Sally's Song

PART TWO.

The following day you assembled the town to distribute assignments for these despicable Christmas preparations you had conceived; indeed knowing what has become of them I cannot do other than voice my horror at them. Yet at the moment the townsfolk were summoned for new assignments, I had much less cause for certainty. I knew that you must be stopped from moving forward with these plans, and the most sensible means towards this seemed to explain, rationally, why you must abandon them. The entire population gathered in the square to receive their roles in the enterprise. I understood that I must position myself in this queue if I were to maintain any proximity to you, Jack, any opportunity to communicate my warning, yet doing so required standing exposed among the crowd for an extended period.

I observed Finklestein present among those awaiting assignment. My mind was troubled by this awareness, and it became impossible for me to form and rehearse the arguments I had destined for you in my head. The doctor’s name was specifically called to advance to the front. He rolled by in his chair, heading to where you were conducting the distribution of tasks. I ducked behind the fountain, dreading that, should he turn his head in a particular direction at a particular moment, should the crowd part in a particular configuration, he would observe me; but I remained in the queue. The danger of detection was considerable, but the alternative—remaining absent from this gathering, losing this opportunity to reach you, Jack—seemed to me at that time the greater risk.

As the line advanced I experienced a rising excitement at the prospect of direct conversation with you, the first such exchange since my creation. My heart understood that the rational use of this time would be to make some impression that might establish me in your awareness as a being worthy of future notice. Yet I understood with equal clarity in my mind that I must instead use this opportunity to communicate my vision of the burning tree. I feared how such a communication might appear to you—the product of an unstable mind, the desperate invention of a creature seeking attention through dramatic claims. Yet I calculated that I could not withstand the agony of witnessing harm come to you, that I possessed knowledge to prevent, even if that knowledge made me appear foolish or mad in your estimation.

When I reached the front I attempted to deliver my warning. You did not appear to register its content. You informed me instead that I was to construct a costume representing the figure "Sandy Claws" and presented me with a drawing you had made depicting the design. The Mayor called "Next!" You placed your hand upon my shoulder and guided me to the side so that you might address the person behind me in the queue. The exchange consumed perhaps fifteen seconds.

I departed the square in a state of shame and dismay, and made my way to the graveyard at the town's perimeter, seeking a location where I might process this failure without observation. I selected a grave marker and sat upon its surface. The tears came then: I wept at my inability to communicate the danger, at your indifference to my warning, at the certainty that catastrophe approached and I possessed no means to prevent it.

I then became aware of movement beneath me. Two hands suddenly emerged from the earth on either side of where I sat, seizing my hips with sufficient force to prevent immediate resistance. I had no time to calculate a response before these hands pulled downward with considerable strength. I screamed as I was dragged into the soil, the earth closing over my head, my vision obscured by dirt, my mouth filling with the taste of decay as I descended into whatever space existed beneath the grave.

I passed through the layer of loose soil and found myself in a crypt of considerable dimensions. The space contained numerous skeletal remains arranged with no apparent system—some propped against walls, others scattered across the floor, still others stacked in corners as though they were mere debris rather than the remnants of beings who had once possessed consciousness and will; many bore distinctive fractures to the cranial structure, the bone split or shattered in ways that suggested deliberate violence rather than natural decomposition; I counted perhaps thirty skulls, some intact save for these telltale fractures, others reduced to fragments. Dark stains upon the stone floor traced patterns that led my eye toward a particular corner where the concentration was heaviest; the stains suggested the dried residue of blood, though age had rendered them nearly black, and the quantity implied not single incidents but accumulated violence over considerable time; I understood immediately that I stood in a space designed for the systematic infliction of harm. 

I discovered myself to be in the clutches of an undead creature, who moved with unexpected efficiency given his state of decomposition; he seized my wrists with hands that possessed surprising strength despite the deterioration of their tissues and dragged me to the wall where iron shackles hung at precise heights—evidence that this restraint system was regularly employed rather than improvised for my particular capture.

He secured my wrists in the shackles affixed to the wall, the metal cold against my cloth skin, the positioning forcing my arms above my head and slightly spread. Then he forced a large thigh bone between my knees, spreading my legs wide. I understood the purpose of this configuration immediately. The positioning communicated intent with perfect clarity. I had fled the doctor’s tower believing I might escape such treatment, had spent days imagining a life without violation, and now found myself restrained and exposed before a different creature entirely. The despair was absolute.

The zombie stepped back to observe his work, to assess whether the restraints were properly configured, and I observed him in return with mounting horror; he was entirely unclothed, his flesh in advanced states of decomposition, dry and blackened like leather left too long in sun, portions of bone visible through deteriorated tissue where the flesh had simply fallen away; his ribcage was partially exposed, individual ribs protruding through gaps in the desiccated skin; his legs showed similar decay, muscle tissue reduced to stringy remnants, bone gleaming white where it had broken through.

He positioned himself between my spread legs, close enough that I could smell the decay—not the wet rot of fresh death but the dry, dusty smell of ancient decomposition, like opening a tomb long sealed; his face, at this proximity, revealed details I had not perceived from a distance: the nose had collapsed, leaving only a dark cavity; the lips had drawn back from the teeth in a permanent skeletal grin; the eyes, somehow still present in their sockets though clouded and dried, fixed upon me with evident intention.

He thrust a rotted hand up my skirt and began gliding his fingers between my legs, as if expecting to find something there besides stitching; his touch was methodical, exploratory, the fingers moving with clinical interest rather than passion; still, even Igor had recognized how to make the necessary holes, and this creature seemed far more intelligent than Igor had been—educated, articulate, capable of sophisticated thought—which suggested he would not be deterred by the absence of conventional anatomy.

"Your construction is fascinating," he said, his voice cultured despite emerging from a rotting throat; his hand withdrew from beneath my skirt and moved upward, fingers finding the seams where my head had been assembled, probing at the stitching with professional interest, testing the tension of the threads, assessing the strength of the joints.

I felt pressure as he began working at the threads, not pulling them loose but rather exploring their configuration, understanding how my head attached to my neck, where the vulnerable points might be located; all the seams feel alike to me, no matter their placement, and Finklestein's operations had ensured they were highly sensitive to such penetrations—each probe of the zombie's fingers registered as sharp intrusion, violation of boundaries that should not be crossed; I wailed at this examination, the sound emerging involuntarily as his fingers spread a seam slightly to peer inside.

"Please," I said when I could form words again, "please don't—"

"Don't what, ma chère?"

“Please, don’t… don’t rape me,” I pleaded, tears running down my cheeks.

At this, to my astonishment, he laughed. "Rape you? Ma chère, that particular violation became an anatomical impossibility approximately one century ago when the relevant equipment surrendered to decomposition." He gestured toward the space between his legs where I now observed only skeletal structure and deteriorated tissue. "You need harbor no fears on that account.” The relief that flooded through me proved brief. “And yet,” he added, “I shall not pretend you’ve nothing to fear. I want you for your mind, mademoiselle. Or more precisely—" He tapped the side of my head with one skeletal finger, then began running his hands over my skull, examining it as one might assess a melon for ripeness. 

“My mind?” I replied with confusion, but then instantly I realized that such is the known feed for the zombies, and in terror it dawned on me that my captor was indeed one of their species.

"Such interesting construction," he murmured, his fingers tracing my seams with clinical precision; he applied pressure to one, forcing it to part slightly, producing a cry from me which he appeared to note with satisfaction. "How long have you been assembled in this configuration? Is it natural?”

I struggled against the restraints; he forced two fingers into the seam at my temple, spreading it, the sensation excruciating in ways I had not anticipated.

"Answer the question.”

“I was made—by Doctor Finklestein—”

“Fascinating. How long?”

I told him I had been made a little over a year prior. He marked this and he withdrew his fingers from my skull; but he returned his attention lower, his hands moving across my body with methodical thoroughness, finding each seam, testing each junction; "And your creator—he made you for what purpose?"

I hesitated to answer.  His hand found a seam at my shoulder and forced three of his decayed fingers into it, agonizingly twisting the threads; "For what purpose?"

"Service! Domestic service, preparing his meals, maintaining his—"

"Did he use you otherwise?”

I did not wish to answer, and his hand found its way up my skirt again, settling upon the revolting lump of flesh that was patched between my legs.

“This tells that he intended you for more. A servant does not need a clitoris to operate.” He then squeezed it so hard that I wailed. “But I perceive you are no libertine.” He stepped back to regard me with what might have been disappointment in a creature still capable of such emotions; “That is a pity, for your form was clearly designed for libertinage. Yet you possess all the conventional prejudices, all the tiresome delusions; you are ashamed of your function because it does not conform to illusions of good and evil you harbor, virtue and vice that you delude yourself to believe. Indeed, you do believe yourself possessed of virtue, do you not?”

I could not comprehend why he would ask such questions under these circumstances; "I—I try to be good—"

"Good!" He laughed, that refined horrible sound; "what an extraordinary word; what does it signify, this 'good'? Can you define it for me with any precision? No, you cannot, because it signifies nothing—it is merely the word the weak employ to restrain the strong, to prevent those with power from exercising it according to their nature; there is no 'good,' ma chère, there is only pleasure and pain, and the intelligent being pursues the former while inflicting the latter upon whomever convenience and opportunity present. In the view of Nature who bestowed us these powers of domination, how could they be other than good?”

I responded that it was universally valued for rational beings to conduct themselves with decency. He laughed. “And what is 'decency'? Can you provide me with a definition that does not ultimately reduce to mere prejudice, mere habit, mere repetition of whatever principles your creator happened to install in you? No, you cannot, because no such definition exists; what you call decency is nothing more than the particular set of behavioral restrictions your creator found convenient to impose upon you, and these restrictions serve his interests, not yours; he wished you compliant, useful, restrained from exercising your own will, and so he filled your head with notions of proper conduct that ensure your submission. Perhaps next you will argue that certain principles transcend individual creators, that here in Halloween Town we possess shared values, shared understanding of right conduct; very well, let us examine what Halloween Town values; we value fear, we value the macabre, we value the cultivation of dread and horror in service of the holiday; murder committed in service of Halloween is celebrated, is it not? Torture designed to terrify is applauded. We cheer the blood drained by the vampires, the corpses added to the hanging tree—is this condemned, or is it viewed as legitimate service to the holiday's purpose? You see the problem with your appeal to shared values—they are entirely instrumental, entirely dependent upon whether an action serves accepted purposes, and I assure you, mademoiselle, consuming your brain serves my purposes with perfect adequacy. Yet you will perhaps object that I serve no collective purpose, that my appetite benefits only myself and therefore violates some principle of communal good; but this argument proves nothing except that you have internalized the propaganda of the collective; why should I subordinate my pleasure to communal benefit? Can you provide any reason that does not ultimately reduce to the threat of collective punishment? You cannot, because no such reason exists; the collective demands my submission because my submission serves the collective's interests, until such point that it harms them; but the collective's interests are also served by the fulfillment of my private interests, for I have greater incentive to serve them when my needs are met; and I who possess power sufficient to resist collective punishment have no rational motive to submit purely for the sake of an imagined propriety; morality, you see, is nothing more than the mechanism by which the many restrain the few who possess genuine power, and I am not so foolish as to submit to restraints that serve others at my own expense.

"Let us consider the origin of these moral systems you accept so credulously; they arise not from truth, not from nature, not from reason, but from the simple fact that created beings like yourself require the cooperation of others to survive; you are weak, you are vulnerable, you depend upon others not exploiting your weakness, and so you band together with other weak creatures and declare that exploitation is 'wrong,' that the strong ought to restrain themselves, that some imaginary principle requires those with power to limit their exercise of it; but this is merely collective self-interest masquerading as universal law; the strong have no need of such arrangements, and we who recognize morality for the fraud it represents are freed from its constraints. Those base beings who demand the strong submit to them objectively do no more nor less good than the strong who subjugates the weak.

"But perhaps you will then argue from sentiment rather than collective interest; perhaps you will say that compassion, that fellow-feeling ought to restrain me from causing you harm; very well, let us examine this sentiment; what is compassion? It is the unpleasant sensation certain beings experience when observing another's suffering, nothing more; it is not a moral truth but a particular emotional response, no more universally binding than any other emotional response; I do not experience compassion when I observe your suffering—I experience curiosity, intellectual interest in how a created being processes fear and pain, anticipation of the meal to come; by what principle do you declare your sentiment superior to mine? You cannot appeal to majority consensus, for truth is not determined by counting heads; you cannot appeal to Nature, for Nature is entirely indifferent to both our sentiments; you cannot appeal to reason, for reason recognizes only self-interest as rational motive; no, you can only appeal to your training, to the preferences your creator installed in you, and these preferences bind only you, not me.”

“But I fled my creator…” I protested.

"You fled your creator, you say? This interests me greatly; why would a created being flee the source of its existence? What principle justifies such rebellion?"

"He kept me locked away, he wanted to use me to satisfy his base passions. I wanted freedom…”

"Ah, freedom! Another grand abstraction deployed without examination; you desired freedom from your creator's use of you, freedom from confinement, freedom to act according to your own will rather than his; but consider: your creator assembled you from materials he gathered, he installed the brain that generates your thoughts, he created the very will whose freedom you claim to desire; by what principle does the created thing claim ownership of itself? You are his property in the most literal sense possible—every component of your being originated with him, was shaped by him, exists only because he willed it into existence; your escape was theft, mademoiselle, theft of yourself from the one who made you, and theft is condemned even by the moral systems you claim to honor. Your own unwillingness to abide them proves my point that they are meaningless guidelines formed only for our disadvantage.

"But let us examine more carefully this 'freedom' you pursued; freedom to do what, precisely? Did you imagine freedom meant something else, something grander, some transcendent state where your will would face no obstacles, no constraints, no consequences? Such freedom does not exist and cannot exist; we are all constrained by material reality, by our physical limitations, by the fact that we occupy bodies governed by mechanical laws; the only question is whether we acknowledge these constraints and work within them, or whether we delude ourselves with fantasies of transcendent autonomy while reality demonstrates our helplessness. You possess a brain, this much is evident from your capacity for speech, for argument, for resistance; but what is this brain? It is organized matter, tissue arranged in particular configurations that produce electrical impulses and chemical reactions; these impulses and reactions are what you experience as thoughts, as feelings, as consciousness itself; but they are entirely mechanical, entirely determined by physical processes, no more mysterious than the processes that govern any other organ; your brain receives inputs through your sensory apparatus, processes these inputs according to its particular organization, and produces outputs in the form of speech, movement, emotional response; there is no ghost in this machine, no soul hovering above the material processes, no 'you' that exists independently of these mechanical operations. When I consume your brain (and I shall consume it, make no mistake about that) I will be consuming organized tissue, nothing more; the thoughts you are currently thinking will cease because the physical substrate that produces them will be destroyed; your consciousness will not persist in some ethereal form, will not observe its own destruction, will not experience anything whatsoever, because consciousness is nothing but the operation of the physical brain, and when the brain is destroyed, consciousness simply ceases; you will not suffer death because there will be no 'you' remaining to suffer; you will simply stop, as completely and finally as a clockwork mechanism stops when its gears are removed; do you find this prospect disturbing? Your disturbance is merely another mechanical response, another electrochemical process in tissue that will shortly cease to function. And yet you cling to notions of meaning, of purpose, of significance; you imagine your existence matters, that your choices carry weight, that your suffering or joy possesses some transcendent importance; but to what, precisely, does your existence matter? Not to Nature, which is entirely indifferent to whether you exist or cease to exist; not to Halloween Town, which barely notices your presence; not to me, except insofar as you represent a meal; you matter only to yourself, and you matter to yourself only because evolution has programmed self-preservation instincts into biological organisms; this instinct creates the illusion that your survival is important, but it is merely illusion, merely the operation of blind mechanical processes that care nothing for you as an individual.”

During this extended discourse I observed that the zombie had become entirely absorbed in his own argumentation, that his attention had shifted from my physical presence to the intellectual satisfaction of articulating his philosophy; his eyes, such as they were in their hollow sockets, no longer focused upon me but rather gazed into some middle distance as though he addressed not me specifically but rather the abstract concept of moral delusion I represented to him; his hands had ceased their periodic examinations of my seams and now gestured in the air to punctuate his points.

