Ask any child anywhere on this bulging globe of ours what they might want to be when they grow up, and certain noble professions are regularly mentioned, time and time again. These are jobs that are simply more cool, more impressive, more heroic, or more fun than what Mom and Dad probably do, such as Astronauts, Ballet Dancers, or News Anchors. These kinds of dream jobs seem all glitz and glamour to those of us watching from home or as an audience member as these impressive people rocket off to the moon, or leap and twirl around a stage with incredible energy and precision for hours, or report on international emergencies from the confines of a perfectly lit television studio—never a hair out of place.
However, as with almost all things, these careers aren’t quite what they seem, and if we had the chance to ask the Prima Ballerina about her tiara-clad life on the stage, she might respond with a guttural warning groan, slipping off her satin shoes to show off her toes—gnarled and green-tipped like a zombie’s fingers poking up from out of his grave. The Astronaut would likely retch, crystalline chunks floating in front of his joyless mouth, as he offered us his 165th packet of dehydrated refried beans in a row, to demonstrate the monotony and flaccid squishiness of his days spent up in the spaceship. The News Anchor actually wouldn’t show any emotion in answer to our questions, as we’d soon learn that their high-arched eyebrows are in fact frozen that way, in a wide-eyed botox-caused stare reminiscent of death masks strapped atop the petrified mummies of ancient South America. We’d find out, if we asked any of these miserable studs, that nothing can be fun all the time.
Jack was enjoying a self-pitying narrative along these lines, as his work-day came to an end promptly at 5pm as usual. He unfurled himself slowly and carefully from under the sofa where he’d been hiding all day, in patient pursuit of an errant naked ankle’s presence, so that he might oh-so-gently slide a small string across it, or touch it with a wet finger, or every now and again give it a wee tickle. Nothing to cause a panic, of course, but just enough so that the ankle-owner might have a vague sense of Something Else being present in their house. This mischievous task was Jack’s bread-and-butter, as he was, of course, a Hob-Goblin. Hob-Goblins enjoy a much envied career, lofty and admired by all. There is nothing more noble than good-natured fun and pranking, and to make an honest living at it, well, could anything be better? Jack would tell you, if you asked him, that yes. Something could. Something that didn’t, perhaps, involve fitting his sturdy three-and-a-half foot tall frame into a six-inch tall crawl space for eight straight hours— with no lunch break—he might add.
What with this deluge of wallowing trains of thought, it took Jack a long moment to rise to his full height as he left his cramped post on this particularly normal late October evening, and in his languor as he stood and looked out the window above the sofa, he was able to observe the full harvest moon just peeking over the horizon and coloring the dusk sky with a brushing of rust-orange.
What a sight, he thought. How marvelous it would be, to be an astronaut and to meet the Man in the Moon in person. How lucky they are. How unlucky I am. How my back aches. Well, never mind. I’ll just walk home slowly tonight and admire the moonlight from here, on boring old Earth. He tiptoed out, setting one disproportionately large and hairy foot in front of the other as quietly as he could, and made his way out of his office and down to the wet cobblestone road in the sweet family neighborhood in which he worked. Bobbing and weaving through the shadows, Jack left the city and made his way back to where he lived in the old forest, following the seductive amber trail created by the moon’s reflection on the shiny stone street. The moon rose higher and high over the horizon as he walked, and from his customary hunched working position, Jack straightened up to better see the moon, raising his chin and adopting a proud posture as he crossed a large clearing at the edge of the forest. He was feeling wonderful, completely out of his sour mood from earlier, having shaken off the office doldrums and rapidly becoming himself again.
As he neared his home, a large hollowed-out walnut tree, once modest but now very nearly ostentatious in scope and complexity what with the many dug-out add-on Jack had afforded over his long years, he became aware of an awful and piercing noise, not quite like anything he’d ever heard before. It sounded almost like a a bull-elk’s desperate bugle calling for a mate, but elk didn’t typically gather in his neck of the woods. He began a mental checklist. Was a tree falling over, but taking a very long time to do it? Had he left his kettle on all day, and was this a build up of steam escaping it with a violence like never before? No, these were ridiculous ideas. What on earth could this terrible cacophony be? Jack immensely valued his peace and quiet, so it was important to him to discover the disturbance’s source and to put an end to it immediately. No sooner had he reached his stoop (and popped his head in to double check that it definitely wasn’t his kettle), than he was off again to suss out from whence the sound came.
