Mindy had been trying to restrain her panic all weekend. When she drove back to downtown late Friday evening, at the appointed time and place to pick Tim up and bring him back home, he was nowhere to be found. And he wasn't exactly the type who could be easily lost in a crowd. From the moment she got there and found bare concrete on the corner where she'd propped him up a few hours earlier, her mind had been racing. She knew he had some limited ability to drag himself down the sidewalk, but he couldn't have gotten far under his own power...
She was kicking herself, mentally and almost literally. She should never have let him do this crazy stuff. He couldn't have done it, after all, without her help. She should've just put her foot down and told him, "You're staying put in your apartment until it's time for you to get changed back, and that's final." And she kept reminding herself - how could she forget? - that it was her last-minute invitation that got him stuck like that in the first place. She felt doubly responsible for... whatever it was that had just happened to him, voluntary or involuntary. She was maybe even more worried about what he might have done voluntarily, given how manic he'd seemed lately.
So Mindy didn't question her immediate impulse to spend most of the weekend trawling the downtown streets until she found Tim. But he never turned up. At that point, she probably should've called the police and filed a missing person report, but she was worried that they'd put the case under "stolen property" and promptly forget about it. S\he called in sick to work Monday morning, something she hadn't done since that first morning after Halloween, and kept on looking. But she was starting to lose hope. She certainly couldn't keep doing this all day, every day.
By the fifteenth time she pulled up downtown and started circling the block where she'd last seen Tim, it was obvious to Mindy that he was not still out on the street somewhere. Maybe somebody came down and offered him a ride? she wondered. But if they did, they never brought him back to his apartment - she'd checked there almost as many times as she'd been here. He must have gone inside some place... but where?
As soon as the thought crossed her mind, Mindy's eyes were drawn away from the driver's-side window of her car and up to the sunroof, where the upper floors of the Cooper Tower could be seen looming above. Lately, Mindy had been picking up on just how much power there was in a witch's intuition. She was getting songs stuck in her head right before they came on the radio, thinking of people she knew only to find that they had just texted her. So as soon as her attention wandered onto the sight of the Cooper, she immediately felt like she was onto something. Everybody knew that the most extravagant Christmas parties in town were held up there. Mindy had never been there herself, of course, but she'd seen the pictures online, and she remembered just how many trees they had lined up in that ballroom. Okay, maybe this was more of a regular old hunch than a supernatural revelation. But it still made perfect sense as a lead for her to investigate.
She got out of the car and strode confidently toward the shining glass doors at the base of the tower, prepared to walk right in like she owned the place. A month ago, the very idea would have filled her with stomach-churning anxiety, but another thing Mindy had learned about her mildly altered form was just how much she could get away with now. Last week, for instance, she had accidentally shown up to work without her ID badge, and then, distracted, gotten off the elevator on the wrong floor. But even though it was supposed to be a secure office, nobody had said a word to her or even batted an eyelash. She wasn't sure if that was the latent aura of magic that apparently now surrounded her doing its work, or just people assuming that she had some important transformation-fixing business to attend to. Or, for that matter, people afraid of what she might turn them into if she was cornered.
But, as she put that silly pointed hat back on for the first time in weeks, to fully look the part, she figured she had the perfect opportunity to test her little theory out. And it worked perfectly! She marched right past the security guard at the lobby's front desk, who didn't even bother to look up from his phone as she passed by. Even on a busy Monday morning like this, nobody did a thing to stop her from going straight to the elevator that was supposed to be "authorized personnel only" and casually smacking the up button.
Was any part of that magic? Or was it just random good luck, mixed with a natural desire in people to avoid confrontation? Mindy was starting to think that there might not be a difference between the two. From the few things she'd been able to find online - experienced witches hastily posting a crash course in "Magic 101" in between long shifts at the Restoration Bureau - magic in its most basic form was nothing more than a manipulation of probability. If you could make something good a thousand times more likely to happen to you, you'd just seem like an exceedingly lucky person. Some people already, naturally, had more of that in them than others. But if you could sharpen that power, then you could make even the most incredibly unlikely possibilities come true - like a man suddenly becoming a Christmas tree, or a Christmas tree suddenly going back to being a man. Mindy was a long way from honing her new abilities like that. But, well, she hadn't hit a single red light on her many trips to and from downtown all weekend.
The elevator doors opened, and Mindy was greeted with a sight she had never expected to see with her own eyes. The penthouse was even more beautiful than it looked in photographs - the detailed carvings in the wooden paneling, the plushly laid out Persian rugs that lined the floor. And the room was otherwise empty - the big Christmas party was still weeks away, after all. But she wasn't here to admire the view. Her eyes narrowed as she scanned the row of trees in front of her. One of them had to be Tim, she felt sure of that by now. But from this distance, they all looked exactly the same to her. Even the ornaments were all perfectly identical, shimmering orbs of gold and silver that screamed wealth and prestige - none of them had the cheaper, but more colorful decorations that she remembered reluctantly hanging all over Tim's body. She was about to wonder if her intuition had led her astray when she spotted a rustle of movement out of the corner of her eye.
