Long-Neck Jack

The following is taken from a series of journal entries taken in as evidence as part of a police investigation of multiple homicides. As of now, the perpetrator is still at large.   Monday, October 2nd, 2010

Life fucking sucks. It always has for me. Something about high school makes it seem that it was designed to feed into that narrative. You try to mind your business, and some asshole has to come and try to make your day miserable, slap your pencil case off your desk, spit in your face as you walk down the hall, or kick the shit out of you behind the cafeteria ‘cause you told the teacher you caught them smoking under the bleachers. But the second you fight back that’s when the teachers rear their heads, and somehow they walkaway with nothing and you get a week’s detention. Today was more of the same, I was in trigonometry drawing anime characters next to Sara, when Mitch, on purpose, knocked my shoulder, making me fall on my pen, and exploding it all over both mine and Sara’s work. I got up and tried to protest and he, turning around, said ‘Got something to say, freak?’ with a smirk on his face. Sara assured me it was alright, but that didn’t help anything. On my walk back home later, while I was crossing the bridge alone, Mitch emerged from out of a bush, wielding a baseball bat. He swung, and I raised my arms in defence, it didn’t help much. The blow hurt like hell and the force made me topple off the edge and crash into the riverbank underneath. I was badly winded from the landing and I’m pretty sure I broke a bone in my ass, but I was alive. I heard Mitch shout the word ‘pussy’ before he ran off. Just then as I turned my head on the ground as I writhed, I spotted it. Half-submerged in the river, glinting in the late afternoon light, I saw a faded grey chain necklace. I didn’t know what drew me to crawl toward it, but I did. Picking it up, I saw it had a pendant with a dog’s face on it? Or wolf? I couldn’t tell, it was pretty withered. Again, I don’t know what made me put it on, but almost as if my body was doing it itself, I placed it around my neck. In minutes my body felt almost completely healed from the attack. I got out of the bank and continued my walk home uninterrupted.  I had a new burst of energy out of nowhere, I almost sprinted home. I write this entry with a serious fervour. I don’t know what’s happened to me, but I think it’s got something to do with the necklace I found. I don’t think it’s a normal necklace. I’m deciding to keep it on.  

Tuesday, October 3rd

I’ve had a hell of a day. I woke up this morning and my hair had turned completely black, where it used to be dirty blonde. My parents were shocked when I came downstairs, but they hadn’t seen me yesterday as I went straight to my room after coming home and played RuneScape until I got my dinner after ten from the fridge, so I told them I spontaneously got it dyed after school. They were very weirded out but accepted my explanation. I was still very much confused. My friends, Lou and Edwin, were also weirded out by my hair change, but Sara said she liked it and that it suited me. So that was something. Mitch had a shocked look on his face when he saw me in the hall, I guess he’d wondered how I’d survived yesterday. I stared him down as he did so. He gave a dismissive sneer and walked away. Rage boiled to the surface inside of me after he left. This was normal for me, but something new came with it, a willingness to do something about it. I felt it itching on my chest. Before, I would submit myself and let the rage give over, not this time, I would not let him get away with what he did to me. I tracked him down after school, I knew he liked to stone ducks at the local lake on Tuesdays, so that’s where I went. I found him pelting a mallard in the face when he turned and spotted me. ‘Oh, back for seconds, are we?’ He called out as he threw his arms to the sides. I called back to him. ‘One of us is.’ Without hesitation, he threw a rock at my head, but I dodged it like a badass, and charged at him. He drew out the machete he’d been hiding in his jacket and made a swing. The second it made contact with my arm, only grazing it, a will overtook my own, a presence, an urge, a ‘feeling’ if you will. I stopped the return swing by catching his wrist and snapping it effortlessly, with a strength I didn’t know I had. Mitch cried out as he fell to his knees. While he was screaming I took the opportunity to spin-kick him in the face. I was gonna stop there, but my rage made me go on. I took the machete, and in one wide swing, I cleaved off his head and his body fell limply to the floor. Once I caught my breath, and gained control of my senses, the impact of what I just did hit me. I stood frozen for a moment, but I wasn’t disturbed or shocked. Instead I gathered my resolve, tossed his head and body into the water, and sprinted home. I again went straight to my room and skipped dinner. Not because I was too distraught with my actions to eat, I was too excited. I never knew I had that in me, I was glad that Mitchwas dead. He was a stain upon the world. I caught myself in my mirror, my necklace was more black now, and it was shining somehow, in its own nebulous way, almost like it took the light from what was around it. and I smirked. Looking back at me was the face of a new boy, a new man. A man that would do something about all the evil in the world.  

