. Why would Adam Maitland, the most squeaky clean and vanilla of men, add a whorehouse that’s not in the real town?”

Betel shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “I dunno! Barbara had just pulled the plug when I was tryin’ to drive the Deetz’s out and I was pissed off! I’d just seen Lydia up close and… needed some action.”

Head tilted, I leveled him with a glare.

He put his hands up defensively. “Don’t gimme that look, Ma, you know it was different back then.” He put his hands down. “And I just assumed Adam added it on the spot to shut me up.”

It wasn’t an unreasonable explanation, but Betel either couldn’t or wouldn’t see the big gap in his reasoning. I had a hunch, and, if I was right, Betel wasn’t going to like it.

“On the spot? Betel, Adam was a newlydead. Maybe he could fabricate a building since it was so small, but how could he bring over so many girls from the Neitherworld? That’s mass teleportation. Not easy for anyone, let alone a ghost only a few months dead. The Maitlands shouldn’t even have known this many dead girls, especially ones that are all so…singularly focused on their profession.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, brow furrowing, eyes squeezed closed as he wrestled with what little information he had. Frustrated, he leaned against the bar again and sighed wearily. The same bartender leaned over the bar again, offering Betel a cigarette and flicked on a Zippo-style lighter, preparing to light it for him. In the dimly lit environment, I hadn't noticed it before, but with that lighter's bright flame so close to the girl's face, I saw something. Or, rather, the lack of something.

“Betel–”

“Don't worry, Ma, I ain't pickin’ smokin’ back up no matter how miserable I get. Quittin’s a bitch.”

“Her eyes.”

He glanced at her eyes briefly and looked back at me.

“What about ‘em?”

My face was serious when I said, “Take a good, long look.”

Betel furrowed, but did as I asked and stared at Candy’s eyes as she held the still-burning lighter. Betel squinted and leaned in closer, lighting his own thumb on fire and bringing the little flame close to the girl's face. 

“Like whatcha see, stud?” she asked, but Betel ignored her question and kept searching her gaze. After a moment, his eyes widened and he jerked back as the flame on his thumb went out.

“Sorry, Candy… time to go,” he muttered, though his reply didn’t quite come out as nonchalant as he intended.

He took my hand and quickly walked towards the door as the girls all seemed to whine and whimper at the same time, approaching him salaciously, begging him to stay. It was unnerving to say the least. He politely, but firmly, pushed his way past them with me in tow, mumbling insincere apologies, trying to stay casual, even coy, as if nothing were wrong. As if we weren’t rushing to escape. When we finally stepped outside, he snapped his fingers immediately and teleported us to our safehouse beneath Japan. 

“You saw it?” I asked him.

“Yeah… there’s nothin’ behind the eyes… no soul,” he replied, clearly bothered by this discovery. “They’re fake. All of ‘em.”

While the saying “The eyes are the windows to the soul” sounds lovely in poetry, it’s not just a metaphor. It’s difficult to describe, but there’s a definite light, or essence, or something in the eyes of a person, whether they’re living or dead, that shows a soul is still tied to their being. It’s easiest to tell the difference with zombies, how their eyes look so vacant, like no one’s home inside, even though their bodies keep moving. For all intents and purposes, without souls, the girls at Dante’s were closer to zombies than ghosts, pre-programmed with one ambition: to keep Betel there as long as possible.

Betel sat at the table, leaned heavily on his elbows, and put his face in his hands. With a defeated sigh, he finally pulled his hands down his face and they flopped in his lap. 

“Juno,” he said wearily. “It’s gotta be her. Makin’ that many puppets runnin’ on their own takes a lot of power and she’s the only one who could pull it off that knew I was in the model.”

Unfortunately, I’d come to the same conclusion. But now that we were confident she’d created Dante’s with a likely goal of distracting him from the Maitlands and the Deetzs, that introduced a new question.

“So, now that you know, what will you do?” I asked carefully, not able to even fathom a guess as to how he’d answer.

He took a breath and paused, thinking. “Nothing,” he ultimately said. “Dante’s stays as is.”

I tilted my head at him, puzzling at what he could mean until he read my silent question and answered it.

“Part of feelin’ like crap this morning was because I’d ended up at Dante’s. I felt… not great… about that. Like the old Lyds woulda been disappointed in me. As much as gettin’ freaky with a puppet ain’t great for my ego, I feel slightly less terrible about it. Like maybe I hadn’t… cheated… or something… because the girls were never actual people. More like elaborate sex dolls.”

I nodded, wrapping my head around what Betel was trying to explain. Thirty years was a long time and it was entirely likely that, despite his best intentions, Betel could end up drunk and lonely at Dante’s again if some event in Lydia’s life drove him there. It was admirable that, because he loved Lydia, he wanted to stay faithful to her, but perhaps it was more admirable that he was being realistic about how difficult it would be to overcome centuries-old habits. Now knowing Dante’s was essentially staffed with sex robots for his entertainment alone, he could forgive himself when he occasionally slipped under the weight of extraordinary circumstances. It had suddenly become a safe outlet in desperate times and Betel’s guilt was a little lighter. 

We only stayed in Japan a few days that time.

Over the next few years, Betel watched Lydia through every triumph and tragedy in college. He watched her flunk a test for the first time when she was hungover, up too late trying to fit in at a party the night before. He saw her gather her resolve afterwards to refocus on school and how she pulled her grades up. How her false friendships withered away when she wasn’t “fun” enough for the people who never really cared about her in the first place. How, finally, she started acknowledging the ghosts she saw, even if it was only when no one else was looking. She still wasn’t the Lydia we knew, but she was starting to return to the parts of herself that really mattered.

This journal dovetails into a Beetlejuice fanfiction epic that I'm posting chapter by chapter here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63522586/chapters/162777649

The final chapter will be posted soon. Happy hauntings, my dears!

[sayit3x]

Mrs. Juice’s Journal #33, part 2

When we disappeared from the quarry and materialized in a dimly lit bedroom, Betel's legs buckled. After spending so much magic, he was passing out in my arms. We were both still dirty from the conflict and soaked through from his hurricane, so it was no wonder he began shivering. I snapped my fingers and replaced his clothes with warm, clean, striped pajamas, his suit appearing in a laundry hamper, boots by the closet. I guided him to the bed where the covers magically pulled back, and tucked him in under a soft, heavy comforter. He tried to sit up, but I gently yet firmly pushed him back down.

“Ma…” he whispered.

“Shhhh… Rest now, Betel. We'll talk later.”

“But–”

So stubborn. 

“Sleep,” I commanded, waving a hand over his face and, with a little magic, he was out like a light. I was glad I asked Donny to teach me that one, though if Betel hadn't already been so depleted, that little trick probably wouldn't have worked.

While he slept, I took the time to ready our new home away from home. I'd furnished it years ago, but the house had never truly been used and everything was hidden under sheets, not to mention a thick layer of dust. I snapped the sheets away and made the house tidy itself, with brooms, dusters, and other cleaning tools floating around, doing their duty. While they were busy, I traveled topside to gather ingredients to make us a proper meal whenever Betel woke. 

He’d already been asleep for hours by the time I decided it was safe to pop home for a visit. I was eager to apologize to Nat and Donny for what happened at the quarry. I set up a spell like a baby monitor to tell me if Betelgeuse woke, and teleported into my living room, where Nat and Donny were already talking. They immediately rose when I appeared, and I threw my arms around both of them. While Nat embraced me, I felt Donny freeze, still unsure what to make of me after what he'd seen.

“I'm sorry, my dears. Both of you have been so patient with Betel and me. We don't deserve it, but we couldn't get by without it.”

Donny burst into tears then, and pressed his face into my shoulder, hugging me tight.

“Mama, I… I don’t know what to think,” he sobbed. “How could you do something like that to Betel?”

I sighed heavily, already weary of the conversation we were about to have. I pulled back from them and looked Donny in the eye, cradling his face. I didn't have to worry about Nat. I was confident that even if he didn't understand my exact actions, as a parent he understood my intent. 

“Let's talk,” I said gently. I took a seat, and didn't speak again until they joined me. 

“Donny, do you have any children running around that I don't know about?” I asked calmly.

He blushed violently and fiercely shook his head. Though that strong reaction made me wonder about his relationship experience, I tabled that line of questioning for another day.

I continued, “Then you've never been a parent. You don't know what it's like. To want what's best for your children, even when it hurts them sometimes. To struggle when you don't know exactly what “best” means, especially when it clashes with what they want. But you do what you can to be their ally, stay in their corner, and understand them, even someone as complicated and haunted as Betelgeuse.”

“Haunted?” Donny asked, confused and concerned.

I raised my hand to interrupt his train of thought. We didn’t have time to pull on that particular thread, and it wasn’t my story to tell.

I continued, “Today, you saw me do what was best for Betel. To stop him before he hurt people he cared about, which would put him at risk for the Fires of Damnation. Were there other things I could’ve tried? Yes. But I wasn't sure they'd work, and I'd lose the element of surprise if I failed. As much as I've practiced to keep up with Betel over the centuries, he’s so powerful that I don't think I'd beat him even in a fair fight. And you know Betel isn't above fighting dirty if he has to. He wouldn't mean to hurt me, but he was so swept up in his own pain that he couldn't even see me.”

Donny mutely nodded, trying to wrap his head around my words. But it was clear he was really struggling to reconcile the shocking act he’d seen with his own optimistic ideals about what “good” and “best” meant. Maybe it was time to try another approach.

 “What’s the lesson from Robin Hood?” I asked him.

