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[Transcript]

        “Sorry, can I get that on the record, Mr. Mayor?” asked Sophie Sybil, Ace Freelance Reporter. “You’re telling me that you are, in fact, two ghosts possessing one man’s body. Is that correct?”

        The Hijacks tried to turn their stolen head in two different directions at the same time, which made it rattle like a frostbitten maraca in an earthquake.

        “False. We’re two halves of one SPIRIT puppeteering one man’s body. Possession is a different thing,” the left side of Mayor Hijack’s mustache slurred impatiently.

        “What we’re doing is special,” his right side interrupted, suddenly choked up. “Like, it’s not EASY, you know? To be a body snatcher? And I feel like, that’s my truth, and I’m expressing it, but it’s like, if you were talking to the real me, if I didn’t have this HOT MAYORAL BODY, would you even HEAR that truth??”

        “No, you would not,” his left side helpfully informed her.

        “Mayor Submits to Democratic Control,” Sophie mumbled, jotting down spun headlines in her smartphone. “Shares Governing Body with... Cooperating Parties? No, a Bipartisan Coalition of Spiritual Advisors...”

        Major Hijack used his goldfish bag to dab sweat from his brow. The trek through the maze that led to the ballroom’s backstage had been exhausting. Not only had he been forced to defeat Razor Rex’s seven fearsome Corpse Cardinals, each of whom was themed around a different deadly sin, his first playthrough of real-life Castlevania had also been a grueling gimmick speedrun. Though the mayor fit like a glove (he seemed familiar, somehow, as if Hijack had driven the same brand of blockhead before), the make of the mitten hardly mattered when it was being asked to house two hands. Every step he took was a leap of faith, every punch he threw a freak mistake of physics... and he’d had to protect Sophie the whole time, who’d insisted they team up because their “star signs were compatible” and because she “didn’t want to get devoured by a zombie.”

        “Wow,” squeaked Sister Mouse, “and here I’d thought that skeletons and vampires were the strangest thing I’d ever learn was real!”

        “Skeletons are a well-documented phenomenon,” Mayor Hijack’s left half said. “You are wearing one right now. And there’s another one inside you.”

        “Super, super. Sooo true,” Sophie blithely blathered on. “Me, I’ve always been a believer, even before I joined a fringe occult religion. Not in, like, anything specific, just kind of like in everything a little bit. Crystals, tarot, ASMR slime videos... that’s, like, all it takes for me to tap into that aura—that truth that all the half-truths tally up to. Some people are just, like, sensitive, y’know?”

        “Um, maybe YOU are,” Mayor Hijack’s right side sulked defensively.

        “I am, yeah! To the spirit world, I mean. I’ve always felt that there’s, like, energy around us. I’m like a medium, y’know?”

        “There is and you’re not,” the left side of the mayor flatly stated. “I am trying to be stealthy. Please be quiet.”

        “As a mouse!” Sophie cheerfully assured him, winking back at his lopsided blink.

        Mayor Hijack gurgled in exasperated gratitude, breathing with one lung and then the other. Why had he agreed to let her follow him around? Sophie’s plan to leak proof of the supernatural threat posed by the PTA to the public was almost surely doomed to fail. At best, her evidence would end up gracing grocery store checkout lanes beside rags claiming that aliens were real, or that Bigfoot and the Mothman were entangled in an amorous affair.

        “I’ve got half the cult unmasked and Davy’s thralls undead to rights,” she’d said when he had tried to shoo her off. “They might be camera shy, but their names will still show up when we roll credits on this creepshow! Once I have the money shot—some proof this isn’t just, like, some kind of early Halloween party—the whole list’s getting sent out with my resume attached. Look, see? Every single network news tip line, CC’d in one career-making draft!”

        Mayor Hijack sighed. Maybe some hard-hitting journalism could help point the Consortium in the PTA’s direction tomorrow, sure, but who knew if there’d be one if they weren’t stopped tonight? It fell on him to save the day... all while fear and logic were both telling him to flee.

        Darn you, Cody! thought the Hijacks, though they knew it was their fault that he’d been caught. Me, myself, and SOME DANG LADY isn’t the kind of TEAMWORK that a brain boy can believe in! I thought that we were in this mess TOGETHER! The mayor closed a fist made strong by shaking donors’ hands; he bit a mustached upper lip made stiff by kissing babies. Once I do my part, you’re on your OWN! I miss MY mom, too... and I have a Wii at HOME!!

