Nobody remembered where Jack Morrow came from, and that was the first strange thing about him.
He showed up in Ashcombe one October evening with a battered cart, a black wool coat, and a bundle of knives wrapped in oilcloth. He rented a room above the inn, paid for three weeks up front, and then asked the landlord a question so ordinary that no one paid it much attention.
“Who grows the best pumpkins around here?”
The landlord pointed him towards the Henshaw farm on the edge of the village. By the following afternoon, Jack had bought nearly every pumpkin they could spare.
He set up a little stall beside the market, a wooden sign hung from the front.
JACK MORROW
LANTERNS CARVED TO ORDER
People thought he was getting ready for Halloween early. The village had made pumpkin lanterns for years. Kids carved them; they were put out in front of houses to celebrate Halloween.
People still repeated the old stories about lanterns scaring off wandering spirits, though most said it with a grin.
Jack’s work was different.
He might carve a real face. Not just eyes and a crooked mouth, but a face someone actually recognised.
His first proper customer was Mrs Ellen Ward. Her husband, George, had died the previous winter. Pneumonia had taken him quickly, and Ellen had been left alone in the cottage they'd shared for thirty-two years.
She stopped at Jack’s stall because one of his lanterns reminded her of George. Not enough to call it a portrait. It was simply something in the expression, perhaps the slope of the mouth or the tired amusement in the eyes.
“My husband used to look at me like that,” she said. Jack glanced at the pumpkin. “Would you wish me to carve him?” Ellen laughed, then realised he was serious.
“I haven’t got a photograph with me.” Jack responded, “I don’t need one.”
Jack took a fresh pumpkin from beneath the table and placed it between them. “Tell me about him.”
So Ellen did. She talked about George’s broad nose, his heavy eyebrows and the little crease beside his mouth while he smiled. She told Jack how George always looked slightly suspicious when somebody served him stew, and how one ear stuck out farther than the other.
Jack listened. He never wrote anything down. His fingers moved slowly over the pumpkin, feeling its shape, then he picked up one of his knives.
Twenty minutes later, Ellen began to cry.
George stared back at her.
It wasn’t perfect, of course. It was still a pumpkin, but the likeness was amazing. Jack apologised, but Ellen shook her head and laughed through her tears.
“No. No, it’s lovely.”
She carried the lantern home below her arm. That evening she ignited a candle inside it and placed it on the kitchen table. For the first time since George died, she ate supper facing him.
By the next morning, the entire village knew about Jack Morrow.
Within a few days, people were lining up outside his stall. They brought photos when they had them, but Jack hardly glanced at them. He liked hearing stories better.
Tell me how she laughed.
Tell me about his eyes.
Did your mother frown when she concentrated?
Did your brother show his teeth while he smiled?
People talked, Jack listened, and somehow the faces appeared. Dead fathers, lost children, sisters gone too soon, husbands, wives, friends. Before long, Ashcombe’s windows were filled with the faces of the dead.
At night, the village glowed orange with faces everyone knew.
People loved it… At first.
Mrs Ward was the first to hear a voice.
She woke shortly after midnight because somebody had said her name.
“Ellen.” She sat upright in bed. The house remained silent.
Then again. “Ellen.” George’s voice.
She hurried downstairs. The lantern was still burning on the table, although its candle had nearly gone out.
Ellen stood in the doorway, trembling. “George?” Nothing.
She walked closer. The carved face seemed softer by the candlelight, nearly alive. Then the mouth moved, just a little.
“Don’t forget the back gate,” Ellen screamed.
The next morning she reminded herself it had been a dream. Then she remembered the back gate. George had always checked it before bed.
She went into the garden; the gate stood open. She kept the lantern. She never told anyone what had happened.
Others were less fortunate.
Thomas Weaver had Jack carve his dead mother. On the third night, the lantern began whistling a tune Thomas had not heard since childhood.
He pursued the sound downstairs and found the pumpkin sitting in the parlour. Its candle had gone out hours earlier, yet still it hummed.
Thomas lit it.