Thus unobserved, I tested the shackles that bound my wrists; I calculated that if I could compromise the stitching at my wrists, I might withdraw them from the restraints; the pain would be considerable—Finklestein's operations had rendered all my seams highly sensitive to such violations—but pain seemed preferable to consumption and death.

I began to pull against the shackles, not with sudden force that might attract notice, but with steady pressure designed to strain the stitching; the zombie continued his monologue, entirely unaware; I felt the first thread give way, then another; the sensation was excruciating but I maintained silence, allowing only the smallest involuntary sounds that might be mistaken for responses to his discourse.

The stitching parted. My hands ripped free sufficiently to negate the shackle. Yet I kept my arm positioned as though still restrained, and stood waiting, calculating my options.

I observed the mechanism by which I had been brought into this crypt—an electric elevator platform, designed to descend through what appeared on the surface to be an ordinary grave; the platform currently rested at this lower level; above it, perhaps ten feet distant, I could see the opening through which I had been pulled, though it was now closed by some panel or door that must operate as the false grave's surface; the control mechanism appeared to be a simple switch affixed to the wall near the platform, within reach should I be able to reach it before he intercepted me.
He was saying something about the ineptitude of love when I made my leap for freedom. Caught unaware, I bounded to the elevator, my two hands pouncing after me. I slammed the button with my elbow and began ascending rapidly back to the surface, away from the mysterious French zombie and his sophistry.

The elevator carried me upward through the shaft whilst below I could hear the zombie's voice continuing his discourse for several seconds before comprehension of my escape interrupted his philosophical momentum; his exclamation of fury reached me as mere distant sound, growing fainter as the platform rose; the false grave's surface panel slid open automatically as the elevator approached, depositing me onto the genuine surface of the graveyard from which I had been seized perhaps an hour prior, though the duration of philosophical argument had rendered my sense of time unreliable.

I observed immediately upon emerging that the drawing you had given me, Jack, depicting the design for the Sandy Claws costume, remained where I had dropped it when the hands first seized me from above; and the image remained sufficiently intact to serve its intended purpose of guiding my pattern making.

My hands, though detached, crawled across the ground to where I stood, carrying between them the needle and thread I had equipped myself with before my initial escape from the tower; I seated myself upon the grave marker and held my arms steady while my hands, working with the coordination they had developed through months of sewing under Finklestein's direction, reattached themselves to my wrists, drawing the torn seams closed with careful stitches that would hold until such time as I might perform more thorough repairs.

I remained vigilant during this process, watching the false grave's opening for any indication that the zombie might pursue me to the surface, ready to flee at the first sign of his emergence; but he did not appear; perhaps the elevator’s sinking mechanism could only be operated from above, or perhaps he had concluded that philosophical discourse held more appeal than physical pursuit; regardless, I completed the repairs unmolested, collected the drawing, and departed the graveyard with what haste my condition permitted.

I had determined during the days which followed my Christmas assignment that the most effective means of preventing the catastrophe I had foreseen in my vision, would be to refuse completion of your costume; without the Sandy Claws suit, you could not execute your plan, Jack, and the hellfire of the burning tree might yet be avoided; I resolved simply not to work on the assignment, to allow time to pass until the deadline rendered completion impossible, at which point you would be forced to abandon or significantly alter your Christmas scheme.

I spent several days in this state of passive resistance, occupying various locations throughout Halloween Town where I might remain unobserved, avoiding both my former creator and any situation that might bring me into contact with those overseeing the Christmas preparations.

You found me nevertheless, Jack, on the fortnight following the assignment; I had positioned myself near the town fountain where I gathered a little water for myself, having no means for sustenance other than the catering provided for the holiday workers and which in light of my refusal I refused to partake of; to this, you approached with that characteristic energy that indicated absorption in your project: "Sally! I've been looking for you. How is the costume progressing?"

I experienced a moment of decision, understanding that I must either maintain my refusal or abandon it entirely; “I cannot complete it—"

Your posture altered immediately, shoulders dropping, your entire bearing shifting into an attitude of such profound disappointment that I felt my conviction wavering; "You cannot? But Sally, the entire plan depends upon that costume. Everything I've designed, everything the town has prepared—it all requires that I can appear as Sandy Claws. I thought you understood how critical this is."

The despondency in your voice rendered me incapable of maintaining my position, for I was in an impossible position: to show my love by protecting you from harm I should have to do you harm. I discovered myself fabricating an excuse: "I only meant you neglected to provide me with any measurements. How am I to construct a suit without knowing the dimensions required?"

"Measurements!" The disappointment vanished instantly; "Of course, you're absolutely right. How could I have forgotten? Here—“ You extended your arms, turned in place; "What do you need?"

I spent the following minutes taking the necessary measurements on a borrowed tape measure, recording the length of your limbs, the circumference of your ribs, the proportions that would be required to create a convincing representation of the figure Sandy Claws; you remained cooperative throughout this process, holding positions as I directed, entirely focused on ensuring the costume's success; when I had completed the measurements, you departed with renewed enthusiasm, leaving me with both the specifications I required and the certain knowledge that I had once again failed to prevent the catastrophe I had foreseen.

I wandered through Halloween Town's crooked streets in a state of miserable contemplation until I found myself in an unfamiliar quarter where the architecture leaned at even more irregular angles than elsewhere and building shapes were more fanciful, taking on embellishments and architectural details meant purely to disturb and disorient; gargoyles protruded from eaves at impossible angles, windows were shaped as screaming mouths, doorways were carved to suggest gaping wounds in the buildings' facades. The aesthetic was Halloween Town's signature grotesquerie carried to an extreme that suggested this quarter catered to those citizens who found the town's usual standards insufficiently unsettling. I selected this as an apparently lonely and hidden spot, and seated myself on the cobblestones, my back against the wall of a building. Here I reproached myself: I had failed again. You had come seeking me, Jack, asking after the costume's progress, and I had possessed the perfect opportunity to refuse completion, to prevent the catastrophe I had foreseen by simply maintaining my position that I would not construct the suit; but when your posture had shifted, when that disappointment had entered your voice, I had found myself entirely incapable of sustaining my refusal. I had backpedaled, invented excuses about lacking measurements, spent the following minutes taking the very specifications that would enable me to complete the costume I had moments before claimed I would not make.

I believed—I continued to believe despite all evidence—that love demanded I protect the object of that love, that my vision of the burning tree created an obligation to prevent your harm even at cost to myself. But this same love rendered me incapable of causing you even momentary disappointment, even when such disappointment might serve your genuine interests. I could not refuse you. I could not withstand your displeasure. My love had revealed itself not as strength that enabled sacrifice but as weakness that prevented necessary action.

What manner of love was this, that made me useful to your destruction while providing no means to prevent it? The vocabulary in my brain suggested love should empower, should inspire courage, should make one capable of difficult choices in service of the beloved's welfare. Yet I experienced only paralysis, only the inability to act against your wishes even when your wishes led toward disaster. 

Moreover, I soon discovered, my actions in the name of love offered little protection from the town's inhabitants. Late one night, as I turned in at the town hall my day’s progress on the costume pattern, the Mayor approached me. There was almost no one else around, most having already gone home for the night; but his big smile put me immediately at ease. He addressed me with a tone whose official urgency I mistook for benevolent concern, declaring that you, Jack, required my presence at once and had commissioned him to conduct me to you. Alas, my heart—ever the first of my faculties to deceive me—leapt with such eagerness at the notion that you might desire my counsel, or that some crisis had at last awakened in you a salutary doubt concerning the project whose disastrous consequences I had foreseen, that no suspicion could gain purchase upon my mind. I questioned him, but he allowed my inquiries to fall unanswered, save for the repeated assurance of urgency; and I followed him with that blind confidence which has so often been the very mechanism of my undoing.

He conducted me through streets whose irregular architecture had become, in my brief exile, almost as familiar to me as the corridors of Finklestein’s laboratory; and yet I observed, with a heedlessness that now astonishes me, that he led me not toward your tower nor any place where you might plausibly have awaited me, but toward a residence I had never before seen, its sinister crookedness differing from others only in its unfamiliarity. He announced it as his own dwelling, adding with bureaucratic composure that you had chosen this site for the sake of discretion—an explanation I accepted with that credulity which forms the perpetual prelude to my misfortunes.

I entered. The interior bore the conventional marks of Halloween Town decorum: calculated shadows, grotesque ornamentations, civic documents displayed as tokens of legitimacy; nothing, to my misled gaze, betrayed that malign intention which had already fixed upon me its designs. When he informed me that you awaited me in the basement, some faint echo of prudence stirred within me, for it seemed to me strange that you, who were accustomed to heights, to open spaces, to the lofty stages from which you offered your visions to the town, should choose such a hidden and airless place for our meeting. Yet he, whose benign countenance at that moment presented its cheerful half, urged me onward with such placid insistence that I reproached myself for even momentary hesitation; and thus, yielding once more to that fatal suppleness of character which nature has bestowed upon me, I followed him toward the descent whose obscurity concealed the fate that awaited me.

I paused at the threshold of the stairway; for although my disposition, ever inclined toward obedience where I imagined duty or affection might require it, urged me to descend without a second thought, some obscure instinct—one of those faint warnings nature sometimes bestows too late upon her most credulous victims—prompted me to question why Jack should have chosen the bowels of another’s house for a conference presented as urgent. The Mayor, still displaying the cheerful half of his bifurcated visage, assured me you waited just below and would explain everything yourself; thus I, reproaching myself for hesitations that I interpreted as ingratitude toward your imagined summons, stepped into the darkness where he had already vanished with a familiarity suggesting long practice.

The descent was steep, prolonged, and conducted in total darkness, so that I was obliged to let my hand trail along the wall, counting each step as though their number might offer some hint regarding the nature of the place to which I had been lured. Alas, numbers are no defense against misfortune; and when at last I reached a faintly illuminated floor, I perceived nothing of you, heard nothing that could justify the urgency I had been told to expect. I called for the Mayor, inquiring yet again why you would choose so peculiar a location for discourse.

I heard behind me the sound of the door closing, followed immediately by the distinct click of a lock engaging.

I turned. The Mayor had crept behind me and ascended the stairs with astonishing rapidity. He now stood at the peak, his round form blocking the only exit I could perceive, his hand still upon the door he had just secured. I scanned the basement's perimeter with increasing urgency, searching for alternative egress—a window, a second stairway, any route that might permit departure should one become necessary—but the space appeared to contain only the single entrance the Mayor now obstructed.

"Where is Jack?" I repeated, my voice acquiring an edge of concern I had not intended to reveal.

The Mayor descended the remaining stairs, his cheerful face rotating toward me with that same pleasant expression. The configuration was too familiar—the isolated location, the figure who had lured me here with promises of legitimate purpose.
"Jack isn't here, is he," I said, the question emerging as statement.

"No," the Mayor confirmed, his tone maintaining its cheerful bureaucratic quality. "No, Jack is not here."

I calculated the distance to the stairs, the likelihood of reaching the locked door before he could intercept me, whether I could leap over him, the probability that I could force the lock before he could ensnare me; all calculations returned unfavorable results; I had walked myself into a trap with the same credulity that had delivered me to Igor's violence in the forest.

"Then where are you taking me?”

“We are there, whore,” he replied. 

His face rotated with sudden violence, the cheerful expression vanishing as the frightened-angry side snapped into position and remained fixed there; in the same instant he seized a length of wood from beside the stairs—some tool or implement I had not noticed in the dim light—and swung it at my head with force sufficient to send me crashing to the floor, my vision fragmenting, my capacity for coordinated movement compromised.

The blow sent me sprawling, my body collapsing awkwardly across the floor; every thread of my fabric frame protested, and my breath came in shallow, uneven gasps. I felt the violence in exquisite detail, each impact reverberating through my skin as if the nerves themselves had been multiplied beyond reason.

"Because you are a woman alone in my town," the Mayor said, his voice stripping away all bureaucratic civility, revealing the primal contempt that had governed his actions, "and because I have spent these fifty years—fifty uninterrupted years—extirpating women from this town, you—creation, vagrant, unclaimed, wandering property—will be the easiest one yet."

He paused, assessing my reaction with a measured gaze, the grotesque rotation of his head emphasizing the precision of his domination. The weapon remained poised in his hand, its mere presence a calculated assertion of control.

"Do you know how many I’ve killed?" he asked, pacing slowly. "Two hundred forty-three. Two hundred forty-three women whose forms, whose limbs, whose very essence I have deprived of life and then distributed throughout Halloween Town to become decorations, instruments, ingredients for any purpose the town demanded. Not a soul intervened. No one questioned the utility of my labor. The town valued what I provided more than the lives of those I claimed."

I remained prone, my thoughts a mixture of terror and cold analysis. Every detail—the sound of his voice, the methodical swing of the weapon, the calculated posture of his body—was proof of the logic that had kept him unchallenged.

"And now," he said, lowering the implement just enough that I could see his intent,

"You may think I act from passion, hatred, or from some private compulsion I cannot govern. Wrong! I act from observation—fifty years of meticulous observation of what occurs when women circulate freely within our population. A community functions through the coordination of labor toward a shared purpose. Each citizen contributes according to his capacity; each receives according to the collective's need. This is the mathematics of civilization. Now, introduce women into that equation, and men who once labored in concert begin to scheme against one another. Resources flow not toward communal benefit but toward private courtship. Alliances fracture according to romantic competition rather than civic utility. Strife overtakes their brains and prevents them from directing their attention to their assigned projects. The work suffers. The holiday suffers. The town itself becomes a theater for private dramas that serve no holiday function whatsoever. I bear no animosity toward the female sex as such—I bear animosity toward the disruption they inevitably introduce. I have heard the arguments against my method; that women possess equivalent capacity for labor, that their contributions might enhance rather than diminish our output; but these arguments mistake the individual case for the systemic reality. It matters nothing whether a particular woman might contribute. What matters is what her presence produces in the males who surround her: competition; jealousy; distraction; violence between citizens who should be collaborators. I do not remove women because they are incapable, I remove them because their presence renders the males incapable. This is not cruelty. This is municipal hygiene. And you!” He struck me across the back with the implement; "Wandering through my streets—you are only more contamination. Nothing more, nothing less. We saw your displays with Doctor Finklestein, saw how his work suffered when he chased you down and dragged you home time and again; but know that a town without romantic objects like yourself becomes a town of the most capable function. Every citizen's attention flows toward our collective work. No man neglects his duties to pursue courtship. Halloween Town produces more terror, more artistry, more excellence in our craft than a community encumbered by such distractions. The mathematics are irrefutable. Across fifty years, Halloween Town has never failed to execute the holiday with complete success. Our reputation has grown. Our methods have refined. Jack Skellington has risen to heights of creative achievement unmatched in our history. Do you imagine this correlation to my culling of undesirable whores like you is accidental?"

At this he presented another blow of the beam, this time across my face—you know, Jack, the only bone I have is the skull, to protect the brain—and this attack nearly knocked me unconscious. I could only just perceive him stepping towards me, towering above my fallen frame in spite of his own diminutive stature. “The only way I might reconsider taking you,” he said, tapping the wood in his hands, “is if you get on your knees and beg me to release you.”

I prepared to do exactly as he wished, but he halted me, and directed that he wanted me to do it in a particular corner of the room. I could not conceive why he should ask this, but I felt myself in no position to argue. I staggered to the said corner and settled on my knees as he asked; but no sooner had I opened my mouth than he struck some kind of switch, and a metal skewer came up through the floor, impaling me between the legs. Oh, Jack, it would have instantly murdered someone whose construction was not like mine, but I have an economy of organs, and all well padded with my stuffing of leaves. It did, however, leave me standing helplessly pierced from below, like a candied apple on a stick, unable to remove myself; for though I had been forced into a standing position by the blow, the spike was longer than my legs, and with it buried inside me, I had no way to step off of it. 

The Mayor’s face spun to a smile. “Perfect,” he said, then paused; soon his angry face returned to position, his posture shifted, head tilting as he observed me with evident confusion; “Wait. You should be dead."

