ORDER OF THE ROANOKE HUNTERS
ALM No.93, September 2026
SHORT STORIES
Do you know the story of the Lost Colony of Roanoke? Well, I thought I did. That was until I had received an old trunk; arrived at my flat with no name or return address, just a brief note from my grandfather, Walter. At the time, I dismissed it as an old family heirloom. Little did I know I had just received the most important piece of family history in my life, the package that changed everything.
1939. That was the year everything in my life changed.
Since then, I have learned that true monsters do actually exist, history is riddled with lies, and the world is a far more dangerous place than anyone had ever realized. If you’re still reading this, consider it a warning. What follows may have you questioning everything you’ve ever known about this world. Oh, and I discovered that I come from royalty, but my grandfather thoroughly mucked it up for the rest of us. As if that weren’t enough, I also learned that my grandfather, Walter Sickert, was none other than the infamous Ripper of Whitechapel.
I stared at the delivery note for what felt like hours.
“To Lucius. The best grandson anyone could ask for.”
The words made no sense at all. I had never even met my grandfather. The trunk was covered in odd symbols and ritualistic runes that made me feel very uneasy. I could smell the cedar varnish as I carried it up to my loft. I hardly wanted to touch it if I’m being honest with myself, but I had to do something with it. Every minute that box was sitting in my living aea, it made the whole room feel dark. As if it was supposed to deter who ever tried to mess about with it.
When I finally opened the old, weathered trunk, my heart sank as a chill widened my eyes in wonder and disbelief. Folded neatly inside was an aged black long coat, a tattered top hat, stacks of worn files, and some old, deteriorating scrolls bound with fading leather cord. I took everything and spread it out in front of me. Searching every corner of the old cedar trunk, I was convinced the box was empty.
I was reading through some of the agent’s case files when I heard a whisper coming from inside the trunk. It was so faint I nearly didn’t hear it. I had begun to question if exhaustion had taken hold, playing tricks on me. Slowly, I knelt down beside it to lift the lid on the creaky wooden box. The old, rusted hinges squeaked as I opened the trunk. I had to see what was mucking about in there. A soft blue light was shimmering from under the reddish cedar flooring. I felt my pulse quicken and my chest was getting tighter with every shallow breath. Running my fingers along the edges, I eventually ran across a hidden switch. A quiet click echoed off of my loft walls before a concealed shifted open slightly. Laying in a blue velvet cloth was two shimmering silver daggers with runes etched into the blades. Every instinct told me to touch them. Every ounce of common sense told me to step away, but the further away I stepped, the louder the whisper was getting.
Uneasy and overwhelmed, I closed my grandfather’s trunk, locked up the loft, and decided whatever secrets were held in that room could wait until morning. The following day, I was awakened by a sharp knock at the door. I answered it almost immediately, but again, the hallway stood empty. Only a folded note wedged into the door frame.
“There is an evil coming… You need to know the truth of your lineage…”
No signature. No explanation.
A chill crept into my bones as I read the message. Whoever had delivered that trunk knew where I lived and wanted to ensure that I opened it. After a breakfast of coffee and beans, I climbed up to my loft and spread some files and scrolls across my floor. Hours were slipping by as I read through them almost religiously. That was when I uncovered the truth about Roanoke Island… and why my grandfather really killed those women in Whitechapel.
The first scroll I examined was almost crumbling from age. The parchment was brittle, and the ink starting to fade. The text was barely visible, but legible enough to make out under candlelight. Some were stained from God knows what. Most of them were partly burnt, covered in dry, three-hundred-year-old blood. According to the first pages, the scroll was dictated in the late sixteenth century by John White himself. Like most, I knew of the historically accepted story of Mr. John White and his colony on the island of Roanoke. According to these records, it was nowhere near historically accurate.
