Nightmare Before Christmas Fan Fiction ❯ I'll Create Something Too ❯ The Skeleton Man ( Chapter 2 )
[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]
By: sesshyfanchick 
Sally catches her first glimpse of the skeleton man, although oblivious to whom he really is.
Non Anime: Nightmare Before Christmas Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Romance / Supernatural | Type: Other | Uploaded On: 03.25.2009 | Pages: 2 | Words: 3.8K | Visits: 406 | Status: Work In Progress
Sally catches her first glimpse of the skeleton man, although oblivious to whom he really is.
Non Anime: Nightmare Before Christmas Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Romance / Supernatural | Type: Other | Uploaded On: 03.25.2009 | Pages: 2 | Words: 3.8K | Visits: 406 | Status: Work In Progress
2: The Skeleton Man
A couple of days had passed within the Finklestein household-- not as if Sally had noticed. She rarely cared for the time and date anymore, since it was useless for her to know anyway. Dr. Finklestein did his very best to keep poor Sally away from the “troubles” of the real world, and that meant keeping her on the down-low in the terms of time.
Sally didn’t quite mind it much, for she was always doing something around the house to keep her occupied, such as spinning new cobwebs to hang about the lofty corners of the dining room until the spiders could spin their own. The doctor had said that appearances meant everything and that meant that she had to do everything in her power to make the entirety of the house look presentable, less a special guest should come.
‘Funny, no one really comes here much,’ she thought to herself, extending her arm over to the far corner of the dining room table where she quickly draped a patch of cobwebs across the edge. She shakily shuffled a few inches back, since her legs were still wonky, and admired her handy-work, a stitched smile spreading as far as it could go over her pale blue face.
She sighed to herself and cocked her head. Was sewing the only thing that she was good at? By all means, she could cook a very mean meal, but the doctor often complained on how she prepared it, for she always used the most strangest of ingredients that were quite unsuitable to the doctor’s tastes. She always thought that she was doing right by picking the most freshest of herbs to boil in a steaming pot of crystal water when preparing a stew, but the doctor often scolded her and told her to only get the most expired ingredients when preparing a meal, and that, thought Sally, didn’t make sense to her at all.
In order to make a meal, weren’t you supposed to get the most fresh and pleasant tasting ingredients available to compliment the meal? She would often find herself searching in the cupboards for more agreeable sounding ingredients such as Rosemary or Nutmeg, but of course, being the doctor’s house, she could not find any. On many an occasion, she was forced to give up and use Witch’s Wart instead of the congenial Thyme.
And it still didn’t make sense to her.
She tried pointing her confusion to the doctor, but he had just scolded her and told her that she was distorted in the brain and couldn’t think like an average person. Was she really that abominable? Was there something horribly wrong with the make-up of her mind?
Sally always found herself getting depressed and gloomy when she thought about those things. It made her feel as if something were truly wrong with her, and that thought alone never settled with her. She tried consulting the doctor’s library on numerous occasions when she found herself lost or adrift, but the books never ended up helping her any for they were always based on strange topics such as “How to Cut Off the Head of a Sickened Sea Sprite” or “The Evolution of the Diseased Bat”, which really only confused her more.
Wasn’t there anything that made sense in the doctor’s home? Anything at all?
“Sally, are you finished with that stew yet?” Dr. Finklestein’s gritty voice rang from somewhere up above, echoing off the walls and down the stairwells that lead to the equally as gritty basement. Sally uncorked a bottle of Toad Sprinkles and swished the sprinkles around in the bottle, hunching her shoulders as the doctor let out another cry that filtered through her ears. She looked up, expecting to see his bulbous head glide along the stone banister, but of course he wasn’t there-- he was currently locked up in his lab, working on yet another experiment that she had no interest in knowing about.
