dark figures move across the well-manicured lawn, reaching a tall wrought iron fence. One of the figures, obviously male, bends and cups his hands next to the fence to give a 3 of the other female shadows a boost over the fence, while three others climb the fence beside them without his assistance, making for seven figures in all. The dim lighting shows that the place is actually a cemetery, complete with weathered tombstones and spooky trees. The giggling silhouettes walk deeper into the cemetery, before coming to a stop at one of the larger tombstones, carved in the shape of a solemn angel, and taking out some of their phones to shed some light on the surrounding area, illuminating the faces of the young men and women. Seniors in high school, this was one of a number of get together's they were having before going their separate ways to various collages and the like.
"See I told you this was a great place to come at night." the more muscular of the boys states.
"I heard this place was haunted." another black haired boy says while making a scary face.
"Dude, don't scare the chicks.
"Ha, don't make me laugh, this coming from the guy that nearly wet himself when he found a centipede under his desk." a confident dark brown haired girl reply's.
"I wasn't talking about you." He snaps back. "Everyone knows that YOU aren't afraid of anything. I was talking about the NORMAL chicks. And why do you have to keep bringing that up?"
"I'll stop bringing it up when it stop's being so dam funny." she says with a smirk
"She has you there Steve." one of the other girls chimes in.
"And you wonder why you don't have any friends." he grumbles back
"It's really creepy here." one of the girls pipes up, hoping to start a new conversation. "We shouldn't even be here; it's probably like sacrilegious or something."
"awww come on, you ask me we're doing this place a favor, liven it up a bit, like the Mexicans. They have a whole day to honor their dead with wild party's. just think of it like that. Besides, everyone here is dead anyway. I doubt they'd mind". the muscular guy reply's honestly.
But unbeknownst to them, someone in fact did mind. Atop the hill behind their merry group stood a sickly looking old man, with pale blue skin and dressed in fine cloths that seem to come from the early 1900's. Beside him is an even sicker looking man, who's about 3 times more oddly dressed than the fellow next to him. Dressed in an unusual suit with wide vertical black and white stripes running the length of it, his skin is chalk white and covered in green patches of mold leading up to wild and unkempt hair. His eyes have dark rings around them, making his face look almost skeletal, while yellowed eyes with bright green irises scan the sheet of paper he holds.
"So you've got an infestation of teenagers huh?" he says with a hint of sarcasm.
"Yes! They break in here at ungodly hours of the night and do all sorts of unspeakable things."
"And just what sort of unspeakable things are we talking about here?" he says with a raised eyebrow and a slight smirk, all sorts of indecent ideas running through his head about what exactly a bunch of teenagers would do in a graveyard at night.
"VANDALS!"
"Oh." he replies, obviously disappointed.
"They come in and ruin my home! Carve their initials into the gravestones, tear up the grass, disturb the carefully arranged flowers…"
"Yea, I've heard enough." Beetlejuice reply's cutting off the old ghosts rant and rolling up the paper. Placing it in his coat pocket. "So what exactly were you lookin for? possession, maiming, next 6 months in an asylum?"
"I don't care what you do! I just want them off my property!"
Beetlejuice's face breaks into a broad smile. That had to be one of his favorite sentences of all time. Well along with, 'please don't hurt me!' and 'why is there horseradish in my pants?' this was gonna be fun.
Back with the teenagers, they snicker as one of the guys presents a bouquet of flowers that he had picked up from one of the graves to his girlfriend with ridiculously dramatic flair, while she replied in an equally corny fashion, when the lights from their phones were suddenly extinguished all at once. A few of the girls screamed while others tried to find their phones in the dark, saying things like. "Man this is creepy" and "why did all the phones go out at once?" when the graveyard is suddenly illuminated with a dim otherworldly glow that doesn't seem to have a source, which is met with more screams.
