Venue: The Secret World
Created by: Funcom
Event: Samhain (Halloween 2013)
Mission:The League of Monster Slayers presents: Spooky Stories of Solomon Island
Location: The League of Monster Slayers' Clubhouse near Innsmouth, Solomon Island, Maine
Chapter Seven: The Ghost of Jack o' Lantern
Chapter Eight:The Death of Mr. Armitage
Hey, Danny. Heard you were gathering weird stories. This town has some strange yarns, but every town's got a dark side. You know? Just turn over the right dead leaf... Anyway, this is one my Nanna (my grandmother) used to tell me. She's part Irish, and maybe it's from the old country. I don't know. It's about pumpkins. I never liked carving pumpkins. The clammy, fibery insides feel like cold guts. Never liked the pumpkin flavored stuff that comes around this time of year, the coffees and desserts. Maybe I had a bad experience. I don't know.
--Deputy Andy
"Some gourds got more reason to grin than others." That's what my Nanna would say. Why do pumpkins grin? Why do they glow? They're lanterns. "People should take more of a caution and a care when they light beacons in the dark," Nanna would say. "You never know what your guiding in."
A long time ago, far-far away -- you know how it goes -- there was a man called Stingy Jack. He was known far and wide as a deceiver, manipulator, and drinker. He was like the king of sinners, a total wicked dreg. One day, while walking down a cobblestone path, Stingy Jack found a grimacing corpse.
Jack bent down to go through the corpse's pockets, when the grimacing face looked up...and it was the devil.
The Devil jumped up to claim his due. Jack knew his life was over, and he was going to Hell. He asked for a final drink. The fiend saw no reason to deny his last request, and the two of them went to a pub. Jack drank his fill. When it came time to pay up, Jack whispered to the Devil, "Wouldn't it be funny if you turned into a coin and I used you to pay?" The Devil agreed and transformed into a coin. Well, Stingy Jack pocketed that coin, in the same pocket he kept a crucifix, and the Devil couldn't change shapes again on account of being in contact with the crucifix.
Stingy Jack forced the Devil to promise to wait ten years before taking his soul. The Devil agreed, and Jack released him. Ten years of sinning went by. The Devil returned. "No drinks for you, Jack!" he said. Jack nodded, accepting his fate. He asked if he might have one last apple to fill his stomach. The Devil agreed and climbed a tree to get an apple. Jack quickly placed crucifixes around the tree, trapping the Devil, forcing the Prince of Darkness to promise to never take his soul.
More years of sinning went by. Stingy Jack, pickled on debauchery, finally died.
He went to Heaven, but they wouldn't let him in on account of all that sinning. He went to Hell, but they wouldn't take him in on account of the Devil's promise. As a warning to others, the Devil gave Jack an ember that glowed with the ghost-fire, marking Jack as a denizen of the netherworlds. To this day, Stingy Jack is doomed to walk between worlds, between good and evil, with only that ember inside of a grinning pumpkin to light his way.
"That was in the long-long ago," Nanna would say, a wet knife in one hand, a dripping wad of orange guts in the other. "This next bit happened when I was just a girl." She wasn't Nanna then, of course. She was just Kate.
One October, a shady figure came to Kingsmouth, selling pumpkins on the outskirts of town. Parents warned their children not to approach this man. But you know kids. It was that year's double dog dare. Kate and a bunch of her friends went to the rickety stand and each bought a pumpkin. The shady man didn't want cash, just asked for a little blood. Just a tiny cut.
"You get what you give," he said.
Kate and everyone else were so intimidated that they paid, all except one boy. Roger. He took his pumpkin and gave nothing in return.
The shady man only nodded, saying, "You get what you give," over and over again.
Halloween night, all these friends decided to bring their newly carved Jack-o-Lanterns out to the forest and have a little party, with liquor Roger stole from his parents. Kate didn't go. The shady man and the purchase and the price had unnerved her. She threw away her pumpkin and stayed home that night.
