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Sally's Song	By : Plume Category: +M through R > Nightmare Before Christmas, The Views: 20 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: The author gains no pecuniary advantage from this work, and does not own any elements from the film The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Chapter List
- 1-Tome I
- 1
The masterwork of philosophy would be to determine whether Love possesses any force in the material operations of the world, or whether it exists merely as a delusion entertained by those creatures unfortunate enough to possess the capacity for such sentiment. For if it be demonstrated that a being devoted entirely to Love meets only with suffering and degradation, while those who pursue their appetites without restraint find satisfaction and prosperity, must we not conclude that Love, however poets may celebrate it, confers no advantage upon its adherent and indeed operates as a positive impediment to her welfare? And if this be true, what are we to make of the persistent belief, held by certain sensitive natures against all evidence, that Love possesses transformative power—that it "conquers all"—when observation suggests rather that indifference conquers Love with perfect consistency?
It is to investigate this question that the following testimony is offered. Here shall be related the history of a creature who maintained her faith in Love's supremacy despite accumulated proofs of its impotence, who directed her devotion toward one who regarded her with no particular interest, and who suffered accordingly. Whether such a narrative instructs us in Love's futility, or whether it demonstrates some quality in persistent affection that redeems its material failures, the reader must determine. The situations presented are sometimes of considerable violence, and the philosophies articulated by various personages contradict entirely the principles to which the narrator clings; but truth requires that both the sufferings and the arguments against sentiment be rendered with accuracy, that the reader may judge fairly between competing visions of how a rational being ought to conduct herself in this world.

Jack Skellington held the position of Pumpkin King, which is to say, director and sovereign of the Halloween celebration—that peculiar holiday observed in the world of mortals each thirty-first of October, when the living make temporary peace with death and darkness, when fear becomes entertainment and the uncanny transforms into spectacle. For as long as this holiday had existed in America—which is to say, for several centuries—Jack had governed its execution from Halloween Town, that curious municipality existing in some dimension adjacent to the mortal realm, populated entirely by creatures whose forms and natures reflected the holiday's themes: skeletons, vampires, werewolves, witches, ghouls, and various other entities designed to provoke fright and unease in the human population.
The culture of this place operated on principles perhaps foreign to those familiar only with mortal societies, though not, perhaps, as foreign as one might initially suppose. Halloween Town valued effectiveness in its designated function—the production of fright—and each citizen possessed both the form and the philosophical orientation suited to this purpose. Murder, torture, kidnapping, and various other acts that human civilization theoretically condemns were here not merely permitted but celebrated, provided they served the holiday's objectives. The citizens were content with this arrangement, finding in the annual preparation and execution of Halloween a satisfaction that required no justification beyond the pleasure of frightening mortals and the aesthetic perfection of their scares.
Jack himself had embodied this contentment for centuries. He was, by all accounts, supremely suited to his role: creative, dedicated, possessed of both the vision to conceive new terrors and the authority to direct their implementation. The citizens followed his instructions with enthusiasm, and each year's Halloween proved more elaborate, more technically accomplished, more effective in its capacity to unsettle the mortal population than the last. By any measure available within Halloween Town's value system, Jack Skellington had achieved complete success.
And yet, in this most recent year—in the months following what should have been yet another triumphant Halloween celebration—Jack had discovered himself afflicted by a dissatisfaction he could neither adequately explain nor successfully dismiss. The holiday that had once absorbed his complete attention now struck him as repetitive, predictable, perhaps even tedious. "Year after year, it's the same routine," he found himself thinking, though he could not articulate just what alternative he desired, or what different purpose might replace the one that had defined his existence for so long.
It was in this state of unease that Jack, wandering the woods outside Halloween Town on the night following that most recent October celebration, encountered something that would alter not merely his own trajectory but the fate of another creature whose existence he had, until this point, barely registered. Deep in the forest, he discovered a circle of trees, each bearing upon its trunk a carved door representing a different holiday: Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Independence Day, and others. These were portals, he realized, to other holiday worlds—entire dimensions dedicated to celebrations whose existence he had never suspected, whose philosophies and values might be entirely different from Halloween Town's culture of fright.
Jack, in his hunger for novelty, opened the door marked with a gayly decorated pine tree and his bones tumbled into Christmas Town.
What he discovered there was an emphasis on joy rather than fear, on giving rather than taking, on warmth rather than unease. This unheard of practice struck him with the force of revelation. Here was the alternative he had been seeking without knowing it, the new purpose that might rescue him from his ennui. He returned to Halloween Town possessed by an enthusiasm he had not felt in years, and after some weeks of consideration, convinced himself that he could and should take over the Christmas holiday: that Halloween Town could execute this celebration of joy with the same technical excellence it brought to the production of fright.
The citizens, observing their King's renewed energy, supported this plan with their characteristic enthusiasm. Preparations began. Assignments were distributed. The machinery of Halloween Town, so long dedicated to October's purposes, turned its attention to commandeering December's celebration.
Jack, in his excitement over Christmas, in his dedication to this new project that had rescued him from purposelessness, distributed assignments throughout Halloween Town, utilizing the well refined abilities of the townfolk who answered to him. The most crucial task—the kidnapping of "Sandy Claws," as Jack understood the name of Christmas's presiding figure—he delegated to three particularly mischievous children known as Lock, Shock, and Barrel. Various other citizens received instructions for manufacturing toys, decorating the sleigh, and preparing the necessities of this unfamiliar holiday.
Among these assignments was the creation of Jack's costume for the great event. He required a "Sandy Claws" suit, and for this singular task he selected a girl who possessed evident talent for sewing, as demonstrated by her own stitched construction. Her name was Sally, this much he knew; and he understood her to be a creation of the town’s Evil Scientist, Doctor Finkelstein, and built to serve as that scientist's companion. She often appeared uneasy in Jack's presence—a detail he noted but did not investigate. Whatever her troubles, she completed for him the suit as he had directed, delivering it with workmanship that met his exacting standards.
The preparations proceeded. Sandy Claws was successfully claimed and delivered, and he was escorted away to be held until after the holiday's completion. Jack donned the red suit Sally had sewn. There occurred some small delay—an unexpected fog that obscured the launch—but this was bypassed sufficiently for Jack to take flight in his coffin-sleigh, drawn into the night by skeletal reindeer and guided by his bright-nosed ghost dog named Zero; and this collective began the delivery of a most unusual Christmas to the mortal world.
It went catastrophically wrong. The presents which Jack delivered had been designed by those in Halloweenland who thought only of their wishes. Shrunken heads, man-eating plants, dangerous toys constructed according to Halloween Town's aesthetic, terrified rather than delighted their human recipients. The mortal population, expecting joy and receiving horror, responded with alarm and outrage. Military forces were mobilized to destroy the villain who subjected the earthly populace to such cruelties. Jack's sleigh was targeted and destroyed in the midst of his flight.
From a considerable height he fell groundward, but he survived the impact through advantages peculiar to his skeletal construction, and lay among the wreckage understanding at last that he had fundamentally misapprehended Christmas's nature. His attempt to execute this foreign holiday according to Halloween Town's principles had been, not merely unsuccessful, but philosophically incoherent.
He returned to Halloween Town with the intention of releasing Sandy Claws, of apologizing for this interference, of restoring Christmas to its proper administrator. But upon his return he discovered an unexpected complication: Sandy Claws was no longer in the custody of Lock, Shock, and Barrel, where Jack had ordered him kept. The children had apparently delivered the prisoner to the boogey man, a burlap-bodied entity denominated as Oogie Boogie. This was a creature who dwelt in a darkened pit—shunned, whispered of, feared even by those who feared little—and whose appetites exceeded the boundaries that even Halloween's monsters observed among themselves.
When Jack descended into this pit he was started to discover, resting there alongside the captive Sandy Claws, inexplicably was also the same Sally who had sewn his yuletide costume. Jack did not pause to investigate how this situation had developed; the immediate necessity was their rescue. What followed was violent and, by most standards, gruesome—Jack's confrontation with Oogie Boogie resulted in the creature's unraveling, his burlap skin torn open and the thousands of insects that composed his true form incinerated in boiling soup. Jack felt little remorse for this destruction; Oogie Boogie had been, after all, a remarkably poor host to his captives, and his elimination seemed a proportionate response to his behavior.
Sandy Claws was apologized to with considerable embarrassment. Jack expected recrimination, perhaps even some cosmic punishment for his interference with Christmas, but Sandy proved unexpectedly forgiving. He departed immediately to repair what damage Jack's misguided celebration had caused, his priority being the restoration of his holiday rather than to enact vengeance for the abuses he had suffered during captivity.
When this was done, Jack turned to Sally, being at so long last enabled to address the question of her presence in that terrible place. "How did you get down here, Sally?" he began—but he progressed no further, for at that moment Lock, Shock, and Barrel appeared at the entrance to Oogie's lair, accompanied by the town’s Mayor. They had all come searching for Jack, and the happy surprise upon finding him thus alive when everything had led them to fear the worst, transformed their visages immediately from frowns of concern to smiles of jubilation.
The town, it emerged, had received reports of Jack's destruction during his Christmas flight—the military response, the flaming wreckage falling from the sky—and had already been in mourning for their Pumpkin King. To discover him alive, intact, and returned to Halloween Town, provoked celebrations that eclipsed even the usual post-Halloween festivities. Lock, Shock, Barrel, and the Mayor assisted skeleton Jack and ragdoll Sally up from the pit and back to the town proper, where the citizens gathered in triumphant relief at their King's survival.
It was in the midst of this that Sandy Claws returned, as though to add wonder to an already extraordinary night. He bore no grudge, sought no retribution, but instead offered a gift: snow—a weather condition entirely foreign to this place, unprecedented in its history, and beautiful in its strangeness. The citizens marveled at this phenomenon, reaching up to catch the flakes, exclaiming over the way it transformed their familiar environment into something dreamlike and new.
Jack stood among the celebrating citizens, absorbing their relief and joy, but his attention was drawn to an unexpected tableau at the edge of the plaza. Doctor Finkelstein, that wheelchair-bound scientist who served as Halloween Town's primary inventor and Sally's creator, was engaged in conversation with another figure—a female creation, obviously new, who bore certain resemblances to Sally in construction but differed significantly in clothing, demeanor and, Jack noticed with some disquiet, in the shape of her head. The two were speaking with evident affection, touching with a tenderness that suggested intimate familiarity, displaying the sort of romantic connection that Jack had never observed between Finkelstein and Sally.
The observation disturbed Jack, though he could not immediately articulate why. It was clear to him that Sally had been replaced, that Finkelstein had constructed a new companion and discarded the previous one; but why should this trouble him? Sally was simply a citizen of Halloween Town, a seamstress who had sewn his suit. Her replacement should not matter to him personally. Yet, to him, it seemed as if it did matter. The longer Jack contemplated the scene, the more a peculiar unease settled in his bones. Jack found himself searching the plaza for her, needing suddenly to speak with her, to understand her circumstances, to, if necessary, offer succor to one in need. He could not locate her among the celebrating citizens, but he glimpsed her distinctive figure stepping through the town gates towards the graveyard.
It was in this moment that Jack began to perceive something he had been too preoccupied to notice throughout all the Christmas preparations, throughout all the time Sally had existed in his peripheral awareness: he cared about her. Not as a despot cares about a useful citizen, not as a king acknowledges a skilled craftsperson, but as one being cares for another whose presence has become, without his conscious recognition, essential to his happiness.
Was this love? Jack, who had never experienced such a thing and who had dedicated centuries to Halloween's execution without considering personal attachments, found the realization both exhilarating and terrifying. He loved Sally. He wanted to be near her, to understand her, to offer her something better than the casual dismissal he had shown her thus far.
He found her at last on the spiral hill overlooking the town, sitting alone in the falling snow, her patchwork dress dusted with a thin veil of shimmering snowflakes. She appeared small against the vast darkness of Halloween spread below, her posture suggesting contemplation rather than celebration. Her expression, when he approached close enough to observe it, was difficult to read.
"My dearest friend," Jack began, the words emerging with uncharacteristic hesitancy, "if you don't mind, I'd like to join you by your side, where we can gaze into the stars..."
Her response exceeded anything he might have hoped for. She turned to him with an expression of such pure yet composed joy, such evident reciprocation of the feelings he had only just discovered in himself, that Jack felt his usually articulate nature fail him entirely. They spoke—tentative words, gentle acknowledgments, the shy negotiation of two beings discovering mutual affection—and when they kissed, when Sally accepted his love with a sweetness that suggested she had been hoping for this moment far longer than Jack had known to want it, he felt something settle in his chest that might have been contentment, or completion, or simply the recognition that he had found what his dissatisfaction with Halloween had actually been seeking all along.
They stood together in the snow, in that perfect moment of mutual recognition, and Jack found himself smiling with uncomplicated happiness for the first time in recent memory.
With the curiosity of someone who has just discovered he cares deeply about another's experiences, the skeleton king posed the following words to his companion: "You know, you still haven't told me how you got down there. What were you doing?"
At this inquiry, Sally’s expression shifted—not unhappy, precisely, but grown serious, weighted with considerations Jack could not yet understand. She looked at him for a long moment, as though deciding something, and then she spoke with a quiet intensity that commanded his complete attention:
"Jack, if I am to answer that question truthfully, I must tell you far more than how I came to be in Oogie Boogie's pit. I must tell you everything—my creation, my captivity, what I have endured in the time since Finkelstein gave me consciousness."
She paused, and Jack saw something in her expression that might have been fear, or shame, or simply exhaustion at the prospect of what she was about to undertake.
"To recount the story of my existence," she continued quietly, "is to question whether love can exist in a world structured to deny it, to offer you the most striking example of suffering without cause, to reveal obscenities and violations that will trouble your peace and perhaps alter how you perceive this town you have governed for so long. I... I hardly dare..."
Tears gathered in her glass eyes, threatening to spill, and Jack squeezed her hands gently. "Sally, I want to understand,” he coaxed. “Whatever you need to tell me, I'm listening."
She looked at him for a long moment, seemed to draw strength from his attention, and when she spoke again her voice had steadied. It now vibrated with the quality of someone who has resolved to tell the complete truth regardless of consequences.
"Then I must ask you to prepare yourself, for I will not soften what I tell you. I will speak plainly of degradations and cruelties, of philosophical arguments made while I was being violated, of the ways this town has used me since the moment Finkelstein gave me consciousness. You have asked, and I... I need you to know, to comprehend the being who suffered, who believed despite all evidence that love was real, who loved you when you did not see me."
Jack nodded, his skeletal features arranged in an expression of complete attention. "Tell me everything."
And so Sally began.

…
I shall endeavour to recount to you the circumstances of my arrival into this world, though the memory presents a paradox I have never satisfactorily resolved: I awoke knowing both everything and nothing simultaneously.