He blinked, dumbfounded. “Steal from the rich and give to the poor?”

I chuckled quietly at how my boys were more similar than they realized. “You're thinking too linearly, Donny. The lesson is that sometimes doing the right thing means doing it the wrong way, at least by society’s standards. That doesn't mean the way you do things, the way you think about things is bad. It's just different from what I do. And my way is different from your brother’s.” 

He stared at me, face scrunched up in thought, still wrestling with questions he couldn’t resolve.

“I just feel like I don't even know you, Mama,” he finally said.

My sweet Donny, always so honest, so forthright. I took his face in my hands again. “Then we can work on that, starting right now.” 

I looked in my youngest son’s eyes and began. “I'm the woman who bore you both in a field, by our little house on the edge of the village, under a clear night sky in summer. The same one who told you stories and tucked you in when you were young. Who raised you alongside your father and sent you away to keep you safe, because I love you that much. I’m the woman who then tended to Betelgeuse, and after my death, watched him grow up and struggle to survive alone. The one who sought you and your brother out after you died to bring you back to our family, because I was worried about both of you. I’m your mother, Donatello, just like I’m Betel’s. And I’ll do what’s necessary, like I’ve always done, even when I wasn’t proud of it, to keep you two safe. If you and your brother are on opposite ends of the spectrum, I'm somewhere in the middle, like a bridge between you, trying to keep our family together.”

He was crying now and even as I wiped his tears away with my thumbs, it was hard to keep up with them, to catch his sadness in my hands.

“Mama… “ he choked out. “Do you love Betelgeuse more than you love me?”

That raw question, which may have plagued him for centuries, broke my heart. If he thought that, even for a second, then I’d failed as his mother.

“Donatello, listen to me carefully. I’d rather tear myself in half trying to save you both than lose either of you. I love my sons, even if that love is expressed differently for each of you. I’m so sorry I ever made you think for a moment that wasn’t the case. You are so deeply loved, mio figlio, and I promise to do more to prove it to you.”

He exhaled a shaking breath of relief, and finally smiled weakly. “It’s ok, Mama,” he sobbed. “I love you, too, and I’m sorry I doubted you.”

Then before I knew it, I was quietly weeping. I let his face go to wipe my own tears away. “I shouldn’t earn your forgiveness so easily, Donny. You're always so kind and polite, so positive, trying to see the best in others, even when they don't appreciate you. I don't know how you do it.” I paused to shake my head gently. 

Still crying, Donny chortled and shrugged. “I don’t either, it’s just what I am. Sometimes I wish I could be more like Betel.”

I took his hands then, squeezing them firmly. “The way you see the world, especially someplace as dark and twisted as the Neitherworld, is a gift. You see the potential for goodness all around you. Betel has learned to see the opposite. Bearing either outlook is a painful way to exist. You risk heartbreak if people don't meet your hopes for them, and Betel is just as frustrated when his suspicions about the worst in people are right. You’re twins, the Gemini, two sides of the same coin, and you’re more alike than you know.”

My words seemed to comfort him, like they gave him hope that he could still have a relationship with his twin. The flow of his tears began to ebb.

“I want to know… I envy you, Mama. I want to know my brother better, like you do, but I don’t know how.”

“Then when he gets home, you should start by telling him that and hear his story from him, not me. Don’t give up, Donny.” 

He nodded, squeezing my hands, and I took that as my cue to hug my youngest son. My poor boys. It’d been such a difficult day for everyone. Just then, I felt the tug of my spell, alerting me that Betel was stirring. It was time to go. I looked at my husband and son, already feeling guilty for leaving Donny when he’d been feeling more vulnerable than I’d ever recognized.

“It seems Betel is waking up. He collapsed as soon as we left the quarry, he’s been out since. I should go,” I said hesitantly.

Donny nodded and his expression softened. “Take care of my brother for me,” he said gently, every word sincere.

The three of us stood and Nat took my hand. “Darling, Juno was here. She wanted to return this,” he said, and pulled Betel's contract with The Worsener from his back pocket, along with a note, which bore just two heavy words: “I'm sorry.” 

It meant there was nothing Juno could do to break the contract and she’d found no extraordinary loopholes that would help Betel weasel his way out of it. If there was a way Betel could stay in Lydia's life, it was already there, captured in otherworldly ink. I looked up at my husband, tears pricking at the corners of my eyes. 

Sniffling, I said, “I just want to do right by my children… but I feel so helpless.”

Nat wrapped his arms around me, tilted my chin up and looked at me gently, reassuringly, in the way he always did when I felt lost, when I needed his comfort to right a world that felt like it was tilting off its axis.

“You, my love, are the least helpless woman I know. You’ve always guided this family, even when it hasn’t been easy, and this time isn’t any different. Betelgeuse is probably falling apart, and, right now, the only person who can help him is you. Whenever you two are ready to come home, we’ll be here. So, go put our Betel back together.”

Always preoccupied with providing for our family, Nataniele was a man of few words, but when he found them, they were often exactly what I needed to hear. Confidence restored, I looked at my husband lovingly before kissing him goodbye. I hugged Donatello one more time, resolving to renew my bond with him once we got through this crisis. And with a thought, I disappeared from my home, reappearing at Betel’s bedside. 

He was tossing and turning with sweat on his brow, beginning to thrash more violently. With Lydia’s name on his lips, he reached out, trying to grab hold of something that was eluding him. Finally, he bolted upright with arms outstretched, yelling, “NO!”

In an instant, I sat next to him and held his shoulders, trying to wake him and calm him down. 

“Betel!” I called, not knowing if he could hear me.

His eyes snapped open, confused, trying to process that he was now awake. 

I persisted, gently soothing him, petting his head as I said, “It’s ok, Betel, it’s alright. It was just a dream.”

“Not a dream,” he panted out, still trying to catch his breath. “A nightmare.”

He had a nightmare? Him?

I studied his face and hesitantly asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”

He stilled, thinking, deciding, and finally began, “I was back in Winter River, but I was a giant snake again… You know the one. She was terrified, worse than when she first saw me. Hysterical, clawing at the door to get away. I tried talking to her, but every word was a hiss. No matter what I did, it just scared her more.” 

He paused, took a shuddering breath, and continued, “‘She panicked, ran… and fell down the stairs. I tried to catch her, but I didn’t have hands! When I reached to grab her with my tail, she recoiled, like she’d rather die than let me touch her. I heard so many bones break. She was dead by the time she hit the first floor… I couldn’t stop it.”

He was shaking, nearly in tears, so I carefully put my arms around him and rubbed his back. I needed no translation to understand what his dream meant. If the Ghost with the Most was having guilt-ridden nightmares about hurting his best friend, “killing” their friendship, his recovery would be a long and difficult one.

I spoke gently, “Lydia is alive now, because of you. You kept her safe, Betelgeuse. And she'd hate to see you beat yourself up like this.”

He whimpered, “She'd hate me, period. She doesn't know me anymore.”

I pulled away and stroked his wild mane, now more unkempt than usual from his restless sleep. “The Lydia Deetz we know and love is locked away with The Worsener somewhere. She's not dead. And this new Lydia can still learn to trust you when you meet again 30 years from now, just like she did before. All is not lost, mio figlio. We just need to figure out what to do in the meantime.”

Betel looked at me in wonder.

“I wish I’d introduced you two… before everything went to shit.”

I tilted my head. “Introduced me to who?”

“Lydia's stepmom, Delia.”

Ah, yes. His moment of hesitation at the quarry, what he wouldn't say about Lydia's stepmother in front of everyone else. 

“I have questions about that, but we'll come back to it. C’mon, get up and join me for breakfast.”

“Breakfast?”

“You were out for hours, Betel. It's nearly dawn.”

I led him through the house, and his eyes wandered over the architecture, taking in the look and scent of the wood and exposed beams, the straw mats under our feet, the paper stretched over sliding door frames. We arrived in the living room, where I had Betel take a seat on a cushion on the floor at the table.

“Ma, where are we?” he asked cautiously.

“A safehouse.”

“Oh…kay. But where exactly?”

I got up, walked to the sliding door that led out to the yard, and pushed it open dramatically to reveal a view of a lake next to the afterlife’s equivalent of Mt. Fuji.

“The Neitherworld beneath Japan. Fujikawaguchiko, specifically.”

“Japan?” He stared at me, incredulous, with eyebrows as high as they could lift. “And you have a safehouse here? Why?”

“After Leo X’s stupid attack, I started to worry you might have more enemies in the future. I needed a place no one knew about, where they wouldn't think to look, in case we had to take the family and run.”

His eyebrows gradually made their way down his forehead. “But why run when we could fight? Between the two of us, we could probably handle anyone.”

“Not every problem can be solved with violence, Betel. If they got to Nat or Donny first, they'd have leverage and we’d be compromised. Some things are just more complicated, they need time, strategy. Remember when Scuzzo framed you for stealing bad jokes and they jailed you in The Big House?”

“Yeah… they wouldn't listen. It wasn't ‘til Lyds…” his voice trailed off. He closed his eyes, took a breath and continued, “She found proof it was Scuzzo and got the Governor to pardon me.”

I nodded. “But that was just for a small crime. What if you'd been framed for murder? You know they don't waste time with The Big House or Oilcatraz for serious charges. If I couldn't get there in time to defend you, they'd send you straight down to the Fires of Damnation. And I wouldn't even get an apology if I proved they'd been wrong.”

He blinked.

 I shrugged and let my arms flop to my sides, resigned. “I'm the mother of two of the most notorious ghosts in the Neitherworld, even if they're on opposite sides of the spectrum. I've had nothing but time to plan how to protect them. We needed a safehouse, I got one. That's it.”

