Seven Days of Halloween: Jack

Did you know, that according to Hoodoo tradition you can banish a certain spirit by tossing a piece of iron in a fire?

My mama read me a story when I was younger. The story was about a man who came to a white town in some country somewhere that was infested with diseased rats. This stranger promised the ruler of the people, and the people themselves, that he’d get rid of the rats, for a price. The ruler and the people both agreed wholeheartedly. The stranger pulled out a pipe: a pipe of shining silver, my mama told me, and played a wondrous tune: a tune that no person in the whole town had heard before. He went up and down the streets and alleys of the town, playing the marvelous melody, and, sure enough, the rats took a liking to it. From sewers, wells, and aqueducts. From straw strewn barns, and thatched roof stone buildings the rats poured at. Soon the streets were a writhing mass of rats pushing against one another, straining to hear the tune of the piper, and out of town he led them.

He led them down the countryside to a roaring river, and each rat, one by one, hopped into the rushing waters. The man went back to the town and asked for his payment from the ruler and the people that he had just helped, and they refused, slamming the gate on his face. That night, however, he’d take his payment. Not in the form of golden coins, nor any precious stones. He snuck into the town and once more blew into his silver flute and led the children from their slumber to some fate. What fate, my mama never told me.

The moral of the story, according to my mother? Not to trust white people when they offer to pay.

I often pondered on that story: how could someone lose all control of their senses: all control of their movements just by a tune?

It was late October, and the sun was beginning to cast its orange light over the marshes that seemed to surround the city, and I was just finishing up a baseball game with some of my friends from around the neighborhood. It was practically neck and neck, and after seven innings, everyone was getting tuckered out: not me, however. I had to sit this game out and play as umpire, because the teams were even and I lost at a quick game of rock, paper, scissors. The team that was up to bat had three people on base, and two strikes so far. It was all up to Johnny.

“Johnny’s up to bat!” The pitcher called out.

The team in the field spread further out: Johnny was a notorious hard hitter. He was responsible for the most amount of baseballs lost, and currently held the high score for number of windows broken: 20 in total. He broke the previous record --also held by him-- earlier in the game.

Whack. Johnny smacked the ball as hard as we’ve ever seen and it flew out of sight, towards the marshes behind us. I sighed. I knew who would have to go carry back the balls after the game was done.

“Hit it softer next time, Johnny!” I called out as he rounded second base.

“Stop whining, Sam!” He called back, and everyone laughed. I only sighed again.

The team on the field came in: it was obvious who won after this, and each player was raring to get home before the sunset and before the mosquitoes that nested in the nearby waters ate each of us alive. They shook hands with each other to show good sportsmanship and went to their homes: all except for me.

For the next thirty minutes I went around and gathered all of the thrown about gear: the rubber bases, the old leather gloves, the torn catchers padding, the wooden and aluminum bats, and put them in the school shed that we had, “borrowed,” them from. I counted all of the stuff and looked on the checklist that hung on a clipboard on the wall. One thing was missing: one baseball. I sighed, I had nearly forgotten….

By the time I had exited the shed the sky was already shining it’s twilight colors: deep oranges had begun to fade into bright brilliant violets, and the slight twinkling of stars began to form behind the firmament. I didn’t have a flashlight on me, but I wouldn’t need one: it was a full moon tonight, and the light from it should be enough to search the outer edges of the marsh.

As I neared it, I sighed one more time: the ball was nowhere to be seen. Could it have sunken underneath the marsh waters? It had to. I groaned and reached my hand into the murky waters, reaching around until I felt something round, smooth, and solid and pulled it up…

I pocketed the ball and stood, turning around to head back to the shed and wipe the water off my jacket sleeve before my ma saw me: she always told me not to go near the swamps, and always got mad whenever I did. After I had gotten about halfway between the swamp and the shed, something caught my eye...something hidden just behind the shed. It flickered like a candle as soon as I saw it and darted past me. I followed it with my eyes, and, before I knew what had come over me, I darted right along with it.

It was quicker than any firefly that I had seen, and stranger, too. While the ones around here glowed a dull neon green light, this one seemed to be almost indecisive: shifting one second from a dull green, to a dull blue, and then to a bright white. No matter how much I picked up my pace, I couldn’t keep up with it: it always seemed to be just on the edge of my sight: peeking through a brush or shining it’s light off the still waters of the marsh to it’s left…yet no matter how hard I ran, I couldn’t lessen the gap between us. I needed to catch up to it, I don’t know why, I just needed to hold it’s light in my hands, and so I ran some more.

Eventually it took a hard turn into the swamp lands, and, without hesitation, so did I. The muck seemed to stick to me almost immediately, weighing heavily on the cuffs of my denim jeans and slowing me down. Yet no matter how slow I got, the gap between the light and I never lessened. And it danced through rotted oaks and dead trees. And I followed. I followed it’s path exactly: crashing through patches of thorns and bramble, crawling through the hollows of dead trees and fallen logs. I could feel branches and the slime sticking to me. The thorns ripping my clothing and flesh. And yet I ran. I ran, and ran, and ran and ran.

