A/N- I'm back, I guess. New chapter. Sorry this took so long. I just got a new job and, seeing as it's so near christmas, they've been working me for all I have. I've also had exams and other assorted crapness such as severe thunderstorms that flooded my house and heatwaves that have put us on big water restrictions to deal with. Consider this my Christmas present to you all.
Please note that this chapter has a lot of switching from them 'telling' the story to the story actually taking place. I'm sure you'll work it out, but if not, use the stars as your wonderful guideline ^_^ Thankyou so much for finding the time to read, and please review!
Umm, also, I've found that my Beta Reading Clientele has hit a bit of a low. I just want to say that I'm a hard-working Beta reader looking for a bit more work to fill up her boring life between studying and watching random cartoons. If you're interested (I Beta for all genres and shows. Anything you can throw at me won't put me off, after what I've seen nothing can surprise me ^_^), drop me an e-mail me at unravelled_stitching@hotmail.com, or leave a review with a valid e-mail I can contact you with. Tenx
-The artist formerly known as Ruri Unstitched.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Never, in all of his long, ceaseless years as the Pumpkin King, had Jack ever had the chance to witness the Town Hall filled to the brim yet so insanely, unbearably silent as it was at that very moment. Silence was not usually a word that associated comfortably with the Halloween folk or their rather eccentric and abnormal customs, and to see the hall so devoid of their proverbial lifeblood was almost too much for the his skull to absorb.
The attentive faces of row after overcrowded row of nightmarish ghouls and goblins stood to attention in frozen, awed silence. It was as if the very fabric of time had been stopped; paused to the nanosecond. Curiosity was not a rare and ancient find in the Hall that night. For every one of the creatures sported more than enough in their features; in their eyes (if of course they owned a pair.) Though ultimately, there was one figure in the hall that did not bare the uniform gaze of perplexed bemusement and curiosity on her face, and for very good reason at that. Even a fully grown adult as she was, she was only slightly older than the little terrors onstage, and not nearly as cunning and witty as they had grown accustomed to being. In a physical match they would slaughter her hands down, and she knew all would be the same for the impending verbal assault at hand.
She cursed inwardly, forcefully and unstopping, at herself. How could she have been so stupid?! How could she, of all the questions she could have possibly asked, bring up the sole issue the little terrors had against her, the one thing they could sabotage and blackmail her horribly with? Was she completely insane? Or were the little trio right; was she just stupid? At that moment, Sally felt nothing but weakness; complete and utter powerlessness. She had made an awful mistake, and she felt in the very pit of her non-existant gut that she would pay for it that night, in front of all those people, at the mercy of three little troublemakers she had only been trying so hard to be nice to on the awful night in question. She shuddered in a long, gulping breath; turning her gaze downward to her recently shined boots. It was going to be a long night.
"Before ya even begin, ya little monsters, how do we know ya ain't jus' gunna lie to us like ya always do?" A small and grotesque demon that lacked both intelligence and constructive vocabulary protested strongly from his well-earned seat in the middle rows. "Ya'll is Boogieses' Boys! Ya got quite a track record fer lyin'." A small, whispered agreement circulated the room in small arcs. The trio giggled viciously, mocking the demon's harshly spoken words of suspicion, causing him to cross his arms and screw his eyes in distaste.
"Oh boo-hoo!" Shock cried sardonically in the cynical squeak of a voice the townspeople had come to greatly despise. "If you thought we were gonna lie all night, then why did so many people even bother showing up?" The crowd, having angrily opened their mouths to strongly protest this remark found, to their dismay, that they had naught a witty comeback nor sarcastic sentence to throw back to the girl. It was very true; why had they come?
"Besides," Lock took a few bounding steps foward, pushing his comrade rather ungracefully to one side of the stage (to her utter displeasure.) His tail had begun to slide beneath the hem of his shirt now; whipping at a slow, menacing speed from side to side in a rhythymic, agressive and hypnotising pattern. Anyone who had witnessed the boy first hand in one of the many mischievious and daily rampages he participated in would have immediately recognised the movement as that of smug and sneering annoyance; a sign to be very wary, a sign to be afraid. "I don't think Jack's heard this one before.... I'm sure it would be a wonderful surprise for him especially, considering him and Sally's little..." his eyes flickered briefly to his Pumpkin King, his unseen eyebrow had slightly upturned as he leaned, forgotten, against the back podium. "Err... arrangement." His voice had grown obnoxiously haughty as he shot the profusively blushing Sally a mocking, telltale grin. A small whisper rippled across the crowd, sneering traces of jealousy in bitter discourse studding the room like brightly coloured christmas lights.
"I don't think you should go on," Jack spoke up sternly from his previously unbeknownst placement, taking a firm step foward, arms crossed in disapproval. Loud tuts and wails of rebellion sliced across the room from the most curious of the souls present. He knew very well that whatever they had planned in their twisted little minds, whether it was true or not, whether it was just a silly game of rebellious payback to himself for not allowing them to have their candy first, whatever it was could not be that of anything pleasant. They had never played that game, neither did he expect them to in the first place. He thought it best to stop the madness before it grew too far out of hand for him to handle alone. Yet in the depths of his skull, far from the part controlling all sense of rationality and defense, just as it had countless times in his past, an odd and surreal sense of curiosity had latched tightly onto his brain, gnawing and tearing away like a bloodsucking lice, ordering him to allow the trio to continue. What was it that Sally had done that was so bad? how could she have done something so serious as to introduce three small children to the most ultimate and absolute evil Halloween Town had ever had to deal with? He had to know....
He damned his curiosity, just as he had countless and bountiful times before. It was the sole emotion refraining him from immediately ordering the tiny trio to cease their story, hand them their sugary bribe and let them be on their way; taking with them the immense hatred and bias that constantly surrounded their being, yet also taking with them the impending embarrassment and shame that he was sure they were to bombard Sally with at any moment.
"Ah, Jack! Stop worrying. We're not gonna upset your little girlfriend-" Lock retorted in a voice stuffed to bursting with mock sincerity to Jack's undecided words, arms folded defiant and smug behind the crook of his back. Jack could almost be certain, with a deathly suspicion, that the middle and index finger on both of his vaguelly translucent hands were crossed tightly over one another. "Besides, betcha she's never told you this one..."
Jack turned to Sally; her eyeline was fixed intently to the floor, lip quivering in a nervous and utterly hopeless twitch and her face denude of calm. It was obvious that whatever was about to be said was going to be hard for her, and perhaps even harder for others to accept. But the curiosity birthed from the situation was simply too immense for Jack to merely let be! It was something too large, something that could not simply be slid away beneath the bed or folded neatly to fit in the closet for another days use. If things like this didn't come out in the open to be disabled, they were a proverbial timebomb, just waiting to blow up in the beholders face.
And so, with a head full of doubts and a heart that he was sure by the end of the night would be full to bursting with regrets, he turned to the trio and let out a tiny, sincere nod. A sign that he gave them his approval to continue. In her seat, Sally groaned inwardly, and on the stage three children grinned very openly as their payback began.
* *
"I think it all began when we died."
"When we died? No, no! It was after we died, moron!"
"As if you can tell the difference, Witchyface! It was all the same thing at the time. Like falling asleep and waking up again," Barrel retorted, voice dripping with sarcasm as he threw an offensive hand motion in her general direction, which was viciously matched and bettered by his female counterpart.