Come morning, none of those children came back. Parents and police went out to search. They found the kids out in the woods, still in costume, traumatized with streaks of white in their hair.
No one could say exactly what happened. They found every child except one. Roger. They only found the white sheets of his ghost costume, with letters burnt into the cotton spelling: YOU GET WHAT YOU GIVE.
Everyone decided this shady pumpkin seller needed to be arrested. But, try as they might, they all discovered that they could not remember what he looked like. He was only a shadow. They never found him. And they never found Roger.
"Shouldn't bring that many lanterns together in one place," Nanny would say. "You light enough of them, and Stingy Jack will find his way to this side of the divide. Like a lighthouse signaling in a plague ship."
So is there something to this story, or is it all bull? Was it something to scare a boy who doesn't like pumpkins? I don't know. But my Mom told me another story. She said that one Halloween, when I was very young, I was lost.
When she found me, I had a cut on the palm of my hand, my Frankenstein's monster mask sealed to my face with tears and snot, and no one could account for the pumpkin I carried with me. I don't know. I don't remember that.
Created by: Funcom
Event: Samhain (Halloween 2013)
Mission:The League of Monster Slayers presents: Spooky Stories of Solomon Island
Location: The League of Monster Slayers' Clubhouse near Innsmouth, Solomon Island, Maine
Chapter Seven: The Ghost of Jack o' Lantern
Chapter Eight:The Death of Mr. Armitage
Chapter Seven – The Ghost of Jack O’ Lantern (By Deputy Andy)
Hey, Danny. Heard you were gathering weird stories. This town has some strange yarns, but every town's got a dark side. You know? Just turn over the right dead leaf... Anyway, this is one my Nanna (my grandmother) used to tell me. She's part Irish, and maybe it's from the old country. I don't know. It's about pumpkins. I never liked carving pumpkins. The clammy, fibery insides feel like cold guts. Never liked the pumpkin flavored stuff that comes around this time of year, the coffees and desserts. Maybe I had a bad experience. I don't know.
--Deputy Andy
"Some gourds got more reason to grin than others." That's what my Nanna would say. Why do pumpkins grin? Why do they glow? They're lanterns. "People should take more of a caution and a care when they light beacons in the dark," Nanna would say. "You never know what your guiding in."
A long time ago, far-far away -- you know how it goes -- there was a man called Stingy Jack. He was known far and wide as a deceiver, manipulator, and drinker. He was like the king of sinners, a total wicked dreg. One day, while walking down a cobblestone path, Stingy Jack found a grimacing corpse.
Jack bent down to go through the corpse's pockets, when the grimacing face looked up...and it was the devil.
The Devil jumped up to claim his due. Jack knew his life was over, and he was going to Hell. He asked for a final drink. The fiend saw no reason to deny his last request, and the two of them went to a pub. Jack drank his fill. When it came time to pay up, Jack whispered to the Devil, "Wouldn't it be funny if you turned into a coin and I used you to pay?" The Devil agreed and transformed into a coin. Well, Stingy Jack pocketed that coin, in the same pocket he kept a crucifix, and the Devil couldn't change shapes again on account of being in contact with the crucifix.
Stingy Jack forced the Devil to promise to wait ten years before taking his soul. The Devil agreed, and Jack released him. Ten years of sinning went by. The Devil returned. "No drinks for you, Jack!" he said. Jack nodded, accepting his fate. He asked if he might have one last apple to fill his stomach. The Devil agreed and climbed a tree to get an apple. Jack quickly placed crucifixes around the tree, trapping the Devil, forcing the Prince of Darkness to promise to never take his soul.
More years of sinning went by. Stingy Jack, pickled on debauchery, finally died.
He went to Heaven, but they wouldn't let him in on account of all that sinning. He went to Hell, but they wouldn't take him in on account of the Devil's promise. As a warning to others, the Devil gave Jack an ember that glowed with the ghost-fire, marking Jack as a denizen of the netherworlds. To this day, Stingy Jack is doomed to walk between worlds, between good and evil, with only that ember inside of a grinning pumpkin to light his way.
