"How long will your car be out of commission, Jillian?" Dan Jacobs asked, glancing from the snowy road ahead to the young woman in his passenger seat.

"Only until I can find an honest mechanic in New York state," replied Jillian, pulling a thin paperback from her brown purse. "That'll only take, what, one or two lifetimes?"

"If you got a guy to go with you who knows something about cars, they might not try to pull a fast one," said Dan with sympathy.

Jillian Zinman was a welcome component of their animal shelter, possessing an open heart that did not just favor the mammals under their care. Anytime someone brought in an injured snake or an abandoned domesticated lizard, Jillian, Queen of the Reptiles, stood ready to assist where she could. "My first pet was a lizard named Petey," she would say, cuddling her scaly charges.

As Dan had left the animal shelter that evening, about a half hour later than he had planned, he had seen Jillian bundled up on the bus-stop bench, her green coat and decorative fringed scarf her only defense against the windchill. He had not hesitated to offer her a ride, which she had gratefully accepted.

The gold band on her left hand caught Dan's eye as she turned a page. "What about your husband?" he suggested. "Could he go with you?"

"Still traveling." She returned her attention to her book.

Jillian didn't talk much about herself. All anyone knew about her private life was that she had a husband and a kid that nobody had seen. Candy Graham at work thought her husband might have been a midget since Jillian had made a passing comment that he was three feet tall, but Candy couldn't tell if it had been a joke.

"Traveling? Like with the circus?" Dan asked, casual.

Jillian snorted without looking up. "He's worked with his share of freaks, if that's what you mean."

The wind picked up, and the snow increased. Dan adjusted his wipers accordingly, glad that there weren't many cars on the road.

"Whatcha reading?" he asked, squinting ahead.

"Oh, just something I picked up from the bookstore on my break." She sounded sheepish. "For nostalgia."

He came to a red light and looked down at the cartoony cover art. A brown-haired ventriloquist dummy burst from a birthday present, his brown eyes as evil as his smirk. The words Goosebumps and Slappy's World graced the top while Slappy Birthday to You and the name R.L. Stine made their dashes across the bottom.

Dan grinned. "Goosebumps, huh? I used to read those as a kid."

Jillian smiled back, a little less self-conscious. "Yeah, me too. Proud to be a Nineties kid." She placed a hand over her heart and gave a theatrical sniff.

Dan squinted at her young face. "How old are you?"

"Depending on how you look at it, thirty-two."

Dan stared. "You are not."

A car horn beeped behind him, and Dan quickly saw the light had changed green. He started forward, and the car behind him did not wait long to pass them.

"I coulda sworn you were eighteen," Dan continued, risking a glimpse from the road to check his companion's features again. No sign of normal aging to be seen.

"I prefer to start counting from the year Nineteen-Ninety-Eight, so maybe I'm twenty instead," she laughed.

Dan shook his head. "I'm thirty-three. You've aged better than me."

"You're in the peak of youth, friend." Jillian shifted her weight, turning herself to face Dan. "So, you read Goosebumps too?"

"Yeah, they were my favorite things to get at Scholastic book fairs. Remember those?"

"Boy, do I!" Jillian beamed. "My father worked with Scholastic, and he let me see all the catalogs before they were sent to schools."

"I loved watching the TV show too," chirped Dan as he slowed to make a left. "Though I remember wondering why Slappy never looked like how he did in the books."

Jillian's round green eyes lit up like birthday candles. "Did you read anything from Series Two-Thousand?"

Dan shook his head. "Hmm, no. I was already going into middle school by the time the next series came out, but my brother read them. He liked The Haunted Car."

"My favorite was Bride of the Living Dummy."

Dan crinkled his brow. "I think I remember my brother having that one." He vaguely recalled a book cover with Slappy, the evil dummy, with a girl doll beside a wedding cake. The wedding cake had frosting skulls with roses for eyes. He couldn't remember anything else about the cover, not even what the other toy looked like, but as a teenager he had thought the skulls would be fun to draw in his art-class sketchbook. "Slappy marries a doll or something, right?"

"Or something," replied Jillian, flipping the pages of her book with her thumb. She then ran her fingertips over the cartoon dummy. "Did you know Slappy used to have blue eyes in the books?" she commented. "Around Son of Slappy or so, Stine started giving him darker eyes."

"First a bride for Slappy, then a son?" chuckled Dan. "Horror franchises really like turning their monsters into family guys, huh?"

"Some families can be scary," replied Jillian, tucking her book back into her purse. She suddenly pointed to an approaching street corner. "You can let me out here, Dan. I can walk the rest of the way."

"You sure?" He glanced at the screen near the top of his windshield, which showed which direction he was facing (NE) and the temperature (34). "I can take you right to your house, Jillian. Mom always said a gentleman escorts a lady to her door."