"He's right, Shock, It really was all the same thing," Lock reasoned, folding his arms tightly before his chest. The girl's eyes rolled painfully in their sockets, an intense urge to hit both boys as hard as she possibly could washed over her briefly. Though in a perspective, she could understand where their words were drifting from. She had never really been able to tell the exact moment that she had switched from dying to being dead, and it was a topic that she often found herself pondering about when there was simply nothing else to think; about how she could of died, and how it had felt when it had happened. But there had been no feeling, no sensation attatched to the event. Nothing that her mind had thought memorable enough to store in it's infinate thought banks. The closest she had come to ever being able to describe the non-existant feeling was that she had blinked, and in that nanosecond everything she had ever known and all the skills she had ever aquired from life had quite simply evaporated into the air, and dying was... in a way, like being born again, waking from a deep sleep, having to start at the start, having to learn and develop in a new, unfamiliar world. It had scared her back then, something she had never thought humanly possible. But now that time seemed too far behind her to be afraid of, and she understood that she was right in some aspects back then; it wasn't humanly possible... as after death, they were no longer humans.
* * * * *
"Unghh.......Ahhow.."
The girl, having slowly swam into conciousness, had initially groaned softly from the sharp bubbling, nauseated feeling eminating from the very pits of her stomach. Yet the second the sound protruded from her mouth she found reason enough to groan a second time. The sound of her own aching moan, barely a decibal above a whisper, was enough to make her brain explode with a sharp, pounding ache from her temples to the very back of her skull. A hand flew to her head shakily, massaging the delicate, throbbing skin about her eyes and forehead, furrowing her brow tightly against the pain. It took a large amount of effort to be able to think clearly; almost as if her mind, still inky dark from the fading unconciousness, had been invaded callously by a thick, foggy mist; making it almost impossible to shine anything through. But one thought had managed to slip its way through the fog, making itself known both in the back of her mind and on the very tip of her tongue. What happened?
"You awake?" a voice she immediately recognised, obnoxiously loud in her sensitive ears, very suddenly invaded the sanity of her already scrambled mind. She immediately cried out as the sound rang painfully through her already throbbing brain, smashing into it as though it were a steel sledgehammer. Her brow furrowed deeper as her hand quickly slid over her ringing ears.
"Would you keep it down, moron! I have a headache the size of your grandma here..." she moaned softly through tightly gritted teeth. A slight tutting from the voice she recognised well sounded above her.
"Yeah, well no wonder! Your brain probably stopped working in the time you've been sleeping. You've been at it like a log in the damn land of Nod," the voice retorted sardonically in a tone only slightly softer than the one he had used previously. The girl snorted, sluggishly pulling herself into a seated position, rubbing her lead-filled eyelids.
"Well at least sleeping is the only thing I...I..." though the girl never had the chance finished her sentence as she agonisingly slowly pulled her eyelids open, turning to the boy she knew was talking. Though when she had turned to him, her eyes had been invaded by a sight that was most certainly not the person she had expected to see before her. She gasped, ignoring her pounding head that screamed, begged for her to stay still and jumped from the hard stone plateau she seemed to have been lying apon with a quick, catlike agility.
The boy- or what seemed to be the general shape of a boy- rolled his eyes painfully, holding his hands in the air as if to represent a truce. She shrunk deeper into the dim shadows of what she now saw was a small, claustrophobic room the two inhibited. Her head ached, yet she persisted.
"Not you too," the boy moaned, placing a hand to his forehead. "I know, I know, it's a change. I dunno why, but we've all changed." His voice lingered slightly before it upruptly returned. "I dunno about you, but I don't think I looks half bad, eh?" he ran a deathly pale hand through his dishevelled deep red hair, throwing an offbeat wink in her general direction. Her tense body slackened immensely at the words and the breath that had had found itself stuck tightly inside her lungs slowly released. Though it didn't look at all like the person it sounded so familiar to, like her friend of years and years, she didn't need his looks to pick his personality immediately. She didn't know what had happened to him, or what kind of joke he thought he was pulling on her, but she knew it was indeed him.
"You scared me," she muttered, pulling herself from the shadows and once again into the dim waning moonlight that washed weakly across the small room's walls in one small strip. The boy laughed sarcastically, taking a step closer.
"I thought nothing scared you."
"Shut up," she retorted darkly as she took a few steps in the direction of the small stone pleateau, examining it carefully through eyes sharp for detail. There was small, curvaceous writing that seemed to be carefully carved into the coarse stone, yet in the sparse light her eyes could not make out the tiny, incomprehensible words. "Just where the heck are we? And why are you dressed up in that goofy Halloween costume?" The boy twitched nonchalantly at her question.
"It's not a costume, I can't get it off," he shrugged. "Can't you remember anything about what happened?"
"No," she scoffed slightly, turning away from the stony scrawl. "Something happened?"
"Did you wake up with a sore stomach too?" She nodded, and he then nodded wisely. "I can only just remember it... Halloween... and we finally got candy from that senile old hag Mrs O'Leary..." he struggled immensely with the thought, small and fragmented, that had embedded itself in his brain like shattered glass. "But that candy she gave us.... it was... bad." Shock, though she could not remember the time Lock was attempting quite immensely to explain, could feel it, and she understood without needing to recall. There had been something wrong, something not quite perfect; her bubbling, still aching stomach viciously confirmed that.
There was an awkward silence between the two as they pondered, searched hard and deep in their memory banks for something, anything that would be able to confirm what their hearts (and stomachs) told them so very plainly. Yet both came up for proverbial air empty. The subject was immediately changed.
"So what the heck is this place?" her voice was hard and stony once more as she turned every which way, slightly baffled. Her male friend shrugged nonchalantly.
"Well, right now we're in your crypt. Other than that, I have no idea."
"Oh hah hah," she replied sarcastically, throwing a sour look in his general direction. He grinned innocently.
"Well I'm guessing it's yours anyway, it has your nickname on it..."
"Seriously Lock," she referred to his long-lived nickname, "couldn't you think of anything better than that to freak me out? If not, you're really losing your touch..."
"No really," he protested, pointing vaguelly to the sole distribution of light in the tiny room; a small crack in what seemed like a door to his left side. "We really are in a crypt, and it really does have your name on it. I have one too, and so does Barrel. See for yourself." The girl tutted, annoyed and unconvinced, yet nevertheless sauntered to the light, all the while lecturing her assailant on his failing trickster skills. The heavy slab of stone being used as a surrogate door had been pushed far enough to one side to allow her to squeeze though, although it was an extremely tight fit. Though it was only the wane moonlight shining, it stung her eyes as she squeezed with much difficulty into the outside world, her friend not far behind her. She turned sharply in the dust and dead leaves that littered the ground beneath her feet, facing back to the impossibly small room she seemed to have been re-birthed from. He was right, it was a crypt, albeit a very crudely constructed one. The stone of it's walls shined ice-grey in the moonlight, coarse and hard. The construction of the room was both horribly lopsided and distorted, as if peering at it with her eyes squinted or through broken glass, at the same time.
