Note:

This is the first story of a 5 story series. They're set in the Cartoonverse, but I did lift a few, small elements from the movie, and applied my own spin to them. While it's Humor/Romance, I've rated it for Teens and Up, for sexual situations in Chapter 3. I've restrained my descriptive words, but what occurs is explicit.

Chapter 1 includes my own take on the Neitherworld, with brief parodies of religion and philosophy, which you may or may not find offensive or boring as hell. If you want to get straight to the Ship, skip to Chapter 2 (but give Chapter 1 a try!).

You can read the rest of my work at Archive of Our Own, including an alternate, explicit ending for Coming of Age. The link is in my Profile.

"Where th' heck is she? She said she'd be home this morning!"

Beetlejuice pressed his pointed nose against his side of Lydia's mirror. Her bed was still made, and the skeleton curtains were still shut, with the Spring afternoon sunlight trickling in around the edges.

The ghost whapped his right palm against the oval window. Of course, the portal between his world and that of the Living remained indifferently sealed.

"Dammit! Limitations! Ya know I hate 'em!" Beetlejuice turned away from the portal, fuming.

The first several decades of his Afterlife had been, literally, a scream. Especially for those he'd haunted. With elation, Beetlejuice discovered very shortly after he staggered into the Waiting Room in confused consciousness that he could do practically anything and everything with his new "magic," or whatever the hell it actually was. The first sign was when, his head pounding with pain and disorientation, Beetlejuice snarled at the victim of an avalanche, who was whistling shrilly (which was the cause of death, a fellow non-survivor complained). No sooner had Beetlejuice said, "Clam up already!", then there was a blast of light, and the mountain climber turned into a large, silent clam.

Everyone else in the Waiting Room scooted several seats away from the newcomer.

"Why can I do this?" Beetlejuice had asked Juno, during his first, and only, interview with the Afterlife Caseworker. He pointed at her office file cabinet. A jagged laser of light flew from his fingertip to the cabinet, and in a second the cabinet's drawers became toothed jaws, masticating centuries of paperwork. "I couldn't do that when I was alive. You can't do that. It's seriously freaky, know whut I mean?"

Juno's reply was to boot him out of her office and tell him to never, ever, ever come back.

Since then, Beetlejuice's powers seemed limited only by his imagination, which was endless. And limited by the threat of being eaten by Sandworms; or, more precisely, the fear of what did or did not happen after being eaten. And by the inability to come and go to the world of the living as he pleased.

But even the thrill of his "magic," of being the Ghost With the Most, dulled with time. The worst part of death was the boredom. The Neitherworld was a stuffy, bureaucratic society that didn't change. The new arrivals were as banal, monotonous, and cautious as they had been in life. There was no one in the Neitherworld who shared Beetlejuice's particular taste in humor, no one whose brain was as actively imaginative as his.

Then Lydia Deetz moved into the renovated Victorian mansion, high on a hill overlooking the Winter River in Peaceful Pines, Connecticut. It was the mansion the townsfolk whispered to be haunted by a malicious poltergeist of unknown origin.

But Lydia wasn't around now. Beetlejuice shoved his fists in his pockets and stomped out of his room.

Ginger the Tap-Dancing Spider and Jacques LaLean the skeleton were sitting on the couch in the Roadhouse's Common Room, watching an old Fred Astaire musical. They were admiring the dancers' talents when Beetlejuice entered. The ghost sighed dramatically and fell backward. A fly-strewn Dumpster suddenly materialized, and he collapsed into it.

"Are you still down in the dumps, mon frère?" asked Jacques, a tint of impatience in his tone.

"I thought Lydia was gonna be home today," said Ginger, in her Brooklyn accent.

"So did I." A long, striped green tongue shot out from the trash, snagged a screaming fly, and retracted. A belch followed.

"I bet she's having all kinds ah fun!" said Ginger. "Decorating' her dorm room! Lookin' 'round the campus! Findin' the college canteen!"

"Oui!" said Jacques, enthusiastically. "We are so proud of our Lydia!"

"Our Lydia?" Beetlejuice's head poked out of the garbage, aiming his narrowed eyes at the skeleton.

"Oui, ours. We have all the three of us seen her grow up, Beetlejuice."

"Grow up? What're ya talkin' about?"

Being French, Jacques said, with gentle realization, "Ah."