Betel gaped at me, blinking like he’d just snapped back to himself. Finally he spoke, his brow furrowed. “But we don't speak Japanese!”

“We'll learn. And anyone seeking you out would probably assume we’d run to a country where we're already fluent. Besides, I've been picking up the basics during my visits when I was scouting for a place.”

He shook his head. “You could've picked anywhere in the world. Hell, we could be colder than a witch’s tit with Santa in the North Pole right now. Why Japan?”

“For a while, I considered South America since we already speak Spanish and Portuguese. But when you were constrained to graveyards in the 80’s, I needed a place with plenty of cemeteries, just in case. Japan has lots of them. Many are beautiful, some are private, some are public. They're all over the country, so we have options. Here, I’ll show you.”

I pulled him to standing and snapped my fingers, teleporting us to the edge of the lake at Kogamasao Memorial Park, where the sun was rising, bathing Mt. Fuji in the pinks, oranges, and purples of daybreak. Betel’s eyes widened, tears gathering in the corners, and his breath hitched in his throat. Betel’s reaction was appropriate. The sight really was breathtaking, and I felt his shoulders relax beside me, the tension leaving his body. This was exactly why I’d chosen Japan. 

So many cemeteries and memorial parks in Japan were absolutely stunning. Even when they weren’t abundant in natural beauty, these resting places were carefully manicured, reflecting the deep respect the Japanese people held for their dead. If Betel was going to recover from the impact crater of losing Lydia and figure out what his afterlife looked like now, he needed the peace and equanimity to do it. Japan, with the tranquility and freedom its cemeteries provided, could give him that.

I stayed silent, letting Betel absorb the views in the morning light. Minutes passed before he took a big breath and let it out. Finally, he spoke, his gaze still fixed on the sunrise. 

“Ma… Thanks.” 

“You’re welcome, Betel.”

He went quiet again and I let him take his time, gathering his thoughts.

His voice broke when he said, “I dunno what to do, Ma, I… I feel so… powerless.”

I could only imagine. To be the Ghost with the Most, arguably one of the strongest, most feared ghosts in the Neitherworld, and yet totally paralyzed, shackled by the contract, unable to fix anything. 

“Then we’ll figure out the rules in this–” I produced his contract in my hand. “–and what you can do to get some agency back.”

He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Are you sure you and Delia haven’t been talking? Cuz she said nearly the same damn thing. Did I miss a conference call or a meeting or something?”

“About that. You started to say something about her stepmother, then changed course.”

He huffed. “Nothing gets past you, does it?”

I smirked. “I learned from the best.”

He managed to give me a weak smirk. “You know how sometimes I'd turn into Lydia's best friend from school, Betty? Delia knew it was me the whole time.”

My mouth fell open. “But you'd been using that Betty disguise for years.”

“Yeah, she knew about that and all my other disguises. She just acted like she had no clue to… keep things simple. She'd supported us being friends, trusted me to keep Lydia safe. She's the only one alive that knows about the contract with The Worsener.”

“Not even her father, huh?”

“Nope. Chuckie definitely couldn't handle it if he knew. He’s still in the dark.” He paused a moment before continuing. “Delia told me to look for loopholes in the contract, ways to help Lydia from behind the scenes. To get my act together, bury the hatchet with my enemies, gather resources so when the 30 years are up I’d be ready for her.”

I raised my eyebrows, impressed. “That’s very strategic advice. Delia sounds like a shrewd businesswoman.”

“She’s an artist, but shrewd is dead on.”

Silence fell over us as we watched the sun continue its climb over the horizon.

“I'm not sure I can do this, Ma…” Betel finally said. “Tryin’ to help her without her seein’ me.” He shook his head. “I’d dive into the Lost Souls room headfirst if I got her killed…”

That got my attention and I turned to face him. “Betel, after everything that’s happened, there’s nothing wrong with just waiting out the 30 years. We all adore Lydia, but you don’t have to spend three decades in agony, afraid of hurting her while you try to walk the line of that contract to help her.”

He shook his head and turned to me with a look in his eyes that I’d never seen before. “I couldn’t walk away even if I wanted to. I always figured she’d… move on someday. Go find the things she couldn’t get hangin’ around with a dead guy all the time. College, a career…” He paused and took a breath, his voice cracking. “A boyfriend… husband… kids…” He blinked back the tears threatening to fall. “When I decided I didn’t care about breakin’ the curse anymore, I knew that meant lettin’ Lydia go. Even if we stayed friends, I couldn’t give her the life she deserved… But I still want to see that life play out. I wanna watch her first day at college, try her first beer and hate it, get stoned and love it, fail a test, argue with a professor, graduate with honors. I wanna see her bomb an interview and nail the next one. I wanna see how nervous she is on her first day at a new job, make friends at work, find her path… Fall in love. Get her heart broken… And finally find the lucky guy who marries her. I wanna watch her be a kickass mom to spooky kids that grow up to be just like her. And hopefully in 30 years, I’ll get a chance to tell her how much I’ve missed her.”

He took a breath and when he couldn’t hold his tears back anymore, I knew what his next words were going to be before he even said them.

“I love her, Ma. And I want to watch her be happy.”

I wept as my heart swelled. Bless Lydia Deetz. Betel had come so far in such a short time, all thanks to her. God, we were going to miss her so much.

Even as he wiped his tears away, they wouldn’t stop falling. “But it’ll be more than just watching. I can feel her in my head,” he sobbed.

Feel her? That… wasn't normal, not even for Betel. He'd been using telepathy for years, but only with very few people, like me and Juno, and to my knowledge, he’d never tried it with Lydia.

“What do you mean?” I asked cautiously, stemming my own tears with my sleeve.

His breath shuddered. “I don’t know what’s going on, or why, but right now, I’m feeling relief and I know it’s not mine. It’s gotta be Lydia, and it’s freakin’ me out.”

I studied him and thought for a moment. Since I was practiced in telepathy, perhaps I could tap in and help Betel understand whatever this was.

“I’d like to try and take a look, if you’re up for it,” I offered.

He nodded, so I took his face in my hands and brought his forehead to mine. I closed my eyes and concentrated, sensing his mind and what looked to my mind’s eye like a red thread extending from him out into the ether. When I touched the thread with my consciousness, it was like instantly traveling along a fiber optic cable. When I found myself at the other end of it, I felt Lydia’s mind and saw what was happening. They’d released her from the hospital and her parents had brought her home. They must have just walked in the door as Charles was still taking his coat off and Delia was walking Lydia upstairs to her room, presumably to rest. Lydia was relieved to be home, that’s what Betel had felt. I brought my consciousness back along that thread to Betel and finally back to myself, gently pulling my head away.

“Betel, I think she can do more than just see ghosts. She's probably a medium. And after being together so long, she probably made this bond with you herself and didn’t even realize it.”

“Ok… that actually makes sense… She did end up literally inside my head once. But why haven’t I noticed it until now?”

“I’d be guessing at this point. But why would you need a psychic connection to keep you two together if you saw each other everyday for three years?”

“So it was like… a lifeline? In case of emergency, break glass and unconsciously activate a soul bond with your dead best friend?”

“Like I said, it’s just a guess.”

Betel nodded, closed his eyes and sighed. Opening them, he took one last long look at the sunlight shining on Mt. Fuji and turned to me. “Let’s head back. Somebody promised me breakfast.”

I snapped us back to our safehouse, made us breakfast, and showed him around our new home. After we explored a few more nearby cemeteries, we slept in the same room on tatami mats on the floor that night. There were western style beds available in other rooms, but sleeping on the tatami mats reminded us of home. Not the home we knew stateside in the Neitherworld, but the little house we shared when we were alive, now dust in the earth. Back then our mattresses, if you can call them that, were just patchworks of cloth stuffed with hay, laid over a hard wooden frame and barely softer than sleeping on the floor. But I hoped that these tiny, gentle reminders of better times would help ground Betel as he worked through his grief. 

And his grief was staggering. Most nights were plagued by disturbing dreams where he lost Lydia in some dramatic and traumatizing fashion, over and over. I woke him from every nightmare he had, just like I did when he was a child. But even those nightly horrors of self-inflicted torture couldn’t keep him from wanting to protect and help Lydia in any way he still could. Between his promise to Delia, this weird tie binding him and Lydia together, and the abyss of his own guilt, Betelgeuse resolved that he wouldn’t leave his best friend’s life. So, once he recovered from his breakdown enough to function, we poured over the contract and started strategizing his options. He still had a lot of work ahead of him to prepare.

In the meantime, we explored the vast array of Japanese cemeteries, taking in the beauty of the country, and it went a long way to helping Betel heal. And even though it wasn’t easy, we learned Japanese. Betel never quite got the hang of speaking it fluently, but he muddled through by understanding others perfectly well. Gradually, he got comfortable enough navigating the language and the customs to even take on a few bio-exorcism jobs, though the demand was definitely limited. Japanese ghosts were in a league of their own and didn't typically need help haunting the living. Most of Betel's jobs were for Western ghosts who'd emigrated to Japan and would benefit from Betel's intervention. Occasionally he'd be summoned for jobs back home, but he was quick to return when the job was over.

We stayed for nearly a year, far longer than I expected. By the time we finally returned home, he’d calmed down dramatically and was generally less chaotic, more focused on his goals. Sometimes we returned to Japan when he had setbacks, like when Lydia got her first boyfriend in college, but they weren’t as bad as his initial breakdown and he recovered more quickly. He’d also learned to ride the wave of their psychic connection and could find Lydia anywhere in the world. Between that and secretly keeping an eye on Lydia through her mirrors, he became the shadow in her life she never knew was there, protecting and loving her from afar. His 30-year vigil had begun.

