Apologies for the delayed updates, I've been doing my best to fight off some serious burnout. I appreciate your patience and support in the meantime! As always, please support Paranatural on Patreon, it's how I keep this up!

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[Transcript]

        Cody’s eyes didn’t need to adjust to the darkness. If anything, it should have been a comforting sight. The ballroom’s skylight had allowed the near-full moon to intermingle with the dim glow of its sconces; Cody’s mind was never at ease underneath it. It always filled him with a lonely sort of dread, the moon—it kept his mom from reaching him. It made her only try when she had claws. He liked the dark without it, and the day where he could roam beyond his father’s stifling reach.

        The darkness backstage, though, belonged to Davy Jones completely.

        Past shambling undead sentries, past spirits whose hoarse and hungry breathing was Cody’s only proof of their existence, a set of spiral stairs led to a tomb enclosed by curtains. Murmurs of the crowd outside were dampened to a dull roar, like distant ocean clawing at the beach.

        At the center of its tide, at center stage, the heart of darkness, was the future Davy dreamed of, cast in miniature.

        “Well, WELL!” creaked the Witch, looking up from her work. She was crouched at the back of the stage like a heap of dirty laundry. In several of her hands, she clutched what appeared to be sticks of colored chalk, which she was using to draw symbols on the floor. “I didn’t KNOW we got a PLUS ONE to THIS portion of the PARTY.”

        One of her bulbous eyeballs rolled to Cody.

        “Fauxbia, darling, I’m certain that you’ve gathered every guest that you could stomach,” Davy replied with droll disinterest. “No portion you partake in needs you adding to the banquet. If anything, at your age? As a doctor? I would rather see you cut down...”

        Davy’s hook gleamed in the darkness.

        “YOU HAVE FRIENDS BESIDES ME?” Razor Rex screeched serenely. “I DIDN’T KNOW YOU HAD IT IN YOU, FAUXBY.”

        “That and MORE, Rexy SWEET. I contain MULTITUDES.” The Witch grinned a ragged grin and rubbed her belly. “Perhaps ONE day I’ll contain YOU, too.”

        “AWESOME,” Razor Rex said. “THAT’S SO COOL.”

        Cody, however, paid no mind to the PTA’s flirting. He stepped forward, towards the strange creation at the center of the stage. Three mounds of the finest paper mache that money could buy extended from the floor up to his shoulders. They were dotted with detail, with buildings and trees, surrounded by a plastic sea that shone a glossy gray in Cody’s vision. It was a painstakingly rendered scale model of—a town. Not Mayview. But similar, twisted... a strange reimagining.

        “What... is this?” Cody asked, drinking in each new distortion he discovered.

        There was East Hill, and West Hill, but swallowed by sea, as though the lake had risen fifty feet. There was a third hill, too—no, a third island, one choked by dark forest, criss-crossed by dark caves, and crowned by a jagged caldera. Everywhere he looked besides that island, Cody noted familiar landmarks. On West Hill, he found his house, the Mayview Mini-Mall, the Academy... but all of them had been polished to a septic sheen and stretched to palatial proportions. Resorts and mansions lapped their way up its coastline’s circumference like pond scum. Davy’s face was plastered everywhere. East Hill, too, had a tacky veneer, just like a smile held too long before a photograph. Its humble houses seemed wrong—crooked, somehow, as though their basements had begun to open wide enough to swallow them. The phone lines on East Hill were tangled, nonsensical, weblike... and all of them led up to Mayview Middle School. No, to the sprawling ruin of a school beside it: a crumbling, overgrown predecessor it had never had, flush against the school that Cody knew just like a swollen parasite.

        “This,” Davy whispered, leaning in to rest a hand on Cody’s shoulder, “is the future I have built for you.”

        “How?” Cody scoffed, turning to face him. He’d thought his father was going to blot out the sun with a doomsday device or something. What was all this? Some kind of joke at his expense? “What are you going to do? Flood the town? You can’t buy enough dirt to build a third hill, dad!”

        “THERE’S NO NEED FOR THAT, BUT YOU PROBABLY COULD. IF DIRT ISN’T DIRT CHEAP, THEN WHAT IS?”