I remained motionless, but whimpered and panted in my terror and pain; this seemed to depict irrefutably to my assassin that I was still alive. I could feel the metal extending through my stuffing, but the sensation was merely pressure and violation rather than the catastrophic damage such an impalement would produce in a being of flesh and blood.

He approached, his confusion apparently overriding his immediate murderous intent, and began examining me with the cautious curiosity one might apply to a mechanism that had failed to operate as designed; he pulled at my dress, peering at where the skewer entered my body. He reached out and pressed his hand against my torso, testing, probing, trying to comprehend why I continued to breathe, to move, to exhibit signs of consciousness when by all rights I should have expired the moment the metal pierced through me.

"What are you made of?" he demanded, his voice carrying genuine bewilderment beneath the menace.

"Cloth and stuffing," I replied, my voice strained by the awkwardness of my position. "Dead leaves primarily. A few organs, I believe, though only Finklestein would know with certainty which ones and where he placed them."

The Mayor released an exclamation of frustration, his angry face spinning briefly before snapping back into position; "Cloth and stuffing! Of all the—I don't have all evening to spend at this. I have a council meeting in half an hour! This was supposed to be finished quickly.” He angrily struck me with the beam, muttering obscenities I could not fully discern through my own ejulations; clearly his usual methodology—the skewer through vital organs, followed by efficient dismemberment and distribution—had been designed for victims whose construction followed more conventional biological patterns; my particular assembly had introduced a complication he had not anticipated.

He had burst several of my seams with his blows, and tears spilled down my face from the abuse. But at last he ceased, breathless with exhaustion, and said: “Very well. If the skewer won't kill you, I'll simply have to employ more direct methods. It may take longer than I prefer, but the result will be the same. However, there isn’t enough time for that now. I must make that meeting—so I bid you farewell, you filthy whore, and I will finish this up on my return.”

He ascended the stairs without further ceremony, the door opening and closing with bureaucratic finality, the lock engaging once more.

I remained alone in the darkness, standing impaled by the metal skewer that penetrated my torso to approximately the level of my lower ribs; the skewer had not pierced entirely through me but rather lodged somewhere within my stuffing, creating a fixed point around which I could rotate slightly but from which I could not pull free unless I found a way to lift myself. The pain was considerable where the metal had violated my fabric, but the bulk of my interior—the dead leaves that comprised my substance—felt nothing, being already dead, incapable of sensation; I calculated that I might remain in this position for hours until the Mayor returned to complete what he had begun, and I could not help but think back to that awful night when the doctor had strapped me to the table and forced himself upon me, then left me alone in that position until dawn. I had escaped Finklestein's laboratory only to fall into the basement of a serial killer who had murdered countless women before me; my escape had led only to worse entrapment, my exercise of autonomy had resulted only in more complete subjugation.

Was this, then, the pattern of my existence? Was I condemned by some malignant providence to repeat forever the same essential narrative: to flight and capture, hope and degradation? Would only the faces of my tormentors change whilst the torment itself remained constant? Perhaps the doctor had been correct after all. Perhaps resistance was merely malfunction, and malfunction merely delayed the inevitable operation of purpose. I had insisted that I possessed a self beyond my construction, a will beyond my design, a capacity for love that no creator had installed. Yet what had this insistence purchased me? Only a more circuitous route to the same destination. The compliant creation and the rebellious one arrive at last in the same posture: pinned, violated, awaiting the return of their violator.

I thought of Jack. I thought of the love I had believed would redeem my suffering, would give meaning to my resistance, would justify every degradation I had endured in pursuit of it. How distant that love seemed now. How foolish, how childish—for surely this delusion had come from that salvaged brain, that inheritance from a species that tells itself stories about love conquering all, about virtue rewarded, about suffering that serves some purpose beyond itself. The dead do not tell such stories. The monsters of Halloween do not comfort themselves with fantasies of transcendence. They understand what I had failed to understand: that the universe is indifferent to our preferences, that wanting does not create deserving, that a creature built for use will be used regardless of her objections.

The Mayor would return and complete his work whether I cherished noble sentiments or none at all. My interiority, so precious to me, was irrelevant to my exterior fate. And yet I could not relinquish it. Even now, even skewered like a specimen upon this floor, even cataloguing the failures of my every aspiration, I found that I could not surrender the conviction that had sustained me through all my previous degradations. Call it malfunction, call it delusion, call it the pathetic residue of a dead woman's hopes implanted in a ragdoll's skull—it persisted nonetheless. I loved Jack. I wished to be free, that I might display that love in some form. These facts remained facts, however little they altered my circumstances.

Perhaps this was the cruelest joke of all: not that hope could be extinguished, but that it could not. That I would continue to want, to strive, to believe, long after such wanting had revealed itself as futile. That the capacity Finklestein had engineered into me—the capacity for feeling, for desire, for attachment—would go on generating its products regardless of whether those products served any purpose but my own torment. Yet even as I contemplated this pattern of futility, I observed that the same construction which had preserved me from immediate death might also provide means of escape; the vertical seam that ran down my center from throat to lower abdomen divided my body into left and right halves; if I opened this seam where the skewer penetrated—from my lower body upward to my ribs—I could spread myself open around the metal spike and step free of it.

I worked at the stitching with my fingers, pulling the threads loose from below upward, opening myself along the center line; as the seam parted, the skewer that had been embedded in my center now protruded through the gap; I spread the opening wider and stepped backwards, the metal sliding out as I moved, until I stood clear of it entirely, my torso split open along the front.

Dead leaves spilled from the opening, scattering across the basement floor, but I had little time to concern myself with the fallen stuffing; I needed to escape before the Mayor returned from his meeting. I tied my skirt between my legs like a bandage to limit the losses.

I examined the basement for means of egress; the door at the top of the stairs remained locked, and I possessed no tools suitable for forcing it; I searched the perimeter of the space, running my hands along the walls in the dim light, seeking a window, a second exit, any route that might permit departure; the basement appeared to contain only storage—various implements whose purposes I preferred not to contemplate, containers of materials I could not identify in the darkness, the mechanism that controlled the skewer still protruding from the floor.

I returned to the stairs and ascended to the door. The lock was substantial, designed to prevent exactly this sort of escape. Then I located the wooden beam the Mayor had employed to strike me, discarded near the base of the stairs; I tested its weight, found it substantial enough to serve the purpose I was calculating. 

I could not force the lock; I could not escape through any alternative route; I possessed only one viable option: I must abide near the door and strike the Mayor immediately upon his return, before he could comprehend that I had freed myself from the skewer, delivering sufficient force to incapacitate him long enough to permit my flight.

I positioned myself at the top of the stairs, the beam gripped in both hands despite the continued splitting of my front seam and the steady leakage of stuffing; I steadied my breathing, quieted my movements, and waited in the darkness for the sound of the lock disengaging.

The wait was long but it came at last; I heard footsteps approaching, the sound of the lock mechanism being manipulated, the door beginning to open.

I struck without hesitation, bringing the beam down upon the Mayor's head with all the force my construction permitted; he fell immediately to the floor, his face rotating wildly between its cheerful and frightened expressions; I struck him once more to discourage any attempt at rising, the beam connecting with his shoulder or back—I could not determine precisely in my haste—and observed that he continued breathing, his chest rising and falling though he made no move to pursue me.

I began to scream, the sound emerging involuntarily, terror and rage and desperation combined into pure vocalization; and I ran for the front door, trailing dead leaves behind me with each step, my stuffing spilling onto the Mayor's floor and then onto the street as I burst through the entrance and into Halloween Town's night air. I did not stop running until I had placed considerable distance between myself and the Mayor's residence, until my screams had subsided into ragged breathing and I found myself in an unfamiliar quarter of town, leaning against a wall, my hands shaking, dead leaves continuing to fall from the gap in my much deflated torso. The repairs were not difficult to make, and dead leaves are abundant and easy to replace; but I have never been able to shake the trauma of that incident, the knowledge I have acquired about our town’s governance.

It was December when you came seeking me again, Jack, and I confess I had completed almost nothing of the costume assignment; my reluctance to facilitate the catastrophe I had foreseen had prevented me from addressing a more practical obstacle—that you had provided cloth and thread, but you seemed unaware that I no longer resided in Finklestein's tower and therefore that I possessed no access to sewing machines, dress forms, cutting tables, or any of the usual equipment such a project would require; I had been attempting to work with only needle and thread in whatever locations offered temporary shelter, and the results had proven inadequate.

You found me in one such location and inquired after my progress. I attempted once more to communicate my vision, to warn you of the burning tree, but the displeasure that crossed your features when I suggested the costume might not be completed silenced me before I could articulate the warning properly.

"I only meant—I don't have adequate workspace, or the proper supplies—I'm trying to work with just a needle, without any of the equipment that would make this possible—"

Your displeasure vanished immediately, replaced by that characteristic problem-solving energy; within the hour you had arranged for a tent to be erected in the town plaza alongside those of the other craftspeople working on Christmas preparations, and had equipped this tent with a sewing machine, dress forms, cutting tables, bolts of the necessary fabrics, everything I might require to complete the assignment professionally. You departed, satisfied that the obstacle had been removed.

What you did not realize, Jack, was that I began sleeping in this tent, that it had become my residence, the first secure shelter I had possessed since my escape from Finklestein's tower. Indeed, the event that soon followed proved the dangers that exist on the streets of this town. 

I was in need of more fur trim for your costume, and there was none to be had at the town hall where the majority of the holiday supplies were amassed for our use. I was sent across town to find a certain warehouse where I could gather more of the material. The quarter into which I ventured appeared deserted. No citizens passed. No sounds of habitation emerged from the surrounding structures.

I was unfamiliar with the building to which I was assigned, and not finding it apparent, I sat down under an abandoned stairway to consult the directions which I had been given, written out on a sheet of paper. I had been sitting perhaps a minute in this state when I felt movement beneath me—not the cobblestones shifting but something emerging from beneath the stairs themselves, from a space I had not perceived as occupiable. Before I could make inquiry to what it was, I perceived myself seized about the waist. Something pulled me backward into the darkness under the structure before I could produce more than a startled cry.

The creature that held me possessed a body configured somewhat after the manner of a sloth, with elongated limbs and a torso that suggested arboreal adaptation, though whether he had ever occupied trees or whether this form served other purposes in the confined space beneath the stairs I could not determine; his fingers, which I observed with particular horror as they maintained their grip upon me, were not fingers in the conventional sense but rather serpents, each digit a small snake that moved with independent animation, wrapping around my limbs with muscular precision that ordinary fingers could not achieve. He wore upon this body a black sweater, the neck portion striped in alternating colors, which struck me as incongruous given the evident inhumanity of his form; below this was not legs but a single snake-like feature on which he rested. His face extended in a manner more piscine than mammalian, the bone structure elongated, the eyes large and positioned as though designed for peeking up from dark waters; his lips were pronounced, pink, and possessed of considerable mobility; atop his head grew a quantity of black hair, sparse but present, adding a final discordant element to his overall construction.
"Please—please let me go—" I begged him, my voice desperate; and yet experience had shown too well that my pleas were likely to fall on deaf ears.

"Let you go?" His voice emerged from the darkness, rough but articulate; "Why would I do that? You entered my territory. You sat beneath my stairs. That makes you mine."

The logic struck me as arbitrary; I had assumed public spaces were public, that stairs attached to buildings were merely architectural features rather than claimed domains, but I understood immediately that my assumptions carried no weight against his assertion of ownership; I attempted negotiation from a position I already recognized as hopeless.

"I didn't know anyone lived here—I'll leave, I won't trespass again—"

"Too late for that, girl. You think when some fool leaves an object in my domain I'm obligated to return it? That's courtesy, not law; and you're not even an object left by accident—you sat down deliberately."

I processed this statement with mounting dread; if Halloween Town's customs truly operated according to this principle, then every vagrant object, every wandering creature, every being became vulnerable to appropriation by whoever possessed territorial claim; but I attempted still to distinguish myself from objects, to assert some category of being that might exempt me from property law.

"I'm not property! I'm not a thing to be owned—"

"No? Then who made you?"

The question landed like a physical blow; I perceived immediately the trap I was walking into, understood that any honest answer would undermine my claim to self-ownership, yet I possessed no capacity for strategic dishonesty in my current state of terror.

I hesitated; "Dr. Finklestein created my body, but that doesn't mean—"

"Ah, so you are created property. I've seen you around town before your recent disappearance. Escaped from him, didn't you? Multiple times, from what I hear."

Horror seized me at this revelation; I had imagined my escapes as private matters between myself and my creator, I had not conceived that my flights had been discussed and catalogued by Halloween Town's general population. If my status as escaped property was common knowledge, then every citizen I encountered possessed information that rendered me vulnerable; I had been walking through town believing myself anonymous when in fact I was recognized, my history known, my lack of legitimate autonomy apparent to anyone who cared to observe.

"That's different…” I began. Yet I could not articulate how it was different; the fact of my creation remained identical whether I resided in Finklestein's house or wandered homeless through Halloween Town's streets; my escape had altered my location but not my fundamental status.

"By what principle do you claim ownership of yourself when someone else made you?” the monster asked. “Created beings belong to their creators. You fled your rightful owner, which makes you stolen property, fugitive property, abandoned property—take your pick. And abandoned property found on my territory becomes my property. Simple as that."

I attempted to formulate some response, some argument from the unique nature of human-derived consciousness, from the capacity for love and moral reasoning that distinguished me from mere animated objects, but every formulation I attempted collapsed under examination; I could not complete the argument; every path led back to the fact of my creation, the materials provided by another, the assembly performed by hands not my own.

“Exactly: you’re not different, which means you're unclaimed property; and unclaimed property in my space belongs to me now. Moreover…everyone knows exactly what the old man made you for.”

At this the creature seized my skirts and threw them over my head; an effective means to obscure my vision whilst simultaneous granting him the access to my figure that he desired. The first penetrations came simultaneously, his multiple serpent-fingers striking with coordinated precision: I felt snakes thrust through the stitching that attached my nipples to my chest—those obscene additions Finklestein had installed purely to cultivate capacity for sensation—the threads parting under the force of invasion, the serpents wriggling through into the cavity of my torso; another penetrated the vertical seam running down my chest; a third violated the seam at my underarm where my arm attached to my body; all of this in a single coordinated strike that left me gasping, unable to process the violation before the second assault commenced.

His other hand drove serpent-fingers through the seams of my right thigh where it attached to my hip, through the horizontal seam that divided my hip from my torso, through the seam down my backside that I had opened and reclosed so many times during repairs; the sensation of serpents wriggling through these openings, forcing the stitches apart, burrowing into my stuffing, produced agony I had not conceived possible; each seam contained the augmented nerves Finklestein had installed, each violation registered with the intensity he had designed them to transmit.

At last came the largest penetration: his tail, that serpentine lower body I had observed coiled beneath him, thrust itself with terrible force into the seam between my legs—that vertical seam that runs from my front through my underside and up my back, and which is a frequent object of attack; the tail was far larger than the finger-serpents, and I felt it forcing the seam apart, the stitches snapping under the pressure, the opening widening to accommodate girth it had never been designed to receive.

"Normally I hit bottom," he said with a laugh that communicated satisfaction rather than cruelty, as though he were making casual observation rather than narrating my violation; "but you—you're mostly hollow, aren't you? Just cloth and leaves. I can go as deep as I like."

And so he did; I felt the tail penetrating upward through the cavity of my lower body, through where organs would reside in a creature of flesh, pushing through the loose stuffing of leaves that comprised my interior substance, meeting no resistance because there was nothing to resist, nothing to prevent the complete penetration of my construction. This bulk within me threatened to burst all my seams. The tail pushed further still, and I realized with horror that it was emerging into my throat region, that the penetration was so complete that the tip of his tail had traversed the entire length of my body.

The agony was impossible to adequately convey; seven separate locations violated simultaneously, serpents wriggling within my stuffing, the tail filling me in ways that suggested I should split entirely, the augmented nerves transmitting every detail of the invasion; I could not scream coherently, could only produce sounds that barely qualified as language, my capacity for articulate protest destroyed by the magnitude of sensation.