Yet it wasn't the room that attracted her attention so avidly, caused her to abruptly cease her inane lecturing; it was the plaque that hung carelessly above the small, lopsided entranceway. Carved in what looked like a severely burned and decaying wood plank, a small R.I.P sat in distorted lettering almost incomprehensible to her eyes. Chipped deeply beneath these letters, as if it had been hacked away at the wood with a blunt butter knife, five letters sat very plainly. An S, a H, an O, a C and a K, looking as though they had been seated through countless elements for hundreds of years sat apon the decaying board. It announced boldly to anyone there to see that the crypt, in the form of her well-used nickname Shock, indeed belonged to her. Her eyes shifted slightly to the left. Another crypt sat obediently by her own, looking identical in every way bar the minute difference of the plaque that hung duly above the doorway, which instead read 'R.I.P LOCK.' in it's blunt-knived scrawl. The crypt to the right read 'BARREL'. Rest in Peace? The words caught in her throat as she realised that, in order to rest in peace, you must first be dead. Or on sleeping pills. And she knew most certainly she wasn't on those.
A long, low cry of sheer disbelievement welled deep inside her throat.
* * * * *
"Ahaha, Shock was actually scared of something!" Barrel laughed, playfully pushing at his female assailant's shoulder. She shot a vehemious glare in return.
"I wouldn't get too cocky, porky," she sneered, "Lock told me that the second you woke up you squealed like a baby and fainted dead on the spot."
"I did not faint!" Barrel retorted, his cheek colour deepening a shade. "Anyone would think dying is an easy job. I was tired."
"You did too faint! Admit it, you were scared silly!"
"Was not!"
"Was too!"
"Shut up!" Lock cried very suddenly, his highly-strung, chalky discourse immediately overpowering anything his comrades could muster from their own throats. They shot one another a passing tongue-poke behind his turned back, before grudgingly allowing their partner to continue for fear of being pummeled and their share of the reward candy being taken when they returned home.
"The point is, it was something new. Something we had never seen when we were alive," his voice became low, almost took on a hint of softness around the razor-sharp edges with an awed, surreal sense of wonder. It was something that Lock had simply never done. But just as the audience began to register this fact, register that there was something softer, something more curious caught in the vocals and mannerisms of a little boy they'd solely seen as trouble, it was gone as swiftly as it had appeared and the scathing, trouble-filled voice returned. "I mean, it isn't everyday you die and then wake up to find out you really are very much alive..."
* * * * *
"Ugh, don't you go fainting on me too..." the boy called in an unamused, nonchalant voice, leaning heavily against the stone exit door and crossing his arms firmly over his red-clad chest. "Barrel already did that. Took one look at his crypt and fainted dead on the spot..."
"Dead?" Shock muttered beneath her breath, looking downward to her now repulsed, outstretched hands. They seemed different to her somehow, detatched. A different colour, perhaps? a different shape? She couldn't tell in the waning moonlight.
"We can't be dead. We wouldn't be so alive," the boy replied thoughtfully to her whispered word, slackening his tight grip on himself and taking a small, shuffled step foward. The girl was slightly shaken about the situation at hand. He didn't fully understand himself why he hadn't panicked like she was when he'd awoken, in the dark, without the comfort of anyone's voice inside his own inky black tomb. But he hadn't, and he didn't intend to begin at that moment. He'd heard about delayed reactions, and he intended to take full benefit from it. With his two comrades heavily shaken, he was in charge.
"We wouldn't have TOMBSONES if we weren't DEAD, Lock!" She cried, shaking her head furiously, her voice quavering violently in her throat
"We have tombs, actually. Those ones are tombstones," the boy replied innocently, pointing in the general direction of a largely constructed stone crucifix located a mere few feet behind her. She yelled, and took a panicked step away from the intimidating monstrosity, marked crudely with the name 'Doctor' in its heavy grey stone. As she turned her gaze slightly she could see many more like it studding the lightly rolling landscape around them like beacons in the night. Were they in a.... a graveyard? "Personally, I like the tombs better. You think waking up in a little badly-made house is scary, imagine waking up six feet under."
"Thankyou, Lock," she cried in a sardonic yet anxious sneer. "Thankyou very much. I'll sleep peacefully in my COLD STONE TOMB to know that, Moron!" She gave him a sharp, violent push in the shoulders to accentuate her point. He huffed indignantly. "I dunno how you can possibly be so calm in this situation!" her voice was shaking in an unnatural manner, as though of someone as far from calm as the body would allow. "Just look at us, Lock! We're hideous!"
"Hey!" he cried, clearly offended. "Speak for yourself, Witchiepoo. I'm just as gorgeous as I ever was." He struck a pose. Seeing her old friend act just as arrogent and pig-headed as he ever did calmed her slightly, yet did not subdue the bubbling and growing discomfort in her stomach and throat.
"Hey! Witchiepoo?.... Is it that bad...?" She touched her arm offhandedly, a small, lopsided grin forming on her face. He turned from his preoccupied swimsuit model pose, looked her up and down once and grinned.
"Well, you look about a million times better that Barrel, but let's just say we might hold off on getting you a mirror for a little while. We don't want you having a fatal cardiac arrest."
"You can only die once, you know," was her swift and simple reply.
* * * * *
"When we got here, and had dealt with the fact that we were... well... dead, we weren't too sure what we were supposed to do," Lock murmered, shrugging his shoulders to add to the overall effect of his sentence. "I mean, we looked different," he cracked his tail as if it were a whip. A few members of the audience jumped slightly in their seats at the loud, sudden noise. "And so did everything else."
"And just when we were looking completely lost and hopeless," Barrel added breathlessly, becoming rather excited that their story's point was fast approaching. Lock added a small 'speak for yourself' beneath his breath, poking his tongue duly at his male comrade, whom of which immediately returned the motion.
"Who should turn up but sweet little Sally." Almost immediately, as if somebody had thrown a large and powerful switch, every gaze in the room shifted from Shock's wiry, unclean little frame to Sally, whom of which had her tremoring hands buried deep in her lap and a small, discontent frown present on her face. It was as if not a soul dared to make a sound, to even breathe, for fear of missing the preceeding part of the story unfurling before their attentive ears.
"You have to admit, though, back then she wasn't like she is now..." Barrel added thoughtfully, tapping a pudgy finger to his chin, head cocked slightly as he briskly searched his memory of the night for the right words to fully explain his thoughts. "She was really... weird. Like she had... no brain at all."
"Yeah, she kept falling over. And laughing a lot."
"She couldn't speak very good either..."
"And she took a shining to Lock, of all people. Anyone that does that must be out of their minds," Shock added, rolling her eyes in an overly dramatic fashion as she recalled the shy, polite tones of a scratchy, unused voice Sally had administered when conversing with the little red demon in that long time ago. A small groan of bitter dismay sounded from the front row of the crowd, between two rather unkempt and awed-looking demons. From Sally, whom of which had bent over, head in hands, internally begging that the floor would suddenly, inexplicably swallow her whole, if only to escape the childrens' words.
* * * * *
"So...." Shock turned three hundred and sixty five degrees in a sarcastic wonder. "If we're so dead, d'you have any idea where this place is supposed to be?"
"Nope, but it must be an obsessive horror movie lover's paradise." Despite still being slightly nervous and on-edge, she giggled slightly at her friend's words.
"Well, if you really wanna know... this is Halloween Town," a small matter-of-fact and slightly out of tune voice, one neither Shock nor Lock had ever heard in their lifetimes called through the night. They turned, searching suspiciously through the waning dark to locate the origin of the small female voice. There was a rustle and a slight creaking eminating from a place close to their pricked ears, before an overshadowed figure appeared. The moonlight raked over her features, catching on the dark, bold stitching that seemed so evident on her face, neck and arms. Lock raised an eyebrow with interest; Shock merely glared with suspicion.