"Well, yeah, ya idiot." Ginger eyed the fog of flies around Beetlejuice's head. "You can't tell me you haven't noticed—"

"Ginger," said Jacques, softly. The large spider glanced at him. He shook his head and put a finger to where his lips used to be, to indicate discretion.

Ginger's expression transitioned from puzzlement to surprised understanding. "Oh. He doesn't… Oh, dear."

"So Lyds is checking out some university." The ghost crossed his arms over his chest, glaring resentfully at the couple in elegant clothes sweeping in black and white on the television screen. "That's no excuse for neglectin' her best friend."

"You are happy for her that she will be going to university, are you not?" asked Jacques, his impatience replaced with concern.

Beetlejuice's yellow eyes flared with offence. "Who was it that was up all night grillin' her for her SAT, PSAT, an' all that? Who made sure she got enough sleep, an' ate breakfast, an' got those applications an' essays mailed out before th' deadlines?"

"When he wasn't tryin' to get her to party an' prank with him," said Ginger, rolling her eyes.

"Hey. All work an' no play, etcetera."

The ghost sank back into the trash. Ginger and Jacques returned their attention to the screen, as Astaire sang "They Can't Take That Away From Me."

"A month!" Beetlejuice blurted, his voice resonating in the metal box, startling the spider and the skeleton. "She's been gone a whole month! I could take it if Chicken-Livered Chuckie and Delia Ditz were around to torment, but they went with her! I'm bored out of my mind!"

There was a loud pop. A brain hopped out of the Dumpster and tried to make a break for it across the floor.

"Come back here, you!" Beetlejuice's arm reached out from the trash, grabbed the fleeing brain, and disappeared with it back into the dark. "Though I dunno why I'm bothering. Not like you've ever done me any good."

Ginger and Jacques sighed simultaneously. Ginger pressed the PAUSE button on the remote control.

"What about haunting?" the spider asked, hopeful. "Scaring th' pants off folks always cheers ya up."

"Everyone in this backward 'burg is used to -," two hands rose from the Dumpster, and their red-tipped fingers mimed quotation marks in the air, "'- unexplained phenomena.' They don't see or hear me anymore. Nobody new ever comes, 'cept a few tourists who get lost on the way to someplace with personality. An' they're too stupid t' frighten." His voice took on a Southern accent. "'Oh look, the car blew up and there's a cackling head of fire looming above the gas station with writhing snakes fer hair. Ain't that something. Well, let's go to the motel and watch 'Saw VI.'"

"To speak of the cinema," said Jacques, pointing at the TV, "this you may enjoy, if you were to quiet down and see."

"Or," Beetlejuice ranted, "they're Intellectuals, come to do gravestone rubbings." His voice curdled, cultured and snotty. "'Yes, dear, I do see the rotting corpse hauling itself out of that mausoleum. But of course that is simply an effect of the milieu of 18th century New England cemeteries we have subconsciously absorbed from the Literature course we took at Harvard in which we deconstructed Hawthorne and Poe.'"

"Wow. I never thought you thought about it that much," said Ginger, impressed.

"An' I'm stuck here!" Beetlejuice sat up, a blackened banana peel across his chest and coffee grounds in his hair. "They won't let me outta Peaceful Pines!"

"They would not have restricted you," said Jacques, firmly, "if you exercised the restraint. Blowing up automobiles, appearing as corpses, these are too far, and you know it. You cannot be allowed to bring attention to the Afterlife. To scare, oui, this is acceptable. But to cause harm and damage which can be measured, mais non, she is against the rules."

"We're dead!" snapped Beetlejuice. "Why th' hell do we have rules?"

"Look," said Ginger, the last of her patience evaporating, "Lydia'll call ya when she wants ta see ya, 'kay already? We're tryin' to watch the flick here!" She hit PLAY, and the movie resumed.

Beetlejuice scowled at the tall, skinny man with big ears as he expertly dipped the tall, skinny woman with blond hair, and tried to feel entertained. It didn't work. His yellow eyes fixed on the spider and her soppy grin.

"Ginge'," said Beetlejuice. "Don't think I ever mentioned it, but there're no spiders even remotely as huge an' ugly as you in th' Real World. Do you remember bein' alive? Where're ya from?"

Both Ginger and Jacques stared, incredulous, at the ghost. Jacques' jaw dropped, literally, into what had once been his lap. Ginger let out a shriek, which was immediately followed by an explosion of tears.

