The Sorrow King (13 page)

The Jackthief

Oletta Goom awoke on the morning of October 1
^st
, going into the baby’s room and knowing exactly what she would find.

Emptiness.

The crib stood in the middle of the room, white cotton blankets piled up against one side. Outside, the wind, turned cold with the season, spat at the house and invaded the open window. Oletta grabbed the worn wooden rail of the crib with a bony hand and cried, her tears running down her wrinkled face and falling onto the cotton sheet that still smelled faintly of Jacquelyn. “Jack,” Oletta had called her. But now Jack was gone.

Just like all of the girls that had come before her. And it was always on this day, the first birthday, that the Jackthief came and took them away. Now she would have to wait another year before going into the haunted woods to claim her prize.

Unless she could find out where the Jackthief took the babies. Unless she could get this one back.

Oletta had been several years younger when she retreated to her house in the woods. Perhaps it was more of a shack, but it served the purposes of shelter and warmth. Shelter and warmth. Maybe it wasn’t all she wanted, but it was all she needed, along with a little food every now and then.

What Oletta wanted more than anything was a baby. She was not a young woman anymore, twenty years past childbearing age, but that desire had never left her. It was only upon the death of her husband she had realized it was an impossibility. Before, she had always prayed for a miracle. Maybe, she had thought, God would fix whatever was broken inside her and she would finally get pregnant. But it never happened. She refused to succumb to the determinist attitude that said, “It just wasn’t meant to be.”

So her husband had died and she had moved to the woods. If she was going to be alone, she thought, she was going to do it right.

That was what she had expected to find in the woods—loneliness, solitude, the chance to confront a past that had fallen so far from her little girl dreams.

But moving to the woods proved to be the source of more joy and sorrow than she would ever know.

It was there she met the Jackthief. There, during the strangest of circumstances.

Summer drew to an end and autumn crept in and Oletta didn’t see how she was going to spend a winter alone in the tiny shack. She figured her best days were well behind her and there weren’t going to be any good ones ahead. She had experienced all the self-exploration she could and, finding only emptiness, decided to end her life of longing. She found a length of strong rope in the old woodshed. She was going to take the rope out into the woods, find a good sturdy branch, and hang herself. She didn’t plan on learning how to do it proper. If she had to dangle for a while, choking on her own windpipe, then that would be penance for the awesome sin she was about to commit.

After a brief survey, she found a capable branch. The rope was slung around her neck to give her frail arms the strength to carry an old wooden ladder. The day was monochromatic. The clouds were bloated black-gray, threatening rain. Maybe, if it rained, it would help weigh down her body.

It took about a half hour to make sure everything was in place. She figured the knot was strong enough to hold. Climbing to the top of the ladder, the fiber of the rope scratchy around her neck, the sky rumbled a hungry growl and she hoped it would drown out the sound of her strangling to death.

Standing at the top of the ladder, she wondered if she was doing the right thing. But this wasn’t a spontaneous decision. It was something she had thought about for a very long time. This was the only way out. The lonely days had become unendurable and she was too proud to be stuck in this constant state of self-pity.

The sky screamed.

Oletta took a deep breath and kicked the ladder away.

She dropped. The rope tightened around her neck.

And then broke.

She fell to the ground. Lightning streaked across the sky, fat cold drops of rain hammered down, and her life changed forever.

On the other side of the huge sycamore tree she had tried to use to kill herself, she heard a baby crying. Oletta unfastened the rope from around her neck, not believing what it was she thought she heard. Nursing a twisted ankle, she trudged through the dead leaves, turned soggy, until she found the source of the crying.

When she saw the baby, swaddled in black cloth, at the base of the tree, her face split and her tears mingled with the beating rain. Stooping down, she picked up the baby and took it back to the house, wanting to get it out of the rain, wanting to get it into the warmth.

Sometimes, Oletta knew, when a person wants something so much, it is not necessary to question the source. It is not necessary to question the truth or validity behind that desire. A Christian wants a God to save her and an afterlife to house her soul when she dies. The Christian does not question these things, she believes them and calls that belief faith. So Oletta believed in her new baby.