The dark haired girl yells at them all to run but the guy who had been scared of the centipede is frozen in place in front of the stone angel, seemingly looking at someone. He stammers "Who are you?" to apparently thin air, when cracks start forming on the angel behind him and it smiles evilly, creepy music beginning to play. "STEVE!" the third boy, who's rather scrawny and shy looking shouts at the top of his lungs, when the angel unfurls its large stone wings, sending chips of stone flying from it, and bends down from its pedestal to scoop up Steve. "RUN! RUN!" the dark haired girl keeps shouting, but two of the girls, one girlfriend to the muscular guy and the other who's in a relationship with the scrawny boy and still holds the bouquet, scream when it suddenly turns into a bunch of hissing snakes that fall to the ground or slither over her arms. They both scream at the top of their lungs and try to back away from the snakes but only meet another large tombstone, they're surrounded.
KATIE! MELISSA! The third girl shouts through tears beside the scrawny boy. The guy held by the angel shouts at her "Rebecca! He's behind you!" and she jumps in surprise like someone had grabbed her ass from behind. "KEEP YOUR DAM HANDS OFF OF HER YOU SICK MOTHER FUCKER!" and an evil disembodied cackle fills the clearing while skeletal hands burst from the ground by the muscular boys feet and grab his ankles. Terrified, he try's to break loose, but their grip is too strong.
The dark brown haired girl looks around frantically to try and find who Steve's yelling at. no, not who, what. She thinks to herself through her terror. She spins around, looking everywhere, when she spots something by the gnarly old tree's, but she can't quite make it out. Like a ghost.
That sends her terrified brain off and running with thoughts of ghosts and the graveyard actually being haunted, when the figure seems to tap his knuckles on one of the trees. The two trees come alive, pulling their roots out of the ground while their branches split into clawed hands. She stares awestruck for just a moment, then tries to make a run for it but those trees are surprisingly fast. they snatch up the remaining terrified teenagers in their creepy wooden hands as a maniacal cackle fills the air, while Steve shouts Rebecca's name through a stream of tears as the stone angel slowly crushes his chest, and the skeletal hands drag the muscular guy further into the ground, and the snakes rear up to strike at Katie and Melissa, and the scrawny guy, Rebecca and the dark haired girl struggle against the sharp wooden hands holding them high above the ground.
The dark haired girl looks frantically for the phantom she had seen earlier through tear filled eyes that linger on each of her friends. Why had she agreed to come? They weren't really her friends, at least not anymore. Sure she might have been friends with some of the guys when they were little kids. But ever since she was transferred to that prissy all-girls school they had just grown apart. It was like Steve said, she didn't have any friends. But she still couldn't stand to see them so scared like this, and her powerless to help. that's what she couldn't stand the most, the helplessness, the feeling of not being able to fight back, and now they were all gonna die, and there wasn't a dam thing she could do about it.
She looks at Steve, who keeps shouting at someone to let Rebecca go. She follows the direction of his gaze to the center of the clearing, but there doesn't seem to be anything there, but the harder she looked, the more something seemed to appear. The phantom from before! The more she looks, the more it seems to solidify, and not only that but her ears seemed to be zeroing in on the source of the laughter. No longer coming from all around her, but from the man in the striped suit.
Through her tears she yells at him without thinking "I'll do whatever you want! Just don't Kill them!" there's a sound like a record being stopped, and suddenly things get a lot quieter, except for the screaming. The corpse-like man in the black and white striped suit spins around to look at her. She meets his gaze, letting Beetlejuice know that she can in fact see him. He thinks for a moment about what she just said. He hadn't really planned on killing them per-say. They were just a bunch of kid's horsein around after dark, probably just looking for a good place to chew the fat and make out. And believe it or not Beetlejuice had a certain respect for young love. Well as much as Beetlejuice could "respect" something. Still, it's not like she knew that, and he could use it to his advantage.
The wooden hands suddenly let go of her, and she falls in a heap on the soft grass. he floats over to her side almost like he were on a treadmill that lead to that exact spot, she scrambles to her feet and trys to back away from him, but only backs into the tree.
