I met Jack during my sophomore year of college. I was at the bar with a group of friends, and we caught each other’s eye across the dance floor. Unlike the other guys I’d been with up until that point, Jack was confident. He walked right up to me and struck up a conversation. He was funny, smart, and had the most amazing blue eyes I’d ever seen. We ended up talking for hours, and by the end of the night, I knew there was something special about him. My friends knew it too - they’d never seen me fall for someone so quickly or so hard. Jack and I exchanged numbers and started going on dates soon after that.
Our relationship progressed quickly, and before I knew it, we were spending all of our free time together. We would explore the city, go to concerts, and have lazy movie marathons on the weekends. It was like we’d known each other forever. We had the same sense of humour, loved the same movies, and were both big fans of hiking and camping.
Jack is three years older than me, and would have been finished college at the time we met, but he never went. He had been working odd jobs since high school, trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life after leaving his deadbeat parents behind in Arkansas. But with me by his side, he seemed to have a newfound sense of purpose. We talked about our dreams and aspirations, and Jack started taking classes at the local community college to get his degree. And after we graduated, we both landed jobs in the same city and decided to move in together. It was a big step, and at the time my parents weren’t so keen on the idea, but it felt like the natural next chapter in our relationship. We found a small apartment in the downtown area, and started building our life together.
The first year of living together wasn’t always easy, but we navigated the challenges of sharing a space and learning each other’s quirks. And despite the occasional argument or disagreement, we always found a way to work through it. And a few months after we moved in, we decided to get a puppy - a golden retriever. We named her Luna, and she quickly became the center of our world. We would take her on long walks in the park, play fetch in the backyard, and cuddle with her on the couch. Luna brought us even closer together, and it seemed like nothing could tear us apart. Luna is four years old now, and we’ve moved to a cute little home in the suburbs. Jack proposed about six months ago, and of course I said yes. My family loves him, my friends love him, and I’ve truly never been happier.
And then today happened.
Last night, Jack came home from work looking more stressed than usual. He didn’t greet me or Luna, which was odd because he usually gives her a big hug and plays with her before anything else. I asked him what was wrong, but he just shrugged and said he had a bad day at work. He seemed to be having more of those for the last little while, but I’d been chalking it up to the fact that he’d been promoted not long ago, assuming that these were simply the growing pains of his new position. I tried to make him feel better, but he seemed distant and preoccupied. I figured he needed some space, so I left him alone for a while.
I finished making dinner at around 6:30, and I called for him to come up to eat. It doesn’t happen every night, but I often have to call him more than once. I’ve always joked that he loses half his hearing once the clock passes 5pm because he’d done this sort of thing ever since we met, no matter where we lived. It sometimes felt as though I was calling a ghost, as if nobody was there at all. He’d always show up after the third or fourth shout though, embracing me with a smile and planting a kiss on my forehead as he apologized.
So when he didn’t show up to the dinner table until quarter to seven, I didn’t bat an eye. He still looked quite stressed; concern etched across his features as he rolled up his sleeves and sat down in the chair next to me, but I didn’t think anything of it. Dinner was quiet, he asked about my day, but he barely touched his food. After we finished eating, he said he was going to take a shower and go to bed early. I offered to join him, but he declined, saying he needed to be alone for a while. I could tell he was upset, but I didn’t push it. I gave him a kiss on the cheek and told him I loved him before settling down to watch some TV before I went to sleep myself.
I woke up around 2am to find Jack sitting at the edge of our bed, staring blankly ahead. I asked him what was wrong, but he didn’t respond. He just kept staring. I was starting to get scared, but then he suddenly turned to me with a blank expression and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
I opened my mouth to ask what for, but before I could respond, he got up and walked out of the room. I was left there, alone in the dark, wondering what the hell was going on. I fell asleep before he came back to the room.
This morning, before he left for work, I confronted him about it, but he denied the entire thing ever happening. He laughed, telling me I needed to lay off the late night TV shows. I knew he was lying, but I just told him to take care of himself and to let me know if he needed anything. He left for work shortly after, and I spent the rest of the morning worrying about him.
I had the day off, and I’d originally planned to spend my day relaxing, but I needed to do something to get my mind off Jack’s bizarre behaviour, so I decided to clean the house. As I was dusting the shelves in the living room, I accidentally knocked over a photo of Jack and I together during a trip to Scotland.
As I was picking it up, I noticed something fall out from behind the frame. It was a small skeleton key, and it looked like it had been hidden there on purpose. I felt a mix of curiosity and suspicion, wondering why Jack had hidden a key behind a photo frame.
I immediately went to the cabinet where we keep important documents and files, but the key didn’t fit any of the locks. I searched around the house for any other locked cabinets or drawers, but still no luck. I started to feel frustrated and confused. Why would Jack hide a key that didn’t seem to open anything?
I decided to take a break and make some lunch, hoping that a fresh perspective would help me figure things out. As I was preparing my meal, I suddenly had a thought. We had a locked cabinet in the basement, an old-fashioned one. I hated the damn thing, but let Jack keep it because he said it was a family heirloom; the only thing he had to remember his grandfather by.
So I had tried to open the cabinet many times before, hoping that perhaps his grandfather had left something inside that Jack could hold onto instead of the hideous cabinet. But I was never able to find a key that fit, and Jack said he’d lost the real one long ago.
But now, with the key in hand, I realized that this might be the key to the cabinet. Excited and a little nervous, I headed down to the basement to try the key. I found the cabinet in the far corner, covered in dust and cobwebs. I inserted the key and turned it, and to my surprise, it clicked. I slowly pulled the door open, revealing a stack of old files, documents, and journals. They were all labeled with dates, spanning back several years.
Curiosity getting the better of me, I opened the closest journal to a random page. The yellowed paper was filled with notes written in Jack’s messy handwriting, accompanied with an old newspaper clipping. My heart stopped when I flipped it over to read the title.
“Local Woman Found Dead in Abandoned Warehouse”
I felt a wave of nausea wash over me as I read through the article. It described the gruesome murder of a young woman that I remembered seeing this on the news a few years ago. I turned the pages, each one the same as the last. Jack’s handwriting. A newspaper clipping. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
In a panic, I quickly flipped through some of the other journals, and to my horror, they were all filled with similar stories of women who had gone missing or been found dead. My hands were shaking when I noticed the stack of journals on the bottom shelf; the spines were dated 1956… long, long before Jack or I were born.
I grabbed one and opened it, met with the same hauntingly familiar sight. Yellowed paper, messy handwriting, and newspaper clippings. But these one’s couldn’t belong to Jack. As I flipped through the pages, I saw that the stories were all the same. Women who had gone missing or been found dead, each one more gruesome than the last. And then I started paying attention to the locations of the crimes.
They were all in Arkansas.