The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Rotting Jack   
by Kathleen McCluskey

Every Halloween, when the sun dipped behind the trees, the pumpkin appeared in the overgrown forest. It was always perfect, round and heavy. The skin was smooth as glass and orange like autumn fire. Its grin gleamed, edges still damp, as though carved only moments before. Eli had first seen it when he was ten years old, standing beside his father in the crisp, cool air. His father’s voice was a rasp in the wind as he whispered, “Don’t ever touch it, except to keep the candle burning.”

 Now twenty years later, Eli stood in front of it again. The same grin. The same flicker inside. The same unease creeping up his spine. The story went that a man named Tobias Crane, his ancestor, had once cheated a witch that lived in the hollow beyond the creek. He trapped and sold her soul for fortune thinking himself clever enough to escape her grasp. But witches are patient. On the next Halloween, she returned, carved his face into a pumpkin and lit it from within. Now he must feed her souls until the end of his line. When the candle went out, the pumpkin would rot and somebody would die.

His father was gone, heart stopped before dawn the previous Halloween. Now the duty of the flame fell to him. He remembered his father talking in whispers to the Jack over the years but last Halloween he didn’t speak a word.

 Eli’s father had tended the flame all his life, whispering to it when the flame wavered. His grandfather had done the same. But each year, the flame burned lower, the rot came faster and the smell of decay lingered longer. By midnight, the pumpkin had already begun to change. Its smooth surface wrinkled and sagged. The carved grin began to droop like melting wax. The scent of rot seeped through the air, sweet and sour all at once, a reminder that the night was slipping away.

Then he heard it, a faint breathy whisper rising from the grinning mouth. “Feed me.”

He froze. It was the same voice that his father had described on his final night. The voice that haunted generations. Eli swallowed hard, his throat raw in the cold. “No,” he whispered. “You’ve had enough.”

“Feed me Crane. You feed me until your line ends. One soul before dawn.”

He clenched his fists, the wind biting at his face. “No…”

The candle flared and the voice grew sharper. “You cannot stop what was promised.” The words crawled through the air, sticky and cold.

Eli had heard his father speak about the whisper but hearing it himself was far worse. Too close. Too human. “No,” he said. “Not this year.”

The Jack’s flame flared, the grin twisting upward. Eli felt the pull of the curse urging him to find a sacrifice.

He could see how it played out for generations: the frightened victim, the offering made, the pumpkin’s light burning steadily until dawn. His father had done it, his grandfather, too. Trading stranger’s souls for another year of breath. The witch didn’t care who died, just that she got her soul.

Eli’s hands trembled as he looked into its hollow eyes. “No,” he said again, louder this time. “You’ll take me instead.”

The wind seemed to pause, the trees leaning in. The whisper stilled. Listening. Eli reached for the pumpkin, the heat biting into his palms. The candle’s glow flickered violently, protesting. He drew in a long, shaking breath then blew out the flame.

For an instant, there was silence, deep and suffocating. Then the Jack shuddered. The skin split from stem to base, oozing black goo that hissed as it hit the ground. The air thickened with the stench of burning earth. Eli gasped, his body locking as pain seared through him. The light burst loose from his chest. The candle flared back to life on its own. But the fire that burned was no longer yellow, it was red. Alive and screaming.

When the first morning light glistened on the dew of the glenn, the pumpkin was gone. Only a faint ring of ash remained. The mist rolled through the hollow, swallowing the traces of the night. By the time the sun climbed above the trees, the ring was barely visible.

A year passed. October came again, bringing its brittle leaves and sharp wind. On Halloween morning, Daniel Crane, Eli’s younger brother, found a pumpkin sitting on his front porch. Perfect. Round and heavy. Its grin freshly carved, the obsidian candle already burning with a steady golden flame. He didn’t remember putting it there. No one did. But as night fell across the hollow, the light in the Jack’s eyes flickered once as though it was breathing and the grin seemed to stretch wider.

Fiction © Copyright Kathleen McCluskey
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com 

More from Kathleen McCluskey:

The Long Fall: Book 1: The Inception of Horror

Lucifer always cunning and intelligent challenges father to a battle of wits. Being the angel of light he casts a judgemental eye upon mankind. He begins a war with his fellow archangels and God. Michael, along with his siblings defend their home and mankind from their deranged brother. Broad swords and hand to hand combat drench heaven in blood. The four apocalyptic steeds are released, each having their own destructive power. Betrayal and lust are at biblical levels. Understand the very creation of evil and the consequenses that transpire in the first of THE LONG FALL series.

Available on Amazon!