Thanks for waiting! Had to do a little less art than I wanted for this one, but I hope you enjoy it! Thanks for reading! If you liked the update, consider tossing me and Paranatural a few bucks on Ko-fi, or supporting the comic and helping me to make a living off it over on Patreon! Thank you, thank you, THANK you!
~
[Transcript]
The Great Wight’s divided attention was forced back to a single point by Davy’s stolen heartbeat.
Ba-dum!
It wanted what he wanted. The heart within him thrummed with the force of his will... and Cody’s too. Amidst the dark ambition that surrounded it, the boy’s hope for a moonless sky, his hope for his mother, his hope for his father—it shone white like a bright star on a cloudless summer night. It was dazzling, like Dimitri’s, but faint, almost fragile, not the burning sun of hopeless hope that filled the spectral’s heart.
Ba-dum!
The dreaming spirit was transfixed. Cody’s wish was the crown jewel in a constellation, the sea of lesser lights beyond the stage. If only it could pluck it from the void that dwarfed them all... but Davy’s all-encompassing desire was the masterwork’s black canvas—and he, too, had a pull, a suffocating gravity, that the Great Wight couldn’t wrest itself away from.
Ba-dum!
Move! thought Mayor Hijack. Jump down! Kick his butt! It’s now or never! Save the day!
His right half, however, was frozen with fear. Davy had made short work of the horrifying Witch. Hijack didn’t stand a chance divided. He was a fraction of one spirit... the odds were worse than even Lucifer had feared! It was hopeless. He couldn’t bring himself to face that horrid hook again. This time he’d die for sure, he had no doubt!
Ba-dum!
“Unlike you craven fools,” snapped Davy, sneering down at a writhing Razor Rex and at the Witch’s severed head, “I don’t intend to leave a list of my demands at the front desk.”
Ba-dum!
“Oh no! No, no, no. If you want to get something done right... you HAVE to speak DIRECTLY to the MANAGER!”
Davy’s eyes burst into eerie beacons, lighthouses on the stage’s pitch black shore. He stood, now, at the bottom of the sea... before a locker, not a portal. Cryptide unfurled above him like leathery wings, like a Transylvanian castle lit by lightning in the distance.
Ba-dum! Ba-dum!
Darn it, darn it! Mayor Hijack trembled slowly to his feet—his left one first, and then his right. Everybody thinks I’m dead already! I m-m-might as well go out for REAL... pretending I’m a HERO...!
While he had found a crumb of courage, however, he’d yet to find even a little bit of balance. Mayor Hijack’s foot (let’s not say which—or Witch, for that matter—lest we dismay the side responsible) snagged on the railing of the catwalk as he rose to vault beyond it. Mayor Hijack slipped, releasing a polyphonic “Oof!” and the goldfish he was holding simultaneously. Sophie Sybil, mouse that she was, squeaked a startled “Eek!” in chorus.
Fauxbia craned her nonexistent neck up towards the noise.
Ba-dum! Ba-dum! Ba-dum!
Time had slowed for Cody as it had for Davy Jones. He heard his father laughing, almost saw something he couldn’t, felt the white-hot lonely gaze he’d sensed before and learned its source. There was something in the locker in this world he couldn’t see, the same vast, sleeping something just beyond the Witch’s door.
Ba-dum! Ba-dum! BA-DUM!
“NO MORE HIDING!” Davy boomed. He swept a hand out towards the Dayview he had built upon the stage. “CAST ASIDE YOUR COSTUME OF DEFIANCE... AND LET MY VISION REACH YOUR TRUE EYES, GREAT UNKNOWN!”
The first mighty slice of his hook split the lock down the middle, and the locker it protected swung wide open.
Ba-dum! BA-DUM! BA-DUM!
The second slashed across the seam of an eye sealed shut by sleep, the teeming whirl of impossible color that the locker had revealed.
“I DARE you, ancient spirit! Make REAL the dream I’ve laid before you! HEAR MY VOICE within your SLUMBER... and GRANT MY HEART’S DESIRE!”
BA-DUM! BA-DUM! BA-DUM!
The Great Wight’s eyelid fell aside. The oculus inside it bloomed like a fractal rainbow rosebud. Reticular vortices swirled into focus, glimpsing light, glimpsing darkness, for the first time in an eon that had fit within the span of thirteen years.
Cody stared back, seeing nothing, seeing everything it was. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t speak. His pleas could only echo in the hollow of his chest.
Please, he thought. If any part of what my dad wants is for me to be happy—
BA-DUM! BA-DUM! BA-DUM!
Davy swept aside—wild-eyed, giddy, and grinning with greed—to clear the Great Wight’s view of his grand vision. As Davy’s spirit trance dissolved, its mind’s eye pierced through Peekaboo’s perspective. It saw the world that he’d envisioned, and, just as he’d demanded, it mistook it for the world that always was...
...but it glimpsed several details that the vampire had missed.
Cloud cover lurched aside as Hijack caught its swaying cables to support himself. It was a backdrop now, bucking upwards, falling down behind the islands like a wall of cotton fog.
The hole that Razor Rex had forced the floor to suffer in her stead still yawned wide beside the portal. It claimed ocean at the margins of the model, an abyss of black amidst the stage’s blue.
A once-bagged goldish burst free as it struck a West Hill billboard. The structure buckled, creasing the “D” in its “DAYVIEW”, and pet shop water blurred the cheerful Davy face beside it. The goldfish bounced in a majestic arc to flop upon the model’s plastic sea.
The chaos was frozen in the aperture of the Great Unknown’s eye. High above the scene below, Sophie Sybil snapped a photo with the flash on by mistake.
The Great Wight blinked.
Within one tiny town, the world reset.
For a moment, for a lifetime, everything was blinding light and color, roaring change, reality denying what the Great Wight had accepted. Then it forgot what it had been. What wasn’t and
what was had traded places, and everything was settled, sure, and still.
Davy had raised the tattered remains of his suit to shield his face, just like the draculas of old. The storm had struck so suddenly that he had missed the din of sabotage preceding it. Now, as his senses returned, he smelled the faintest whiff of seafoam on the air. Davy Jones took in the first breath that he’d bothered with in years. A sigh became a smile, which became a wicked grin.
“Ah ha ha ha... AH-HAHA HA! YES! YES!! I’ve DONE it! I’ve DONE it! AHA HA HA!” He laughed maniacally, his sight a blur of swimming color. “Where was your LAST MINUTE GAMBIT, BOSS LEADER? WHERE were your SECRET AGENTS sweeping in to save the day? No INTERVENTION from dear DOORMAN? No pesky SWARM of MASTER GUERRA’S FINEST BRUTES? You’ve been SLACKING, my opponents! My OWN PAWNS gave me more trouble!”
He heard the groaning of an addled Fauxbia and Razor Rex’s useless, livid writhing. He glimpsed the sleeping Great Wight’s sheet ghost limb slowly reforming from some otherworldly shape. Before he could take in his victory, though, before he could notice Hijack, Sophie Sybil, or the damage that their meddling might have caused... Davy heard a subtle klick klick klick! ring out beside his feet.
A tiny stone had left the fog, sailed over a slumping Peekaboo, and landed in the hopscotch court’s first square.
Davy stared at it, then smirked and rolled his eyes.
“You’re much too late, old friends,” he drawled, stepping out to block the threshold. “I’ve already succeeded!” He was invincible. He was victorious. A chance to finish off his former cellmates... that was just icing on the cake. “Go on, then. Show me what mad science you’ve concocted to defeat me!”
A wooden stake shot like a missile from the mist its spiral parted.