She once again swirled the Toad sprinkles around and watched as the various assortments of green colored bits shook and rumbled against each other, before she shrugged her shoulders and poured a generous amount of the green stuff into the boiling cauldron set before her. An unpleasant rotting smell escaped the cauldron as fumes spiraled out like wisps of gnarled smoke. She choked back a stagnant cough and retreated from the cauldron to rummage in the cupboards for anything useful enough to gag over the horrific smell. Her eyes widened as she spotted a lonesome bottle of Frog’s Breath shuttled back into the far corner of the cupboard. She reached over and stuck her tiny hands in, trying to reach the bottle, but in doing so, she accidentally bumped into a jar of Witch’s Wart. The jar hurdled to the cobbled ground of the basement and shattered into a vast amount of shard-like pieces, scattering about the floor like glinting grains of sand. The liquid traveled over the ground slowly and seeped into the stones, staining them with their dreadful stench. If Sally could gag, she would most certainly have done so. She was very grateful that her insides were made up of nothing but crinkled leaves.
“What was that sound Sally?” the doctor yelled rather fiercely, his lab door shutting close. Sally’s eyes widened with blatant panic as she frantically (and shakily) ran about the basement in search of a broom and a mop. Not finding neither of them, Sally began to choke back unshed tears as the thought of the doctor’s scolding loomed dreadfully near. She hated when he scolded her; she always felt unworthy when he did that to her, and at most times, she was. If only she could be a bit more well balanced on her feet and a bit keener in the brain, maybe then the good doctor would recognize her more and give her the praise that she most certainly deserved.
Giving up on finding the broom and the mop, Sally backed away until she was standing beside the bubbling cauldron, tiny hands folded in front of her as she awaited for her creator. She could hear the mechanism of his wheel-chair creaking and groaning as he rumbled down the stairwell.
Finally, he reared ‘round the corner and halted in his movements, his beady little eyes immediately switching over to the broken jar of Witch’s Wart scattered about the ground. His thin lips pursed into a wrinkled snarl, his spaced teeth seemingly gritting against each other as his tiny and withered shoulders shook with anger.
“Although the scent is pleasing to the nose, you must clean this up Sally,” the doctor grit out, trying to keep his anger from bubbling over. “Why are you just standing there, insolent girl? You know better than that! Clean up this mess this instant, before I go over there and shred you to pieces!”
Sally quickly nodded her head. “Yes, of course, of course!”
The doctor sneered at her one more time, before he turned around with his wheelchair and headed back up the stairwell, the motor growing faint as he retreated farther and farther. Sally stared up at his retreating form, waiting until he was completely gone before she moved over to the glass shards. She bent down, biting at her lip, her shoulders shaking.
She truly hated being scold at.
‘Well, since there’s no broom…’ she trailed off. She began picking up the bigger pieces of glass with one of her hands, piling the shards onto the other hand while she continued to pick them up one by one. Some of the smaller bits embedded into her palm, which didn’t hurt her at all, and seeped into her skin. Even if it didn’t cause her pain, the feeling that they left behind in her palm made her feel off kilter.
She got up from the floor and carefully strode over to the cupboards, where she opened a door and gently places the glass shards on the top most shelf. She had decided that she would keep them there until she could find a proper broom and disposal can to dump them in.
Now to clean up the Witch’s Wart.
She grimaced as she stared at the putrid liquid running amuck across the basement floor. She cricked her head as indecision crept upon her, until she finally let out a final sigh and shied away from the mess. She supposed that since the doctor liked foul smells like Witch’s Wart, it wouldn’t hurt to have it perfume the air of the basement for a little while until the smell died out. Sure, it would be most unpleasant for her, but it wouldn’t harm the doctor none-- plus, she just wanted to get out of cleaning the darned mess altogether.
Bunching up her nose and trying to block out the retched smell, Sally began mixing a wooden spoon around the bubbling cauldron, green fumes spindling out and encasing her with their putrid scent.
She wouldn’t know if the soup would turn out right, because she wasn’t going to taste it.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&a mp;&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&a mp;&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Sally sat at the edge of her bead, her tiny feet tracing patterns amidst the stone ground. Her head drooped and her shoulders were hunched, and once again, like many a night, she was feeling agitated.