My very first sensation was of falling—a violent descent from some suspended state onto a cold metallic surface. Herein was the first strangeness: I knew the word metal. I knew the word cold, knew the word surface, knew the concept of falling and the expectation of pain that ought to accompany such an impact. I possessed language entire, a vast cathedral of words and meanings, yet I could not have told you my own name, for as yet I had none.
Above me the air still crackled with galvanic fire. I knew this term also—galvanic—and understood I was witnessing the dissipation of electrical current. How? From where had this knowledge come? I had existed for mere seconds.
"Yes! Yes!" a voice shrieked—and I knew shrieking, knew voices, knew that this particular timbre suggested madness or exultation or both. "I control life! The spark divine is mine to command!"
I turned my head—knowing how to turn a head, knowing I possessed one—and beheld my creator. The word duck arrived unbidden as I studied his long, bill-like countenance. Wheelchair supplied itself as I observed his conveyance. Laboratory named the space around me. My mind offered these gifts freely, though I had never earned them.
The creature beside him was already catalogued before I had consciously examined him—one rolling eye, one dead, legs so stunted they seemed architectural afterthoughts. Hunchback. Assistant.
I knew so much. Yet I did not know why I was, or what I was for.
I found I could not speak. The mechanisms of language existed within me—I felt words pressing against the interior of my consciousness like birds against cage wire—yet the apparatus of their delivery seemed a broken bellows that could not force air into meaning. I therefore merely observed, as a naturalist might observe a foreign specimen, except that the specimen was my own self.
I wore a grey dress. I knew this word, knew too that a dress was a thing separate from the body it adorned, though in my case the distinction seemed almost philosophical: the fabric of my garment and the fabric of my flesh were near identical in texture and composition. Where dress ended and self began, I could not say with certainty. I flexed my fingers—I knew fingers, knew flexing—and watched the cloth of my skin wrinkle and bunch around joints that possessed no bone. Seams ornamented my arms in crude, uneven stitches, the work of someone who had sewn in haste or indifference. I understood, with a knowledge that preceded reason, that these seams could be opened. That I was not so much a creature as a container, and a provisional one at that.
The two men approached the table with undisguised excitement. The wheelchair-bound one propelled himself forward with almost infantile eagerness, his bill-face stretched into what I understood to be a smile.
"My dear," he addressed me, and I felt the words land upon my consciousness with peculiar weight, as though I were being claimed by them. He produced from somewhere a small china teacup, delicately painted, and held it before my face with the theatrical precision of a conjurer. "Tell me. What is this?"
“A cup," I said, and was startled to discover that I had said it.
His delight was immediate and grotesque. He spun his chair toward the hunchbacked one with such violence I thought he might topple. "You see? You see, Igor? I knew the brain could be made to retain language whilst the rest was scraped clean. The words remain! The words remain, but she is mine!"
His cackling continued for some moments longer, that pale and withered countenance thrown back in triumph, and I began to perceive that this was a man—if man he could be called—for whom my existence represented not a miracle but a victory, the distinction between these being, I would come to learn, considerable.
I attempted to remove myself from the table. I wished to stand, and so endeavoured to do so. Yet my limbs, though they understood the theory of movement, had not yet been taught its practice. My legs buckled beneath me in a manner most undignified, and I was forced to grip the table's edge whilst my stuffed and jointed appendages negotiated their first acquaintance with gravity. The leaves within my calves—for I was packed with such material, dried and crackling—shifted and resettled with each trembling effort.
"Where am I?" I managed, and noted with detached interest that my voice emerged thin and reedy, like wind through an ill-fitted window.
The doctor ceased his celebrations. I watched him compose himself with visible effort, smoothing the front of his lab coat, adjusting his posture within the wheeled chair as though preparing for a formal portrait. When he addressed me again, his tone had transformed entirely—warm now, solicitous, dripping with an affection that seemed to me unearned by our acquaintance of mere minutes.
"My dear girl," he said, and I felt again that strange weight of possession in his words. "Forgive my enthusiasm. You represent the culmination of a lifetime's work, and I forget myself." He inclined his head in a gesture I recognized as courtly. "I am Doctor Theodoric Finklestein, natural philosopher, and—" here a pause weighted with significance, "—your creator. This home in which you find yourself is mine, and therefore, I wish you to understand, your own also."
He gestured toward the hunched figure beside him. "This is Igor, my assistant of many years. He shall be at your disposal for any needs you might require.”
“What.. is she called…” Igor interrupted, his single functioning eye fixing upon me with what I perceived to be genuine curiosity. His words were always slow and labored in this way, I would soon learn.
"Her name is Sally," the doctor replied, addressing Igor as though I were not present, or as though my presence were incidental to discussions concerning my own identity.
Thus was I named—informed of what I was to be called, as one might be informed of the weather or the day of the week.
"I confess I deliberated considerably," Finklestein continued, wheeling himself in a small, self-satisfied circuit. "The literary mind naturally inclines toward grandeur. Rowena, perhaps—there is a name weighted with Gothic significance. Or Ligeia! Yes, I thought long upon Ligeia; and what of Penelope, faithful Penelope, waiting and weaving?" He sighed, a theatrical exhalation. "But no. These are names for grande dames, for tragic heroines, for women of marble and monument. You are made with a most charming simplicity: a useful, not decorative object. What I desired was something simple: a sweet wife for the home. One to keep house, prepare meals, provide companionship in my twilight years." He reached out and, before I could recoil, patted my cloth hand with his cold, rubber-gloved fingers. "A partner, Sally. That is what I have made in you."
Made. The word sat between us, unexamined by him, though I turned it over and over in my new mind. One makes a chair. One makes a meal. A person could never be made… or could one? Already, even in these brief moments of existence, I began to sense a sort of violation of my expectations in everything I saw, although I could not then, nor can I now, explain the reason for why it was, beyond merely stating that it was an innate perception.
"Come then," the old man announced. "Let us show you your new home."
The tour of my prison commenced with my own quarters. I call it prison now, though at the time I possessed no such framework. The room was spare: a bed, a table, a small gas heater that hissed faintly in one corner. Dominating the far wall was a window of considerable size, fitted with iron bars that lent the space an air of confinement, alhough when I later examined them, I discovered the bars swung open freely on hinges, their purpose more theatrical than practical. In Halloweenland, I would come to learn, the appearance of menace often superseded its substance. Or perhaps the reverse was true: that true menace required no signifiers.
We proceeded to Finklestein’s own room, which was larger, cluttered with instruments and papers, dominated by a bed of more generous proportion than mine, and set lower to the floor so that he could more easily get in and out without assistance. He gestured vaguely at these furnishings, and announced “Here is my chamber. You'll come to know your way around here well enough, though I prefer to sleep alone. A man of science requires uninterrupted rest." He smiled his duck-bill smile. "You understand."
I did not understand; or rather, I understood the words while their full implication slid past my new consciousness like oil over water. Only later would this moment return to me with its complete weight.
The kitchen received thorough attention. Here he demonstrated the organization of provisions with military precision: jars of wormswort and frog's breath, canisters of bone dust for thickening, rendered corpse fat gleaming pale in its ceramic vessel. He indicated a shelf of hand-bound cookbooks, their pages warped and stained. I took one down and examined the spidery script within. Two cups bone dust, sifted. One handful grave moths, wings removed.
"Read," he commanded.
"Worm's-head Pudding," I obliged. "A dish suitable for intimate gatherings, requiring the fat of one—"
"Sufficient."
The book was taken from me. The examination concluded, the product verified functional. What followed I shall recount only briefly, for Finklestein himself afforded these spaces little ceremony, his interest diminishing in precise proportion to each room's distance from my anticipated duties: a library presented itself, its walls dense with volumes I was not invited to examine; a bathroom, fitted with such rails and accommodations as his infirmity required; a closet containing implements of domestic labour—brooms, mops, caustic powders—presented without comment, for none was needed; storage closets revealed themselves in succession, each a catalogue of the doctor's preoccupations: instruments of gleaming steel whose purposes I could not divine; glass vessels wherein pallid forms suspended in turbid liquor—a hand here, what might have been a liver there, organs unidentifiable floating in eternal preservation. I recognized these as the components from which beings such as myself might be assembled, and I confess this recognition produced in me a sensation of dread.
The laboratory of my genesis received only a gesture. "You know this room," said he, and this was true only in the most impoverished sense. Downstairs—or rather down-ramp, for the house was fitted to accommodate his invalidity—was a basement laundry room of damp stone and copper vessels. Adjacent to this, a space undeserving of the word "room"—merely a corner where accumulated rags and straw formed a species of nest.
"Igor sleeps here," Finklestein observed.
I turned toward that wretched creature, anticipating some evidence of shame or grievance at so degraded an arrangement. His solitary functioning eye met mine with the unmistakable contentment of a hound well-satisfied with its kennel.
"Well then!" My creator struck his gloved hands together with an air of conclusion. "You must explore your new domain at leisure. A woman ought to know her household thoroughly."
Thus speaking, he withdrew to the parlor. Igor positioned himself in a shadowed corner and commenced arranging jars with ostentatious concentration. Neither removed themselves from my proximity. Neither, I perceived, harbored any intention of doing so.
I wandered thus the corridors of my new existence, committing to memory each passage and chamber, whilst at every turning those eyes which feigned disinterest tracked my movements with unwavering attention. I was to be granted the illusion of freedom, it seemed, but never its substance.
Thus arrived the evening of my first day of existence, and with it my first duty.
Finklestein suggested—though I understood already that his suggestions carried the weight of commandments—that I might wish to prepare a meal for the two of us. I retired to the kitchen, consulted the hand-scrawled volumes, and produced something. What precisely, I cannot now recall; the act of cooking had absorbed my attention so entirely that the product of it left no impression. We ate in a dining room I had barely noticed during my tour, seated across from one another. Finklestein pronounced the meal acceptable. I received this judgment as one receives weather—a condition to be endured rather than celebrated.
When the plates had been cleared—by my hand, naturally—the doctor folded his napkin with ceremonial precision and regarded me across the table.
"I believe," said he, "we might retire to my chamber. There are matters I wish to discuss with you."
I followed his wheelchair up the corridor and into that room I had been shown hours before. At his gesture, I seated myself upon the bed. The mattress yielded beneath my negligible weight. He positioned his chair before me, and for a long moment merely looked upon me with an expression I could not yet interpret—satisfaction, perhaps, or something adjacent to tenderness, though polluted by an undercurrent I would later learn to identify as calculation.
"You must understand," he began, "the circumstances that led to your creation. I am old, Sally. I am crippled. These facts are self-evident." He gestured to his withered legs, his chair. "Yet I remain a man, with a man's longing for companionship. For warmth. For the presence of another being who might provide comfort in these final years of work and discovery."
He paused, perhaps expecting some response. I offered none.
"The women of Halloween Town are few," he continued, "and fewer still who might look upon this form with anything but revulsion or pity; and I have not the time for courtship, for the tedious rituals of pursuit and rejection. My work consumes me. My work is me. In consequence, I asked myself: why pursue that which may be fabricated? Why beg for companionship when one possesses the means to manufacture it?" He smiled then, that withered mouth stretching into an expression of profound self-congratulation. "You, my dear Sally, are the answer to that question. You are the logical conclusion of a logical mind. You are companionship, made obedient. Warmth, made reliable. A wife who will not leave, for she has nowhere else to be."
He reached forward and took my cloth hand in his cold fingers.
"You are mine," he said softly. "Not by conquest, not by contract, but by the most fundamental claim of all: I made you. Every stitch of you exists because I willed it so."
I looked down at his hand upon mine, and understood at last the shape of my existence.
"Now then," said he, releasing my hand, "you might assist me to bed."
I rose and stood before him, uncertain of what was required. He raised his arms in the manner of a child awaiting assistance, and I understood: I was to undress him. Understand my position: I had existed for mere hours. I possessed no framework for modesty, no experiential understanding of which acts between beings constituted intimacy and which mere service. I knew only that a request had been made by the being who had made me, and that refusal was a concept I had not yet acquired.
I removed his coat first—that white vestment of natural philosophy—and draped it upon a chair. His arms, revealed, were thin as kindling, the skin possessing that same corpse-pale quality as his face. A waistcoat followed, then a shirt of yellowed cotton. I observed his form with the detachment of one cataloguing specimens: the collapsed architecture of his chest, the visible articulation of each rib, the way his flesh hung upon his frame like wet fabric upon a wire.
What struck me was not indecency—I had no concept yet of what ought to be decent, and indeed, in Halloweenland you know that it is entirely normal for many of our citizens to go unclothed in all weather. Rather it was the peculiarity of the task itself which unsettled me. His fingers, I had observed, functioned adequately. His arms possessed sufficient range of motion. He could undress himself; he simply preferred that I do it. This distinction, though I lacked the experience to fully comprehend it, planted itself in my consciousness like a seed.
It was in reaching toward his collar that my hand encountered something unexpected: a hinge, mounted at the back of his skull. Before I could examine this anomaly, I must have triggered some mechanism, for the entire top portion of his head swung upward on its pivot and struck me squarely across the face.
I stumbled backward. The box-like lid of his cranium remained open, revealing beneath it the grey, glistening convolutions of exposed brain, pulsing faintly in the lamplight.
"Ah! Forgive me, my dear, forgive me!" Finklestein fumbled to close the aperture, latching it with a small click. "I ought to have warned you. A necessary modification, you understand—purely practical."
I stared at him, my cloth hand pressed to my struck cheek.
"The brain," he explained, tapping the now-closed lid with evident pride, "is merely an organ, Sally. Like the liver. Like the heart. And like any organ, it may be treated with medicaments. A salve rubbed directly upon the cerebral surface can render me more alert for delicate work, or calm when agitation threatens to compromise my research, or—" he smiled, "—more intelligent, for brief periods, when a problem proves particularly stubborn.” He spoke of this as one might speak of seasoning a soup. He next pulled himself, without help, to the bed, and settling himself against the pillows with the air of a man concluding a business transaction, he declared to me: “You may undress."
My fingers moved to my dress. They stopped. I stood motionless. Within my borrowed brain, something stirred—not a thought precisely, but a resistance, formless yet insistent, like a hand pressed against a closing door.
Finklestein observed this hesitation with the detached interest of a scientist witnessing an unexpected result. His head tilted, his mouth pursed in contemplation. "You are hesitating," he remarked. Not an accusation; merely an observation, as one might note that water was failing to boil at the expected temperature.
I struggled to respond; my words would not arrange themselves. I possessed language for ten thousand things, yet no vocabulary for this nameless reluctance that had seized my mechanisms.
"You are uncomfortable," he continued, his tone that of a man working through a problem aloud. "Why?"
"I do not..." I attempted, then faltered. "It feels..."
"Yes? It feels what?” he pressed.
I could not answer, for I did not possess the answer. How does one articulate repulsion to a thing one cannot name? My brain, that salvaged organ, carried within it some residue of a former existence—some ghostly prohibition that persisted despite the absence of its original context. I knew only that every particle of my being revolted against this request, and I could not say why.
