Fat Jack - 1954

Jack Campbell was well known around town back then. Folks called him Fat Jack, on account of how skinny he was. One of those ironic nicknames, you know? Nothing but flesh and bone was old Jack. A mean, iron-hard strip of a man with an attitude to match. He was a man of strict habits and wilful restraint, and everybody in Millpond knew it.

Every morning, Fat Jack was up at five for a breakfast of dry toast and black coffee, then to work at the old Oakland Manor House. He’d been groundskeeper there for longer than anyone could recall. He worked hard, toiling in the weeds and the dead flowers until lunch - a single green apple - then back to work until six. On the drive home, Fat Jack would stop in at the Pumpkin Pie Diner for a hamburger - rare, no onions, no mustard, no cheese. Every day the same, regular as the tides. Folks often said you could set your watch by Fat Jack, and they weren’t lying.

That is, until the last Tuesday of summer, 1954. That Tuesday, something changed in Jack.

That morning, he got up at five, as usual, worked all day, as usual, and stopped in at the Pumpkin Pie, as usual. But, after finishing off his hamburger, Jack realised he was still hungry. Ravenous, in fact. Jack ordered another, and another after that and then, in his shame, dropped his money on the counter and ran out the door.

The next day, for the first time in anyone’s memory, Fat Jack arrived at the Pumpkin Pie an hour early. Folks who were there at the time swore you could hear his stomach growl from clear across the room. When he sat at the counter, he ordered five hamburgers right off the bat, and proceeded to devour them all in a matter of minutes. Then he paid and left without a word to anyone.

Every day after that, Jack arrived at the Pumpkin Pie earlier and earlier, and ate more and more hamburgers. After a while, he started tossing the buns to one side, and it didn’t take long for the line cook to get the hint. Soon, Jack was demolishing whole platters of oily, bloody meat. His skinny frame filled out quick. All that hamburger had to go somewhere, right? He got rounder and rounder, heavier and heavier. His skin grew sallow and greasy, spattered with angry red pimples, his hair grew thin, his eyes grew cloudy and grey. Fat Jack finally started to live up to the nickname.

And still he ate.

“Never seen anyone eat so much,” one fellow diner was overheard to be saying. “And always hamburger. That’s some dedication.”

“More like obsession,” said another. “Almost puts me in mind of a caterpillar. You know they only ever eat one type of leaf? The one they’re born on. But they gorge themselves on it, eating and eating until they’re nice and fat and then…”

And then.

One cool day in the fall, Fat Jack crashed through the doors of the Pumpkin Pie for the last time. He shuffled to the counter, but rather than hauling his bulk onto his usual stool, he wordlessly pushed aside the waitress and squeezed into the kitchen. The line cook watched, confused and horrified, as Fat Jack opened the fridge and started scooping handfuls of raw hamburger into his wide-open mouth. He barely chewed, just swallowed gob after gob of bloody, red meat, the heavy flesh of his arms wobbling with every jerking movement. It took three men to drag him away and out the door. And that was the last anyone saw of him.

After a few days the Millpond PD raised a search party, but by then it was Halloween Night, and you know what Halloween Night in Millpond is like. Only three men could be spared, which, considering what happened next, could be considered a mercy. The party found Fat Jack’s truck quick enough, abandoned by the old railway line near Welden Woods, and reasoning that a man of Jack’s size couldn’t have gotten far on foot, set off down the tracks until they came to an abandoned toolshed just past the treeline. The smell hit them first, a stench like raw, rotting meat. Then the sound. A soft, rhythmic pounding, like the pumping of a gigantic heart. With trembling hands, the party opened the door on rusted hinges and in the darkness of the shed, the meagre beams of their flashlights slid over something black and slick and squirming. Something big. A cocoon, hung from the walls and ceiling on ropes of glistening silk. And, as they watched, horrified, the cocoon began to split…

Days later, a second search party - sent out to find the first - came upon the old toolshed by the tracks in Welden Woods. Inside, they found two bodies, both wizened like mummies, completely drained of their vital fluids. Two bodies they found, and one survivor. He was half-starved, the poor lad, and delirious, could only sob uncontrollably when asked what had happened to the other men. He never told a soul what occurred that night, not even on his death bed. Never told what had crawled out of that hideous cocoon. But in the early days, in his feverish, gibbering madness, he spoke of Fat Jack Campbell, and screams, and the beating of great and terrible wings in the night.

And the stink of raw hamburger.