"That was in the long-long ago," Nanna would say, a wet knife in one hand, a dripping wad of orange guts in the other. "This next bit happened when I was just a girl." She wasn't Nanna then, of course. She was just Kate.
One October, a shady figure came to Kingsmouth, selling pumpkins on the outskirts of town. Parents warned their children not to approach this man. But you know kids. It was that year's double dog dare. Kate and a bunch of her friends went to the rickety stand and each bought a pumpkin. The shady man didn't want cash, just asked for a little blood. Just a tiny cut.
"You get what you give," he said.
Kate and everyone else were so intimidated that they paid, all except one boy. Roger. He took his pumpkin and gave nothing in return.
The shady man only nodded, saying, "You get what you give," over and over again.
Halloween night, all these friends decided to bring their newly carved Jack-o-Lanterns out to the forest and have a little party, with liquor Roger stole from his parents. Kate didn't go. The shady man and the purchase and the price had unnerved her. She threw away her pumpkin and stayed home that night.
Come morning, none of those children came back. Parents and police went out to search. They found the kids out in the woods, still in costume, traumatized with streaks of white in their hair.
No one could say exactly what happened. They found every child except one. Roger. They only found the white sheets of his ghost costume, with letters burnt into the cotton spelling: YOU GET WHAT YOU GIVE.
Everyone decided this shady pumpkin seller needed to be arrested. But, try as they might, they all discovered that they could not remember what he looked like. He was only a shadow. They never found him. And they never found Roger.
"Shouldn't bring that many lanterns together in one place," Nanny would say. "You light enough of them, and Stingy Jack will find his way to this side of the divide. Like a lighthouse signaling in a plague ship."
So is there something to this story, or is it all bull? Was it something to scare a boy who doesn't like pumpkins? I don't know. But my Mom told me another story. She said that one Halloween, when I was very young, I was lost.
When she found me, I had a cut on the palm of my hand, my Frankenstein's monster mask sealed to my face with tears and snot, and no one could account for the pumpkin I carried with me. I don't know. I don't remember that.
Chapter Eight – The Death of Mr. Armitage (By Danny Drfesne)
So, yeah. Not exactly an urban legend. But it kind of is.
Sam Krieg, the great and powerful, published this in 1994. Supposedly, he wrote it over a decade before that, before he was anybody. And the real weird thing, he published it in a tiny ‘zine called DREADFUL PENNIES. Why hide it in a nobody rag when he was famous? Why didn’t he ever reprint it in a collection?
Among horror buffs, the story goes that Sam went from store to store, destroying copies of DREADFUL PENNIES. I first heard about it on that Sam Krieg blog and read it at a certain super fan’s house. Never found a spare copy. It’s like finding an existing reel of London After Midnight.
Something about this story… Reading it feels… off. Like the start of the night terrors I used to get. All my neck hairs do the Thriller. I don’t know. YMMV. Read on.
--Danny Dufresne
In the beginning, the family wasn't sure that they wanted to settle on Solomon Island. From the start, you should know that I am not an accomplished writer. But I am a writer, and we are, all of us, liars.
None of this has happened. All of this is true. I promise.
I despise the trope of the unreliable narrator, so you can imagine my self-loathing, tonight, as I bleed black upon the blank page. I was full of self-loathing that night too. I was a writer, barely at the start of my career, and I’d run out of stories.
Desperate. Very desperate.
Never mind whether I found him, or he found me. Never mind the ritualistic particulars - whether I waited at a cross roads under a harvest moon or drew a chalk circle or invoked his name nine times before a dark mirror - whether I sacrificed a cat, swallowed a leech ballooning on virgin blood, or answered an odd ad in the Personals. Pick your cliche and suckle on it.
We met.
“So your pen has run dry, eh Jack?” the doctor asked. I wrote under the name Jack Fatuus.