She often asked herself, angrily might she add, why she was constantly bombarded with all these thoughts of escape and freedom and what not. Why should she be feeling these things at all? Her creator had slaved over his equipment and equations trying to build her and bring her to life, and what does she give in return? Her undying gratitude and loyalty?
Sally huffed, digging her fingernails into her cot. She wished she could give him loyalty and gratitude as freely as he would have wanted it-- she truly wished that she could be an obedient and responsive little creation towards her master, like a good little rag doll, but as each day passed and as more time elapsed, she constantly found herself on the brink of uncertainty.
Disobeying her masters orders, Sally quickly sprung from her bead (almost toppling over to the ground at the sudden movement) and unsteadily walked over towards her enormous window. She stood in front of it, staring up at the glowing yellow moon that hung over the sky like a giant beacon of illumination. She wasn’t sure if she should open the window or not, for she feared that if she did so, the doctor would unexpectedly wander into her room and catch her in the act.
After a few minutes worth of indecision, the sense of freedom overcame her very own will, and then her mind was set. She scooted closer to the window and unlatched it, jumping back as the window swung from its hinges and stood open like a welcoming embrace.
Sally’s eyes grew even wider than usual, her eyelashes fluttering as she blinked numerous times. Even though she often did this at times when she felt bored or flustered, she really never could get over that feeling of exhilaration whenever she felt that tantalizing breeze brushing across her skin.
She walked closer to the rim of the window, hesitantly jutting out her elbows and placing them on the metal window frame. She leaned in, her body supported by the window frame and her room’s wall, and basked in the moonlight, her eyes eagerly wandering and roaming as she took in the sight of the night world surrounding her.
It was magical to her, in an odd sense though. She couldn’t quite get the beauty from the gnarled and bare trees that dotted the outside like blotches on a painting, nor did she understand why they were still there in the first place, but it was a part of the world outside Dr. Finklestein’s dome, so they must serve some fantastic purpose. Just like any normal night, the atmosphere was practically rotting with gloom and obscurity, the ground swirling with grey and purple mist-- the moon was the only bright thing out there. It was strong, vibrant, and it tickled her very being to know that there was something out there so beautiful that it could shine so magnificently and hang up in the sky so that everyone could get a chance to marvel at it, even a worthless rag doll such as herself.
She smiled up at it, tracing invisible patterns about the air with her finger. She stared across at the misshapen tower hanging about like a rusty nail disembarking from a wall. That single, yellow light was on again, shining with full force so that the tower literally glowed amidst the back drop of its surroundings.
She yearned to know who lived there, what lived there, if there was even anyone that lived there, and why the light was only turned on during the night when the rest of the world should be sleeping. Whoever did live there, presuming that the tower was occupied, Sally’s heart reached out to them. She could sympathize because just like the being in the tower, she could not go to sleep very well. Her thoughts were too restless at night, and they sometimes seemed to suffocate her mind, which wasn’t very pleasant at all.
“I am hopeless,” she whispered to herself, sorrow lacing her voice. She often felt like that because she knew that staring out her window was the closest that she was going to get to feeling a breeze brush across her skin, or taking in the sights of the towers and oddly shaped buildings of the town that stood straight across from her. She didn’t even know the town’s name, which was a downright shame, since Dr. Finklestein never answered her questions any longer. When she was still fresh and new, he would gladly answer any little thing that spiked her curiosity, but now…he only got angry with her whenever she asked about something new concerning the town. It was almost as if he were actually trying to keep her in the dark about it.
“But I want to be free!” she spoke aloud, pressing into the window frame, leering her head out in the window. “I want to be out there. I need to be out there.”
She was looking at the tower in the distance, her eyes mesmerized on that single spot. She inched further, the upper part of her body sticking out the window like a rigid tree branch.
“I am so close, yet so very far away,” she whispered to the wind, and at that very same moment, as if the wind had listened to her plea and responded, a breeze racked through her body and made her lose her stability.
She could feel it, that sense of panic surging from within her until it coiled and sprang. She was tipping over, the top part of her body gradually sliding forward until she was nearly out the window entirely. She gasped, her tiny feet wriggling in the air, but they were too small to support her. She kept sliding and sliding, until she could no longer feel the support from the window frame, or anything at all.
