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This is Halloween
Chapter 2: Boogie's Boys
By dawn the sound of practice cackles and the slow dull thud of an axe was already ushering in the new day. A few bats slipped down the chimney and hid in Lu's closet. Sally encouraged them to nest there, explaining to Lu that bats were cheaper than mothballs and worked better too.
The leaves on the hangman's tree had begun to shed their swamp green coloring in favor of orange and yellow with occasional streaks of blood red. The time of the Council was close at hand and soon after would follow Halloween itself.
Needless to say, it was the busiest time of year.
"Dear, settle down!" Sally wasn't sure whether to laugh or simply pray her husband didn't try to walk out of a tower window while he was caught up in his preparations.
Lu rubbed the sleep from his eyes and stumbled into the kitchen. Jack strode past on long legs, his arms full of papers. A few fluttered away in the skeleton man's hurry.
Lu picked one up, dark eyes curious. On it were a few notations and scales.
"A house of mirrors, Dad?" Lu asked aloud.
"not quite, not quite," Jack answered, taking the paper from Lu and adding it to his own stack. "You might like this one, actually. We're going to connect our mirrors to the real world. A kid looks in the mirror, a mummy looks back!" Jack grinned.
Lu nodded. Knowing his dad it would only be a brief glimpse of the monster. Maybe later he could talk to his dad about things like real glimpses of teeth or claws in the night. Bring back a little respect to the holiday. Christmas was jolly. Halloween was supposed to be frightening. Sometimes he didn't think Jack ever really let go of his fascination with Christmas.
Still, the mirror idea had potential.
Lu grabbed a slice of moldy bread and a rotten egg, slipping past Sally who was trying to get Molly dressed.
"Heading out, Mom," Lu called. Sally nodded as the door banded shut behind him.
Lu sat down by the fountain near town square. It was the same one his mother had once poured a vat of fog juice into years and years ago. This time there was no fog though, just the crisp wind of autumn rushing past.
"What's up, Pumpkin Prince?"
Lu groaned and turned to face three masks. Lock, Shock, and Barrel let out a trio of giggles. The mischievous children had become mischievous young adults. They still carried their signature masks, the ones that matched their own faces with odd attention to shape and detail, but the large black bag no longer held candy or at least not as much. Not there was also a carton of rotten eggs and a few rolls of TP.
Even as they stood there, Barrel was absentmindedly spray painting a crude drawing of his own grinning face on the fountain's surface.
Lu would never have bothered with them if he didn't have a few things in common with the trio. Mainly the idea that Halloween should be scary. Lu didn't believe half their stories of mischief (there was no way they'd stolen the werewolf's teeth one night and used them to bite the mummy) but they did take pride in scaring people.
Lu's biggest interest in them was that they were born henchman. Once they had been under Oogie Boogie. Well now they were under him. Even if he didn't like the title, Lu was the Pumpkin Prince. One day people would look to him to find out what Halloween would be like that year.
And when that year came, Jack Skelington's son was going to give them a hell of a show.
In the meantime though, he had to deal with the Trio.
"Don't call me that," Lu frowned.
"Sorry Lucifer," the witch-masked Shock said with a smirk. "Did his highness get up on the wrong side of the coffin this morning?"
"Nah, he's just impatient to get going," Lock answered. A candy-cane, of all things, was sticking slightly out of his mouth. Lu made a mental not to later ask where he'd gotten it. Cross-holiday trading was kept to a minimum to avoid confusion in the real world.
Barrel capped the spray-paint and just grinned. It disturbed Lu sometimes that Barrel almost looked like he could have been Lu's distant cousin.
Lu nodded to Lock, relaxing a little. "Let's go."
The four of them moved silently down the road towards the old tree house. Barrel ran ahead with Shock and Lock standing on either side of Lu like body guards. It made Lu proud sometimes to think that the Trio answered to him. They didn't even answer the law.
"So you found it?" Lu asked as they ducked inside the dimply lit room. Lock smirked as Shock pulled a black leather bound book from under a damp box of pizza.
"It's his alright," Lock said as he slapped it down on the floor in front of Lu. "But it's in code." The young skeleton dropped to his knees and opened it up.
"The Boogie Man's journal," Lu breathed, a smile creeping over his face. When he'd realized that the Boogie man wouldn't have bothered to obey whatever decree that had obliterated any records of Old Halloween, he'd sent the Trio back down into the layer of their former master to search.
A few seconds inspection told him Lock was wrong. The journal wasn't in code, though it may as well have been. It was in an old form of language. Lu thought he could make out a word here or there, but unless the Boogie man had written an awful lot about pudding in the first few pages, he was going to have to translate the journal with something more accurate than guess-work.
"Good job, boys," Lu said. Shock scowled. "And girls," Lu amended hastily. "This could give us a lot of answers."
Shock grinned and winked at Lock. The two erupted into laughter which Lu barely heard, absorbed in the puzzle of the black bound book.