This journal dovetails into a Beetlejuice fanfiction epic that I'm posting chapter by chapter here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63522586/chapters/162777649

Chapter 32 "Across the threshold" is now up.

[sayit3x]

Mrs. Juice’s Journal #33, Part 1

When we lost Lydia in 1991, Betel was devastated. He didn't call, he just materialized in our house, shaking like a leaf. Everything about him looked terrible, like he'd been crying all day and had run out of tears. I'd never seen him so distraught. When he collapsed, I teleported next to him and barely caught him before he hit the ground. Before I even asked the question, I feared the answer. I knew only one person could have such a staggering effect on my eldest son.

“Betelgeuse, what happened?” I asked as I helped steady him.

“There's so much, Ma… I gotta get it out. But I don't know how… I wanna explode, tear the world apart.”

“Then let's go to the quarry.”

He gaped wide-eyed at me, freshly horrified. “No… I can’t pull my punches tonight, Ma…”

“I’m not asking you to hold back, Betel. You know I can keep up with you, and I don’t plan on getting hurt. We can have Donny there for healing if you're really that worried. Hell, we can ask Juno, too. There's nobody better.”

Betel opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. He knew I was right and finally nodded, resigned.

“But everybody’s gotta be there. I can’t take talkin’ about it over and over.”

With a snap of my fingers, I brought Betel and I to the abandoned quarry in the Neitherworld, in the middle of nowhere, where we usually sparred. With another snap of my fingers, his neighbors, his car, Nat and Donny appeared, looking extremely confused. I held up my hand, asking for patience. As their eyes darted between me and the silent, deflated Betelgeuse, they stayed quiet. I was more polite with Juno and the Mayor's assistant, Iyam, sending them a telepathic message first with what little I knew and asking permission to bring them. They both agreed and with another snap, they were standing alongside the others. While Iyam looked cautiously upset, Juno masked her concern far better. But when her eyes met mine, we had a silent understanding.

I asked Donny to put up a massive dome-like barrier and he complied, with Juno on standby to reinforce it. They both could help with healing if it was needed, but Betel and I were so old (deep into the 600's) and well practiced by then, our ability to regenerate was substantially high. Unless we didn't heal deliberately, which was what I was afraid of for Betel. That, in his despair, he'd want me to end him. Destroying his soul wasn't a feat I was capable of, but even so, any damage would still hurt. Regardless, I wasn’t about to let him die again and would see him healed by force if necessary. Teleporting yards away, I gave Betel room to be as unpredictable and violent as he feared he was doomed to be.

And yet, he didn't speak and barely moved. I didn't want to rush him, but I worried he was spiraling inside.

“Betel, tell us what happened,” I prompted.

He took a shuddering breath.

“It's all my fault.”

A shockwave like a bomb burst from him, cratering the earth beneath his feet, sending dust and rock in every direction. I let the wave and subsequent debris phase through me and bounce off the dome, waiting for him to continue.

“I should’ve done more.. should’ve convinced her… I shoulda been there sooner,” he choked out.

Another invisible blast erupted from Betel, sending larger pieces of stone from the already fractured ground rocketing in all directions. Again, I let them phase through me to hit the surrounding dome. But this time, the dome wobbled slightly when Donny flinched at the dangerous rock that would have otherwise taken his head off. I realized that if things were going to ramp up from there, I'd need to intervene more directly to keep Donny focused.

“Betel, we don't understand,” I replied. “What happened to Lydia?”

Everyone but him and Juno shifted on their feet when they heard Lydia's name, now realizing how high the stakes were. Betel shrunk back, recoiling in on himself as if her name in his ears physically hurt him. God, his guilt was eating him from the inside out.

He clenched his trembling hands into fists and continued, “Her prom date attacked her… gave her a concussion before I could get there.”

My eyes widened for so many reasons. What the Hell happened? Was Lydia alright? A concussion was bad, but recoverable. What else had happened to make Betel a brittle shell of himself? And what did he do to the foolish mortal teen who dared hurt his best friend? The punishment for murdering a living person was merciless, whether the crime was justified or not. If Betel had killed Lydia’s date, my son was bound for the Fires of Damnation.

Juno, ever stoic, asked firmly, “Is this stupid boy still alive?”

Betel suddenly growled low in his throat until he screamed at the sky, “YES!”

Lightning cracked from sudden storm clouds swirling high above him, and the hair on my arms stood up from the electricity now coursing through the air. Bolts of lightning struck, again and again, stabbing the ground and ricocheting off the dome. It was like being trapped in a fish bowl with a Tesla coil. It hit the dome in Juno's direction repeatedly, as if Betel was enraged that anyone could be asking about the well-being of the criminal instead of the victim, his dearest Lydia.

He growled out through gritted teeth, “I should've torn him to pieces, not a recognizable scrap left for what he did to her!”

After dodging a few lightning strikes and redirecting the ones that were heading for Donny, I carefully shook my head.

“But she wouldn't want that,” I calmly replied. That just wasn’t who Lydia was. At the very least, she’d never want her best friend to risk capital punishment for her sake.

Suddenly, the lightning faltered mid-air and the storm clouds faded, disappearing in the dome.

“…No…” he almost whimpered. After a breath he continued, “I scared the piss outta him… cops took care of the rest.”

I quietly exhaled in careful relief. “Then what happened?”

He collected himself slightly, but his eyes still looked far away, lost in memory.

“Hospital did tests, said she was fine… We went home, I stayed with her… She was traumatized. Her stepmom…” his voice trailed off and I knew him well enough to hear that the words that came next weren't the ones he meant to say. “… And dad were so worried.”

He paused and closed his eyes, tilting his head down at the ground. His voice shook when he spoke. “Next morning she collapsed. Doctor said her brain was bleedin’, worst they'd ever seen.”

His neighbors and Doomie gasped, looking desperately at each other. Donny glanced over his shoulder to exchange wide-eyed, nervous glances with Nat. Even my eyes darted to Juno briefly, suddenly anxious. But if Lydia were dead, Juno of all people would know, and would’ve told me. The case worker's eyes assuaged my fears. Our beloved Lydia had not yet crossed the veil.

Betel continued, “She was in a coma, havin’ seizures… She was gonna die before they could operate.”

I heard Ginger whimper from beyond the dome and she leapt into Jacques’s bony arms for a comforting hug. The Monster Across the Street put a reassuring hand on Jacques's shoulder. I knew they loved Lydia as much as my family did, bless them, and I was grateful they were there for Betel's sake. 

He went on, “I couldn't take it… I couldn't just sit there and watch her die… I called The Worsener.”

When that name hit my ears, my eyes closed in a wave of sadness and frustration. A ghost with unique powers to harm and heal, The Worsener was a decaying bundle of contradictions, held together with scars that never faded and rage disguised as philanthropy. He'd only been around for a few decades, but in that relatively brief time, he'd already done so much damage. His exploitative contracts stripped away the happiness of hundreds of Neitherworlders, perhaps thousands, in exchange for using his healing prowess when their regeneration stalled. Even if he “helped” people as he claimed, his saccharine demeanor told me not to trust a word he said and my family knew well enough to give him a wide berth. Betel was no fool. He must have really been desperate.

Juno let out a quiet expletive, ashed her cigarette, and cautiously asked, “And Donny couldn't have healed her?”

At that, meteors of fire erupted from overhead, raining down like flaming death in the dome. I knew Betel was raging at the implication that he made the wrong call, as if he had other options in such a critical time of distress. Again, I dodged and deflected the fiery missiles to keep Donny focused. My sensitive Donny had already been openly crying by then, trying to keep the dome up through the stream of tears he was constantly rubbing into his sleeve. I already knew the answer to Juno’s question, but was relieved when my youngest son answered.

“No… I'm not good enough. Other ghosts came to me after turning down The Worsener, but I couldn't heal them. I couldn't even make a dent in the damage. And I haven't tried healing a living person. If Betel entrusted Lydia to my care and I failed, I'd never forgive myself…He did the right thing.”

For once, Donny's words seemed to soothe Betel, rather than enrage him, and the flaming meteor shower slowed until it stopped. Even if he already knew it deep down, it was important for Betel to hear that he did everything he could before making such an impossible decision.

My tone was already mourning a tragedy yet unknown when I said, “Betel…”

He interrupted me, “The Worsener fixed her, saved her. She's gonna be fine.”

I swallowed hard, afraid of the answer to my next question. “Betelgeuse… what did you give him?”

He breathed harder then, trying to brace himself for the difficult truth that he struggled to force from his mouth. Finally, through a tight throat he gritted out, “He wanted all her memories of us being friends...” His whole body heaved with the sob that followed. “And I can't see her again for 30 years… If she sees me, she dies.”

Before Lydia and Betelgeuse were friends, her last memories of him would’ve been when he terrified her family and tried to marry her in exchange for saving the Maitlands from exorcism. The Worsener had literally reset them to nothing, back to square one with my eldest son painted in his most villainous light. And Betel would have to wait 30 years, watching from the shadows as Lydia lived a life without him, before he could even begin to try to make amends again. If she was even willing to hear him out. Who knows who she’d grow up to be without the memories of her best friend that had shaped her so much as a teen? With such a drastic, heartless contract, The Worsener had shown himself to be a crueler, more savage monster than Betel ever claimed to be.