Her eyes were wide, the first shock of perpetual fear clinging to her body like a cat’s sharpened claws, as the ground grew nearer. She closed her eyes, too afraid to open them, until she felt herself smack with a sickening thud against the leaf littered earth. She could hear the ripping of her limbs and she could feel her stitches coming apart with a quickness that seemed strange to her. Surely she still had some stitches left?
So she lay there, her face facing the moon, her eyes now wide open as she stared at the looming world around her. Despite her death defying fall, she could feel the electric tingle of excitement coursing through her. If she could hyperventilate, she would have surely done so, but she was far too thrilled to do anything of the sort.
The gnarled trees were much larger than she knew them to be. They practically soared into the sky in a mixture of twisted limbs and contorted bark.
‘They’re so tall,’ she wondered to herself, still amazed by their length. Actually, everything seemed as if it were larger than life and she just simply couldn’t get enough of it. She drank everything in, from the moon above to the outside appearance of Dr. Finklestein’s home. She never knew that it looked like that from the outside and she was amazed that it even looked that way.
‘I need to get up, I need to look at everything,’ she thought to herself. However, she found that she couldn’t move-- at all. She looked down at herself and gasped, her mouth hanging open like a window. Her limbs, her feet and both her arms were scattered about the ground, surrounded by their own cushioning of leaves. Her head was still connected to her torso, which was a fortunate case for her, but now she couldn’t even move! She didn’t even have any sewing supplies with her to mend her injuries!
She felt as if she should cry, and she would have, given if it were any other situation. She was still feeling that surge of excitement from before, which quelled her mortification at seeing her limbs strewn about the ground like worthless twigs.
‘Oh dear, how am I going to pull myself together?’ she asked herself morosely. She wasn’t prepared for any of this, not even being out here in the open, which was a dream that she wanted ever since her mind could form dreams.
A crunch in the distance.
And the rustles of leaves nearby.
Oh, it scared Sally so, for she was equally not as prepared to meet anyone yet. She could see her limbs twitching along with the apprehension she was feeling. She stared up at the sky, awaiting her fate as dense clouds began forming from above.
“What a pity.”
She refrained was gasping this time, and quickly jerked her head. She stared off into the distance, her eyes practically gluing to the form of a tall, thin figure currently walking across the earth towards the doctor’s place. As he grew near, her panic within her sky rocketed as she viewed the details pertaining to the strange figure.
He was certainly tall, with the skinniest legs and arms and an equally thin waist. Sporting an old fashioned pinstripe suit, and a black bowtie that was placed at the base of his neck, she saw that he wasn’t like anything that she could ever imagine.
The only people she could compare him to would be the doctor and Igor, since they were the only people that she knew, but him…that creature, walking very idly with a somber expression gracing that skeletal head of his, he was out of the ordinary.
“A skeleton,” she answered herself. Thankfully, she knew was a skeleton was, since the doctor had taught her about the inner workings of a regular body, but she always thought a skeleton was supposed to be in the inside of a body, not on the outside. This truly confused her, for she didn’t know what to think anymore.
It was strange how his skeletal face could contort into a vast array of expressions that flitted across his face, however somber they were. All the while she was watching him, she could make out the look of sadness, annoyance, anger, exasperation, and all those other kinds of feelings that splashed across his face like water.
And then she felt bad for him. She couldn’t help it.
He seemed so sad, so lonely. From the way he was walking, to the way his expressions changed, she couldn’t help but feel for him.
“He looks like I do when I want to go outside,” she whispered to herself, lidding her eyes. What could have caused that poor, thin creature to feel so downright horrible?
Lost in her musings, she didn’t notice when a shadow fell upon her, and then, as she screamed within her mind, she looked up.
The creature. The skeleton man was standing close to her on a dirt path, his head tilted up to the sky, his eye sockets squinting in thought.
He was staring at the moon.
“What a pity, the moon,” he said softly, holding a bony hand to his hip while the other dangled by his side.
