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    The Soulless Daughter
    The Soulless Daughter
    The Soulless Daughter
    Ebook148 pages1 hour

    The Soulless Daughter

    By Jon Jacks

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    About this ebook

    If you ever saw Keyri joyously caring for her parents’ farm animals, you’d think she was the most kind-hearted soul you’d ever come across. And yet when the villagers saw she had neither heart nor soul, but was made of wood, linen, and clockwork cogs, they fearfully chased her away. To be like them, to be accepted, she needs to find a soul. But souls aren’t so easily acquired.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJon Jacks
    Release dateOct 7, 2023
    ISBN9798215903858
    The Soulless Daughter
    Author

    Jon Jacks

    While working in London as, first, an advertising Creative Director (the title in the U.S. is wildly different; the role involves both creating and overseeing all the creative work in an agency, meaning you're second only to the Chairman/President) and then a screenwriter for Hollywood and TV, I moved out to an incredibly ancient house in the countryside. On the day we moved out, my then three-year-old daughter (my son was yet to be born) was entranced by the new house, but also upset that we had left behind all that was familiar to her. So, very quickly, my wife Julie and I laid out rugs and comfortable chairs around the huge fireplace so that it looked and felt more like our London home. We then left my daughter quietly reading a book while we went to the kitchen to prepare something to eat. Around fifteen minutes later, my daughter came into the kitchen, saying that she felt much better now 'after talking to the boy'. 'Boy?' we asked. 'What boy?' 'The little boy; he's been talking to me on the sofa while you were in here.' We rushed into the room, looking around. There wasn't any boy there of course. 'There isn't any little boy here,' we said. 'Of course,' my daughter replied. 'He told me he wasn't alive anymore. He lived here a long time ago.' A child's wild imagination? Well, that's what we thought at the time; but there were other strange things, other strange presences (but not really frightening ones) that happened over the years that made me think otherwise. And so I began to write the kind of stories that, well, are just a little unbelievable.

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      Book preview

      The Soulless Daughter - Jon Jacks

      Chapter 1

      The hens Keyri cared for had no way of knowing how unusual she was.

      To them, she naturally appeared much like any other girl her age.

      Much like any human, in fact.

      The beauty of her singing was lost on them.

      Her tumbling, moon-toned hair was of no interest at all, as far as they were concerned.

      Her glossy skin wasn’t registered as being rather too flawlessly white.

      So, even if they had noticed the odd, unusually awkward move Keyri made as she threw the seeds amongst them, it would have meant nothing to them.

      Maybe if they’d been hunters rather than prey they might have sensed that Keyri lacked the warmth and smell of a blood-coursed flesh.

      For Keyri’s actions were powered wholly through the regimented whirring of a whole mass of wooden cogs and a spring-loaded clockwork.

      Her skin was of finely spun and woven linen, wrapped about an elaborate wickerwork.

      Her hair had been originally shorn from a handsome mare.

      Where her ability to sing came from, however, no one knew.

      No, not even her father and mother, who – discovering they were unable to have children – had created her through an ingenious merging of their skills and talents.

      And as for her ability to think; why, that was surely quite miraculous.

      *

      From a distance, Keyri could easily pass for a young, beautiful girl

      And so, as long as any strangers passing by their farm kept to the tracks, her parents remained unconcerned that their secret might be discovered.

      She had to be hastily hidden away from any visiting neighbour, however; otherwise, questions would soon be asked as people began to wonder why their daughter was never seen down in the village. Or, indeed, seen anywhere else that other children might gather, such as the prettier parts of the woodland and riverside.

      Keyri led a lonely life yet remained wholly unaware and unconcerned by this. She’d never known any other kind of life, or experienced anything that might have made her realise she was missing out on so many of life’s pleasures.

      She found all the enjoyment she needed, anyway, in her observations of the wonders of the life that blossomed each spring about her, the gorgeousness of a dawn or sunset, and the glistening beauty of the moon, casting its silvery glow upon a silkily rippling lake.

      And then, of course, there were also all the farm animals and the creatures of the field, woods, and sky to marvel at.

      There was so much to see, so much to discover and learn about!

      Naturally, there were many things that left her bewildered.

      Her fingers, for some reason she couldn’t fathom, were nowhere near as nimble as her mother’s, especially when it came to spinning and weaving

      She also feared the heat of her father’s furnace, even though she watched awe-struck as he forged his metals into the most elaborately wrought shapes. She hated, too, the rasp of his saws as he worked freshly hewn branches into contraptions he’d sell on to other, less-ingenious farmers.