My thoughts were interrupted by the howl ripped from Betel’s throat. 

“IT'S ALL MY FAULT!”

At those words, a hurricane burst into being inside the dome, with sudden lightning, gale force winds, and torrential rain as violent as his heartbreak. At the same time, the ground beneath our feet began violently shaking, the intensity of the tremors ramping up by the second. I glanced outside the dome and his earthquake was reaching outside the barrier, aggressively swaying everything in sight. As the ground rocked beneath them, everyone struggled to stay upright, teetering on unsteady legs.

The earth split in several places as his tirade continued, “I SHOULD’VE PROTECTED HER!”

The ground ripped open, cracks tearing into fissures, and fires erupted from the holes in the earth. Lava bubbled through and the ground began to pitch up as a small black mountain of fire slowly climbed skyward. I'd never seen such an intense display of power. Creating a volcano? To my knowledge, it’d never been done, and in that moment, he might as well have been a god. But poor Betelgeuse wasn't even aware of how his grief was manifesting, and that he was putting his friends and family in danger. 

“Beatrice!” Juno yelled.

My head whipped to Juno. She had levitated the lot of them so they wouldn't burn up now that the floor was literally lava. Everyone but her and Donny were in their own protective bubble, but Donny floated over the lava, covered in sweat, with skin breaking into boils, practically cooking over open flame.

“You have to stop this!” the caseworker barked matter-of-factly.

I hardened my stare, about to do something drastic. “I know.”

With that, I marched through the mud to Betel and finally saw up close the overwhelming guilt, rage, and sorrow that was wrecking his body. His eyes had gone black like a shark’s and it was obvious he couldn't see me. As he wept and sobbed, the rain soaked him head to toe and you couldn't tell where the raindrops ended and the tears began. He tore at his sopping hair, violently clawing at himself as he screamed, and bled everywhere his fingers touched. When I wrenched his hands from his face and held them tight, his head jerked toward me, and his teary, tortured eyes finally met mine.

Choking through a sob of my own, I managed to say, “I’m sorry, Betel.”

And with one vicious thought, I decapitated my eldest son. I heard everyone outside the dome sharply gasp in shocked horror, even Juno. Whatever she thought I would do to stop him, apparently it wasn’t that. But The Ghost with the Most doesn't exactly come with an instruction manual or an off switch, so I did what I knew would work. Sure enough, the hurricane abruptly stopped as the invisible blade from my mind sliced through his flesh and bone, and the volcano that was emerging from the earth disappeared entirely, lava gone. 

When Betel told me he’d nearly lost his afterlife to a carefully planned attack by the villains of S.N.O.T.R.A.G., I learned that taking him apart was a sure fire way to stop the flow of his power, like interrupting the current of a circuit. Lydia had saved him when he'd lost his magic back then, too. God, what were we going to do without her?

Betel’s hands went slack in mine, the blackness in his eyes receding, and his head toppled forward with his body collapsing to the ground. I dropped his hands and caught his head, bringing it eye level with my own. He was still conscious, though the wind had been taken out of his sails considerably, and both of us wept. Still wracked with silent sobs, his body curled into the fetal position at my feet, and he knew in his grief that he’d gone too far.

“I’m sorry, too, Ma…” he whimpered.

I hugged his disembodied head before crouching down to put it back firmly between his shoulders, where it quickly reattached, healing the seam at his neck. I had to stay focused for Betel's sake, so I collected myself as best I could and pulled him up into a hug. 

As I rubbed his back, I whispered in his ear, “I know you're exhausted. We'll get out of here as soon as we can.”

He silently nodded and I helped him rise to his feet to stand beside me, his knees still quivering.

I called to my youngest son, “Donny, you can relax now.”

Juno had put them all back on the ground by then, but Donny's hollow eyes gaped back at me, as if I were a stranger. Perhaps at that moment, I was. With all the secrets I’d kept from him over the centuries, he was seeing me, or at least a different part of me, for the first time. After what he'd just watched me do to stop his brother, I wasn't surprised he was in shock. But I had to push my guilt down, and resolved to talk things through with Donny and Nat later once this particular crisis was under control.

I broke through Donny’s haze when I spoke again. “Donatello… I'm sorry for frightening you. That must have been terrifying to watch, and you shouldn't have had to see it. But Betelgeuse wasn't himself and he put you and everyone else at risk with that outburst. I had to bring him back to his senses, and it will haunt me. But I’d do it again, as many times as it takes, to keep you all safe.”

He blinked, seeming to take in my words, and when Nat put his hand on Donny's trembling shoulder he finally dropped his hands and the dome melted away. Betel clung to my arm as I walked him back towards the others and when we arrived, Juno spoke.

“The contract between you and The Worsener, I'd like to look it over if you don't mind. If there's anything I can do…”

Juno knew he was still reeling and in no position to read and absorb complexities of that long, binding document. Betel reached in his inside jacket pocket and fished out the rolled up parchment, handing it to Juno. 

“I'll bring it back as soon as I can, hopefully there's something we can work with,” she said, resigned.

I could tell she already feared this contract was like all the others The Worsener had written, ironclad and crafted to his advantage alone. With a solemn nod to me, she disappeared. The Mayor's assistant, Iyam, looked at Betel with heartfelt pity. As often as they clashed, Iyam still wouldn't wish this outcome on his worst enemy, and the shrunken head man deeply respected Lydia, even if he didn't understand what she saw in Betelgeuse. 

Looking at the ground, Betel muttered, “Iyam… couldja keep Lydia's permit to come to the Neitherworld on ice? Don't get rid of it, just… put it on hold… suspend it or somethin’.” 

Iyam took a breath, knowing Betel would wait for Lydia for eternity if he had to. “Of course, it's the least I can do. I've got to go back, but… do take care.”

“Thank you, Iyam,” I answered. 

And with that, Iyam, too, disappeared. I looked at those who remained – Betel's neighbors, his car, and our family. 

“Thank you for your patience and for listening to Betel. Please give him the space he needs for as long as he needs it. I'm sure he'll let you know when he's ready for whatever comes next.”

After they sorrowfully nodded in understanding, I snapped his neighbors and Doomie away, back to the Roadhouse, before my eyes fell upon my husband and youngest son. Their eyes were so sad, so hopeless.

“I'm going to send you back now. I don't know when I'll be home, but please don't worry. We'll do our best.” 

Wearing a weak smile, I sent them back to where I'd spirited them from, and exhaled a heavy sigh, squeezing Betel’s hand.

“We should go,” I said gently.

“Ma, I can't go back to the Roadhouse yet… Too many memories.”

If the Roadhouse was off limits, I knew the model would be, too. Especially if there was a chance Betel would hear Lydia's voice through the walls, it would do nothing but torture him. We needed something neutral, devoid of painful reminders. Luckily, I had just the place in mind.

I snapped my fingers and spirited us away.

This journal dovetails into a Beetlejuice fanfiction epic that I'm posting chapter by chapter here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63522586/chapters/162777649

The last two chapters are still in progress, so no updates yet, but I hope they'll be worth the wait.

[sayit3x]

Over time, I intend to go back and add historically appropriate illustrations to each journal entry. For this one, I'm including an art nouveau example of my Betel wearing his Edwardian suit at the turn of the 20th century.

Mrs. Bea Juice’s Journal #21

Queen Victoria, who had been ruling Great Britain since 1837, crossed the veil in 1901, marking the end of the Victorian era. Thus, the Edwardian period began, with modernization as its hallmark. There were massive leaps in transportation, like electrification of the Tube, the arrival of automobiles (among the wealthy anyway), and early airplanes not far behind. And though Neither-London was gradually catching up, it would be a while before Betel was able to get behind the wheel of one of these newfangled automobiles. And when Betel finally did drive for the first time by possessing the rich and unfaithful husband of a newly-dead client, he crashed almost immediately. Luckily, Betel’s ghostly client was delighted to see her adulterous husband’s favorite toy destroyed. Perhaps it’s for the best that Doomie, Betelgeuse’s sentient car decades later, could reliably drive itself.

Even the flourishing arts were becoming more modern. Art Nouveau had made its way to England by way of the “Modern Style” and authors like H.G. Wells were dazzling readers with visions of the future. Naturally, Betel’s favorite of Wells’ works was “The Invisible Man.” Yet, despite modern advancements in art, technology, and even welfare reforms, like the Old Age Pension Act in 1908, social inequalities persisted. The women’s suffrage movement had already been fighting since 1872, but it took years of struggle for popular opinion to shift in women’s favor. I found it particularly frustrating that Queen Victoria ruled the country for more than 60 years, yet her female subjects wouldn’t get the right to vote until decades after her death. 

But modernization couldn’t slow the primal tension that was building internationally. And after both dodging and witnessing many European conflicts for so many centuries, we could practically smell war coming from a mile away. Between a heightened sense of nationalism sweeping across Europe and imperialist competition for colonies, like the Second Boer War in South Africa, countries were building up their militaries. The start of the Balkan Wars in 1912 was our cue to move again, after barely 22 years in London.

With the English language firmly under our belts and the threat of war looming on the horizon, we decided to make the transition to America earlier than we’d initially planned. It was the right call, as “The Great War” began in 1914. From Neither-New York, we read about the London we left behind. How the draft emptied cities, how 250,000 refugees (mostly Belgian) filled them back up, and how 1916 bombardments from Zeppelin raids tormented everyone left behind. But we never would have guessed The Great War would drag practically the whole world into the fight, with millions of military and civilian lives lost all over the globe by the time the war ended. It was the biggest, bloodiest war we never dared to imagine in our 500 years dead.