A half-smile pulled at her lips like a marionette string. "Maybe," she said as Dan slowed the car, "but if my husband's home, he'll get the wrong idea." She unbuckled the seat belt and stepped out into the snow, gaining a white dusting upon her long black hair. "And he's not much of a gentleman," she finished.

Dan plunged forward, throwing out his hand to stop the closing door. "Whoa! What do you mean?" he demanded.

Jillian met his eyes and released a small, dry laugh. "Not like that. Don't worry," she assured him. "He'll never be able to harm me that way - but he can get nasty if he thinks someone wants to lure me away from our marriage covenant." She laughed again and gave a wave. She then started toward a small fenced-in alley between two nearby houses, a path too narrow for Dan's car to follow.

"I'm home," Jillian called out flatly to the empty apartment. She pulled off her wet boots and deposited her purse onto the table near the door. She paused only to retrieve her new book and ventured into her quiet, colorless living room, not even bothering to switch on the lamp.

She probably should have attempted to add a little Christmas cheer, at least a candy dish with green and red M&Ms. Yet with an empty second bedroom and a game console gathering dust beneath the television - its preteen owner so desperate to leave that he had abandoned his birthday present because there hadn't been room in Jillian's car when she had helped him escape - there seemed to be little point.

Jillian's gaze trailed along the room, which had felt much too big for months. Aside from her framed pictures of a sweet-tempered twelve-year-old boy with dark hair and eyes, not a single family photograph hung on the walls. Then again, could one have said she had a family when the majority of her relatives had never lived?

Jillian touched the well-worn paperback that sat on its stand on her coffee table. An ever glaring ventriloquist dummy in a tophat and a smirking doll bride greeted her. The original manuscript had been burnt long ago as a safety precaution, yet Jillian felt a connection to the ink contained within and to the characters who resided only as phantoms on the dog-earred pages.

Katie. Amanda. Harrison. Mom. Dad. Petey. Even little Eddie Simkin. Her affection for each of them felt as real as if they had all sprung to life with her from Bob Stine's magic typewriter - but they remained only as flat letters inside a children's book. Stine hadn't even given her parents proper descriptions for her to draw a picture of them. Publishing deadlines and all that.

Jillian wandered into the kitchen. A day this cold needed a mug of cocoa with a blanket of itty-bitty marshmallows on top.

She flipped on the light, gently tossed the new book onto the counter beside the stove, and pulled out the kettle. After she filled it and switched on the burner, she withdrew a mug with a troop of green lizards and a box of Swiss Miss.

She turned, items still in hand, ready to grab the pint of creamer from the fridge - and a little face grinned back at her, next to the sink.

"Seasons greetings, snookums," rasped Slappy.

The yelp escaped Jillian before she could stop it. The cocoa box and her favorite mug slipped from her fingers, shattering against the tile. Jillian bit back a word that Scholastic would have never let her say in print, and she summoned her dignity to stare coldly at the brown eyes which twinkled with mischief.

"How about something sweet for a lonely caroler?" Slappy suggested, raising his eyebrows welcomingly. He leaned against the refrigerator, one boneless ankle tucked under his other knee while his free leg dangled over the counter, projecting an air like he owned the place.

The short puppet looked just as he did on the new cover art but with more noticeable scratches across his peachy face. His carved hair - not literally carved, but that's how Stine described him - had been altered to a slightly lighter shade of brown than what he had in the 90s, closer to their writer's own. He wore his dark-gray suit with the red carnation. His eyes, once a pretty (if cold) shade of blue, were now a warm brown, but still unpleasant toward anyone he held no affection for - and they certainly were amiable now.

Jillian folded her arms, making no move toward him. Although she lived ever prepared that the dummy would make an appearance, it would have been nice to get some form of warning from her so-called creator beforehand.

"The one thing Bob Stine promised me was that he'd stay out of New York state," she exhaled. "Figures he couldn't even do that."

His eyelids lowered slightly, and his eternal smirk seemed to widen. "Actually, my presence here has little to do with Stine, dear." He tittered a high-pitched heeheehee, as if laughing at an inside joke.

"Then how did you get here?" she asked, careful to let her voice betray no unwanted emotion. "Isn't your teleportation limited?"

He tilted his brown head, looking as if he had a great big secret. "You might say his childhood home in Wardenclyffe had more than a few skeletons in those closets." He snickered again.

Oh, joy of joys. Jillian pinched her nose. "Serves me right for hiring two kids to clean out the old Stine place instead of doing it myself," she muttered, remembering the free job she had arranged back in October.

She should have shoved the deed to the decrepit house right back into Evan Ross's hands when the protagonist had stopped by. Any real estate Evan was too scared to handle should have been a red flag, but Stine had written Jillian to have a greedy side, even back when she had been a twelve-year-old character.