        Razor Rex ducked beneath the black curtain of cotton ball clouds hanging above the town, suspended on thin wire from the catwalk rafters overhead.

        “It’s wisdom like that, my dear goddess, that made you such a strong candidate for PTA treasurer,” Davy sneered, oozing sarcasm.

        “AW, SHUCKS!” blushed a sheepish Razor Rex. “NO, DAVE, YOU WERE RIGHT WAY BACK WHEN... SHADOW SECRETARY IS A MUCH COOLER POSITION. WHO NEEDS POWER OF THE PURSE WHEN YOU HAVE POWER OVER DARKNESS? WHO WANTS TO WORRY ABOUT CHECKS AND BALANCES AND ALL THAT OTHER BORING BANK STUFF? THE PRESIDENT CAN HANDLE THAT KIND OF POINTLESS BUSYWORK... WHILE I WIELD TRUE AUTHORITY! NYEH HEH HEH!”

        “I live to serve,” smirked Davy.

        “SAID the deceased CONTROL freak,” Fauxbia snickered, content to be a cauldron calling the kettle black. Her scribbled chalk sigils were nearly complete—numbers arranged inside some sort of grid...

        “THAT’S MY ISLAND,” Razor Rex bragged to Cody, pointing at the third, wild hill with her scythe, the brand new one teeming with gangrenous life. “YOU CAN VISIT IF YOU WORSHIP ME.”

        Cody shook his head.

        “...This isn’t Mayview.”

        “No,” his father proclaimed triumphantly, “it isn’t.”

        He prowled around his model town, priceless shoes clicking on priceless wood flooring.

        “But then... what is Mayview, anyway?” Davy’s voice dropped to a whisper, as though he spoke to reassure himself. “Perhaps it’s better that you witness this,” he muttered darkly. “This time, you’ll understand the work I’ve carried out behind the curtain. This way, you will remember to be grateful...”

        “...Dad?”

        “What! Is! MAYVIEW?” Davy spread his arms wide. “Perhaps the better question to ask first is... WHERE is Mayview?”

        “H-huh?”

        Cody shivered. His father’s eyes were wide and haunting.

        “What state, my boy? What time zone? Where is it, this hometown that you adore?”

        “Th-that’s...” Unease and vertigo filled Cody’s hollow chest, as though he stood above a yawning precipice. Of course he knew that. Of course he did. He had to—so why was it that nothing came to mind...?

        “Don’t worry,” Davy said, laying his hand upon Cody’s stolen heart as if to soothe it. “Mayview is exactly where you think it is. Exactly where we ALL think it BELONGS! Around the bend, right off the road, precisely where you left it!”

        His smile became a grin, and then a snicker, and then a mad chorus of maniacal laughter in rapturous harmony with Fauxbia and Razor Rex.

        “THE GREAT UNKNOWN IS VAST! It can hide a ghost town ANYWHERE! And that’s how Mayview’s citizens wanted it: a peaceful, sleepy, well-kept secret. How CONVENIENT for the FOOLS that sang the lullaby! That kept it walled off from the world!” Davy surveyed his scale model with a ravenous delight. “But now that’s CHANGED. I’ve given the town a taste of wealth and progress, of tourism and luxury! I’ve helped it GROW! And, in its growing pains, our sleepy hollow stirs—”

        “To a STATE most suggestible,” ribbited Fauxbia.

        “IF ONLY MAYVIEW’S PRAYERS COULD REACH THE POWER AT ITS HEART,” screeched Razor Rex.

        “This... this isn’t what Mayview is praying for,” Cody uttered in breathless bewilderment, looking down at Davy’s model town. “Nobody wants this.”

        “Oh, I think they do. They’re only human, after all, and I’m a rather skillful salesman,” the vampire overlord said with a chuckle. “And while they’re fast asleep tonight, they can’t deny it—nor the will of those we’ve gathered who EMBRACE mankind’s monstrous appetites. Its true nature, undisguised!” Davy snapped his fingers. “Here’s a lesson on rulership, Cody, one that you really should have learned in student government: you don’t need the majority’s vote... just the passionate investment of an organized elite.”

        Behind him, layers of black curtains slowly parted, letting in the light and murmurs of the ballroom.