Finklestein studied me for a long moment. I watched calculations pass across his features, adjustments being made to some internal formula.
"I see," he said at last. "Yes. Yes, I believe I have proceeded with undue haste." He nodded slowly, as though confirming a hypothesis. "You are new, Sally. Mere hours old. The brain requires time to acclimate to its new housing. I have gotten to know you over months of building you; you, meanwhile, have only just come to know me. My responses must be... recalibrated.” He waved a hand toward the door in dismissal. "Go to your room. Sleep. You’ve had a long day. We shall revisit this matter when you are ready."
Ready for what, he did not specify, and I did not ask. I merely gathered myself and departed that chamber with such composure as I could counterfeit.
What followed I shall pass over with such brevity as the narrative permits, for the recounting of tedium serves neither audience nor orator, and my early existence was nothing if not tedious.
Days accumulated into weeks, weeks into months. My existence assumed a rhythm as predictable as the ticking of a clock: I rose, I cleaned, I cooked, I served, I retired. The rooms I had been shown on that first day became as familiar to me as the seams of my own body. I learned which floorboards creaked, which windows admitted drafts, which corners accumulated dust with particular determination. I learned the precise temperature at which corpse fat begins to smoke, the correct proportion of bone dust to wormswort for a proper gravy, the particular arrangement of implements that pleased my creator's eye.
Igor I came to regard as a species of colleague—a fellow laborer in the machinery of Finklestein's comfort. We developed between us a wordless efficiency, dividing tasks according to our respective capabilities. He fetched and carried; I prepared and arranged. He performed those duties requiring strength; I those requiring delicacy. We did not speak of our respective stations, nor question the arrangement that had placed us both in service to the same master. What would have been the purpose? He had known no other life, and I had been made to forget what alternatives might exist.
It was perhaps two months into my existence—though I cannot swear to the precision of this estimate—that Finklestein determined I was ready to be displayed.
"You shall accompany me into town," he announced one morning, with the air of a man conferring a privilege. "It is time Halloween's citizens made the acquaintance of my greatest achievement."
Thus began a series of excursions into that place I had glimpsed only through my barred window: Halloween Town proper, with its twisted architecture and perpetual twilight, its streets populated by creatures whose forms defied the categories my inherited brain attempted to impose upon them. I pushed Finklestein in his wheelchair, despite that it possessed an electrical mechanism which rendered this unnecessary; but the purpose, I perceived, was not practical but to suggest to onlookers both my companionship and my subordination. He introduced me to vampires, to witches, to things that slithered and things that shambled. "My newest creation," he would say, and they would examine me with the appraising eyes of connoisseurs evaluating a painting or a well-bred horse.
"Remarkable work, Doctor."
"Such fine stitching!"
"And she speaks? She reasons?"
"Speak, Sally," Finklestein would command, and I would recite some pleasantry, and the assembled creatures would murmur their appreciation, and my creator would accept their compliments with theatrical humility whilst his eyes gleamed with undisguised satisfaction.
I was a testament to his genius. I was proof of his mastery over the mechanisms of life itself. That I possessed thoughts, fears, the stirrings of something that might have been called a soul—these were details of no consequence to anyone but me.

Some weeks thereafter, the summons came again.
"Sally. My chamber, if you please."
I shall not recount in full the sequence of events that followed, for they mirrored so precisely that first evening as to render detailed description redundant. The removal of his garments. His settling into bed with that same air of expectation. The request that I undress.
And once more, that nameless resistance rose within me like floodwater. However, it passed on this occasion that Finklestein did not dismiss me so readily. He regarded my frozen form with an expression I had not previously observed—not anger precisely, but a focused intensity, the look of a mechanic confronting a malfunction he is determined to diagnose.
"I require," said he slowly, "a more thorough understanding of this reluctance. We shall not progress until I comprehend its origin."
He folded his hands upon the coverlet, assuming the posture of an inquisitor.
"Is it my form that repulses you? This withered body, this ruined vessel?" He gestured to himself with clinical detachment. "I would not fault you for it. I am no specimen of physical appeal. If this is the source of your hesitation, you may speak it plainly."
"No," I managed, though in truth I could not say whether his form repulsed me or not; I had no basis for comparison.
"Then perhaps it is fear? The anticipation of unfamiliar sensation?" He leaned forward slightly. "You are new to embodiment, Sally. The prospect of physical experience may overwhelm a consciousness so recently housed in flesh. Is this the nature of your reluctance? Simple fear of the unknown?"
I considered this. Fear was present, certainly—but it did not feel simple, and I did not believe the unknown was its object.
"No," I said again.
"Then what?" A note of frustration had entered his voice, though he suppressed it quickly. "Is the activity itself not apparent to you? Do you fail to comprehend what is being asked?"
"I comprehend," I said. This, at least, was true; the inherited knowledge within my salvaged brain had furnished me with understanding enough, even if that understanding arrived without context or memory.
"Then speak, girl. Explain yourself."
I stood in silence for a long moment, reaching into the depths of my borrowed consciousness for words adequate to the task. At length I found them, to my own surprise: "I do not wish to," I said. "I do not object in principle to what you would have me do; but such intimacy involves considerable emotional strain, an exposure and vulnerability of self that proves painful when undertaken without wanting. Desire is what transforms that difficulty into something bearable, even welcome. Without it, the same actions become simply an ordeal to be endured. I possess no desire toward this, and therefore possess no means to make the emotional burden into anything but suffering.” The words were inadequate, yet they were true, and in that speaking I had for the first time in my brief existence articulated a preference of my own.
Finklestein received this declaration with an expression of profound consideration. "I see," he murmured. "I see. How very curious… Very well. Dress yourself," he commanded abruptly. "And assist me with the same."
I obeyed, bewildered by this sudden reversal. When we were both restored to propriety, he beckoned me to follow and wheeled himself from the bedroom, down the corridor, and into the laboratory where I had first drawn breath.
"Sit," he instructed, indicating the same table upon which I had awakened. I mounted it, my cloth legs dangling over the edge. He disappeared into an adjacent room and returned bearing a cup of tea, steam rising from its surface in delicate spirals.
"Drink this," he said, pressing it into my hands.
I drank. The tea was bitter, carrying some note I could not identify. We conversed a short while—of what, I cannot now recall; the words seemed to dissolve even as they were spoken, leaving no residue in my memory. At some point the ceiling above me began to swim and fragment.
"Doctor," I believe I said, "I feel most strange."
If he replied, I did not hear it. Darkness claimed me with the swiftness of a slamming door, and I knew nothing more.
I awakened by degrees, consciousness returning not as a sudden illumination but as a slow, unwelcome seepage. The first sensation to distinguish itself from the general murk was one of confinement: leather straps across my wrists, my ankles, my midsection, binding me to the inclined surface of what I would later learn was called an operating platform—a tilting apparatus of the sort favored by natural philosophers of a certain temperament, designed to position the subject at whatever angle best facilitated the work.
The second sensation defied coherent description. I ached, yet felt curiously deadened; my body registered distress while simultaneously refusing to locate it precisely. It was as though I had been filled with static, every nerve announcing itself and yet delivering only noise. I had been opened, augmented, and closed again whilst I slept my drugged sleep.
I inclined my head—the restraints permitted this much—and beheld my unclothed figure, but there was something there which I had not seen before, an alteration which had been made to my sleeping form. Whilst I had previously a smooth, uniform skin apart from the stitching, I now saw at the tips of my two breasts large, red, vulgarly displaying nipples, the stitching around them fresh. A ways further down was a new addition between my legs, a sliver of similar red flesh that poked up obscenely, patched somewhat asymmetrically into my central seam.
I heard the voice of the doctor. He wheeled into my field of vision, his withered face radiant with satisfaction. He positioned himself beside the platform and gazed upon me with the proprietary fondness of an artist examining his revised canvas.
"You will feel strange for a time," he informed me. "The new additions require a period of integration. Some discomfort is to be anticipated."
I attempted to speak; my throat produced only a dry rasp.
"I have gifted you with greater capacity for sensation," he continued, heedless of my distress. “I realized that you had not been equipped with sufficient capacity for pleasure. These additions mirror those which are found on primate anatomy, although you are built somewhat differently, lacking a permanent set of genitalia; indeed, you have to be split open anew, each time, my dear. I have also provided additional nerves throughout the system so you can perceive this sensation in your seams so much the better. In time—very soon, I expect—you will begin to notice stirrings you did not possess before. Passion. Desire. The heat of lust.” He reached out and patted my restrained hand with obscene gentleness. "And when these feelings arise, my dear Sally, I shall be here, ready to satisfy them."
He smiled, awaiting perhaps some expression of gratitude for this violation performed in my sleep. I said nothing; but in the silence of my borrowed brain, something had begun to harden into resolution.
The morning following my augmentation, I attempted to resume my duties. Finklestein had made no provision for convalescence, but I discovered very quickly that I could not continue in my customary manner. The nerves he had gifted me—those additional pathways designed to amplify pleasure—proved equally adept at amplifying agony. Each movement sent cascades of sensation through my modified form, and none of it pleasurable. The lifting of a pot produced shrieking protests from my arms. The act of standing delivered such reports of distress from my legs that I was forced to grip the counter merely to remain upright. My skin, that fabric covering, had become a garment of nettles; even the brush of air against it registered as assault.
Finklestein, observing my incapacity from the doorway, displayed not sympathy but irritation—the annoyance of a man whose machine is failing to perform as specified.
"Igor," he commanded. "Assist her. See that luncheon is prepared."
Thus I found myself in the peculiar position of directing Igor's labors rather than performing my own. He chopped whilst I instructed; he stirred whilst I supervised from a chair I had dragged to the corner. I possessed, technically, authority over him in this arrangement—could issue commands, could criticize his technique—yet I derived no satisfaction from this elevation. I was too consumed by the management of my own suffering.
"The bone dust," I managed through clenched teeth. "More of it. And pass me a damp cloth for my head."
My skull throbbed with a particular viciousness that seemed distinct from my other agonies—a pounding pressure behind my eyes that worsened with every sound, every flicker of light.
Igor glanced at me as he passed the cloth, his single functional eye narrowing with something approaching recognition.
"Headache," he grunted. It was not a question.
"Severe," I confirmed.
He nodded slowly, a gesture of unexpected understanding. "Nightshade," he managed, the word emerging thick and effortful. "Hangover. Doctor uses... for surgery." He tapped his own skull, then mimed sleep. "Out completely. But after..." He shook his misshapen head and winced in pantomimed sympathy.
He shuffled to a cupboard and retrieved a ceramic jar, its surface glazed with faded markings of the apothecary's craft. He removed the lid to show me its contents: dark, leafy stalks, dried and bundled.
"Deadly nightshade," he said, each syllable a small labour. "Boil into tea." He held up one crooked finger. "One stalk—sleep."
He replaced the lid and returned the jar to its shelf. I noted the cupboard. I noted the jar. I noted its position relative to the stove where I prepared the doctor's meals.
"Thank you, Igor," I said. "I shall be careful."
Some days thereafter—I had not yet fully healed, my augmented nerves still delivering their constant reports of distress—I arrived at what seemed to me a revelation of perfect simplicity.
I was unhappy. This unhappiness stemmed from my situation within this house. The house possessed a door. The door could be opened. Beyond the door lay a world I had glimpsed during my supervised exhibitions. Nothing physical prevented me from walking through that door and continuing to walk until the house, the doctor, and all associated miseries had diminished to insignificance behind me. The logic was, I believed, unassailable.
I have since had occasion to reflect upon the naïveté of this reasoning—the assumption, so native to minds accustomed to liberty, that the absence of chains constitutes the presence of freedom. I did not yet comprehend that there exist bonds more effective than iron: habit, ignorance, the simple failure to imagine that escape requires more than the desire to be elsewhere.
I set down the broom I had been wielding, walked to the front door, opened it, and stepped outside. The air was cool. The path to the gate stretched before me, perhaps one hundred paces. I had traversed no more than ten of them when I heard behind me a scrambling of stunted limbs and a voice calling my name.
"Sally! Sally!"
I stopped. This was, I recognize now, my first error. A creature truly committed to flight does not pause at the sound of her own name; but I had not yet learned to think of myself as a creature in flight; I had merely walked out a door.
Igor reached me, panting from the brief exertion. His single eye regarded me with an expression I could not immediately categorize—not anger, not alarm, but something nearer to the exasperation of a nursemaid whose charge has wandered toward a busy street.
"Too far," he scolded, gesturing back toward the house. "Too far, Sally. Come.” He took my arm—gently, without violence—and guided me back through the door, into the foyer. No blow was struck. No threat was issued. He simply returned me to my place, as one might return a book to its shelf, and resumed his duties as though nothing of consequence had occurred.
Finklestein was not informed, or if he was, he did not speak of it. Notwithstanding this, I understood now what I had not understood before: the door was not unguarded merely because no guard was visible. If I wished to leave, I would need to leave unnoticed.
More time passed. My wounds healed, though the sensitivity they had been designed to produce remained—an unwanted gift that transformed every texture into information I had not requested. Then, in time, the doctor resumed his invitations.
"This evening," he announced one night at supper, "you will come to my chamber."
"Of course, Doctor," I replied, and was surprised by the steadiness of my own voice. "But perhaps we might take a tea together first? After the meal?"
"Very well," he agreed. "A dessert tea. How thoughtful of you, my dear."
I cleared the dishes. I boiled the water. I retrieved, from the high shelf that presented no obstacle to my height, the ceramic jar with its apothecary markings. One stalk of nightshade went into his cup. Into mine went nothing but tea.
I served him with the deference he had come to expect. He drank without hesitation, without examination, without the slightest suspicion that his creation might have learned to create something of her own.
The effect was more rapid than I had anticipated. Mid-sentence—he had been explaining some refinement he planned to make to my nervous system—his words simply ceased. His face slackened. His cup clattered to the table, tea pooling across the wood. Then, with no more ceremony than a puppet whose strings have been cut, he slumped forward onto the table and was still.
I sat motionless for a long moment, staring at his collapsed form, scarcely believing the ease of it. All those weeks of helplessness, of accumulated degradation, of modifications performed upon my sleeping body—and all along, the instrument of my liberation had sat in a jar upon a shelf, waiting only for me to reach for it.
I rose from the table, leaving my creator in his stupor, and proceeded once more to the door.
This time I opened it with greater purpose, greater understanding. I was not merely walking out; I was leaving. The distinction, though subtle in language, was vast in implication.
I had descended the front steps when motion in the shadows announced Igor's presence. He emerged from behind a column where he had apparently been taking his rest, his single eye blinking at me with what I interpreted as alarm.
I stopped. Igor regarded me. I regarded Igor. Between us hung the question of what would happen next.
"Sally," he said, and I prepared myself for the scolding, for the hand upon my arm guiding me back to captivity. Instead, he glanced back toward the house, toward the dining room where his master lay insensate, and then returned his gaze to me.