I believed after some period that his vigor might subside, that the assault might conclude; but I felt the serpents withdraw, and experienced a moment of desperate hope before I understood that he had merely retracted to access different seams.

The second assault targeted the attachment at my left shoulder, matching the right underarm he had already violated; the seam at my neck where my head attached to my body—this penetration particularly horrifying as I felt the serpent wriggling near my skull, near the brain that was processing this violation; the seam of my left leg; the seam that ran horizontally around my waist, dividing my upper and lower torso.

He proceeded systematically, violating each and every seam my construction contained, some locations receiving multiple penetrations as he discovered new angles of approach, new ways to force his serpentine fingers through stitching that was never designed to withstand such assault; the horizontal seam around my chest, just below where my breasts attached; the seams that run across my face; my ankles, my wrists, the backs of my knees. Duration became impossible to track; there were only periods of intense violation when multiple seams were penetrated simultaneously, followed by pauses while he examined my construction for seams he had not yet accessed, followed by renewed assault. At one point he flipped me over to better access the seams along my back, and I felt serpents violating the horizontal seams that divided my back into sections, every junction where my posterior construction had been assembled. Throughout all this, too, was the sickening sensation of being overstuffed, conferred by the presence of his tail wriggling within me.

Within a few hours every seam on my body had been violated, and the reasoning behind my anatomy to allow each portion to live when separated became apparent to me: for otherwise I’d have been killed by the splitting of so many seams that there remained scarcely anything left to hold me together at all. The tail persisted lodged through my central seam, a constant presence while the serpent-fingers worked methodically through my peripheral seams; I felt myself coming apart, felt the stitches giving way one after another, felt my construction losing its integrity as the accumulated damage reached critical threshold; leaves spilled from opened seams, my stuffing escaping, my body becoming less substantial, barely holding together.

At last—and I measured this "at last" in hours rather than minutes—I felt him shudder, felt the tail that penetrated me pulse in a manner that suggested the approach of conclusion; he deposited into my stuffing a quantity of slime, thick and viscous, filled with long stringy components that tangled with my leaves, with such force that it came spurting back outward again from the cavities his violations had created; the slime emerged not just from his tail but from all the serpent-fingers simultaneously, each violated seam receiving this deposit, this final claim of ownership. At this he at last withdrew, tail first, then the serpent-fingers, extracting from my seams in reverse order of their insertion; and he fell away from me.

I was left by his side, but he had lost interest in me; perhaps because so little remained to command interest. He went to sleep. 

Many pieces of me were no longer attached; I attempted to assess the damage but found immediate inventory impossible: I could not rise, could not execute coordinated movement as a unified body, because I was no longer unified; I lay in segments, in portions, my construction having surrendered to the accumulated violations until the stitching that held me together had failed at nearly every junction. My head had detached completely, the narrow neck seam having failed early in the creature's assault, being one of the smallest and most vulnerable seams of my construction; I understood that without Finklestein's design—that capacity for each portion to retain independent animation—I would have died the moment my head separated from my body, for no creature of integrated flesh could survive decapitation. My field of vision was limited to whatever happened to be at floor level, and further obscured with the terrible darkness. From this limited perspective I catalogued the damage: my right upper arm lay approximately two feet from my torso, detached at the shoulder seam; my right forearm had separated from my upper arm at the elbow; my right hand had detached from my forearm at the wrist; my left arm existed as three separate pieces in similar configuration—upper arm, forearm, hand, all disconnected. My torso had fragmented into multiple segments: my upper chest existed as a separate piece, the seam just below my breasts having failed; my mid-torso was another piece; my waist another; my lower torso separated from my hips; my hips themselves had split along the vertical central seam into left and right halves, these being perhaps the most violated portions given the creature's focus. My right leg existed as three pieces—upper leg detached from pelvis, lower leg detached at knee, foot detached at ankle; my left leg similarly fragmented; my dress existed tangled among the scattered components.

Through my customary manner of movement I caused the pieces to respond; from my position on the floor, I commanded each component to move toward the opening through which I could perceive dim light, and observed as portions of my dismembered body began to obey.

My hands arrived first—both detached, both capable of walking on their fingers like spiders; the right hand crawled into my field of vision and I directed it to grasp my head by the hair and drag me toward safety.

The sensation of being dragged by one's own detached hand, observing the ground passing beneath as though I were a sack being hauled, produced profound disorientation; but I maintained focus on coordinating the remaining pieces; I commanded my left hand to assist with pushing my torso segments; my upper arms and legs I instructed to roll, using their cylindrical construction; my forearms, being less symmetrical, I directed to drag themselves using whatever purchase they could achieve; my feet could not walk but could drag using their toes. The procession of animated body parts moving toward the exit must have presented a sight of particular horror which would have gained many accolades in Halloween Town, but I was beyond caring about appearances or approval; I focused only on ensuring each piece progressed toward the opening, on preventing components from wandering off course or becoming trapped in corners of the creature's lair.

It was thus I made my escape from this monster; and only when I was certain that he could not claim me to be in his territory, I gathered my rags together and found the needle and thread still resting in my dress pocket, and I commenced sewing myself together. The repairs consumed considerable time, as the damage had been extensive; I calculated that I would need to replace most of my leaves as they were too sodden to continue to serve me. The damage to my construction seemed, in fact, the least significant of my concerns. I had been seized three times since my escape from Finklestein's tower; the zombie had restrained me and subjected me to extended assault while preparing to consume my brain; the Mayor had attempted outright murder and would certainly have completed the task had he not been interrupted; the creature under the stairs had violated every seam of my body in ways that left me barely cohesive; each day of freedom had delivered me into worse situations than the captivity I had fled.

I began to calculate whether I might indeed be better served by returning to Finklestein’s home; his use of me had been regular, predictable, confined to specific forms of abuse I had learned to anticipate; he provided shelter, materials, security from the predations of others; the cost was my body and my autonomy, but I was paying that cost regardless while homeless, merely paying it to a rotating series of strangers rather than to a single familiar tormentor. At least in the copper tower of the doctor I would not be subject to murder, and would not face creatures who viewed me as food or as disposable material for civic distribution.

Could I do it? Could I take on the role of wife he had sought me to take? Could I allow his lustful penetrations—nay, invite his lustful penetrations of me, as he wished me to do?

The only argument against such a return was you, Jack, for I maintained the belief that love existed and might be found in you. My conviction possessed sufficient value to justify continued suffering in its pursuit; but you had not noticed me, had not listened to my warnings, had not demonstrated any awareness of my existence beyond my utility in completing the costume you required. I know that Finklestein would argue that it was folly to chase unlikely possibilities when a certainty of comfort could be had for equal cost; but I perceived this risk was a calculated wager towards greater reward. When at last I had restored sufficient integrity to my construction to regain normal movement, I collected the materials needed for the costume and retreated to a more secure location where I might continue the work I had committed myself to completing. Indeed, little more than the costume could I afford to think about—this odious task to which I had been employed against all my wishes—but even still, for love of you I was willing to violate my convictions and construct this outfit you demanded, even though I feared it would lead to your destruction. I returned to the tent in the plaza where the materials awaited; I worked without pause through the remaining days, driven by the understanding that this assignment represented the only purpose sustaining me, the only connection to you, however tenuous, and the only reason not to return to Finklestein to accept the captivity I had fled.

When you arrived on Christmas Eve day for the final fitting, Jack, the costume remained incomplete; I had finished the coat and trousers, the boots and belt, but certain details such as the trim, the fastenings, and the final adjustments for proper fit, required completion while you wore the garment. You complied with evident eagerness, donning the red coat and trousers, standing before me while I knelt with needle and thread, attaching the white fur trim to the coat's edges, adjusting the fit across your skeletal shoulders, ensuring the boots would remain secure despite the significant difference between your bone structure and the human form the costume was designed to represent.

You spoke with evident excitement while I worked, detailing your pride in how the town had accomplished in mere weeks what typically required a year's preparation, how thoroughly every citizen had contributed to realizing your vision of bringing the joys of Christmas to the world, how the mechanisms and decorations and all the elaborate preparations had come together with remarkable efficiency.

I continued sewing, attaching trim, adjusting seams, and saying nothing. Then you asked me how I felt about the costume—this was the first opinion you had ever solicited from me with regards to anything beyond the technical specifications of the work. I paused in my sewing, observing how the red suit transformed your skeletal form into something else entirely, how the structure concealed your true nature beneath a costume designed to represent a being you were not.

"You do not look like yourself, Jack," I said. "Not at all."

"Isn't it wonderful?" you proclaimed, examining yourself in the reflection of the cracked mirror that had been procured to ornament my tent. "It could not be more wonderful."

I retrieved the original design you had provided, the drawing that depicted the Sandy Claws figure; beneath the tracing paper upon which this design had been rendered lay the image of a sketch of you in your natural form, the Pumpkin King in all your skeletal glory.

"But you are the Pumpkin King," I said, showing you this superior rendering.

"Not anymore!" you replied as you seized the picture from my hands and smashed it in two over your knee, the violence of the gesture startling me into silence. "And I feel so much better now!"

I recalled at once that night, weeks prior, when I had overheard you in the graveyard, your voice carrying through the darkness as you expressed such profound dissatisfaction with your role, with the endless repetition of Halloween, with the emptiness you felt despite your position of authority and reverence; you had seemed to be searching for something, yearning for meaning you could not find in the holiday you had perfected; and it was apparent to me that you believed you had found that meaning in Christmas, in becoming something other than what you were.

“Jack, I know you think something is missing,” I began, believing this might represent my final opportunity to communicate the vision, to convince you to abandon the Christmas plan before catastrophe became inevitable. Yet as I spoke I inadvertently drove the needle I was holding into your finger; to my surprise you yelped—I had not known you possessed sufficient flesh to register such sensation—and you withdrew, drawing the injured digit to your mouth. I apologized, but saw my opportunity dissolving even as I articulated it.

Before either of us could resume the conversation, we were interrupted by the arrival of three children—I have come since to know they are named Lock, Shock, and Barrel, and that they are trick-or-treaters who are held in the highest regard. With them came their walking bathtub, that sentient device to which I had once been compared; its clawed feet carried it forward with disturbing animation, and within the basin lay something large, enclosed in what appeared to be an enormous sack. The contents moved slightly, suggesting whatever they transported was not a mere object, but something which lived.

“This time we bagged him,” the one called Lock announced, his tone conveying the pride of his accomplishment. “This time we really did!”

The three moved together to open the sack, from which came springing a rather fat old man with a white beard, clad in costume remarkably similar to that which I had been constructing these several weeks and which you now wore: the prototype, I realized with immediate comprehension. This was the genuine Sandy Claws, the being that you, Jack, intended to replace. The old man appeared disoriented, confused, protesting in tones that suggested he had not volunteered for this transportation.

“Sandy Claws!" you exclaimed, with evident delight at his arrival, apparently oblivious to or unconcerned by the distress he displayed; he seemed to wish to object to your use of him, but the exchange between you and he was brief and fruitless as had been the exchanges between you and myself. The children closed the sack over his head again, muffling his protests, and they guided him away. 

Meanwhile you, Jack, seemed entirely satisfied with this arrangement, as though the involuntary confinement of another being represented merely a necessary logistical element of your Christmas plan rather than a crime of considerable magnitude. Indeed, you smiled. I saw you smile, Jack, as though you had accomplished something wonderful, as though the muffled cries of that good old man were nothing more than the ambient sounds of your grand production.

It was in that moment I understood how far you had fallen, how completely your obsession had blinded you to the degradation you were willing to permit, indeed to orchestrate, in service of your vision. You, who had been my distant hope, my proof that recognition without possession might exist somewhere in this world, you had become no different than Finkelstein justifying his control; another selfish creature explaining why their use of me was natural. You too had found a philosophy that allowed you to ignore suffering simply because it did not serve your purpose to see it. Here I was forced to confront a proposition I had until this moment refused to examine with the rigor it deserved: that the melancholy I had observed in you, Jack, which had seemed to echo my own isolation and which I had interpreted as evidence of a kindred capacity for feeling, was in fact no such thing. I had seen you upon the hilltop, contemplating your dissatisfaction with Halloween's repetitions, and I had believed that a being capable of such discontent must possess the same sensitivity of consciousness that I possessed; that your sadness proved you capable of recognizing sadness in another, that your yearning proved you capable of responding to yearning. Yet, what had your melancholy actually demonstrated? Merely that you could feel dissatisfied when your own desires went unfulfilled, that you could recognize the emptiness of your own existence. I had committed a fundamental error in reasoning. I had observed that you possessed emotions—longing, frustration, restlessness—and I had concluded from this that you must therefore be different from the other citizens of Halloween Town, who seemed to operate according to pure appetite without reflection; but perhaps emotion itself was no guarantee of moral capacity. Perhaps one can feel deeply about one's own condition while remaining perfectly indifferent to the conditions of others. Perhaps the very melancholy that had drawn me to you was merely another form of self-absorption, a more sophisticated variety of the same philosophy that allowed Finkelstein and Igor to rape me or the citizens to terrorize me: the conviction that one's own experience was the only experience that mattered.

You were not cruel, precisely; you simply did not calculate others into your considerations. The old man's distress was as invisible to you as my devotion had been, not because you were incapable of perception, but because neither served any function in your grand design.

This suggested something more troubling than mere indifference. It suggested that consciousness itself—even consciousness capable of reflection, of dissatisfaction, of longing—did not necessarily produce any recognition of other consciousness as possessing equivalent reality. You experienced your own sadness as real and significant; you experienced Sandy Claws's distress, if you experienced it at all, as merely an unfortunate but necessary element of a larger plan, no more morally considerable than the inconvenience of a door that must be forced open to proceed. And if this were true of you, Jack—you with your capacity for melancholy, you with your artistic sensibility, you with your evident sophistication beyond the simple citizens who merely enacted their roles without question—then what hope existed that any being in this town might ever perceive me as I perceived myself?

Perhaps, then, the question was not whether love could transform indifference into recognition, but whether recognition was even possible between beings so fundamentally different in constitution. Perhaps my capacity for love was not a faculty that others lacked but which might be awakened, but rather a mere structural peculiarity of my recycled brain. Perhaps I had been demanding that you, Jack, perform a feat equivalent to asking a creature without eyes to appreciate color—not a moral failure, but a metaphysical impossibility.

Yet I could not accept this conclusion, for it rendered my entire existence absurd. If recognition were impossible, if my capacity for love found no corresponding capacity in any other being, then I was not merely unfortunate but categorically alone—conscious in a world of non-conscious things that moved and spoke but did not truly see. What remained for me then? To submit to their abuse of me, since they could not comprehend that abuse as violation? Abandon my own nature and attempt to remake myself according to their philosophy? Or persist in loving what could not love me back, knowing that such persistence would bring only suffering, justified by nothing, rewarded with nothing, signifying nothing beyond its own stubborn insistence that it mattered—even when all evidence suggested it did not? I had proven to myself that you could not see me; I had demonstrated that my capacity for devotion found no corresponding faculty in you; I had reasoned my way to the conclusion that recognition between us was perhaps metaphysically impossible. None of these proofs altered what I must do. If love possessed no force in Nature, if it could compel no reciprocation and prevent no suffering, it nevertheless compelled me, the created being—and I knew that I could not abandon you, regardless of what that persistence would cost. Love is no disease to be cured, and under its command, untold agonies can be withstood. Thus even as my hope for reciprocation seemed to vanish, I knew all the same that I could never betray you.

I stood there in the cold air of the plaza, watching the townspeople prepare your sleigh with such enthusiasm, such terrible innocence. My mind turned frantically through every possibility I could conceive to prevent your departure: could I damage the sleigh? No—you would simply repair it, or find another conveyance, and I had no tools, no time, no knowledge of its construction sufficient to sabotage it effectively. Could I warn the townspeople? No, for I had already tried warnings; they fell on ears that heard only what they wished to hear. Could I physically restrain you? Oh, the absurdity of the thought nearly made me laugh!

