Jack Skellington awoke with a start and immediately sat upright in bed. His bedroom window was thrust open, allowing the cool night wind to rustle the scraggly curtains. The moonlight spilled across the wooden floor and onto the empty space beside him where Sally normally slept. "Sally..." he whispered nervously, afraid that if he raised his voice any higher he wouldn't get an answer. He slipped out of bed and glided soundlessly across the floorboards to the window. Nothing outside. All of Halloweentown was fast asleep. Not even the vampires stalked the streets at this awkward our between evening and dawn. So then why did he feel so ill at ease?
He pulled the window closed, and looked around his dark room once more. No sign of his Sally. He resolved that she must have woken up extra early to pick Witch Hazel as she tended to do on occasion, and was about to slip back into bed when he heard the soft sobbing. "Sally?" He called, his heart visibly beating against his rib cage. His slight nervousness quickly began mounting into an overpowering fear.
He threw open the door of his room and was about to run down the stairs, but there was no need. Sally was a mere three feet in front of the door. She lay crying face down on the floor, her long red hair strewn around her like a blanket. Jack hurried to her side and put a trembling, bony hand on her shoulder. "Sally?" He asked, his voice threatening to falter. "Sally...what's wrong?" No answer. "Are you hurt?"
"No..." Came a soft murmur from under the mass of red locks. "It's not that." Jack waited for an extended explanation, but none came. Then he looked up to see that the mirror hanging on his wall had been shattered. Shards of glass still hung in the frame and lay on the floor, sparkling in the moonlight that crept through a large window above the staircase.
Jack had to smile at her naivete. In many ways, she was like a child in her innocence. After all she never did have a real childhood. "Sally, darling, it's alright. I can get a new mirror anywhere at anytime. You don't have to worry about it. It was an accident..."
"It's not the mirror!" Sally snapped, still hiding her face. "It's what I saw in the mirror." She sat up, but turned away from Jack, so that he was unable to look at her. "I don't know what I did, Jack. I just wanted to go out for a walk, but when I saw my reflection..." Her voice trailed off and she fell into short, gasping sobs again.
"What happened?" Jack demanded. "Sally...please tell me what's wrong!" But this only made her cry harder. In desperation, Jack grabbed onto her shoulders and made her face him. He pushed her hair away from her face and gasped.
"I don't know why this happened, Jack." She said frantically. "I don't know what I did wrong." But Jack could not find any words to say. She was not deformed in any way. In fact, she was beautiful. But all of her stitches were gone. Her eyes, which were once slightly mismatched, were perfect, but they were leaking. Tears! Real tears! And her complexion, which used to be so ghostly pale it was almost blue, was now slightly peach, rosy from crying. No, Sally wasn't deformed at all. She was real. She was human. She was alive. But how could this be? That night, when he had kissed her goodnight, her skin had been cold. Stitches lined her pretty face and held her extremities to her body. How could this have happened? And more importantly...why?
"Jack?" Sally whispered, knocking him out of his confused stupor. "Jack, what do I do?" Jack shook his head in an attempt to shake out all of the confusion in his skull. Then, with long, bony fingers he brushed the tears of off Sally's shockingly warm cheeks. He smiled in the most assuring way he could.
"We will go see Finklestien right away." He said. "He will know what to do."
To Be Continued....