The flu pandemic that followed in 1918 only prolonged the suffering of millions, including hundreds of thousands who died in the U.S. alone. Needless to say, Betel and Juno had their work cut out for them for a long time.

This journal dovetails into a fanfiction epic that I'm posting chapter by chapter every week here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63522586/chapters/165139855

Chapter 18 "The informant" and Chapter 19 "The leg in the sea" are now up.

[sayit3x]

I try not to break character when I post, but this public service announcement feels relevant and necessary.

My fellow creatives, the world needs your stories, your paintings, your songs, your comics, your ART.

Not everyone will like it, and that's ok. What are now recognized as pillars of culture were often despised in their time. El Greco was considered a defective, eccentric one-off. Vermeer made more as an art dealer than as a painter, with many of his own paintings left unsold when he died. Van Gogh went practically unnoticed. The Eiffel Tower was abhorred. Art can't be everything to everyone. All art NEEDS to be is a way for you to express your authentic self.

Life is too short for doubt. Don't let fear of judgement or failure keep you from doing something you love.

I'm attaching this video, an excellent TED talk by Amie McNee summed up as "a battle-cry for the creative spirit."

[sayit3x]

An EPIC interpretation of The Worsener (an OC in my AO3 fanfic) captured beautifully by @natharaslytherin ! THANK YOU!

Some fan art for @sayit3x

The Worsener from an amazing Beetlejuice fic on AO3. Go check it out!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63522586/chapters/162777649

[sayit3x]

Mrs. Juice's Journal #32

When Betelgeuse brought Lydia to meet us for the first time, I knew immediately she was the one. 

After I died and he’d grown up, I became aware of the less gentlemanly habits he had with women when he was still alive. I don't blame him for wanting companionship, even by the hour, in one of the darkest eras of human existence. After he'd earned the scorn of all the village girls and a rotten reputation as a scoundrel, he could only have the illusion of a woman's affections as long as he could afford it. At least until he started scavenging the pockets of plague victims, heaped in piles. Then no women would even look at him, not even for money. That is, until Delores ensnared him. He must have seemed like such an easy mark.

Even after he'd died and came to our side of the veil, he started his bad reputation anew. Again, as much as it seemed like a shame to waste a fresh start, he couldn't help bringing his bad habits with him. By then, it was all he knew, and an untimely death didn't change that. But after hundreds of years cycling through who knows how many women, including exotic dancers and prostitutes when they were his only option, he never once talked about any of them, let alone brought one home to meet us.

He only ever mentioned one name. Lydia. The first time he said her name was in an unexpected visit after a certain sandworm incident in 1988. When he first met her, he knew immediately, from the note in her hand to the tear tracks on her face, that she planned to end her life. So he just kept her talking, eventually trying to get her to say his name, stalling until the Maitlands returned. 

When he told me he tried to marry her to break his name limiter, it took me every ounce of restraint not to literally bite his head off. His excuses, from wanting his freedom, to upholding bargains, to his intent to not lay another finger on her after the knot was tied, fell flat with me. But that was exactly why he'd come to see me. He knew he'd blown it. He also knew she needed a friend, her suicide note still fresh in his mind. Especially when he saw her from her mirror, alone and miserable, after she helped her beloved Maitlands move on with a loophole only months after they’d met. But he didn't know how to approach her, how to fix what he'd broken when he terrorized her family and dragged her down the aisle. I coached him to be patient, to just learn about her, wait for his moment, and apologize. 

And luckily for both of them, he got his opportunity and made the most of it, hat in hand and an apology (though a weak one) on his lips. And, for the risk he took in humbling himself, he was rewarded. Afternoon chats through her vanity mirror evolved into late-night conversations in her room, and soon, day-long adventures and Neitherworld shenanigans only Betel could scheme up. She fit so perfectly at his side, grew to know and accept him so well, moss and all, that he could no longer imagine his afterlife without her. And through his example, his unabashed belief that being authentically yourself was the only way to exist, she gained the confidence to fully embrace everything about herself that was strange and unusual. 

He even gave up smoking for her! As the kids say, Mind. Blown. One of the many clues that she truly mattered to him, and not because he wanted to break his curse. Far from it. This wasn’t the self-centered Betelgeuse of Neitherworld infamy. No. Someone new was emerging, being pulled into the sun before my very eyes. In the centuries since my death, his heart had been like a tight bud, buried in the winter snow, and around that sleeping promise of beauty, he'd built a wall of thorns. I think I might have been the only presence in his afterlife keeping that little bud alive, just barely clinging to the hope that someone, someday could love him enough to help him grow.

And then, over 600 years after his death, he met Lydia. And with each of their adventures, conflicts, and heart-felt resolutions, she patiently pulled his thorns away, one by one, even when they impaled her fingers. Even when it hurt them both, she bled for him and for her, he bloomed. Breaking his curse suddenly felt unimportant and just being around Lydia, day after day as she grew up next to him, was more than enough. He'd gladly take on his curse anew if it meant keeping Lydia in his afterlife. I hadn’t seen him so happy since he and his brother played in the garden when they were children. Betel and Lydia found in each other the cure for their loneliness and the understanding they both so desperately sought, and they were the best of friends, inseparable for three beautiful years.

That is, until we lost her in 1991.

This journal dovetails into a Beetlejuice fanfiction epic that I'm posting chapter by chapter here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63522586/chapters/162777649

Chapter 31 "The wedding" (yes THAT wedding) is now up.

[sayit3x]

Very late to the party, but here's Day 1 - Dancing with the devil. Tried to capture a moment from my AO3 fanfiction when they were dancing in her room on prom night in 1991.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63522586/chapters/162777649

[sayit3x]

Mrs. Juice's Journal #31

The early 80’s were densely packed with leaps in technology, evolutions of culture, and milestones in history. Fashion changed, disco died, Three Mile Island melted, Mount St. Helens erupted, John Lennon was murdered, MTV was born, and the AIDS epidemic began. Staggeringly, all within a few short years of each other. Yet, the times felt unremarkable to Betel since he’d finished his curriculum at Juilliard. He stayed taking classes longer than he originally expected, adding guitar, drums, and violin, among other instruments, to his curriculum. But eventually, he left Juilliard to resume his full-time focus on bio-exorcisms, and day after day was the same old routine. That is, until one night in 1985, when Juno appeared in my living room while I was home alone.

“Good evening, Beatrice,” Juno said, more politely than was typical for her. Never a good sign.

“Good evening, Juno. Not that I don't appreciate your visit, but I'm assuming I should get Betel?”

Her voice sounded tired and frustrated when she said, “He’s already been informed and is on his way.”

On cue, Betelgeuse appeared, already scowling and disgruntled. 

“I was in the middle of a job. What the Hell is so important that this couldn’t wait?”

Juno tried to exhale some of her frustration and replied, “You two were going on your monthly outing tonight, correct?”

Betel blinked and gawked at her, confused. “Huh?”

I jumped in, “Yes, right after Betel's job. But why does that matter?”

Juno somehow managed to look even more frustrated. “It doesn’t matter to me. It matters to them.”

“Who?” Betel asked, furrowing.

“The powers that be.”

We tensed, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Juno continued, “Now that there's a chance, however slim, for you to break your curse, the powers that be are keen to limit your time topside. They're asking that you only be summoned above by potential clients and the living.”

Betel blinked repeatedly. “What?”

I rarely curse, but in that moment, I couldn't help myself, even as Betel and Juno gaped at me for my tasteless language. I realized what the powers that be were doing and it made my blood boil. They'd seen how my participation in Betel's afterlife, summoning him topside, had helped him skirt the constraints of his name limiter and made his existence tolerable over the past 450 years. They felt he wasn't being punished enough and would do their best to put an end to what little comfort he enjoyed. Finally, I collected myself enough to pose a useful question. 

“You said ‘asking’, that they're asking him not to be summoned topside except for work or by the living. What does ‘asking' mean here?”

Juno replied, “They technically can't prevent anyone from summoning him, but have expressed a preference on who should do so and under what circumstances.”

She glared at me and her eyes told me to read between the lines.

I nodded and turned to my son, speaking directly to his mind. “It's a trap, Betel. She's saying they can't stop me from summoning you above ground, but that we'll both be punished if I do. Only she's not allowed to tell us that and they're hoping we'll disobey and get caught. They want you gone.”

Betel looked away, silent, and anxiously rubbed the back of his neck. Now it was his turn to unleash a string of curses.

Juno spoke directly into both of our heads then. “There’s not much we can do, but you do have an option. Graveyards.” 

I turned to her and, out loud, invited her to sit at the table, hoping our ongoing silence hadn't already aroused suspicion. There was always a chance the powers that be were watching this very moment, waiting for someone to slip up.

Out loud I asked, “Can I get you anything, Juno?”

Then I replied telepathically, “What’s the point? Graveyards aren’t even haunted by other ghosts most of the time, and the living only go for funerals. Hardly anyone alive visits the dead after they’re buried.”

Catching on, Juno replied aloud, “Some tea would be nice, thank you.”

Juno answered in our minds, “True, but it’s something. And the higher ups haven’t sniffed out this particular loophole yet, so take advantage of it while you can.”

Betel caught on to what we were up to, joining Juno at the table. 

“You drink tea?” he asked, trying to fill the silence with an inconsequential question.

Then he jumped into the telepathic chat and silently asked, “What counts as a graveyard?”

“Earl grey,” Juno answered out loud before silently adding in our minds, “Typical graveyard definition. It needs to be a space where the dead are buried and marked as such. Even an anonymous burial stone would do.”

