Spirited Away on Halloween 2; Hirac's Return

This took a while. I was working on something else.

The gingerbread homes were blackened beyond recognition, many of them still smoldeirng from whatever had caught them on fire. A narrow cobblestone street was visible underneath the lake that was now ChristmasTown; the melted snow was not helping to put out anything that happened to be on fire. The central Christmas Tree was gone, the trunk grooved like it was bitten off by a set of giant teeth. There was no sign of life, only the faint whistling of wind through the cracks in the wreckage.

Pyramus slowly entered town through the main gate, his feet "plop"ping in the water with every step. Jack followed (stunned, but still aware), but did not pick up his feet enough to stir the water. Pyramus raised his head and sniffed deeply through in nose, exhaling with an ashy cough. "I can't smell anything but smoke," he hoarsely replied.

"What happened here?" Jack stared stunned at the soggy, scorched roofs of the buildings; now that he concentrated, his ears could just barely hear three recurring notes from the carousel (the first three notes of "Jingle Bells"). From the sound of it, something was jammed in the motor, preventing it from playing any farther. "This was Christmas... so peaceful, so innocent-"

"So destroyed."

Jack snapped around. "This is not the time, Pyramus!"

Pyramus startled, then relaxed himself. "I doubt your plan will work now."

Jack rubbed his head, a nice numb feeling running through his skull. For now, he refused to believe that Christmas was destroyed; it was as if a close relative had died, and he simply refused to acknowledge it true.

Ding ding ding... ding ding ding... ding ding ding, went the carousel. The first three monotonous notes of "Jingle Bells", one of the more annoying of the Christmas carols (in Jack's opinion). Each "ding" shook Jack's jawbone more, his teeth clenching and clenching more and more with Every Single Note-

"What's doing that!" Jack roared (Pyramus jumped up and back three feet in shock). Jack tore through the street and, miraculously, found the carousel. He stepped onto the platform and, finding the door, tore open the middle pillar and searched through the gears for the offending "monkey-wrench"-

It was an elf! An itty-bitty elf, too, almost too small to be noticed. Jack picked up the small child, a boy, and pulled him out of the cogs, smoothly out his clothes and dusting away the ashes as if he were a precious gem. Little tufts of blonde hair stuck out from his elfen cap, most of his clothes burned to a dismal brown. "Oh no.. Pyramus, come see!"

Jack patted the elf's hand softly while the gargoyle craned his head over Jack's shoulder. "Come on now, wake up!"

"Is it dead?"

The elf-child coughed, making both of the men jump. "Fire..."

&&&

The single word was enough to cement Jack and Pyramus' resolve to return to Halloween (that, and my writer's block was kicking in again). The Pumpkin King and his servant gargoyle found their way through the forest of holidays and managed to sneak partway back into Halloween before Pyramus pointed out that they didn't have a plan.

"I'm tired of making plans, Pyramus..." Jack admitted, keeping his concentration on the roots of the trees as to not notice his soggy wet feet and the fact that he now had a cat AND a child elf sleeping in his usually empty ribcage. "I don't know what happened to my town, or even if it's still there. You're the warrior class of Halloween, you figure something out."

"I can't," replied Pyramus, barely exerting any effort to keep up with the Pumpkin King. Rather that try to avoid the tree roots underneath them, he instead kicked them up out of the ground as they tried to trip him, leaving a rather obvious trail of uprooted roots and angry trees behind him. His not-often-used mind spun as he considered Jack's words. "I'm a warrior class?"

Jack stopped for a second, surprised at himself. He placed his middle finger on the bridge of his nose and tapped his skull with his index. "I have no idea where that came from. Please, ignore that statement."

Pyramus pointed to Jack's hand with a wingbone. "What spell are you trying to cast?"

"Hm?" Jack noticed that he was doing the gargoyle wing-bone gesture that Pyramus had used with Barrel and jumped. "Ignore that too, Pyra-"

He gave up in mid-sentence and growled, leaning his back against a tree. "What's going on here? You seem to be comprehending this better than I am."

The gargoyle shrugged. "I know only what I am allowed to know."

The jelly ball gave a light flutter in Jack's pocket. The exhausted skeleton reached in and pulled out a handful of lint, four thread spools, Sally's ear (his eyes twinged with tears, but he sniffed and held them back), a rat's tail, the REST of the aforementioned rat, a blade of dead grass, MORE lint, gum wrappers, a half-eaten Snickers heart that was covered in dust, and the ring box with the jelly ball in it.

He put everything that wasn't a jelly ball back in his pocket. "I've got to try and not reach so deep."

He gave the box a good shake, noticing that the earth moved as he did it. "Pyramus, you know this all started when I poked this thing, right?"

"I do now."

Jack was beginning to get annoyed with his friend's overly-accepting natur- He called Pyramus his friend. Jack humped to himself; odd that he should do that, because not only was Pyramus a gargoyle (which he simply had a natural fear of for whatever reason), but he was an overly-agreeable, unexciteable, overly-muscled lump of rock that did whatever Jack told him to. Jack had never found this more annoying in his life!

Jack went out on a limb and grabbed Pyramus's shoulder, and the larger gargoyle flinched. "Pyramus, doesn't that sound odd to you? Think about it: something bad always happened after I hit the ball, poked the ball, tried to throw the ball in the lake. Don't you think that's a little more than coincidental-" (Pyramus began to open his mouth, but another thought entered Jack's head, and he interrupted). "And Pyramus, so help me, if you say anything to the effect of 'I do now', I will find a way to change into that gargoyle thing I was and rip your spleen out through your throat!"

And now he was shaken; Pyramus stepped back, his ears lying flat against his head. His large eyes widened in shock, his nostrils flaring and his fingers clenching. His mouth was obviously struggling to speak, but words seemed to have left his head entirely at that point.

Nevertheless, Jack kept talking to, or more like scolding, Pyramus. "You are the single strongest thing I know, and yet you act like some 90 lb. suck-up whose afraid of getting his face beat in! Form an opinion! Tell me; do you think this is odd, or not?"

A few minutes passed without Pyramus saying anything, his bestial face contorting in thought before Jack gave up and walked away. Having completely forgotten about the ball in his struggle to form an opinion, Pyramus could do nothing but follow.

&&&

They stepped back into HalloweenTown, but thought they were taken somewhere completely different somewhere along their travels. The sky was a shade of blue so light it was painful, almost white (much like the scenery). The ground, the trees, the plants, everything was the color of Greek marble treated white Clorox bleach, the sun distilled into an almost flourescent glow. Small buildings that resembled attorney's offices were spread out from the still-black forest to the horizon. Jack and Pyramus shield their eyes from the brightness and tried to look farther, but their vision fuzzied as they tried to find anything in the distance. There must've been a fog rolling in, because the wind would blow every now and then and disturb the fuzzy-ing, revealing what looked like castle turrets in the sky.

Jack stood aghast. "What did they do to my town?"

The two men dared to step into town, leavin the twisted forest behind.


DONE! Notes time;

Sorry about the long wait, but due to bug collections and upper respiratory tract infections, it took a while. Getting blood drawn hurts, did you know that? Especially when, for whatever reason, the nurse can't find the stupid vein! (holds elbow and whimpers)

Going on my friend Double F's (old) advice, I'm gonna start putting a line between the end of my story and the notes.