When John White and his settlers arrived in the new world during the summer of 1587, they believed they had discovered a new frontier of untouched land. Unknowingly, the had settled in a territory of monstrous creatures disguised with human faces. At first, the colony was welcomed warmly. The natives smiled, traded with the colonists, and even helped establish peace with the other surrounding tribes. Yet the scroll claimed that the previous two English settlements had not only failed but had been slaughtered. This time round was different. Rather than wage war, the natives had a goal and chose deception instead. The lived among the settlers. They earned their trust. Then they just waited.
Eventually, John had uncovered their horrifying intentions. The creatures planned to stow away on the colony’s next supply voyage to England, where they would awaken ancient beings that bring the world to its knees. The scrolls only referred to them as The Ancients. Even the text on the parchment was darker around those words as if the scribe himself was hesitant while writing.
“God forgive me. They wear our faces yet cast no reflection in the still water.”
After seeing a woman by shore having no reflection, and a few days later noticing a few of the men had glowing eyes and big teeth, John knew the rumors were true; he had no other choice. Nearly two weeks ahead of schedule, he set sail for London’s docks to gather supplies and reinforcements. John left with good, quick intentions, but fate had other plans for him. Spain’s war, relentless storms, and torturous pirates delayed his return for three agonizing years. When John had finally stepped ashore on Roanoke Island in 1590, he found not a colony, but a graveyard. Only silence. Homes had been burned to ash; structures lay broken and abandoned. His family was gone… There was no laughter. No voices. Only death and destruction. As John searched desperately through the ruins, uncovering journals and blood stained writings describing a war between the colonists and the native creatures; a brutal, violent conflict that had erupted soon after John’s disappearance.
John searched the island desperately for what felt like days, walking through the ruin of his life’s work. Looking for any survivors, or even possible evidence of where they had gone. The parchment writings he had discovered described a brutal, violent war. The war of Roanoke had only lasted less than nine months, and ninety percent of both populations were obliterated and wiped out. According to the records John found, only 12 colonists survived and escaped aboard a raft back to the docks of London… Though, none of them were ever heard from or seen ever again.
“It has been many months since John disappeared in the night, and there are few of us left. I fear there will be nothing left when he returns. A group of us have devised a plan. We are giving up, going back to England.”
His search ended abruptly when he stumbled upon a perfectly encircled clearing. The only part of the colony that was clear of any destruction; still green and lushes. At its center stood a great oak tree bearing only a single carved word: CROATOAN. The silence washed over the entire island. As a soft whistle of the breeze blew through the big oak tree, John traced the carved letters with his index finger. He could feel the darkness behind it, the anguish of the colony, the pain of his people. John sailed back to London with nothing but despair in his heart and hatred in his eyes for the ones that took his world. From that hatred, The Order of the Roanoke Hunters was born.
As the months, year, even the decades were flooding past, John travelled the world over again hunting the supernatural and even recruiting for the order he had created to avenge his family. According to the journal of John White, Europe was far more infested with monsters than he previously encountered in the Americas. In John’s life, he had hunted vampires, werewolves, witches, zombies, and even a few of the ancients that woke in 1589. Years passed by, and John kept hunting endlessly as if the scourge would never come to an end. Before age, or worse, could claim John and his compatriots, they chose legacies; those willing to fight and follow in the footsteps in hunting and ending the supernatural threat. I set the scroll aside and took a deep breath. It was the most wicket, yet sorrowful story I had ever read. After a moment, I continued to rummage through my grandfather’s belongings until I found myself within his journal and case files. That was when I found the amazing truth. Not only did I discover that Walter was in fact Jack the Ripper, but there was a special reason he was never caught. In order to keep the local bobbies off their trail and throw off the MET, the Order used a simple espionage trick. The “Jack” moniker had been established by the Order as a shared identity. There was indeed not one Jack, but five. After combing through my grandfather’s journal and the Order’s records, I believe I uncovered the true story.
Remember when I mentioned my grandfather came from royalty but ruined it? Well, his story began the night he fled the capital. Walter despised the way his family treated him, but he hated the way they spoke of the people of England even more. One night his father caught him giving out food to the poor, food that was meant for the royal family. Walter’s father was enraged, and his family disgusted by his actions. For nearly nine years, he wandered the streets of London, homeless, surviving on whatever scraps he could find. One journal entry reads:
“Most nights I lay awake, hungry, dreaming of a better life. Yet I still think of the night I left capital… Strangely enough, I still have no regrets.”
