Entry in the Rennick Hollow parish book, 29 October 1871: "Forty-one pumpkins carted into the barn at dusk, forty-two carted out at dawn. The forty-second was lit." The book names no one. The farmers name the thing and keep the name short: Jack. It stands about six feet, a frame of bundled cornstalk and dry vine under a coat of husks, with a carved gourd for a head and a flame inside that burns sulfur yellow instead of orange. It walks stubble fields from mid-October until the hard frosts, then goes back into the furrows and is a pumpkin again.
Fenwick Sorley is the rind man of Rennick Hollow, an office the parish has paid for since the 1850s and which exists for nothing else. On the last night of harvest he walks the rows with a short maul and splits every pumpkin that feels warm under his palm. A warm one has been lit from inside or is about to be. Jack leaves its seeds in a straight line, wet and evenly spaced, and a patch of stubble where the dew will not settle. Fenwick puts it at the height of a door. He says it does not speak, but that it hums once when a rind cracks.
Fiona Cray keeps the chandlery at Ormsby Fen. Between the last sheaf and the first of November she will not sell, lend or give away a candle stub, not to a neighbor, not to her sister. A stub that has passed from hand to hand, she says, has been offered. She puts the creature no taller than a boy. One night in 1893 it stood at her shop window for as long as it takes to boil an egg, smeared pith on the glass, and asked her the hour. She did not answer. Fabian Lyle carted barley between the two villages for most of his working life. He says it kept pace with his wagon along the hedge on the Fen road, its flame level with his lantern and never ahead of it. When he reined in, it stopped, and the head came round on a neck of twisted vine until the grin faced him. The grin, he says, was cut by someone who had only heard teeth described.
The three agree on the color of the light and on little else. Height, voice, and whether it follows or merely walks alongside all differ, and none of them has seen it by day. Change is easier to measure. When I first walked the Fen, the grin held five teeth. I came back two autumns later and counted seven, and the left eye, a triangle, had slipped half an inch below the right. At the chandlery I asked for a stub to test the flame against. Fiona Cray shook her head at the door. "Not till the first of November, love."
- Classification
- Harvest-born gourd walker
- Habitat
- Stubble fields and hedgerow lanes
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 6 ft, about door height
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Autumn harvest fields
- Binomial
- Cucurbitus lampadarius
- Diet
- Candle tallow and pumpkin pith
- Temperament
- Patient, silent, watchful