"Halloween? Halloween Town?" He replied to the figures words, his eyes dragging over the stitching with slight awe. She seemed to nod enthusiastically, clasping her hands to her chest and taking another unbalanced, tentative step foward.
"That's what the doctor told me anyways," she replied nonchalantly, turning her curious gaze away from the duo as it caught on anything that seemed to move even slightly in the bitter autumn breeze. She brought a small hand to her face, brushing at a strand of dark hair that the wind had blown playfully onto her facial features. "He made me, you know. All by himself."
"Have you been spying on us?" Shock eyed the woman cautiously, throwing a bitter glare in her general direction. The woman laughed loudly and carelessly, attempting to take a step foward, yet falling clumsily to her knees in the process.
"No, no. I was just walking. It's such a pretty night, so I wanted to come out.... but the Doctor wouldn't take me. 'Not today', he said, 'perhaps tomorrow Sally'," she innocently imitated a much lower, gruffer voice with her own throat, eyes shining as she placed her hands carefully on her kneecaps. She ran a finger curiously along a particularly precarious line of stitching. "But I didn't wanna go out tomorrow; tonight is so lovely but it might not be here when tomorrow comes. So I came out without him." She sighed dissmissively, struggling to push her already fully developed body into a standing position. She seemed shaky on her legs, unbalanced, as if she were only just beginning the slow and tedious learning process of walking. The children turned to one another, a slight shrugging of shoulders and raised eyebrows were exchanged silently before they turned back to the woman, who seemed to be waving her hands shakily from side to side as if to prevent herself from toppling to the muddy ground a second time.
"So tell me, Sally," Lock replied in an over flattering manner, placing a pale hand to his chin as he vaguelly recalled the name she had placed to herself previously. The woman now turned her full attention toward him, the smile flooding her face seeming to be that of both pure innocence and obedience; as of a newly-trained puppy. "You say that this graveyard is in a place called Halloween Town."
"Yes, sir, the one and only," Sally replied. The sole thing that the Doctor had taught her, apart from basic vocabulary notions and the seemingly neverending struggle to walk with poise and balance, was manners. Lock beamed as the visibly older woman replied as if he were her superior, most likely for the lack of knowing any better.
"And what exactly is this Halloween Town?"
"Well, I think it's stupid, actually," Sally haughtily began, touching her upper arm lightly with the opposite hand, "going to all that fuss to scare little human children silly on one night of the whole year! I think it'd be so much easier to be nice and kind and-"
"Did you hear that? Halloween Town IS Halloween!" Lock whispered with an extatic enthusiasm through Sally's droning, unable to keep the extreme elation coursing through his veins at bay. Shock, though, took a tediously long time to nod in agreement. "T-This is too good to be true! I mean....I mean this is gotta be something we dreamed about every single day of our lives!"
"Exactly, moron, our LIVES! I dunno how, but we've... we've given up our own lives....for this?" Shock thrust her hand furiously in the direction of the childish ragdoll, whom of which had stopped talking abruptly when she found a wilting, blackened flower protruding awkwardly from the overgrown grasses surrounding a headstone and was currently eyeing it curiously from every direction available.
"Dont be stupid," he turned back to his comrade, shrugging. "We didn't give up our lives, we would have died anyway. This is just a.... a bonus level."
"There are no bonus levels in life, Lock," she replied slowly, almost painfully. Her mouth pulled into an unhappy frown. "In case you didn't realise, we never got instruction manuals or a twelve month warranty.... it's not one big game."
"But come on! We're talking permanent costumes here!" He cried, rubbing a modest hand down the chest of his scarlet jumpsuit.
"We don't know anyone here.... except for her," his small assailant replied indignantly, folding her hands stubbornly over her slender chest and jabbing an accusing finger at the ragdoll who was now attempting to create a song about the flower she had just picked- to no avail.
"Trick or Treating.... something we do best!"
"We're DEAD!"
"No more bossy, annoying adults!"
"Well if they're all like her, we'll never survive!" Sally, having quickly lost interest to the snapping flower, downcast her eyes at the pointed yelling. The words they were using were simply too difficult for her to decipher, but to Sally their tone seemed that of tense anger... something she despised with a passion. Gently and carefully she pulled herself to her feet, swaying slightly to find her centre of gravity. She took a tentative step foward, rubbing her shoulder heavily in deep, purposeful thought. There had to be something she could say to stop their increasingly louder brawl.
"My house is up on the hill," her small, thready voice, though nothing to their booming ruckus, cut through the commotion with a smug sense of pride. The woman pointed vaguelly to the rickety remains of an observatory at the very peak of one of the many rolling hills that spread themselves throughout the landscape. "Where's your house? Can we go there now?"
"We got nothin' but a crypt with our names on it, lady. So if you don't mind, I'm going back to my cold stone tomb to die now." Shock, filled to the brim with sarcasm and incompliance shot at the ragdoll lady, turning in a mock huff to storm away with a slight 'Oh wait, I can't even do that, I'm already dead!'. A strong hand latching tightly into her collarbone stopped the little would-be witch dead in her tracks.
"Excuse my friend. She's an idiot." A tight and rather painful squeeze supressed any retaliation the girl may have given to the comment. She growled vehemiously, yet stayed where she was nonetheless. "We haven't got a house yet, but maybe you might know of one? Just a place we can stay until Shock here stops being such a whiner and my other friend stops being such a baby?" Sally giggled childishly at the tone of his voice; drenched and sugar-coated in politeness and flattery.
At that moment the sole thing that Sally felt she was obliged to accomplish was to please this little boy. This... This.... She studied him carefully. He was wearing a deep scarlet red and a long, twisting tail protruded from the seat of his pants (And was, in fact, wrapped around the girl in the witches hat's throat, having she provoked a fist fight in retaliation to his previous statement). This demon. He looked like a demon to her. She wanted to please this demon. Her mouth twisted into a content yet lopsided little grin, pulling at the fresh stitches that tightly held her mouth into place. She had figured it out all by herself, without the Doctor's help this time. The demon had been awfully nice to her and it seemed, to her simple yet innocent mind, that one good turn really did deserve another. But where did she know of a place they could stay?
* * * * *
"Sorry Sally, but you were kinda... well... stupid back then." Lock shrugged, holding a smirk of sheer superiority and smug satisfaction tightly latched onto his face. Sally, between the two burly demons in the front row, shook her head slowly in utter dismay.
"Yeah, anyone that takes a shining to Lock of all people must be mentally defective," Shock added in a sniping fashion, joining Barrel in a small giggle as a grimace of annoyance flashed across their unspoken leader's face. He shot them a stare of pure poison and slowly but surely the giggles wasted away to nothing and Lock, once again, turned to the agaped crowd.
"Well, regardless of whether she was mentally defective or not," he shot his friends a pointed glare, "Sally made the worst mistake here...." Lock continued, blissfully unaware that his comrades were foolishly pulling horrid faces behind his turned back. "This is where our story really gets really interesting, and what you've all been waiting for...."
* * * * *
A/N- Sorry, I know, I always end the chapters in cliff hangers, it's just my style of writing. I apologise for this chapter being a little boring.... I had to set the scene. It actually did have more in it but it was becoming too long, so I just cut it here. New chapter should be out very soon, as I'd already written half of it to go with this one. Thanks for taking the time to read.
