Marty Jacobs
Posted by Phantomwing
Date Posted: 07/15/2008

I dumped the firewood I had collected into the pile with all of the rest. It was getting late and I couldn’t wait for dinner. Then I noticed that the light from our tent was still on, but Sally’s silhouette was gone. I looked in the tent and it was empty. I circled the tent, searching for her and I found her body lying on the floor. It was horribly mauled. A man stood over her with a meat-hook. He saw me and said “Compliments of Marty Jacobs,” before vanishing. I threw up and fainted.

* * *
Dr. Linda Dent sighed as her patient now slept. She hated performing hypnosis but as a psychiatrist, she needed to be able to venture deep into the minds of someone who had long gone. Dr. Dent worked the local mental institution in Merbrah. This was the seventh case this month. Seven people each had slipped into a state of shock and paranoia because of the loss of a person near to them. The strange part was that each victim was convinced that a man named Marty Jacobs was the cause of every death and had left the patient alive as a warning. Apparently, he used a meat-hook to gut each target. Ordinarily, this would have been investigated, yet forensics showed that each death was a natural death. Sally Sanders, wife to the man Dr. Dent was just attending too, had been found to be mauled to death by a wounded grizzly bear (which was later found and shot.) Another casualty had been killed in a car accident and another had a fatal accident at a pie factory. Out of plain curiosity, she ran multiple searches for people with the name of Marty Jacobs. The only matches included a man who died sixty years ago, and was a dairy farmer and a man who lived over two hundred years ago, as a town clerk.

It was getting late, and Dr. Dent wanted to get home. As she headed for the exit, Brett, the janitor, stopped her. “Oh…..Miss Dent…..er…Doctor…that is….”. For the past three months, he had been trying to work up the courage to talk to the pretty doctor. Everyone, even the inmates, knew about it. Everyone except for her. “So…are how are you?”
“Fine thank-you Brett.”
“And what have you been working on?”
“Well, lately there has been a string of cases lately, in which surviving relatives of deceased persons have gone into hysterics.”
“Really?”
“ They all seem to belief that the victim was murdered by a man named Marty Jacobs.”
“So?”
“No such man exists. No one has an alias like this either. Besides, each body has been examined thoroughly and the real causes of death have been found to be natural, not homicide.”
“But who is Marty Jacobs?”
“Marty Jacobs is a figment of the imagination, probably created by the subconscious mind to help each patient cope with their losses.”
“But more than one person shares this delusion right? Isn’t that a bit strange?”
“ Well, that is the part that puzzles me.”
Dr. Linda Dent looked at her watched. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to be getting home. It’s late.”
Brett blushed. “Oh, sorry for keeping you then. Uh…goodbye.”


Later, Dr. Dent pulled up at a petrol station. As she began filling her tank, she wondered how soon it would be until another case was presented to her. She looked at the people surrounding her. Any one of them could be her next patient. The short, dumpy elderly lady? The tall skinny man with red hair at the pump opposite her? The tired looking woman carrying her baby in her arms, walking towards her car? Or would it be someone else entirely? As she went to pay, Dent’s mobile rang.
“Hello?”
“Linda, it’s me, Betty,” came the strained, shaky voice of her sister. “Dad just had a bad accident in the shed. Mum is in a really bad state. She’s in shock and keeps babbling about some guy called Marty Jacobs. I already called an ambulance but you should get her as quick as you can.”

As Linda pulled up in the driveway of her parents’ house, she saw the flashing red light of the ambulance coming around the corner, accompanied by the wailing siren. As she walked up to the house, a hand clamped down on her shoulder. She turned, and saw a shadowy figure, holding something metallic which glinted in the street light.
“Don’t worry doctor,” said the figure in a harsh, mocking tone, “Marty Jacobs is just a figment of the imagination, probably a delusion created by the subconscious to help cope with their loss.”
Dr. Dent screamed and everything went black for her…….

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