The moon was now almost directly overhead, and there was an ever more interesting affect to its light, filtered through the forest canopies and bleeding onto the thick carpet of disintegrating needles and freshly fallen leaves. As Jack followed the unseemly sound, the moonlight often seemed to flicker just in front of him before quickly changing direction. Jack studiously ignored this nomadic spark as he focused only on continuing towards the direction of the noise. He’d gone about half a mile when something enormous, white, and shiny glinted from between the thick trees. Cautiously, Jack crept nearer, peering from his safe post behind a wall of trunks and branches. As more of the mysteriously pale monstrosity came into view, he realized it to be some kind of manufactured box, a trailer. Along the side of the trailer, in thick red paint, was written “U-haul.” The sound was so loud now that Jack needed to press his hands tightly over his ears, for fear his eardrums might burst at the intensity of it, and so he could better hear his own thoughts. Was the sound coming from the engine of a rusted out old over-worked pickup truck tasked with lugging this storage trailer? But there was no truck to be seen. With razor-sharp focus on stopping the awful cacophony, Jack rushed towards the U-Haul and around it before coming to a screeching stop at the sight of a ghastly woman caterwauling and wailing at the top of her lungs, yanking on ragged dark locks that grew almost to her knees, whose frail body was clearly racked with sobs through the flimsy old-times nightgown that barely covered it.
“Stop that noise at once!” Jack wasn’t interested in beginning their exchange with niceties, as this was his neighborhood and he’d be setting the ground rules here. “I’m happy to help you if you’re lost or stranded, but by God nothing is so bad as to warrant this heinous racket.” The strange woman stared at him with red, weepy eyes, and violently pulled out two chunks of hair on either side of her face, prompting her to cry even louder, but said nothing.
“STOP CRYING!” Jack shouted. The woman fell to her knees, looked up at the sky, and began beating at her chest with tight-clenched fists as she howled like a dying wolf. “SHHH.”
Oddly, despite growing more exasperated with each new level of her melodrama, Jack couldn’t help but to notice that his own eyes were welling up with tears. The only thing he could think he might be feeling sad about was that his beloved stomping grounds were clearly going to seed with this new nightmare neighbor, but regardless, his throat was choking up and he was fighting the urge to fall to the ground and wail himself. “Please, lady. Please stop, I beg of you. At least you’ve got to tell me who you are and what on Earth has happened here?”
The woman finally stopped howling and turned her anguish down to a low simmer, just continuing with some gentle tears and gasps, with the occasional hair-pull or touch of the back of her hand to her forehead added for flair. When she was finally collected enough to speak, she said, “I’m new here, this is my first day on the job.”
“On the job? And this is your first day? Where are your co-workers? Have they all died in a mysterious and awful incident, and that’s why you’re in such a sad state? How terrible!” Jack started to tear up again out of uncharacteristic sympathy, thinking of how unfortunate her situation was.
“No, no, I’m all alone here. This is my job— to cry as hard as I can. I’m a Banshee!” To prove it, the woman let out a howl so sharp that Jack’s head felt much like a delectable creme brûlée, his skull the crispy shell, violently tapped open with a jagged metal spoon wielded by a dessert-loving sadist.
“A Banshee?” Good Grief, Jack thought. There goes the neighborhood. “Well, what have you been hired to caterwaul about, all the way out here, by yourself? Who’s died?” Jack enjoyed scanning the daily obituaries to begin his mornings off on the right foot, but he couldn’t recall anyone local being featured there recently.
The Banshee stopped short, mid-yowl, and started speaking very matter-of-factly. “You know, I don’t actually know! They didn’t really tell me anything, my agency just called me up, said they had a long-term gig for me, that they’d provide transportation and storage, that I should pack for all kinds of weather, and then they just dropped me off at this location!” Remembering herself and realizing she was shirking her shrieking duties, the Banshee took a brief moment for another perfunctory meltdown, slumping and sliding in agony until prone on her belly, pounding the mossy ground with her fists, and throwing dried leaves around like confetti.
Jack, though still fighting back tears of his own, was much less concerned now knowing that this strange woman was in no real danger, and he’d adopted a casually amused stance leaning against a tree to observe her performance with a mix of enjoyment and confusion. Finally, the Banshee seemed to run out of grieving moves in her current position, and she slowly raised her head from the ground and opened one eye to steal a peek at Jack and ascertain whether he was still watching. Finding that he was, she prepared to start the next phase of her breakdown by rolling onto her back, in the manner of one about to make a snow angel. Upon seeing this, and especially because there wasn’t even any snow, Jack gathered himself and interrupted her once again. “So you’re just gonna be here… in this area… grieving with such gusto… indefinitely?”