Reviews, please!
Please note that this chapter has a lot of switching from them 'telling' the story to the story actually taking place. I'm sure you'll work it out, but if not, use the stars as your wonderful guideline ^_^ Thankyou so much for finding the time to read, and please review!
Umm, also, I've found that my Beta Reading Clientele has hit a bit of a low. I just want to say that I'm a hard-working Beta reader looking for a bit more work to fill up her boring life between studying and watching random cartoons. If you're interested (I Beta for all genres and shows. Anything you can throw at me won't put me off, after what I've seen nothing can surprise me ^_^), drop me an e-mail me at unravelled_stitching@hotmail.com, or leave a review with a valid e-mail I can contact you with. Tenx
-The artist formerly known as Ruri Unstitched.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Never, in all of his long, ceaseless years as the Pumpkin King, had Jack ever had the chance to witness the Town Hall filled to the brim yet so insanely, unbearably silent as it was at that very moment. Silence was not usually a word that associated comfortably with the Halloween folk or their rather eccentric and abnormal customs, and to see the hall so devoid of their proverbial lifeblood was almost too much for the his skull to absorb.
The attentive faces of row after overcrowded row of nightmarish ghouls and goblins stood to attention in frozen, awed silence. It was as if the very fabric of time had been stopped; paused to the nanosecond. Curiosity was not a rare and ancient find in the Hall that night. For every one of the creatures sported more than enough in their features; in their eyes (if of course they owned a pair.) Though ultimately, there was one figure in the hall that did not bare the uniform gaze of perplexed bemusement and curiosity on her face, and for very good reason at that. Even a fully grown adult as she was, she was only slightly older than the little terrors onstage, and not nearly as cunning and witty as they had grown accustomed to being. In a physical match they would slaughter her hands down, and she knew all would be the same for the impending verbal assault at hand.
She cursed inwardly, forcefully and unstopping, at herself. How could she have been so stupid?! How could she, of all the questions she could have possibly asked, bring up the sole issue the little terrors had against her, the one thing they could sabotage and blackmail her horribly with? Was she completely insane? Or were the little trio right; was she just stupid? At that moment, Sally felt nothing but weakness; complete and utter powerlessness. She had made an awful mistake, and she felt in the very pit of her non-existant gut that she would pay for it that night, in front of all those people, at the mercy of three little troublemakers she had only been trying so hard to be nice to on the awful night in question. She shuddered in a long, gulping breath; turning her gaze downward to her recently shined boots. It was going to be a long night.
"Before ya even begin, ya little monsters, how do we know ya ain't jus' gunna lie to us like ya always do?" A small and grotesque demon that lacked both intelligence and constructive vocabulary protested strongly from his well-earned seat in the middle rows. "Ya'll is Boogieses' Boys! Ya got quite a track record fer lyin'." A small, whispered agreement circulated the room in small arcs. The trio giggled viciously, mocking the demon's harshly spoken words of suspicion, causing him to cross his arms and screw his eyes in distaste.
"Oh boo-hoo!" Shock cried sardonically in the cynical squeak of a voice the townspeople had come to greatly despise. "If you thought we were gonna lie all night, then why did so many people even bother showing up?" The crowd, having angrily opened their mouths to strongly protest this remark found, to their dismay, that they had naught a witty comeback nor sarcastic sentence to throw back to the girl. It was very true; why had they come?
"Besides," Lock took a few bounding steps foward, pushing his comrade rather ungracefully to one side of the stage (to her utter displeasure.) His tail had begun to slide beneath the hem of his shirt now; whipping at a slow, menacing speed from side to side in a rhythymic, agressive and hypnotising pattern. Anyone who had witnessed the boy first hand in one of the many mischievious and daily rampages he participated in would have immediately recognised the movement as that of smug and sneering annoyance; a sign to be very wary, a sign to be afraid. "I don't think Jack's heard this one before.... I'm sure it would be a wonderful surprise for him especially, considering him and Sally's little..." his eyes flickered briefly to his Pumpkin King, his unseen eyebrow had slightly upturned as he leaned, forgotten, against the back podium. "Err... arrangement." His voice had grown obnoxiously haughty as he shot the profusively blushing Sally a mocking, telltale grin. A small whisper rippled across the crowd, sneering traces of jealousy in bitter discourse studding the room like brightly coloured christmas lights.
"I don't think you should go on," Jack spoke up sternly from his previously unbeknownst placement, taking a firm step foward, arms crossed in disapproval. Loud tuts and wails of rebellion sliced across the room from the most curious of the souls present. He knew very well that whatever they had planned in their twisted little minds, whether it was true or not, whether it was just a silly game of rebellious payback to himself for not allowing them to have their candy first, whatever it was could not be that of anything pleasant. They had never played that game, neither did he expect them to in the first place. He thought it best to stop the madness before it grew too far out of hand for him to handle alone. Yet in the depths of his skull, far from the part controlling all sense of rationality and defense, just as it had countless times in his past, an odd and surreal sense of curiosity had latched tightly onto his brain, gnawing and tearing away like a bloodsucking lice, ordering him to allow the trio to continue. What was it that Sally had done that was so bad? how could she have done something so serious as to introduce three small children to the most ultimate and absolute evil Halloween Town had ever had to deal with? He had to know....
He damned his curiosity, just as he had countless and bountiful times before. It was the sole emotion refraining him from immediately ordering the tiny trio to cease their story, hand them their sugary bribe and let them be on their way; taking with them the immense hatred and bias that constantly surrounded their being, yet also taking with them the impending embarrassment and shame that he was sure they were to bombard Sally with at any moment.
"Ah, Jack! Stop worrying. We're not gonna upset your little girlfriend-" Lock retorted in a voice stuffed to bursting with mock sincerity to Jack's undecided words, arms folded defiant and smug behind the crook of his back. Jack could almost be certain, with a deathly suspicion, that the middle and index finger on both of his vaguelly translucent hands were crossed tightly over one another. "Besides, betcha she's never told you this one..."
Jack turned to Sally; her eyeline was fixed intently to the floor, lip quivering in a nervous and utterly hopeless twitch and her face denude of calm. It was obvious that whatever was about to be said was going to be hard for her, and perhaps even harder for others to accept. But the curiosity birthed from the situation was simply too immense for Jack to merely let be! It was something too large, something that could not simply be slid away beneath the bed or folded neatly to fit in the closet for another days use. If things like this didn't come out in the open to be disabled, they were a proverbial timebomb, just waiting to blow up in the beholders face.
And so, with a head full of doubts and a heart that he was sure by the end of the night would be full to bursting with regrets, he turned to the trio and let out a tiny, sincere nod. A sign that he gave them his approval to continue. In her seat, Sally groaned inwardly, and on the stage three children grinned very openly as their payback began.
* *
"I think it all began when we died."
"When we died? No, no! It was after we died, moron!"
"As if you can tell the difference, Witchyface! It was all the same thing at the time. Like falling asleep and waking up again," Barrel retorted, voice dripping with sarcasm as he threw an offensive hand motion in her general direction, which was viciously matched and bettered by his female counterpart.