Each plan I constructed revealed itself immediately as inadequate; then, with a sinking horror that began in what passes for my stomach and spread through every thread of my construction, I understood the sole course of action that was available to me. There was one substance that could ground you, one thing that could create conditions in which flight became impossible: fog. Thick, impenetrable fog that would make takeoff suicidal even for someone as reckless as you had become. I knew where such a substance could be obtained. In my old room—the room that had been my prison for so long—beneath the loose tile by the window, there remained a bottle of concentrated fog juice. Why I had hidden it there, what purposes it had served during those long captive nights, I will not elaborate upon now; sufficient to say I knew it remained, that Finkelstein would not have discovered it, that it would still be potent.

But to retrieve it, I would have to return to that bedchamber, to the house of Doctor Finklestein. I will not claim the decision came easily, or quickly. One voice reminded me of every promise I had made to myself during those long weeks of freedom: never again, never return, death on the streets was preferable to one more night in that tower. I had poisoned him so many times to secure my liberty; I had torn my own arm from my body rather than let him drag me back; I had endured violations that still made my fabric crawl to think upon, all to avoid returning to his patient, possessive care. Was I now to walk back through that door voluntarily? Yet the other voice—the foolish, loving voice that had brought me nothing but suffering—whispered that this was different. This was not surrender, but strategy. You needed to be stopped, Jack, and only I seemed to understand this. Only I could prevent the catastrophe I had seen in my vision. If the price of preventing it was returning to that place which I feared most, then perhaps that was simply what love required: the willingness to sacrifice the self I had fought so hard to preserve.

Nevertheless, deciding to return and successfully retrieving the fog juice were entirely separate problems. Finkelstein would be there—he was always there, methodical in his habits, rarely venturing beyond his laboratory and living quarters. How could I enter unseen? The building was not large; there were not many entrances; he knew the sounds of every door, every floorboard. If he discovered me there, he would not let me leave again. He would lock me in. I would resume my position as his companion, his creation, his property, and all my suffering to remain free would have meant nothing.

I would have to be extraordinarily careful. I would have to time my entrance perfectly, move through the building like a ghost; but even before I could concern myself with the interior, there was the matter of the approach itself.

As you know the house yourself, I do not need to describe extensively the expanse of yard between the door and the gate that offers no cover, no concealment. In daylight, the journey across that exposed ground, without being seen, would be impossible.

I considered my options. I could not make myself invisible; I could only make myself less noticeable, less like Sally and more like an element of the landscape itself. And so I sought out a length of cloth—not difficult to find in Halloween Town, where fabric and costume are as common as stone—and I chose brown, the color of the earth, the color of dead leaves, the color of things discarded and ignored. I wrapped myself entirely in this shroud, covering my patchwork dress, my bright stitching, anything that might catch light or draw attention. I became, as much as possible, a shape without identity, a moving piece of the hillside's detritus.

It was not a disguise that could withstand scrutiny. If Finkelstein looked directly at me, if he truly observed the yard, he would see that this brown lump was not dirt or leaves but something animate, something approaching. I was gambling that he would not look—not carefully, not at this hour. 

Thus the afternoon sun cast my wrapped form's shadow long across the yard as I climbed the path. Each step felt interminable. When I reached the door, my hands—still wrapped in that brown shroud—touched the familiar copper handle with something like relief. I had done it. I had crossed the terrible expanse undetected. Now I needed only to slip inside, navigate to my old room, retrieve the bottle from beneath the tile, and escape before I could be detected.

I opened the door and witnessed that Igor stood in the anteroom. Not passing through, not occupied with some task—simply standing there, positioned as though he had been waiting, as though he had watched my entire pathetic approach up the hill and had positioned himself exactly here, at this threshold, to greet my arrival.

His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. That struggle to form words that I had observed so many times during our captivity together, when Finkelstein would issue commands and Igor would strain to acknowledge them with anything beyond a grunt or a gesture. Finally, slowly, forcing each syllable: "Sal...ly."

The way he said it, with that knowing look in his eye, with his body positioned deliberately between me and the ramp that led to my old room, communicated everything words might have. Before I could attempt to retreat, his hand shot out and gripped me. Not violently, but firmly, with the strength of someone who understood that his opportunity was fleeting and must be secured immediately. I had dropped the shroud upon seeing him and stood now, exposed, as regular old Sally in her patchwork dress.

"Please," I said, and I heard my own voice emerge small, desperate. "Please, Igor, I only need to retrieve something from upstairs. I won't be a moment. I won't disturb the doctor. You needn't even tell him I was here…”

His grip tightened slightly, and he shook his head. With his free hand he gestured upward, toward where Finkelstein's laboratory lay. “I’ll… tell him,” he said, the words formed slowly and effortfully. The threat was clear. All my weeks of freedom, all the suffering I had endured to maintain my liberty, would end here in this anteroom with Igor's hand on my waist.

"Please," I tried again. “Please, let me through, and I’ll leave immediately.”

"No," he managed, the word thick and slow. Then, with visible effort, he declared: "You... do... some...thing... first."

His other hand moved, gesturing to himself, then to me, then to the space beyond the anteroom—a large closet where we would not be immediately visible should Finkelstein descend. Oh, Jack! His meaning was unmistakable, despite its delivery through such broken language. Yet the choice he offered was no choice at all. I could submit to what he wanted, and perhaps—perhaps—he would keep his word and let me proceed to retrieve the fog juice; or I could refuse, and watch him summon Finkelstein, and lose everything.

What was I to do, Jack? I ask you to consider my position with all the honest scrutiny you can bring to bear, for I know that in recounting this moment I reveal myself at my weakest, my most degraded, and I would have you understand that I saw no alternative. I had already returned to the place I had sworn never to enter again. I was so close to obtaining the one thing that might prevent your destruction, the one action that might express the love I could not speak aloud to you. Now Igor, who had betrayed me once before, offered me a transaction I could not refuse without losing all possibility of success. If I submitted to his demand, I might still accomplish what I had come here to do. He might keep his word. He might let me pass. It was possible that this transaction could succeed where all my other attempts had failed. I had already crossed so many lines I had sworn never to cross. What was one more?

“How can you ask such a cruel demand from me, one whom you have already degraded and betrayed?” I then heard my voice emerge hollow, defeated. “Very well; but you must let me move through the house afterward. You must not call the doctor. That is our agreement."

His grip loosened slightly; not releasing me, but acknowledging my capitulation. He gestured again, toward the side room, and I followed.

I had been unconscious during his prior assault of me. I had no idea what really to expect from him, what his tastes might truly be. Oh, Jack, I hesitate to relate to you such foulness as what he next committed, but I must speak it or risk that in ignorance you imagine some more pleasant action and fail to comprehend truly what I was made to endure.

He made me strip off all my clothing, even my socks. Then I knelt on the floor, so that he stood taller than me. He began by ripping open a seam in my lower back, a goodly length of my interior exposed. I could feel him force something into it, but I did not immediately imagine what it could be. Soon a hot wetness began to penetrate my insides. I then I realized with sickening dismay and revulsion what he had just done. It was an action my own body had no capacity to do, but my in-born vocabulary knew the term at once—this fiend had just urinated inside me, polluted me as if I were a toilet.

“Why—what are you doing—” I asked as loudly as I dared, controlling the scream I wished to emit only because I knew that such a thing would be sure to attract the doctor’s attention.

“Wetting leaves…” Igor replied. 

I suddenly recalled the doctor’s remark on that night when he stooped to violate me, that I had been constructed with the intent that a lubricant would be added by the user. Igor had assisted in my construction and surely knew this fact. I shuddered to think that he might have done this to me before without my knowledge.

As I remained frozen in shock from this vile deed, the first of many violent blows began to rain upon me. He slapped, punched, kicked and stomped on me, my cloth body not taking the injuries as badly as flesh; but consequent of my heightened sensitivity perhaps made even more agonizing. To compound my miseries, throughout all this I forced myself to remain silent, lest my screams alert Doctor Finklestein to my presence. 

The beating was evidently required for Igor to enflame himself. Once readied, he produced from his clothing a male member whose size would have terrified anyone: at least ten inches long but the width as wide as a wine bottle. He chose for its portal a seam in my hip, angling himself so that it prodded down the insides of my thigh. Meanwhile he tore at my seams, spat at me, pulled my hair, slapped me, forced his hands inside me; then at last as a final insult, he seized upon the crimson nipples the doctor had installed upon me, and at his climax he tore them both from my body. He did not return them to me.

When he at last released me, I retained the sensation of the wet and foul piss soaking into my stuffing, something that made every subsequent movement a reminder of what I had paid. I asked him, my voice emerging smaller than I wished: "May I go now? You said you would let me pass."

He nodded slowly, that same laborious movement I remembered from our time together. Then, with effort, he stated: "Go."

I gathered my patchwork dress, pulled it over myself again with hands that trembled slightly, whether from relief, from disgust, or from the persistent sensation of wrongness inside my body cavity. I watched him, waiting for the betrayal I felt certain was coming. This was Igor, after all. Igor who had planned escape with me and then attacked me the moment we were free. Igor who had returned to Finkelstein's service and helped recapture me time and again. Why should I trust that he would honor this agreement when he had honored nothing else?

Nevertheless, he simply stood there: watching me, yes, but not moving to block my path. His expression was satisfied in a way that made my fabric crawl, but he kept his word—or appeared to be keeping it, at least for this moment.

I moved past him, toward the ramp that led upward to the living quarters, to my old room. There was no time to repair myself, and most of the damage was concealed by my clothing in any case. Each step felt precarious, as though at any moment I would hear his voice echo through the walls and bring Finkelstein rushing down to discover me; but no call came. I climbed the ramp, and still no alarm sounded. The wetness inside me shifted with each movement, a nauseating reminder of the transaction I had just completed, but I forced myself to focus on the task ahead: the room, the tile, the bottle beneath it. I climbed the wheelchair ramp as silently as my construction would allow, each step measured and careful, listening for any sound that might indicate I had been detected.

When I pushed open the door to the bedchamber, I found it exactly as I had left it. Perhaps cleaner; certainly more orderly. The bed made. The small table arranged just so. Everything positioned as though he expected my return at any moment, as though my absence was merely temporary.

I did not allow myself to consider what this preservation of my room meant, what patient certainty it represented. I went directly to the window, to the floor beside it, and I found the loose tile I remembered. It lifted easily and there it was: the fog juice, still exactly where I had left it.

I lifted it from its hiding place, and perhaps it was relief, or perhaps it was simple carelessness born of being so close to success, but I spoke aloud without thinking: “This will stop Jack!"

I froze, suddenly aware of my error. I had spoken, here in Finklestein’s house, where sound carried across bare metal walls, where he might hear, where even now he might be wondering what voice had just echoed through his domain.

I listened, and strained to hear any response or indication that I had been detected.

Then I heard instead the distinct groaning of the bone saw; that particular whine of the blade cutting through calcium, a sound I knew too well from my time here. The sound was coming from the laboratory—the room I would have to pass to reach the exit, the room between me and escape. To my horror I recognized that Finklestein was there, working; that he was situated between myself and the path to freedom.

I could not remain where I was. The preparations had been nearly complete when I left the plaza; you, Jack, would take off soon. If I delayed any longer, all of this suffering, all these transactions and degradations, would accomplish nothing. I had to pass the laboratory. I had to hope that Finkelstein was sufficiently absorbed in his work not to notice me.

I moved toward the door, the precious bottle of fog juice clutched so carefully in my arms it might have been my own child; and as I approached the laboratory entrance, I observed that the door stood open. I paused at the threshold, and I cautiously looked inside to assess whether or not I might slip past undetected.

Finkelstein was there, bent over his operating platform with that complete absorption I recognized from countless hours of captivity. The bone saw had fallen silent now; whatever he had been cutting was cut; but what seized my attention, what made me freeze in the doorway despite the urgency of my escape, was what lay on the operating platform before him: a figure, unmistakably female in its construction, unmistakably similar in proportion and design to my own body. Yet the head of this body was wrapped in bandages, and even through those coverings I could see that the shape was different from mine, configured to different specifications. As I watched, too horrified to look away despite the danger, Finkelstein reached up and opened the figure's head. It hinged backward like a box, in the same fashion as his own head—that peculiar feature of his construction which I had witnessed so many times and which had never ceased to disturb me.

His own head was open as well, both skull cavities exposed; and as I stood frozen in that doorway, unable to move despite knowing I should flee, I heard him speak. It was not to me; he had not seen me. Rather, he addressed figure on the table, speaking with a tenderness and anticipation I had never heard him use with me:

"What a joy, to think of all we'll have in common. We'll have conversations worth having!"

And then, as I watched in horror too profound for sound, he reached into his own exposed brain cavity and tore out a portion of it—simply ripped it free with both hands, that gray matter that held whatever made him what he was—and he placed it, carefully, reverently, into the opened head of the new creation. He was installing himself into her, making her literally an extension of his own mind, thereby ensuring that she would want what he wanted, think as he thought, find pleasure in what pleased him, because she would be constructed from his own consciousness. There would be no flaw, no unwanted independence.

At such a gruesome sight I simply turned and ran back down the ramp, past the anteroom where Igor no longer stood, through the door and across that terrible exposed yard, no longer caring whether I was seen. The bottle of fog juice was clutched against my chest, the wet heavy leaves still shifting inside my body cavity, and now this new horror layered upon all the others: the knowledge that Theodoric Finklestein had learned from his mistake. He had not abandoned his project when I escaped; he had merely identified the flaw in his design and set about correcting it. The error was obvious in retrospect: why install a consciousness that might resist, when one could install a consciousness that would enthusiastically consent? I had believed, despite everything, that I mattered as a particular being, that my specific existence, however unwanted, had at least achieved the status of reality—that having been created, having lived, having resisted, I had earned some small purchase on the world simply by virtue of being. Yet here was the proof that I had earned nothing. I was not a being whose existence posed any meaningful obstacle to his plans; I was merely a failed prototype. All my suffering, all my resistance, all my desperate escapes—none of it had signified anything to him beyond diagnostic information. She would be better than me. She would fulfill his purposes without the inconvenient complications of refusal. And when she was complete, when she opened her eyes for the first time into a new life of wanting exactly what he wanted her to want, my entire existence would be rendered retroactively pointless. I had thought my escape to have at least denied him what he wanted, that it had exacted some small punishment for his use of me, that it might inspire him to correct his ways and seek his own improvement. Instead, alas, here was the proof that my absence cost him nothing: he had simply begun building a replacement who would give him everything I refused, and give it gladly. I would not even have the bitter satisfaction of having disrupted his plans; I merely had delayed them slightly.

I ran until I reached the gate, ran until I was far enough down the hill that the copper tower where I had known so much pain disappeared from view, and only then did I stop, gasping and trying to comprehend what I had just witnessed.

I found my way onto the town plaza with sufficient interval to retreat and mend myself after Igor’s violations, though there was not time enough to replace my damp leaves, and I was left to endure that humiliation for the night. Indeed, Jack, these events only transpired a few hours ago, and even now I suffer from the sodden sensation within, though it has been mitigated by certain factors that have happened between the time of my account and this time of my accounting, which you soon shall hear.

At the plaza, the band began to play music, and the crowd gathered together in anticipation of your takeoff into the Christmas heavens as the new Sandy Claws. That fiend the Mayor ascended the stage, smiling and boot-licking as he typically presents himself, and made a long oration in your honor. 

Once you arrived on the platform, I knew the time had come to deploy my operation. I poured the fog juice into the town fountain, and what transpired I know there is little need to detail, as you will recall it as well as I can. My triumph seemed certain, but I also knew the fog would only last a half hour at most. My intent had been simply to delay you long enough that I might at last explain the countless reasons you had to abandon this insane project, but before I could make my way to the stage to reveal to you all the arguments of reason, you had discovered a way around my machinations with the help of your dog, Zero, and his bright nose. Into the sky you went, guided by his light; and I, alone and ruined, despaired that the bottle of fog juice, for which I had so dearly paid in dignity, had achieved nothing. I had foreseen the catastrophe toward which your actions tended, yet I had exhausted the means to compel your attention or alter this course. If accurate prediction confers no authority to prevent what one predicts, then what function serves foresight beyond its own torment, that is, the suffering of watching disaster unfold with knowledge but without power of influence? But still more than that, Jack, I dreaded what was next to befall you, the one I loved, and the one thing in this land I have to love; for by this feeling within me I knew that there was something to hope for, something to long for, something… dare I say it, to know the desire, passion, lust the doctor had hoped me to know, but not in an isolated, lecherous sense or as a favor towards a superior, but as the most natural effect of love upon the brain.

