It was the first week of the New Year, and the citizens of Halloween Town expected to focus on their upcoming festivities anew. No more would they attempt to remake foreign territory that wasn't theirs to understand. From then on, their focus was to be on Halloween only, the holiday that they knew best. Wanting to expand their resources for the festivities, the town council decided to give a much-expanded focus on a more exciting, most glorious Halloween for next October.
This brought Jack Skellington and the Mayor where they were now. With Oogie Boogie having died over a week back, the other monsters thought it best to put his slimy, dangerous lair disguised as a casino to better use. The popular suggestion was to repurpose the chamber as a Halloween party house, complete with a dining area and activity rooms. Lock, Shock, and Barrel had been given an option to participate in its involved annual festivities if they could put their mischievous ways to good use and give up the truly naughty tricks that they had utilized when working for Oogie, but the Mayor had yet to hear their decision on the matter. Regardless, the former lair being connected to the trio's treehouse did not prove to be an obstacle, as there was an alternate entrance on the ground, and a vampire's family had been tasked with looking after them at the vampires' house besides, to ensure that the trick-or-treaters wouldn't get in the way of the job and possibly sabotage it.
At present, Jack Skellington and the Mayor, toolkits in hand, were walking into the main room just past this ground entrance, having been tasked with cleaning out all of the death traps and other furnishings in every nook and cranny so that the refurbishment could begin. While Jack showed no concerns as he looked around, the Mayor was using his unhappy face, clearly quite scared.
"Oh, I don't like this!" he remarked as he saw all of the skeletons lying about. He shivered. "Just think—there were victims of harmful scares down here!"
"I don't like this either, Mayor," Jack responded, "but at least there won't be any more."
They were now in the torture room where Oogie's latest batch of snake and spider stew was to be prepared before Jack had foiled that plan. The pit with the stew's broth had not been emptied since the Christmas Eve fiasco, and the smell of rotting insects and spoiled juice would be making itself present to anybody who had a working nose. The two of them were lucky to be immune to the stench.
"I'll clean out the corpse-filled traps if you can't," Jack told the Mayor. "I think we could set the skeletons' remains in the boneyard just beyond the tall, rotting pair of oak trees. As for the traps themselves, I'm not sure what to do about them, but we'll likely have their mechanics destroyed."
"I can do that, actually!" the Mayor responded nervously. "You're far more dexterous than I am, so I'd feel better if you checked the casino room instead. If it's still booby-trapped, then you certainly would be able to dodge them prior to removal."
Jack grinned at the confidence that his second-in-command was giving him. He then looked up and eyed the giant claw that was hanging over the stew pit. "Speaking of dexterity…"
He was looking at Oogie's torn sack that was still wrapped around the claw. Nimbly, Jack climbed onto the tilting rack nearby, leaned forwards a little bit, and jumped to grab the stationary claw. He then hoisted himself onto the thing and stood, resembling the pose that Halloween Town's only evil resident had made in his last moment alive. Straddling carefully so as to avoid losing his balance, Jack leaned down and proceeded to remove the burlap. Being bound as tightly as it was, it ripped further as it was pulled from the claw, and audibly at that.
The Mayor watched nervously as Jack did this. "What are you planning to do with that, Jack?"
Jack inspected the torn remnants once the sack was freed from the claw entirely. The whole interior—what was left of it, anyway—was completely empty; any bugs that may have clung to it when it was ripped off of Oogie's body had long scurried away. In answer to the Mayor, Jack leaned over the claw and dropped the burlap into the stew pit on the floor. As the stew was now curdling and far from hot, the sack didn't boil, instead just landing with a GLOP! and getting stained in the almost hardening broth. When the duo and some other townsfolk got around to siphoning out the stew and patching over the floor pit in tomorrow's work phases, the burlap also would be disposed of.
"We can't stitch it up for reuse," he told his task assistant. "If we used it to stash this upcoming party house's decorations, then it would be seen as being just as tasteless as head-hunting someone who would die from head loss, no matter how disliked Oogie was by everyone."
The Mayor nodded uneasily as Jack contorted his way back to the ground.
Once back on ground level, Jack lifted a skeletal hand over his sockets, squinted, and peered into a very distant corridor. "I'll go into the main room just over here and look for possible traps to deactivate. I'll call you when I'm sure that it's safe."
