Jackboys

The Jackboys are a band of dead lumbermen who appear at the midway during Mike and Kyra’s passage into the past at the Fryeburg Fair. Part ghostly procession and part physical pursuers, they surround the pair and demand that Mike surrender Kyra. Their appearance makes the Fair’s altered time more than an uncanny setting: the dead carry an unresolved history of violence into the present of the scene, and Mike must choose whether to let that history claim a child again.

Appearance and Arrival

The Jackboys emerge from Freak Alley in a group of seven men dressed in lumbermen’s clothes. Four look faded, white, and ghostly, almost no more substantial than daguerreotypes; the other three seem real within the strange world surrounding the Fair. The difference is one of degree, not of life: Mike understands that all of them are dead, though some appear more present than others.

At their center is an old man in a faded blue Union Army cap. Mike recognizes his eyes from the man who had watched him over an oxygen mask, but the figure is not simply a returned version of Max Devore. When he addresses Mike as an Irishman and reaches for Kyra, his face is subtly different from Max’s: gaunter in the cheeks, with brighter blue eyes. The resemblance links the apparition to the Devore family without making it an ordinary encounter with Max himself.

The Midway Blockade

The men spread across the midway, hand to hand and boot to boot, cutting off the route back to the arch and The Street. Mike considers whether he could break through the pale figures, wondering if they have any more substance than the presence that had thumped the cellar insulation. The question offers no safe answer: their apparent insubstantiality does not cancel the danger posed by the men who look more alive.

The old man orders Mike to hand Kyra over, then says that the group will take her if he refuses. Mike refuses. The dead advance, and Mike recognizes one of the lumbermen as Kenny Auster—the man whose family history includes the drowning of his baby brother beneath a pump by his father. Mike’s recognition turns the approaching figures into more than an anonymous mob: their line connects the Fair’s threat to a history of violence passed through descendants.

The Demand for Kyra

The Jackboys press their demand as a bargain. One tells Mike that he and the woman can have more children, insisting that Kyra is young and that they can have as many more as they want. The offer treats her as replaceable, reducing her to the possibility of future children rather than acknowledging her as the particular child Mike is carrying. It also exposes the coercion beneath the men’s insistence that surrendering her is all Mike has to do.

Mike is momentarily hypnotized by the confrontation, and Kyra cries out against his shirt that something smells. The smell reaches him too: spoiled meat, swamp gas, burst tissue, and simmering guts. The old man is the most vividly alive-looking of the dead, with a forceful magnetism reminiscent of his great-grandson, but the insects feeding in his nostrils and at the corners of his eyes disclose his actual condition. The Jackboys’ near-presence is therefore not a return to life; it is a spectral appearance whose apparent vitality cannot conceal decay.

Flight and Narrative Significance

As the Jackboys reach for Kyra, other ghosts begin emerging from broken windows and red-brick chimneys. The threat is no longer confined to the line blocking the midway: the surroundings themselves release more dead figures. Holding Kyra, Mike runs toward the Ghost House, while Jared Devore shouts after him and urges the others to catch them. Kyra’s stuffed dog remains clutched in one hand, its soft contact against Mike’s cheek accompanying their flight through the Fair.

The Jackboys make the past an active antagonist rather than a distant backdrop. Their ranks vary in apparent solidity, but their shared condition as the dead binds the procession together; their family and historical connections, meanwhile, give the supernatural threat a human genealogy. In demanding Kyra and pursuing Mike when he refuses, they turn the protection of one child into a direct resistance to the violence embodied by their return. The scene ends with flight rather than a defeat of the Jackboys: Mike and Kyra reach for the Ghost House as the dead close in behind them.