JACOB’S CAMPFIRE TALE

AS FEATURED ON EPSODE #46

“RESCUED WOOD” By Jordan Miller

There are terms in the english language that upon close inspection make no sense, yet people use them without a second thought. These are terms like old news, civil war, and jumbo shrimp. Another more obscure example is rescued wood. The term, of course, refers to lumber taken from older structures and repurposed into something modern. The oxymoron lies in the fact that the supposedly “rescued” wood was originally cut from the torso of a dead tree. It would be like pulling a person’s charred skeleton from smoldering rubble, piecing it back together and calling them rescued bones. We couldn’t save the poor woman, good doctor, but we rescued her bones! 

This paradox was something that local businessman Charlie Minch had never considered, even though his business was based entirely on the rescuing and restoration of aged lumber. To tell the truth, he didn’t care much about the wood, but he enjoyed honest hard work and discovered that city people paid surprisingly high prices for old shitty lumber.

Charlie prayed primarily on the hip, modern businessman who came prepared to spend top dollar on genuine reclaimed wood in order to give their cafe that “rustic feel” or to add a layer of legitimacy to their new vegan restaurant. They usually came in from Hartford, Bridgeport or Stamford, but occasionally he got the real assholes who drove their shiny cars all the way up from New York City and those suckers paid through the nose. Charlie wasn’t always such a shrewd capitalist, however, and had been known to donate some of his rescued wood to friends and local artists for various projects. This is how he met Jacob Farber. Jacob said he lived in New York City for years but Charlie had trouble picturing it. Jacob was funny, respectful and interested in thoughtful conversation, all traits Charlie did not associate with those from the city, especially New York City. 

Regardless, Jacob was a Connecticut citizen now and had come to Charlie’s business several times before for small pieces of wood to complete one of his many art projects. Jacob never wanted large pieces so at first Charlie only charged him half price. What the hell, he figured, he’s a nice guy. Soon he started just letting Jacob pick from the pile free of charge. This is how Jacob came into possession of the piece of old forgotten wood.

“It’s a weird shape,” Charlie mused, “can’t do nothing with it.”

Jacob stared at the block of wood for a long moment and considered it closely. It was roughly two feet tall and about a foot and a half deep, and Charlie wasn’t kidding about the shape. It was warped and twisted as if someone had given the world’s strongest indian rug burn to a stump. 

 Jacob was a sculptor, and like most things in his life he had thrown himself into it head first. He had always been creative in one way or another, but when he tried sculpting he found that he immediately connected with the medium on a deep level. He discovered that his hand, equipped with the right tools, could move its way effortlessly across the edges of the wood, shaving away sliver by sliver, for hours on end without tiring. Jacob had tried group meditation classes a few times in the city, but found sculpting to be more calming and effectively centering.

Jacob discovered something else as well. If he stared at an unsculpted piece of clay or wood long enough, he could start to see the shape of the finished product inside of it. A piece of unsculpted material was nothing more than an outer shell hiding a secret shape, a truer shape inside. In this way, he thought, a sculpture was not unlike most people. Jacob would wait until he could see that secret shape of whatever it was inside, then he would make his first cut. After that it would always come quickly, his hands working fast to free the figure from inside the piece of clay, or wood, or whatever it may be. 

Jacob stared at the block of wood trying to unlock that shape, and gradually the waves of the ancient wood grain started to reveal their hidden form to him. He wasn’t sure what it was yet, but he knew it was there. When Jacob found his spark he could always tell, and he prided himself on following those good instincts. 

“It’s perfect. I’ll take it.” Jacob said, to which Charlie only shrugged.

“It’s yours, buddy”.

Jacob got home, placed the wood in the middle of his living room table and spent most of the night staring at it, trying to unlock it’s secret shape. Lately Jacob had found himself sculpting elements of the human form in an abstract way. Some would view his pieces and remark it was like Picasso if his paintings were three dimensional. This piece of rescued wood however, did not seem to want to take a human shape. In the block, Jacob began to see a figure that made him think of the unsettling stone gargoyles he had seen atop so many old gothic churches in Europe when he studied abroad back in his college years. 