On a bitterly cold night, as snow drifted through the streets of London, Walter attempted to steal a string of pearls from an eccentric woman’s purse. Unfortunately, he was caught almost immediately by some bobbies. As the officers dragged him through the streets of London to the jail, Walter found some humor in the situation and managed a sly grin.
“At least I won’t freeze to death tonight.” He scoffed while being tossed into a cell. “Much appreciated for the roof and bed by the way!”
My grandfather was both arrested and recruited by the Order within the same week. He was only twenty-three years old; the age at which the path of his destiny began. Walter had spent only two days in jail before a man name Samuel Butcher arrived to bail him out. With no explanation, Samuel gathered Walter’s belongings and escorted him toward a black carriage waiting at the entrance. Walter described Samuel as a mountain of a man. A giant with broad shoulders, thick arms, a scarred face, and a stare that looked like he had been through some serious hell.
“Um… Thank you Mr. Butcher, but I think I’ll be on my way now.” Walter said
Walter wrote that Samuel practically shoved him into the carriage when he tried to walk away. Mr. Butcher just stared and gave a grin before starting ahead. The two men road in silence for nearly an hour before arriving at an old church that was hidden deep in the back of beyond of Whitechapel. That was when Walter started to experience the extraordinary. Without warning, the ground beneath shifted, and the scraping, groaning stone began to descend like some sort of mechanical lift. When it finally came to a halt, Walter found himself standing in an underground temple hidden under the church crypts. Despite the astonishing architecture and the beauty of the hanging spires, Walter barely noticed any of it at first. He was too distracted by the four grown men balancing upside down on their heads.
“Training?” I muttered to myself as I turned the journal page.
“Stained glass, odd statues, relics, even a few skulls with enormous teeth were in view as I got off the lift. The place was phenomenal. As Mr. Butcher gave me the grand tour, I noticed a weapons rack with swords made of pure silver, ancient relics, and an entire collection of ancient books of lore.”
That night, Walter decided to stay. He learned that Samuel served as the Order’s attendant, meaning he trained the hunters, prepared their meals, maintained the temple, and drove for them. Later that evening, Samuel built a mellow bonfire, and Walter spent hours drinking rum and brandy; speaking with the four other hunters.
“They all spoke of extraordinary stories.” My grandfather wrote in one journal entry.
“At first, I believed my life had been tragic enough on its own. Yet the stories belonging to the other agents were somehow even darker. Whether it was the face, arms, or chest, all four of them had battle scars. Not to mention the horrors and scars in their psyche.”
Michael, Aaron, Francis, and Montague all lived fantastical lives, even before they were recruited. As they drank on warm brandy and recollected on old hunts and life before, they each told of the day they were recruited. Mr. Butcher even recalled of the day he went to acquire Montague. Though cackling hysterically, he managed to tell the story of how he had to fish out Montague from a small locker at Oxford University. Montague Druitt was a student of law and a junior barrister at Oxford; he thought Samuel was a member of a criminal gang that came after him for putting his leader in prison. As soon as he saw Samuel’s giant stature and scarred face, Montague ran and stuffed himself in a locker like a can of sardines. An entry from Samuel’s journal reads:
“I had never seen anything like it in all my years with the Order, it was the funniest thing I’ve ever encountered. And he really got himself stuck in there… it took fifteen minutes just to wrench him out of that little metal box.”
Just like Walter, Michael and Francis were also homeless and recruited right out of jail. They were the next to tell their tales that night and let me say the stories were amazing. Both were skilled in different forms of magiks and ritualistic runes. Michael joked about the time he was attacked on a recon mission to a wolf den; he was mauled, bitten by a werewolf and had the scarred pectoral to prove it. Francis was the one that saved his life and drew the venom out of his body so he wouldn’t gain the moon’s curse, but Michael likes to give him hell and joke about how badly his magic did because there is still a horrendous scar.