"Sheesh," said Beetlejuice. "Guess you're from Overly Sensitive World."

Ginger ran off the couch, up the wall, and to her room in the Roadhouse's ceiling. She slammed the corrugated tin door behind her.

Jacques slapped his jaw back into place. "You know better than to ask about Before!" he shouted, standing up and balling his finger bones into fists.

With a snap of his fingers, Beetlejuice made the Dumpster disappear. "Cripes, Jacques. Ya know better than t' know that I know better 'bout anything. Know whut I mean?"

"Mean is what you are being! It is you who should be doing the growing up! Take out your frustration elsewhere!"

"Hey, pal, this is my Roadhouse! You just rent here! Nobody tells me where t' go!"

"Oo la la," said the skeleton sarcastically. "Excepting Juno and Them, non? You go too far, the leash, she is yanked. Ha!"

"The Ghost With the Most is on nobody's leash!" Steam screamed from Beetlejuice's ears. His teeth sharpened to points. "I go where I want, when I want!" His voice darkened, turning female and hoarse; Juno's voice. "'Geographical and Temporal Perimeters; Functional perimeters vary from manifestation to manifestation, '" his voice returned to its normal, dry sarcasm, "my fat, dead ass! I'm goin' t' find Lydia!"

He vanished with a thunderclap.

The sky above Peaceful Pines darkened as roiling clouds formed with alarming speed. A lightning bolt shot down into the small, ancient cemetery. Had anyone in the town with an open mind been watching, they would have seen a mist coagulate into a foggy shape beside the rusty, leaning iron fence which enclosed the place of the dead.

With wind lashing his yellow hair, Beetlejuice glared at the sign by the fork in the road a few yards from the cemetery's fence, which declared You Are Now Leaving Peaceful Pines. Come Again Soon!

One road went North to New York State, where the Deetzs had gone. The other went South, through Connecticut, and to the ocean. His sharp teeth clenched, Beetlejuice hauled first one leg, then the other, over the rickety iron bars. Immediately he felt a shift, as if the world had moved backwards a few inches beneath his pointed boots. With determination, he stormed down the small hill and straight for the sign.

"HA!" he barked, slapping the sign with contemptuous triumph as he passed it. "So much for 'perimeters!'"

The moment his heels hit the road, the earth yawned beneath them.

Twisting as he fell, Beetlejuice sank his fingers into the rim between the worlds.

"OH, crap!" Above, through the portal, Beetlejuice saw the storm clouds writhing. He didn't dare look below. He kicked, hanging hundreds of feet in the air, and frantically tried to lift his own body weight with his arms. As always, his fear short-circuited his magic. Levitation was impossible; so was shape-shifting. He may as well have been a helpless, limited, living human again.

A roar, like a giant, rusted metal gate creaking open, echoed far away.

"They must have th' best sense of smell in th' universe!" Beetlejuice yelled in the howling wind. A clod of earth broke from between his fingers, but as it fell into the portal, it disappeared.

"C'mon, 'Juice! C'mon!" He heard something enormous –no, more than one—shifting far below with the ease of sharks turning in waves. One hand grappled and dug a few inches higher into the Real World. Like an idiot, he looked down.

Windblown yellow sand almost obscured two moons, a greater and a lesser, pale and low in the dark blue sky. He hung in the midst of that sky. Gigantic, striped fins sliced through the wheat-colored dunes of Herbert World, heading in Beetlejuice's direction.

"AA!" With strength from sheer panic alone, Beetlejuice yanked out a hand and dug it like a mountaineer's claw hammer six inches further up.

Metallic screeching indicated that the creatures had spotted him dangling in the air.

Shrieking himself, Beetlejuice scrambled and pulled and kicked. His arms, his head and his chest were out when he felt a concussion of air from great jaws snapping below his feet.

"I am not gonna die again!" screamed Beetlejuice, clawing furrows into the grass beside the road. "The first time was bad enough! I am not gonna be digested! I don't know if there's another side!"

Something brushed his left boot, and hot, dry breath heated his ankle. With terror, Beetlejuice grabbed handfuls of long grass and yanked himself free from the portal. It immediately slammed shut.

Huffing, Beetlejuice turned over and stared at the quiet, whole asphalt road, and the amiable sign You Are Now Leaving Peaceful Pines. Come Again Soon!