Tuesday, October 10th

Like last week, I woke up feeling more different. I looked in my mirror again, had I got slightly taller? Slimmer? I’d noticed a slight change bit by bit as the week went on, now it was really apparent. Moreover, maybe I slept funny, but I got up and saw that the front of my hair was swooped to the side, and had some straightened it in my sleep? Regardless, I thought it was a good look, so I thought nothing of it. At school, Sara said I looked good too, she just thought I’d been hitting the gym or something. My friends noticed a change in my demeanour as well. They said I appeared way more confidently, and walked the halls with the stride of a king. But new looks from my other classmates emerged along with those of admiration from my friends and Sara, looks of accusation. The strongest ones came from Mitch’s friends, Toby, Tommy, and Geoff, the great oafs of the football team.Everyone was wondering what happened to Mitch, and I was the prime suspect, this didn’t worry me, though. They made their looks but kept their distance. I like to think that something in their minds told them that they’d meet the same fate as Mitch if they tried to cross me. Friday, October 13th Today. Was. Amazing. I was waiting at the bus stop and Mitch’s friends emerged from behind it to meet me, fixing to ambush me. They were gonna either beat a confession out of me about what happened to Mitch, or just kill me. I said nothing, the urge overcame me again, burning my stomach and chest, the rageful urge to fight. To kill. I let them make the first stupid move. Geoff approached first, swinging a hockey stick at my head. It broke over my forearm and I grabbed his neck with my other hand, tripping him and slamming his head into the concrete ground. Toby was next. He tried to swing his lacrosse bat down onto my head, but almost on instinct, I caught it with both hands behind me. I swiped the bat from his hands and, with a low side swing, I shattered his left knee. The crackly snap it made and his cry of pain rang out like a symphony. I kept the momentum and brought the stick up, clocking him in the face, sending a spat of blood and a single tooth flying into the air in a graceful arch, and him onto the floor. I then dodged Tommy’s croquet mallet as he advanced, weaving under it and coming back up behind him. I grabbed both ends of the mallet and forced it back into his throat. He made a funny gurgle sound as it happened. I kicked him in the back of one knee, sending him to the floor before placing my own knee on the back of his head, raising the mallet’s shaft, thrusting my knee, and snapping it over his fat face. I turned over his now unconscious body, and shoved one of the mallet’s broken ends down his mouth, waking him back up, but only for an instant, before he struggled, gargled, fell limp, and died. I then approached Toby. I grabbed his head, as he tried to crawl away, and snapped his neck. I looked back to Geoff. He’d already bled out from his head, his chest made no movement. I had done it. I had killed all three. I had gotten rid of my tormentors forever. I laughed as I stood there on the pavement, and more as I ran away. But as the thrill and adrenaline faded, I wasn’t satisfied. The urge still remained in my chest, almost like the feeling of goosebumps. I had killed four wicked people, but I wanted more. I needed more. The necklace needed more.

                        (Final Entry)