“Well, yes. I suppose! Odd, isn’t it?” the Banshee agreed as she sobbed and waved her arms and legs up and down in the leaves and pine needles.
Jack needed to find a clever way to get rid of this dang Banshee, and soon. This is where his knack for scheming, finely honed after years as a top performing Hob-Goblin, ought to kick in. He could practically see the Zillow property value numbers for his home ticking downwards with each and every new howl and yowl of hers. “Erm. Indeed, one might say it was odd. I’m just wondering, since I’m here now, and you seem a bit troubled. How can I convince you to leave-- I mean, lean on me for help discovering the reason you’re here?”
“Well, I’m not really even supposed to be speaking to anyone at all while I’m working, much less taking a stranger’s advice. It’s considered a breach of contract!”
“Oh, come on, no-one will ever know. We’re all alone here!” Jack tried to persuade her.
“Well… perhaps just a bit of help so I could do a better job…” Mid-sentence, she seemed to remember herself, and racked with guilt at finding herself beginning to do exactly what she knew she oughtn’t, the Banshee clambered to her feet and ran to the other side of the clearing, away from Jack’s sneaky meddling. Just as she reached the line of trees across the way, a sudden orb of light flashed extremely brightly in the air, right at her eye-level, and she screamed in fear.
Jack recognized it as the strange harvest moon’s light which had stayed so near to him and moved in that unusual fashion on his earlier trek to this clearing. “Oh don’t mind that now, it’s just a bit of moonlight. Full moon tonight, I think.” Even as he espoused the normalcy of the light-orb, it started changing shapes, pulsing rhythmically, and darting away into the trees and then towards them again.
The Banshee, amazed, had completely forgotten her tears, and was now just watching the incredible light move around. “There’s no way that is just moonlight. I think it wants us to follow it!”
“You seriously think the light wants us to follow it? Light isn’t a sentient thing…” Jack’s judgemental grumbling faded away, as the Banshee had already started off down the path through the trees, illuminated by the wisp of light. He stayed leaning against his tree for a moment, watching her gallop away, stringy black hair streaming behind her. With a firm shake of his head, and a low-muttered “Crazy,” Jack pushed himself off the trunk and started on after her.
The light was no longer erratic in its direction, and it led the unlikely duo on an efficient and straight path; deep into the center of the forest, over the river, and eventually into an extremely dark, plushly foliaged area.
Having lived in the area his whole life, Jack was surprised that he didn’t recognize where they found themselves, but chocked the unfamiliarity up to the strange orange light, which was still with them. The Banshee, breathless from the brisk pace they’d kept up during the trek, wasn’t even pretending to cry anymore, but just leaning over with her hands on her knees, gasping for air.
“Well, it seems this is where we’ve been led. What’s your big plan now?” Jack asked the Banshee.
“ I haven’t the faintest idea. I’d sort of hoped maybe there’d be another sign, or a next clue,” she replied.
“Good grief. Well, we can’t get back unless the light starts moving again, it’s much too dark, we’ll never find our way.”
“You mean, we’re completely lost?” The Banshee was horrified, despite this particular adventure having been entirely her idea. As though it had overheard her dismay, the little orb of light flew above them, and shone a spotlight onto what they could now see was a cliff, with a shadowy figure balanced right on its edge. She gasped, “Do you see that?” Jack only nodded in response, feeling way in over his head now. “Why,” she continued, horrified, “I think that’s a person! You don’t suppose they’re about to jump, do you?”
“I certainly hope not! I don’t know, but this doesn’t seem to be a very tall cliff, I can’t imagine what the point would be,” he scoffed.
The beam of light coincidentally increased in intensity right then, and they could now see more clearly what was happening. The figure was a young man, with a rope fastened tightly around his neck, and he was in the act of tying it in a complex knot around a thick tree root stretched out beyond the side of the precipice.
With a another enormous gasp, though in the current circumstance seeming much less melodramatic than those prior, the Banshee ran to the base of the incline and started calling up to the man to come down. This was a much more serious circumstance than the light fun Jack was accustomed to, and he followed trepidatiously behind, unsure of his next move.