Sally tried to be as perfectly still as possible, less he notice her, for he hadn’t. She didn’t want him to notice her anyway, not in the state that she was in.
As if her wished were granted, the skeleton man slowly walked away, heading back towards the town with his head still perked to the sky.
Grief filled Sally as he left; she too stared up at the moon. It was nearly covered by the swirling grey clouds that twirled about in the air, blocking its beauty from the world.
“What a pity,” she repeated, closing her eyes.
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A couple of days had passed within the Finklestein household-- not as if Sally had noticed. She rarely cared for the time and date anymore, since it was useless for her to know anyway. Dr. Finklestein did his very best to keep poor Sally away from the “troubles” of the real world, and that meant keeping her on the down-low in the terms of time.
Sally didn’t quite mind it much, for she was always doing something around the house to keep her occupied, such as spinning new cobwebs to hang about the lofty corners of the dining room until the spiders could spin their own. The doctor had said that appearances meant everything and that meant that she had to do everything in her power to make the entirety of the house look presentable, less a special guest should come.
‘Funny, no one really comes here much,’ she thought to herself, extending her arm over to the far corner of the dining room table where she quickly draped a patch of cobwebs across the edge. She shakily shuffled a few inches back, since her legs were still wonky, and admired her handy-work, a stitched smile spreading as far as it could go over her pale blue face.
She sighed to herself and cocked her head. Was sewing the only thing that she was good at? By all means, she could cook a very mean meal, but the doctor often complained on how she prepared it, for she always used the most strangest of ingredients that were quite unsuitable to the doctor’s tastes. She always thought that she was doing right by picking the most freshest of herbs to boil in a steaming pot of crystal water when preparing a stew, but the doctor often scolded her and told her to only get the most expired ingredients when preparing a meal, and that, thought Sally, didn’t make sense to her at all.
In order to make a meal, weren’t you supposed to get the most fresh and pleasant tasting ingredients available to compliment the meal? She would often find herself searching in the cupboards for more agreeable sounding ingredients such as Rosemary or Nutmeg, but of course, being the doctor’s house, she could not find any. On many an occasion, she was forced to give up and use Witch’s Wart instead of the congenial Thyme.
And it still didn’t make sense to her.
She tried pointing her confusion to the doctor, but he had just scolded her and told her that she was distorted in the brain and couldn’t think like an average person. Was she really that abominable? Was there something horribly wrong with the make-up of her mind?
Sally always found herself getting depressed and gloomy when she thought about those things. It made her feel as if something were truly wrong with her, and that thought alone never settled with her. She tried consulting the doctor’s library on numerous occasions when she found herself lost or adrift, but the books never ended up helping her any for they were always based on strange topics such as “How to Cut Off the Head of a Sickened Sea Sprite” or “The Evolution of the Diseased Bat”, which really only confused her more.
Wasn’t there anything that made sense in the doctor’s home? Anything at all?
“Sally, are you finished with that stew yet?” Dr. Finklestein’s gritty voice rang from somewhere up above, echoing off the walls and down the stairwells that lead to the equally as gritty basement. Sally uncorked a bottle of Toad Sprinkles and swished the sprinkles around in the bottle, hunching her shoulders as the doctor let out another cry that filtered through her ears. She looked up, expecting to see his bulbous head glide along the stone banister, but of course he wasn’t there-- he was currently locked up in his lab, working on yet another experiment that she had no interest in knowing about.
She once again swirled the Toad sprinkles around and watched as the various assortments of green colored bits shook and rumbled against each other, before she shrugged her shoulders and poured a generous amount of the green stuff into the boiling cauldron set before her. An unpleasant rotting smell escaped the cauldron as fumes spiraled out like wisps of gnarled smoke. She choked back a stagnant cough and retreated from the cauldron to rummage in the cupboards for anything useful enough to gag over the horrific smell. Her eyes widened as she spotted a lonesome bottle of Frog’s Breath shuttled back into the far corner of the cupboard. She reached over and stuck her tiny hands in, trying to reach the bottle, but in doing so, she accidentally bumped into a jar of Witch’s Wart. The jar hurdled to the cobbled ground of the basement and shattered into a vast amount of shard-like pieces, scattering about the floor like glinting grains of sand. The liquid traveled over the ground slowly and seeped into the stones, staining them with their dreadful stench. If Sally could gag, she would most certainly have done so. She was very grateful that her insides were made up of nothing but crinkled leaves.
