A/N: Ummm.. it's really belated, but disclaimer: I don't own Beetlejuice or any ideas related to the movie and/or cartoon.
Also, this has not been proof read even a little bit. It will be proof read soon if you want to re-read it in the future.
Beetlejuice used the hell out of that book over the years.
He encouraged the book to wander from hand to hand. It travelled all over the world. Though it took longer to reach some countries he was pretty sure he still hit every one eventually.
He had some especially great moments that he liked to sit back and reflect on. The Black Plague was perhaps his favorite. He hadn't actually started the spread of the disease, or the disease itself. However, he did cause a major infestation of fleas. There may or may not have been some Neitherworld fleas mixed in with the rest. They were significantly harder to kill. Just the thought made his lips twist in a demented smirk.
And it was so easy. All he had to do was get the book into the hands of a sensitive. There wasn't even that much work involved because sensitives seemed to be drawn to it. Once they touched it he could leech a touch of their power to anchor him to them. He usually did this through something personal belonging to them.
Initially Beetlejuice gave up those ties as soon as he was released. The sensitives didn't last long past getting him out. He burned bridge after bridge, connection after connection for a hundred years. Then he went through a dry spell.
He could feel the world changing around his book, but he couldn't affect anything; couldn't latch onto anything. It was killing him. Sure he knew a lot about the living world and all the innovations going on, but even as his brain filed those things away for later he could only focus on his frustration.
Finally someone took his book off the shelf it had been sitting on for twenty years. They stored it in a box for a fairly brief trip and then took it out again. After that various people were picking up the book for a few weeks at a time and then a new person would repeat the cycle. Beetlejuice determined that it must have been added to the collection of a public library. He grinned. Now it was only a matter of time.
After playing with the book for a while early on, Beetlejuice had figured out that he could change the text at will. At first this meant a minor glamour that made the book look appealing until he could see more of the person and specifically change it to their interests.
He didn't bother with that anymore. Since then he'd figured out how to enchant the book. Now it sensed the reader's interest using a little of his juice and entertained them with minor nonsense.
Beetlejuice knew this would only work inside a library for so long. If someone noticed that the book changed with every reader it might get sent somewhere he couldn't get access to a sensitive.
There was nothing he could do though. Until someone with power touched the book he was stuck. So, one day, when Beetlejuice felt a jolt of electricity flood his body he jumped to his feet and through power outward around the book before realizing the holder was probably still in the library. He waited until later that evening to send out much more tentative feelers.
A few minutes later he found the perfect thing: a mirror set into a stand.
Grinning widely the ghost carefully infused every fiber of the reflective surface with his power.
When he at last turned his attention away from the project at hand he was surprised to see a man asleep on a nearby bed. Beetlejuice had learned long ago that men tended not to be as open to the occult and were rarely useful for this sort of haunting. But if the world was changing he fully supported it. This would double his targets.
It was too bad this current guy didn't have enough power to keep him going. Beetlejuice could only really pull a few pranks. He moved objects around at random, floated objects in the poor man's peripheral vision, and snuck into his head to make him obsessed with the book.
This last turned out to be a good thing and a bad thing. The guy didn't want to return the book to the library. He clung to it at night before bed and just seemed to get more fixated when he found it next to his mirror in the mornings.
Unfortunately for him this library kept a strict record of their books. And they had a collection agency.
It took several weeks for the man to recover from the collector's visit. Then he snuck back into the library to find the book.
Beetlejuice began to get annoyed. He needed someone with enough power that he could change the words in the book. He had an idea about writing some spell that would convince a reader to summon him. But he still didn't have enough power. His curse made it hard for him to communicate any information on himself.
This guy, with his sick and twisted obsession was making his afterlife impossible.
So one night with the mirror and the book in the same room Beetlejuice changed tactics.
The next time the collector came he was surprised to find his objective cowering in a corner. He tightly clutched the object and only some rough treatment released the book. The man didn't even seem to realize that he'd been hurt. He just continued to rock back and forth, whimpering.
As he turned to leave the room the collector heard a ghostly cackle that raised the hairs on the back of his neck.
Beetlejuice kept the link on that mirror. The book was more important, but the mirror would allow him a window into the living world. And it had enough juice that he could summon the book to the mirror. Beetlejuice guessed that the way the mirror held his juice had something to do with it being manmade. No tree or rock had held his power. It didn't matter. Now he had at least two ways into the outside world. And there would be more in the future.