As I fetched her tea, I asked out loud, “Do you take sugar?” followed by my true telepathic question, “What about a new graveyard? Intending to bury the dead there, but no bodies interred yet.”

She spoke, replying, “No, thank you,” and silently added, “Even without the dead yet, if there was some kind of a memorial marker already in place with the intent to house the dead, it might fly. But we’ve never tried it, so I have no idea if it works.”

I set down her cup of tea and she took it in both hands.

“Can you actually drink that with, you know…” Betel asked aloud and gestured to his own throat.

“Betel!” I barked at his incredibly rude question.

“Ass,” Juno answered through a smirk.

She lifted the tea cup and smelled the fragrance wafting up with the steam. With an eye on Betel, she put the tea cup to her lips and tilted it back, watching him focus on her in anticipation of a disaster. Unbothered, she swallowed the tea and when it didn't spill from the wound in her neck, she flipped Betel the middle finger. I figured she must have used a little magic to force the tea past her fatal injury since we knew if smoke escaped through that same gap, food and drink would as well. How very like her to deliberately mess with Betel. When she lowered the now empty tea cup, she lifted a defiant eyebrow at him and he chortled.

With that, Juno rose from her chair. “Well, that's all the news I have for you two. And thank you for the tea.” 

Before either of us could reply, she disappeared.

After Juno's visit, Betel started putting out feelers for graveyards, sensing them from the Neitherworld to find ones he’d want to pop up into. He could feel the bodies of the dead, whether there were other ghosts, the condition of the graveyard, and so on. He started investigating ones worth his time, talking to the ghosts if there were any present (usually they were totally empty), and getting a sense of how often people visited. Again and again, most graveyards usually lacked both the living and the spirited dead. There were sometimes a few visitors, but of those few, barely half were women, and none could see him without summoning him, all ignoring the fliers he dropped. The only time graveyards seemed to get predictable foot traffic was on Halloween when misguided humans would try to summon a demon with a nonsense spell they saw in a movie, or heaven forbid, a book. Still, no one saw him. 

And so, it went on like this for a few years. Betel and I still visited once a month, occasionally going topside to a graveyard just to take in the air and any views nearby, but it wasn't the same when he was otherwise stuck in the Neitherworld. Even though we still enjoyed each other's company, every visit felt like a cruel reminder of the now heavier chain around Betel's neck. His relationship with Juno also became more strained. Targeting fresh ghosts for his bio-exorcism work meant sniping clients from right under Juno’s nose, making her afterlife more difficult when his success meant the newly deads never learned to haunt properly. Inevitably, new people would move into the same haunted house and the young ghosts continued to struggle without Betel’s services. And if things escalated, sometimes the living got hurt in the process. Not that Betel or the newly deads cared, particularly, as long as no one died, no rules were broken. But the rare humans who were truly determined to stay would try to cleanse the house or exorcise it, and the fresh ghosts were the ones on the hook, not Betel. As much as it frustrated Juno tremendously, per the terms of the contracts the clients signed, Betel couldn’t be held responsible. With or without Betel’s involvement, exorcism was always a risk to ghosts actively trying to drive the living from their homes. But despite how much Betel’s bio-exorcisms irritated Juno, she never revealed his graveyard explorations to the powers that be, and his tiny topside searches continued.

And then everything changed in 1987, when Betel sensed something new. It's not everyday that fresh graveyards are built, and this one felt different. He went to investigate and came back not five minutes later, grabbing my hand.

“MA! You gotta see this!”

We disappeared and reappeared in the middle of what seemed to be the tiniest graveyard I’d ever seen, but it looked entirely fake, like it was made out of Halloween decorations, even the trees and grass. Everything about it was wrong. Especially the part about it being literally tiny. A quick glance around revealed this itty bitty graveyard was in the middle of an equally small town, itself surrounded by an enormous room. I felt like Jack after he'd climbed the beanstalk to find himself in a giant’s house.

“Betel, what is this? Where are we?”

“We’re in a model town someone built in their house, Ma! With all this junk, I think it's in their attic. We’re only a few inches tall right now.”

I gawked at him, incredulous. “You're telling me we've shrunk down to fit into a literal small town in some human’s house? And those fake little headstones count as a graveyard?”

“Apparently! Ain't it wild?”

“Wild doesn't even begin to describe it.” I puzzled for a moment. “So, now what?”

“Well, I can't leave the model, but could you take a look around for me? I wanna know what we're dealin’ with. Hell, I don't even know where this house is.”

“Good idea. Sit tight.”

I disappeared from the model, reappearing next to it, automatically restored to my normal size. I glanced down into the model and spotted my teeny tiny son, unfortunately adorable in his smallness. I couldn't help but giggle. He crossed his arms and smirked up at me, tapping his foot impatiently.

“Get it outta your system, Ma.”

I somehow managed to contain subsequent giggles, but couldn't stop smiling. 

“I'm sorry, Betel, you're just too cute pocket sized.” 

When he put his hands on his hips and glared at me, I put my hands up. 

“Ok, ok, I'm going! I'll be back soon.”

I phased through the attic door and floated down the stairs to quietly investigate the house. From the homey decor, I guessed these were small town folk. Their framed photos told me they were a young married couple, Adam and Barbara Maitland according to the mail on the table. I wandered the house and found it to be quite large, perched on a hill at the end of a long driveway. Phasing through the front door, I flew down the driveway and quickly followed the road into town. Sure enough, the house stood in the barely-there town of Winter River, in the middle of Connecticut. The Maitlands ran a small hardware store downtown and seemed well liked by their customers and neighbors. Now that I knew the way, I teleported back to the house on the hill, directly to the attic in front of the model where an itty bitty Betel looked up at me expectantly. 

“Well, the homeowners are a lovely young couple named Adam and Barbara Maitland and your new graveyard is in Winter River, Connecticut.”

“Small town?”

“Barely bigger than this model.”

He nodded and glanced around, plotting. “I think I can work with this.”

I blinked. “How? It’s all fake, Betel. Even if it’s a loophole within a loophole, eventually a grave without the dead is just a hole in the ground.”

I could see the gears behind his eyes turning before he said, "Then let’s make it real.”

I squinted at him. “I’m not going to like this idea, am I?”

“Prolly not.”

I sighed, “Alright, spill it. What’s your plan?”

“I need you to bury me, Ma.”

I balked. “I beg your pardon?”

“Dirt, shovels, coffin, all of it. We’ll dig me a hobbit hole I can live in underground, the coffin’s the door, we bury the whole thing. Boom, it counts as a grave cuz there’s a genuine dead guy in it. My topside home away from home.”

“So you’ll have a miniature vacation home in a fake graveyard no one visits except two country bumpkins in Middle-of-Nowhere, Connecticut?”

“Yeah, basically.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “But what’s the point, Betel?”

He looked at me desperately. “Ma, this is the closest I’ve gotten to finding humans in a graveyard for years. And they live here!” He was pacing now, emphatically gesturing with his arms as he spoke. “This model’s huge! It ain’t goin’ anywhere for a while. Maybe they’ll have kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, neighbors visiting who wanna checkout the weird diorama in the attic, I dunno! Maybe someday, one of ‘em will…”

When his voice trailed off, I realized this absurd model with its ridiculous graveyard was the chance he’d been waiting for. That a secret corner of his heart still wanted to break his curse. That he still had hope.

I sighed, knowing that I’d help him, whatever it took, including (apparently) burying him. I disappeared, reappearing back in the model next to him and shook my head, smirking.

“You’re crazy, you know that?” I said, resigned.

His relief and gratitude were immediate. “And you’re gonna help me. Crazy must run in the family.”

“Definitely.”

He picked an empty spot and, with a little magic, we tunneled a huge cavern into the ground the size of the whole cemetery, punching nearly to the model’s wooden foundation. It really was like a hobbit hole, tall enough that he could stand up straight with clearance overhead. It had space for a bedroom, kitchen, living room and bathroom, almost like an apartment in an underground bunker. Windows were out of the question, but a few magic-imbued artificial lights quickly remedied the subterranean darkness. With a few snaps, he furnished his new “vacation home” and, knowing my eldest, this was the cleanest it would ever be, even for a big hole in the ground. Grinning wide, he practically bounced with excitement.

“Well? Whaddya think?”

“It’s cozy,” I began. “But for a grave? It’s downright posh.” I smirked.

He squealed with delight. “Now the fun part! Coffin door!”

We floated back up to the surface and with a quick snap he materialized a coffin in the air. After cutting the back off to make it an elaborate doorway, he magically shoved it into the entrance to his new house and closed the lid, piling model’s cardboard and foam over and around it. The fake grass followed, covering the entrance completely, restoring the little fake cemetery’s appearance perfectly.

Betel eagerly rubbed his hands together. “And finally, the cherry on top.”

An elaborate headstone appeared, adorned with skeletal, winged demons perched on top, one pointing down to his new gravely bunker.

His head tilted. “What should it say?” he pondered aloud.

In my ears, it suddenly felt like a heavy question. I never knew what happened to his body after he died. It might have been tossed into a plague pit, or perhaps set ablaze by Delores’s cult, or any number of other horrible things that happened to the dead in the middle ages. All I knew was his body was gone, and he never had a headstone. No one alive had cared enough to give him one.

“You can’t ask a mother that…”

His head snapped to me and he suddenly recognized the weight of his ask.

“Ma…”

“I'd only embarrass you.”

He paused and finally said, “Maybe once in a while ain't so bad.”