"Okay!" said the Mayor, his head still in unhappy mode. Starting his current task, he took a saw and cut a sword-bearing King of Hearts card from the ground.
...
The casino room was right next to this one. As Jack had somewhat expected, the props were not moving, as Oogie was not around to activate them. Despite the lack of jumpscares, Jack's entrance did disturb a few skeleton bats, which started flying around the room. He made a mental note to lead them to a room with a window or an exit to free them when clearance of the casino section was over.
Jack rushed to the junction of the rooms. "Mayor, there's nothing dangerous in here after all! It's just dormant. You can enter safely."
The Mayor was nearly finished uprooting what few traps were in the snake and spider stew's room. His head swiveled to its happy side. He hustled into the casino room but returned his head to the unhappy side as he became uneasy again with the surroundings. Regardless, he and Jack set to work dismantling what was in here.
...
Two and a half hours passed. After the casino relics were lying in a scrap pile to be dealt with later and the bats had been chased into the ground entry room to fly out the window, Jack and the Mayor headed into a somewhat secluded corridor. This, they assumed, was where Oogie's living quarters must have been, as the casino was more than enough to finish off a victim.
"Depending on what we see here, we probably will use these areas for either storage or reservation rooms," Jack brainstormed to the Mayor.
The Mayor's head swiveled to the happy side again. "Ooh, now THAT'S a thought! We could have people reserve for games! Who wouldn't want their own room for playing Musical Iron Chairs?"
"Well, we'll just have to see about the possible crawlspaces first."
They came to a glowing room, lit up just like the cheap funhouse colors of the casino traps, that had multiple doors arranged in an octagonal pattern. Thinking them to lead to actual rooms, Jack opened one and headed down it. Instead of going anywhere, he found himself coming right back into the room via another door. The Mayor decided to try another. It was a dead end, much like a closet, and when opened, it triggered a voice recording that Oogie had made of his signature maniacal laugh. Had the lights been on properly, the Mayor and Jack could have seen that there was a speaker mounted to the top of the dead end wall, but since the funhouse glowing effect was on, just the doors and the floor (the latter of which was designed to look like a bright white spider web, appropriately) were shining in bright colors, and the speaker was well-hidden.
The Mayor switched back to his unhappy face at the jumpscare. "Oh, my. He really wanted his lured victims to get trapped in here!"
Jack, never having been afraid of Oogie in the first place, kept his optimism about him. "One of these must be a way out. He couldn't have sustained himself in just the casino."
It took about five minutes of guessing wrong doors, including opening a false passageway to find a horribly mutilated skeleton of a poor Halloween Town resident hanging in it, but the two finally found the door that actually led to the living quarters. The funhouse lights were still on in the connected corridor, making a bunch of painted murals of dice, snakes, and playing cards glow on the walls. In actuality, these wall paintings were most likely plain, but the dimmed visuals made them look quite colorful. It was slightly hard for the Mayor and Jack to see where they were walking along the passageway, but their eyes—or blinking sockets, in Jack's case—became quite well-accustomed.
Jack turned to the Mayor, whose unhappy face was glowing in the dark now. His currently dormant happy face looked slightly purple. "These images could serve as nice decorations for the hallway, provided we get rid of the funhouse lights," Jack suggested, gesturing to a cartoon of a worm inching out of a die dot. "As for those doors, we quite possibly could install locks on the fake ones and make them storage closets, but the trip wire voice recording will have to go."
"So will the remains he left there!" the Mayor added, shivering.
"Oh, of course!" Jack replied. "We'll bury them in the boneyard with the other bodies being cleared out. When official transformation of this lair begins, I plan to host a memorial for all of the townsfolk who fell victim to Lock, Shock, and Barrel seizing them and tossing them down here." He paused to sigh in sadness, clearly remembering the Christmas fiasco that thankfully had not resulted in Santa Claus having a similar fate. "I'll never know why I didn't put those three into scare rehabilitation a long time ago. Oogie was a bad influence, and everyone knew it!"
The Mayor reached over to Jack to pat his upper back, being far too short to reach the tops of his shoulders. "The important thing now is that he can't hurt anyone anymore."
Jack sighed. "Well, you're right about that part, at least."
...
After some more walking, passing by such audacities as a tilting indoor balcony and a barred window with a purple strobe light, they came to a set of stairs.
"This must be where Oogie actually resided," Jack deduced. "If anyone will want to make overnight reservations, then we could prepare this area into hostel bedrooms."