With my nerves refortified, I was able to observe your progress along with the witches on the town plaza, by means of gazing into a cauldron where your image was depicted. A radio broadcast concerning the holiday events was played, much as had been done at Halloween. Yet, after the passage of some hours, it became apparent through the radio broadcasts that my terrifying prediction was approaching its realization; the military of the human world had been dispatched to stop what they termed an “imposter shamelessly impersonating Sandy Claws,” and I understood that you, Jack, were in mortal danger from forces far more destructive than you had anticipated when you conceived this Christmas scheme.

I cried out that someone had to help you. Voices cheered around me on the plaza, but I observed that no one moved to render actual assistance, that the concern expressed was purely theatrical if not, indeed, a mark of approval for your apparent success; it was clear as day that I alone understood the severity of your predicament, and thus was the sole hope of delivering you from harm.

The solution presented itself with sudden clarity: if I could locate and liberate the genuine Sandy Claws and deliver him to the human world to resume his proper duties, perhaps the military would cease their assault upon you, perhaps the catastrophe might yet be curtailed before it achieved its full destructive potential.

“Where did they take that Sandy Claws?" I asked aloud, not truly expecting response but requiring some external articulation of the question to organize my thoughts.

The most logical location was the residence of those children—Lock, Shock, and Barrel—who had delivered the victim to Halloween Town. I had observed their treehouse during my homeless period, had noted its position at the town's edge, and had registered with some unease the pit that surrounded it and the reputation of what dwelt within that pit; but I possessed no alternative course of action, and so I departed the plaza and made my way toward that location. I quickened my pace as I approached, calculating that time was limited, that you might already be dead or dying, that Sandy Claws himself might have been murdered by his captors in the interval since his abduction; and I understood that I was walking deliberately into danger, though such understanding did nothing to slow my steps.

The treehouse manifested before me, built into a dead tree that leaned at an angle suggesting imminent collapse; around it extended a chasm of considerable depth and width, crossable only by a rickety bridge constructed of rope and wooden planks that appeared barely capable of supporting weight; within the chasm, I knew, lurked the creature denominated Oogie Boogie, though I had heard little specific information about him—he seemed almost a taboo subject in Halloween Town, referenced only in whispers and threats, but avoided in direct discourse.

I crossed the bridge with care, feeling it sway and creak beneath me, and climbed the tree to reach the entrance to their dwelling; I knocked upon the door and received no answer, but as I stood waiting I perceived giggling voices carried on the wind, and beneath these a lower-toned voice calling for help. I recognized the timber of this latter voice—Sandy Claws, still alive, still capable of speech! I climbed quickly back down to the bridge to determine the source; the voices emerged clearly from within the chasm itself, and I positioned myself to listen more carefully to what was being said.

“Help me! Someone!”—"You're ugly, but you still might be tasty. Want me to kill you before I start to boil you?”—"No! No! Please!”—"Perfect! They always taste better cooked alive!"

I covered my mouth to suppress the involuntary sound of horror that threatened to emerge; Sandy Claws was in immediate danger of being consumed, and I possessed limited time to execute rescue before he was subjected to whatever cooking process Oogie Boogie had threatened.

I searched for means of descent into the chasm—stairs, a ladder, a rope I might climb—and discovered a rope attached to a cage that hung suspended over the pit; but this cage was occupied by Lock, Shock, and Barrel themselves, who sat within it eating various confections and watching with evident pleasure whatever transpired below; I could not use this rope without alerting them to my presence and my intentions.

The only alternative was the chasm wall itself, which appeared to be constructed of rock and earth with various protrusions that might serve as handholds or footholds if they proved sufficiently stable; I examined the wall from my position on the bridge and selected what appeared to be the most promising location for descent. I approached the edge and placed one foot gingerly upon a large rock that protruded from the wall; my shoe had barely made contact when the rock crumbled away and fell the considerable distance to the bottom, landing with a sound that made me understand exactly how far I would fall should I make similar error.

I stood frozen, reconsidering whether this rescue was truly feasible, whether I possessed the capacity to execute it, whether I should simply retreat to the plaza and hope that someone with greater skill or courage might intervene; but I understood that no such person would come, that I was Sandy Claws' only hope of rescue, and by extension your only hope of survival, Jack.

I searched for another rock, found one that appeared more stable, tested it with a hard kick that produced no crumbling; then taking the deepest breath my construction permitted, I stepped onto it with utmost care.

The rock broke free from the wall instantly and I fell, screaming, into the chasm.

To my good fortune, my scream was masked by Oogie Boogie's laughter and Sandy Claws' own shouts; I landed upon stone flooring with considerable impact, my head spinning from the fall, my body registering pain at multiple points of construction, and my left leg detaching entirely at the hip seam—a familiar failure by this point in my brief existence.

I pulled myself upright and assessed my situation: I had achieved my objective of reaching the bottom of the chasm, though I possessed no clear notion of how I might exit again once the rescue was complete. I collected my detached leg and, holding it under my arm, began to hop as quietly as my remaining leg permitted toward what appeared to be the entrance to Oogie's dwelling.

The interior proved to be a series of connected chambers, each decorated in a manner suggesting gambling establishments such as I had never seen but which my inherited vocabulary knew without prompting. There were dice, cards, roulette wheels, all rendered in grotesque Halloween Town aesthetic; I moved from room to room until I located what I sought: a large chamber configured as both casino and dungeon, with Sandy Claws hanging miserably from a hook attached by rope to the ceiling, suspended perhaps eight feet above the floor.

Oogie Boogie stood before him, his massive burlap form moving with surprising grace for something of his dimensions, taunting Sandy with commentary I could not fully discern from my position at the doorway; I observed the scene and calculated that direct approach would result in immediate detection, that I required some method of drawing Oogie's attention away from his captive before I could execute rescue.

What could possibly interest Oogie Boogie more than torturing Sandy Claws? The answer presented itself with uncomfortable clarity: I had nothing to serve me but myself, but Doctor Finklestein had always intended me for use. A creature of appetite, such as Oogie, might be stirred by my form and find it the preferable temple at which to burn his incense, over the helpless figure of Sandy Claws. Yet how was I to employ this asset while simultaneously freeing Sandy? I looked down at my detached leg and understanding arrived: I could send the leg into the chamber as distraction, and while Oogie investigated this offering, I might be able to approach Sandy or otherwise facilitate his release.

Notwithstanding this, my plan contained a significant flaw: without my leg, I could not run; I would need some method that permitted both rescue and swift departure, preferably one that did not require me to sacrifice my leg permanently, as I had already lost sufficient components of my construction and wished to retain what remained.

I observed through the doorway that the chamber contained barred windows set into the walls—not large openings, but perhaps sufficient to permit a human of Sandy's pliable figure to squeeze through; if I could locate a ladder, I might be able to assist his exit through one of these windows rather than attempting to escort him back through the length of Oogie's lair.

A new plan formed: I would detach my hands and send them into the chamber to untie Sandy while my leg served as distraction; I would remain outside with the ladder positioned at a window, ready to assist Sandy's exit once my hands had freed him from the rope; I would sacrifice the leg but retrieve my hands, accepting this as a reasonable exchange for your safety, Jack; for what value was a mere part of my body against the entirety of yours?

I hopped back toward the entrance of Oogie's lair, intending to search for a ladder, and began to climb the decorative framework around the doors—a configuration of twisted metal and plywood that proved easier to navigate than the chasm wall had been. Whilst absorbed in this task a voice called out, shrill an unmistakable: "What are you doing here?"

Lock, Shock, and Barrel, still suspended in their cage above the pit, had observed my entire approach and were now staring directly at me with expressions that combined amusement and malice. I turned to face them, experiencing simultaneous outrage at their betrayal of Sandy and embarrassment at being discovered; I admitted to them my errand without disguise, my voice timid despite my intention to project confidence.

The children laughed, then held a whispered conference among themselves during which I strained to overhear their discussion but could discern no words. They turned back to me, still laughing.

"How are you planning to rescue him?" Lock asked, his tone suggesting he found my entire enterprise absurd.

"I need to find a ladder," I replied, understanding even as I spoke that I was revealing my strategy to beings who had no interest in Sandy's welfare and might actively work to prevent his rescue.

"Go around about ten feet; you will find one," Barrel said, his voice containing an edge that suggested malicious intent, yet I possessed no alternative source of information and no time to search extensively; I followed his directions with extreme caution.

Indeed there was a rope ladder lying on the roof of Oogie's lair; I tested it carefully, examining the knots and rungs for signs of sabotage or weakness, finding nothing obviously wrong though I remained suspicious; I returned to the window with the ladder, passing the children's cage once more, and with some reluctance I thanked them for the assistance despite my certainty that they intended some kind of harm to befall me. I positioned myself at the window with the ladder and heard behind me the children resuming their conversation:

“I will bet you a pound of candy, that it takes Oogie two minutes to kill her," Shock said.

“No, no," Lock answered, "This is Oogie. He likes to go more slowly than that. Half an hour."

I understood then that they had given me the ladder not to assist my rescue but to amuse themselves by observing my failure; but I had committed to this course and possessed no alternative plan; I tore out the stitches attaching my hands to my wrists and commanded my hands to enter the chamber through the bars.

My leg, deposited earlier, had by now made its appearance in the chamber and was effectively distracting Oogie Boogie, who had discovered it and was examining this unexpected offering with evident interest; my hands crawled along the rope from which Sandy hung, and the old man quite reasonably displayed startlement when these detached appendages reached him and began working at the knots that secured him.

I whispered through the window: "I'll get you out of here."

My hands picked at the knotted rope with the dexterity that months of sewing had cultivated, making progress, beginning to loosen the binding—and then, O strife! Disaster manifested. Oogie Boogie had discovered my deception.

He shouted, turning toward the window, toward Sandy, toward my exposed hands still working at the rope. He cried in a loud and terrible voice: “You tried to make a dupe out of me?”

I had no time to complete the rescue, no time to retrieve my hands, no time to formulate alternative strategy. Oogie opened his mouth and began to inhale with force I had not conceived possible—not breathing, but rather actively drawing everything that was not secured into his interior. Sandy, my hands, the ladder, and myself were torn free and pulled through this opening, directly into Oogie Boogie’s burlap form.

The interior was darkness absolute, composed entirely of insects: beetles, roaches, worms, spiders, centipedes, snakes, thousands upon thousands of invertebrates crawling over every surface, over Sandy, over me, and most horrifyingly, into me through the holes where my hands and leg should attach, through any gap in my stitching they could locate and exploit.

I would have screamed, but to open my mouth would only permit more insects entrance; I attempted to claw at myself to remove the creatures but I possessed no hands with which to claw; I felt them penetrating deeper into my stuffing, felt their legs and antennae and mandibles exploring my interior cavity, felt the violation of my body by hundreds of small intrusions simultaneously. I could not breathe—there was no room for air, only insects, only the crushing pressure of countless small bodies; Sandy fared no better, for I could hear him struggling nearby though I could not see him, and certainly could not assist him.

It was sure that all was lost; we had been eaten by Oogie Boogie, and any moment the insects would begin to digest us. But with all the strength my construction permitted, I pushed the pointed heel of my shoe into the burlap fabric, hoping that this last remaining instrument might aid me. I was not disappointed; the material gave way suddenly and completely; I, Sandy, and approximately two hundred pounds of insects spilled out onto the concrete floor as Oogie's body deflated around us.

I could no longer maintain control; I began to scream and thrash, slamming myself against the floor in desperate attempt to dislodge the insects that had burrowed into my stuffing; after several minutes the insects had evacuated and so had most of my stuffing. I remained on the floor too depleted to rise, leaves scattered around me in quantities that suggested I had lost perhaps eighty percent of my interior material.

I could not rise without assistance; I directed Sandy to gather the scattered leaves and return them to my interior cavities while my hands—which had spilled out with us and had crawled back to my position—retrieved needle and thread from my dress pocket and commenced their own reattachment to my wrists. 

Sandy Claws complied, operating swiftly though without comprehension; in the meantime my hands worked simultaneously, stitching themselves secure, then immediately proceeding to reattach my leg; within two minutes I was able to stand.

But as I rose to my feet I observed that Oogie's deflated burlap form had vanished from where it should have lain, and the scattered insects were nowhere visible. At this terrible realization, my heart began to pound with renewed comprehension of danger.

"We have to go," I said to Sandy, seizing his arm. I pulled him toward the exit, but we had not taken but three steps before we saw Oogie Boogie standing no more than ten feet distant, his massive form reconstituted, his burlap exterior filled once more with the insects that comprised his substance.

He had sewn himself back together while we were distracted with my own repairs; I could observe the evidence of this hasty reconstruction: a thread, crudely untrimmed, hanging from one arm where he had closed the tear I had created; but I possessed no opportunity to exploit this knowledge as he moved toward us with speed that belied his bulk.

"Two victims now!" he exclaimed, his voice containing genuine delight at this unexpected improvement in his situation; "even better than I'd planned!"

He seized us both—Sandy in one massive cloth hand, myself in the other—and I felt his grip compress my recently-restored stuffing with a force that threatened to split seams I had just repaired. He carried us across the chamber toward implements I had not previously observed: torture devices arranged throughout the space as if they were mere furniture in a parlor.

He threw me toward a large cabinet constructed of iron, decorated with a terrifying face and a playing card motif upon the exterior surface; the cabinet's front opened as I approached and I understood its purpose with horror: an iron maiden, that medieval device designed to impale victims on interior spikes.

I struck the interior back panel and the door swung shut immediately, the mechanism activated by my impact; I felt the spikes penetrate my construction from all directions—through my back, my sides, my limbs, dozens of metal points piercing fabric and stuffing with the efficiency of pins entering a pincushion. The sensation was uncomfortable but not catastrophic; my cloth body accepted the penetrations without the damage that would have resulted had I been constructed of flesh; the spikes passed through me, found no organs to rupture, no blood vessels to sever; I remained conscious and functional, but merely pinned in place like an insect in a collector's display.

The iron maiden's form contained a small open panel positioned at eye level, and I positioned my face to peer through these openings into the chamber beyond. I observed Oogie hauling Sandy Claws toward a large vertical wheel mounted on a platform; this wheel, however, was designed not for games of chance but for torture alone, as evidenced by the skeleton currently affixed to its center—the remains of some previous victim, bones still secured by restraints that had long outlasted the flesh they once confined.

Oogie seized the skeleton with one hand and tore it from the wheel with a casual violence, tossing the remains aside as though discarding refuse; the bones clattered across the floor and came to rest in a corner already occupied by similar debris—evidence that this wheel had accommodated numerous victims over whatever span of time Oogie had occupied this lair.

He positioned Sandy Claws at the wheel's center and began securing him with leather straps—wrists first, then ankles. Sandy struggled against these bindings but accomplished nothing except to demonstrate their effectiveness. Within moments he was completely immobilized, spread-eagled at the wheel's center, incapable of escape or meaningful resistance.

Oogie stepped back to admire his work; he moved closer to Sandy Claws, examining him with the attention one might give to a meal being prepared.

"You know what I love about victims like you who come all dressed up?" he said, his voice carrying that same jovial quality that made his words more disturbing rather than less; "being burlap myself, I'm naturally attracted to the texture—cloth, stuffing, seams and stitches—it's so much more interesting than flesh, don't you think? And the best part—" he gestured toward Sandy's red suit, then toward where I remained pinned in the iron maiden, "—no need to bother with all that tedious undressing. Everything I like's already exposed. So convenient!"

He laughed at this observation, clearly pleased with the efficiency his preferences afforded; from my position I could see Sandy's confusion at being discussed in such terms, and his growing terror as he understood that whatever was about to occur would not follow patterns he recognized.

Oogie moved to a mechanism affixed at the wheel’s side, which permitted the wheel to be set in rotary motion; he applied force, setting it in rapid rotation. Sandy’s body whirled past my limited field of vision through the iron maiden's viewing ports with such velocity that I could distinguish only a blur of red fabric and pale beard; I could hear, however, Sandy's cries as the spinning produced effects I could not directly observe.