“What was that sound Sally?” the doctor yelled rather fiercely, his lab door shutting close. Sally’s eyes widened with blatant panic as she frantically (and shakily) ran about the basement in search of a broom and a mop. Not finding neither of them, Sally began to choke back unshed tears as the thought of the doctor’s scolding loomed dreadfully near. She hated when he scolded her; she always felt unworthy when he did that to her, and at most times, she was. If only she could be a bit more well balanced on her feet and a bit keener in the brain, maybe then the good doctor would recognize her more and give her the praise that she most certainly deserved.
Giving up on finding the broom and the mop, Sally backed away until she was standing beside the bubbling cauldron, tiny hands folded in front of her as she awaited for her creator. She could hear the mechanism of his wheel-chair creaking and groaning as he rumbled down the stairwell.
Finally, he reared ‘round the corner and halted in his movements, his beady little eyes immediately switching over to the broken jar of Witch’s Wart scattered about the ground. His thin lips pursed into a wrinkled snarl, his spaced teeth seemingly gritting against each other as his tiny and withered shoulders shook with anger.
“Although the scent is pleasing to the nose, you must clean this up Sally,” the doctor grit out, trying to keep his anger from bubbling over. “Why are you just standing there, insolent girl? You know better than that! Clean up this mess this instant, before I go over there and shred you to pieces!”
Sally quickly nodded her head. “Yes, of course, of course!”
The doctor sneered at her one more time, before he turned around with his wheelchair and headed back up the stairwell, the motor growing faint as he retreated farther and farther. Sally stared up at his retreating form, waiting until he was completely gone before she moved over to the glass shards. She bent down, biting at her lip, her shoulders shaking.
She truly hated being scold at.
‘Well, since there’s no broom…’ she trailed off. She began picking up the bigger pieces of glass with one of her hands, piling the shards onto the other hand while she continued to pick them up one by one. Some of the smaller bits embedded into her palm, which didn’t hurt her at all, and seeped into her skin. Even if it didn’t cause her pain, the feeling that they left behind in her palm made her feel off kilter.
She got up from the floor and carefully strode over to the cupboards, where she opened a door and gently places the glass shards on the top most shelf. She had decided that she would keep them there until she could find a proper broom and disposal can to dump them in.
Now to clean up the Witch’s Wart.
She grimaced as she stared at the putrid liquid running amuck across the basement floor. She cricked her head as indecision crept upon her, until she finally let out a final sigh and shied away from the mess. She supposed that since the doctor liked foul smells like Witch’s Wart, it wouldn’t hurt to have it perfume the air of the basement for a little while until the smell died out. Sure, it would be most unpleasant for her, but it wouldn’t harm the doctor none-- plus, she just wanted to get out of cleaning the darned mess altogether.
Bunching up her nose and trying to block out the retched smell, Sally began mixing a wooden spoon around the bubbling cauldron, green fumes spindling out and encasing her with their putrid scent.
She wouldn’t know if the soup would turn out right, because she wasn’t going to taste it.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&a mp;&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&a mp;&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Sally sat at the edge of her bead, her tiny feet tracing patterns amidst the stone ground. Her head drooped and her shoulders were hunched, and once again, like many a night, she was feeling agitated.
She often asked herself, angrily might she add, why she was constantly bombarded with all these thoughts of escape and freedom and what not. Why should she be feeling these things at all? Her creator had slaved over his equipment and equations trying to build her and bring her to life, and what does she give in return? Her undying gratitude and loyalty?
Sally huffed, digging her fingernails into her cot. She wished she could give him loyalty and gratitude as freely as he would have wanted it-- she truly wished that she could be an obedient and responsive little creation towards her master, like a good little rag doll, but as each day passed and as more time elapsed, she constantly found herself on the brink of uncertainty.