I took a breath. “Here lies Betelgeuse, cherished brother and beloved son.”

He swallowed and blinked rapidly, willing the moisture in his eyes away.

“Ma, I…”

“It's alright, Betel. I know you can't risk your reputation. Can't have potential clients getting the wrong idea.”

He looked down at the fake grass and nodded.

Finally, he said, “How about this?”

And the words “Here lies Betelgeuse” carved themselves into the headstone.

“And only we'll know the rest,” he said.

We stood next to each other, admiring the headstone, and he put his arm around my shoulders when I sniffled.

The Maitlands drowned only a few months later in 1988, and their deaths changed everything.

This journal dovetails into a Beetlejuice fanfiction epic that I'm posting chapter by chapter here:

Chapter 30 "Return to the living world" is now up.

[sayit3x]

Mrs. Juice’s Journal #30

It was fall of 1972 when Betelgeuse told me he wanted to attend classes at Juilliard. I thought I'd somehow misheard him. But, knowing my ears were working just fine, I asked him to explain. Apparently he and Ginger had been talking and, according to the tap dancing spider, Juilliard was the best performance school in the country and had recently launched a drama department. The new drama curriculum emphasized the interconnected nature of speech, movement, and acting, including physical comedy and storytelling. Betel wanted to add more showmanship to his bio-exorcist work and thought sitting in on classes might inspire him. Just like Betel to one up himself.

When we arrived on the first day, I started walking towards the drama classes, but he began heading in the opposite direction. I furrowed at my eldest in confusion. 

“Betel, the drama classes are this way.”

“I know, Ma, but that's later. There's something I wanna check out first.”

He led me to a large studio with bright wooden floors, mirrors and ballet bars on the walls, and a herd of students dressed in comfortable clothes patiently waiting. This was a dance class, and Betel intended to crash it as well.

Apparently Ginger had also shared that Juilliard offered classes in dance and choreography, and dancing was a near universal key to making women smile. Of course, this last detail wasn't news to Betel at all. He'd gone dancing to pick up women many, many times. Being centuries old, he’d already picked up many social dances that had been in fashion in Europe and America. He already knew the waltz, polka, mazurka, galop, Schottische, and redowa. 

And after partying through “the Roaring 20’s”, he'd picked up the Lindy Hop and kept up with styles that emerged in “the Swing Era” in the 30’s through the 40’s, like the jitterbug, east coast swing, and west coast swing. That being said, even I knew he only learned to dance well enough to lead a woman to his bed, and would have benefited from some formal instruction. 

At first, why he wanted to learn choreography was beyond me. But when I watched him possess a group of rats in the subway and make them do a coordinated dance, it made total sense and the possibilities for how he could apply that to his hauntings seemed limitless.

In spring 1973, the day finally came where the weather was nice enough topside to enjoy some time outdoors. Central Park was just a block from Juilliard at Lincoln Center and I’d been looking forward to a morning stroll through it for months. That morning, I asked Betelgeuse to come over early, well before class was going to start.

“Rather than calling you straight to class, I thought we'd commute, walk through the park, and enjoy some people watching on the way.”

“You got me up early for that?” Betel laid on the sarcasm thick, earning an eye roll from me. “I’m kiddin’, Ma. Let's go.”

After emerging in the land of the living, I summoned Betel, and we walked to the subway entrance, snarking at the living around us. We descended into the subway, phased through the turnstiles, and made our way onto a train heading towards Central Park. We phased through the train cars, observing the humans and poking fun at the ones who stood out to us. We were half way through one car when Betel stopped in his tracks.

He was looking at a woman with jet black hair wearing a baby harness strapped to her front. The mother had nodded off, but her infant, a little girl like a baby raven with a tuft of midnight fuzz barely contained by an adorable black bow, was wide awake. And, surprisingly, staring straight at Betelgeuse.

“Uh, Ma… I think she can see us,” Betel said hesitantly, not breaking eye contact with the doe-eyed little one.

“It seems so. The handbook does say small children and animals are often still open to seeing the strange and unusual.” Looking back and forth at him and the baby, I smiled. “But it looks like she only has eyes for you, Betel.”

Betel took a step closer and crouched down to be eye level with the tiny girl. He raised his finger and moved it back and forth in front of the baby's face, and sure enough, the girl's dark brown eyes tracked it. Then her little hand shot out and she gripped his pale, mossy, long-nailed finger in her tiny, pristine ones. He softly gasped and his face warmed over. In all my 600 years, I'd never seen Betel interact with a baby before. The moment felt as rare and precious as a perfect painite gem, and I felt privileged to witness it. 

When he chuckled, her eyes darted to his and locked on. Then she smiled broadly at him and he practically melted. He smirked at her, and when a pair of tiny black and white striped snakes popped out of his nostrils, she squealed with delight, laughing adorably. Her mother stirred in her sleep at the sound of her baby's joy, and I put my hand on Betel's shoulder as we pulled into our station.

“This is our stop, Betel. Time to go.”

“I wanna ditch class today.”

“To goof off with a baby all day? Be serious, Betel.”

“Can I keep her?”

“She's not a puppy. Besides, I'm sure her mother would object.”

“Aww, but Ma! She likes me!”

“Then there's hope for you yet. C’mon.”

He reluctantly rose, but the little girl wouldn't let his finger go, and he seemed so unhappy to have to delicately peel her petite digits away. She looked so sad when he walked out the train doors and she reached for him, starting to cry. He looked back at her as the doors closed and he waved, watching the train depart and disappear into the tunnel.

There was a quiet, thoughtful pause before Betel spoke.

“She wasn't scared of me.”

“Well, you're scary by profession, not by nature.”

He scoffed, smirking. “There goes my reputation. The Ghost with the Most can't even scare a baby.”

“And you didn't seem to mind one bit. Besides, you know your secret’s safe with me.” Studying the pensive expression on his face, I added, “Maybe you'll haunt her again someday.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

This journal dovetails into a Beetlejuice fanfiction epic that I'm posting chapter by chapter here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63522586/chapters/166513510

Chapter 29 "The trials" is now up.

[sayit3x]

Mrs. Juice's Journal #29

The space race between the Soviet Union and the United States had long been underway when the Saturn V rockets blasted off from Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969, launching the Apollo spacecraft towards the moon. The United States had been trying to catch up to the Soviet Union ever since news of the Sputnik satellite broke October 4, 1957. As a result, NASA was created in 1958 and Project Mercury was born. But when the Russians successfully flew their first manned space mission with Yuri Gargarin in 1961, President John F. Kennedy set the ambitious goal of landing a man on the moon before the decade was up.

First with Project Mercury, then Project Gemini, and Project Apollo it was clear that the United States wouldn’t let the Soviet Union dominate the field.  Even when JFK was assassinated on November 22, 1963, the momentum toward the moon never faltered, and his dream would be realized only a few years later.

We learned of the repeated attempts and failures at developing rockets and spacecraft in the decade or so from when Sputnik flew around the world to when Apollo finally brought men to the Moon. It was admirable to keep trying, failing, and trying again, advancing with steadfast determination to travel beyond the stars.

It seemed like there was an unspoken agreement in the afterlife that every human at NASA and their families were off limits to hauntings to keep them focused on the complicated challenge ahead. Perhaps the powers that be intervened to guarantee non-interference, but the Neitherworld seemed to take just an interest in supporting NASA as the humans did topside.

When the “landing day” came four days after launch, the twins came over so we could witness this historic moment as a family. As the boys sat on the rug, crowding close and staring up at the TV, I suddenly flashed to them when they were little, sitting together on the floor looking up in wonder at me while I told them stories before bedtime. 

“Ten bucks says the moon’s haunted,” Betel joked.

Donny’s brow furrowed skeptically. “How could the moon be haunted?” he sincerely asked.

“I dunno, aliens? There are sandworms on Titan, for cryin’ out loud! Why couldn't there be ghosts on the moon?”

“But alien ghosts, really?”

“My dear, dumb Donny, my roommates are a talking spider and a skeleton, and my neighbor is a giant fur covered monster. Why NOT aliens?”

“I suppose you're right, brother.”

“Although, if these guys kick the bucket on the moon, it'll definitely be haunted!” Betel snorted.

“Oh dear…” Donny at first muttered at such a sad thought. Then his face scrunches up in confusion. “But how would that even work? Does the moon have its own waiting room?”

“NOW you're asking the right questions!” 

“Shhh! It's starting,” I shushed them.

As we watched the Apollo moon lander touch down and Neil Armstrong took humanity’s first steps out onto the moon, we were captivated and the implications for the future were staggering. Though Betel had been trying to mess with Donny, their conversation reflected many of the questions we ghosts had about the future of space exploration. The Neitherworld was exactly that. One world. If there were multiple inhabitable worlds, did that mean that there were ghosts on other planets? Was space haunted? Could we haunt a space station or a spacecraft? And naturally, especially after Star Trek aired in 1966, we wondered how far man would travel into the final frontier. Would they ever get to Saturn's moon, Titan? What would people say when they saw sandworms? Technically, Titan was haunted since ghosts periodically popped onto its sandy surface (usually involuntarily) and were whisked back to the waiting room after an inevitable sandworm attack.

But all our burning questions aside, when we watched the grainy, black and white footage of the first steps on the moon, it truly felt like a revolutionary moment. Even though there were no ghosts among them, we still felt like it was an achievement for humanity that we somehow shared.

This journal dovetails into a Beetlejuice fanfiction epic that I'm posting chapter by chapter here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63522586/chapters/166425565

Chapter 28 "Regret and revenge" is now up.