"OK," he moaned, "I wasn't that bored." He gulped. "I need a drink."

The Downtown of New Yuck City, a few miles from Beetlejuice's Roadhouse, was probably a twisted version of the Real World's New York City. The ghost didn't know; he'd never been to New York, in life or death, but he'd seen photographs of where Lydia used to live. Why the dead insisted on trying to replicate the Living World escaped him, because it was impossible to make it feel as it had when they were alive. The residents of the Neitherworld couldn't help but put a darkly cynical spin on things, because of their natural fascination with the grotesque and the frightful. It was similar to the way recovering addicts shared dark jokes amongst themselves, which sober people didn't, and couldn't, understand. "You had to be there" had extra meaning for the dead. When you've had huge chunks ripped from your body because your son hit ENGAGE on your speedboat's Evinrude, after you'd repeatedly told him to never touch that button goddammit I mean it, you couldn't help but have a skewed sense of the ridiculous.

But there was a longing for What Had Been, even though, once you were out of the Waiting Room, out of your Caseworker's office, and through the door to the Neitherworld, you didn't breathe a word about Before. No one wanted a Flashback. Some who had them went too far, and didn't come back. Ghosts who haunted in the Real World didn't mix with those who had Crossed Over permanently. That was a Rule that Beetlejuice, and Beetlejuice alone, broke.

"Repent!" cried a voice on the street corner.

And then, mused Beetlejuice with irritation as he floated down the sidewalk, there are those morons who just won't goddamn let it go.

Beetlejuice stopped and sized up the two dozen newcomers grouped on the corner. He loved playing How Did They Croak?

"Gashed clothes," he mumbled as he assessed the damages, "lacerated flesh…glass an' splinters piercing all over their bodies…limbs missing…" Beetlejuice snapped his fingers confidently. "Tornado!"

"Repent!" bellowed the tallest man, who had a nine iron speared through his chest, and thin, mousy brown hair sticking out at all angles. He clutched a Bible that was shorn of its back cover and half its pages. His group, which were trying to cover the most immodest areas of their bodies with the few scraps of clothes they still had, obediently echoed, "Repent!"

Beetlejuice strolled up to the tall man. "Repent what?"

"The Kingdom of God is at hand!" hollered the man, not looking directly at Beetlejuice, or any of the many pedestrians, human and otherwise, who were indifferently walking by.

"You're dead," said Beetlejuice.

"Those who have Walked with the Lamb have Eternal Life. We are being tried and tested. The Might of Our Lord plucked us from the midst of our prayer meeting, to bring His message to—"

"Dorothy," said Beetlejuice, "yer not in Kansas anymore. An' this ain't Oz."

"We're from Oklahoma, not Kansas," said a hefty woman, whose ineffective girdle showed through her shredded dress. Her hair looked as if the tornado had yanked it straight up in a tribute to the Bride of Frankenstein's Monster. She patted the ghost's arm. "It's an easy mistake, dear. Goodness, you're cold. You need a sweater. And a haircut."

Beetlejuice observed, "It's th' atheists an' Buddhists who adapt th' quickest. Th' Rastafarians don't notice any difference."

"Only a personal Relationship with Jesus will save you from this realm of Damnation," the tall man went on. "You, sir!" He jabbed Beetlejuice in the chest. "Do you have a personal relationship with Our Savior?"

"Sure thing, Sparky," said the ghost. "We were having decaf chamomile an' bars this morning, an' he told me to tell ya that YOU'RE DEAD!"

"Is this Hell?" asked a teenage boy timidly, his right arm dangling from one or two ligaments.

"Only if yer definition of Hell is no diseases, being able to eat whatever ya want, drink as much as ya want, have as much sex as ya want, an' no consequences," said Beetlejuice.

"Hallelujah!" yelled the boy, joyfully.

"Son, do not give in to temptation!" yelled the tall man, whose nine iron punched the hefty woman in the eye as he turned. "This is merely a Way Station on our journey to His Great and Glorious Mansion, where care and woe are forgotten—"

"Oh, christ. So to speak." Beetlejuice walked toward an alley. "Time to do unto others, as…" He paused. "I forget th' rest."

The newcomers were still verbally accosting passersby when a huge shadow fell across them. They went silent and looked up.

The sun –which for some reason didn't look like the sun back in Oklahoma—was blotted out by a head of long, flowing hair on a bearded man fifty feet high. His robe was made of simple cloth; his feet were shod in sandals. The only things which were unrecognizable were his thick, blood-red toenails and yellow eyes.