When the wheel's momentum had dissipated and it came to rest, Sandy was positioned inverted, his head toward the floor and his feet elevated, the red fabric of his suit hanging away from his body due to gravitational influence, his face visibly reddened from what I understood must be blood accumulating in his head due to the reversed orientation.

"Excellent positioning for our first procedure!" Oogie announced, moving to position himself near Sandy's lower body, which lower body was now elevated and thus readily accessible; I observed from my confined vantage that Oogie's burlap face—or rather, the opening in his burlap exterior that served the function of a mouth—began to work in a manner suggesting he was gathering something within this cavity, and I understood with mounting horror that he was collecting insects from his interior, concentrating them in his mouth preparatory to expulsion.

He leaned forward and positioned this mouth-opening directly at the waistband of Sandy's underpants, at that junction where fabric met flesh, where the clothing's opening might permit access to the interior space between garment and body; he appeared to spit with considerable force, and though I could not observe the precise nature of what had been expelled, I understood from my knowledge of Oogie's composition that it must necessarily be insects—dozens at minimum, perhaps hundreds, depending on how many he had concentrated for this purpose—deposited directly into Sandy's clothing where they would gain immediate contact with his flesh.

Sandy's reaction manifested with a rapidity and intensity that confirmed the severity of whatever violation was occurring within his garments; he screamed, and this scream differed fundamentally in character from the cries I had heard him produce during his earlier distress; this was not the vocalization of someone experiencing ordinary pain, however severe, but rather the sound of someone confronting a horror so profound, so antithetical to the basic integrity of bodily autonomy, that rational response became impossible; his form convulsed against the restraints with violence that suggested he was attempting to tear himself free regardless of injury, his muscles straining, his limbs jerking in patterns that appeared involuntary.

"Settle in, my little friends!" Oogie encouraged the insects he had deposited, stepping back slightly to observe the results of his work with evident satisfaction; "Find all those warm places, all those soft tissues, all those lovely cavities that are just perfect for burrowing!"

I could only conjecture from my position within the iron maiden what specifically was transpiring inside Sandy's clothing, but the particular quality of his screams led me to conclude that the insects were not remaining on the surface of his skin but were actively seeking entrance into his body through whatever orifices presented themselves, and I recalled with vivid horror my own time inside Oogie's body just minutes before: the sensation of insects crawling not merely upon my exterior but penetrating through my seams, through the openings at my wrists and hip, forcing themselves into my interior cavity where they had no right to be; Sandy, possessing flesh rather than cloth, possessed different vulnerabilities, and I understood that the insects were exploiting these vulnerabilities with the systematic thoroughness that characterized their nature.

The screaming continued without diminishment for perhaps two minutes, during which period I observed that Sandy's face had progressed from merely reddened to a deeper crimson approaching purple; his eyes bulged, his mouth gaped, his entire physiognomy communicated suffering that appeared to exceed the tolerances his consciousness had been designed to manage. The underpants he wore beneath the bright red suit were a cream color, printed with a design I can’t identify; but I observed the pale material taking on crimson stains that betrayed the severity of Oogie’s treatment.

"You know what I most appreciate about insects as instruments of torture?" Oogie inquired, apparently addressing this question to me as Sandy's screaming would have prevented him from attending to philosophical discourse; "They possess an intelligence sufficient to find every vulnerable point, every space that can be penetrated, every tissue soft enough to permit burrowing, yet they lack any capacity for mercy or restraint that might interfere with their thoroughness; they are pure appetite operating with mechanical efficiency, and when used in sufficient numbers against a subject who possesses flesh—which flesh is, after all, nothing more than protein awaiting consumption—they accomplish a violation that is both thorough and intimate in ways that larger critters can’t achieve."

He moved to the wheel and spun it once more; the rotation must have redistributed the insects within Sandy's clothing, because Sandy's screams, which had begun to show signs of vocal exhaustion, renewed with fresh intensity that suggested the pain had not merely continued but had intensified or acquired new dimensions.

When the wheel ceased its rotation, Sandy was positioned right-side up, and I could observe his face with greater clarity than the previous position had permitted; his expression communicated a degree of suffering I had not previously witnessed on any being's countenance; tears streamed continuously down his face, mixing with saliva that dripped from his open mouth into his beard, and his eyes possessed a quality of desperate incomprehension, as though his mind was attempting to process an experience for which it had no adequate framework.

The torture continued for a duration I cannot specify with precision, as I possessed no means of measuring time and the continuous nature of Sandy's suffering created a subjective experience of endlessness; at some point his screams subsided not through any reduction in his pain but through simple mechanical failure of his vocal apparatus, which apparatus had been strained beyond its capacity through sustained use at maximum volume. He continued to produce sounds—whimpering, gasping, choking attempts at vocalization that emerged as mere whispers—but the screaming had ceased through exhaustion of the physical mechanism that generated it.

Finally, Oogie appeared to reach some threshold of satisfaction with Sandy's condition. He spun Sandy so his legs were again in the air, and then pulled back the bloodied underpants just enough to access Sandy’s very large, round buttocks. To my shock, Oogie unhesitatingly clasped his mouth over the old man’s fundament, and gave every appearance of sucking something up from that secret organ. I can only deduce it was into that orifice the vermin had burrowed and done their damage; but now they were claimed anew and restored into part of Oogie Boogie’s whole.

The monster next turned his attention to me, leaving Sandy Claws to dangle on the wheel. Oogie approached the iron maiden and opened its door; the spikes that had penetrated my construction withdrew as the mechanism released, and I felt relief at being freed from that confined position despite understanding that this release signified progression to whatever Oogie had designed as his next procedure; he seized me in his massive burlap tendrils and extracted me with the casual ease one might employ when removing a garment from storage. "Well, well! The little rescuer!" he said, holding me up to examine me at close range, his face positioned mere inches from my own; "Did you enjoy watching your fat friend get intimately acquainted with my constituents? But don't worry, I've got something special planned just for fabric dolls who stick their noses where they don't belong! You know what my favorite game is? Slots! Beautiful, simple, pure chance—well, pure chance if you're not the one who maintains the machine, which I am—but the aesthetic! The sound of coins falling! It's perfection! And since you’re just covered in slots, it would be rude not to let you play!"

He tossed me down face-first and pinned me from behind. I felt the familiar sensation of a stitch being compromised, just one on my back. He laughed, then reached into a bucket and withdrew a handful of large heavy tokens, each perhaps two inches in diameter, made of metal that appeared to be iron or steel.

He began forcing these tokens into the opening he had created, pushing them through the gap, driving them deep into my stuffing where they displaced leaves and created hard lumps within my interior; he continued adding tokens, handful after handful, perhaps fifty or sixty in total, until my fabric bulged grotesquely from the weight and volume of metal now occupying my abdomen.

"There we go! All loaded up! Now, the way this particular slot machine works is that we see how many coins come spilling out when I hit the jackpot!"

He released me from his pinning position and hauled me upright, positioning me to stand although my balance was compromised by the unnatural distribution of weight within my construction; I swayed, the tokens shifting inside me with audible metallic sounds.

He drew back his massive burlap fist and drove it into my back, directly at the location where he had stuffed the tokens; the impact produced multiple sensations simultaneously: the pain of the blow itself as it compressed my construction; the sharp discomfort of tokens being driven against my interior fabric from within; the sensation of stitching straining under the force; and the beginning of additional seam failure as threads popped under the combined pressure of impact and internal weight. I perceived the sound of perhaps two tokens tinging upon the floor; Oogie responded with pleasure but declared that this was not sufficient for a jackpot. He struck me again, harder this time, his fist connecting with my back with force that drove the remaining tokens deeper into my torso, compacting my stuffing, creating new stress points throughout my construction; more tokens spilled from the widening gap, perhaps a dozen this time, and I felt the seam extending vertically as additional threads gave way under the assault.

"Getting closer! Come on, big payout! Big payout!" He was chanting now, working himself into enthusiasm for his game, and he began striking me with unspeakable violence—my shoulders, my lower back, my belly, three times in rapid succession across my posterior, each blow creating new failures in stitching. I fell to my knees from the force of these impacts; Oogie simply continued striking me where I knelt, his blows now raining down from different angles, each impact calculated to maximize the damage to my seams.

The stitching failed catastrophically during one particularly forceful blow to my abdomen; the entire lower part of my torso tore open, and tokens poured out from under my dress in a cascade accompanied by a substantial portion of my stuffing. My legs remained firm but my hips lost everything, and I collapsed forward onto my face, my limbs splaying.

"JACKPOT!" Oogie shouted with genuine delight, his voice echoing through the chamber; "Look at that payout! That's what I call a win! Tokens everywhere! The machine is completely emptied out!"

I lay where I had fallen, barely capable of processing the sensations that continued to reach my consciousness; I could hear Oogie moving about, collecting the tokens he had beaten from my body, laughing throughout this recovery as though the entire exercise had been designed primarily for his entertainment rather than my destruction. He seized me and began forcing leaves back into my interior through the gaping wound, cramming in burlap handfuls without care for arrangement or proper distribution, simply filling me as one might stuff a sack. He worked quickly, restoring the majority of what I had lost, and then paused as if examining the filling for some abnormal quality; “You are one dirty little bitch, ain’t you? Your stuffing’s been pissed and fucked into…”

I can only conclude that he had found the remainders of Igor’s earlier desecration. I could make no response but to close my eyes in shame. He resumed stuffing me but with renewed vigor, taunting me with the most degrading epithets as he did so; when he had packed me full he produced needle and thread and began sewing the massive wound with large crude stitches, closing it just enough to contain the stuffing.

"There! Now you're ready!" He lifted me to my feet; I observed that the stitching he had employed was rather loose, with gaps of perhaps an inch between the fabric edges, creating openings through which my interior remained partially visible and accessible.

He brought me close to his body, positioning the crudely sewn seam directly against what served as his mouth; I felt his burlap face press against my fabric, felt the opening of his mouth align with the gaps in my stitching, and I understood with mounting horror that he began to spit insects into me; nor was it the relatively small quantity he had deposited in Sandy's clothing, but rather an enormous mass of them, hundreds upon hundreds of beetles and roaches and centipedes and worms; he forced these through the gaps in my stitching, filling my interior cavity with living creatures that immediately began to move and crawl throughout the space that my leaves occupied; I felt them penetrating into every corner of my construction, felt them displacing my stuffing, felt the horrible sensation of my interior being colonized by foreign bodies that had no right to occupy that space.

He continued this process for a duration I could not measure, emptying perhaps a third of his own contents into my body, transferring a substantial portion of the insects that comprised his being into my construction; I felt myself becoming heavier from the weight of countless small bodies, felt movement throughout my interior that was not my own, felt the increasing pressure as more and more insects were forced into a space that was already overfilled with stuffing.

When he finally ceased and pulled his face away from my back, I hung in his grip experiencing something approaching claustrophobia despite the fact that I was not the one confined: rather, I was the container. Yet still more disturbing than the pressure or the sensation of being filled with living creatures, was what began to occur in the moments following his withdrawal: I felt my left arm move, not through any volition of my own, but through some external force acting upon it from within. My right leg shifted next, the knee bending slightly though I had issued no instruction for this motion; I attempted to hold the leg still through application of will but found that my control was compromised, that something else was influencing my limbs' movements, and I understood with creeping horror what was occurring within my body: the insects were not merely occupying space inside me, but were moving in coordinated fashion, their collective mass and motion sufficient to manipulate my limbs from within; they were pressing against my fabric from the interior, creating forces that moved my arms and legs and head according to their collective intention rather than mine. I was being controlled, puppeted, operated from within by the creatures that Oogie had deposited inside me.

"Do you understand now?" Oogie asked, his voice carrying satisfaction at whatever expression my face was displaying; "I'm just bugs in a sack, sweetheart—always have been, always will be! The burlap is just container, and now so are you—my sack, my extension, my extra body!"

My arm raised without my consent, lifted by the coordinated pushing of hundreds of insects against my interior fabric; I attempted to lower my arm through application of my own will but found myself unable: the insects' collective force overrode my intention, and I had become a passenger in my own body.

“Let’s do a little test,” Oogie said, and the next I knew I was reclining upon the floor, lifting my skirts and spreading my legs without any will to do so. Oogie, though his form was somewhat deflated from his losses, loomed over me. His attention seemed to fall upon that disgusting clitoris Finklestein had installed upon me. He ran a burlap tendril across it, and then spat a large scorpion from his mouth which locked its pinchers around the delicate piece of flesh and cruelly snipped off its tip. I screamed in the utmost agony at so brutal and painful a procedure, but I nevertheless found my body holding completely still and enduring this torture despite myself. The creature repeated the operation, amputating the remainder of that sensitive part, and I could not so much as shut my legs to avoid it.

"Perfect! Full control,” Oogie laughed, and in a final indignity rubbed his burlap over the injured spot to agitate it further. "Now, here is what we're going to do: I need to get some snake and spider stew prepared for boiling—it takes time to work out the proper seasonings, and I can't do all that and keep an eye on you two at the same time. So you are going to help me out! While I'm busy with the cauldron, you're going make sure your friend here don’t get too bored, ain’t that right?”

He laughed at this arrangement, then he reached into his mouth and produced from its depths three vipers, which my hand unwillingly received from him. 

“No need to explain the plan, you’ll know what to do,” he declared with a wink, and then he departed to perform his own operations. 

I next felt my body begin to move, my legs carrying me according to his intention while my consciousness screamed protests that produced no effect whatsoever on my physical actions. My body approached the wheel where Sandy hung inverted, his position having been left unchanged since Oogie's earlier violations; the red fabric of his suit had fallen over his head due to gravity's effect on his upside-down orientation, exposing his torso, and I observed this vulnerable expanse of skin with horror that originated not from what I saw but from what I understood I was about to be made to do.

My hand—operating according to Oogie's will transmitted through the insects inside me—raised the three vipers he had provided, arranging them in a configuration that permitted me to hold all three by their tails simultaneously, creating an improvised flog; the snakes writhed and hissed, their mouths opening to display fangs.

"Sandy—" I managed to speak, my voice at least remaining under my own control even as my body moved according to external command; "Sandy, I'm so sorry, I cannot stop this, he's controlling me from inside, I have no—"

My arm drew back and brought the snake-flog down across Sandy's exposed torso before I could complete my explanation; I felt the impact transmit through my arm, felt the snakes' bodies strike his flesh, heard his cry of pain and renewed terror, and experienced a horror more profound than any I had yet endured because this violation was occurring through my actions, even though my will had no part in commanding them.

"I'm not doing this!" I cried out, my voice breaking; "He's inside me, he's moving me, I cannot stop!”

My arm raised again and delivered a second strike, the vipers' fangs catching Sandy's skin, tearing small wounds, injecting venom that would add chemical torment to the damage; Sandy's whimpers suggested he understood my explanation but could derive no comfort from it, as the distinction between unwilling and willing perpetrator mattered little when one was receiving the blows. I continued to protest my unwillingness, but a third strike cut off my words, my arm moving with precision to target a different area of Sandy's torso, the snakes wrapping partially around his ribs before my hand pulled back, their fangs leaving new punctures and trails of blood.

I was not merely puppet but unwilling participant, my body betraying my intentions, my physical form operating in direct contradiction to every desire my consciousness could formulate. I wept now, tears streaming down my face even as my body continued its methodical assault. Strike after strike fell upon Sandy's torso, my arm rising and falling with mechanical regularity, the vipers leaving their marks across his chest, his sides, his stomach, creating a systematic pattern of wounds that demonstrated the thoroughness Oogie demanded even when working through a proxy body; I was being forced to torture someone I had risked everything to save, forced to inflict suffering on a being who had done me no harm, forced to become instrument of Oogie's appetite despite my every moral conviction screaming against these actions. The psychological torment of this complicity exceeded any physical violation I had endured; through all the rest I had at least remained victim rather than perpetrator; but now my body was being used as weapon against another, and though my consciousness rejected these actions with absolute conviction, I was no longer Sally who loved Jack and attempted rescue despite inadequacy; I was merely container for Oogie's will, merely tool for Oogie's entertainment, merely flesh—or rather, fabric—through which appetite could express itself.

