After a series of commercials trying to sell the viewing audience some Duncan yo-yos, Pizza Hut pizzas, Snick, and the concept of a "helmet day," which the advert strongly implies is actually every day, the Midnight Society fades back in seated around their campfire in the woods.
FRANK: Veruca Salt isn't even grunge, they're bubblegum pop with a reverb pedal and an octaver.
GARY: Come on, FRANK. Veruca Salt is easily grunge.
BETTY-ANN: Well, their first album—
FRANK (rearranging his underwear): "Seether" is practically their only song. All their albums should just be eleven tracks of "Seether."
SAMANTHA (looking reverently around at her friends and leaning forward a bit): I love "Seether." I think it's about her cat.
ERIC: It's about her temper, dork!
BETTY-ANN: The music video prominently features cats. I think it's about a cat, too.
TUCKER (chewing on a mouthful of God-knows-what): Ummuff a thing iddabud the wuh uh muh—
FRANK smacks TUCKER upside the back of his head, causing him to spray half-chewed chunks of food into the fire. The fire erupts in color, just like with the magic dust.
KIKI: Whoa. Did you guys just see that?
TUCKER coughs and gags raucously.
GARY: Let's just get back to the story.
BETTY-ANN: Right.
Danny's blood froze in his veins as he watched Mister Sardo and Doctor Vink pull up to his trailer in the Power Wheels jeep. Doctor Vink was done up extravagantly, dressed in leather moccasins, pressed slacks, a toy wrestling belt his parents had got for him at the dollar store, a red Christmas sweater that was so small it barely covered half his hairy stomach, an expensive-looking white bowtie, and his football helmet and shoulder pads, with his beard tightly bound in the style of the Egyptian pharaohs. But the outfit Mister Sardo had chosen was even more offensive: he was wearing cowboy boots, skinny jeans, and a Veruca Salt t-shirt.
"Take that off!" Danny screamed, running down the lawn to meet them. When he reached the jeep he removed Mister Sardo from the driver's seat with a flying tackle that sent them both rolling halfway down the lawn.
"What the deuce!" Mister Sardo cried breathlessly.
"Take that shirt off!"
"Get your hand away from there—"
Danny ripped the edge of the shirt out from under Mister Sardo's belt and Mister Sardo loosed a girlish squeal of pure misery. They scuffled for what felt like hours but, according to Doctor Vink's stopwatch, was only about ten seconds.
"You idiot! My mom will never let you in wearing a shirt like this!"
Mister Sardo was bewildered but eventually conceded the shirt and went with Doctor Vink and Danny into the trailer. He looked like a wad of uncooked dough with his torso bared and his lower half crammed into the skinny jeans.
"Who's that," Danny's mom yelled, spatula raised defensively, as the three boys climbed in through the trailer's narrow door. "Oh! Boys! Mister Sardo, where is your shirt?!"
"He doesn't own a shirt," Danny immediately said, passing the balled-up Veruca Salt tee behind his back and swiftly into the garbage can.
"Shirts!" Mister Sardo said, turning beet red as Danny's mom's eyes drilled into his flabby breasts. "Intolerable! I never wear a shirt, myself. And that's Sah-doh!" he snapped.
Doctor Vink's tiny eyes flicked wildly from the kitchen sink to Danny's bedroom door. He was breathing very loudly inside the football helmet.
"Are you boys excited to watch that street cleaning movie? I'll be in with cookies and milk in just a little while," Danny's mom said with a warm smile.
"The hell she will," Danny announced a minute later, in his room with his two friends, as he wedged a chair underneath the cheap plastic latch of his door.
"Street cleaning?" Doctor Vink said in a terrified voice. "I thought we were going to watch Fern Gully!"
"You imbecile!" Mister Sardo shrieked. He turned to Danny and said with a wicked smile, "I told him it was going to be Fern Gully. Tell him what we're really watching, Pest-catori."
"I rented a violent-ass cowboy movie," Danny said, holding the sacred VHS in his hands. "The cover was a picture of a cowboy riding on two horses at the same time, and he had guns. And the old man who ran the video store was gothic."
"What video store was this?" Mister Sardo demanded. "What kind of video store would be run by an aging goth?"
"I dunno, it was just some little mom and pop magic video store."