Beetlejuice continued to make physical connection after physical connection. And he didn't bother disconnecting them anymore.
Now he had a pocket watch in the living world that was linked to a pocket watch in the Neitherworld. The mirror he'd first enchanted was synced to a full length mirror in Beetlejuice's bedroom. There were coins, knives, glasses – anything reflective – that he had connected with a similar object in his house.
Most of the time he ignored them. He had to be touching the corresponding item to feel what was happening around the living world item. It was easier to just focus on his book.
That was always a source of fun. Over the years he tortured both the living and bound ghosts. He frightened them and toyed with their minds. Sometimes it was harmless pranks and other times he got into their heads. He could make them forget things, like their husbands or wives or children. Or he could make them remember things that had never happened. His favorite was making people remember things that would happen.
Beetlejuice was careful to only ever go into someone's head if he thought they deserved it. Which didn't mean much since he often thought they deserved it if he was having a bad day.
Or if they didn't let him out quickly enough. Because he did figure out how to convince people to let him out.
His book could read them. And he borrowed power like the fiend he was to change his book into spells, poems, flighty bits of prose, anything that would convince the reader to repeat his name aloud three times. Hell, he got good at it.
Inevitably someone would send him back, but he could spend years at a time in the living world if he was careful.
He became the most cultured ghost in the Neitherworld without anyone even knowing it. He spent time with the highest classes to the lowest and everything in between. He helped develop new technologies and social fads. When he wasn't helping develop he was learning everything he could. Beetlejuice devoured knowledge.
He wanted to know everything. It made him more powerful.
He thought it was some time in the 1880s or '90s when he got called back last.
After fifteen years of no one touching his book Beetlejuice began to wonder if The Administration had caught on. Since his first 100 year dry spell Beetlejuice's book had never gone this long without even being touched.
Finally he got tired of waiting. He got tired of pulling pranks on Neitherworldians. He got tired of pretending he was a mostly harmless, small-time annoyance.
So he went home and pulled out his intricately carved floor-length mirror.
Interestingly enough, the corresponding mirror appeared to be in a child's bedroom. After a few hours watching the room Beetlejuice was rewarded with a view of a little boy, maybe seven years old.
A week later Beetlejuice summoned the book to the kid's room and left it on his bed. The kid looked through the book of spells interestedly. He only focused on the spells that benefitted him. One such spell broke the arm of a neighbor.
It took more than a year of Beetlejuice granting the kid's every wish for him to realize that the kid had grown too selfish to ever use the spell that would summon Beetlejuice.
So he stopped helping the kid.
It wasn't long before things changed in the kid's life. He came home with a black eye, then bloody lip, then a broken arm. Eventually the family moved away.
The next three inhabitants of the room were all kids and they were all varying degrees of selfish. Beetlejuice allowed some spells to work while ignoring others just to see what the brats would do.
None of them had the reaction he wanted. And he didn't even know what that reaction was!
Finally an adult lived in the room. She found the book, scoffed at it, and threw it away. Beetlejuice spent years driving her insane.
When they took her away the room was empty for a while.
Beetlejuice checked on his other trinkets, but bored of them more quickly. They didn't let him look out into the world as the mirror did.
He came back to the mirror only to find it covered in a sheet.
Furious Beetlejuice almost shattered the glass. It took weeks of pranking the local ghosts to get the fury out of his system. He even turned his own brother into a good person in the process.
Once he was calmer, Beetlejuice went back to the mirror. He wasn't sure how many years had passed since he'd driven that woman insane, but now the mirror was in a different house. The room it was in had a similar feel to all the others, but the view outside the window was vastly different.
One day a little girl moved into the room. She was about the same age as the first boy that had moved into that room. But she was very different.
He watched her for years to see if it was even worth summoning his book. He had grown jaded towards children.
So he watched her catch bugs and then free them. He watched her put up dark curtains and read gothic books. He watched her wardrobe grow slowly darker along with the rest of her room. He watched her befriend a black cat.
Everything he saw made his grin slowly grow.
When she was nine – and he knew this because her parents had woken her up with the number – he left the book on her bed for her when she got home. That night after school she found the book on her bed.
Whether she thought it was a birthday present or a Halloween present he didn't really care. He was just happy she seemed entranced.
She had no idea what that book would come to mean to her.
Little Lydia.