"He's right, Shock, It really was all the same thing," Lock reasoned, folding his arms tightly before his chest. The girl's eyes rolled painfully in their sockets, an intense urge to hit both boys as hard as she possibly could washed over her briefly. Though in a perspective, she could understand where their words were drifting from. She had never really been able to tell the exact moment that she had switched from dying to being dead, and it was a topic that she often found herself pondering about when there was simply nothing else to think; about how she could of died, and how it had felt when it had happened. But there had been no feeling, no sensation attatched to the event. Nothing that her mind had thought memorable enough to store in it's infinate thought banks. The closest she had come to ever being able to describe the non-existant feeling was that she had blinked, and in that nanosecond everything she had ever known and all the skills she had ever aquired from life had quite simply evaporated into the air, and dying was... in a way, like being born again, waking from a deep sleep, having to start at the start, having to learn and develop in a new, unfamiliar world. It had scared her back then, something she had never thought humanly possible. But now that time seemed too far behind her to be afraid of, and she understood that she was right in some aspects back then; it wasn't humanly possible... as after death, they were no longer humans.
* * * * *
"Unghh.......Ahhow.."
The girl, having slowly swam into conciousness, had initially groaned softly from the sharp bubbling, nauseated feeling eminating from the very pits of her stomach. Yet the second the sound protruded from her mouth she found reason enough to groan a second time. The sound of her own aching moan, barely a decibal above a whisper, was enough to make her brain explode with a sharp, pounding ache from her temples to the very back of her skull. A hand flew to her head shakily, massaging the delicate, throbbing skin about her eyes and forehead, furrowing her brow tightly against the pain. It took a large amount of effort to be able to think clearly; almost as if her mind, still inky dark from the fading unconciousness, had been invaded callously by a thick, foggy mist; making it almost impossible to shine anything through. But one thought had managed to slip its way through the fog, making itself known both in the back of her mind and on the very tip of her tongue. What happened?
"You awake?" a voice she immediately recognised, obnoxiously loud in her sensitive ears, very suddenly invaded the sanity of her already scrambled mind. She immediately cried out as the sound rang painfully through her already throbbing brain, smashing into it as though it were a steel sledgehammer. Her brow furrowed deeper as her hand quickly slid over her ringing ears.
"Would you keep it down, moron! I have a headache the size of your grandma here..." she moaned softly through tightly gritted teeth. A slight tutting from the voice she recognised well sounded above her.
"Yeah, well no wonder! Your brain probably stopped working in the time you've been sleeping. You've been at it like a log in the damn land of Nod," the voice retorted sardonically in a tone only slightly softer than the one he had used previously. The girl snorted, sluggishly pulling herself into a seated position, rubbing her lead-filled eyelids.
"Well at least sleeping is the only thing I...I..." though the girl never had the chance finished her sentence as she agonisingly slowly pulled her eyelids open, turning to the boy she knew was talking. Though when she had turned to him, her eyes had been invaded by a sight that was most certainly not the person she had expected to see before her. She gasped, ignoring her pounding head that screamed, begged for her to stay still and jumped from the hard stone plateau she seemed to have been lying apon with a quick, catlike agility.
The boy- or what seemed to be the general shape of a boy- rolled his eyes painfully, holding his hands in the air as if to represent a truce. She shrunk deeper into the dim shadows of what she now saw was a small, claustrophobic room the two inhibited. Her head ached, yet she persisted.
"Not you too," the boy moaned, placing a hand to his forehead. "I know, I know, it's a change. I dunno why, but we've all changed." His voice lingered slightly before it upruptly returned. "I dunno about you, but I don't think I looks half bad, eh?" he ran a deathly pale hand through his dishevelled deep red hair, throwing an offbeat wink in her general direction. Her tense body slackened immensely at the words and the breath that had had found itself stuck tightly inside her lungs slowly released. Though it didn't look at all like the person it sounded so familiar to, like her friend of years and years, she didn't need his looks to pick his personality immediately. She didn't know what had happened to him, or what kind of joke he thought he was pulling on her, but she knew it was indeed him.
"You scared me," she muttered, pulling herself from the shadows and once again into the dim waning moonlight that washed weakly across the small room's walls in one small strip. The boy laughed sarcastically, taking a step closer.
"I thought nothing scared you."
"Shut up," she retorted darkly as she took a few steps in the direction of the small stone pleateau, examining it carefully through eyes sharp for detail. There was small, curvaceous writing that seemed to be carefully carved into the coarse stone, yet in the sparse light her eyes could not make out the tiny, incomprehensible words. "Just where the heck are we? And why are you dressed up in that goofy Halloween costume?" The boy twitched nonchalantly at her question.
"It's not a costume, I can't get it off," he shrugged. "Can't you remember anything about what happened?"
"No," she scoffed slightly, turning away from the stony scrawl. "Something happened?"
"Did you wake up with a sore stomach too?" She nodded, and he then nodded wisely. "I can only just remember it... Halloween... and we finally got candy from that senile old hag Mrs O'Leary..." he struggled immensely with the thought, small and fragmented, that had embedded itself in his brain like shattered glass. "But that candy she gave us.... it was... bad." Shock, though she could not remember the time Lock was attempting quite immensely to explain, could feel it, and she understood without needing to recall. There had been something wrong, something not quite perfect; her bubbling, still aching stomach viciously confirmed that.
There was an awkward silence between the two as they pondered, searched hard and deep in their memory banks for something, anything that would be able to confirm what their hearts (and stomachs) told them so very plainly. Yet both came up for proverbial air empty. The subject was immediately changed.
"So what the heck is this place?" her voice was hard and stony once more as she turned every which way, slightly baffled. Her male friend shrugged nonchalantly.
"Well, right now we're in your crypt. Other than that, I have no idea."
"Oh hah hah," she replied sarcastically, throwing a sour look in his general direction. He grinned innocently.
"Well I'm guessing it's yours anyway, it has your nickname on it..."
"Seriously Lock," she referred to his long-lived nickname, "couldn't you think of anything better than that to freak me out? If not, you're really losing your touch..."
"No really," he protested, pointing vaguelly to the sole distribution of light in the tiny room; a small crack in what seemed like a door to his left side. "We really are in a crypt, and it really does have your name on it. I have one too, and so does Barrel. See for yourself." The girl tutted, annoyed and unconvinced, yet nevertheless sauntered to the light, all the while lecturing her assailant on his failing trickster skills. The heavy slab of stone being used as a surrogate door had been pushed far enough to one side to allow her to squeeze though, although it was an extremely tight fit. Though it was only the wane moonlight shining, it stung her eyes as she squeezed with much difficulty into the outside world, her friend not far behind her. She turned sharply in the dust and dead leaves that littered the ground beneath her feet, facing back to the impossibly small room she seemed to have been re-birthed from. He was right, it was a crypt, albeit a very crudely constructed one. The stone of it's walls shined ice-grey in the moonlight, coarse and hard. The construction of the room was both horribly lopsided and distorted, as if peering at it with her eyes squinted or through broken glass, at the same time.