As the night went on, Walter also learned of each of their titles, skills, and what they did for the Order. Michael Ostrog, the first of the hunters, was Jack the Mercenary. He was a gunner that had special runes carved in his weapons and bullets that could kill anything, he even carved runes into the other’s weapons, including the dagger blades my grandfather used. Aaron Kosminski was Shadow Jack, the Order’s shadow ninja and werewolf specialist. He used a pure silver ninjato with runes in the blade. Francis Tumblety was Warlock Jack, the mage and clinical doctor for the team. Francis carried a dark oak warlock staff that was made by Mr. Butcher and had a big blue stone at the top that was rune carved by Michael. Montague Druitt was Sir Jack, the crucifix knight. But for Walter’s title, he was deemed Jack the Ripper. He would be trained in all forms of hunting and would have trait skills of the entire Order; skills of stealth and mysticism, and weapons of silver. As the fire embers smoldered, everybody had retired to the bunks for the night. Before fading to sleep, Walter wrote in his journal that night.
“When I asked about my moniker, Sam got sort of serious for a moment. He looked at me deep in my eyes as if he was starring right into my soul. Once you take the Order’s Roanoke oath, you no longer have a name when in the field… From tonight on, you are Jack, you are The Ripper. It’s all he said before going back to treating his brandy. It sent chills down my spine, yet it also inspired and woke something in me.”
Unfortunately, and unknowingly to the Order, a new evil had wandered into the city looking for fun and food. According to the files, Walter’s first serious supernatural threat was a female vampire named Mary Lisa La’Flur, though the Order deemed her “Bloody Mary.” For nearly a week, Mary and her gang stalked the streets of London before Samuel Butcher finally caught wind of the killings. Bloody Mary had disguised her girls as private escorts, and according to the records, they were exceptionally effective at their jobs. Before the Order intervened, the vampires had already slaughtered six men. From what I could gather, Walter was already a capable street brawler during his years living homeless, so his hand-to-hand training progressed quickly. My grandfather had only been part of the Order for a week before being sent on his first mission, and according to his journal, it terrified him.
“Tonight is my first mission with the lads and… I can’t deny that I’m very nervous. My hands have been shaking all morning since Sam informed us of the situation.”
As I continued reading through Walter’s journals, and the Order’s debrief files, I uncovered what I now believe to be the true story behind Jack the Ripper. In truth, the man was no monster. He was a bloody hero; though I doubt history would ever remember him as such. From what I gathered, Walter’s first “victim” was Mary Ann Nichols, a vampire turned by Bloody Mary herself. At the time, Walter had barely received any formal weapons training. Samuel had simply handed him a silver dagger etched with anti-demonic runes and wished him luck. One shakily scribbled journal entry made me laugh.
“Trust me, lad. This dagger will do just the trick for now, he says. A knife was all the man offered me before sending me after a supernatural monster. I was beginning to think they had gone mad… or perhaps I had.”
From what I’ve read in these files, Walter and the others hunted down one vampire nearly every night. Escort or not, they wanted every scrap of information they could gather to locate Mary. Despite being the newest member of the Order, Walter seemed to excel at nearly everything. His first slay wasn’t even one of Mary’s escorts, merely a fledgling that was turned by accident when Mary’s gang were feeding. Walter shook tremendously trying to push his dagger in to the vampire’s chest. The vampire gave a slight petty grin thinking Walter would not be able to do it. He thought wrong; all that smile did was piss him off. With a hard scoff, Walter pierced its heart with a swift shove of the blade, but not before gaining the information the team was after. Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, and Catherine Eddowes were the next vampires slain by the Ripper. By the time he tracked down and killed Mary Jane Kelly, the last of Bloody Mary’s escorts, he had become a fully trained hunter. With each hunt, my grandfather’s instincts seemed to sharpen more and more, but with each victory only came more sleepless nights. Walter was no longer the scared thief that Mr. Butcher had recruited all those months ago.