"So much for my bed-and-breakfast idea," she said before she stooped to pick up the broken pieces of her mug.

However, before her fingers could even brush the ceramic surfaces, the fragments jumped to life. They swirled through the air, rejoining as if glued by an unseen hand, and the lizard mug floated up to counter, right beside Slappy Birthday to You.

"Allow me," the dummy purred, and his eyes shot toward the kettle.

A sudden head of steam whistled out the spout before the kettle hopped into the air, tilting toward the mug. A packet of Swiss Miss zipped from the box and shook its contents into the stream of boiling water. A counter door opened, and a bag of marshmallows waddled out. A conga line of confectionery trooped out its opening and plopped into the sweet liquid, soon covering the top.

"Did you want milk with that?" grinned Slappy, self-satisfied.

Jillian tried not to appear impressed. "Anyone ever tell Stine that he made you too O.P.?"

"As if you'd have me any other way," he giggled. He then leaned over to inspect the paperback on the counter. "What's that you're reading?" he smirked. "Certainly a handsome cover."

Jillian looked away. "I volunteer at the local youth center," she lied. "They ask me to read the donated books so that parents don't complain."

"People should take the price stickers off books before they donate them," giggled Slappy, lifting up the cover.

"Yes, some folks can be extremely inconsiderate." Jillian felt the urge to snatch the paperback from his little hand and hide it from sight, but she settled for a casual flip of her black hair. "Please tell whatever monster horde you've brought this time that I mopped yesterday, so I would appreciate them wiping their claws on the mat."

"Just me this time, love." He spread out his arms. "How about a hug for your other half?"

Jillian coolly retrieved a spoon from her silver drawer and stirred her cocoa, sending the marshmallows swirling in a brown vortex.

"A friendly handshake?" Slappy persisted, arms still raised. His fingers twitched, itching to touch her, but the magic of the typewriter kept him in place - at least Bob Stine did that one thing right.

Jillian leaned against the kitchen table. She blew upon her cup, ignoring the dummy.

Slappy's arms lowered. His dark eyebrows arched, making his smile appear like a scowl. "Mrs. Slappy, I'm starting to think you're not happy to see me."

Jillian at last graced him with eye contact. "The last time you were here, you hypnotized Jackson into tormenting our mailman and unleashing monsters."

"Father-son bonding!" he rasped in protest. He then turned his head toward the kitchen entrance. "Where is the boy anyway?"

Jillian's fingers tightened on the mug handle. "After he saw a rumor on the Internet about a town in Delaware being terrorized by an evil puppet, he begged me to relocate him."

"Oh." Not a hint of remorse. Just a thoughtful expression. "So, does that mean he's living with Evan Ross? Amy Kramer? Luke and Liz - "

Jillian cut him off, "I'm not at liberty to disclose that information."

Although Jackson Stander was not her biological child (nor legally adopted by Slappy), Jillian had accepted the young protagonist into her home as a kindred spirit. He had brought a welcomed atmosphere to her apartment these past few years, and now he had left her for who knew how long.

Slappy frowned and drew himself up. "I didn't exactly have the best parental example myself, you know," he rasped.

"I know."

That was one thing they could agree on. She had suggested multiple times for Bob to write Slappy into a few therapy sessions, but he had insisted the typewriter would never let him do something so mundane. However, Jillian suspected that he just didn't want to redeem Slappy - lock up his monsters in books, yes. But redeem the villains he brought into the world?

Slappy held up his stiff hand again, reaching for her. "Let's not deal in lovers' quarrels, Jillian," he urged. "I have a Christmas present for you. Something to make up for all the missed birthdays and wedding anniversaries," he added darkly.

"If it's a talking head, you gave me that already."

He shook his head, leering. "Something even better."

The kitchen light flickered then, and in a blink of an eye, a flat, dark thing rested on his lap.

An unpublished manuscript.

Jillian almost dropped her mug again. She took a step back, her heart thundering in her chest. "What monster is in there?" she gasped. Her mind flew to the thirty other apartments in her complex, many of which included children.

Slappy gripped the spine tightly. "The king of all Goosebumps monsters." His brown eyes grew more wicked than normal. "R.L. Stine himself."

Jillian stared. "Stine? But how..." Thunderstruck, she reached for the book.

Slappy leaned away and tucked the manuscript behind his back. "Ah-ah." He shook a tiny finger side to side. "You want it, come get it."

He watched her, irreverent and even a bit hopeful. The way the book sat behind him meant she could not take it without risking physical contact - and that would only open the floodgates, allowing him to do what he pleased under her roof.