His mother’s face brightened. “Thomas,” it uttered. He wept.
For several nights it spoke gently. It remembered things. A blue cup Thomas had broken when he was six. The dog they had before his father died. A scar on Thomas’s knee caused by falling from an apple tree.
Things no stranger could have known.
Thomas began spending more time with the lantern. His wife became uneasy. “It isn’t your mother,” she said. Thomas ignored her.
One night she came downstairs and found him sitting in darkness with the lantern in his lap. Thomas was whispering to it.
His wife heard another voice whisper back.
Stories started to multiply. A father who passed away last year asking to be taken outside. A grandmother calling from an empty bedroom. A lantern laughing when nobody was nearby. Few spoke with the voices of the dead.
Others merely watched. One woman claimed the eyes of her husband’s lantern followed her around the room. Another claimed the face changed whenever she looked away.
Nobody blamed Jack. Not yet. Instead, they returned to him with questions.
“How do they know things?”
Jack’s answer was always the same.
“Memory is a strange thing.”
That stopped sounding reassuring after a while.
By the week before Halloween, Jack had cut over sixty faces. He worked longer every day. His hands were stained orange and black, dark circles formed under his eyes, and people noticed he no longer ate at the inn.
He hardly slept.
Each morning, his stall contained more lanterns than he remembered carving.
That was when Jack became frightened. He began keeping notes.
October 25th. Carved twelve today. Counted fourteen before closing.
October 26th. Carved nine. Found thirteen.
October 27th. One lantern has no customer. Face unfamiliar.
Jack destroyed that one. He cut it into pieces and burned them behind the inn.
The next morning, it sat on his table. Whole. Waiting.
He smashed it with an axe.
The next morning there were two.
Jack packed his knives. He intended to leave Ashcombe, but he never did.
That afternoon a little girl came up to his stall. Her name was called Sarah Bell. She carried no money and no photograph.
“My brother died,” she said.
Jack had heard the story. Daniel Bell had fallen through river ice the previous winter. He had been nine. Sarah was seven.
“My mum won’t allow me to have one,” she said. “She says it isn’t right.”
Jack looked at her. “She may be correct.”
“But I want to see him.” Jack should have refused. Instead, he asked the question he always asked.
“Tell me about him.” Sarah smiled and talked.
Jack carved.
When the lantern was finished, he knew immediately that something was wrong. The face smiled before he had finished the mouth. Jack froze. Sarah did not notice.
“There he is.” Jack grabbed the pumpkin.
“No.” Sarah stepped back. The lantern blinked.
Jack dropped it. The pumpkin rolled across the floor.
Sarah screamed in horror.
From inside the empty shell came the voice of her dead brother. “Sarah?”
Jack smashed the lantern with his boot. The voice carried on. “Sarah?”
Again.
Again.
Again.
Until Jack drove his knife through the carved face. Silence. Sarah ran.
At sunset, the whole village knew.
They came for Jack. Some wanted answers. Others wanted their lanterns destroyed. Jack gave them both.
He told them what he had finally understood. The lanterns were opening something to the other side.
Every story people told Jack shaped the lanterns; memories added details to the carving. Love gave them voices; grief opened the door.
But what spoke through those carved mouths had never been human; it never walked the Earth.
The things inside learned from those who mourned. They took memories, then voices, then faces.
The villagers started smashing lanterns.
That made things worse.
When the first one broke, something screamed from inside it. When the second shattered, every other lantern in Ashcombe lit at once.
Dozens of dead faces appeared in dark windows; candles ignited without flame, doors flew open.
Voices called from every house.
“Mum?”
“George?”
“Thomas?”
“Please.”
“Come here.”
“It is me.”
“Don’t leave me.”
People ran into the streets. Some covered their ears. Others moved towards the voices.
Jack realised what was happening. The things inside the lanterns were learning how to lure people closer. Soon they would not need pumpkins. They would have enough memory to make faces of their own.
Jack ran back to his stall.
The unfamiliar lanterns were waiting. There were thirteen now. All had the same face. Jack’s.
