✨🍬"The witches saw the boys before the boys saw the witches."🍬✨
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The night had gone quiet. It was so late that all the children of Salem were tucked into bed. So late, in fact, that their babysitters had fallen asleep, as well, drifting off as they waited for their employers to come back from the Town Hall Pumpkin Ball.
As a result, the town felt deserted and eerie beneath the harsh light of its own streetlamps.
Jay and Ernie didn't seem to notice, however.
Long-haired Jay perched on the hood of an old black sedan while stocky Ernie leaned against the front bumper, unwrapping fun-size candy bar after fun-size candy bar and stuffing himself silly. Toilet paper cascaded around them from the branches of a sycamore tree that had mostly shed its leaves for winter. The boys knew the local cops would unfairly presume them guilty if a stranger's house - or worse, a classmate's - ended up decked out this way, so instead they'd TP'd Jay's house. In the morning, his parents would just look disappointed and point them toward the stepladder.
"You wanna smash some pumpkins?" Jay asked, toying with a half-empty roll of toilet paper.
"No," said Ernie around a mouthful of chocolate.
"Well, then you wanna look into windows and watch babes undress?"
"It's three o'clock," Ernie said. They've undressed already."
Jay flung the paper away. "Well then, you think of something."
"I don't feel so good."
"That's 'cause you're eating too much candy, you oinker," Jay said, smacking the latest bar from Ernie's hand. He hated when Ernie got this way - so fixated on one thing, and usually a thing that was totally boring and didn't involve Jay at all.
The witches saw the boys before the boys saw the witches.
Mary, who had been desperately sniffing the air for what felt like two hours but was probably merely minutes, was the most excited to spot them.
"The boy, Winnie!" she hissed, tugging on her red-headed sister's sleeve.
"Are you sure that's the right one?" Winifred asked.
Mary was not, but she knew Winifred did not like insecurity.
"I am," she said. "It must be."
"It must be," said Winifred, "or it is?"
"Good," said Winifred. Her voice grew darker and more vindictive then: "The girl who trapped us in that fire box is mine. I'll teach her to try and burn a witch."
Jay and Ernie were, to an outside observer, old enough to be more men than boys, but the night was heading toward dawn and the Sanderson sisters were not eager to discriminate.
The witches crept up behind them. As they did, Sarah danced through the soft, waving curls of white paper, spinning and smiling.
Mary homed in on the strongest scent in the street: without a second thought, she pressed her nose against the larger boy's foot.
"Yo, witch," Ernie said, smacking her with Max Dennison's nearly empty candy bag. "Get your face off my shoe."
Mary scuttled backward, fixing her hair. "Oh," she said, frightened more of Winifred than of this boy with the strange hair and the useless weapon. "Wrong boy. Oh sorry, Winnie."
Sarah plucked up a scrap of toilet paper and swung it about, watching the thin material make equisite shapes as it caught the air.
Winifred threw her hands up. "Why, why, why was I cursed with such idiot sisters?" she demanded.
Sarah didn a little twirl. "Just lucky, I guess."
Mary snorted before she could stop herself, and Winifred let out a tearless sigh.
The three sisters turned away to try to find their original targets.
"Oh, man," said Jay. "How come it's always the ugly chicks that stay out late?"
One by one, the Sandersons turned. Sarah in particular looked prepared to turn someone into a box turtle or slug. Something slow on the road and sweet on the tongue.
"Chicks?" prompted Winifred.
Pages 143-146 of Hocus Pocus & The All-New Sequel by A.W. Jantha
Some thoughts:
In the sequel in this novelization, in an effort to include the original cast of characters, A.W. Jantha makes Jay (Tobias Jelinek) the principal of the high school twenty-five years later. Ernie (Larry Bagby) ends up moving away and becoming a park ranger. In the sequel in this novel (not Hocus Pocus 2), it seems like the boys went through some kind of trauma from being suspended in bird cages. In the original movie, the boys are never showed being freed, even in a post-credit scene. When Max takes back his stolen Nike shoes from Ernie's feet, the direction of the film seems to say that the boys got what they deserved for bullying little kids, stealing their candy, and toilet papering houses. I kind of do think it was a stretch for the blonde stoner dude to become school principal twenty-five years later.