Jillian hung back. Should she grab it and free her creator? Or did she let him stay trapped to avoid touching the wooden husband Stine had created her for?

Well, that wasn't hard.

Jillian returned to her cocoa, and the part of her which used to wish revenge on her little sisters reared its head with grim satisfaction.

About two decades ago, Bob Stine had written himself into a corner of ethical ramifications. His publisher had seen the trailer for the then upcoming Bride of Chucky and had pressed Stine to give his money-making fictional dummy a love interest in the new Goosebumps Series 2000. Stine had put on hold his manuscript of Slappy's Nightmare - one of his many attempts to reign in his little monster - and had discussed the matter with the puppet. Slappy had been agreeable toward entering unholy matrimony, except he hadn't wanted the evil, ugly doll Stine created for him. He had demanded the green-eyed protagonist with the insatiable thirst for revenge.

Stine's solution had been to cobble together a thin plot where Slappy spent the majority of the story off screen and unconscious. After completing that hurried manuscript (how the plot twist slipped past the Scholastic censors, Jillian couldn't tell), Stine had started work on a private sequel which would never be seen outside his household: The Marriage of Slappy. Written in the style of his Fear Street novels, the story followed an eighteen-year-old Jillian who crossed paths with the dummy once more. Over the course of the adventure, the two had to team up against a mutual foe. As the pair met each horror and surprise, an odd friendship evolved between them, finally culminating in a climax where Jillian entered a marriage covenant with her former enemy.

The power of the covenant granted Slappy the magic they needed to defeat their tormentor, but Stine included a plot twist to keep Slappy a docile husband. Every time dummy and wife met anew, even if Jillian stepped outside to check the mailbox, Slappy would be unable to touch his bride, either to harm or to caress, unless she made first contact. Stine had made sure Jillian would have the most control in their marriage and, per Slappy's Nightmare, had added a few nasty surprises if the dummy exploited certain loopholes - the only time Bob managed to do something positive with Slappy.

"Well?" her miniature husband asked innocently at her continued silence. "Don't you want to read my masterpiece? I put your name in the dedication."

She shook chocolate droplets from the spoon and placed it in the sink. Her eyes flicked to the colorful paperback on the counter; even after all these years, Stine could not start a new Goosebumps series without including the dummy. Hardly a change to his character, except to push the envelope of what he would let Slappy do to his enemies.

Jillian acknowledged the puppet at last. "What are you planning, Slappy?"

"In due time, wife," he winked. He pressed his wooden fingertips together. "I suspect dear Sister Hannah will be frantically contacting you soon, asking if you've seen our papa. Can I trust you to keep your tempting mouth shut?"

Jillian folded her arms, taking another indifferent sip. "What's in it for me?"

"The world, if you want it. Revenge - something you were created to crave," he smirked, appreciative. "With Stine locked away, we can write a sequel to our own tale." His eyebrows rose. He held out a hand again. "You always wanted to see Paris, didn't you? How does a second honeymoon sound?"

Jillian looked away. "It will take more than good intentions to get the family you want, Slappy," she said softly.

His hand dropped with a thud. "Well, I won't have the chance to get it if I'm locked in a book," he growled.

Jillian refused to acknowledge that. "I can have anything I want from the typewriter?"

"Within reason," he replied quickly.

You are right to fear me. Jillian shrugged, still playing indifferent. "Fine. If Hannah calls, I won't say anything. For now."

She felt a twinge of sympathy for the ghostly girl; she genuinely loved Stine and would probably be sick with worry. However, sometimes a monster's bride - even a dummy's bride - had things she needed to do first.

Jillian jabbed her thumb toward her front door. "You can show yourself out, right?"

He nodded, studying her face. "How about a goodbye kiss?"

Jillian snorted. "What's in it for me?" she repeated.

His brown eyes narrowed. "You didn't complain last time," he pointed out. In a flash, he disappeared from the counter and popped up on the table at her elbow.

Jillian contained the small flinch of surprise.

He shifted as close as the magic allowed him. "I've been locked away for a long time, Jillian, and don't you think Christmas is a little nicer with mistletoe?"

Jillian laid her mug on the table and gave him a half smile. She tucked her arms behind her back and lowered her head slowly.

Slappy stared back, expectant. His wooden jaw lowered slightly, parting his lips.

She stopped, inches from his mouth. "Do something to deserve it, snookums," she said sweetly. She blew upon his wooden lips.

Slappy scowled, unable to move closer. "Baby, you ain't seen nothing yet."

In the next moment he vanished.

THE END

While I make a reference to the Slappy's World series, I wouldn't be surprised if the twist of the 3rd film is that Slappy wrote that series himself after he locked up Stine. (If you think about it, it would explain why in that universe why "Stine" would write more Slappy books despite not wanting to release Slappy again.)