Harbinger: A Jack O'Lantern Tale

By Lee Allen

Hear my words. I am waiting for you. For I am the harbinger of justice.

Letters sent to a local newspaper reveal the tortured mind behind a series of brutal murders.

What led this killer to claim their victims? Are there deeper motives and explanations or were they blinded by fury and bloodlust?

Examine an unexplored chapter in the tales that surround the Jack O'Lantern Men and venture into the mind of a murderer...

A psychological slasher short story, etched in gothic undercurrents, from the author of 'The Jack O'Lantern Men' and 'Whispers from the Dead of Night'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781471037481

Lee Allen

Born in South Wales, Lee Allen was writing from a young age, developing his fascination with mystery and thrillers. His debut Those Crimes of Passion was published in 2012, and he is currently working on his second novel.

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Harbinger

A Jack O’Lantern Tale

Lee Allen

Copyright © 2022 Lee Allen

ISBN 978-1-4710-3748-1

All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the author.

This is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters and events portrayed are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is purely coincidental.

Harbinger

The following dossier of letters received by a local newspaper in 1961-63 were originally dismissed as a hoax by police. Their veracity was later accepted, perhaps shedding light on a grave miscarriage of justice, which evidence suggests was subsequently covered up. Newspaper articles are included for context.

Friday, 27th October 1961

It is with absolute certainty I inform you I am going to kill.

You may wonder who I am, but that should not be your first question. You should ask yourself whom I am going to kill. You should ask yourself: Is it going to be me?

Please. Make it stop! So many thoughts thunder against the inside of my skull. I hear them all. As if there are hundreds of them in there.

You go about your daily lives, oblivious to the torment of others. The torment I have endured, just to show you truth. Yet you spit it back in my faces with ingracious ingratitude. I am beyond you. You ought to worship at my feet. My only crime was to show you all there is to see, all there is to experience.

I hear the screams. My head pounds with them, like my skull will burst and my brains will spill out into this void of a world, the screams in their wake.

Oh, how sweet your blood will taste, licked from the blade that has violated you, entered your body and stolen from you like a thief in the night.

Hear my words. I am waiting for you.

For I am the harbinger of justice.

Monday, 30th October 1961

The time is almost upon us. I can feel it, trilling in the air – as if it be a sound, or something that can be touched, or tasted on your tongue; almost, but not quite, instead sensory at one remove. It renders all of those sensations so superficial. This speaks to a deeper sense. The druids knew it well, the power of the season. They knew to respect it. They knew to fear it.

I am amongst you all, and you shall repay me in blood. For that is the only way you can renew yourselves.

You did not heed my warning. So be it. Your mistake will be apparent when the streets run with blood.

I fear I cannot control what is coming…

Harbinger of Justice

Tuesday, 31st October 1961

Yet, I am not the raving lunatic you will imagine me to be.

I once thought in very much the same way as you. That to commit heinous crimes and cause harm to others, one must suffer a great calamity of mind, to be quite mad or lacking in something so as to make them less than human. Somehow monstrous. We are safe then, as normal people. Yet what if such acts are committed by neither animal nor monster? What if evil is simply banal, altogether human?

What if we are all murderers?

The greatest achievement of the Devil is to have convinced us he does not exist. Thus he operates in the shadows,