There were times in the days of his traveling youth when he had walked beneath these stone devils and felt his skin prickle to gooseflesh, feeling as if through those stoic creatures were watching him, or perhaps even judging him. He would have never admitted it to his friends, but those statues had just plain creeped him out. Jacob hadn’t thought of the gargoyles in years, and he had certainly never considered sculpting one. 

Feeling a bit uneasy, Jacob stepped outside for some fresh air. The thing he loved most about living out here instead of in the city was the way the air tasted. He had always heard people in movies take a dramatically deep breath and say things like “my God, smell that country air” but he had always thought it was mostly bullshit. Now, however, he was a believer. 

“Got anything for me?” Jacob heard a small voice ask. He turned to find a little boy in jeans and bare feet staring at him. It was Robbie Burke, the little boy of the family next door who was constantly running around unsupervised. This wasn’t really a big deal though, and nobody thought Robbie’s parents were neglectful. The truth was that this was a nice area and a lot of kids played outside unsupervised as long as they knew to be home before dinner.

“Not today, sorry” Jacob replied with an apologetic smile. Jacob had taken to giving Robbie some of his excess clay or small pieces of wood cleverly cut into animal shapes. Jacob spied one of those very pieces gripped in Robbie’s tiny hand now; a tiny wooden elephant. 

“I’ll have something good for you next time, promise” Jacob said. Robbie smiled and darted off and Jacob found that, gargoyles or no, he was ready to give the rescued wood another try.

Back in New York City, Jacob had made a particularly difficult sculpture entirely out of wood and fishing line that swiveled on its own axis, each piece dangling on its own line as if from branches of a large rotating tree. Angling down above the rotating sculpture was a bright light. It was impossible to predict when it would happen, but about twice a day all of the sculpture’s pieces would align perfectly with the light to project the fleeting shadow of a stallion up on its back legs. There was an article in the paper about it and everything. Within weeks local kids had torn it to pieces and it had been vandalized beyond repair. Jacob was not put down by this, and in fact had entirely expected it. In a way, he thought, it’s what the whole piece was about in the first place. 

That stallion had been the most difficult shape he had ever encountered when it came to envisioning it and coaxing it out with his sculpting tools. The stallion had taken weeks, but the piece of rescued wood proved to be even more elusive. Jacob would catch a glimpse of something--an eye, a knuckle, or a claw-- and then the image would evaporate. The moment his tool would shave off a sliver of wood, it was as if the secret shape would escape back into the grain once again, leaving Jacob lost and frustrated. It was as if the harder he tried to find it, the further away the shape would become. 

One day after four weeks of hitting the same brick wall, Jacob felt he needed something to knock some creative screws loose. So he walked down to the store and bought himself a bottle of Olde Crow; the best shitty whiskey in the world, as Jacob often called it. It was also the whiskey of choice of writer Hunter S. Thompson, and so it seemed to Jacob to be good fuel for creativity. It was certainly also fuel for a nasty hangover, but after four weeks Jacob thought it was worth the risk. As it turns out, the Olde Crow was good for both. 

Jacob woke up to a blinding stream of midday sun and a dull jackhammer pounding away inside his head. After downing three full glasses of water he saw the lump of wood on his table and realized that at some point in his drunken stupor he had gotten down to some serious work. His tools lay scattered in a sea of wood shavings across his table and floor and there, in the middle of it all, was the piece of rescued wood. Now, however, he could see some definite character taking form. Jacob could make out what looked like a small clawed hand gripped over what might be a scaled knee. He was amazed. When he concentrated and really tried, he couldn’t make an iota of progress, but somehow in a cheap whiskey blackout he had managed to knock out a good portion of the sculpt. 

The most surprising thing was that it was good work. Really good work, when you got right down to it. Jacob looked at the impressive detail around the sculpted hand, which was really more a talon, then at the half empty bottle of Olde Crow. He couldn’t help but laugh. The laughter brought back the dull throb in his head, but it didn’t seem to matter so much now. He downed four Aspirin and another half glass of water and headed back to his bedroom. Jacob smiled and thought that if there was a single sculptor in Connecticut that deserved to sleep off the rest of a hangover, it was him. 