No matter how  tired I was, no matter how long I ran, and how much I wanted to stop, I couldn’t. I ran and ran and ran. Until my running was but a slow saunter: weighed down my own fatigue and the muck, and the water that was now waist high. I struggled against my mental bonds and tried to take a step back, but every time I did. Every time I succeeded, a burning sensation racked against my chest. The deep marsh and deeper night was filled with my cries for my mother…nothing but a low murmur on the surface of dead water. My mind flashed to the story of the piper several times that night…

Finally after what felt like an eternity...it stopped. The running through brambles and branches and wood and rotted water stopped. I stood, instead, on semi solid ground, the floating wisp mere inches from my face. I fell to my knees: the fatigue taking over. I wretched onto the dull green grass again and again, and shivered: the water amplifying the cold autumnal air. The flame zipped away again: between two trees that seemed to me, at the time, the frame of a door in the middle of the swamp...and I felt no compulsion to follow, instead I felt a compulsion to stand and wait. And so I stood, shakily, on my feet.

Hours, I stood. And I didn’t move an inch. The wind howled and rattled the branches like the bones of some long lost being, and nothing happened. My feet felt like they could give out at any point, and I felt the corners of my eyes stinging from the crying I had done. I wanted out of this, this nightmare. I now knew had the children felt when they were sent involuntarily across the streets of that town: they felt terrified. No control of anything they did, no control over their movements, their motions...their reflexes. How long did they dance across the valleys and plains? How many days? How many weeks? How long would I have to wait here? These questions flooded into my mind as the moon painted it’s pale arc overhead.

And, then, the flame returned. Following closely on it’s comet tail several hundred of the flames lit up the still dark night. There were brilliant whites, and dull reds. The flames encircled around me, yet I did not feel the lick of their flames, no. Their flames were a cold one. The cold bit to my bone, as it were a searing hot flame. More and more flames spewed out of that portal: that portal to hell. It seemed to be a neverending parade to me, but, just as suddenly as it began, it stopped. And at the end, something more terrifying emerged: the flames acting as a torch to light up this terrible thing.

It first reached its arms through: two long, dark brown hands that seemed to be made of the soil of the marsh. It grasped onto both of the entwined trees that made the portal and pulled itself forwards: the trees groaning at the incredible weight of the thing. Then, a giant orange pumpkin peered out of the portal: it had a maniacal grin carved into it, and two fierce eyes that burned with a bright, malevolent yellow. Followed suit was the body: a wriggling mass of green vines, on top of which was the pumpkin that made it’s head. Each tendril was stuck deep into the ground, and it moved itself by pushing the earth around each, like a giant worm was moving just beneath the surface.

I felt my heart and breath quicken as it approached with one vine outstretched to grab me...and I couldn’t move. No matter how hard I tried I could not move my legs to run. No matter how terrified I was, I stood in place. As the vine was about to touch me, however, it shot back, as if in pain. I swear I could hear it curse in some horrible language as it slithered back into the portal…

As it did so the flames that were stilled sprung back to life, each one orbiting me like tens of thousands of tiny stars. The lights all blend together to a blinding white, and, instead of the grove that I was in with the portal on the other side, I was near the shed….I was out of the marsh. And back to safety. The moon hung high in the sky: using the light of the full moon I stumbled back home wearily.

A single lamp was lit in the window of my living room, and nowhere else. My ma was going to be upset, I told myself. My clothes were ripped and dirty: these were supposed to last until we got new ones at Christmas that year. I stood on the porch, steeling myself for the scolding that was sure to come: I could hear both my parents on the other side

Hesitantly I wriggled the knob and the door creaked open and the room went still.

“S-sorry…” I mumbled out, but no one responded.

I looked up, and all eyes were staring at me: with my parents sat an elderly lady that I didn’t recognize, and she grinned at me. At that grin, both my parents sprung up and embraced me in hugs and kisses.

“You brought him back!” My mother cried. My father was doing a poor job of holding back his tears.

She kissed my head several times and then looked me over. She screamed at something, it was then that I felt the several cuts and lacerations all over my body and the fatigue took over and I collapsed.

I woke up a couple hours later in a hospital bed. I had to get several stitches on both of my arms, and legs and my both of my feet: which, according to the doctor, were the worst he’s seen.

I was told that I was gone for a month, and I corrected them: I’ve only been gone for a couple of hours. Everyone in the room looked at me dumbly. My disappearance was the buzz of the town for the last month, they told me. They showed me newspaper clippings of the reports on the investigation, and where the police had decided to give up...then they turned to a witch doctor from a nearby: the old lady I saw with them. They told me that all she did was throw a piece of iron into the fireplace and in I walked, thirty minutes later...I recounted my story to them, and none of them believed me. I couldn’t blame them, though it angered me at the time. The police wrote it off as me getting lost in the swamp, and the doctor said that my experience was caused by a hallucination brought about by a bursting swamp gas bubble or something. But I knew the truth, and held it with me all these years.

As October nears it’s end, once more, twenty years later, I throw a piece of iron into the fire each night they’re gone. I do this every year around this time, so that they do not, like me, run into Jack and his innumerable lanterns.

Author's Note

Writing a story a day is pretty hard, or so I've found out.

Reviews

[D Connolly]

cool story! I enjoyed it.