The Banshee screamed and yelled, “Sir, come down from there! Please! You don’t need to do this! It can’t be so bad as all that! We’re here for you!” using the full breadth of her well-honed diaphragmatic projection. The man couldn’t seem to hear her though, no matter how loudly she called up or how gently she encouraged him. She elbowed Jack, indicating that he should do his part to help. He too called up to the mysterious man, but didn’t really know what to say. Again, it didn’t seem like their words were reaching the figure, as he continued to stoically tie the knot, before standing and tightening the noose around his neck. As the situation grew more and more dire, and the man began to teeter at the edge, the beam of light suddenly changed from a spotlight into the shape of a hound, standing silently on the cliff’s top just behind the man. In his intense concentration, the man didn’t even notice this.
Jack could only think of how he would distract an assignment from their task at hand in his work as a Hob-Goblin, so he began to throw small pinecones up at the man, in the hopes that he’d turn around. Seeing what was happening, and that the light was incapable of getting the man’s attention from behind, the Banshee began to whimper and cry, mimicking the voice of a wounded dog. Just in the knick of time, thanks to their combined efforts, the man turned around and saw the dog shape at his feet. Startled, he almost backed off the cliff and negated their entire rescue. The glowing dog turned and walked five feet away from the man, and away from the hazardous edge. It then sat and looked at the man, and the Banshee, quickly thinking, called up another whimper. The man took one step towards the dog, then continued to stand there, looking confused and frozen.
Jack, upon seeing that their scheme was finally working, was getting in the zone and decided to fake an earthquake, by holding tight to some tree-root systems and branches at the base of the cliff, and shaking them as hard as he could. The Banshee chimed in, alternating between the whimpers and high-pitched wind sounds. Their combined efforts began to work! The man, crouching cautiously at the threat of an avalanche, began to make his way towards the light, and away from the outcropping. The light, still in the shape of a dog, began to run down the hill, crying and barking, and the man followed to help, thinking it was in danger, or lost.
Amazed, Jack and the Banshee stayed hidden beneath the cliff, and watched as the man continued to run after the light, having clearly forgotten about his plan to jump due to concern for a stray dog’s safety. Soon, the man and light were far enough away that they could only make out the glow, and couldn’t see the man’s shape through the trees. The light grew fainter and fainter, until it disappeared altogether—the man had been led to safety, all the way out of the forest. The two undiscovered heroes looked at each other in what was now a pitch-black landscape without the presence of the light that had originally led them there. Only the teeniest fragments of moonlight were reaching them through the tree canopies, scarcely enough to illuminate their eyes.
“Wow-EEE,” started Jack.
“I know… I’ve never felt so useful before.”
“I sure hope he’s okay. And hey, at least you finally stopped crying.”
“Oh! Oh no, oh my gosh. Um…” The Banshee took a deep preparatory inhale, when a strong glare started moving towards them extremely quickly, accompanied by a loud roaring and the sounds of many trees and branches being cracked and knocked down.
“I didn’t think the light would come back so soon! I figured that guy would need it more than us… but great! Now we can get out of here!” Jack readied himself to leave.
In just moments, the lights rushed towards them, getting so close that they were for a moment blinded, before making out the shape of a pick-up truck, hauling the very same large U-Haul they’d abandoned earlier on. A gruff man in a tailored navy suit stuck his head out the window.“You’re all done here, Maggie. Great work today.”
“Oh, hi, Mr. Faramund!” Maggie, our hard-working Banshee, recognized her boss. “Really? It was okay? I thought I’d be in trouble, I didn’t even keep crying the whole time.”
“No, you did exactly what you were supposed to do. We knew you were the girl for the job. Now, let’s get out of here.”
Jack, feeling awkward, shuffled his feet and cleared his throat.
“Thank you so much!” said Maggie. “Listen, would it be alright if we gave, um, this fellow—”
“—It’s Jack.” Jack finally introduced himself.
“ Yes, Jack here, a ride back to his place? We’ve become a bit lost.” Maggie asked.
“Well, it’s against policy, but I suppose just this once, as he was a big help with this one. Come on, pile in.”
Maggie opened the passenger-side door and sat up front, brushing her stringy hair out of her face and looking like a whole new and much less haunted person now that she was officially off the clock. After a moment’s hesitation, Jack hauled himself up into the bed of the pick-up, the only remaining place. Everyone on board, Mr. Faramund and his high-beams got in gear and started off towards Jack’s place.
As they drove off, Jack finally had a chance to collect his thoughts. What a very strange night, he determined. Well, all’s well that ends well! Looking up from his breezy spot in the bed of the truck, Jack had a clear view of the bright stars and golden harvest moon shining down on them, all of which seemed to blur together in a streak of light as the truck continued to pick up speed as it took him home.
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