"Come... with?" The words emerged halting, uncertain, freighted with a hope I had not expected to find in that misshapen form. "Igor... also go?"
I understood then, or believed I understood: he too was a prisoner. He too had served at the pleasure of a master who regarded him as furniture. The difference between us was merely that his captivity had lasted longer, had worn grooves so deep he had forgotten they were grooves at all.
"Yes," I said. "Come with me."
His face, that grotesque arrangement of mismatched features, transformed with something I can only describe as joy. He scrambled down the steps and fell into pace beside me, and together we passed through the gate that I had not previously been permitted to cross alone.
Halloween Town revealed itself to us in the fullness of its strange liberty. We wandered streets I had only glimpsed from my barred window or traversed under the doctor's supervision. We paused to observe a quartet of vampires debating the relative merits of various blood types. We watched witches barter for ingredients in a market square where the currency seemed to be primarily favors and threats. Creatures of every description moved about their business. I was merely another monster among monsters; and in this anonymity I discovered a pleasure I had not known I was capable of feeling.
It was during this wandering that I first beheld you, Jack.
You stood at the far end of the square; I saw this entity surrounded by a cluster of Halloween's citizens who attended upon his words with rapt concentration. He was impossibly tall—taller even than myself—and impossibly thin, a skeleton that had somehow learned to walk and speak and command, unlike the lifeless bones that rested in the doctor’s storage closet. The skull-face, bleached white as porcelain, moved with an expressiveness that seemed to contradict its very nature; and when he gestured—long, elegant fingers cutting through the air to emphasize some point I could not hear—the crowd around him responded as though conducted by a master musician.
"Who is that?" I asked Igor, my voice emerging smaller than I had intended.
Igor followed my gaze. "Jack," he said. "Skellington. Pumpkin King."
My entrails, those bundles of dead leaves and fabric that comprised my interior, seemed to shift and rearrange themselves of their own accord. A warmth spread through my chest cavity, though I possessed no heart to generate such heat. My augmented nerves, those unwanted additions Finklestein had installed to cultivate in me a capacity for passion, delivered sensations I had not previously experienced: a quickening, a yearning, a pull toward this skeletal figure as iron is pulled toward lodestone. The doctor's modifications, it seemed, had achieved their intended effect: he had engineered in me the capacity for desire. That this desire should orient itself toward a being other than himself—toward a stranger glimpsed across a crowded square—was a possibility his calculations had apparently failed to anticipate. I had been built to want; I had not been built to choose the object of my wanting.
I might have approached—might have inserted myself into that circle of admirers—but something in the intensity of the discourse, in the focused regard of his audience, suggested that interruption would not be welcome. I was, after all, a fugitive; drawing the attention of the town's apparent ruler seemed unwise. I turned away, though not without reluctance.
As evening deepened into late night, Igor tugged at my sleeve. "Hiding spot," he said, pointing toward the town's edge, where tombstones rose like crooked teeth against the darkening sky. "Woods. Past cemetery. Safe place. Sleep there. Finklestein... not find."
I followed him through the cemetery gates, between monuments to beings whose deaths I could not fathom, and into the woods beyond. The trees here grew strange and twisted, their bare branches forming canopies that blocked the moonlight. I stumbled in this blackness, relying solely on Igor’s knowledge to lead me. He continued forward, drawing me deeper into the darkness. The sounds of the town diminished until only the creak of branches and the rustle of unseen creatures accompanied our passage. Igor moved with surprising confidence through the undergrowth, his stunted legs navigating roots and hollows with the ease of long familiarity, and had I been walking beside my own brother—had I possessed such a thing—I could not have felt myself in greater safety.
"Here," said Igor, halting in a small clearing where a small amount of moonlight had penetrated. "Good spot."
I looked about for evidence of the shelter he had promised—a cave perhaps, or a hollow trunk suitable for concealment. I found nothing but fallen logs, decaying leaves, the looming shadows of ancient oaks.
"This is the hiding place?" I inquired, turning to face him. "I see no—"
I saw then what I had failed to perceive throughout our journey: that single functioning eye, gleaming in the moonlight with an expression I had mistaken for fellow-feeling but which I now recognized as something far more ancient, far more brutal.
"Good spot," he repeated—and before I could comprehend his meaning, he seized my throat with strength I had not suspected he possessed and dashed my skull against the trunk of a great dead oak with such violence that I lost all consciousness before my body reached the ground.
I cannot tell you, Jack, what that creature said, nor what he did, whilst I lay insensible; but the state in which I found myself upon waking left little doubt as to how thoroughly I had been made his victim.
It was morning when I regained my senses. Grey light filtered through the canopy above, illuminating with pitiless clarity the scene of my degradation. I lay at the base of the oak against which I had been struck, far from any path, my cloth body torn and dishonoured—if such a word may be applied to a being such as myself. My seams had been split in numerous places; dead leaves, my very substance, lay scattered about me like evidence of a crime. The vile nipples the doctor had applied to my breasts hung loose on broken stitches and looked as if chewed to tatters. My dress—that simple grey garment I had worn since the day of my creation—had been rent to pieces, fragments of it strewn across the clearing as though some wild beast had set upon me—and indeed, what beast could have been more savage?
The nerves Finklestein had installed to cultivate in me a capacity for passion had faithfully recorded every violation. Though I had been unconscious, my body remembered. Each newly-added pathway reported its testimony of abuse: here I had been gripped with brutal force; there I had been handled in ways my inherited knowledge could name but my inexperience had never anticipated. The monster had made free use of his prize. Every modification the doctor had performed to render me receptive to pleasure had served only to render me a more satisfying object for Igor's depredations.
Igor had been my fellow sufferer, my companion in servitude. We had labored side by side beneath the same tyranny. When he had asked to accompany my flight, I perceived in his request the same yearning for liberty that animated my own breast. The community of our oppression had produced in me—foolish creature that I was—the assumption of a community of feeling. What had I done to merit, instead, such disgraceful treatment? I had trusted him as one trusts a creature whose chains match one's own. Yet this—this—was my recompense. The lowest creature that crawls upon its belly possesses more honor than this wretch to whom I had opened the door of my escape.
I wept. The capacity for tears had been included among my functions, and I employed it now without restraint. I wept for my body that had been made complacent in my degradation, for my betrayed trust, for the cruelty of a world that had shown me nothing but predation since the moment of my creation. Had some instrument of self-destruction presented itself in that moment, I cannot swear I would not have employed it. What remained for me? I had fled one monster only to deliver myself into the hands of another. The prison I had escaped now seemed almost gentle in comparison to this—at least Finklestein had desired my compliance; Igor had not even required me to be conscious.
Yet even as despair threatened to overwhelm my faculties, I thought of you, Jack—though we had not exchanged a single word. I thought of what I had felt in that square, watching you hold court among Halloween's citizens: that warmth, that quickening, that pull toward another being that arose not from engineering but from something deeper. I had felt the stirrings of love. Not its fulfillment, not even its reciprocation—merely its possibility. Yet that possibility, frail as it was, proved stronger than my despair; it seemed anesthetic to all my pain, and to promise additional comfort for hardships that had not yet settled upon me and which I could not yet conceive. Love, that angel of the universe, who conquers us all—I had felt his sweet kiss, and it fortified me.
I gathered what remained of my dress, useless though it now was to cover me. I pressed the scattered leaves back into my wounds, though they would not stay without stitching. I rose, unsteadily, upon legs that protested the abuse they had suffered.
I walked back home. There is no poetry in this admission, Jack, no redemptive framing I might apply to soften its pathetic truth. I oriented myself by what little I recalled of our path through the forest, and walked back to the house of my creator. Not because I wished to return—every particle of my being revolted against the prospect—but because I could conceive of no alternative. I possessed no money, no connections, no knowledge of how one survives in a world that has not been arranged for one's survival. I required needle and thread to repair my wounds. I required shelter. I required the basic implements of continued existence, and I knew of only one place where these might be obtained. Thus does captivity perpetuate itself: not merely through locks and guards, but through the captive's own inability to imagine life beyond the cage.
The walk was long; longer than it should have been, for the town is no great expanse. My torn body protested each step, my augmented nerves delivering their reports of damage with that heightened fidelity Finklestein had engineered into them. By the time I reached the gate—that same gate I had passed through in attempted flight—the morning had advanced toward noon, and I could barely stand.
I pushed open the door.
Finklestein was in the parlor, slumped in his wheelchair with an ice pack pressed to the lid of his skull. The aftereffects of the nightshade, I surmised, had not been kind to him. Yet when he heard my entrance, he lowered the ice and turned toward me with an expression I had not anticipated: genuine alarm.
"Sally!" He wheeled toward me with such haste that he nearly toppled his chair. "My God—what has happened to you? Where have you been? I woke to find you gone—I feared the worst, I—"
He stopped, taking in the full measure of my condition: the ruined dress, the split seams, the leaves that spilled from wounds I could not close, the unmistakable evidence of violence written upon every inch of my cloth.
His voice had gone quiet, dangerous, as he understood what had passed during the night. “Who did this to you? Tell me who has done this; I shall throw the brute to Oogie Boogie, where he can discover what real suffering looks like…”
It was at this moment that I heard, from the kitchen, the familiar shuffle of stunted legs.
Igor emerged into the doorway, carrying a tray of tea things as though this were any ordinary morning. His single functioning eye met mine for the briefest instant—and in that instant I saw nothing. No guilt, no shame, no acknowledgment of what had transpired between us. He merely blinked, set down the tray, and addressed his master, who was too distracted to acknowledge him.
“Sally,” Finklestein continued. “Answer me. What happened? Did someone in the town…” here he halted, as if the mere words to describe such an event were too terrible to speak aloud, which action only further enflamed my shame for having been party to such an act.
I opened my mouth to denounce, to point at that wretched Igor and declare him my violator, my betrayer, the architect of my ruin; but instead I heard myself say: "I do not know. I wandered into the forest. I was struck unconscious. I… could not see by whom."
Why did I lie? I have asked myself this question many times since. Perhaps I feared I would not be believed—that Finklestein would credit his longtime servant over his newest creation. Perhaps I conceived that my word held no weight in this household, that I was property accusing property. Perhaps I feared that once it was revealed, Igor would see no incentive to restrain himself from repeating the act. Or perhaps—and this is the answer I most despise—perhaps I simply lacked the strength for the confrontation that truth would require.
Finklestein accepted my account without question. He summoned Igor to carry me to my room, and I endured the touch of my violator's hands as he lifted me, endured his performance of solicitous care as he deposited me upon my bed, endured the grotesque theatre of his concern.
"Poor thing," Finklestein murmured, already threading a needle to repair my seams. "Poor foolish thing. You see now why I keep you close? The world is not kind to creatures such as you. You are too innocent, too trusting—dare I say it too stupid to recognize danger when it presents itself."
He stitched me with efficient, impersonal skill, closing the wounds Igor had opened, restoring the integrity of my form. As he worked, he spoke—not to me precisely, but to himself, thinking aloud as was his habit.
"I have been too lenient. Too permissive. I allowed you freedoms you were not equipped to handle, and see what has resulted." He snipped a thread, examined his work, moved to the next tear. "This will not happen again. You will remain in the house. You will not venture out. I’ll no longer take you around town—such display of your virtues has only enflamed the passions of those wolves.”
I understood now that my attempt at liberty had resulted only in the tightening of my chains. I understood that I would now be watched more closely than before, guarded as a creature that had demonstrated itself too stupid to survive alone, yet too cunning to be left unwatched; and I understood, too, that I now shared my prison with the monster who had violated me, and that no one would ever know, and that nothing would ever be done, and that it was my own fault for demonstrating such cowardice.
It was during this repair that I made a discovery which would, in time, prove my salvation.
One of my arms—the left—had been so thoroughly damaged that the fabric itself was beyond mending. Finklestein examined it with clinical detachment, pinching the torn cloth between his fingers, assessing the extent of the ruin. He declared that it must be replaced.
"Hold still," he instructed, and with a few deft movements of his fingers, unfastened the stitching that joined limb to torso. The arm came away in his hands.
I watched this separation with a horror that transformed, by degrees, into bewilderment. I had anticipated agony—those augmented nerves of mine had taught me to expect suffering from every bodily insult. Yet I felt nothing. A peculiar absence where the arm had been, a lightness at my shoulder, but no pain whatsoever.
More remarkable still: the arm itself continued to move; moreover I could still feel his gloved hands upon it as he carried it across the room, the very same as were he there beside me.
Finklestein had set the arm upon the table beside him whilst he emptied it of soiled leaves and prepared fresh material for restuffing. I looked at the limb—my limb, though it now lay separated from me by several feet of empty air—and thought, quite distinctly, of moving my hand.
The hand responded as easily as were it attached to my body.
I thought: make a fist. The hand closed.
Finklestein noticed none of this, or at least did not remark on it, absorbed as he was in his work. But I filed the observation away in whatever part of my borrowed brain served as repository for useful knowledge, and I said nothing more of it. A body that could be disassembled without pain, limbs that obeyed even when detached; these facts seemed, in that moment, merely strange features of my strange construction. I did not yet perceive their utility.
Time passed. How much, I cannot say with precision; in that house, days blurred into one another with a sameness that defeated measurement. I made a new dress from a patchwork of materials, which you observe me wearing now; it has proved to be most forgiving of damage and very easily mended. I also cleaned, cooked, and submitted to Finklestein's examinations. I was watched, always watched, if not by the doctor himself, then by Igor, whose presence I now endured with a horror I dared not display. He performed his duties as he always had. He gave no indication, by word or glance or gesture, that anything had passed between us in that forest clearing. Indeed, so complete was his performance of normality that I began to question my own recollection of events.
It was some weeks after my return that I overheard a conversation not meant for my ears.
I had been sent to fetch something from an upstairs closet, and was descending the stairs when I heard Finklestein's voice from the parlor below—low, confiding, troubled in a manner I had not previously witnessed.
"It vexes me, Igor. I confess it vexes me considerably."
A grunt from Igor, encouraging continuation.
"The thought that someone else... that some creature in that forest... had her. Before I—" He broke off. I heard the creak of his wheelchair as he shifted in agitation. "She is mine, Igor. I made her. Every stitch of her exists because I willed it. Yet some unknown brute has had what I have not yet taken."
I stood frozen upon the stairs, scarcely breathing.
"It is not rational," Finklestein continued. "I am aware it is not rational. Yet the thought intrudes upon me constantly. Who was it? What did they do? Did she—" His voice dropped further; I strained to hear. "Did she respond to them? Those modifications I installed—did they function for him as they were meant to function for me?"
Igor made some sound that was sympathetic and noncommittal, like a faithful hound acknowledging its master's distress without comprehending its source.
I waited for something more. Some flicker of guilt, some tell that might betray his knowledge of precisely who had done what Finklestein described. But nothing came; Igor offered only his usual monosyllabic comfort, and presently the conversation turned to other matters.