She took it home with her. First she named her Jacquelyn and called her Jack. She loved Jack. She fed her and sang to her and talked to her and cared for her and took her everywhere she went. She even took her into the town to buy food and clothes, not caring if the folk talked and wondered. They would, Oletta knew, come up with their own reasons why she now had a baby and those reasons could not come remotely close to the fantastic truth.

For exactly one year, Oletta was the mother of a beautiful baby.

On Jack’s first birthday, a full year since Oletta had found her, Oletta opened the door to her room and discovered the baby gone, the bedroom window open, a cold wind blowing in. For an entire year after this discovery, she searched for baby Jack. Searched and mourned because she knew the baby was gone. She began to wonder if Jack had ever been there in the first place.

That was the worst year of Oletta’s life, having had something and then lost it. Each day was worse than the one before. Her life had become a spiraling black nightmare as she wondered about who would steal the only thing she had ever wanted. She never found the Jackthief but she had a picture of him in her mind.

The Jackthief was carved from wood and bone. He traveled by moonlight and drank the sorrow of others. He was drawn to this sorrow, drinking it in and, drunk from it, had to create more. Oletta knew the Jackthief had always been there. He was the one who had snapped the rope when the only thing she wanted to do was snap her neck. He did it because she had not suffered enough. She was a well of suffering and the Jackthief had not drunk the last of that well. So he had let her love the baby for a year. And just as quickly, he had taken it away, once again cloaking her in sorrow. Now he surrounded her in the woods, watching her, mocking her silently as she searched and searched.

No, she never saw him but she knew he was there. Exactly a year since losing Jack, she found the baby in the same place she had found her two years earlier. The baby was the same size as that first time and Oletta had a distinct feeling of falling back two years in time. But, once again, the sorrow had lifted. She had her baby. Maybe the circumstances were not normal. Maybe they weren’t even believable, but it was nice to hold Jack in her arms once again and feel a year of sadness melt away.

Over the next two years, the cycle repeated itself.

After losing Jack again, Oletta did not search for her.

She sat in her house and waited, her mind expanding out into that depressed ocean, knowing that her time would come again. Yet, knowing that did not make it easier. The only thing she could think of was the year after, when she would have to go without the baby again. And, after all, wasn’t the point of having a baby to watch it grow? To shape it and give it a good life? To see what kind of adult it became?

That year, Oletta decided she was not going to go without Jack again.

On October 1
^st
, when she found Jack under the tree, Oletta said to her, “I’m never letting you go. If he takes you again, I will find you.” And she took the baby back home and they had another good year but now the time had come again and Oletta stood in an empty room, surrounded by nightmares.

That morning, she left the house in search of the Jackthief, knowing he was out there, somewhere. She was not going to go back home until she found the baby. For days, she wandered deeper into the woods, the noose of cold and hunger wrapping around her neck.

Madness rats nibbled at her brain. She followed the Jackthief. She followed his scent. He smelled like wax and fallen leaves. He smelled like memories. Some nights, she thought she heard the baby crying. Some nights, she thought she heard the Jackthief laughing, laughing as he told the most sinister bedtime stories to the baby.

She became hungry and confused, knowing she was too far from her house to ever get back. The sorrow was black and swollen in her mind. She let it grow, knowing the greater the sorrow, the more likely she was to see the Jackthief. And then she could take her baby back.

On the night of her death, before the Jackthief came and took the sorrow away for good, Oletta couldn’t open her eyes. She couldn’t see the Jackthief. But she thought she could open her eyes far enough to see the little black bundle that he held in his arms. She pawed at the blankets, wanting to touch Jack’s soft baby skin one last time but the thing inside the blankets was not Jack.

It was carved from wood and bone.

It smelled like burning wax and dead leaves.

And when it opened its mouth, it didn’t want milk, it wanted to drink sorrow and a whole life filled with longing. And when it satiated itself on those things, it laughed, and moved on to the next person in the next town, fat on sadness.