In 1800s England, a boy named James received a magical jack-in-the-box on Christmas morning. The toy contained a clown — black-and-white striped, bells on his costume, a permanent grin — who called himself Laughing Jack. Jack and James played together through the winter, a genuine friendship between a lonely child and something that had been made specifically for him.
Then James was sent to boarding school. He left Jack in the attic. He was gone for six years.
When James came back, he had been changed by the school in the way that institutions change children — the softness beaten out, the imagination methodically removed. He was cruel in the specific way of someone who learned cruelty from adults and decided it was the correct way to be. He didn't remember Laughing Jack. He found the box in the attic and threw it back without opening it.
Jack waited. This is the important part of the story. Jack waited.
What had been colorful in Jack slowly drained away while James was gone. The stripes turned to grey. The bells lost their tone. The grin remained, because the grin was not an expression — it was a structure.
When Jack emerged again, he was hungry in a way he hadn't been before. The bond with James had sustained him. Without it, he had been emptying for six years into something that still looked like a toy but wasn't.
The neighborhood children began disappearing the spring James came home.
Jack was found eventually — the box, the clown inside, the grin. No one could explain how a mechanism without moving parts had done what it had done. No one wanted to.
The box was burned. The grin was the last thing to go.
They say Jack is still around. Different boxes, different lonely children, different neighborhoods. He's always been made for a specific child. And he always waits, however long it takes, for them to forget him.
That's when he gets hungry.