Jack Kennel was emotionally mutilated, he read in the morning press, a new time bomb on the brink of another catastrophic ignition. His vigilant eyes poised upon the only florescence shining like a solitary star of what neighborhood had glamorized this two-story, alluring house. His invading binoculars ineptly glanced through a small fold in the living room curtains where, for a few sexually charged seconds, he caught the crisp nipples of a young girl somersaulting through the house with her half dressed boyfriend.

   Jack was sitting in the darkness, in the middle of the residential road. East Paris Drive was his newest addiction.

   The constant rain draped over the newly painted Mustang. Red, shiny…his tin cage held anyone he needed, he thought, as the windshield wipers scattered the water from obscuring his needing, engrossing view of her sucking on a Camel cigarette, as he was doing the same, but nervously.

   The house was elegant. Obviously, Jill showed signs she was well established with comfortable and financial stability. A picket fence, painted white (the color of the house itself) decorated around its front porch as a brick styled layout surrounded the garage. A well-sized balcony wrapped over the second level as a spotlight shone over the exterior of the two-story residence, soon extinguishing. In ten minutes, the lights snuffed to black as if the house was taking in its last breath, except for the bedroom.

  It was eleven.

   "Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pale of water," Jack recited over and over like a sacred verse in the Bible, grunting in a vile, animalistic notion, "Jack had gone up the hill…to find Jill."

   He didn’t know how he knew her name, but he knew it. He wasn’t a psychic like that lunatic John Edward, never talked with the dead…but perhaps he did hold some flame in his raging mind that had some connection…with something.

   Jill was in her late twenties. Fair-skinned, a girl he’d noticed since joy riding through that neighborhood after his parole took in effect. Sometimes in the morning he’d affiliate himself with the Western Michigan University college campus just a few blocks from where he held his shithole efficiency.

   One count of first degree murder—that’s what he was charged with, and yet he was never linked to the other murders in the area. He targeted women—they all seemed related. They all had something in common.

   She was twenty-six. Perhaps twenty-nine.

   She looked so much like a Jill, he could taste it.

   A black Mazda 626 was backing out of the driveway. Jack knew Jill’s boyfriend would leave. He watched their pattern. After fucking, he always left. That had been the pattern each weeknight.

   "Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pale of water," he mumbled to himself behind the wheel, flicking his finished cigarette out the slightly cracked window, mesmerized by the sound of the falling rain tapping against the glass like a soothing hand.

   Was he was having second thoughts? He felt what could’ve been a last minute panic of guilt, but it was only momentarily. He kept thinking how much he wanted her, how much he wanted to fuck her, and after gaining back his encompassing rage, the overhead thunder seemingly grew heavier, more leaden with threat.

   The unexpected storm radiated streaks of lightning throughout a thick sky of a layer of dark bluish thunderclouds, bloating in the realm of what was a Monday night, the twentieth day of October, 2003. The thunder was a devious voice, seemingly ordering Jack’s presence to appear, there, in the driveway of his newest obsession.

   Finally those bedroom lights plundered from his poised and immobile eyes. The house lost within the darkness.

   A half-hour later, Jack cut the engine. He pulled himself out of the car, into the roaring storm like an inconspicuous phantom. He was sure no one saw him, he thought assuredly, clutching the handle of a six-inch butcher knife he’d purchased earlier that day at Joe’s Hardware Store, as soggy autumn leaves stuck to the soles of his white, grass-stained tennis shoes.

   In the backyard, the sliding door in the back of the house was disappointingly but expectedly locked. He managed, as he was articulate in breaking and entering, to pick the lock on another side door with a stretched-out paperclip he’d found in his torn pocket. Successful, he had not made a single sound. Not one jiggle in the doorknob. He could hear nothing but the low hum of the refrigerator. In the bedroom, a slight noise of what Jack guessed was her revving heater, as the temperature was staggeringly colder than usual that week.

   Jack opened the refrigerator door, took out the deli roast beef, made a sandwich with Miracle Whip, and was eating it. A noise came further down the hall.

   Jill was a shadow along the wall. The floor creaked as she came out of the bedroom as Jack gripped the knife’s handle tighter. Sweat poured out of his hands. He could see the faint outline of a dark figure walk into another room across from the bedroom, the bathroom, as its door closed behind her. She didn’t see him.

   Jack remained still. The sound of the toilet flushed. For the moment he stayed where he was as the door opened again, as she came out. Several flashes of lightning soaked through the window blinds, illuminating her body like a ghost. She hadn’t looked in his direction.

   The warbling sound of an electronic phone erupted the silence in the house and nearly sprung Jack to his knees. Someone was calling her at two in the morning?