Usually, in Jacob’s artistic experience at least, starting a piece of art is by far the hardest part. Once he cracked a creative barrier, however, everything else would fall into place with relative ease. He assumed this would be the case with the rescued wood as well and expected to return to the sculpt with a newfound vision and carve out the rest of the gargoyle or whatever it was in a couple days. It was likely he would even come out with several pieces of scrap wood large enough to make some figures for Robbie next door. 

Returning to sculpt, Jacob found himself once again banging against that familiar brick wall. Working on the rescued wood now was just as impossible as it had been in the beginning. Even with the significant work he had already done, he couldn’t find the next move. He eyed the half bottle of Olde Crow and winced. After that morning’s hangover, Jacob didn’t care much for the thought of whiskey. He looked angrily at the piece of wood. Never had such a small sculpt given him this much trouble. He looked again at the whiskey and found it didn’t make him wince this time, so he unscrewed the top. 

His first thought upon waking up was that he was drowning. This wasn’t the case, however, Jacob had simply woken up in his bathtub with the shower running. He thought about climbing out but, realizing the depth of his current hangover, thought the shower might be a better place for the time being. After a little time in the shower, Jacob made coffee and drank about a gallon of water before checking his phone. What he saw there made him almost choke on his drink. He had been certain that he had opened the last of the whiskey to work on the sculpt on Tuesday night, but according to his phone it was now Thursday afternoon. He looked on the counter where he found two more empty bottles of Olde Crow he had no memory of buying. 

Jacob splashed water into his face hoping that it would bring back some sort of rationality. It seemed impossible but the evidence was right there. He had apparently drank through the night, finishing the first bottle of Olde Crow, then the next day purchased two additional bottles and finished them. Even in his wildest college days he had never gone on a 48 hour whiskey binge. What else had he done in that lost time? It was at this moment he remembered the piece of wood and ran into his living room. He was not at all shocked to see that once again, he had been hard at work. 

The wood sculpture was almost completely finished now, which should have brought him some sense of accomplishment. Instead he felt only disgust. The shape the wood had taken was horrid. Surely this could only be something he had sculpted while his mind had been twisted on an alcohol binge, because he couldn’t imagine sculpting anything like this with a sober mind. The wood had been carved down to reveal a vile creature, hunched over itself in a fetal position. It’s clawed talons held a set of four folded legs tight to it’s chest giving it a spider-like appearance. Between those legs he had carved a large erect penis with bizarre symbols carved up its shaft. On its chest was another symbol which was more or less a triangle. 

 The wooden creature had no perceivable neck but a head similar in basic shape to a large toad. Above its fat chin was a grinning mouth lined with hundreds of needle-like teeth. Those teeth must have taken me forever to sculpt by hand, Jacob thought wildly. Above the mouth was nothing but bulging eyes. He wasn’t sure how many, even though he had apparently carved them, but he was sure at least fifteen or twenty. The word that immediately came to Jacob’s mind was Imp. 

As the wooden Imp stared at him with rows of inhuman wooden eyes, Jacob thought that it seemed to be holding back laughter. The carving was not entirely done, as the side of its face was still mostly covered with rough, untouched wood. Jacob found himself with no real urge to finish it. In fact, he felt more like throwing it away, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. It was, he realized with overwhelming gloom, some of his best work.

Jacob spent the night watching mindless television and trying not to think about the nearly finished sculpture. He wanted nothing more than to let himself be as lazy as possible and when he grew tired he opted to save the energy of walking to the bedroom and just pass out on the couch with the television on. 

What should have been a deep, long night’s sleep was interrupted by the bitter, acidic taste of vomit. Jacob choked and spit out a large glob of brown slop onto his couch cushion. There was a circular pile of puke on the floor and a fresh, half empty bottle of Olde Crow on the table. Where the fuck did that come from, Jacob wondered. After the initial shock Jacob realized he was shitfaced. Somehow in his sleep he must have walked to the liquor store, bought more booze and come home. It didn’t make any sense but that was the only explanation. He had been sleep-drinking and woke himself up by puking his guts out. 