I nodded. We both sipped strong coffee the colour of bog bodies. He wore lambskin gloves. It was a cafe, the same one these things always happen in.
“Am I to believe you’re the doctor?” I asked. "You’re the one traipsing about Dunwich, doing battle with horrors?“
"Yes,” he said, “or rather… that was a story written about me. You see, I once met a boy who was made entirely of fear. He was afraid in the night and afraid in the day. He was afraid of the world outside, but terrified he would never get to see it. He was afraid of foreigners, but fascinated by them. He was afraid of his psychotic father. Afraid of disappointing his mother. He spent a lifetime of people watching from the windows of his skull, which he kept shuttered fast. This prodigy child of Providence loved stories, but was afraid he would never trap them on the page, never to be read. So I made a deal with this anxious son of fear.”
“A deal?”
“He would be forever full of stories, the cup never empty. And the people would read his stories. On one condition: he had to write a story about me.”
“Why?” I sipped my coffee. My head throbbed.
He spoke in a rushing whisper. Tectonic plates in my brainpan shifted. He told me he was indeed a doctor of the occult. Long ago, he stumbled upon hideous combinations of dissociated knowledge. His hands dipped into the murmuring ink, and he did not clean them off. It stained like blackworm jism. It erased his name from the book of life, and rewrote it along countless dimensions. The sentient ink. The virulent ink. Story as contagion. Language as pathogen. He existed as a legion of fractals dancing on impossible curves.
“I’m dying somewhere, always dying.” he said. "I’m dying right now. But I can buy more life if someone inks me onto the page. That frightened child of Providence did. So I showed him an echo of the truth, opened up such terrifying vistas of story. I am offering the same deal to you, Jack.“
My hand shook, rattling the coffee cup on the saucer.
"It’s important I survive, Jack. I am burdened with terrible knowing. That knowledge must get to certain people. Stories ever-flowing, Jack, a whispering tide, yes or no?”
“Yes,” I said without meaning to speak.
Off came his lambskin gloves. Each fingernail was a platinum fountain pen nib bleeding black ink. All I could see was the gleam of those claws and the grin. He grabbed my forearm, and the needle points pierced my flesh. Viscous ink. With the index finger of his free hand, he wrote my name, my true name, on the napkin sitting in front of me. Something gaped open in my head, a nocturnal flower aching for the pollinator bat.
The doctor rose, tipped his hat, and left the cafe just like that. Outside, a soft drink truck promptly smashed into him as he crossed the street. There were screams, of course. There was crimson and ebony, like black cherries smashed on summer pavement. I fled.
The stories were there, wriggling like worms. All I had to do was pen a tale about Dr. A first. But I hesitated. The doctor was not, by profession, a writer. But he could still be a liar. Maybe such a creature shouldn’t be allowed to continue. Maybe his knowledge is dangerous. Maybe he doesn’t mean any of us any good.
I was afraid, so I waited. I’ve waited like a good boy. My career has gone nowhere. I’ve watched all of my peers surpass me in every possible way. Now I can’t wait anymore. I still have that napkin. Maybe… maybe if I lock this story in a desk drawer, if I wait years before publishing it, it won’t happen. I suspect that frightened child of Providence did the same thing. But it’s a pretty lie. I know that right this second, as I type, the doctor is birthing from a gory puddle of ink, fully formed - hat and grin and gleaming nails.
If you’re a writer, he might contact you someday. It might be a rumor or a cryptic phrase written on a bathroom stall wall or a raggedy flyer that blows into your leg as if by it’s own agency. If you’re a writer, you know. We are, all of us, liars. If you’re not a writer, then beware. We hide behind pseudonyms and ciphers. Even as you confide in us, we steal pieces of your life to feed the entities we sustain on the page.
None of this happened. All of this is true. I promise.
I am Jack Fatuus. I am not Jack Fatuus. I am not an accomplished writer. But I will be. God have mercy on my soul. I will be.
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