"Did you just say, whatever I want?" he steps beside her and slings an arm over her shoulder in an oddly lighthearted and friendly fashion. Like the two of them were best buds. "What's your name hot stuff?" she can only stammer. "Come on, I won't bite, that is unless you want me too rrrrrrraow."
"Brianna." She reply's timidly. "Really? Huh, so Babes, and let me just see if I understand you right, if I let the little lovebirds go, you'll do whatever I want?" she didn't like the way this was going.
He leans on her more, stroking his chin thoughtfully. "Hmmm, what do I want?" then with a slight shrug he says, "well, I guess there's one thing." he reaches in his coat pocket and goes down on one knee before her, opening a velvet ring box with a simple silver ring inside. "Brianna, would you make the happiest poltergeist in the world, and do me the honor of being my wife?"
She's completely dumbstruck. A monkey riding a unicycle while juggling live salmon could have rolled past and she wouldn't be half as surprised and confused as this. "If you don't your little friends'll pay for it." He saye while pointing at the guys behind him with a casual thumb over the shoulder. she looks over at them, then back to Beetlejuice, considering his offer.
"I don't have to die, do I?" "What? no noooo. If anything I want you alive as long as possible. Ever heard of till death do us part?" "What does it mean exactly, marrying you?" "Oh nothing much. I just get to overlook a few obnoxious rules and you get to say that you're married to the most eligible ghost in the neitherworld." "So that's it? Bragging rights?" "Yea, pretty much." "And I don't have to do anything else, just get married?" "Well that and everything that goes along with being married." Steve shouts "don't do it!" but the stone angel puts a hand over his mouth to stifle his protests. "I..." Beetlejuice motions for her to get on with it "IIIII..." "Come on I don't have all night." "I do."
He smiles mischievously, grabs her hand and puts the ring on, and then, with a well practiced movement he grabs her and spins her into a big sloppy kiss. she struggles out of his grasp, spitting to try and get the taste of him out of her mouth, but she looks down to see herself in a big frilly red dress and looks up to see him in an awful red tux. A flick of the wrist and a nearby crypt suddenly becomes an altar and a creepy blue goblinlike creature walks out from it. The angel steps off its pedestal and walks Steve over to in front of the altar. The skeletal hands holding the muscular guy pull him along through the dirt like he was being dragged through water, with only his upper torso visible, and the two trees wander over to each side of the crypt, one of them picking up Katie and Melissa on the way over.
Brianna in hand, he marches her to the alter. "You said if I agreed to marry you you'd let them go!" "Hey, technically we aren't married yet. Sides, we need witnesses don't we?" they reach the altar, and Beetlejuice holds her against him tightly to prevent her from running off, which she was seriously considering right now. "Let's keep this quick whadaya say?" Beetlejuice asks, and the blue goblin thing begins to speak. "Do you Beet.." but Beetlejuice cuts in, "Hold it, we've been over this." "But I don't even know your name." Brianna says timidlly. Beetlejuice does a double take. "Good point. Go ahead." "Do you Beetlejuice, take this woman to be your wedded wife?" "I will if you will babes" he says to Brianna. "And do you Brianna, take this man to be your husband?" "...yes?" she reply's skeptically. "Then by the authority vested in me, I pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride."
He pulls her face to his, and kisses her forcefully. she screams into his mouth as his inhumanly long striped tongue forces its way into her mouth and thrashes around like she were trying to eat an eel. He finally takes his mouth away, and she gags, feeling like she's about to hurl, while he turns to the trapped teens. "Alright you little twerps, your free to go." simultaneously the tree's, skeleton hands, and stone angel release their captives, many of whom immediately try to scamper off while Beetlejuice turns to his new bride, who's currently bent over trying to vomit, and pulls her up so they're face to face.
"And now for the fun part, let's get this marriage con-su-mated!" "WHAT!" but before she has a chance to react Beetlejuice teleports them to and open door that leads to a sleazy and tasteless bedroom. Lifting her up he carry's the screaming Brianna over the threshold and tosses her on the bed, shutting the door behind him which locks automatically.