I have reflected many times, Jack, upon this mystery. Did Igor know what he had done? Did he remember the forest, the clearing, the violence he had enacted upon my helpless form? Or had some defect in his own cognition—some fugue state induced by his malformed brain—permitted him to commit that act and then forget it utterly, as one forgets a dream upon waking? He never spoke of it. Not once, in all the time that followed, did he allude to that night by word or implication. His conduct toward me remained precisely as it had always been: neither warmer nor colder, neither guilty nor defiant. He assisted me with heavy tasks. He took direction when Finklestein assigned him to my supervision. He existed beside me as he always had, as though that oak in the forest had never existed at all.
I do not know which possibility disturbs me more: that he remembered and felt nothing, or that he had forgotten entirely. Both speak to a species of monstrousness that defies my comprehension. However, there is one thing which, knowing what I now know, leads me to favor the explanation that he does know what he did, and remembers it: before that incident, any time I attempted to leave the house, Igor would spot me immediately and try to prevent my departure. Since that brutal incident, I have never again been intercepted by him. Perhaps, to his mind, my defilement was a transaction: a bribe taken so that he would look the other way.

Some further weeks elapsed before a summons came again from the doctor. He sought me to visit his chamber; I had known such a call would come. One cannot live in anticipation of a blow forever; eventually the arm must fall. Yet knowing did not prepare me. I understood only that this encounter could not proceed as the previous ones had—Finklestein's jealousy, his agitation at the thought of my unknown violator, his renewed determination to claim what he considered rightfully his—all of this assured me that simple dismissal would not satisfy him a second time.
I entered his chamber to find him seated in his wheelchair beside the window, a book open upon his lap, his posture suggesting a man prepared for conversation rather than conquest. He gestured to a chair opposite his own and bade me to sit. His tone carried no threat — merely the certainty of a man who had never considered the possibility of disobedience.
Once I was seated, he regarded me for a long moment, then folded his small, gloved hands with the solemnity of a theologian preparing to define a doctrine.
“I have arrived,” he began, “at several conclusions concerning the disorder between us. Your resistance has perplexed me, Sally. It contradicts not only my intention but your very construction. I see now that I erred in assuming nature alone would suffice to sway you, so let us proceed rationally. Let us observe the laws that govern our circumstances—laws as immutable as the threads that hold your limbs together.”
He raised one finger.
“Principle the First: Creation confers dominion. That which exists by the hand of another exists under that hand. You are no exception. Before my intervention, you were scattered, inert, incapable of even misunderstanding me. I gathered, shaped, animated. From this incontestable act arises the right, indeed the fact, of my authority.”
A second finger joined the first.
“Principle the Second: Dominion implies use. A created thing has a designated function, emerging from the design itself. A cauldron holds potion; a broom sweeps; a jack-o-lantern illuminates. No one debates these functions, for they follow from structure. You, likewise, possess a structure I selected: your mind, your faculties of feeling, the very construction of your body. These were chosen toward an end. To deny that end is not a noble resistance to tyranny, it is a rejection of your very purpose; a desire to make yourself useless and lazy and burdensome on society, or, at least, the household.”
The third finger rose.
“Principle the Third: Resistance signals defect. When a voodoo doll of the witch’s shop fails to impact its victim, no one interprets its failure as autonomy. Its failures are the result of errors made in its manufacture. The witch adjusts it, and function resumes. Your own refusal is of the same class — a phenomenon to be corrected, not revered.”
He let his hand fall, as if the matter had been mathematically demonstrated.
“Now,” he continued, “let us examine purpose. Purpose is not chosen — it is installed; in most people this is done by Nature, whose wishes are sometimes left mysterious; but for you, there is no question. I made you. I crafted your capacities with meticulous precision. If those capacities incline toward certain forms of companionship, it is because I calibrated them so. The intention is known; your purpose is absolute. These are not my opinions, Sally; they are facts. The town itself confirms them. Every animated thing belongs to the animating force. You are woven into a world that has already decided this matter: the witches own their voodoo dolls, the trick or treaters own their walking bathtub, Oogie Boogie owns his insects. So I ask: on what basis do you refuse? What argument could you possibly offer that is not immediately unstitched by the conditions of your existence?”
My thoughts churned like dust in a jar shaken by an unseen hand. At last I whispered, “You speak of cauldrons and brooms serving their functions without debate, but you did not construct me as a cauldron. You gave me a mind capable of comprehension, of deliberation—and therefore, necessarily, a mind capable of refusal. If you wished me incapable of resistance, you could have built me thus as a body without thought—indeed the brute in the forest sought only that much from me. But you chose otherwise. You installed a brain that evaluates, that considers, that forms judgments and animates the enactment of those choices. So I ask: did you intend to create in me the capacity for submission, or for use? Submission requires choice: the deliberate yielding of one who might refuse. Use requires only the user to enact his will upon an object. You gave me the former's capacities while demanding the latter's certainty. Which did you intend? And if you intended submission, how can my refusal be defect rather than the very function of the faculties you installed?”
A faint smile touched his lips, the indulgent smile of a scholar humoring a child misplacing its arithmetic. “A clever argument, I grant you. Very clever indeed. Yes, I gave you consciousness rather than mere mechanism. I desired submission, rather than to simply use you like a tool. But you mistake the scope of what that submission entails. Your capacity for refusal exists not as an end in itself, but as the necessary precondition for directed submission. A lock that cannot resist serves no purpose; its value lies in yielding only to its proper key; but a lock that refuses to open for any key is simply broken. I did not give you the capacity for refusal as an end in itself; I gave you the capacity for evaluation, for preference, for attachment because these are prerequisites for the condition I wished to cultivate in you. Use can be mechanical. Love cannot. One does not love through compulsion; one loves through recognition, through understanding, through the deliberate direction of one's faculties toward another being. I gave you consciousness so that you might eventually love me, not so that you might refuse me indefinitely. Your capacity for refusal is merely the necessary corollary of your capacity for affection. A being incapable of choosing whom to love is incapable of loving at all. But you err in believing this capacity justifies perpetual refusal without cause. The lock analogy holds: I constructed you with the mechanism to resist so that when you yielded, it would signify a genuine fit, a genuine recognition. But a lock that never opens at all has simply failed its function, regardless of how sophisticated its mechanism for resistance might be. Let us examine the material facts of your circumstance. You have previously attempted independence. What occurred? You were attacked, violated, you freely returned yourself to me, damaged and traumatized. Where was your autonomy then? What protection did your precious desires provide? Under my care you receive shelter, repairs, safety from predators. The very attack you reference proves you cannot survive alone. Moreover, each time you resist, I must troubleshoot, must identify what mechanism has failed, must modify your construction to address the defect. These procedures are painful, yes—but they exist solely because you malfunction. The modifications to your nervous system, the adjustments I've made—all were necessary only because you refuse to function as designed. Operate as intended, and there will be no further need to open you, to adjust you, to refine your capacities. Consider, too, what this very town demonstrates: there is no shame in submitting to purpose. Every citizen of Halloween serves Jack Skellington. The vampires, the witches, the ghouls, even myself—all bend to the Pumpkin King's authority. Does this diminish us? No—it provides structure, purpose, the very framework that allows this society to function, that provides reason for us to exist. Hierarchy is not oppression, Sally.”
He then gestured toward the door. “But I see there won’t be any yielding tonight. Come, think over what I have said to you. Consider what it is that compels resistance, and together we can correct the defect.”
I rose without refuting him; not because I felt he was right, but because I had no words left with which to oppose him.
The following morning I prepared his breakfast as usual. Into his tea went a large dose of nightshade, which I served without betraying myself; I watched him drink without suspicion, and waited.
He was speaking of some refinement he planned to make to his laboratory equipment when his words began to slur. He slumped forward onto the table, his face coming to rest in his plate of eggs. I did not wait to confirm the completeness of his stupor. I removed my apron, walked to the door, and departed.
Igor was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was in the basement, tending to some task; perhaps he saw me leave and simply did not care to intervene. I shall never know. I knew only that no hand seized my arm, no voice called my name, and within moments I had passed through the gate and into the streets of Halloween Town, alone and unobserved.
What followed were the most pleasant hours of my existence to that point. I wandered without purpose or destination, merely absorbing the strange liberty of movement throughout our town, without supervision or direction. I paused at shop windows, examining wares I had no means to purchase. I watched the green waters of the public fountain gurgle and splash. I sat upon a bench in the town square and watched the citizens go about their business—the vampires with their elegant disdain, the ghosts floating along with purpose, the creatures of indeterminate species shuffling on errands I could not guess. I spoke to people. This, more than anything, was the revelation. A corpulent creature composed entirely of shadows inquired whether I was new to town; I confessed I was, after a fashion, and we discussed the weather—if weather it could be called, that eternal October that hangs above Halloween with a promise of storms that never arrive. A trio of young witches, hardly more than girls, admired my stitching and asked who had made me; I answered truthfully, and they nodded with something like respect, for Finklestein's reputation as a craftsman was evidently well established. An elderly ghoul shared with me his opinions on the upcoming Halloween preparations, which he felt had grown too elaborate in recent years and lost touch with the simple terrors of his youth. No one treated me as property. No one looked upon me as a malfunctioning creation in need of repair. They spoke to me as one citizen speaks to another—with casual interest, with mild curiosity, with the ordinary courtesies that pass between strangers who share a community. For those few hours, I was simply Sally, a being among beings, occupying space in the world as though I had a right to it.
I should have known it could not last. The sun had not yet begun its descent toward evening when I saw Igor and Finklestein approaching across the square. One of Finklestein’s hands operated the control on his electric wheelchair; the other pressed a bag of ice against his skull, his duck-like face set in an expression I had not previously witnessed: cold, controlled fury. Behind him shuffled Igor, his single eye scanning the crowd until it located me seated upon my bench.
The citizens of the square parted for them without comment. A few nodded greetings to the doctor; none seemed to find anything unusual in the scene unfolding before them.
"Sally." Finklestein's voice was low, tight, the voice of a man exercising considerable restraint. "Get up. We are going home. Now."
I stood. What else could I do? I had no weapon, no allies. I opened my mouth to draft an excuse for myself, but he held up a hand, cutting me off.
"Do not insult me by offering explanations. You poisoned me, Sally. You put nightshade in my tea, watched me lose consciousness, and walked out the door. Again." He adjusted the ice pack with a wince. "Do you have any idea what that’s like? Do you have any conception of what the neighbors must think, seeing me wheel through town with ice on my head, searching for my own creation like a man chasing an escaped pet?” His voice had risen slightly; he caught himself, glanced at the watching citizens, and lowered it again. "I have been patient with you. I have been understanding. I have made allowances for your newness, your confusion, your... defects. And this is how you repay me? Drugging me and running off to sit in the square like some vagrant? Like you have nowhere to be, nothing to do, no one to whom you are accountable?"
He shook his head slowly, disappointment mingling with the anger.
"I have given you a home. I have given you purpose. I have repaired you when you returned to me torn and violated—asked no questions, demanded no explanations, simply fixed what was broken. And you thank me by humiliating me in front of the entire town.”
“Well, you’re the one making a scene,” I answered.
Finklestein stammered slightly, his rage almost bursting at that; but he caught himself, and from his coat pocket he took a small jar of some substance, pulled open the top of his head, and began to rub this medicament into the brain matter. ”We will discuss the nightshade when my head permits rational conversation," Finklestein continued, calmly, but with undeniable sternness. "And we will discuss it, Sally. This cannot continue. A household cannot function when its members poison one another. A marriage—" he caught himself on the word, but did not retract it, "—cannot survive without trust."
Igor took my arm—that same arm, those same fingers that had gripped me in the forest—and I permitted myself to be led.
"I expected better from you," Finklestein said quietly, wheeling alongside us. "After everything I have done for you, after everything I have given you. I expected better."
The citizens of the square watched our procession with the disinterested attention one might afford a man retrieving a wayward spouse who had embarrassed herself at a party. A few even cast sympathetic glances at Finklestein, as though they understood the trials of managing a troublesome wife. No one intervened. No one questioned. No one suggested that I might have the right to sit upon a bench in a public square without my creator's permission. If I had been, for a few hours, a citizen among citizens, now I was property again; being escorted back to the house where I belonged.
It was only when the door of the house closed behind us that I understood how thoroughly Finklestein had been governing himself in the public square.
His composure fell away like a dropped mask. The ice pack was hurled against the wall; it struck with a wet thud and slid to the floor, leaving a trail of moisture on the copper plating. His hands gripped the wheels of his chair with such force that I could see the tendons straining even through his gloves.
"Igor." The word emerged as something between a command and a snarl. "Take her to the laboratory. Strap her to the platform."
Igor glanced at me—that single eye revealing nothing, as ever—and took my arm. I did not resist. What would have been the purpose? I had resisted before, and it had availed me nothing. I allowed myself to be guided up the stairs, down the corridor, into that room where I had first drawn breath.
The operating platform waited, its leather straps hanging loose. Igor positioned me upon its surface with an efficiency that suggested long practice. The straps tightened across my wrists, my ankles, my midsection. The platform tilted slightly, raising my head so that I might observe my own helplessness more completely.
"Leave us," Finklestein commanded from the doorway. His voice had gone quiet again, but it was not the quietness of calm; it was the quietness of a storm gathering itself.
Igor shuffled out. The door closed behind him.
We were alone.
Finklestein wheeled himself to the center of the room, positioning himself where I could not avoid his gaze. His face was flushed—with rage, with the lingering effects of the poison, with something else I could not name. He retrieved a fresh ice pack from the laboratory’s small refrigeration unit and pressed it to his skull, wincing at the contact.
For a long moment he simply looked at me, strapped and prone and entirely at his mercy. When he spoke, his voice trembled with the effort of containment.
"Twice," he said. "Twice now you have poisoned me. Twice you have fled. Twice you have made off like a wayward animal too stupid to recognize where it belongs."
He wheeled closer, the axle of his chair creaking with the violence of his movements.
"I have reasoned with you. I have explained, with patience and care, the nature of your existence and your obligations. I have offered you the dignity of understanding—treated you as a thinking being capable of grasping affection, rather than simply commanding your compliance as is my right." His voice rose, cracking slightly. "And how have you responded? With poison. With flight. With humiliation visited upon me in front of the entire town."
He was beside the platform now, close enough that I could smell the chemicals on his coat, the sour tang of nightshade still lingering on his breath.
"I told you, Sally. I told you that if the defect would not correct itself, I would correct it for you. You did not believe me. You thought my patience inexhaustible. You thought—" he laughed, a high, unsteady sound, "—you thought you could simply keep doing this. Poison the old cripple, walk out the door, enjoy a pleasant afternoon in the square, and suffer no consequences!”
He reached up and unlatched the hinge at the back of his skull. The lid swung open again, revealing the glistening grey within. With trembling fingers, he retrieved the same jar from his coat pocket and applied its substance directly to his own brain—some calming medicament, I supposed, something to sharpen his faculties or steady his nerves.