        Murmurs and a strange, unearthly pressure filtered in from the pitch black curtain just ahead. They’d climbed stairs behind the stage up to the rafters high above it. The mayor twitched at Sophie, who nodded back, a bead of cold sweat running down her brow. Something wasn’t right here... even she’d begun to sense it. As carefully as they could manage, the Hijacks parted the shroud surrounding the darkness that awaited them. Trembling like a leaf, they skulked inside.

        Down past the landing they’d emerged on, down past catwalks, ropes, and rigging, stood all three wicked leaders of the Phantom Threat Authority. There was Cody, too. A model town. A hopscotch court. A key passed from one hand into another. Before the new arrivals could begin to parse the scene that they were seeing—

        “Heh HEH heh...! ONE last time, BEFORE the HURLY-BURLY has begun... Let ME get a CLOSER look AT you all!”

        Fauxbia’s eye launched from its socket with a faint and funny pop to dangle by a thread a foot below. In the hollow it revealed, a bright red light began to swirl into the crude shape of a keyhole. It hadn’t been a simple task to slip true fear beneath the skin of such an old, determined spirit... but pluck the heartstrings just so, strip the sutures that had mended it, and old wounds could reopen good as new. Now she’d claimed it. Now his power was hers...

        DOORMAN’S MASTER LOCK!

        With a mad cackle, the Witch jabbed Razor Rex’s key into the void behind her eye. There was a click... and then her every seam began to glow with pulsing power.

        Lilliputty’s LIQUIMANCY!

        Fauxbia bubbled and writhed like a carbonated bog. She rose into the air, twisting and stretching. Her hunched back formed an archway, her ragged robes a door-shaped curtain with the features of a face.

        “D-Dad—” Cody started, unsettled by a dread filling the room like noxious gas.

        “Until it’s done, Cody,” whispered a reverent Davy Jones, staring vacantly ahead, a moth who thought himself Prometheus standing before the flame he craved, “I command you. You will not speak. You will not move.”

        Cody’s eyes went wide as his authority took hold. He looked up at his father, stunned and betrayed. Davy’s gaze met his, cold and sharp and hollow, as he glanced back past his shoulder... but then it softened. A flicker crossed his face—uncertainty? Guilt? Fear? Confusion—a struggle to reconcile something in his mind. Why had he brought Cody here, to this moment, to this threshold? Hadn’t he sworn that... that he would never again let—

        “You will not move,” Davy repeated, “except to flee... if I cannot protect you.”

        Then the shadow of doubt on his face was gone, and Cody was left frozen as his father stalked ahead to claim his prize.

        Deadweight’s IMMOVABLE Object! PRINCESS Pedestal’s Dichotomy PARADOX!

        Fauxbia’s oozing silhouette went rigid, locked in place before the hopscotch court’s first step. A golden forcefield formed around her, shimmered softly, and then faded.

        “PLACES, EVERYBODY!” giggled Razor Rex delightedly. “JUST LIKE WE REHEARSED, RIGHT? OR IT’S CURTAINS FOR ALL THREE OF US!”

        The Witch’s head hung above the doorway she’d transformed into like mounted taxidermy. Flexing limbs and fingers spread like feelers from its frame. A hungry grin had found her face, a haunting light her intact eye.

        “W-what’s going on...?” Sophie whispered to the mayor, but the Hijacks couldn’t answer. They were frozen. They didn’t know why or for what, but they both knew they were too late.

        The key protruding from Fauxbia turned in its socket like a music box—no, like a jack-in-the-box; she was humming one’s tune, awaiting something imminent with famished desperation.

        “Ready or NOT...” whispered Davy, greed beyond greed in his eyes, reaching out as if to knock upon the door.

        Click!

        With just that simple sound, the world was wrong.

        A hum had joined the silence of existence, like a question posed to every settled matter all at once. Why should up and down be different? Why shouldn’t kindness sear like flame? Why not turn all life to stone, or give each breeze and happy thought its own eyes, teeth, and hunger?

        Suffocating loneliness filled Cody’s heartless chest. That was when he realized, with a horrid, haunting lurching of his soul, that the hum beyond the door was something breathing.

        In and out. In and out. An impossible colossus in repose. Scale’s perception shifted; the cavernous backstage became a cramped and fragile vessel at the bottom of the sea.

        Beyond the door, there was a sound like lapping waves.

        Something was stirring in its sleep.

        Behind the door, there was a creak of weight on wood.

        Something was inching slowly closer.

        Beneath the door, a pale light shone.

        Something was waiting to be freed.

        Davy reached out with his hook... and threw the portal’s curtain to one side.