Suddenly she's out of the red wedding dress and back in her normal clothes, but not for long. Beetlejuice leaps onto the bed after her, pinning her flailing arms and straddling her waist. Then with one hand firmly on her chest to keep her from clawing his eyes out he starts taking off her jeans. "I don't know what your complaining about, you did agree to this." "I didn't agree to this!" she screams back at him "well I beg to differ." he says as he throws her jeans on the floor and the slips off her underwear, leaving her with nothing but a yellow t-shirt, and then he unzips his pants. She screams and thrashes around more violently, but not nearly as loud as the bloodcurdling scream she lets off when he tries to enter her. The word here is tries.
"Holy fuck you're tight down there. You're a total virgin aren't you?" he says with a sly grin. "But luckily for you, I've had a lot of experience, and I mean a-lot of experience in this department. So just sit back and let the ghost with the most make it all better." he slings her protesting legs over his shoulders and holds them there with an iron grip, hitching her up until his face is right in her bare crotch. Unable to escape she starts sobbing pitifully while Beetlejuice puts on one of his evilest smiles, sticks out his long green and black striped tongue, and starts to lick. Tracing along the folds of her vag and nuzzling against her crotch. The fuzzy mold on his face and lack of body heat adding to her feelings of disgust, but all she can do is cry. He goes from licking to kissing, big sloppy wet kisses, when suddenly, his tongue slips in.
She screams and try's to struggle out of his grip, but this seems to only encourage Beetlejuice, who lengthens his already long tongue further into her vagina while scraping the outer skin gently with his teeth. She goes back to sobbing and lying there limply while he continues lubing her up. Then apparently satisfied, he drops her roughly on the bed. She immediately try's to scramble away but he was prepared for that and pounces on her again.
straddling her waist and keeping her arms pinned, he bends low over her till they're face to face, and uses his knee to push her legs apart. He nibbles on her neck, blocking his now upright dick from her view and starts pushing it in. she screams again and then grimaces with pain as he slowly slides into her. She starts sobbing again at the loss of her virginity to a dead man. He draws it out slowly, and she struggles and screams in an effort to stop him from thrusting in her again, so to stop her scream Beetlejuice clamps his mouth over hers as he thrusts again, this time quickly, catching her by surprise. She try's to scream again, but it's difficult and muffled with his tongue fiddling around in her mouth. He starts sliding out again, and then thrusts back in her with a powerful thump that jars her whole body. She squirms, uncormfortable beneath him, streams of tears running down the sides of her face as he trusts again, and again, and again. One final thrust and he pulls his mouth away from hers, and starts licking the tears off her face while she coughs from inhaling his spit. With one hand he reaches down and strokes the side of her vag, then brings his hand back and inspects the residue. As he suspected there are traces of blood, so he slides his dick out and flops into the bed beside her, zipping up his pants. She lays there exhausted while Beetlejuice lights up a cigarette and takes a few puffs, looking kinda disappointed. "Well Bree, you aren't the worst virgin I've ever nailed, but it woulda been nice to know these sorta things ahead of time. Don't get me wrong, I'm flattered to be your first, what with the whole you can only give it away once and everything. But I've always imagined having a more eventful honeymoon. Still, we've got plenty of time to make up for it don't we?" He says while giving her a small kiss on the forehead. He nestles down onto the bed. "Yup, all the time in the world. God I love being married."
She wakes up in her own bed. Wondering, hoping, that the whole thing was a dream. except she's not in her pajamas, she's in her yellow t-shirt and jeans, which in turn are covered with grass stains, and her body aches all over, with bruises on her arms from where the tree and then beetlejuice held her in place. And worst of all, that silver ring is still on her finger. She looks at it in terror for a few moments, vividly remembering the horrors of last night. Then grabs hold of it and try's to pull it off, but it won't budge, not even a centimeter. It doesn't constrict her finger; in fact she can barely tell it's there at all, so why won't it come off? She rushes to her bathroom, and runs it under the water for a moment and try's to remove it again, but it still won't budge. This time she adds soap, but still nothing. it's like the ring is a part of her skin and nothing she try's can make it move.