Yet it wasn't the room that attracted her attention so avidly, caused her to abruptly cease her inane lecturing; it was the plaque that hung carelessly above the small, lopsided entranceway. Carved in what looked like a severely burned and decaying wood plank, a small R.I.P sat in distorted lettering almost incomprehensible to her eyes. Chipped deeply beneath these letters, as if it had been hacked away at the wood with a blunt butter knife, five letters sat very plainly. An S, a H, an O, a C and a K, looking as though they had been seated through countless elements for hundreds of years sat apon the decaying board. It announced boldly to anyone there to see that the crypt, in the form of her well-used nickname Shock, indeed belonged to her. Her eyes shifted slightly to the left. Another crypt sat obediently by her own, looking identical in every way bar the minute difference of the plaque that hung duly above the doorway, which instead read 'R.I.P LOCK.' in it's blunt-knived scrawl. The crypt to the right read 'BARREL'. Rest in Peace? The words caught in her throat as she realised that, in order to rest in peace, you must first be dead. Or on sleeping pills. And she knew most certainly she wasn't on those.
A long, low cry of sheer disbelievement welled deep inside her throat.
* * * * *
"Ahaha, Shock was actually scared of something!" Barrel laughed, playfully pushing at his female assailant's shoulder. She shot a vehemious glare in return.
"I wouldn't get too cocky, porky," she sneered, "Lock told me that the second you woke up you squealed like a baby and fainted dead on the spot."
"I did not faint!" Barrel retorted, his cheek colour deepening a shade. "Anyone would think dying is an easy job. I was tired."
"You did too faint! Admit it, you were scared silly!"
"Was not!"
"Was too!"
"Shut up!" Lock cried very suddenly, his highly-strung, chalky discourse immediately overpowering anything his comrades could muster from their own throats. They shot one another a passing tongue-poke behind his turned back, before grudgingly allowing their partner to continue for fear of being pummeled and their share of the reward candy being taken when they returned home.
"The point is, it was something new. Something we had never seen when we were alive," his voice became low, almost took on a hint of softness around the razor-sharp edges with an awed, surreal sense of wonder. It was something that Lock had simply never done. But just as the audience began to register this fact, register that there was something softer, something more curious caught in the vocals and mannerisms of a little boy they'd solely seen as trouble, it was gone as swiftly as it had appeared and the scathing, trouble-filled voice returned. "I mean, it isn't everyday you die and then wake up to find out you really are very much alive..."
* * * * *
"Ugh, don't you go fainting on me too..." the boy called in an unamused, nonchalant voice, leaning heavily against the stone exit door and crossing his arms firmly over his red-clad chest. "Barrel already did that. Took one look at his crypt and fainted dead on the spot..."
"Dead?" Shock muttered beneath her breath, looking downward to her now repulsed, outstretched hands. They seemed different to her somehow, detatched. A different colour, perhaps? a different shape? She couldn't tell in the waning moonlight.
"We can't be dead. We wouldn't be so alive," the boy replied thoughtfully to her whispered word, slackening his tight grip on himself and taking a small, shuffled step foward. The girl was slightly shaken about the situation at hand. He didn't fully understand himself why he hadn't panicked like she was when he'd awoken, in the dark, without the comfort of anyone's voice inside his own inky black tomb. But he hadn't, and he didn't intend to begin at that moment. He'd heard about delayed reactions, and he intended to take full benefit from it. With his two comrades heavily shaken, he was in charge.
"We wouldn't have TOMBSONES if we weren't DEAD, Lock!" She cried, shaking her head furiously, her voice quavering violently in her throat
"We have tombs, actually. Those ones are tombstones," the boy replied innocently, pointing in the general direction of a largely constructed stone crucifix located a mere few feet behind her. She yelled, and took a panicked step away from the intimidating monstrosity, marked crudely with the name 'Doctor' in its heavy grey stone. As she turned her gaze slightly she could see many more like it studding the lightly rolling landscape around them like beacons in the night. Were they in a.... a graveyard? "Personally, I like the tombs better. You think waking up in a little badly-made house is scary, imagine waking up six feet under."
"Thankyou, Lock," she cried in a sardonic yet anxious sneer. "Thankyou very much. I'll sleep peacefully in my COLD STONE TOMB to know that, Moron!" She gave him a sharp, violent push in the shoulders to accentuate her point. He huffed indignantly. "I dunno how you can possibly be so calm in this situation!" her voice was shaking in an unnatural manner, as though of someone as far from calm as the body would allow. "Just look at us, Lock! We're hideous!"
"Hey!" he cried, clearly offended. "Speak for yourself, Witchiepoo. I'm just as gorgeous as I ever was." He struck a pose. Seeing her old friend act just as arrogent and pig-headed as he ever did calmed her slightly, yet did not subdue the bubbling and growing discomfort in her stomach and throat.
"Hey! Witchiepoo?.... Is it that bad...?" She touched her arm offhandedly, a small, lopsided grin forming on her face. He turned from his preoccupied swimsuit model pose, looked her up and down once and grinned.
"Well, you look about a million times better that Barrel, but let's just say we might hold off on getting you a mirror for a little while. We don't want you having a fatal cardiac arrest."
"You can only die once, you know," was her swift and simple reply.
* * * * *
"When we got here, and had dealt with the fact that we were... well... dead, we weren't too sure what we were supposed to do," Lock murmered, shrugging his shoulders to add to the overall effect of his sentence. "I mean, we looked different," he cracked his tail as if it were a whip. A few members of the audience jumped slightly in their seats at the loud, sudden noise. "And so did everything else."
"And just when we were looking completely lost and hopeless," Barrel added breathlessly, becoming rather excited that their story's point was fast approaching. Lock added a small 'speak for yourself' beneath his breath, poking his tongue duly at his male comrade, whom of which immediately returned the motion.
"Who should turn up but sweet little Sally." Almost immediately, as if somebody had thrown a large and powerful switch, every gaze in the room shifted from Shock's wiry, unclean little frame to Sally, whom of which had her tremoring hands buried deep in her lap and a small, discontent frown present on her face. It was as if not a soul dared to make a sound, to even breathe, for fear of missing the preceeding part of the story unfurling before their attentive ears.
"You have to admit, though, back then she wasn't like she is now..." Barrel added thoughtfully, tapping a pudgy finger to his chin, head cocked slightly as he briskly searched his memory of the night for the right words to fully explain his thoughts. "She was really... weird. Like she had... no brain at all."
"Yeah, she kept falling over. And laughing a lot."
"She couldn't speak very good either..."
"And she took a shining to Lock, of all people. Anyone that does that must be out of their minds," Shock added, rolling her eyes in an overly dramatic fashion as she recalled the shy, polite tones of a scratchy, unused voice Sally had administered when conversing with the little red demon in that long time ago. A small groan of bitter dismay sounded from the front row of the crowd, between two rather unkempt and awed-looking demons. From Sally, whom of which had bent over, head in hands, internally begging that the floor would suddenly, inexplicably swallow her whole, if only to escape the childrens' words.
* * * * *
"So...." Shock turned three hundred and sixty five degrees in a sarcastic wonder. "If we're so dead, d'you have any idea where this place is supposed to be?"
"Nope, but it must be an obsessive horror movie lover's paradise." Despite still being slightly nervous and on-edge, she giggled slightly at her friend's words.
"Well, if you really wanna know... this is Halloween Town," a small matter-of-fact and slightly out of tune voice, one neither Shock nor Lock had ever heard in their lifetimes called through the night. They turned, searching suspiciously through the waning dark to locate the origin of the small female voice. There was a rustle and a slight creaking eminating from a place close to their pricked ears, before an overshadowed figure appeared. The moonlight raked over her features, catching on the dark, bold stitching that seemed so evident on her face, neck and arms. Lock raised an eyebrow with interest; Shock merely glared with suspicion.
