On a chilly winter evening in 1986, Dr Jack Cronenberg, eccentric quantum physicist and former Franciscan Monk, was experimenting with teleportation at the Montague Institute for Ethically Questionable Science in Chesterford Research Park.
It was the evening Jack had chosen to secretly carry out the first human teleportation experiment. It was the evening that would change Jack’s life forever.
Unbeknownst to Jack, a lost muntjac found its way into the laboratory through an open window. As Jack entered one of two teleportation pods and initiated the experiment sequence, he failed to see the muntjac wandering into the other pod.
The experiment destroyed the laboratory and fused the DNA of Jack and the muntjac together, creating an unholy mix of man and animal. A manimal. The body of a man, with the head of a muntjac.
Jack stumbled from his damaged teleportation pod. At that moment, a lab assistant investigating an explosion she had heard moments earlier caught sight of Jack and ran away screaming in terror, calling out for security.
Jack tried to call after her, but all that issued from his throat was a horrid wheezy bark. He fled the laboratory through the window that the muntjac had entered and ran across the research park’s open ground, pursued by security guards.
Jack evaded the guards in the surrounding woodland and returned to his home on Gold Street. He quietly rifled through his wardrobe, careful not to wake Marigold, his sleeping fiancé, and found the only bit of clothing that would cover his entire body. His old hooded Franciscan monk habit.
When he put on the old habit, he became “Monk Jack.”
It is said that Monk Jack has lived in the woodlands around Walden ever since, feeding off ivy, bramble, coppice shoots, and flowers and seeds. Over the years, there have been a few unconfirmed sightings of Monk Jack, either in people’s gardens or standing by the roadside at night.
His beloved Marigold is said to have visited him regularly until she passed away in 2008, giving him a man-muntjac child in the 90s.
When Bane wrote the Monk Jack entry in his bestiary in 2009, he said there was evidence of grandchildren in the woodlands. Half-man, half-muntjac children, all wearing a monk’s hooded habit.
Joan Carpenter, October 2022