Danny put the tape into the mouth of his VCR, which brought a terrified scream from Doctor Vink. Mister Sardo slapped him upside the back of the helmet and said, "It hasn't even started yet!" The video tape disappeared into the VCR with a series of clicks and whirrs. The screen of Danny's boxy little television lit and suddenly they were all looking at a garbage can. The scene was utterly silent. There was no color. The image flickered and jumped sideways before returning to the center. Nothing happened. Doctor Vink was quivering in terror and Mister Sardo's nipples had become very hard. Suddenly the lid of the can began to move.
"Is this the right movie?" Mister Sardo asked.
Danny shrugged irritably. "Just watch!" he commanded, and Mister Sardo turned back to the TV.
The grainy image of the garbage can went on flickering and jumping slightly as the lid popped up, slid sideways, and eventually tumbled to the ground. Two gnarled hands crept over the edge of the can and squeezed tight on the rim. A figure began to haul itself up.
"You said it would be Fern Gully," Doctor Vink cried helplessly. He and Danny and Mister Sardo were staring unblinkingly at the screen, unable to tear their attention away from the thing climbing from the garbage can. Its arms writhed out and were then joined by a pair of pointed shoulders and a hung head wreathed in a flat-crown gunslinger's hat. The thing's eyes were glowing pits, seeming holes in reality, that jerked from Danny's face to those of his two friends. It grinned. Its teeth had been filed to points.
"Goth-ic!" Danny cheered.
The skeletal gunslinger continued climbing out of the garbage gan, now strained its arms until they shook. The can rocked and fell over. The gunslinger flopped out like a wounded and angry fish but was soon on its feet. It resembled a scarecrow recently paroled from the pits of hell, and as the three boys watched, it drew twin pistols from the holsters on its hips.
And it began to walk forward, toward the camera.
"I want to go home!" Mister Sardo screamed.
"You dorks think this is scary?" Danny said. "I've seen some shit on the internet that would give you nightmares for the rest of your life compared to this. Have you guys ever heard of goatse—"
The Regulator (for it could be no one else) was right up to the television's screen now, darkening the frame and crouching to peer into the room with its missing eyes. It reached to tap on the glass with the barrel of one of the revolvers. Tink! Tink tink!
Danny laughed. "What do you guys think? Pretty good?"
"NOOOOOooooooooooOOOO!" Doctor Vink squealed.
Danny couldn't have been happier with this result. A hokey old black and white cowboy movie had melted Doctor Vink's brain! It might have even—
Then Danny realized that he couldn't move. His eyes could still flick about, but he had otherwise turned into a frozen slab. He looked at Vink and Sardo and then at the screen, where the Regulator was still tapping. Tapping and widening a small crack it had created.
This is too gothic to be happening, his brain insisted cheerfully. Right? Then he looked up at his radio alarm clock and saw that it was 11:58.
Somehow they had been watching the movie for almost two hours.
Panic began to settle into his bones and burn in his sinuses. Breath ran quick and hot through Danny's frozen windpipe. He couldn't have said how long they had been sitting there—his sense of time had been whisked cleanly away, as if by a hit of LSD—but he knew the alarm clock wasn't lying. They'd been sitting so long just staring at the strange images on the screen that his muscles and bones ached furiously. Confusion and horror ricocheted in his head. His eyes whipped to his bedroom door, which he saw was now the ancient, rickety type from a 19th century saloon. His desk had magically transformed into an old poker table. The walls were melting, changing. All his posters had turned from portraits of goth bands into portraits of old cowboys with grim, hateful eyes. Danny looked at Mister Sardo and saw that the man's flabby body had shriveled into something that looked embalmed. A hole yawned in his side, exposing several blackened ribs, and his face had sunken in and dried up, leaving no expression other than a skeletal scream. Mister Sardo's head creaked slowly around on its neck to look at Danny.
"Great movie, Pest-catori," came Mister Sardo's voice conversationally from out of the shriveled husk's mouth. "Too bad it's getting so… late."
Danny cranked his eyes back to the clock and saw that it was 12:00. As he watched in terror, the clock flashed to 12:01.
The screen of the television shattered and went dark, and Danny saw one of the Regulator's arms, still clutching the pistol, flop out from inside to paw the floor like a probing antenna.
Danny was still trying to scream when he passed out.