"Halloween? Halloween Town?" He replied to the figures words, his eyes dragging over the stitching with slight awe. She seemed to nod enthusiastically, clasping her hands to her chest and taking another unbalanced, tentative step foward.
"That's what the doctor told me anyways," she replied nonchalantly, turning her curious gaze away from the duo as it caught on anything that seemed to move even slightly in the bitter autumn breeze. She brought a small hand to her face, brushing at a strand of dark hair that the wind had blown playfully onto her facial features. "He made me, you know. All by himself."
"Have you been spying on us?" Shock eyed the woman cautiously, throwing a bitter glare in her general direction. The woman laughed loudly and carelessly, attempting to take a step foward, yet falling clumsily to her knees in the process.
"No, no. I was just walking. It's such a pretty night, so I wanted to come out.... but the Doctor wouldn't take me. 'Not today', he said, 'perhaps tomorrow Sally'," she innocently imitated a much lower, gruffer voice with her own throat, eyes shining as she placed her hands carefully on her kneecaps. She ran a finger curiously along a particularly precarious line of stitching. "But I didn't wanna go out tomorrow; tonight is so lovely but it might not be here when tomorrow comes. So I came out without him." She sighed dissmissively, struggling to push her already fully developed body into a standing position. She seemed shaky on her legs, unbalanced, as if she were only just beginning the slow and tedious learning process of walking. The children turned to one another, a slight shrugging of shoulders and raised eyebrows were exchanged silently before they turned back to the woman, who seemed to be waving her hands shakily from side to side as if to prevent herself from toppling to the muddy ground a second time.
"So tell me, Sally," Lock replied in an over flattering manner, placing a pale hand to his chin as he vaguelly recalled the name she had placed to herself previously. The woman now turned her full attention toward him, the smile flooding her face seeming to be that of both pure innocence and obedience; as of a newly-trained puppy. "You say that this graveyard is in a place called Halloween Town."
"Yes, sir, the one and only," Sally replied. The sole thing that the Doctor had taught her, apart from basic vocabulary notions and the seemingly neverending struggle to walk with poise and balance, was manners. Lock beamed as the visibly older woman replied as if he were her superior, most likely for the lack of knowing any better.
"And what exactly is this Halloween Town?"
"Well, I think it's stupid, actually," Sally haughtily began, touching her upper arm lightly with the opposite hand, "going to all that fuss to scare little human children silly on one night of the whole year! I think it'd be so much easier to be nice and kind and-"
"Did you hear that? Halloween Town IS Halloween!" Lock whispered with an extatic enthusiasm through Sally's droning, unable to keep the extreme elation coursing through his veins at bay. Shock, though, took a tediously long time to nod in agreement. "T-This is too good to be true! I mean....I mean this is gotta be something we dreamed about every single day of our lives!"
"Exactly, moron, our LIVES! I dunno how, but we've... we've given up our own lives....for this?" Shock thrust her hand furiously in the direction of the childish ragdoll, whom of which had stopped talking abruptly when she found a wilting, blackened flower protruding awkwardly from the overgrown grasses surrounding a headstone and was currently eyeing it curiously from every direction available.
"Dont be stupid," he turned back to his comrade, shrugging. "We didn't give up our lives, we would have died anyway. This is just a.... a bonus level."
"There are no bonus levels in life, Lock," she replied slowly, almost painfully. Her mouth pulled into an unhappy frown. "In case you didn't realise, we never got instruction manuals or a twelve month warranty.... it's not one big game."
"But come on! We're talking permanent costumes here!" He cried, rubbing a modest hand down the chest of his scarlet jumpsuit.
"We don't know anyone here.... except for her," his small assailant replied indignantly, folding her hands stubbornly over her slender chest and jabbing an accusing finger at the ragdoll who was now attempting to create a song about the flower she had just picked- to no avail.
"Trick or Treating.... something we do best!"
"We're DEAD!"
"No more bossy, annoying adults!"
"Well if they're all like her, we'll never survive!" Sally, having quickly lost interest to the snapping flower, downcast her eyes at the pointed yelling. The words they were using were simply too difficult for her to decipher, but to Sally their tone seemed that of tense anger... something she despised with a passion. Gently and carefully she pulled herself to her feet, swaying slightly to find her centre of gravity. She took a tentative step foward, rubbing her shoulder heavily in deep, purposeful thought. There had to be something she could say to stop their increasingly louder brawl.
"My house is up on the hill," her small, thready voice, though nothing to their booming ruckus, cut through the commotion with a smug sense of pride. The woman pointed vaguelly to the rickety remains of an observatory at the very peak of one of the many rolling hills that spread themselves throughout the landscape. "Where's your house? Can we go there now?"
"We got nothin' but a crypt with our names on it, lady. So if you don't mind, I'm going back to my cold stone tomb to die now." Shock, filled to the brim with sarcasm and incompliance shot at the ragdoll lady, turning in a mock huff to storm away with a slight 'Oh wait, I can't even do that, I'm already dead!'. A strong hand latching tightly into her collarbone stopped the little would-be witch dead in her tracks.
"Excuse my friend. She's an idiot." A tight and rather painful squeeze supressed any retaliation the girl may have given to the comment. She growled vehemiously, yet stayed where she was nonetheless. "We haven't got a house yet, but maybe you might know of one? Just a place we can stay until Shock here stops being such a whiner and my other friend stops being such a baby?" Sally giggled childishly at the tone of his voice; drenched and sugar-coated in politeness and flattery.
At that moment the sole thing that Sally felt she was obliged to accomplish was to please this little boy. This... This.... She studied him carefully. He was wearing a deep scarlet red and a long, twisting tail protruded from the seat of his pants (And was, in fact, wrapped around the girl in the witches hat's throat, having she provoked a fist fight in retaliation to his previous statement). This demon. He looked like a demon to her. She wanted to please this demon. Her mouth twisted into a content yet lopsided little grin, pulling at the fresh stitches that tightly held her mouth into place. She had figured it out all by herself, without the Doctor's help this time. The demon had been awfully nice to her and it seemed, to her simple yet innocent mind, that one good turn really did deserve another. But where did she know of a place they could stay?
* * * * *
"Sorry Sally, but you were kinda... well... stupid back then." Lock shrugged, holding a smirk of sheer superiority and smug satisfaction tightly latched onto his face. Sally, between the two burly demons in the front row, shook her head slowly in utter dismay.
"Yeah, anyone that takes a shining to Lock of all people must be mentally defective," Shock added in a sniping fashion, joining Barrel in a small giggle as a grimace of annoyance flashed across their unspoken leader's face. He shot them a stare of pure poison and slowly but surely the giggles wasted away to nothing and Lock, once again, turned to the agaped crowd.
"Well, regardless of whether she was mentally defective or not," he shot his friends a pointed glare, "Sally made the worst mistake here...." Lock continued, blissfully unaware that his comrades were foolishly pulling horrid faces behind his turned back. "This is where our story really gets really interesting, and what you've all been waiting for...."
* * * * *
A/N- Sorry, I know, I always end the chapters in cliff hangers, it's just my style of writing. I apologise for this chapter being a little boring.... I had to set the scene. It actually did have more in it but it was becoming too long, so I just cut it here. New chapter should be out very soon, as I'd already written half of it to go with this one. Thanks for taking the time to read.
Reviews, please!