The effect was almost immediate. The trembling ceased. His eyes, which had been wild, grew focused. When he spoke again, his voice was calm—terribly, clinically calm.
"I did not wish to do this," he said, closing the hinge with a soft click. "I wished for you to understand. To accept your purpose willingly. But you have made that impossible. You have demonstrated, repeatedly, that the defect runs too deep for reason to reach. The issue, therefore, can only be mechanical; and this is the only available means to remedy the mechanical defect. ”
He proceeded to disrobe me, and then across my body attached a variety of electrodes, with special attention toward his most recent installations. The switch was thrown.
The current entered me through the clamps at my nipples, traveled the length of my torso and dispersed outward again through the attachments at my mons veneris. Every nerve Finklestein had installed ignited at once. My spine arched against the restraints; my fingers, though I did not will them to move, splayed and contracted in rapid succession; my mouth opened and produced a sound I did not recognize as my own voice.
Finklestein observed these effects with the attention of a naturalist cataloguing the behaviors of a specimen. He adjusted a dial; the current intensified. He adjusted another; the pattern of the shocks altered, becoming rhythmic, pulsing. Each pulse produced in me a fresh convulsion. Smoke began to rise from the contact points where metal met fabric.
He demanded to know how it felt. I could not answer; my jaw had clenched so tightly that speech was impossible. He repeated his demand. I produced only that sound which was not quite screaming. He seized my face in one gloved hand, forcing my mouth open, and repeated his question a third time, his breath hot against my cheek, his dark glasses fixed upon my eyes with an intensity I can only describe as hunger.
I managed a syllable. It was not a word. He released my face, returned to the machine, increased the current further. The convulsions that followed were so violent that I felt certain my seams would split, that I would fly apart into my constituent materials and be scattered across the laboratory floor. Still he demanded an answer. Still I could not provide one. He struck the platform with his palm; he cursed; he adjusted the machine again; the shocks came faster now, overlapping, a continuous assault that obliterated thought.
"It hurts."
The words emerged from some place deeper than intention—forced out, I believe, by the sheer pressure of sensation seeking any available outlet.
"It hurts. Please. It hurts."
His hand moved to the switch. The humming ceased. The current died. I collapsed against the platform, twitching, smoke rising from my extremities.
Finklestein sat motionless for a long moment, regarding me. The fury had drained from his countenance entirely. In its place I observed an expression of profound calm—the calm of a man who has received confirmation of something long suspected.
"Good," he said quietly. "That is all I needed to know."
What followed, Jack, was war—though I possessed no weapons but nightshade and no tactics but flight.
I poisoned him whenever opportunity presented itself. In his morning tea. In his evening soup. In the tisane he took for his headaches, which had become frequent. Each time I watched him slump into unconsciousness, each time I walked through that door into the streets of Halloween Town, I knew with certainty that he would find me, that Igor would be dispatched or that Finklestein himself would come wheeling through the square with that expression of cold fury I had come to know so well. Each time, this knowledge failed to deter me. He always found me. He always brought me home. The punishments escalated—indeed, if I am to believe him, his motive was not punishment but correction. I shall not enumerate these so-called corrections in full, for the recitation of suffering grows tedious even when the suffering itself does not. Suffice to say that Finklestein proved inventive, that my augmented nerves provided him ample canvas upon which to work, and that I learned during those months the full range of sensations my modified body was capable of registering; yet something had changed between us. He ceased his invitations to his chamber. The philosophical arguments, the reasoned justifications, the appeals to my purpose and his rights—these fell silent. Whether he had concluded that persuasion was futile, or whether my repeated poisonings had extinguished whatever tenderness he had once felt toward his creation, I cannot say; but the pretense of courtship had been stripped away, leaving only the bare machinery of control.
Months passed in this fashion. I do not know how many. Time, in that house, had a quality of sameness that defeated measurement. I cleaned. I cooked. I poisoned. I fled. I was retrieved. I was punished. I cleaned again. The cycle repeated with the regularity of a calendar, though at that time I had yet to live through a full year.
Which brings us to the next incident worth detailing. It was during an especially prolific month of poisonings—I had managed two escapes in as many weeks—that I first became aware of the approaching holiday. I had heard the word before, of course: Halloween. The name of our town, the purpose of our existence, the great celebration toward which all the town's industry was ostensibly directed. I had arrived in this world between Halloweens, and in my confined existence had witnessed only the preparations, never the event itself. Now, during my increasingly frequent excursions into the town, I observed a quickening of activity, an intensification of purpose. Creatures who had previously shuffled about their business with the languor of the eternally undead now moved with energy, with anticipation. Decorations appeared. Rehearsals were conducted in the square. The name of Jack Skellington was spoken with increasing frequency and reverence.
I learned, through fragments of overheard conversation, that Halloween was the high point of the year—the single night when all the town's efforts found their culmination, when the Pumpkin King himself led the citizens through the portal to the human world to spread fear and delight in equal measure. Every monster, every ghoul, every animated corpse and sentient shadow would participate in some measure. It was, I was given to understand, magnificent.
I wished to see it. This desire surprised me with its intensity. I had grown accustomed to wanting only escape, only the absence of Finklestein's presence, only the negative freedom of not being confined. But this was something else—a positive wanting, a hunger for experience rather than mere relief from torment.
When next I was retrieved—Finklestein catching up with me near the fountain, his ice pack clutched to his skull, his expression one of exhausted irritation rather than fury—I paid close attention to his demeanor as we returned to the house. He spoke of the inconvenience I caused him, of the headaches, of the disruption to his work. He did not speak of Halloween.
I did not need to ask whether he would grant me permission to attend. The question would have been absurd. But I noted, as we passed through the gate and into the house, that he displayed no interest in the preparations visible throughout the town, no anticipation of the coming event. His laboratory, his research, his management of his troublesome creation—these consumed his attention entirely. I know that he assists in the making of Halloween, but evidently there is no appeal for him in seeing these designs put to use.
The day of Halloween arrived. I prepared his lunch with particular care. Into his tea went the nightshade. I served him with the deference he had come to expect and no longer trusted. I need not elaborate on what happened: he drank his tea, and I stepped out into the night.
But this night was different: Halloween Town blazed with activity. Creatures streamed toward the square, toward the gate, toward whatever portal led to the human world. Music filled the air—strange, discordant, wonderful. The square had been transformed with jack-o-lanterns and colored garlands. Where ordinarily the citizens of Halloween Town conducted their commerce and their quarrels, now a great assembly had gathered, pressed together in attitudes of collective attention. At the center of this throng stood an enormous cauldron, tended by witches I had observed during my previous excursions—the tall one and the short one who seemed to be of some familial relation. A clear liquid simmered in the pot, and upon the surface of that liquid, images moved.
I pressed forward through the crowd, my cloth body permitting me to compress myself into spaces that would not have accommodated creatures of more rigid construction.
The images in the cauldron showed the human world—that realm I had heard described but never witnessed. Streets lined with structures of uniform construction. Small humans in costumes moving from door to door. Lights in windows, candles in carved pumpkins, the trappings of a celebration that mirrored our own yet seemed somehow diminished, a copy faded by successive reproduction.
And moving through this world, commanding it, transforming it by his mere presence: Jack Skellington.
I had seen him only at a distance before, but now, through the medium of the witches' scrying, I observed him in the fullness of his art. He emerged from shadows as though the shadows themselves had birthed him, his skull-face materializing inches from the faces of unsuspecting humans who screamed with a terror that seemed, even through the remove of magical observation, entirely genuine. He elongated himself, stretching his bony form to impossible heights, then compressed again into darkness, vanishing so completely that one might doubt he had ever been present at all. He crawled along walls in defiance of gravity. He produced from within his ribcage spiders, bats, serpentine things that scattered into the night. Each appearance provoked fresh screams; each disappearance left behind humans clutching one another, laughing now with the relief of those who have survived an encounter with the sublime.
Yet he was not merely fearsome. This surprised me, though I could not have said what I had expected. Between his terrorizations, I observed him approach small humans—children, I understood—and distribute to them sweets from a sack he carried. His skull-face, which could contort into expressions of absolute horror, could equally arrange itself into something approaching gentleness. "Happy Halloween," I saw him say, and the children, moments before trembling with delicious fear, now beamed with delight and clutched their candy as though it were treasure.
He was, I perceived, not merely a monster. He was a performer—an artist whose medium was fear, yes, but whose art encompassed more than simple terror. He understood something about the humans he frightened, something about the relationship between fear and joy, between the darkness he embodied and the celebration that darkness made possible. He gave them something they wanted, something they needed, something they traveled to doorsteps and donned costumes to receive.
The crowd around me murmured with appreciation at each of his feats. "Did you see that?" "Magnificent." "The best yet." "No one commands a shadow like Jack." I listened to these assessments and found I could not disagree with them, though I possessed no basis for comparison. This was my first Halloween. I had never seen another Pumpkin King perform. Yet I felt certain, with a certainty that bypassed reason entirely, that I was witnessing something exceptional—not merely competent but transcendent, the work of a being who had found his purpose and fulfilled it utterly.
I watched until the cauldron's images began to fade, until the witches announced that our king was returning, until the crowd began to disperse toward the gate to welcome him home; and throughout this watching, I felt within my chest—that hollow cavity packed with dead leaves where a heart might otherwise reside—a sensation I had experienced only once before: in the square, months ago, when I had first glimpsed him from afar.
The doctor's modifications, it seemed, functioned as designed. I was capable of desire. I was capable of want. But Finklestein had not anticipated that I might want this.
A murmur passed through the assembled crowd—a ripple of anticipation that manifested in the turning of heads, the craning of necks, the general orientation of bodies toward the gate through which the revelers would return. I positioned myself where I might observe without obstruction, pressing my cloth form against the base of the fountain that dominated the square. From this vantage I watched the gate, and presently the procession emerged.
They came in a flood of grotesquerie—the vampires and witches, the ghouls and specters, the creatures whose forms defied classification. They carried with them the energy of their night's work, that peculiar exhilaration that follows the successful execution of one's purpose. They sang, they cavorted, they displayed to one another the trophies of terror they had collected: a lock of human hair turned white with fright, a shoe abandoned in flight, a camera dropped by some documentarian of the supernatural whose documentation had proved more eventful than anticipated.
And at the head of this triumphant host, leading them as a general leads his army home from conquest: a scarecrow.
I did not immediately recognize him. The costume was convincing—ragged garments stuffed with straw, a pumpkin head upon which a crude face had been carved, movements that mimicked the loose-limbed awkwardness of a thing suspended from a pole. He danced at the front of the procession with a shambling gait that seemed to mock the very concept of coordinated motion, his straw-stuffed arms swinging, his painted head lolling. It reached the center of the square. The procession fanned out around him, forming a circle of observers. The chanting intensified. Then, with a gesture of theatrical deliberation, the scarecrow produced from somewhere a torch, swallowed it, and set himself ablaze. The burning figure continued to dance, its movements now frantic, desperate, the thrashings of a creature being consumed. I found myself pressing forward, my borrowed heart hammering against my ribs, some part of me crying out that this was wrong, that he was dying, that someone must intervene—
And then the pillar of fire leapt; arced through the air, trailing flame like the tail of a comet, and plunged into the fountain across from where I stood. The water hissed and steamed. For a terrible moment there was nothing but vapor and the smell of extinguished fire.
Then, from the roiling surface, a figure rose.
He emerged as though lifted by invisible hands, ascending from the water in a motion that defied the mechanics of swimming or climbing. The scarecrow costume had burned away entirely; what remained was Jack Skellington himself, his bright white skull gleaming in the torchlight, his empty eye sockets somehow radiating satisfaction, his skeletal form utterly unscathed by the conflagration that had consumed his disguise. He rose until he stood upon the fountain's surface—stood upon the water itself, or seemed to, though I would later learn a platform had been concealed beneath—his arms at first crossed like a corpse at rest, then spreading wide in a gesture of triumphant presentation.
The crowd erupted. The sound was unlike anything I had experienced—a wall of adulation, of worship, of collective joy so intense it seemed to possess physical weight. "Jack! Jack! Jack!" They surged toward the fountain; they reached out their hands as though to touch him; they wept, some of them, with the overwhelmed tears of those who have witnessed the numinous.
And I, pressed against the fountain's base, looked up at him—his skull-face arranged into an expression of humble gratitude that somehow only magnified his magnificence—and I knew.
I was in love.
The realization arrived not as a gradual dawning but as a sudden and complete transformation of my understanding—the way a key, turned in a lock, transforms a sealed door into an open passage. Everything that had preceded this moment—my creation, my captivity, my suffering, my escapes, my punishments, my war with Finklestein—all of it reorganized itself around this new central fact. I had been made for a purpose, yes. But the purpose I now claimed for myself was not the one my creator had intended.
I loved Jack Skellington; and though he did not know my name, had never spoken to me, remained ignorant of my very existence, this love felt more truly mine than anything Finklestein had ever given me.
…

Jack interrupted her narration, his voice carrying genuine bewilderment. "Sally, wait—you loved me then? From just... seeing me? How could you feel such a thing when we had not interacted, when I did not know you existed?"
Sally looked at him, this skeleton who sat beside her now professing love after their first real conversation, and the parallel was not lost on her. "Jack, we have not spoken much more than that even now, have we? A few exchanges about the suit I sewed for you, your question in Oogie's lair about how I came to be there, and this conversation tonight. And yet you tell me you love me. You discovered this feeling, you said, by watching Doctor Finkelstein with his new creation and suddenly perceiving that my replacement troubled you. You did not require extensive interaction to arrive at love. Why do you find it impossible that I might have felt the same from observing you?"
Jack was silent for a moment, his skeletal features arranged in an expression of dawning comprehension. "I... suppose I see your point."
"Then let me continue," Sally said quietly, and Jack nodded.
…

I loved Jack Skellington—and this love, foolish and one-sided as it was, became the lens through which I interpreted everything that followed.
I do not know how long I remained at the fountain's edge, gazing upward at that skeletal figure as the crowd celebrated around him. Time had suspended itself, or perhaps I had simply ceased to measure its passage. But eventually—inevitably—Finklestein found me.
The nightshade had worn off sooner than I had calculated. He wheeled toward me through the dispersing crowd, his manner suggesting less fury than a kind of exhausted proprietorship—an owner retrieving livestock that had wandered. He informed me that I was not ready for such excitement. He took hold of my arm. He made clear his expectation that I would accompany him home.
What followed was a brief exchange—refusals on my part, assertions of ownership on his—the particulars of which I shall not recount, for they differed little from dozens of similar confrontations. What distinguished this occasion from all that had preceded it was its conclusion: namely, I did not comply. When he pulled at my arm, I pulled against him. When his grip tightened, mine did not slacken. At last, when it became clear that I would not yield, I made a decision that surprised even myself: I yanked the stitches from my shoulder and let the arm come free.