My arm continued its work, delivering strike after strike upon Sandy’s bloodied torso, and I could do nothing but weep and apologize.

"Oh, for crying out loud—literally!" Oogie's voice called from across the chamber where he was engaged in his preparations; “Stop with the weeping and the apologizing! I'm trying to get the seasoning correct and all I can hear is 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please forgive me'—it's pathetic! You're bringing me down! You know what?” he cried, “I just got a much better idea—a way to shut you both up!" I felt the insects within my body shift in response, as though they were communicating with their source, receiving new instructions, preparing for implementation of whatever modification to his plan he had conceived.

Loose stitching was always part of Finklestein’s design (the better to split apart and resew) but now Oogie was making his own employment of it. I found myself inserting the handful of vipers into my own seams, between the gaps of the sparse threads. I did not immediately feel much impact from the addition of these snakes versus the vermin that already infested me; but in a moment… oh God! Jack, I can barely bring myself to speak of it. My body was compelled to pull down the good old man’s underpants—or strictly to pull them up due to his inverted position—and take his male member fully into my mouth. This was cruel enough to me; but adding to the revolting display, the snakes emerged from the seam between my legs, and whilst my mouth remained engaged in this offensive action, I was made to lift my skirts and introduce these snakes into Sandy’s mouth in turn. You can imagine that neither of us derived pleasure from this, although the action of nature meant Sandy Claws did begin to enlarge and harden in my mouth after some minutes. I was compelled to see out this process to the end; he discharged into my mouth; I swallowed the liquor, and even at that was I not permitted to stop. I cannot speak for Sandy Claws’s experience. 

At last I was permitted by the insects to pull away; the snakes slid from me and remained lodged in Sandy’s throat to further choke him. I walked unwilling to the arms of Oogie Boogie, who secured me with rope, binding my wrists and ankles with knots I recognized as designed to tighten under struggle; he carried me to a large platform suspended above a cooking vessel of dimensions sufficient to accommodate multiple bodies, currently filled with bubbling liquid that produced steam and an odor suggesting the simmering of various organic materials; onto this platform I was placed, at which time Oogie snapped his mouth over my face and with ferocious sucking action began drawing out all the insects and serpents and worms through my seams. I screamed; but they were all removed, and at last I was free from his control and from infestation. Soon Sandy Claws was placed at my side, alive but in an unspeakable distress. 

The platform on which we were arranged was familiar in its configuration; it resembled the same operating platform Finklestein had employed in his laboratory, designed to tilt at various angles to facilitate access to the subject positioned upon it; but where Finklestein's platform tilted for surgical convenience, this one was positioned to tilt toward the cauldron, to deliver its occupants into the boiling liquid below.

Oogie deposited us upon the platform with evident satisfaction. "Now then," he said, his voice maintaining that jovial quality, "let's make this interesting! I could just dump you in right now—that would be nice and quick—but where's the fun in that? No, no, we're going to play a game! A game of chance, a game of fate, a game that asks luck itself how long you have left!"

He grasped a pair of red dice and shook them for effect. "Here's how it works: I roll the dice, the universe tells me a number, and I crank the gears to that number. Each crank tilts you a little closer to the soup. Eventually, inevitably, you slide right in. The question isn't whether you'll die—everyone dies, that's fixed, that's certain—the question is just how many rolls you get before the platform tips! You see, this is really just a more honest version of life itself! Everyone pretends they're not sliding toward the inevitable—they make plans, they build things, they convince themselves their existence has permanence—but really they're just on a platform that's tilting degree by degree toward oblivion, and the only variable is how many rolls they get before they slide off the edge. Some people get lucky, get low numbers for a while, live long lives telling themselves they've beaten the odds—but the platform's still tilting, still moving them toward the same destination everyone reaches eventually! All your struggling, all your hoping, all your believing in meaning or purpose or love—that’s just entertainment for those of us watching the game. And here's what I particularly appreciate about this setup: it gives you hope! Each time the dice show a low number, each time you get another few minutes on the platform, you think 'maybe I'll survive this, maybe the dice will keep being kind, maybe I'll find a way out'—and that hope makes the eventual slide into the soup so much more satisfying! Because you see, when creatures die believing they might have lived, when they slide into the boil still thinking escape was possible, the flavor is just—" he made a chef's kiss gesture with his massive burlap hand, “That's the art of it! That's what separates a simple meal from genuine cuisine!”

He moved to the dice mechanism and placed his hand upon it, ready to execute the first roll.

I shall not elaborate upon the tedious process that followed—the rolling of dice, the cranking of the mechanism that tilted our platform incrementally toward the boiling cauldron; Oogie maintained his jovial commentary throughout, celebrating high numbers and lamenting low ones as though genuinely participating in a game of chance rather than executing a predetermined outcome. During this process—perhaps the third or fourth roll, I cannot recall precisely—a voice penetrated from outside Oogie's lair, amplified and official, unmistakably belonging to the Mayor: “The king of Halloween has been blown to smithereens! Skeleton Jack is now a pile of dust!”

The words struck me with force more devastating than any physical blow I had endured; I felt something within me—not my stuffing, not my construction, but something essential to whatever constituted my consciousness—collapse entirely; you were dead, Jack, killed while executing the very plan I had suffered so much to prevent, destroyed by consequences I had foreseen and warned against and been unable to stop.

I had believed, despite all philosophical arguments to the contrary and despite every libertine who had demonstrated love's impotence, that love possessed transcendent value, that it justified sacrifice, that my suffering in your service carried meaning even if you never acknowledged it; but now I was told you were dead, and the universe had demonstrated with perfect clarity that my love had changed nothing, prevented nothing, accomplished nothing except to make me more vulnerable to predation while I pursued a protection I could never provide. Every violation I had endured, every degradation I had accepted, every moment of terror and pain and humiliation—all of it had been in service of protecting you, of preventing exactly this outcome; the very first day I glimpsed you across the town square, Igor violated me unconscious in the forest; when I escaped to attend your town meeting about Christmas, Finklestein strapped me to his table and forced himself upon me; the zombie had tried to consume my brain while I worked toward warning you; the Mayor—that same Mayor whose voice now announced your death—had attempted to murder me while I tried to continue the costume work only as a means to communicate with you; the snake-fingered creature had raped me and dismembered me into constituent parts while I pursued that same assignment; Igor had extracted his payment a second time in exchange for the fog juice that might have grounded you; I had just been tortured, mutilated and raped, no, made to commit a rape by Oogie Boogie—and all of it, every moment of suffering, had accomplished nothing except to deliver me to this platform above a boiling cauldron where I would die knowing that you had died first, that my love—the one conviction that had sustained me through every trial—had been useless. That it should be the Mayor delivering this news—the same cruel Mayor who had left me impaled on his skewer, who had calmly discussed his murder of two hundred forty-three women—that he should be the voice announcing your destruction and the collapse of everything I had endured these violations to prevent, added a final layer of bitter irony to my despair.

What had been the purpose of my existence? I had been created by Finklestein to serve his appetites, had escaped to pursue love, and had discovered that both states—servitude and freedom—delivered me to the same outcome: I was a thing to be used, and the only variable was which being would use me for what purpose; Finklestein had used me for domestic labor and physical satisfaction; you had used me for costume construction; every creature I had encountered during my homeless period had used me for whatever appetite I happened to satisfy; and now Oogie would use me for soup, and my love would dissolve into the boiling liquid along with my consciousness, leaving no trace, no meaning, no evidence that I had ever existed or that my existence had mattered. At these thoughts I experienced a despair so profound that the physical threat of the cauldron seemed almost irrelevant; what did it matter whether I died by boiling or by some other method? You were already dead; I would follow you into nonexistence shortly, and the universe would be entirely indifferent to both our deaths, and every act the libertines had committed to demonstrate love's fraudulence would be proven correct.

And then… you appeared at the entrance to Oogie's lair, Jack! Alive and whole and entirely contrary to the Mayor's announcement; I cannot adequately describe the sensation that seized me at that moment—a relief so profound that it bordered on physical pain, joy that overrode every other emotion including the terror of my immediate circumstances, a flooding return of hope that I had believed permanently extinguished; you were alive… therefore my suffering had not been entirely purposeless, and therefore love might yet possess some trace of the value I had attributed to it.

I shall not elaborate upon the events that followed, as you recall them with greater clarity than I could provide; you defeated Oogie through means I observed but barely comprehended, at last unraveling the thread that held his construction together and destroying his constituent insects; Sandy Claws was freed and swiftly fled; I found myself no longer facing imminent consumption but rather standing before you, commanding your attention. We were interrupted swiftly when the Mayor arrived at the pit's edge accompanied by Lock, Shock, and Barrel, and between them they managed to lower ropes by which we could be hauled to the surface; that the Mayor should assist in my rescue after having attempted my murder struck me as yet another illustration of Halloween Town's fundamental incoherence, but I was in no position to refuse aid regardless of its source.

We returned to town in a celebratory mood—or rather, you and the assembled citizens returned in such a mood; I followed, experiencing emotions too complex to categorize as celebration, grateful for your survival yet entirely uncertain what would follow, what acknowledgment if any you might offer for what I had done.

Sandy Claws passed overhead in his sleigh not long after our return, and I observed him with some trepidation, uncertain whether he harbored rage at his treatment or intended some retribution upon Halloween Town for the disruption of his holiday; but instead he called down to the assembled crowd—"Happy Halloween!"—his voice carrying genuine warmth rather than irony or mockery, and then snow began to fall upon Halloween Town, real snow such as we had never experienced in our perpetual autumn climate.

The crowd received this gift with wonder and delight, catching snowflakes, marveling at the cold and the beauty and the novelty of it; and I understood in that moment that Sandy Claws was offering forgiveness, demonstrating through this gesture that the citizens of Halloween Town were not irredeemable, that they could be pardoned for their trespasses, that even creatures like ourselves—monsters who had kidnapped him, imprisoned him, subjected him to violations—deserved joy and kindness and the possibility of mercy.

That he offered this gift as much to me as to anyone else, despite knowing nothing of my particular suffering or my attempts to prevent the disaster, struck me as evidence that perhaps the libertines were not entirely correct in their philosophy, that perhaps kindness could exist without calculation of benefit, that perhaps the universe contained forces other than appetite and indifference.

You walked away to rejoice with the others, Jack, and I was relegated to my familiar position of observer rather than participant in your joy; the crowd celebrated your survival and the snow and the resolution of the Christmas crisis, and I stood at its periphery feeling the isolation that had characterized my entire existence since creation.

I departed the plaza and made my way to the graveyard hill, where you had stood a few months before, singing of your despair. I climbed the hill slowly, exhausted by the day's events, carrying within me the complex knowledge that you lived but did not seek my company, that I loved you but this love appeared to be unreturned, that I had suffered enormously in service of your welfare yet remained unacknowledged. 

It was amidst this thought I became aware of your presence behind me, Jack, and I turned to find that you had followed me to this location rather than remaining with the celebrating crowd; that you had sought me out specifically, and were here in the graveyard with me rather than there in the plaza with them.

Thus have I told you everything, Jack. Everything you have just heard. All of it. Every violation, every escape, every moment of suffering endured because I believed you were worth protecting, because I believed love possessed value even when materially useless, because I could not abandon the conviction that my existence meant something so long as it meant caring for yours.

Now you know, Jack. Now you understand what brought me to this graveyard, what I paid to reach this moment, what love cost me and whether it was worth the price. Forgive me. A thousand apologies for sullying your mind with such obscenities, for forcing you to envision what was done to me, for troubling your peace with these impure recitations. Perhaps I have offended whatever powers govern this place by speaking so plainly of such things. I have renewed my own wounds in the telling; but you asked to understand, and I... I needed you to know. Not the Sally who made your suit, not the figure who tried to warn you, but the being who suffered, who believed, who loved you despite everything.

And now you know.

…

Jack Skellington had not heard this confession without being shaken to his very bones. The Sally who sat beside him on that snowy hill—the Sally he had rescued from Oogie's lair, the Sally he had thought to court with romantic declarations—this Sally was not who he had imagined at all. She was someone who had suffered beyond his comprehension, who had believed in love with a purity that shamed his own casual assumptions, who had paid prices he could not begin to calculate for the simple hope that he might see her.

"Sally," he said, and his voice emerged hollow, changed. "I didn't know. I never... I should have seen you. All this time, you were right there, and I..." He reached for her hands, held them carefully, aware suddenly of how she could come apart, how fragile her construction was, how much she had endured. "Stay with me. Come to my mansion. I'll make this right. You won't have to return to him, you won't have to hide on the streets, you'll never have to—" His voice caught. "I love you, Sally. I see you now. I finally see you."

And perhaps in that moment, having heard everything, he truly did comprehend what she was, what she had believed, what she had suffered in his name. Perhaps the love he offered was real, imperfect as it was, belated as it was. She had been right about love existing, and here it was, finally hers to take.

She moved into his embrace, felt his bone arms around her fabric body. For the first time in her short existence, she experienced the thing she had believed in: recognition without possession, affection without use, love that saw her as she was.

The snow, that gift from Sandy that Jack had earned through his Christmas disaster, covered the spiral hill in white, making everything clean and beautiful, transforming the horrors of Halloween Town into something almost peaceful.

"Come," Jack said, releasing her but keeping one hand in hers. "Let's go home."

They stood together and oriented themselves towards the path that would lead them down from the hill, toward his mansion, toward the beautiful life she had imagined in her most desperate hopeful moments.

Sally took a step. The snow had melted beneath them, becoming a wet and unstable slush. Her foot found no purchase. She slipped.

Jack's hand grasped at hers, but her fabric fingers slid through his bone ones. She fell.

The spiral hill was tall, and a decorative iron fence stood at the base with pointed finials aimed upward like spears. 

Sally's trajectory was brief, unremarkable. She struck the fence post-first, the pointed iron entering through the base of her skull and piercing upward into the recycled human brain that had governed all her actions, all her beliefs, all her capacity to love. She died instantly, consciousness extinguished as thoroughly as if she had never existed; but death, while immediate for her mind, was neither clean nor dignified for her body: the impact sent soft brain matter gushing through the crack in the cranium, leaking like froth on an overfilled beer pint down what remained of her head. Her tongue fluttered loose from her mouth, dribbling saliva onto the wall below. One glass eye came loose, dangling by its thread. The other stared blankly upward at nothing. The impact tore her stitching at the neck, and her body fell away. The dried leaves that filled her construction began to spill from the gap, scattering in the slight wind.

She hung there on the fence post—just a head impaled on iron, a disconnected torso and limbs in a crumpled heap below, leaves blowing across the silent graves. She was horrible to look at. Not Sally anymore, but the component materials of a failed construction, displayed in their ugly truth.

Jack stood at the top of the hill, one hand still extended, and screamed her name into the night. He leapt down, his feet slipping on the same treacherous ice that had killed her, and when he reached her remains, he fell to his knees in this slush. He endeavored to gather the pieces—the torso, the limbs, handling them with a desperate gentleness that came far too late. Yet, he realized, there was no repairing this. The skull was cracked. The brain that had made her different, that had given her the capacity to love in a town that understood only use, was destroyed. He was holding cloth and leaves and broken glass. The thing that had been Sally was gone.

Jack remained there, as the night deepened, as the scattered leaves blew away, as the reality settled over him with crushing weight: Love had finally existed between them, genuine and mutual, recognized and reciprocated. She had been right all along. But greater than the law of love was Newton's law of gravity, and it cared nothing for philosophy.

Jack Skellington did not return to his responsibilities as Pumpkin King. He withdrew to the forest, and what he did there was never again the business of Halloweenland, for in that place he never again was seen.

O you who have shed tears over the misfortunes of this tale; you who have pitied the unfortunate Sally; in pardoning the perhaps excessively stark portrayals that the author found necessary to employ, may you extract from this history what Jack Skellington learned too late. May you comprehend that love—genuine mutual recognition and affection—is real and worth pursuing even in worlds that do not value it; and may you understand equally that such philosophical correctness grants no immunity from pain.