   He ducked behind the kitchen’s counter. His face kissed the tiled floor as he listened to Jill’s voice sounding increasingly upset. Something was wrong, something was wrong.

   "You saw what on the side of the house?" she said, now panicking. Jack’s pulse skyrocketed.

   Jill dropped the phone. She just stood there like a monument as a feeble whisper derived underneath the kitchen counter. "Jack and Jill…went up the hill…to fetch a pale of water."

   She dropped the phone, screaming. She clenched her mouth with her right hand, retreating toward the front door as fast as possible.

   Jack rose up from crouching underneath the counter, appeared before her, looking at her with that hateful, sly smirk. When she saw him, he quickly and almost systematically lunged from the kitchen, successfully grasping her. One hand clutched onto the back of her head as the other wrapped around her back tightly, pinning her. "Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pale of water!"

   "What are you saying to me?!" she was frantically sobbing.

   "Say it, Jill! Say it!" He said it now very slowly, "Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pale of water."

   Her victimized eyes looked desperately into his godless face. His veins surfaced distinctively in his strained neck. "Jack…and Jill…went up the hill," she trailed off quivering. "To fetch a pale of water."

   "Okay. Good girl." But he was not okay, not in the least. Jack’s stomach churned. Something bothered him. He saw something unusual, and it was glowing in the dark pupil of her victimized expression…something that weakened his usual routine. "Say it again."

   "What do you want?!" she cried, gasping and violently shaking.

   He smelled an aroma on her, her stale perfume smelled like Obsession. He stroked his hand through the thick fibers of her blond hair. He saw the saliva in the corners of her mouth, wildly running from it like the tears from the corners of her eyes poised in shock. Dug beneath the tears, he saw a certain light he never noticed before on anyone.

   Jack couldn’t believe what came over him. He had the knife drawn high in the air, the sharp tip of the blade pointed directly over her forehead. He could carve her brain out if he wanted to, he had the chance. She squirmed and flinched and struggled in his grasp to break free and he wanted to go forward, wanted to get it fucking over with.

   "LET ME GO!!"

   But as Jack was about to end her life, he had already turned the weapon on himself. He fed it, as deep as he could, and buried it into his brain, without even the slightest idea what made him do it.

   Jack stumbled backward on the floor. His glossy eyes turned fixed and cold as a thickening pool of blood accumulated onto that tiled kitchen floor. The back of his head had snapped back, eyes pivoted toward the high ceiling now in disarray.

   But then, Jack awoke. He caught sight of the radiating sun, but it was a ball of deep purple and shimmered a spectrum of different colors throughout the deep sky, into the horizon.

   He was sitting atop a brick wall, one narrow but long, as a never-ending shaft endlessly coiled and spiraled down into a misty unknown. Jack gasped for air as he felt threatened for the fall, his short stubby legs dangling over the infinite vacuum.

   What was this? This can’t be happening. "I’m sorry!" he yelled, but no one seemed to answer. "Someone…someone help me!"

   His voice sounded much different, like a squeaky animated cartoon. His head felt different, as well. His hands were draped with white gloves.

   "Humpty-Dumpty…." Jack said. He’d no idea what came over him. "What the hell is happening? Humpty-Dumpty? Is that who I fucking am?"

   Jack heard more voices further below, faintly echoing back in some sort of response, "…And all the kings horses, and all the kings men, couldn’t put Dumpty together again."

   "This is impossible!" Jack wildly shrieked. This can’t be happening!"

   Turbulent G forces gutted his stomach. Something pushed him and he was now falling. Now he could see the white, glossy floor coming at him, spiraling like a goddamned bat out of hell. Suddenly a sound like glass, that high pitched sound the last thing he’d ever hear, falling like condemned passengers of a commercial plane plunging to their infinite death.

   His body broke like porcelain. Pieces scattered throughout the land. As more fairy-tale figures clustered and quickly gathered in a mournful congregation, covering their mouths in appalled terror, they appeared to be heavily sobbing. "Where is he going?" Hansel asked Gratel, who shrugged discouragingly, a glimmer of sadness brimming in her soaked eyes.

   "Somewhere worse than here. You see, not every story has a happy ending. Not even our world wants to keep him."

   "He’s in a different place."

   Jack was in a different place, all right.

   He couldn’t feel his legs, couldn’t even see them. He was sitting in the second row of the back of a courtroom, a number of other people bitterly sobbing as a godlike voice announced, "All rise."

   But Jack couldn’t rise. What next, he couldn’t even believe what came into the courtroom as he heard was his own wailing screams for mercy, which would never be answered. "I wish I could just fall, again. Jesus, just make me fall forever."

   But Jack wasn’t going anywhere.

©2003 Richard John Crawford