Back of Ruffet Wood, there lived a family that knew only of themselves.

Such self-sufficiency could usually be told only in a fairy stories, but here it was real. The Jumberlacks, for that was their name, had lived here for centuries within centuries. The First Father was older, he claimed, than the oldest tree he ever remembered hiding behind. Indeed, the day he first met his wife-to-be and took her back to the small wooden house in the clearing was also beyond remembering. She may have indeed been older than him.

The resultant children had, in turn, discovered mates with whom to couple outside the reach of their own memories. The First Father and Mother had simply nodded knowingly, as each of their children had eventually fallen in love with a chosen stranger. Everyone shrugged, too, at the mystery of the exponential growth, not only in the family, but in the wooden house which, as if nourished by the leaf-loam, towered higher each day, just like the trees.

The last in line, so far was Jack Jumberlack, who, if he had only realised, was in search of his own partner, confident that, when the day of his maturity dawned, she would be there ... emerging like a dream-child upon the sun shafts in Ruffet Wood.

Jack was tall for his age and he lived in the highest attic of the wooden house. When he was due to seed his wife with his own children in the soon-to-be-forgotten future, new attics would by then have groaned into growth beyond the present roof limits. Jack's own toddlers would play seeky-find among the chimneystacks, while wooden slopes slowly formed new roof-contraptions above the old.

But, until then, Jack Jumberlack had to make do with his own company. He knew the secrets of playing seeky-find on his ownsome, since those other Jumberlacks last up the ratchetting ladder of generation had already outgrown such childhood games. So, Jack often dodged behind the widest, tallest tree - the one that was still the oldest beyond any memory's reach - and then dart up into the branches before he had the chance to change body. Looking down, Jack Jumberlack spotted Jack Jumberlack crouched in misspent hiding.

"Yoo hoo, found you!"

And Jack joined Jack in shrill boyish laughter: only to slope off as a single Jack, to milk the large-headed cow which only had one bent horn. Which was one too many.

One day, out of nothing, beyond sight of the wooden house's only window, Jack Jumberlack saw something hiding amid an incipient tree growth. It looked like a worm, with a human face, coiling around the sapling's tenuous existence.

In innocent joy, Jack called out: "You who! Found you!"

He plopped the wriggling creature into his mouth, knowing that supper would be late, if not never. It was such a delicious flavour, he dreamed of Handsome and Petal.

Later, when he told his mother, she smiled wickedly.

"Never fear, Jack Jumberlack, it will harbour within you and grow limbs like yours, but shapelier - grow a face like yours, but sweeter and prettier - and it will use your own body like a glove puppet ... until the cocoon breaks and love comes."

But nobody actually said these unlikely words of enlightenment, so Jack of course did not hear them. His mother had indeed been somewhere else all the time, no doubt coupling, as was her wont, with a creature owning a voice so hideous, it was more like tree bark than sound.

In any event, Jack Jumberlack had left his real self behind another tree in Ruffet Wood, during one of those misbegotten, misbegodden games of endless seeky-find. So it was not Jack Jumberlack at all who had not heard the words that had not been spoken by his absent mother.

The real Jack Jumberlack was, of course, to find himself again when the time was ripe. And eventually - when the wooden house creaked in the night - the First Father died in the arms of the First Mother, pleased that indeed time was at least ripe for him. But, death being an orphan of birth, it was easy to forget how dark it could become beyond Ruffet Wood.


(Published 'Gothic Light' 1992)