The Jacket

(Author's Note: 'The Jacket' is both an epilogue to 'The Visitor', and a prologue to 'The Confession'.)

Among the few things in this house

to survive the roaring fire,
A varsity football jacket;
Typical sports guy attire.

The owner of the article 
Killed dozens of innocent souls
To sate his twisted appetites,
Then buried them in holes.

The jacket is a symbol
Of a man of authority,
Who used and abused that power, 
To fuel his killing spree.

Among the burned possessions
In the killer's dungeon space;
Curled and blackened photographs
Of each girl's smiling face.

He let them wear the jacket 
As a loving souvenir,
Took the photo, kept it
And then dragged them screaming, here.

Each body found within the woods
was rightly identified,
But for one: there was a grave,
But no one was inside.

The jacket now, it has been said
Is haunted through and through,
Thirty-seven murdered girls
Who wore the jacket too.

The killer was dismembered,
By wild animals devoured;
Nothing left but chunks of teeth
In all the forest scoured.

Investigation carries on;
the house will be rightly destroyed,
The smell alone was well enough 
to doom it to the void. 

And so concludes the grisly tale, 
which brings us to our task;
This jacket is for auction, 
fifty dollars, may I ask?

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- © Jackson Cambridge, 2015.