"AND THUSLY YOU HAVE PROVEN YOUR WORTH." The huge man's voice reverberated against them.

The group fell to their knees, bowed their heads, and clasped their hands in prayer, if it was at all possible.

Pedestrians cut across the street as if such a scene were an everyday occurrence. Which it was, if Beetlejuice was bored.

"Lord, we have awaited Your Glorious—"began the tall man.

"PUT A SOCK IN IT." A sock suddenly crammed the man's mouth. "I KNOW. I KNOW EVERYTHING. GIVE ME A BREAK. ANYWAY. YOU HAVE COME TO PURGATORY, AND YOUR SINS HAVE BEEN WASHED AWAY. I MEAN PURGED, THEY'VE BEEN PURGED. NOT LIKE 'VOMITED.' IF THAT'S WHAT YOU'RE THINKING I MEAN."

The group blinked up at the towering man, looking confused. "Lord," said the tall man, "we're Baptists. We don't believe in Purgatory."

"ARE YOU QUESTIONING ME?"

"No sir, nossir, not at all, never," they chorused.

"OK. SO. NOW YOU'RE GOING TO SHUT UP ABOUT SALVATION AND DAMNATION AND LEAVE EVERYBODY ALONE. CAPISCE?"

The group blinked.

The teen boy raised his hand.

The enormous man sighed. "YEAH, YOU IN THE BACK."

"If we're done with Purgatory, don't we move on to Your Heavenly Kingdom?"

"HOLY MYSELF! DIDN'T A GUY JUST TELL YOU THERE'S NO DISEASE, YOU CAN EAT ALL YOU WANT, DRINK ALL YOU WANT, BOINK ANYBODY YOU WANT AS MUCH AS THEY WANT, AND THERE'RE NO CONSEQUENCES? DID THAT NOT JUST HAPPEN?"

The group looked at each other for confirmation, and then vigorously nodded.

"SO WHAT THE HELL MORE DO YOU WANT? HARPS? STUCK UP ANGELS? GIFT BAGS?"

"Well," said the hefty woman, "I do like those little soaps, the kind that look like seashells, that you get in hotels, y'know, the lavender ones—"

"OH, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD." With a crack of thunder, cellophane wrapped gift bags appeared in the hands, or at the feet, of the newcomers. "THERE. SO DIE AND LET DIE, AND SHUT UP ALREADY."

With another explosion of thunder and a slash of lightning, the huge man vanished. The group smiled and nodded and walked into the shopping district, holding their bags.

Sneering, Beetlejuice appeared in normal form in Central Central Park, across the street from the corner.

"That," said a voice with an Irish accent, "was of great amusement, sir."

"Saw it, did ya?" Beetlejuice put his hands in his pockets and warily looked at the heavy-set man in the powdered wig, black clothes, and white collar, who was sitting at the same park chess game table, with the same people, where he was every afternoon when the ghost happened to pass by. "I was gonna take them to a portal, tell 'em Herbert World was New Jerusalem, an' feed 'em to th' Sandworms."

"But you didn't," said the pale, bald man with large, dark eyes, wearing a turtleneck under a corduroy jacket. He turned to a man with copper skin and graying black hair. "That's where he deviates from the trope. Coyote would have done it."

"No, the Trickster is chaos," said the darker-skinned man with the deep voice, "but he is not a murderer."

"Are you talkin' about me?" Beetlejuice strolled over to the table.

"You are a person who inspires fascination," said a woman in a white Grecian robe.

"Don't you know it, baby." The ghost smoothed back his dry hair with his palm. "I stand out bigger than all the others." He leaned over and said, in his deepest voice, "An' I can prove it. How about we both get under that sheet an' play Dirty Laundry?"

The woman laughed. "The insatiable sex drive, as well as the inflated ego! It is even as you say about Coyote, Heȟáka Sápa!"

"Whut?" snapped Beetlejuice, indignant.

"Aspasia, he is not Coyote, any more than he is Raven or Reynard," said the bewigged man with the white collar. "Or Beelzebub."

"Why don't you get a death?" Beetlejuice sat back in mid air. "You guys sit here every week, jawin', when you could out havin' fun."

