lock, shock, and barrel ( complete )

11. The Twins (Reprise)

Three days passed while Lock, Shock, and Barrel were healing in Jack and Sally's house. Veronica came over every day to check on them. Soon enough, they could walk around without help and wear their normal day clothes. Word had spread around town that the three were not dead and living with Jack and Sally. Jack was widely known for opposing this idea.

"I never agreed to it," he said at a meeting once. "They will soon be out of my place, I assure you."

Sally, however was quietly changing people's minds about the three of them, one at a time. Lock, Shock, and Barrel were spoken about all over Halloween Town. Emily and Veronica told them about their findings on the twins.

"Porcelain?" asked Shock, taking a bite out of a banana. "What's that?"

"It's like glass," said Emily. "Really fancy glass. And it's not clear."

"Cool," said Shock. The sun streamed in through the window and sent cascading pictures on the floor. Barrel was making shadow puppets on the floor. He had a long scar on his neck. Shock's hat was hung on a post on her and Lock's bed and her hair was in two long braids. Lock was balancing some of Jack's old test tubes on his nose while meditating. They were listening, and Emily and Veronica knew it.

"So you think they gassed your parents?" asked Lock, his eyes closed. The test tube fell with a clunk on the ground. They were a strong plastic, so they didn't break.

"Yeah," said Veronica, doing the same thing as him. "Unless they were really sleepy, but they would have told us that small detail."

Barrel made a dog and acted as though it tried to eat Lock's fallen test tube. "Why would they gas your parents?"

"That's what we're trying to find out," said Emily. "So far, they only have a reason to be mad at Vanessa and Derek."

"Maybe the town beat them senseless," Barrel suggested, making a duck. "Quack, quack."

"Probably," said Lock, balancing another test tube. "But they did it to us and we didn't put anyone under a sleep gas thing."

"Why is nobody concerned about why they were in our house?" asked Shock.

"Maybe they had something to do with the bugs," said Barrel making a butterfly and flapping it around.

"So their gonna take a bug army and get revenge on my sister?" said Veronica. She balanced another tube. "That doesn't seem lethal."

Shock took a bite out of her banana. "Where did they go? They weren't there when we got back, it was just your parents."

"Maybe they left before us," said Barrel. He was currently making a wolf and having it howl at a nail on the floor.

"We would have seen them," said Lock. "We didn't come that much after the whole thing happened."

"So they were in the house the whole time," said Emily.

"They can't hide," said Shock, tossing her peel in the trash. "I know that place inside and out. The only good hiding places are behind the couch and Oogie's lair."

The test tube fell onto the floor again. Lock's eyes grew wide. "The lair. They went in the lair."

Veronica turned her head, causing the tube to fall, Shock raised her eyebrows at him, Emily tapped her notebook with a pencil, thinking, and Barrel stopped making shadow puppets to listen.

"Think," said Lock. "They didn't go down the elevator, and they didn't hide. The parents were found by the entrance. The two didn't want to be seen by them, so they passed them out and went down."