Jacob stood up and swayed, finding it hard to keep his balance. Grabbing for the side of the couch for support he noticed that there was already something in his hand, one of his sculpting knives. On the table next to the bottle of whiskey was the Imp sculpture, now just a few strokes from completion. To Jacob it seemed like the thing was grinning even wider now. The world blurred out again and Jacob fell back onto his floor and into an obscure sleep.

Jacob woke up to the sound of water running a thousand miles away. As he drifted back into consciousness the running water grew closer and by the time Jacob was ready to open his eyes he understood it was coming from his own bathroom. He stepped onto the floor and was shocked out of sleep by the sensation of cold wetness beneath his feet. He looked down to see the carpet was soaking wet. Understanding immediately what he had done, Jacob rushed to the bathroom to shut off the sink which had been running for who knows how long. He slammed the nozzle closed and looked over the pooling water from the bathroom out into his bedroom. He noticed that the water had a slight pinkish hue. Just then the nausea took over and Jacob was puking into the bathtub. Desperately dehydrated, and figuring the damage couldn’t possibly get any worse, he turned the sink back on and put his face underneath it, letting cold water run over his face and down his throat. 

Jacob was walking into the living room with phrases like renters insurance and extensive water damage slithering through his thoughts when he saw the thing on his living room table. Suddenly all of those other ideas drifted away like a fine mist. Those things just weren’t important anymore now that he was looking at the disemboweled body of little Robbie Burke sprawled out across his table. 

There are things that can drive the human mind over the edge of sanity into total annihilation, and this is almost what happened to Jacob. Seeing the boy’s body split open with the grinning completed Imp carving, painted in a fresh coat of red, balanced on the boy’s tiny chest brought him immediately to hysteric tears. He thought of the water with the pinkish hue and imagined himself hypnotically washing his bloody hands in the middle of the night. 

“What the fuck have I done?!” Jacob screamed as hard as his whiskey thrashed vocal cords would allow. Then his legs buckled and he collapsed to his floor. In his head, Jacob kept repeating the last thing he said to Robbie. I’ll have something good for you next time, I promise. Amongst the thousand tortured thoughts running through Jacob’s head, he grasped firmly to the idea that Robbie’s eviscerated corpse would haunt him forever. He would fall asleep and see him standing barefoot in his nightmares asking “did you bring something good for me this time?” as his guts leak out from his unzipped stomach.

It has been accounted that drunk drivers are more often to survive car accidents because the alcohol keeps the drunk driver more relaxed when they reach the point of impact. In some ways, this is what happened to Jacob. If he had been in his usual sober, sharpened state of mind he would have surely fallen over that brink into insanity. For now, at least, that impact was softened by the simple fact that he was operating on extreme nutritional deficiencies. 

He didn’t know what to do other than to call someone. The trouble was, he had no idea who to call or what to tell them. All he knew now was there was something happening to him and it was dangerous, so he dialed the first number that popped into his head.

“Jake, good to hear from you. Looking for more pieces already?” Charlie Minch’s voice said from the other end of the line.

“No, no, that’s not it. I’m actually calling about the piece I got last time” 

“No returns now” Charlie chuckled

“Nothing like that. I actually want to know where that piece of wood came from.” There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. Something in that silence made Jacob uneasy.

“Why do you care about a thing like that?” Charlie finally responded.

“I really just need to know, Charlie. Where did it come from?” followed by another long pause.

“Alright, fine, fine, I’ll tell ya. It came from this old church in Rhode Island that burned down. Don’t go telling people that’s where it comes from though, ‘cause when it comes down to rescued wood, let’s just say this one was a secret rescue.” It was Jacob’s turn for a long pause as he started to process this new information.

“What church was it? Jacob demanded.

“I don’t know, it was right outside Exeter and just burned down last year. It was a big thing in the papers I’m sure you can look it up.” Jacob hung up the phone without saying goodbye and on the other end of the call Charlie looked at the phone. “He hung up on me” he marveled, thinking that maybe now he could believe that Jacob had come from New York City after all.