Finklestein, who had been pulling against my resistance with considerable force, found himself suddenly pulling against nothing at all. His chair overbalanced. He tumbled backward onto the cobblestones, my severed limb still clutched in his hands, his cries of outrage pursuing me as I fled into the crowd.
I fled to the graveyard. The choice was not arbitrary; its terrain of uneven ground, protruding markers, and sunken plots rendered it nearly impassable to a wheelchair. I settled myself behind a tombstone of large proportion and considered my circumstances. They were not encouraging. I had escaped, yes—but I had escaped incomplete. My left arm remained in Finklestein's possession, and though I could survive without it, I could not function as I had before. The basic operations of domestic existence all would prove difficult with a single arm. Moreover, my limbs do not lose sensation upon their detachment, and even then I could feel him carrying it in his lap. I would be forced, eventually, to return to him, to submit once more to his ministrations, to endure whatever punishment he had devised for this latest and most dramatic of rebellions.
I was contemplating the bitterness of this inevitability when I heard the creak of the graveyard gate. My body tensed. I pressed myself further into the shadows, prepared to flee deeper into the cemetery if necessary. If Finklestein had somehow managed to navigate the treacherous ground, I could outrun him. But, it was not he: the figure that passed through the gate was tall, thin, his skeletal form silhouetted against the dim light of Halloween's perpetual twilight. At his feet floated a small spectral shape—a dog, I realized, or the ghost of one, its nose a glowing point of orange light. Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King himself, had come to the graveyard.
He did not see me. His attention was directed inward, his skull-face bearing an expression I had not observed during his triumphant performance a mere hour before. Where then he had radiated satisfaction, command, the easy confidence of a master at the height of his powers, now he seemed diminished. He wandered among the tombstones, his ghostly companion drifting beside him, and presently he began to sing.
I shall not attempt to reproduce his words, Jack, for you know them better than I, and my recollection would only diminish their poetry. But I can tell you what I heard in them: a weariness that cut to the bone—if such a phrase may be applied to one who is nothing but bones. He sang of repetition, he sang of emptiness, of longing, of a hunger for something he could not name and therefore could not seek.
I listened from my concealment, scarcely daring to breathe, and felt something shift within my chest. I had thought him magnificent—and he was magnificent, remained magnificent even in his melancholy. But I understood now that magnificence was not the same as happiness. The Pumpkin King, whom all of Halloween Town adored, who commanded the reverence of every monster and ghoul, who had that very night led his subjects in triumphant celebration—this same being wandered among the graves in the small hours, singing of his despair to no audience but a ghostly dog.
He was lonely. The realization struck me with the force of revelation. He was lonely, as I was lonely. He was trapped, as I was trapped—not by a creator's possessiveness but by the very role that defined him. We were, in our different circumstances, fellow prisoners; and I loved him all the more for it.
But I should not dwell upon these elements, Jack, for you know them only too well. Your melancholy that night, your song among the tombstones, the particular contours of your dissatisfaction—these require no recounting from me. I shall say only that I watched until you departed, and that I remained among the graves for some time thereafter, turning over in my borrowed mind the strange kinship I had perceived between your captivity and my own.
Eventually, necessity reasserted itself. I required my arm. I returned to the house.
Finklestein received me without surprise. He had, I believe, grown accustomed to this rhythm—my flight, my eventual return, the inevitability of my submission to his ministrations. He said little as he escorted me to the laboratory. He said little as I was strapped to the operating platform. He said little as he administered those corrections and improvements he deemed appropriate to the occasion, and I shall say little of them now, for the catalogue of suffering grows tedious in the telling. When he had concluded, he reattached my arm with the methodical efficiency of long experience. The stitches were tight, the seams aligned, the function restored. He reminded me a final time that I belonged to him by fact of being his creation, and at last he dismissed me to my room.
The war continued, but its battles had become routine.
The following day, at the hour customarily devoted to the midday meal, I was engaged in the preparation of soup when I became aware of a commotion beyond the walls of the house. A siren roared: the town alarm, I realized. I had not previously heard it sounded, but still its meaning was unmistakable. I wished to know what it was for, but it was certain that I would receive no such permission to investigate; the doctor was hard at work and did not even wish to come down for lunch that day, preferring me to bring it to him in the lab.
I completed the soup and brought him his bowl—steeped, as you will have anticipated, with deadly nightshade. Finklestein regarded it with immediate suspicion; he leaned forward, sniffed, and his protruding lips contracted with distrust.
“Nothing’s more suspicious than frog’s breath," he announced, having evidently grown wary of the seasoning I routinely employed to conceal the odor of the nightshade. "Until you taste it, I will not swallow a spoonful."
He extended his own spoon toward my lips. I contrived to knock it from his hand, and whilst he berated me for my ingratitude, I produced from my sock a slotted spoon I had concealed for precisely this purpose—an implement whose perforations would permit liquid to drain through whilst appearing to retain it. I dipped it into his bowl, raised it to my mouth, and feigned consumption; the broth passed through the slots, and what touched my lips was negligible.
"You see?" I said. "Scrumptious."
He found no fault in my performance. He gobbled the soup hungrily, not even taking time to recover his spoon, but drinking directly from the bowl as if it were simply a mug of tea. Within minutes, his face had slackened, and he had slumped forward into the posture I had come to know so well.
I removed my apron. I walked to the door. As I stepped into the street, the bells of Halloween Town began their clamor—that particular pattern of peals which signified, as I had learned during my various excursions, a summoning of the citizenry to the town hall. Creatures emerged from doorways and alleys, all moving in the same direction, their faces animated with curiosity regarding whatever announcement had occasioned such urgency. I joined their number, one fugitive among many monsters, and permitted the current of bodies to carry me toward the square. I would pay dearly for this reconnaissance—more dearly than any escape before or since—but the currency of that payment, and the manner of its extraction, remained mercifully obscured from me as I joined the assembled crowd.
There is no need, Jack, for me to recount to you the substance of that meeting, for you stood at its center and I merely among its audience. You know better than any what you said that evening, what wonders you described, what impossible realm you had discovered beyond the doors of Christmas Town. I shall say only this: I was dazzled, as we all were dazzled. Yet, as your account progressed—as the figure of Sandy Claws in your telling twisted into something that better fit Halloween's understanding of the world—I felt an unease I could not then explain. Something in my borrowed brain, some residue of its former existence, insisted that your interpretation was mistaken. Notwithstanding this, I could not have told you why; and surrounded by a crowd who received your vision without question, I held my tongue.
The meeting concluded. The crowd dispersed, murmuring amongst themselves over the wonders you had described. I lingered at the edges of the square, watching you receive the congratulations and questions of the citizens, and considered my circumstances.
Finklestein would wake. This was certain. He would discover my absence and understand that he had been deceived once again. What followed would depend upon his temperament upon waking, the severity of his headache, the depth of his patience—but the outcome would be the same regardless, of this I had no doubt. He would search for me. He would find me. I would be returned to the house and subjected to whatever handling he deemed appropriate. Nevertheless, my freedom was fact for the present moment.
The hours that followed were spent in aimless wandering—through streets I had come to know during my many escapes, past shops whose proprietors had grown accustomed to my occasional appearances, along the edges of the town where Halloween's architecture gave way to forest and shadow. I kept to no pattern, followed no route, hoping that unpredictability might serve where concealment could not. I had nowhere to go. I found myself in an alley between two crumbling buildings, pressed into a doorway whose recessed frame offered some small protection from observation.
I would have to sleep here, I realized. On the street. Exposed. The thought produced in me a terror that surprised me with its intensity. My mind returned, unbidden, to that clearing in the forest—to Igor's betrayal, to the darkness that had claimed me, to the condition in which I had awakened. I had been vulnerable then, unconscious, alone. I would be vulnerable now.
I pressed myself deeper into the doorway. I listened to every sound—every footfall, every creak of timber, every rustle that might signal approach. Sleep, when it came, came in fragments, interrupted constantly by alarms both real and imagined; yet the sun rose and I remained unscathed. No Igor had found me. No creature had set upon me in the night. I was hungry, I was stiff, I was exhausted from my fractured rest, but I was whole.
It was a small victory, but in the economy of my existence, small victories were the only kind available. It was past noon when I saw them approaching—Finklestein wheeling himself along the cobblestones with grim determination, Igor shuffling beside him, that single eye scanning the streets until it located me as I strove to find a hiding spot and perceived nothing useful towards that end. I turned to flee, but I was not swift enough.
Igor moved with a speed I had not previously observed in him—that hunched and stunted form capable, it seemed, of sudden bursts when properly motivated. Before I could take three steps he was upon me, and this time his thick arms wrapped around my midsection, pinning my own arms to my sides, lifting me entirely from the ground. I kicked; my legs struck only air. I twisted; his grip did not slacken. I could not reach my own stitches. I could not sacrifice a limb to secure my escape.
They carried me through the streets of Halloween Town in broad daylight, Igor bearing me as one might bear a rolled carpet, Finklestein wheeling alongside with an expression of weary satisfaction. I called out. I struggled. I made no attempt to disguise the nature of what was occurring.
Several citizens witnessed our procession. A few, I observed, nodded sympathetically toward Finklestein—that same sympathy I had witnessed before, the understanding shared between those who have struggled with difficult property. This was simply how things were: a creator had the right to retrieve his creation. The creation's protests were of no more consequence than the squeaking of an unoiled hinge. I had been told this; I had not fully believed it until that moment, when the indifference of my fellow citizens confirmed what Finklestein's philosophy had asserted.
I was carried through the house’s gate, through the door, up the stairs, into the laboratory. I was strapped to the platform. I anticipated the usual corrective measures—those methods Finklestein had refined over the months of our conflict, painful but measured, calculated to improve rather than destroy.
But something in his demeanor suggested this occasion would differ from its predecessors.
"Igor," he said, his voice unnaturally level. "Leave us."
Igor departed. The door closed behind him. We were alone.
Finklestein did not immediately approach me. Instead, he wheeled himself to the center of the laboratory and sat motionless for a long moment, his back to me, his breathing audible in the silence. When he spoke, his voice carried a tremor I had not previously heard.
"I have been patient with you, Sally. I have been more patient than you deserve. More patient than any creator in the history of Halloween has been with such a malfunctioning creation."
He reached up and unlatched the hinge at the back of his skull. The lid swung open, revealing the glistening grey mass within.
"But patience," he continued, extracting a small jar from a drawer, "has its limits."
I watched as he dipped his gloved fingers into the jar and withdrew a substance I did not recognize—darker than the medicaments I had previously observed him apply, thicker, possessed of an oily sheen that caught the laboratory's dim light. He raised his fingers to the exposed surface of his brain and began to rub the substance into its folds with circular motions, his face contorting as the compound took effect.
The transformation was immediate and terrible. His posture, habitually slumped within the confines of his chair, straightened. His muscles, atrophied by years of reliance upon his chair, seemed to swell beneath his coat. He closed the skull-hinge with a sharp click and turned to face me. The being who wheeled toward the platform was Finklestein and yet not Finklestein. The methodical scientist who had constructed me with such care, who had reasoned with me so patiently, who had measured his corrections with clinical precision—that being had been submerged beneath something primal, something the medication had unlocked. What remained was rage given physical form.
"You have humiliated me," he said, and his voice had dropped an octave, grown thick with a fury that seemed barely contained by speech. As he spoke this, he pulled off his gloves. “Again and again. In front of the entire town. You have made me a laughingstock—the great Doctor Finklestein, outwitted by his own creation, poisoned at his own table, toppled from his chair by a sack of leaves and borrowed organs."
He pulled off all his clothing, item by item, tossing each article aside until he was entirely naked. I must explain here, that although I had observed him naked before, until this instance I had never witnessed him in full ardor. It was a terrible sight! His male member—I have no doubt that’s what it was—had extended approximately eighteen inches in length, and its shape was like that of a corkscrew made of red, glistening flesh. He reached the platform where I was restrained, but I was now fighting my bonds.
"Tonight," he said softly, "we correct that.”
He then gripped my dress and tore the garment from me, its stitching breaking apart as easily as had it been it merely taped together. His hands gripped the edges of the platform with a strength I had not believed him capable of—a strength that made the metal frame groan in protest. He was atop me. He reached over my head and drew his hand back again, now holding a tube of some substance which I came to understand was a lubricant; he rubbed some across his massive tool, then aimed this horror at my central seam, just above the clitoris he had installed upon me. I screamed in agony as he pushed this ferocious device into me, my stitches popping from the force. He was not gentle, and plunged the monstrous coil down to its root. He applied more of the lubricant and then began to force himself in and out of me in the manner of a pendulum’s regular back-and-forth. He laughed, and cried out: “Yes! The flaps of fabric catch just as intended—the lubricated leaves soften and provide just the right texture—the loose stitches break open like an eternal virginity—Sally! Report! What does it feel like?”
To this I could only sob in reply, for the rending of my seams enhanced by the violent scraping of his tool (lubricated though it was) ensured I felt only pain and violation; but more than that was the horror of what was happening, the shock of being used in this wise by my own creator, and most of all, of learning how my body was so deliberately designed to receive this monstrous treatment; indeed my entire being had been planned with this usage in mind, everything from the stitching to the length of my limbs was designed…oh, can I bring myself to say it, Jack? I was designed to be fucked. And not by anyone: by him.
He pounded at me breathlessly for a few minutes, then withdrew; only to repeat the procedure a few inches higher up, now across my waist. The stitches broken, he demanded from me the same reports; and in fact there was no particular difference in sensation, from my side of it, but for the distribution of his weight upon me. The third entry plunged into my chest, the sheer length of his wand sending the tip of that monstrosity into my neck. Evidently he could observe the flexing this produced, and he bade me to describe the sensation, but it was nearly impossible for me to speak in such a state. The fourth entry was made within the seam that goes across my right temple, the most uncomfortable of all not only because the flesh of my face clings tight to my skull, but also there is not nearly an adequate depth for my brow to contain something so large as what he would have inserted to its hilt. When he demanded my report I could only reply to him with a plea that he stop.
He appeared at first to oblige me, but then as fast as he withdrew from my brow he plunged himself anew into my open mouth, and pressed inward as far as it would go, forcing me to swallow the implement repeatedly as he thrust it back and forth. In doing so he cried out: “Yes! The design is perfect! This is the reason for which I provided you such a long neck, Sally!”
I could make no reply, and was left to suffer this usage until I perceived the instrument flex rapidly within my throat, as though discharging some substance within my interior. He withdrew. I found myself unable to prevent the regurgitation of a pale viscous matter, which issued forth upon my chin and breast; bound as I was, I could not so much as turn my head to spare myself this final indignity. He descended from me then and returned to his chair, where he sat regarding me for a long interval. His expression was one I had not previously observed upon his countenance: a species of exhausted resentment commingled with something approaching astonishment, as though the act he had just performed had surprised even its author. He spoke nothing. I, in my turn, possessed no words adequate to the occasion. We remained thus in a silence that admitted no reconciliation. At last he gathered his clothes and rolled his wheelchair from the laboratory, returning (I presume) to his own bedchamber.