He stared at them.
One smiled.
“Your turn.”
Jack understood. Every face needed a memory. Every memory needed a person. Every door could be closed if something was placed on the other side.
So Jack carved one final lantern.
He worked faster than he ever had before. Not from memory and not from a photograph. From touch.
He felt his own brow, his nose, his cheeks and the lines beside his mouth. He carved himself.
Outside, the voices became louder. The crowd screamed. Windows shattered. Orange light filled the village.
Jack finished the face, then cut away the top.
Inside the pumpkin was darkness.
Not hollow space. Darkness. Deep and endless.
Jack picked up whispers from somewhere inside it: hundreds of them, every borrowed voice, all stolen memory… Waiting.
He placed the pumpkin over his own head. The village went silent. Every lantern extinguished at once.
Jack screamed.
The people outside heard it. Then they heard something else, a noise like wind rushing backwards through a forest. Lights burst from windows.
Orange fire rushed through the streets in long twisting ribbons, pouring towards Jack’s stall. Every borrowed face collapsed. All sound stopped. All stolen memory returned to its owner.
The fire entered Jack.
His coat blackened but did not burn. His body stretched strangely beneath the fabric. Green moss and roots burst forth around his shoulders. Two glowing openings appeared in his chest, burning with the trapped light of everything he had captured.
The pumpkin fused around his head; Jack Morrow vanished, replaced by something terrifying.
The locals screamed, ran, and tried to get as far away from this monster standing in front of them.
By morning, the market square was empty; Jack’s stall had disappeared. Only his sign remained swinging in the morning breeze.
Someone had scratched another word beneath it.
NEVER.
For many years, Ashcombe stopped etching faces into pumpkins. They left them plain. No mouths. No eyes. No invitations.
People started calling him Jack O’Morrow, and he became part of local Halloween folklore.
Jack was spotted on lanes between villages, standing by fields, or watching from hedgerows. Sometimes, people saw the orange lights glowing inside his dark shape before they noticed the pumpkin head.
He rarely approached anyone, but he appeared whenever somebody tried to call back the dead.
Séances, Spirit boards, Mirror rituals- anything that invited something unseen to wear a familiar voice.
Jack came.
Not because he was cruel.
Because he knew what answered.
Professor Barnabas Ravenwood encountered Jack O’Morrow many years later while investigating reports of a woman hearing her dead husband speaking from an old wardrobe.
Ravenwood followed the voice upstairs and found the woman standing before the open wardrobe doors. Inside was darkness.
Her husband’s voice murmured from somewhere within.
“Come closer.”
Before Ravenwood could stop her, she advanced forward.
Then the room became filled with orange light.
Jack O’Morrow stood in the doorway.
The thing inside the wardrobe hissed.
Jack tilted his pumpkin head. His carved grin broadened; two fiery shapes shone more brightly inside his chest.
The voice changed. It became deeper, angrier, then afraid.
The wardrobe slammed shut.
The woman collapsed.
Jack turned to leave.
Ravenwood, being Ravenwood, followed.
“Excuse me.” Jack stopped. “I should very much like to ask you some questions.” The pumpkin slowly turned. Ravenwood later wrote that this was the moment he realised there are certain occasions when curiosity should perhaps be considered a medical condition.
Jack spoke only once. His speech sounded like dozens of people whispering at the bottom of a well.
“They remember us better than we remember ourselves.”
Then he walked away.
Ravenwood did not follow.
Not that time.
Jack O’Morrow still wanders. The faces are still inside him. Not the real people, just their copies. The things inside learned to smile, speak, and beg just like them.
Sometimes, if you stand close enough to Jack, you can hear them murmuring through the glowing holes in his chest.
They will use voices you recognise.
Even the voices of people who are still alive.
That is the part Ravenwood never managed to explain.
So if you ever see Jack O’Morrow standing by the road on an autumn night, don’t be afBe afraid only if he’s looking past you.ing past you.
And no matter what voice you hear behind you, don’t turn around.