The Mayor switched to his happy face. "We could give room service! Just imagine—on request, your favorite blood-red wine, with a Lily of the Valley in a vase for decoration!"
Jack grinned. "Thank you for mentioning that! I'll add it to the ideas!"
Jack turned out to be right when he and the Mayor descended the stairs. There were three doors catty-corner in sight, two of which were wide open. One led to Oogie's bedroom—that was obvious from the furnishings. His old bed had been a mattress-and-blanket-shaped pile of leaves, but everything else, minus the absence of a closet, looked like a typical bedroom. Jack took one peek and was glad that Sally had been rescued from the lair, not that the bed was necessarily made from people who had leaves for guts or anything. The second visible room, he deduced from peeking, was most likely a game room for Oogie to satisfy his gambling lust when there was nobody to torture. Both of these rooms reintroduced the cheap funhouse lighting, as if Oogie couldn't have gotten enough of it. The third door, which, like its triplets, was designed to look like it was from a dungeon, was locked.
Jack tried to stand on his phalanges to peek through the tiny, barred window near the top of the door, but since Oogie had been taller than most of the other creatures in Halloween Town, including Jack, the pane was just out of eye level.
"If you'll lift me up, I could try to look," the mayor offered. He removed his hat.
"Okay!" Jack lifted him to the barred space on the dungeon-like door.
The Mayor squinted to peek. "I think it's another bedroom, but the bars are making it hard to make out. The glass isn't the clearest, either."
Jack was startled. "Another bedroom? For whom?"
The Mayor knew that Jack had been asking rhetorically but answered him anyway. "I—I can't possibly imagine. Boogie's Boys live in the treehouse, don't they?"
"They do. Are you sure that you're not seeing something else?"
"I'm guessing based on the image, but it's a bit distorted. The bars are a huge block."
Jack set down the Mayor very carefully, who then reached to his hat to put it back on. "Well, there's only one way to find out. There ought to be a key here somewhere…" pondered Jack.
This section of the lair, besides the lit-up rooms beyond, had its natural, dank tones in it, so the key was found easily on a hook at ground level. The Mayor saw the key first. It was bright gold. The loop at the end was crafted to look like a poker chip, while the handle looked like a cottonmouth snake, the hook that turned the lock serving as the snake's venomous teeth in design.
He handed the key to Jack, who then unlocked the door and creaked it open very slowly. Before he could open it further than ajar, they heard the last thing that they expected.
A scared yelp was heard all of a sudden. Jack was about to ask the Mayor whether he had heard anything, when a very terrified voice blurted out, "What did I do this time, Dad?!"
Jack swung the door open all the way. The Mayor had been right; the room was a second bedroom. The only similarities that this one shared with Oogie's, however, were the presence of hideous wall murals of things that went "Bump!" in the night (which sounds vague, but anyone who lives in Halloween Town can tell those things) and the bed of leaves. Atop the bed, much to the duo's surprise, was a glowing, green burlap body. He looked like a teenage version of Oogie, only this creature was a little less rotund and had hints of legs in his shape. The teenage-appearing boogeyman had a chain wrapped underneath his head, as if the chain was supposed to give him the appearance of a neck but was failing drastically due to the sack's density. He was using both hands to cover up a spot on the outer side seam of his lower gut and was squinting both eye sockets shut.
"Whatever it was, it was a mistake! Don't hit me!"
The Mayor switched to his unhappy face, which dropped its jaw wide open in surprise. Jack made a shocked "O" shape with his mouth. "Oh, we're truly sorry!" the latter apologized sincerely. "We had no clue that anybody other than Oogie Boogie lived here!"
The boogeyman adolescent hyperventilated for a few seconds before opening his sockets. To much his surprise as Jack's and the Mayor's, he saw two strangers instead of whom he'd been expecting.
"Who are you? Did my dad send you in here?" he blurted out nervously, obviously missing what Jack had said about being unknowing of the sack's existence.
Suddenly, it dawned on them. This nearly lookalike but smaller creature must have shared a relation with Oogie. Despite not knowing until seconds ago that this being existed and thus being unsure if he and Oogie had the same personality, guilt started to wash over Jack. After all, he had killed Oogie directly. It may have been nothing more than a last resort to save Sally's and Santa's lives, but Jack still had done it. Now that he was in the know of someone who called Oogie "Dad", Jack was beginning to feel as if he were about to cause indirect suffering.