"And you come, at least once a week, to listen, and pretend that you are not." The man in black offered Beetlejuice his hand. "Forgive us our neglect. I, sir, am George Berkeley, late of Dysert Castel, Ireland, and Oxford. These are Aspasia of Athens, Greece; Samuel Johnston, late of Staffordshire and Oxford; Heȟáka Sápa, often known as Black Elk, late of Little Powder River, Wyoming; and Professor Carl Sagan, late of Brooklyn, New York."

"Beetlejuice," said the ghost, shaking the man's hand, "late for gettin' hammered. Smell ya later." He started to float away.

"But, sir, before you go," said Samuel Johnston, "if I may be so bold to ask: What were you? Where were you?"

"Huh?" Beetlejuice halted in mid air. "Nobody asks about Before."

"We do," said Aspasia.

"How can one not?" said Black Elk.

"Why do ya wanna know?" asked Beetlejuice, suspicious.

"Because we don't know," said Sagan. "Don't you ever look around, compare it to how it was before death, and ask 'Why? How?'"

"No. What's the point?" Beetlejuice hesitated. Unable to resist, he allowed, "Ok, I got a question for ya. What are those?"

Beetlejuice indicated a group of furry creatures whose limbs were scaly tentacles, strolling by with Ice Scream cones.

"I never saw anything like that Before. Are they dead? Where'd they come from?"

The group let out a simultaneous, delighted murmur.

"This has been a particular area of study of Professor Sagan," said Johnson.

"The nonhuman creatures are as real as we are, and we were," said Sagan, eagerly. "I've interviewed lots of them. They're as reluctant to discuss their previous existence as humans from Earth are, but what I've learned from the little they'll tell is they're from what must be other planets, and other dimensions."

"Gimme a break," said Beetlejuice. "Now yer gonna tell me there are Little Green Men."

"I don't believe in you, either," said the little green man with antenna, walking by in Hawaiian shorts.

"You know about Sandworms," said Sagan. "Most of us had encounters with them when we first stumbled across a perimeter. Their planet is Saturn. But it's not Saturn, not the Saturn observed and studied during my lifetime, in my solar system. It's seemingly another Saturn, in another solar system like but unlike my solar system, in a dimension layered over the dimension I lived in."

"Who knows how many layers upon layers there are," said Aspasia. "With uncountable different beings."

"The world we come from, Beetlejuice, is one of many hoops which make one circle," added Black Elk. "We believe the portals occur when the hoops touch."

"For some reason, the dead can cross between dimensions which the living can't," said Sagan. "I think it's because the dead are more…well, for lack of a better term, elemental."

"So why do all these people an' creatures end up here after they Bite It?" demanded Beetlejuice. "What is this, th' All Dead Warehouse?"

"It could be," said Sagan. "No one's ever measured the size of the Neitherworld. It may be infinite, more than enough to hold all the dead. Perhaps there's a turn over, a kind of reincarnation, for some beings. It could be that this is the infinity in which dwell all dimensions and universes, and from which they come. Maybe this is what was before the Big Bang. Maybe this isn't Death, but a collective Primal Soup, where matter and elements –"

"Now I really know that you need to get laid," said Beetlejuice. "Alright, answer me this. Why do I have powers I didn't have Before? An' why don't a lot of the dead have 'em, or have as much as I do?"

"That," said Sagan, "is why we've noticed you."

"We are speculating," said Aspasia, "that the determining factor is imagination."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge," piped up a man with a German accent, a bushy gray moustache, and wild gray hair, who was seated at the next chess table, concentrating on the board as a creature that looked like a gargoyle indecisively fingered a knight.

"There are those who have great imagination," said Berkeley, "but will not employ it, due to the inability to transcend societal, religious, and moral restrictions, which they cannot or will not shed on This Side. Therefore, they do not have, or cannot use, such 'powers' as you may call to hand."

"But those who have the least compunctions," said Johnson, "and the greater imagination, may, by instinct alone, call upon abilities they could not in their previous existence."

"Being elemental," said Sagan, "one thing can shift to another. Think of it as constantly being able to do what a caterpillar does, when it's becoming a butterfly. The Neitherworld is an eternal cocoon."

"The Dead are in a state of Becoming," said Black Elk. "While the Living are fixed into Being."

"That is not to say that the Living world is itself material," said George Berkeley.

"Oh, not this again," groaned Samuel Johnson.