      Yet she delighted in all other things on the farm. And the hens and cows in turn seemed to appreciate her good nature too.

      So she would have been very surprised indeed to hear that anyone who accidentally came across her would undoubtedly regard her entirely differently.

      For what was she to them but a fearfully unnatural device, a work of some devil that was only fit to be immediately consigned to a bonfire’s flames?

      *

      Bearing in mind the fear and loathing that Keyri might engender in anyone who caught sight of her, her father always took especially attentive care that they were secreted away whenever her daily winding was due.

      Her winding key was kept in a drawer in her bedroom, next to her bed. Here, also, was the oil required every now and again to ensure the spring and the metallic parts were kept smoothly running. There was also beeswax and varnish for the woodwork.

      Keyri’s mother took responsibility for repairs to her linen skin and her body work of cleverly woven willow, elder, and rowan branches. This, too, was undertaken in the utmost privacy.

      Keyri regarded all this as being perfectly normal, of course.

      She’d never seen either of her parents being wound up or repaired with material taken from the loom, yet she simply assumed that all this – like her own maintenance – must be conducted in private.

      She wasn’t aware, too, that her parents successfully hid from her their need – just like the animals – for water and food. They ate only sparingly, and mostly on a night.

      For it was on a night when Keyri’s clockwork slowed almost abruptly to a complete halt, plunging her into a sleep in which she lay entirely motionless.

      With her switching off so completely, it might well have been claimed that she spent her nights in a state akin to death, suffering a sleep devoid of even dreams.

      Certainly, her parents believed this must surely be the case.

      How could it be otherwise, once her clockwork had fully wound down?

      Yet they were wrong.

      For each night Keyri roamed though ultimately bewildering dreams just like any one of us; dreams that made little sense at all, if any attempt were made to recall and dissect them in any way.

      Though, of course, the most inexplicable aspect of Keyri’s dreams was that she dreamt at all.

      *

      Chapter 2

      Where did Keyri go to in her dreams?

      Why, to every place and everywhere, just as we all do when traveling through the realm of dreams.

      There are no limits in such a world.

      Yet the most curious dreams of all were those in which she never left the farm.

      In which she saw a cot, flanked by two moon-white wraiths.

      Or looked out across the farthest borders of her father’s fields, seeing a wooden hut there, a place that lay silently waiting, as if alive.

      There was a third dream that she suffered repeatedly.

      It was also the most hurtful.

      For she dreamt that she had sisters.

      Three younger sisters.

      And yet, in that curiously inexplicable way in which all dreams work, they had all come before her.

      *

      It wasn’t just dreams that puzzled Keyri.

      She couldn’t understand why the farm animals, along with the birds and the countless woodland creatures, were so surprisingly different from her and her parents.

      They required water and food to survive.

      When injured, it took a great deal of caring to restore them to health.

      Sometimes they just stopped moving, and couldn’t be revived at all. There was no keyhole, no key.

      When this happened, her parents insisted that they would take care of the poor creature, for there really wasn’t anything more that Keyri could do to help.

      She’d seen too, of course, that the hens laid eggs that often led to chickens erupting from them: chickens that in their turn would become other hens, for the older birds aged, tired, and eventually stopped working.

      The cows had calves without requiring eggs, yet otherwise the process seemed to Keyri to be much as it was for the hens.

      And in this way at least, Keyri realised, humans were similar to the animals.

      For, albeit from a distance, Keyri had seen that humans too had smaller, younger children. Children who gradually grew in size. And there were men and women who looked to her to be even older than her mother and father.

      Keyri couldn’t remember what it had been like when she was a younger child.

      That, obviously, was unfortunately just the way it was: memories understandably only lasted so long before fading away.

      For what use, after all, would there be in reminiscing over such unimportant things?

      Still, she often thought, it would have been nice to remember a few things from when she was smaller. She must have been more in wonder of the world than ever when she was younger!

      Her parents had no trouble in recalling events going much further back into their past than she was capable of.

      When she was older, she was sure, her memory would improve.

      *

      Keyri’s parents were quite aware that her recollections must be frustratingly incomplete.

      How could it be otherwise, when she’d suddenly been brought to life by the turning of a key?

      The wonder of it all, rather, was that a construct of wickerwork and linen could recall anything at all!

      Whenever they found themselves reminiscing about past events in their own lives, Keyri’s parents actually took great care to restrict what they appeared to remember when speaking in front of her, fearing they might unintentionally reveal things best left unsaid.

      What good would it do to discuss the

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