Alright… I imagine you’re familiar with the variations on the Jack ‘o Lantern folktale? The eponymous Jack, generally through trickery, finds himself barred from both heaven and hell and is forced to wander for eternity with his lantern.

There’s a local variation here, apparently unique to Solomon Island.

Our resident Jack the Lad never did anything as impressive as deceiving the devil though. All he did was have the misfortune to take a job for the wrong farmer and fall in love with the farmer’s only living daughter. As it so happened, the farmer was a talented magus who’d decided to pursue a simpler life with his family - most of whom he’d lost by the time Jack entered the picture.

He caught them together one night, Jack and the daughter, on the night they had planned to run away from the island entirely. Jack was struck dead on the spot and cursed to linger, the daughter ran into her own misfortune while fleeing. The farmer took his own life after.

I’ve met Jack. A few times actually. I imagine he’s too ingrained in the island’s history to ever be fully destroyed now. But the first time we met was the most interesting.

I didn’t actually know the cases I was looking into had anything to do with him at first. The whole thing started with me having an idle conversation with one of the residents about the weather, of all things. A storm was coming. The pressure was building but never breaking. A swarm of ravens accumulating in the trees, waiting for something to happen.

It reminded her of a severe drought several years ago. And the string of murders that happened alongside.

There were three known victims and several more missing, all young women and girls, with the three found butchered. The town demanded justice, and the sheriff’s department complied. They put out the name and face of a transient farmhand and had him arrested. He submitted a confession with noted inaccuracies and killed himself in the days following.

And that was the end of it for a time. The case had happened so long ago, there wasn’t much in the way of new leads I could follow. I was stretching just to justify looking into it in the first place. It probably didn’t have anything to do with what was happening on the island at that time. It was just an interesting case that had never really been solved.

Then I died for the first time.

It was a stupid accident, not even related to the case. A creature I’d never come across before caught me by surprise and pinned me in the strait separating the main island from one of the smaller ones until I drowned.

I woke up at the sheriff’s office alone and throwing up seawater, but fine.

It took me a long time to work up the nerve to look around like that. I was pretty sure I was dead, and there wasn’t a single living thing around when the sheriff's office had been full of people holding their ground there just hours before. It was completely empty and quiet, and I didn’t know how to get out.

Eventually I found Mr. Checkon, the farmhand who’d taken the fall for the murders. There wasn’t much left of him; barely a psychic imprint left after 15 years. But he’d managed to leave behind a clue. Something he’d seen, either before he died or shortly after. Something to do with the ravens flocking outside.

And as it so happened, one was was waiting for me when I left the station. A single white raven that never flew out of sight and cawed at me until I followed it.

There’s a forest on the island called the Wispwood, for the ignis fatuus often seen there, and at its heart is a large crooked tree surrounded by wild growing pumpkins. My raven led me there, to its flock and to Jack.

He looked human at first. I don’t think he expected to see me like that either, but he offered to help. But before he could make it more than a few steps, the ravens descended on him.

I don’t know what exactly they did or how they managed it, but both of us were dragged back into the living world. I was fine, and Jack? He was forced into the open in the form the old farmer inflicted on him: a twisted humanoid mass of vines and rotted pumpkins.

He didn’t stay long that first time; I think the ravens tore into him hard enough with whatever they did that he didn’t have the energy for it. But we ran into each other a few more times that year. He mostly avoids me now, but I still sometimes see misshapen pumpkins that will appear and disappear in the fields. The will o’ wisps get more restless when he’s around too. And the ravens.

I don’t see the white ones around anymore though, even if I go to the other side. I guess I’ve always assumed that they were manifestations of all the people he’d killed over the years, and now that somebody knows about him and them, and is able to keep him in check, maybe they’ve been able to move on. But they aren’t around for me to say for sure, and there are so many people who have gone missing on the island for one reason or another that it’s hard to say how many can actually be attributed to him. All we have is that he tended to hunt more often during seasons when the pumpkin crops weren’t doing well, or shouldn’t have been doing well but thrived for unknown - but very guessable - reasons.