"WOD Halloween" - Part Two

 Part Two

            Yep. A haunted mansion.

            Although we didn’t quite know it was haunted until we stepped inside.

            There was an art gallery with paintings that stretched, suits of armor that moved on their own, a demonic grandfather clock, and the disembodied head of a blue-haired medium in a crystal ball – who was rather helpful in giving us directions around the mansion (not that they did any of us much good).

            We moved down a hallway that seemed to have been endless, judging from the fact that we were still walking down it after twenty whole minutes.

            “Whew!” Craig wheezed. “Can we stop for a sec?”

            Unfortunately, that was the last thing I heard him say before I turned around to discover that both he and Coraline had disappeared! I didn’t see it at the time, but someone had swept the kids away, pulling them through one of the doors in the endless hallway. Sally, Jack, and I tried to double back and check the doors we had passed, but each one led to either a dead end or a deadly trap. The last door unleashed a tidal wave that washed the three of us back outside.

            “We have to get back in there!” I shouted in desperation. All I could think about was poor Craig and the danger that he was in. He would always be my sole responsibility during our travels, and I don’t know what I’d do if something were to ever happen to him in my care.

            I found out later what transpired in that mansion while Jack, Sally, and I devised a way to get back inside.

            Craig and Coraline were brought to the mansion’s ballroom. They were forced to sit down at a long dining table that was already occupied by ghosts adorned in Victorian garb. Their kidnapper was none other than the notorious Oogie Boogie, a boogeyman in the form of a bug-filled burlap sack, speaking with a powerful baritone. “You kiddies gonna sit right there and listen to Mommie Dearest,” he told Craig and Coraline.

            “Mommie Dearest?” Craig was baffled by Oogie’s meaning.

            “He’s talking about her,” Coraline disdainfully pointed to the other end of the dining table. There, he saw a woman with black buttons for eyes.

            “Who’s she?” Craig inquired of the button-eyed lady.

            “My Other Mother,” Coraline hissed.

            Now Craig was really confused, especially as Coraline’s ‘Other Mother’ addressed him in a very loving and charismatic way typical of a maternal figure. “Welcome, Craig,” she said. “We’re so glad you could join us for dinner. What would you like to eat? Pizza? Cookies? How about a whole cookie pizza?”

            Craig was tempted by the offer, and he was about to agree to it before Coraline intercepted and advised him, “Don’t accept anything that she offers you! She’s just luring you into a trap!” She then glared at her Other Mother and yelled, “She’s not your mother!”

            The Other Mother was undeterred by Coraline pointing this out. “You’re right, Coraline,” she admitted. “I’m not Craig’s mother. But he does have another mother of his own.” On that cue, another ominously familiar figure walked into the ballroom.

            That figure was an abominable copy of me – the ‘Other Rania’!

            She dressed like me, had the same hair as me, and even sounded like me.

            The only difference was her button eyes, which were fashioned the same as the Other Mother.

            Now poor little Craig was beyond confused!

            And yet, he was wise enough to proclaim, “Rania’s not my mother!”

            “But she wishes that she was – more often than you realize,” the Other Rania told him (painful as it was later to find out that she had). “And I know that you feel the same way. Don’t you, Craigy?”

            “I…I don’t…I mean…” This monster pretender had Craig so flustered that he could barely answer.

            “Trust me, Craig,” the Other Rania pressed. “We can have much happier travels together…us and Thomas.”

            Now she had Craig right where she wanted him.

            Upon hearing the name of his surrogate big brother and the eleventh incarnation of Neas, the Gladiator of Gallifrey, Craig beamed with hope. “Thomas is here?!”

            The Other Rania nodded. “Mm-hmm! He’s right behind that door.” She gestured to one of the closed doors that led into the ballroom. Its frame was outlined by the purple hue of light shining from the other side.

            Craig was drawn directly to it. Coraline tried to stop him by calling his name, but her voice was drowned out by Craig’s centered focus on that shining door, fueled by a false hope that Thomas was behind it.

            Thankfully, before he could have turned the doorknob, he was stopped by the sound of my TARDIS materializing into the ballroom.

            “NOOOO!!!!” The Other Rania and the Other Mother both shrieked.

            I knew the only way back inside the haunted mansion was through my TARDIS, using the computer to pinpoint the nuage energies around Craig and Coraline – which were higher than those concentrated around the mansion – and hone in on their precise location.

            But, enough with all the technobabble, it was time to save these kids!

            “Craig!” I called to him as soon as I exited the ship with Jack and Sally. “You and Coraline get in the TARDIS now!”

            I thought Craig had snapped out of it as soon as I showed up.

            But he shocked me (as well as Coraline, Jack, and Sally) when he declared, “No! I’m going with the other you!” He joined at the side of the Other Rania, whose mouth formed a sinister smirk of delight.

            “Craig…” I gasped, not anticipating such a betrayal from my best friend.

            Of course, I should have trusted my instincts that he had an ace up his sleeve.

            Standing close to the Other Rania gave Craig the opening he needed to literally pull off a rather clever plan. Somewhere in the time between our arrival and this moment, Craig managed to spot a loose thread on the Other Rania’s ‘skin’. This unleashed a plethora of rats that were underneath my pathetic doppelganger.

            The unleashed rats infested the entire ballroom, even scaring away the ghosts at the dinner table. They also gnawed at Oogie’s burlap body. “GET AWAY, YOU RODENTS!” he bellowed. “YOU KNOW HOW LONG IT TOOK THE OTHER MOTHER TO STITCH ME BACK UP!!!” His protests fell on deaf ears, as the rats unraveled his whole sack-body, leaving nothing but a mass of crawling bugs all over the floor.

            Infuriated, the Other Mother howled, her form twisting and contorting into a taller and more skeletal version of herself. She chased after us, but we all jumped inside the TARDIS before she could get her long, bony fingers on either Craig or Coraline. She clung to the ship itself, just as I took it back into the Infinite DC.

            Ultimately, being exposed to the interdimensional plane was too much even for her misshapen form, forcing her to let go of my TARDIS and leave her to be disintegrated into the corridor.

            With the Other Mother vanquished, I safely returned Coraline home to her real mother, who was completely unaware that her daughter was off on an adventure into another dimension.

            Surprisingly, the haunted mansion remained in the realm of Halloween Town, apparently not a manifestation of the Other Mother like I thought it to have been.

            Jack took great pleasure in its new residence. “I can’t wait to include it into our next Halloween celebration!”

            “It would make a great new home for us, Jack,” Sally happily suggested.

            Jack smiled at her suggestion. “Ya know, Sally, that would be just wonderful.”

            And so, Craig and I bid the two lovers a fond farewell and wished them a ‘Happy Halloween’ before setting off to our next journey into the World of Disney, starting off with a more relaxing trip to Eventide, a utopian kingdom forever enchanted by endless twilight.