"Now Johnson, even in death all we have is perception. We have no proof of material substance. The existence of the universe is merely an idea we assume from our senses. We can never perceive substance directly."

"Oh, don't go there," said Sagan.

"What we experience," said Berkeley, on a roll, "are tastes, odors, colors, and such, which we conclude come from the observed material world."

"You're bollocks," said Johnson, with feeling.

"But we are experiencing the sensations, not the material substance itself," Berkeley continued, undeterred. "Therefore, it is impossible to prove that substance exists. This you cannot refute, Johnson."

"I refute it thus!" said Johnson, and punched Berkeley in the nose.

The two large men dropped to the ground, rolling and hitting and pulling each other's wigs off. They were immediately surrounded by men and women in togas, dress robes with mortar boards, and clerical uniforms, pumping their fists and excitedly yelling, "Fight! Fight! Fight!"

Berkeley and Johnson collapsed on their backs on the park grass, clothes dirty and torn, giggling.

"They never let us do that at Oxford!" laughed Berkeley.

"An' they call me a nutjob." Beetlejuice floated away from the cheering crowd. "I am so gettin' plastered today."

The Living End was a new bar. Therefore, it hadn't banned Beetlejuice. Yet.

The place was full, but quiet. The ghost floated in and found a seat at the crowded bar. The bartender, who looked like a green dragon with a green octopus for a head, with great bat-like wings folded against his back, glanced up from washing beer mugs.

"One of yer best," said Beetlejuice.

"Best what?" asked the bartender.

Beetlejuice blinked. "Ya got more than one?"

"Look, pal," said the bartender, straightening up and adjusting his Dunwich Horror Now On Tap apron, "be specific. I can't read your mind. Well, yeah, I can. But who wants to do that all day, in a bar, of all places? You have no idea."

Beetlejuice peered at the shelves of bottles in front of the large mirror behind the bar. His eyes popped when he saw the reflection of the person seated to his left. He turned, his eyes half-lidded. Grinning leeringly, and said, "I'll have what she's havin'."

"You want that Diet Tab straight up, or on the rocks?" asked the bartender.

"Just pop the can and gimme two straws, my good man."

Beetlejuice leaned his back against the bar. His right arm stretched unnaturally far along it, in front of the bluish young woman wrapped in a bath towel, with wet feet and her spine protruding from the back of her neck. He said, in his smoothest, deepest voice, "Judgin' from the way yer dressed, you've been waitin' for me."

The woman sipped her Tab, and glared straight ahead.

The ghost's right wrist stretched down from its arm, until the forefinger and thumb of its hand were playing with the edge of the bath towel. "The Beetlejuice Playland is open an' ready fer business. Thrills a minute, guaranteed. An' you get free admission."

The woman's handbag slammed across Beetlejuice's face.

"A purse! I was wondering where ya kept yer money."

The purse smacked again.

"OK, OK," said Beetlejuice through the hair in his face. "I can get into that." He raised his hands, his fingers trembling. "Ooo, hurt me, hurt me, you big, strong—"

The third blow landed him on his back on the tile floor. The woman stomped over him, headed for the door.

"I take it that wasn't foreplay?" he yelled after her.

Beetlejuice got to his feet, yanked his crumpled suit down and his pants up, shot his cuffs, straightened his lapels, and smoothed his hair. He turned to the ashy black woman in the hospital gown on the next stool, and produced a long, licentious smile. "I was just tryin' t' get rid of her, so I could have a shot at you, Scrumptious."

She punched him in the nose. He hit the floor. She stepped over him on the way out.

The ghost grabbed the stool where she'd been sitting and hauled himself upright. He confided to a gray-haired woman on the next stool, "Ever notice that since we're all dead, nobody hesitates t' use physical violence?"

The old woman sipped a green liquor, refusing to acknowledge Beetlejuice's existence.

Beetlejuice's smiled. "Speaking of physical—"

"Oh, please," said the old woman, drily. "I am no one's act of desperation."

"Well, down that, Blue Eyes, and look again. They say absinthe makes the heart grow fonder."

The woman punched him in the nose. Beetlejuice hit the floor. She stepped over him.

The bartender leaned over the bar and said to the ghost, who was flat on his back on the floor, "You owe me five bucks."

Beetlejuice remembered that he was broke when a voice, faint and very, very distant, whispered in his mind.

Home.

"Lydia!" Beetlejuice whispered back. In a crack of light and thunder, he vanished.