Tuesday, October 31st

The last month has flown by. It feels like I’ve lived a different life, but I’ve never felt more like myself at the same time. I continued the urge’s wishes. A couple weeks ago, I caught Danny Montrose in an alleyway after school, smashing his face into the edge of a dumpster before stuffing his carcass into it. And last Wednesday, me and Timothy Schmidt were alone in detention together. I stabbed both his eyes out with pencils, and sliced his throat with a protractor, with enough force to slit it. I then smashed a window, and told everyone that a crazed killer had broken in, done the deed and made a quick getaway. The necklace has continued to change my appearance. I keep getting taller, now lankier, I now seem to be doing my eyeliner in my sleep. And the other was particularly strange, as I went to school the morning of, dressed in a plain hoodie and sweatpants, but after I used the men’s bathroom, I wastaken aback to look in the mirror and see that I was now dressed in skinny ripped jeans, a studded belt, multiplebracelets, and some kind of band shirt by the looks of it. I don’t know what ‘Alesana’ is or even if that was a word, but it looked pretty cool. My friends have abandoned me. They said I’d gained more confidence lately, but a new aura had also come to envelop me. A darker, sinister one. They said they’d notice it whenever I’d stare someone down, or talk to myself quietly. I don’t care. I don’t need friends. I have become stronger. Friendship only stymies strength. This day, though, was quite different, Sara was yet to stop talking to me, like my other friends. We’d spent more time together lately. She really appreciated the improvements made to my look and attitude, and this afternoon she told me her parents would be out, taking her little brother trick or treating, and asked me to come back to hers with her. I asked her why and she hesitated before saying ‘To study.’ Just then the urge rose in me again, harsher than ever. The killer’s urge. My chest itched furiously. This was odd. I’d only ever done it before to people who deserved it; Mitch, Geoff, Tommy. Even Danny and Timothy had their reasons, however small. I went through the motions and asked myself if this was what I really wanted. Strangely enough, no resistant feelings came to meet me, no guilt, no sinking feeling in my gut, no gnawing in the back of my skull. I relented, and I agreed to her proposal. After getting to hers, and entering her bedroom, she started sorting some clothes on her bed and I sat down on it, contemplating how I’d do it. Before I could come up with any concrete plan, almost immediately, the rising itching, burning sensation, the urge, coated my entire body, setting my nerves on fire, I let out a scream and in a flash I was in her bathroom, which was covered from floor to ceiling in blood. And so was I. Sara was nowhere to be seen. My clothes were torn in places but still clung to my body. I exited the room and noticed something. The urge, and itching sensation on my chest were completely gone. Something I hadn’t felt in weeks. Instead something new replaced it. Warmth, stillness, like I was laying on a pillow, but still standing up. A serenity passed over me and I cracked a smile. I looked in her bedroom mirror, I was coated in red from head to toe. Everything on me, except for the necklace. It still shone in its inky blackness, almost like it’d absorbed whatever blood was on it. I left before Sara’s family got back. I jumped out of her window, landed in her driveway’s hedge, and bolted down the street. My clothes were back to normal by the time I got back to my house, clean of blood. However, oddly, my head and arms were still coated in it, that was something I had to wash off myself. As I sit here, writing, I have come to realise, I had been killing all the wrong people before. They lacked something the urge truly needed, Innocence. It needed it, like a flavour, like a bland cut of meat needs salt. I think to myself, and I strangely don’t really have a problem with it. Now if you asked me a month ago to do the same, I am fully convinced I would have said ‘no’ and called the police on you for being crazy. But something’s changed. It’s all to do with the necklace, I know that now. A normal person would have probably removed it and thrown it away by now, but I don’t get the urge to. Oddly, enough when I think about doing that, my mind instantly switches to thinking about something else, against its own will. I like wearing it. I like what it has done for me. It has made my life better tenfold. I’m stronger, cooler, respected, and feared. And I’ll keep feeding it as long as it holds up its end of that bargain. The stains of the world still won’t be safe either, there is a satisfaction in itself I still gain from erasing them, I won’t be discriminate, I’m not a monster, but the needs of the necklace come first. My parents just called me up for dinner. After I responded, the itching feeling came back again. I guess I’ll go and have dinner then.   The following is a transcript of a call made to a 911 operator at 5.45 PM on October 31st.   ‘Hello, this is 911, what’s your emer-‘ ‘Please… how soon can you get here?’ ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry but I’m struggling to hear you. What’s your name, where’re you at?’ ‘I’m sorry, I have to stay quiet, or it’ll find me. I-I’m at 53 North Bank Street. My name’s Sara. Please, you need to get here, it’s looking for me. ‘Okay, Sara, can you tell me what’s going on?’ ‘I-I-I was hanging out with a boy and- I don’t know I can’t explain it. I turned my back and he just… stretched….’ ‘Sorry, he.. stret-?’ ‘Yes, stretched! His limbs, his torso, his arms got all long and gangly, and- and his face became long, like a-like a dog’s face. His eyes went completely white and, oh my god, his neck, his neck is so long. It looks like a snake with a man’s head.’ ‘Ma’am, this isn’t the time to be making Halloween prank calls. We have real emergencies-’ ‘No! Please don’t hang up. I’m being serious. I’m. Serious. I don’t know what I saw, I don’t know what else to do I-I’m sorry.’ ‘Um-I-Um, okay, and where’re you now, Sara?’ ‘I managed to run away. He chased me around the house, but I locked myself in the downstairs bathroom.’ ‘Okay, police are on their way now, Sara. Are you positive that’s what you saw?’ ‘Yes, I’m ‘positive’ I- he’s at the door…’ ‘….’ ‘AHH! AH HE’S BANGING!! HE’S BREAKING THE DOOR DOWN!’ ‘Sara! Is there a window you can escape through!?’ ‘NO!!! PLEASE!!!!’ (Audio cuts out) ‘Sara!? Sara can you respond!?’