Disobeying her masters orders, Sally quickly sprung from her bead (almost toppling over to the ground at the sudden movement) and unsteadily walked over towards her enormous window. She stood in front of it, staring up at the glowing yellow moon that hung over the sky like a giant beacon of illumination. She wasn’t sure if she should open the window or not, for she feared that if she did so, the doctor would unexpectedly wander into her room and catch her in the act.
After a few minutes worth of indecision, the sense of freedom overcame her very own will, and then her mind was set. She scooted closer to the window and unlatched it, jumping back as the window swung from its hinges and stood open like a welcoming embrace.
Sally’s eyes grew even wider than usual, her eyelashes fluttering as she blinked numerous times. Even though she often did this at times when she felt bored or flustered, she really never could get over that feeling of exhilaration whenever she felt that tantalizing breeze brushing across her skin.
She walked closer to the rim of the window, hesitantly jutting out her elbows and placing them on the metal window frame. She leaned in, her body supported by the window frame and her room’s wall, and basked in the moonlight, her eyes eagerly wandering and roaming as she took in the sight of the night world surrounding her.
It was magical to her, in an odd sense though. She couldn’t quite get the beauty from the gnarled and bare trees that dotted the outside like blotches on a painting, nor did she understand why they were still there in the first place, but it was a part of the world outside Dr. Finklestein’s dome, so they must serve some fantastic purpose. Just like any normal night, the atmosphere was practically rotting with gloom and obscurity, the ground swirling with grey and purple mist-- the moon was the only bright thing out there. It was strong, vibrant, and it tickled her very being to know that there was something out there so beautiful that it could shine so magnificently and hang up in the sky so that everyone could get a chance to marvel at it, even a worthless rag doll such as herself.
She smiled up at it, tracing invisible patterns about the air with her finger. She stared across at the misshapen tower hanging about like a rusty nail disembarking from a wall. That single, yellow light was on again, shining with full force so that the tower literally glowed amidst the back drop of its surroundings.
She yearned to know who lived there, what lived there, if there was even anyone that lived there, and why the light was only turned on during the night when the rest of the world should be sleeping. Whoever did live there, presuming that the tower was occupied, Sally’s heart reached out to them. She could sympathize because just like the being in the tower, she could not go to sleep very well. Her thoughts were too restless at night, and they sometimes seemed to suffocate her mind, which wasn’t very pleasant at all.
“I am hopeless,” she whispered to herself, sorrow lacing her voice. She often felt like that because she knew that staring out her window was the closest that she was going to get to feeling a breeze brush across her skin, or taking in the sights of the towers and oddly shaped buildings of the town that stood straight across from her. She didn’t even know the town’s name, which was a downright shame, since Dr. Finklestein never answered her questions any longer. When she was still fresh and new, he would gladly answer any little thing that spiked her curiosity, but now…he only got angry with her whenever she asked about something new concerning the town. It was almost as if he were actually trying to keep her in the dark about it.
“But I want to be free!” she spoke aloud, pressing into the window frame, leering her head out in the window. “I want to be out there. I need to be out there.”
She was looking at the tower in the distance, her eyes mesmerized on that single spot. She inched further, the upper part of her body sticking out the window like a rigid tree branch.
“I am so close, yet so very far away,” she whispered to the wind, and at that very same moment, as if the wind had listened to her plea and responded, a breeze racked through her body and made her lose her stability.
She could feel it, that sense of panic surging from within her until it coiled and sprang. She was tipping over, the top part of her body gradually sliding forward until she was nearly out the window entirely. She gasped, her tiny feet wriggling in the air, but they were too small to support her. She kept sliding and sliding, until she could no longer feel the support from the window frame, or anything at all.
Her eyes were wide, the first shock of perpetual fear clinging to her body like a cat’s sharpened claws, as the ground grew nearer. She closed her eyes, too afraid to open them, until she felt herself smack with a sickening thud against the leaf littered earth. She could hear the ripping of her limbs and she could feel her stitches coming apart with a quickness that seemed strange to her. Surely she still had some stitches left?