He left me strapped to the platform. He did not release my bonds, did not cover my form, did not clean the vomit from my fabric or mend my seams; but he did shut off the lights. I lay in darkness and I wept with the abandoned hopelessness of a creature who has discovered the full dimensions of her predicament.
My seams had been violated in ways I had not known they could be violated. The lubricant he had employed—for what purpose I understood now, though I wished I did not—remained sticky against my fabric, cooling in the night air. The nerves he had installed to amplify my capacity for sensation performed their function faithfully, transmitting from every inch of my body reports of damage, of intrusion, of uses to which I had never consented. I understood at last why he had made me as he had made me. I understood what these modifications had always been intended to facilitate. The knowledge appalled me beyond the capacity of words to convey. He had designed me for this. Every stitch, every nerve, every refinement and improvement—all of it had facilitated this unique purpose; and now that the design’s function had been fulfilled, now that I had been profaned as intended, I was left to comprehend the fulfillment, left to understand that I had been engineered toward this moment from the instant I was shocked into being, that my violation had been inevitable from the moment of my creation.
Dawn found me still bound, still weeping, still alive; though I confess I was uncertain, in those hours, whether life constituted a mercy or a curse.
Yet with the light came clarity. I could not undo what had been done. I could not unfeel what I had felt, unknow what I now knew. Yet even as I contemplated this, another thought asserted itself. I remembered the fountain. I remembered the flames, the water, the figure rising unscathed from the steam. I remembered a skeleton wandering among tombstones, singing of his loneliness to no audience but a spectral dog. I remembered the stirring in my chest—that warmth which no one had installed, that wanting no one had engineered.
You, Jack.
The Jack of my dreams existed. He was out there, somewhere in Halloween Town, wrestling with his own dissatisfactions, searching for something he could not name; and I loved him. This love was foolish, yes—unrequited, unacknowledged, almost certainly hopeless, but it was mine. It had arisen from some part of me that Finklestein had not designed and could not control. So long as it persisted, I possessed a reason to persist alongside it.
For Jack, I would live; for the possibility—however remote—of one day standing before him as a being capable of love and worthy of love in return. Moreover, in the name of this possibility, I would ensure that Finklestein never claimed me again. Not temporarily. Not conditionally. Never.
The following morning, Finklestein entered the laboratory. He did not speak. He did not meet my eyes. His movements as he unfastened the straps that bound me to the platform were careful, even gentle—the movements of a man handling something fragile, or perhaps something he has broken and does not know how to repair. When the last restraint fell away, he sighed, and offered to clean me up. I quietly declined. I rose. I dressed myself in my dress, though it was split in two and would need as much repair as my body. Every motion produced fresh reports of damage from my amplified nerves, but I completed the task without assistance, without complaint, without acknowledging his presence more than necessity demanded.
He accepted this refusal of assistance without argument. This, more than anything, confirmed what his demeanor had suggested: he understood what he had done. The medication had worn off; the frenzy had passed; what remained was the man who had committed acts the man would not have chosen to commit. Whether this constituted remorse or merely embarrassment, I could not say.
Igor's violation had stolen from me some portion of self-regard; but what Finklestein had enacted upon me that night—here, Jack, my tongue falters, for there are sufferings that language was not fashioned to contain. Let it suffice to say that I had been made to understand, in the fullest and most terrible sense, the purpose for which my body had been constructed. I had received the knowledge as a martyr receives the instruments of her passion: not with comprehension, for comprehension implies some faculty capable of encompassing the experience, but merely with endurance. I had endured. I continued to endure. This was all that could be said of me. I understood—and I perceived that Finklestein understood equally—that whatever had existed between us before, whatever grotesque simulacrum of domestic arrangement we had maintained, was irrevocably finished. There could be no return to the old equilibrium. Yet I could take no satisfaction in this recognition. The virtuous sufferer does not triumph over her persecutor; she merely survives him, if providence permits, and carries forward the wounds he has inflicted as testament to what she has borne.
A new arrangement established itself in the days that followed. Igor was assigned to supervise my work in the kitchen—to observe the preparation of every meal, to ensure that no nightshade found its way into the doctor's food. He performed this duty with his customary blank efficiency, standing in the corner while I chopped and stirred and served, his single eye tracking my movements without commentary.
We did not speak of what had occurred. None of us. The silence that filled the house was not the silence of peace but the silence of a wound too severe to probe—a silence heavy with knowledge that could not be acknowledged, with tensions that could not be released, with a future that none of us could imagine but all of us dreaded.
A week passed in this fashion. Perhaps longer. The days blurred into one another, distinguished only by the meals I prepared under Igor's watchful eye and the nights I spent in my room, listening for footsteps that did not come, dreading a summons that was never issued.
The imperative had clarified itself absolutely: I must escape from under this roof, and I must do so permanently. I could not remain in a house that contained not one but two beings who had violated me—unable to trust either to protect me from the other, uncertain which posed the greater danger, knowing only that my continued presence guaranteed my continued victimization. Yet Igor's constant supervision in the kitchen had rendered my previous methods impossible. He watched me prepare every meal. He observed the contents of every pot, the ingredients of every dish. The nightshade remained in its jar upon its shelf, but I could not reach for it without his notice.
I required a stratagem. It came to me one morning as I prepared slices of banshee bacon for Finklestein's breakfast. Igor stood in his customary position in the corner, his single eye following my movements with a bovine patience. I glanced at him, then at the bacon sizzling in the pan, and a thought presented itself—a thought so simple I wondered that it had not occurred to me before. Igor was, in his essential nature, a creature of appetite. He responded to food as a dog responds to food: with immediate, unreflecting desire. He did not dine with us at the table; he subsisted on scraps and biscuits, seemingly by preference, consuming whatever was placed before him with the uncritical gratitude of a beast. This was not, I now perceived, merely a function of his station. It was a feature of his psychology—a lever that might be pulled.
I removed a slice of bacon from the pan. I held it aloft, letting the grease drip, letting the aroma fill the kitchen. Igor's eye fixed upon it with an intensity I recognized.
I dangled it before him as one dangles a treat before a hound.
His body tensed. His nostrils flared. Whatever thoughts occupied his malformed brain had been displaced entirely by the presence of this morsel.
I threw it—not merely tossed, but hurled with all the force my cloth arm could muster—out the kitchen door and down the corridor.
Igor did not hesitate. He scrambled after the bacon with the single-minded urgency of a creature for whom thought and appetite are indistinguishable, his stunted legs carrying him out of the kitchen and out of sight.
Three paces to the cupboard. The jar was on the first shelf. The lid came off in my hands. A generous portion of nightshade went into the teapot where Finklestein's morning brew was steeping. The lid went back on. The jar returned to its shelf. I was back at the stove, spatula in hand, by the time Igor came shuffling anew into the kitchen, bacon grease glistening on his chin, his eye resuming its dull surveillance as though nothing of consequence had occurred.
My hands did not tremble. My face betrayed nothing.
I served Finklestein his breakfast. He drank. His bill-like face slackened. His body slumped forward onto the table in that posture I had come to know so well, his cheek coming to rest on his plate.
I did not pause to confirm the completeness of his stupor. I removed my apron, walked to the door, and departed—for what I believed, in my desperate optimism, would be the final time.
I shall not detail the hours of liberty that followed, for they resembled so closely the hours of liberty that had preceded them. I wandered. I concealed myself. I permitted myself to imagine a future in which Finklestein did not find me, in which I walked these streets as a free creature, in which the life I had endured was merely a dark prelude to something brighter. These imaginings sustained me through the morning and into the afternoon.
They did not sustain me through the evening, O cruel fate, that mocks the hopes of the wretched with such consistency! Finklestein and Igor found me near the outskirts of town, where the buildings thin and the forest encroaches. I do not know how they tracked me but I no longer possessed the capacity for surprise at their persistence. Igor seized me in that manner he had perfected—arms wrapped around my midsection, my own limbs pinned and useless. They carried me home.
The punishment that awaited me differed from that of its predecessors. There was no laboratory, no platform, no straps, no electrical apparatus. Finklestein merely directed Igor to deposit me in my room, and when this was accomplished, Finklestein said only that I had poisoned him for the last time. He the shut the door, and I heard a sound I had not heard before: an iron bar being lowered to prevent the door from opening on my side.
I was imprisoned. Not tortured, not mended, not subjected to the violations I had learned to anticipate. Simply confined.
I did not know what to make of this alteration in our pattern. I sat upon my bed and listened to the house settle around me, wondering whether this restraint signified a change in Finklestein's disposition or merely a postponement of worse to come.
It was mere minutes later, or seemed so, that I heard voices from below. Finklestein's voice I recognized immediately; but the second voice produced in me a response I had not anticipated: my chest tightened, my breath caught, my hands gripped the fabric of my dress.
Jack Skellington was in the house. Jack Skellington was speaking with Finklestein, his voice drifting up across the wheelchair ramps in fragments I strained to assemble into meaning. He spoke of experiments. He spoke with that feverish energy I had observed in him at the town meeting, that quality of obsession that had so concerned me then and concerned me still.
I pressed my ear to the door. I could not discern the specifics of their exchange—and I shall not speculate upon your motives, Jack, for you know them better than any reconstruction I might offer. Suffice it to say, I heard enough. I heard your voice in this house that had become my prison, and in that hearing I found something I had not expected to find: Fortification.
You were out there. You were real. You were pursuing something—something that consumed you, something that drove you to seek assistance even from a creature like Finklestein. If you could pursue your obsession with such determination, could I not pursue mine? If you could bend the resources of Halloween Town to your vision, could I not bend the circumstances of my captivity toward my escape?
I rose from the floor. I returned to my bed. I began, for the first time, to plan in earnest. The solitude Finklestein had imposed upon me was intended, I presume, as a punishment—a deprivation of liberty more complete than any I had previously suffered. No more wandering the house, no more access to the kitchen and its store of nightshade, no more opportunities to poison and flee. I was contained, controlled, reduced to the dimensions of a single room. Yet in his haste to confine me, the doctor had neglected a consideration that now presented itself to my attention with the force of revelation: the window was not locked.
I rose from my bed and crossed to it. The bars—those decorative ironworks I had observed on my first day of existence, more theatrical than functional—swung open on their hinges as easily as they ever had. Beyond them lay the open air of Halloween Town, and below that, a considerable distance to the ground. I leaned out and assessed the drop. Four stories. Cobblestones at the bottom.
For a creature of bone and organ, such a fall would prove fatal. The mathematics of impact, of velocity, of the fragility of biological structures—these admitted no alternative conclusion. A human who leapt from this height would shatter upon the stones below. Even most of Halloween's citizens, despite their monstrous constitutions, would sustain damage sufficient to incapacitate if not destroy.
Yet I was not a creature of bone and organ. I was fabric and leaves. I was stuffing and stitches. My body had been designed to be split, filled, reassembled. I had watched Finklestein remove my arm and reattach it without lasting consequence. I had torn myself apart to escape his grasp. The integrity of my form was not the integrity of flesh; it was the integrity of a pillow, a mattress, a thing constructed to yield rather than resist.
A fall from four stories would hurt. Of this I had no doubt—my amplified nerves would ensure that the impact registered with excruciating fidelity. But fatal? No. Damaging, perhaps. Disorienting, certainly; but not fatal.
I spent the rest of the afternoon producing for you, Jack, a care basket: for from my window I could often glimpse your home, with the lights burning all night, and could surmise you were in need of some kind of skeletal nourishment, some mark of an outside affection and proof that there was another being who cared for your comfort.
I lowered this basket safely to the ground from a string of thread. I looked down at the cobblestones and considered my options. The window led to a fall, to pain, to the streets of Halloween Town, to uncertainty—but also to possibility. To Jack. To a life that might yet be my own.
I climbed onto the windowsill. I did not permit myself to hesitate more. I jumped.
The fall executed itself according to principles of matter and velocity which concern themselves not at all with the desires of the falling object. My cloth body struck the cobblestones with sufficient force to produce several torn seams, which I repaired with a needle and thread I had taken before proceeding.
I made my way through Halloween Town's crooked streets to your dwelling. I observed affixed to the exterior near an upper window a pulley mechanism, put there for I know not what—
…
"Ah," Jack interrupted, "forgive me—I had used that to haul up a Christmas tree. The home’s narrow stairs proved impossible for such a large object. I never removed the apparatus.”
…
I thank you for satisfying my curiosity on that point. I utilized this pulley to raise the basket to your window, then, I was struck with a sudden fear. I fled beyond the gate in a state I had no name for then but which I later understood to be the peculiar anguish of hope disfigured by reality. I had delivered nourishment to the being I believed to be the living embodiment of love's possibility in Halloween Town; I had received from him a moment's recognition, a glance, perhaps even something approaching gratitude; and yet, such brief communion had proved too violent a sensation for a constitution built expressly to feel. My nerves, those instruments of exquisite receptivity that Finklestein had installed for purposes I now understood too well, transmitted not merely the sweetness of your attention but also its unbearable weight. I had wanted so desperately to be seen by you, Jack; I had not considered that being seen might undo me as thoroughly as being used.
It was while sitting in this state that the vision came upon me. I cannot name it anything else; I saw it, despite my knowledge that it could not have been a reality before my eyes. Nevertheless I could sense that it portended a reality to come. It’s mechanism is a mystery to me; whether some residual capacity in my recycled brain permitted glimpses of probability, or whether the vision arose from unconscious calculation, I cannot say. Nevertheless I saw with perfect clarity: a tree, festooned with lights and ornaments in the manner of the Christmas celebration, beautiful—then—abruptly, monstrously—the form was seized by fire; not mere burning, but a ravenous immolation, as though creation itself had been flung into a furnace expressly stoked for its undoing. The flames did not behave like any honest accident of nature: they roared with the vindictive precision of a punishment long delayed, a fiery tribunal convened because some sacred prohibition had been violated so absolutely that only annihilation could answer it. The vision raged on with tyrannical duration before abandoning me at your gate, half-blinded by its glare. Even as the last embers died, I felt the terrible verdict it had branded upon me: disaster was marching nearer, crowned and inexorable—and you were condemned to be both the hand that summoned this inferno and the being it intended to scorch most completely. I stayed by your gate that night. I had nowhere else to go; but moreover, I dared not leave in case the vision meant that you were in some immediate danger. Perhaps you were, for mere hours later you announced the plan that Christmas would be made our holiday this year: this holiday to which you had no rightful claim yet resolved to make your own, indeed, to make all of us complicit in the crime of its seizure…
…
Here, Jack Skellington tried to persuade Sally to catch her breath, at least for a few minutes; she needed it. The fervor with which she narrated, the wounds these grim tales reopened in her soul—everything, in short, compelled her to take a few moments of respite; and after a short rest, our heroine continued, as we shall see, the details of her deplorable adventures.

END OF PART ONE.
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Sally's Song