Unfortunately for the Jacks, Mary Lisa had begun hearing whispers about the Order’s crusade, and she was furious. In Bloody Mary’s file it states that she could somehow sense it, the deaths of those she had sired. Tired of the anguish, she launched an attack of her own. The next evening when dusk fell and twilight washed over London; Mary had started ravishing her way through the streets. She had caused so much chaos and bloodshed it could be sensed by creatures of all for miles. People screaming and running for their lives, protecting their children. But most of all, people were dropping. So many people had been drained, eaten, or turned that the streets ran red. Street after street, entire neighborhoods of hundreds ravished. Within twelve hours a great percent of London’s population was slaughtered by an army of creatures. Vampires, werewolves, and zombies were seemingly everywhere. If it wasn’t for the so-called “serial murderers”, history could’ve unfolded far differently.
The battle that followed was brutal. Silver blades and monstrous teeth clashing. Heads and hearts being ripped from bodies, both human and monster. Smoke and flame filled the air as the church bells still rang every hour. In the end, the hunters stood victorious. Not proud. Not triumphant. Only exhausted. Though Mary’s reign had finally come to an end, the Order now faced an entirely different threat. The MET had launched a massive investigation into the Whitechapel murders. And unfortunately for Walter and the others… there were now five prime suspects.
I closed the journal and case files. I had to take a step away and take this all in. This was only the beginning; I had only scratched the surface of this amazing world my grandfather had stumbled upon. I closed the panel in the bottom of the trunk with the blades secured. I folded and packed everything nice and neat back into the box before lugging it to the empty corner of my loft next to my father’s ashes.
I climbed down to my kitchen for a cup of tea before heading off to sleep. I had read and researched all day. It was already approaching 11:00pm, and all I wanted to do after a day like that was lay in my bed and fade away to the dull sounds of the radio. Yeah, like that was going to happen. As soon as I let my eye lids close, there was a strike at my door.
“Oh, bloody hell. Who could that be at this time o’ night?” I said through my teeth with a sigh.
I sauntered over to my sink to set my teacup down. As I walked toward the door to check who it was, I started to shout out.
“Oi! Whoever’s out there, this had better be good. I only just finished my cupper. What the hell could you possibly want?”
I swung the door open to an empty hallway yet again. This time round, I caught a glimpse of the tail of a rather nice trench coat. I quickly started down the hall after the man. Every corner that I’d turn, I would only ever catch sight of his loafer shoes or his coat. After running throughout the entire building chasing this mystery man who kept leaving cryptic messages for me, I could have sworn I had finally caught up. I rounded the corner directly after him, but he had vanished. Gone just like that, with no trace. After looking about for a moment, I climbed the stairs back up to my flat. I was just about to walk through the door when I stepped on a piece of parchment that had fell out of the door jam.
“Another note?” I said out loud as I stepped through the framing.
“The Order never truly died out, Lucius. We need you. We know you have them…”
I set the note on the stand next to my bed and leaned back to stare at blank ceiling. After my thoughts had stopped racing, I closed my eyes and started to fade away like I had been wanting all day. I had just dozed off when I heard it. There it was again; that whispering I heard that morning coming from the daggers. My eyes shot open as I gave a deep sigh.
“Guess my night is just getting started…”
Or was it just the beginning of fate giving me a brand-new path…
Zaxery (Zachary) Bruce is a twenty-six-year-old debut writer and first year student at Full Sail University. He will be graduating in 2028 with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing. Zax will be joining the entertainment industry and has a goal career in screen writing, and producing. He has a great passion for speculative fiction and building sci-fi worlds of immersive hidden history, supernatural thrillers, heroes and villains, and even old classic western fiction. He enjoys watching all sorts of television genres, writing comic book stories, and cooking for his friends. Zaxery also likes to write short stories in his free time to get his name published and out there in the professional writing world. He is very excited to have his first publication with Adelaide Magazine and will be showing more of his talent as time goes on. Zax can’t wait to show readers his fantastical stories.
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