So she lay there, her face facing the moon, her eyes now wide open as she stared at the looming world around her. Despite her death defying fall, she could feel the electric tingle of excitement coursing through her. If she could hyperventilate, she would have surely done so, but she was far too thrilled to do anything of the sort.
The gnarled trees were much larger than she knew them to be. They practically soared into the sky in a mixture of twisted limbs and contorted bark.
‘They’re so tall,’ she wondered to herself, still amazed by their length. Actually, everything seemed as if it were larger than life and she just simply couldn’t get enough of it. She drank everything in, from the moon above to the outside appearance of Dr. Finklestein’s home. She never knew that it looked like that from the outside and she was amazed that it even looked that way.
‘I need to get up, I need to look at everything,’ she thought to herself. However, she found that she couldn’t move-- at all. She looked down at herself and gasped, her mouth hanging open like a window. Her limbs, her feet and both her arms were scattered about the ground, surrounded by their own cushioning of leaves. Her head was still connected to her torso, which was a fortunate case for her, but now she couldn’t even move! She didn’t even have any sewing supplies with her to mend her injuries!
She felt as if she should cry, and she would have, given if it were any other situation. She was still feeling that surge of excitement from before, which quelled her mortification at seeing her limbs strewn about the ground like worthless twigs.
‘Oh dear, how am I going to pull myself together?’ she asked herself morosely. She wasn’t prepared for any of this, not even being out here in the open, which was a dream that she wanted ever since her mind could form dreams.
A crunch in the distance.
And the rustles of leaves nearby.
Oh, it scared Sally so, for she was equally not as prepared to meet anyone yet. She could see her limbs twitching along with the apprehension she was feeling. She stared up at the sky, awaiting her fate as dense clouds began forming from above.
“What a pity.”
She refrained was gasping this time, and quickly jerked her head. She stared off into the distance, her eyes practically gluing to the form of a tall, thin figure currently walking across the earth towards the doctor’s place. As he grew near, her panic within her sky rocketed as she viewed the details pertaining to the strange figure.
He was certainly tall, with the skinniest legs and arms and an equally thin waist. Sporting an old fashioned pinstripe suit, and a black bowtie that was placed at the base of his neck, she saw that he wasn’t like anything that she could ever imagine.
The only people she could compare him to would be the doctor and Igor, since they were the only people that she knew, but him…that creature, walking very idly with a somber expression gracing that skeletal head of his, he was out of the ordinary.
“A skeleton,” she answered herself. Thankfully, she knew was a skeleton was, since the doctor had taught her about the inner workings of a regular body, but she always thought a skeleton was supposed to be in the inside of a body, not on the outside. This truly confused her, for she didn’t know what to think anymore.
It was strange how his skeletal face could contort into a vast array of expressions that flitted across his face, however somber they were. All the while she was watching him, she could make out the look of sadness, annoyance, anger, exasperation, and all those other kinds of feelings that splashed across his face like water.
And then she felt bad for him. She couldn’t help it.
He seemed so sad, so lonely. From the way he was walking, to the way his expressions changed, she couldn’t help but feel for him.
“He looks like I do when I want to go outside,” she whispered to herself, lidding her eyes. What could have caused that poor, thin creature to feel so downright horrible?
Lost in her musings, she didn’t notice when a shadow fell upon her, and then, as she screamed within her mind, she looked up.
The creature. The skeleton man was standing close to her on a dirt path, his head tilted up to the sky, his eye sockets squinting in thought.
He was staring at the moon.
“What a pity, the moon,” he said softly, holding a bony hand to his hip while the other dangled by his side.
Sally tried to be as perfectly still as possible, less he notice her, for he hadn’t. She didn’t want him to notice her anyway, not in the state that she was in.
As if her wished were granted, the skeleton man slowly walked away, heading back towards the town with his head still perked to the sky.
Grief filled Sally as he left; she too stared up at the moon. It was nearly covered by the swirling grey clouds that twirled about in the air, blocking its beauty from the world.
“What a pity,” she repeated, closing her eyes.
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