Chapter #3
He pulled from the doorway, as fast as it would allow him, and ran down the corridor after Angel. He rounded the corner where she'd slipped by, and slammed himself flat against the wall. Brained for a moment, he stared dumbly at the gray stone wall, until he realized that she must have disappeared. He ran a boney hand across his forehead, and felt a little dent. "Lovely." He mumbled, walking away.
There was just something about the way the walls loomed over him. They compressed his thinking, and muddled his speech when he tried to talk. Now he realized what Angel was saying when she mentioned the oppression inside the building, but he hadn't thought it would be this harsh. Even the pictures seemed to be jeering at him.
"How could someone live here, and feel at home?" He scratched his head. "I would have died of a heart attack, had that been the case." He came to a door on his left. The door was painted black, with glowing slime green chips inside, forming a glowing dragon. It intrigued him how the dragon was curled into a slight ball. Between the dragon's teeth, was a thorny rose, with the wilted petals falling off onto nothing but air. The rose petals were a bright crimson.
He took one look, and turned the other way. "No way! I'm tired of doors!" Jack walked back to the corridor he came from, hesitated, and went back the dragon door. "Curse the cat's curiosity." He mumbled. His mind began to wander... Back to when he first discovered the grand Christmas door. How much fun that'd been! And yet, he'd put his friends in danger. Still, there was a chance he could re-do the whole scenario, just to get a little fun out of it.
So the new idea, was to check behind this door, and see what he could see. Now the problem with this was, he'd be in a new world, in a new world, at the same time, and didn't want the risk of destroying himself. This was the new test. To see how far his abilities would allow.
Behind him, Angel had sneaked up. She peered over his shoulder shyly, making sure he did not see her, and watched as he pushed the door open a ways. Just enough to see inside. When he reached a certain point, Angel shoved him in, shut the door, and locked it with a skeleton key. Jack landed heavily on the hard dusty wooden floor. In his astonishment, he didn't even see where he was. All he could do was stare at the door in which he'd been pushed.
"Let me out! What is the meaning of this?!" Jack pounded on the strange hard wood. When no one answered, he let out a sigh, and took a look around. Nothing else to do, right? Wrong. Jack was in a wood. A strange, dark, mossy wood, where the trees grew so big, a single tree was the size of a skyscraper, and the branches were just as large. Huge, spider webs of moss hung from every limb, and little light came from the forests canopy.
Scared mindless, Jack backed himself against a tree, and was astonished to see that the forest held no life at all, outside the trees. He was staring at nothing but vegetation. Not a single animal, or insect. A thought occurred to him... Maybe Angel had sent him here on purpose, for he finally realized she was the only one who could have pushed him in. The elf was still in her quarters. The question, was why.
Now Jack knew that Angel had betrayed him, so he wasn't sure if it was for the good, or the bad that she shoved him into this strange place. But he did know, he was away from the elf, and that's all that mattered right now.
He wandered for a short while, staring into nothing but twilight from the strange lighting, and seeing so many trees, he got lost. He came right back to the place he'd started. Only this time, turning to where the door had been, there stood nothing. He was trapped here. The desolate wood seemed to move, and a few of the trees creaked and groaned in the wind. None of this really bothered Jack, for he was used to the speaking of the trees, but the very thought of no life here at all, seemed to take his mind backwards, and into childhood again.
His thoughts became that of a small child, lost, and afraid. Where had Angel sent him? He couldn't handle the fact that he was alone. Things started swimming in his mind, and he began to feel strange. Like the ground were coming out from underneath him. As this sensation began to increase, he was forced to lean on a tree, and sink to the ground in order to regain his control.
A small pool by his side shimmered, and became cloudy. The surface became completely flat, except for one difference. An image was appearing. In the image, he could see Sally, asleep on her bed, and the clock beside the bed, read the exact time he'd left. Nothing had changed, and Sally had no idea he was even gone. Where he was now, did not effect time the way it had at Christmastown, where everyone knew he was missing.
Now, he could find a way out of here without having to worry about time. Frustration began to well up inside him. Now that time wasn't a factor, even though it had its good points, bad things began to happen too. If he didn't get out of here, time in Halloweentown would freeze, meaning Sally would never wake from her dreams.
The hard part, was getting out in the first place. Looking around, he noticed all the trees looked the same. But as he looked closer, he could see that something about them was different. Something about them told him he was in a different spot than he'd originally thought. He wasn't in the same place as he'd first come in. The wood was a maze. That explained why he couldn't find the door, and why there were no animals. It wasn't a real wood, it was a maze!
Energized with new life, Jack jumped up, and runs around some big trees to a different place. Here, he finds another spot that looks like the one he passed. He searches for a different route, and taking a right hand turn instead of a left, comes out at the exact place where the door had been before he was pushed inside.
Now his hope returned with magnified gusto. He ran to the door, and pounded eagerly to be let out. No one came. In his haste, and excitement at finding the door again, he grabs a broken branch of a tree, struggles to lift it, and drops it again. Jack breaks a few branches off, and takes the tree into the door with a force that would shatter a rock.
He returned to the castle walls. The darkness was like a brick wall, and the torches were out, smoke billowing from where they had once been lit. They hadn't been out long. Cold air circulated threw the room, and Jack could tell something went horribly wrong.