She flips through a small notebook of phone numbers. Her cell phone is a piece of crap so she has to do it the old fashioned way. She stops on a page labeled Steve Morris.
She picks up the phone and dials his number. It rings a few times, before being picked up by a kindly sounding woman, Steve's mother. "Hi miss Morris, this is Brianna." "Brianna! Oh it's so nice to talk to you again. I haven't heard from you in years, even though me and your mother promised to keep in touch. But it's just so hard with her job. Can't imagine the kind of strain it must put of you with her going on all those business trips. So I assume you wanted to talk to Steve?" "Yes, is he ok?" "Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that. Last night he had a terrible nightmare. He's still shaking. I even had to call him in sick for school today. he said he invited you to join his friends last night, what happened exactly?" she panics, knowing that she would never believe her is she told the truth, so she hangs up and buries her face in her hands only to jerk them away again because she didn't want that ring touching her face.
She moves the book closer and starts flipping through the pages again, stopping at the name Melissa Holmwood and dialing the number. A young boy picks up the phone. "Hi, can I talk to Melissa?" she asks, trying to sound as normal as possible. "She's at the hospital." the little boy reply's while her heart starts beating like a jackhammer. "What? Why?" "She got bit by a snake. It wasn't poisonous or anything but she had to go get stitches for it anyway. She was really freaking out about it too. I know I wouldn't have been crying so much if a snake bit me. She even ran all the way home. Didn't just call an ambulance or anything. And she had her phone with her the whole time and everything." "Ok, that's, ummmmm, 'pretty scary'. I guess I'll call her later." "Well who's callin?" But she hangs up before he can finish his sentence.
She wants to see if the others are ok, but those were the only two numbers she had. And really she didn't know the others that well. They were really just friends of old friends. And she didn't even know the names of some of them. Not that she didn't want to. It's just that ever since she got into that fight in 7th grade and beat another student half to death with her metal thermos she used to use to bring hot chocolate to school in the winter; things just hadn't been the same. He had been teasing one of her other guy friends to the point of tears and it's like she just snapped. One of the teachers had to drag her off of him, while he left in an ambulance with a broken nose, broken collarbone, broken jaw, 2 cracked ribs, and a cracked skull.
From that point on everyone was terrified of her, and she was forced to change schools. Being sent to a "dignified, all girls private school", or as she liked to call it a " boring, stuck up school for the completely spineless." here there were girls that were scared of butterfly's, so many were downright terrified of her. Even those that did warm up to her, it didn't last for long, because at that school being friends with Brianna Harker meant that Brianna Harker was your only friend. But it also meant that nobody would dare mess with you, so she became somewhat of a silent guardian, or level headed negotiator. No-one would dare try to bully someone within sight of her. And a in a similar sense a few choice words could silence most arguments her classmates would start. But there was no doubt about it, it was a downright lonely existence and for five long years she had little choice but to tough it out. But soon she would go off to college, and she could finally start of fresh. Or at least she hoped. Because she was so tired of this thing hanging over her head for so long. But unfortunately for her, it had just been replaced with something much, much heavier.
She hears footsteps approaching and her dad appears in her doorway, looking surprised and a little bit mad. "What are you doing here! You should have been at school 2 hours ago!" crap, she had forgotten. It was Tuesday. She had school today. And apparently Beetlejuice hadn't thought to set her alarm that night. "Sorry, I'll drive over soon. I just had a really bad night" she thinks of how saying last night was horrible would lead to questions, and that answers would lead to more trouble so she adds on "-mare. And I guess I forgot to set my alarm." "Well get going, your already late! And he walks off. Her dad would often work night shifts so he slept in most mornings.