She hastily jogged in the general direction of the tree that she thought she saw moving. All the while, her head was on a swivel, checking to make absolutely sure the room really was empty before she did what she was planning to do next. "Tim!", she called out, in a hushed but hopefully still audible tone, still worried that somebody might start eavesdropping from another room. And in response, as if out of nowhere, one of the identical trees in the line suddenly stirred from its spot and began to turn around on its trunk. She was expecting to see the artificial face that would set him apart from any of the others, but on the other side, all she saw was more silver and gold.
Under her breath - and she was out of breath - Mindy started to whisper conspiratorially to the tree she knew was Tim, even if she still couldn't recognize him by sight. "Are you okay?", she hissed out. Asking the obvious question - "where the fuck is your face!?" - occurred to her, but she went with something a little broader. "What happened to you?"
And then, Mindy watched as a series of uncanny movements, branches touching each other like tiny hands, until they reached deep into the tree's interior and spat out an instantly familiar decal. The mouth spoke softly in Tim's voice, the image printed on it animating to match every syllable that he said, as he explained how he'd been mistaken for a last-minute delivery and taken up to be installed here. "Then I was sort of stuck here," he continued. "All through the weekend, people kept coming and going, and even when I was alone, I was afraid to leave this spot in case someone suddenly came in. And I guess they must have realized that my decorations weren't the same as the others, because yesterday, somebody came along to fix that. I was able to hide my mouth piece just in time before they noticed it, but they, uh... they took my eyes."
"Oh my god!", Mindy said, momentarily forgetting that she was trying to keep down the volume. "Is that... I mean... does it hurt? I can't believe I let this happen, I should've nev-"
"Hey, wait, it's okay", Tim said. "I can still see and everything. It's just that, well, they took all those other ornaments and put them in some storage closet, and that's all I can see right now. So, since I have you here, would you mind helping me out...?"
He gave her directions to the other room, the best he could remember from when his entire field of vision was being carried over there. And it wasn't terribly difficult for Mindy to find, just unsettling. She stared at the cardboard box that had "DISCARD" scrawled on it in Sharpie, filled with the very same ornaments she'd put on him not too long ago. The ones that had to be his eyes, with the black dots in the middle of the white orbs, sat right on top. She wasn't sure what unnerved her more, the fact that he was actually staring at her right now, or the realization that he couldn't have seen a thing when she was talking to him, since she had to flip the lights on to search through the pitch-black closet. No, it had to be the very thought that such a thing could even happen to a person. She shuddered to think that the box could have just been tossed in a dumpster, his eyes getting crushed into shards of broken glass - and what would happen to his sense of sight then?
She dwelled on these thoughts as she walked quickly back over to where Tim stood, then promptly took his eyes out of the box and hung them right back where they belonged. She stared into the opening of the surprisingly heavy box in her hands, the bright red and green colors inside still shining in the dim light. "Do you want me to put these back on you now?", she asked, once she was sure she'd positioned his eyes correctly. "Or can it wait until after we get you out of here? I don't want anyone to think I'm stealing their decorations..."
"I don't think you need to," Tim said. The cheerful-sounding tone in his voice surprised Mindy, given everything he'd been subjected to this weekend. "I actually kind of like the look of these, now that I can actually see them properly. Oh, and speaking of which, have you had a chance to look out the window yet? The view is incredible from up here!"
Mindy blinked. She could almost feel the gears turning in her head, and she didn't like the conclusion they were leading her to. "Don't tell me you're actually thinking about staying up here. I mean, Jesus, Tim, I know you're looking to put a positive spin on your changes, but surely there's a better way to do it than-"
"Oh, no," Tim interrupted. "No, please help me get out of here. I want to spread positivity to people, and it's really lonely up here. And when the big Christmas bash comes in a couple weeks, I don't think anyone there would be happy to find out I've accidentally crashed the party. Plus, I don't know what they do with these other trees after Christmas is over, and I don't want to find that out the hard way. I just thought that, if you're gonna have to carry me out of here one way or another, super suspiciously, we might as well get a free set of ornaments out of the whole ordeal, right?"
Mindy laughed at that, although it was really more out of a sense of relief than humor. She was just glad none of this was Tim's idea - she would have been pissed if she'd spent the whole weekend searching everywhere for him, only to find out that he was happy as a clam with where he'd been taken. And hey, at least she had a good excuse for playing hooky for a day. The only challenge left now was to hoist him under her arm and figure out how to get him out of this place without anybody noticing.
And as it turned out, that wasn't so hard, either. The whole elevator ride down, she was rehearsing in her head for what to say when she was inevitably stopped and questioned. She couldn't help but think of another green-skinned figure who stole a Christmas tree and had to come up with a lie quick when he almost got caught. But she didn't want to dwell for too long on a copyrighted character that she didn't own the rights to. Anyway, when she finally made it down to the lobby, all her feeble attempts at thinking of an alibi turned out to be totally unnecessary. Once again, nobody paid her a lick of attention as she crossed the floor - even when one of the gold ornaments fell to the floor with a muted clatter and she had to stop and pick it up. She still couldn't really comprehend how her neighbor had gotten so comfortable with being turned into a Christmas tree, that was for sure. But she could certainly see the advantages that came with being a witch.