Jacob hadn’t spent five minutes online before he understood how right Charlie had been. Looking up the church had been no problem. It had been fairly big news in Rhode Island, and Jacob was surprised that it hadn’t become national news. He supposed if it were the 1980’s or early 90’s it would have. Small Town Church Burned Down By Its Own Parishioners - a headline with all the classic feel of the Satanic Panic era. 

According to the articles, the small group of church members, who had spent their entire lives as moral God-fearing Christians, turned to violence overnight as they set their own isolated, wooden church ablaze and killed a group of twelve people inside. Two of the arsonists died themselves, caught in the ferocity of their own fire and falling to a burning pile while running from the scene. The surviving arsonists claim they had no choice, that their own congregation had been infiltrated by an obscure Satanic cult. They believed the only way to save their church was to burn it. The website also listed the address of the former House of God, which Jacob scribbled onto a piece of paper before grabbing the bloody Imp sculpture and rushing out the door.

It only took two hours to drive to Exeter, where Jacob arrived shortly after 2AM. He didn’t know what he was doing here but it seemed like the logical place to look for answers. He found the place easily, even though there was nothing left but a charred rectangle in the ground and a section of one wall. How something the size of his piece of rescued wood came out of this mess unharmed, Jacob had no clue. Holding his gargoyle, he walked into the center of the charred rectangle of earth where he suddenly felt very hopeless. He didn’t know what he was hoping to accomplish by even being here, but one idea popped into his head that made a lot of sense, he had lost his mind. He had simply snapped at some point and now here he was, looking for answers i n the rubble of a burned down church. Still, he had made the drive and he didn’t really have any options left.

“Fuck this!” Jacob screamed as he hurled his wooden Imp to the ground. He began to weep as he fell to his knees to a sudden jolt of white pain. He fell backward, grabbing his shin where he had fallen onto a piece of a broken metal bracket, which cut fairly deep into his leg. All the sudden another word rose up in his brain like a distant alien thought from a much saner reality. That word was tetanus. He rubbed his hand over the wound as fresh blood flowed over his fingers.

The pain brought him back to reality and Jacob got to his feet. Whatever he had hoped to find, there was nothing here. He walked over to gather up the loathsome imp carving. Jacob bent down to pick it up with his bloody hand, but upon touching it was knocked back violently by something that felt like an electrical shock. He looked at his hand, which was now turning pink and burning uncontrollably.

A wall of hot air rushed over him, burning his eyes as he brought them back up to look at the Imp carving. It grinned with some newfound intelligence and was pulsing in a way that made Jacob’s head hurt. It wasn’t vibrating in any physical sense, but rather pumping out a series painful oscillating waves of some sort of terrible psychic heat. Jacob could feel the warmth press against his face, but felt it stronger inside his head. Each wave was like a vice grip pressing tighter against his skull. The wooden creature’s grin seemed to grow wider, and Jacob thought he could hear distant laughter. He could see cracks forming across it’s wooden face as if something inside was growing too large and about to burst out. Then it would surely do what all things do after they hatch, they grow.

Looking at his burned hand, Jacob thought about how it had been covered with his blood when he touched the carving. He thought of how the carving reacted to it, like it was electrically charged. He then thought of little Robbie with his blood painted over the Imp’s mouth and face. Once again, certain phrases started invading Jacob’s rushing thoughts. Terms like cult, blood sacrifice and hallowed ground. He recalled the symbols carved across the Imp’s body, especially the peculiar triangle on its chest, and suddenly felt that bringing it back to the old burned out church had been a terrible idea. 

The cracks in the wooden Imp spiderwebbed out as splinters of broken wood exploded from it’s expanding shape. As its shell broke and fell away, Jacob could see it’s many eyes moving underneath its wooden exoskeleton. He marveled at how they all moved and shifted together. When they blinked, it would start with one eye on the outermost edge and quickly waterfall across the other eyes to the opposite side. Like a flock of birds, he thought dreamily, as his mind took it’s last long leap over the edge of human sanity and into a realm far deeper and infinitely darker.