Chapter 11: Pickle-Me-Jack

11

The forest was dying.

It was being slowly sapped of its essential energies. The magic that animated its consciousness was being leeched away, drained like a tapped tree.

All over the Incata it was the same. The living avatars of this world's most essential natural elements were under attack, some had even succumb, dying off and forever severing the sub-dimensional connections that they maintained with the Earth. Roots that had grown deep down into and through the thin barriers between worlds, serving as transoms and anchors since before recorded time, had been lost forever.

Deep in the heart of many of the Incata's elementals, growing like cancers, the Anansia Shitani, Spider Demons known to swap out and share human forms, slowly spin, killing and replacing these nodal points from the inside with a massive weaving, a binding spell that they hoped would tie the two planes of existence permanently in place. If these demons were successful, the natural orbital ellipse of the Earth and the Incata would be forever disrupted. Or so it was believed.

Pickle-Me-Jack, an old and malevolent creature, had been hidden away here in the heart of the Great Forest for some time. He had cast his thin, corrupting threads all throughout and slowly sucked away at its life energies, perverting, corrupting, until a dark tangle of foul webbing had formed. A sickening tumorous knot that swallowed up whole stands of trees, cut off the sunlight and created a cold, dark void that seemed to absorb the sounds of the world around them as Jack shuffled towards it, his little cart trundling along behind him.

He laughed and sang and bobbed happily along, pleased with himself. He'd gathered two unique and tasty morsels. Had felt them tap-tap-tapping along his invisible webs. He'd woven a calming about them before they knew what was happening and watched with delight as they gladly sought him out, winding themselves up tight.

The boy, weaved up tight, trapped within his mind, his delight glowing like a pyre, still danced and darted through the field of flowers with his mother, just as happy as a bug. He couldn't see the threads.

The woman though, she had resisted from the start. She had somehow sensed his weaving as she walked through the woods. It had taken more effort to draw her in, to find a story that would keep her, but he had, and now she is holding her son, spinning round and round with laughter in the field of flowers they'd just passed through.

But she still distractedly brushed at her face.

Pickle-Me-Jack had planned on doing the boy first. His young stories were undeveloped, unripened. He will be a sweet bite to eat, but there wouldn't be much there to tell. He'd wrap up the meal much too soon.

Oh, but the boy's mother! Jack would draw small sips from her and bottle the best for later.

Ducking into a ragged hole amongst the web sheet-ed trees, they enter into a cave-like dwelling, a hermit's hovel lit by a dim blaze in a makeshift hearth. The main room gives way to several passageways that vanish into eerie darkness.

Taking his prey from the cart, he means to tuck them away amongst the many piles of bones and bodies. The desiccated dead and dying, some fully intact skeletons, the scattering of long dead voles and birds and a few bears and boars and unicorns, and dozens of wooden boxes, filled with corked bottles, crowded the room, forcing Jack to carefully pick his way through the mess.

He grows irritated to see that Monie had burned away at several layers of his bindings. He'd have to get started on her right away.

Pickle-Me-Jack fed on psychic energies. He devoured the stories and tales of his victims, savoring the spicy emotions sprinkled throughout their histories and memories. Which were most often two different things.

Warming his fires, he set about preparing his meal. Snatching Monie up, he scrabbles up the side of the hovel and spins her in place, leaving her dangling upside down from the ceiling. Dropping down to the floor, he peels back the intangible threads from around her face and weaves his way inside, filling up her mouth and nose and eyes and ears. Her life story springs open to him, a tidal wave of events, a world-line spun back through to her beginnings.

Monie begins to thrash about, rejecting the foul intrusion.

He weaves faster, filling her mind with his sickly threads until he overwhelms her resistance, overpowering her defenses like a virus. He finally breaks through and threads in place the cherished recent memory of her surrounded by a field of flowers, chasing after her son. This is a good story. A tasty little morsel. It would keep her wrapped tight in his weaving.

He wanted more. He needed more.

He could sense the depths within her. The histories. There were great crescendos of emotion buried down inside her.

Pickle-Me-Jack shudders with sensuous delight as he begins to draw forth from these memories. He slowly, patiently works at the twisted, tangled layers of her world-line, the unalterable chronicle of her life, smoothing out the uncertainties and straightening out the confusion.

He was a meticulous chef. Discerning. He prepped his meals with care.

This one was something special. As he began to get a clearer understanding of the torrent of memories and emotions that rushed forth when he'd tapped into her mind, he could not believe his good fortune. Her life's essence blazed a path back through several of her generational lines. He could see into histories that she could not possibly know that she possessed.

Pickle-Me-Jack could grow fat from the sustenance this one had to offer.

His eyes rolled back and his tongue lolled drunkenly as he probed deeper, searched further along her genetic line for more. He unlocked the natural barriers that he encountered, hungry, desperate to reach the end of her.

He would fill his disheveled home with draught after draught of her distilled memories and histories. He would satiate himself with her story.