She gets changed into her uniform. White shirt, woman's tie, plaid skirt, blue blazer, and knee high socks, and rushes off to school. Normally she would have packed herself a lunch, but she really didn't feel like eating that day.
She's a nervous, exhausted wreak the entire day, and at times even being downright paranoid. Not that anyone commented on the fact, at least to her face, but when she gets home is when she gets a real punch to the gut. She walks in to see her father watching the news. She overhears the word "disaster" and so decides against her better judgment and takes a closer look. The news is reporting live on site about a Cinco de Mayo celebration gone horribly wrong. Apparently someone had "spiked" all the drinks at the party with a powerful hallucinogen, causing widespread, vivid, and terrifying hallucinations. They interview one of the people who had been there. "It was horrible! It's like the chair I was sitting on came alive and tried to trample me, like a bull or maybe a really angry horse. And that laughing. Someone must have thought it was the funniest thing ever seeing that chair kick me like that." Her eyes widen with fear. As if she wasn't paranoid enough. And worse, was it all her fault?
Over the next few days she does everything she can to keep herself busy, which mostly consisted of struggling through her homework, fighting sleep, and watching endless hours of old cartons and sitcoms, strictly the comedic stuff. The last thing she needed right now was more drama in her life, but it didn't help that these supposed mass hallucinations kept coming in over the news. Regardless she tried to push the thought of Beetlejuice out of her mind, as futile as it was.
Every night she would have nightmares, and many days when she woke up she could swear that she smelled him, no matter how many times she washed her sheets. But it turns out that there was a good reason her sheets always smelled like Beetlejuice. He was sleeping with her. Every night when she was fast asleep, he would crawl in bed with her. Being a ghost he didn't really need to sleep per say, but when he did, he just preferred to sleep with a warm body next to him, and he figured it wouldn't hurt to get to know his new wife a little better in the process before he started exploiting a certain loophole in the neitherworld marriage laws when it came to marriage between the ghost and the living.
You see there are a few rules regarding intercourse between the living and the dead. The primary rule being that if at any point the living member should say no or decide to refuse intercourse, the ghost would have no choice but to obey. There was literally only one exception, marriage. If the ghost and the living partner were married, or in some cases remarried because if one of the partners dies but comes back as a ghost if the wanted to stay married they would have to re-marry, then the ghost would have as much freedom sexually as their partner, and when tweaked around a bit, it meant the only time a ghost could rape a living human was if they were married. It was actually this loophole that lead to many instances of 'sold your soul to the devil'. When occasionally a rapist or someone similar would gain enough power to interact freely in the land of the living, they would seduce and marry as many as dozens of living men and women at a time, only to rape and often kill their partners to fulfill their sexual desires. And Beetlejuice should know, because for a long time he was a major force against such malevolent spirits, partnering up with various brave and adventurous men, but more often women, to track down these ghosts and perform exorcisms. This was actually one of the reasons why ghosts as powerful as Beetlejuice are so rare, he was one of the few that were on the winning side. But despite their best efforts it eventually reached a point where it got so bad that the head honchos of the afterlife were forced to amend a rule, banning polygamy between the living and the dead. Now if a ghost wanted to marry a living man or woman, they had a limit of one, but the other laws remained in place. Divorce required the consent of both partners, and sexual freedom was granted to the ghost when it came to their living partner.
As he lay beside his sleeping wife starring at the ceiling, he thought of the strong women he had once fought beside to take down the other ghosts, and he thought of his last marriage, comparing the two in his head. How he had driven her to cutting off her ring finger after only 2 months of marriage. He swore to himself that this time would be different. This time he would be more careful. Give her more time to recover, back off when things started getting too much for her, and be more discreet about it. because as much as he liked shaking things up in the bedroom and terrifying the living, he also liked making women happy, and having the occasional partner in crime to go along with all his crazy schemes. He rolls onto his side and starts running his gnarly fingers through her long dark hair thoughtfully, before snuggling up beside her and drifting off to sleep.