"Egad! It's another boogeyman!" the Mayor exclaimed, scared.
"I know, I know," Jack replied. He felt around for an electric switch and flicked it off, draining the room of its cheap funhouse colors. The bedroom plunged into its true, dank color scheme, also draining the green from the occupant's body. He now looked the same hue of brown as normal burlap, and the chain that was trying very pathetically to cinch a neck onto him went from blue to gray. With the funhouse illusion gone, it was plain to see that this bedroom resembled a dungeon.
"My dad must have sent you in here! Really, what did I do?!" exclaimed the Boogie next-of-kin. He was now facing both Jack and the Mayor in terror and was still covering part of his gut seam.
Jack sighed. "Well…your father's dead. We're clearing out his lair for remodeling."
The Boogie adolescent, surprisingly, looked rather relaxed. "He is?"
Jack nodded. "He was boiled in a batch of snake and spider stew last week."
The living sack looked down slightly. "I can't say I'm sorry."
Jack made his shocked expression again. The Mayor, while keeping his unhappy face active, opened his mouth reflexively in surprise.
"Wh-What do you mean?" asked the Mayor.
The Boogie adolescent threw up his arms. Now that he was no longer covering the spot where his left hip would be had his gut been shaped more like a human body, Jack and the Mayor could see that that fragment of the seam was rather ill-sewn. "I mean, 'Good riddance!'."
The two onlookers could react only nonverbally in utter surprise. They looked at each other, concerned.
The occupant of the room flopped his arms by his sides and sighed. "May I come out now?"
"Of course, you may come out!" replied Jack. "You're not upset?"
"He abused me! I couldn't be happier that he's gone!" As the living burlap said this, and still in an upset manner at that, he got up from the leaf bed and scuffled towards the door rather nervously.
The Mayor's head swiveled to its happy side. "Allow us to introduce ourselves! I'm the Mayor of Halloween Town, and this over here is good old Jack Skellington!"
"Some call me 'The Pumpkin King', even though I have nothing to do with pumpkins," Jack added. "I actually do most of the ruling in this town, as annual Halloween events all depend on me."
Both of them held out a hand to shake. When the young boogeyman saw this, he stood still for a moment before recoiling in horror.
"Don't touch me!" he shouted in alarm. He backed up quickly, waving the front stubs of his starfish arms (where hands would be on a humanoid body) to gesture the duo to keep away from him.
Jack and the Mayor looked at each other in surprise. "They're just handshakes," Jack remarked.
"I think it's psychological trauma," the Mayor responded, swiveling his head again.
They looked back at the young boogeyman. "Could you at least tell us your name?" asked the Mayor. He went back to displaying his happy face.
"Pogey Boogie," said the sack. He squatted down and hid his head under his arms.
"Pogey Boogie," Jack remarked, stroking his chin region. "That sounds nice!"
Pogey untucked his head from his arms and looked back at the visitors. "Nice?"
"Yes." Jack smiled. "I quite like how it flows!"
"You're…not going to hurt me?"
"We weren't sent by your father; we just stumbled here by chance. We won't hurt you."
"As in…'cross my heartworm, hope to die, stick a needle in my socket'?" Pogey gestured by air-drawing an X over his chest and pointing to his right eye hole.
"Well, we don't have worms, and, as you can see, the Mayor here has eyes in his sockets, but yes, as in that. Oogie was our polar opposite. Did you know that he was so dangerous to the other townsfolk that he was in fact banished to this lair?"
"Well, no; I've lived in the lair all my life and been locked in my room for so long that I don't even know what today's date is!"
Both Jack and the Mayor went agape. "What did he DO to you?!" gasped the Mayor, swiveling his head to the unhappy side once more in horror.
Pogey squatted frozen for a moment. "It's too horrible to describe."
"Well, we're letting you out of this room, if you wish," said Jack. "We were tasked to remodel this place over the next few days now that Oogie is gone, but we didn't know that you were living in here. Our apologies. If you want us to stop and to restore everything, then we will do so." Of course, taking this option would open up the possibility that Pogey would take up Oogie's atrocious pastimes in spirit, but Pogey didn't seem the type, despite being exactly the same sort of creature.
"Please don't. I want out of here, period."
"Well, wish granted!"
The Mayor turned to Jack and talked very softly, worried. "How are we going to introduce him to the rest of the town? They'll think that he was just like his father!"
