Wormwood Tales #3: John and Jack
Wormwood Tales are stories written by the Wormwood creative team, designed to tell stories before, after and around our central tale. These stories may contain clues to the mysteries of Wormwood. Or they may not. We’ll never tell.
We hope you enjoy.
John and Jack: A Tale of Twins
By Rob Allspaw
John was sitting in jail. John had been convicted. John was to be executed in two days for a crime he had not committed. John was finally angry at Jack. Jack should be sitting in jail. Jack should have been convicted. Jack should be waiting to be executed in two days time for a crime he did commit. Jack was a murderer.
It started twenty-nine years ago to the day when John and Jack were born. Identical twins so identical you couldn’t tell them apart physically. Physically, that is. Personality was a completely different matter. When you were talking to them you could tell who you were dealing with. As nice as John was, Jack was twice as mean. Kentucky whiskey drunk mean.
John would save stray animals, Jack would hunt them down. John knew what Jack was, but John always thought that he could redeem Jack. John was a good person, and that was the only thing he wanted. Jack thought John was a sap, a sap to be used and taken advantage of. Which is why John was in prison awaiting the hangman’s noose.
John and Jack grew up in the way most boys in a small town grew up. The town they grew up in was north and a bit east of San Francisco. Its name was Wormwood. Needless to say the town had never been a tourist attraction. Not with a name like that. Southern Pacific scrapped its proposed plan for the railroad to run put a stop in town when the town refused to change its name. The railroad argued that nobody would want a rail stop named Wormwood. The stop instead went to Lyonsville, a town just a bit further north. That put the nail in the proverbial coffin and doomed the town to a life of obscurity.
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