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Xander wakes to the sound
of pounding at his door. “There are snakes in my crypt,” Spike says when
Xander wrenches it open and growls, “This better be good or it better be
pizza.”
Spike backtracks and asks, “What’s pizza if it’s different to good?”
Xander says, “Extra good,” and slams the door. He opens it again when
the pitiful cries of, “Snakes! Xander, come on, mate. Help a bloke out,
yeah? Snakes!” get too much for him to bear.
They gear up with oven mitts, a broom, a mop and pair of goggles each.
Xander feels stupid carrying a mop through a cemetery, but at least it’s
the middle of the night and he knows Spike looks more ridiculous than he
does because Spike is already wearing the goggles and mitts and has
somehow managed to procure Xander’s hard hat.
Xander opens the door to Spike’s crypt as quietly as he can, only waking
up half the dead at Shady Hill Cemetery with the enormous creak that you
only get when trying to open a door quietly. Spike complains that Xander
is being too noisy and wakes up the other half in doing so.
Xander goes in first; he has to, because Spike has already thanked him
in advanced and patted his back hard enough to ensure that Xander had no
choice.
“Where?” Xander stage-whispers. “I can’t see.”
Spike is still hiding behind the door, but he’s brave and risks poking
his arm around it to point frantically and stage -whisper back, “Are you
blind?! In the corner!”
A flashlight would have been much more practical than a mop, Xander
silently decides, and he goes back to the door and forces a very
unhappy, flailing Spike to come inside the crypt and give him his Zippo.
There are snakes everywhere.
Xander doesn’t mind snakes - he finds the lack of legs comforting – but
he’s not in the slightest bit happy about this.
Spike shrieks and jumps like a surprised cat. He ends up clinging upside
down to the ceiling. Xander looks down at the snakes slithering around
his feet and then looks up at Spike and wishes he was a vampire too.
Vampires were springy.
“Get ‘em! Get ‘em! Get ‘em!” Spike shouts, and Xander seriously
considers not getting ‘em and hoping Spike just stays stuck on the
ceiling. It could become a local attraction!
Come and see the crazy vampire! He’s been up there for five years,
eighty three days, four hours and nine minutes! Only $9.99 a ticket!
Mind the snakes
Spike shrieks again and starts to sob, and that’s when Xander knows he’s
a sucker because he feels sorry for him.
So Xander grips his mop a little tighter and gets started. It doesn’t
take him long to realise that mopping them up isn’t going to work, and
not just because mopping up a crypt full of snakes is something only the
mentally challenged would consider, but because the snakes aren’t really
there.
Except they are.
Ghost snakes
Xander shrieks and jumps like a surprised cat. He doesn’t get anywhere
near the ceiling and the blanket of ghost snakes does nothing to cushion
his ass from the hard concrete floor.
Later, when he’s done a passable job of pulling himself together and he
manages to peel Spike from the ceiling with the power of persuasion and
the promise of a whole carton of cigarettes, alone, he and Spike do the
research thing at the Magic Box.
Turns out the crypt belongs to one I. C. Kuntz.
Coming from a long line of Kuntz, Ian was an avid collector of snakes.
He loved his hobby dearly and was apparently buried with a whole big
batch of them.
“We’re gonna have to exorcise them,” Spike insists. His eyes are
permanently like saucers and it’s beginning to freak Xander out.
“How?” Xander asks. “With a treadmill? I really don’t see how we’re
going to get them to use one of those. Or were you thinking free
weights?”
“Exorcise,” Spike enunciates.
“Oh! Then we’ll be needing this.” Xander pulls out a cross and Spike
does the cat thing again, except this time he jumps on Xander and knocks
the cross away with a grr.
Xander finds he likes being pinned underneath Spike. The grr travels
right down his spine and tickles his prostate – metaphorically speaking.
Spike catches on, tilts his head to the side and does the grr thing
again. “Like that, do you?” he asks when he’s done it a few times and
Xander has been reduced to a simple puddle of liquid Scooby.
“Fffff,” is all Xander can manage to say back.
“Completely agree, pet.” Spike goes straight for the goods while Xander
is still in a state of flux. He unbuckles Xander’s belt and begins
pulling it from its loops in the most provocative way possible.
Unfortunately, the long leather belt suddenly reminds him of a snake.
Spike shrieks and jumps like a surprised cat.
Xander now owes him two cartons of cigarettes and a blow job, but he
manages to coax Spike back down from the ceiling.
“Make a great team, don’t we?” Spike says about an hour later when
they’re both knee deep in books. Xander has just found a text written by
U. R. Kuntz – the great, great, great grandfather of I. C. Kuntz – and
it has a whole chapter on snake hauntings.
All that’s needed is a sprinkling of grated bison along with the correct
banishing spell – helpfully supplied in the book - and Spike’s snake
problem was going to be a thing of the past.
Luckily, a bison had been delivered to the Magic Box in error and was
currently tied up outside.
Spike holds it still while Xander grates. Xander feels incredibly guilty
and makes sure to put several band-aids on the bison’s boo boo. He also
promises it freedom and coerces Spike into agreeing to help. Xander now
owes Spike two cartons of cigarettes, one blow job and a hand job.
Xander thinks he hasn’t quite got the hang of coercion.
They arrive back at the crypt and get jiggy with the banishing spell. It
goes well apart from the fact that it doesn’t banish the snakes.
Spike looks at the book again and realises they grated the wrong part of
the bison. They go back the Magic Box and try again. Xander promises to
make a donation to a charity of the bison’s choosing.
Another hour later, when the spell has been performed again and the
snakes are nothing more than a horrific memory, Xander collapses on his
couch and remembers that he’s still wearing his goggles. He takes them
off just as Spike collapses next to him and does the same.
The sun is up now so Xander can’t really change his mind about Spike
staying for a day. “Just in case. We might have missed some. Please
don’t leave me. I feel all jumpy and urgh.”
Besides, now he only owes Spike one carton of cigarettes and a hand job,
and Spike owes him the blow job and a good hard fuck in the shower.
Spike makes him check the bathroom for snakes.
**
The End
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