"Oh, I doubt it," Jack replied. "I'll explain to them fully."
Pogey, meanwhile, was collecting a pair of dice and an emergency sewing kit, his only possessions. He wrapped them in a handkerchief and tied the small bundle to a stick.
Once the stereotypical image of a runaway was emanated as Pogey perched the stick beside his chain-cinched neck region, Jack offered his hand for Pogey to take.
Pogey was terrified all over again. "NO TOUCHING! PLEASE!" He backed up a few steps.
Jack retracted his hand in embarrassment. "Oh, I am so, so sorry! Please, follow us, then!"
Jack and the Mayor led Pogey out of the room. He glowed green again as they walked through the funhouse-lit passageways and faded back to brown when the room with the stew pit was approached. At intervals, whenever somebody had a shoe squeak when taking a step, Pogey froze in terror as if expecting an ambush, and his company always had to assure him what the sound was.
Finally, they made it to the room where the now-spoiled snake and spider stew was rotting in its pit. Unlike Jack and the Mayor, who were immune to the hideous stench, Pogey felt his body recoiling. He couldn't smell it, but all of his critters could, and they were reacting with wretch beneath the sackcloth. Not even the flies were excited.
Pogey turned to look at the pit. He saw Oogie's old burlap sitting in the curdled broth. Pogey appeared to have another psychological reaction to this, and his mouth opened to let his snake tongue hang out like a human tongue would when seeing something disgusting.
"I NEVER want to see another batch of that stew ever, EVER again!" he declared. By now, the trio were at the ground exit of the lair and ready to leave.
The Mayor swiveled his head to the happy side. "You won't have to see it again!"
It was mid-afternoon, as the sun very well indicated for early January, and as Jack, the Mayor, and Pogey stepped outside, they saw that nobody else happened to be around.
"Dracula must still be babysitting Boogie's Boys at his house," observed the Mayor. "Otherwise, they'd be heading up here in that bathtub by now."
"Boogie's Boys?" asked Pogey.
"That's what he calls Oogie's former comrades, Lock, Shock, and Barrel," Jack clarified. "They're trick-or-treaters who used to pull naughty stuff for Oogie. I don't think you know them."
Pogey stood as if in shock again. Finally, he responded, "I thought Shock was a girl."
"You do know them?" Jack asked, astonished. "Anyway, it was alliteration, and although Shock is a girl, she never seemed to mind when the Mayor used that descriptor."
"Yeah, I do know them." Pogey went into terror mode again. "Dad just…just…never mind!"
Finally, they reached the bottom of the hill. Not much was visible from this point except far off in the distance, and Jack and the Mayor were pondering where to go.
"Well, this was certainly unforeseen, but I suspect having to reprioritize things," Jack told the Mayor. "We'll have to find a suitable abode for Pogey first and put off the party house refurbishment until after he is safe and sound somewhere."
"I'm Mayor. Of course, I'll give you permission for that!" the Mayor assured, chuckling.
Jack stuck up an index finger in thought. "I know—I'll call a town meeting for this evening!"
A/N: Pogey's name was chosen very much on purpose. First and foremost, it's an obscure slang word for a package of candy, the association of which is quite fitting for Halloween. Secondly, the word's more common definition is someone's much-needed, government-given relief, and in this case, the two individuals who more or less "govern" Halloween Town have released him from a nightmarish bond (though how the introduction of him to the rest of the town's society will turn out will remain yet to be seen). Plus, there's the phonetic similarity between "Oogie Boogie" and "Pogey Boogie".
The newly-mentioned segments of Oogie Boogie's lair, particularly the trick room with multiple doors and the glowing hallways, were inspired by walking through Dr. Frankenstein's Haunted Castle at Indiana Beach last August. (I am not from that area; Indiana Beach was a stop along the multi-state drive to college I took before the semester started.) The attraction is an upcharge scare maze designed to look, as the name implies, like a Halloween-esque castle. The lights are off throughout the whole thing, and the vast majority of the interior has glowing paint and bright murals along the walls. I thought that the color scheme looked exactly like that found in Oogie's casino, so I incorporated parts of the architecture here. The trick doors, tilting balcony, and purple strobe lights were taken from there, too. With that being said, Dr. Frankenstein's Haunted Castle was not the inspiration for the fic itself—I have had the idea for it for many months but waited to release it until Halloween—only the visuals for part of this chapter.