The Jigsaw Puzzle

This happened to an elderly lady near Dartmoor in England who lived alone for 15 years after her husband passed away.

An independent person, the lady choose to keep her large Dartmoor home after her husband's sudden death in a car accident, and she managed the upkeep on the place quite well until her last 2 or three years.

In the last years, the old woman gained the help of some servants during the day but she managed well on her own, at night, preferring to be alone.

Her love of puzzles, particularly jigsaw puzzles, saw her through the lonely nights. Perhaps she loved jigsaw puzzles so much because doing jigsaw puzzles was also the activity her husband had loved and participated in, like clockwork - for an hour or two every evening, before his sudden demise. Continuing to engage with the jigsaw puzzles in a routine way probably brought the widow fond memories of her husband and made living in the foggy area of Dartmoor more bearable to her.

One particularly stormy night, the winds were howling when the old woman completed a jisaw puzzle. Typically, she would do 2 or 3 puzzles in an evening before retiring, so after finishing this first puzzle, she reached for another, but found that there were no more new puzzles to be found. This was unusual, as she loved puzzles so much and her routine was so steady with building puzzles that she normally kept a stack around all the time.

As her most steadfast routine was broken by running out of puzzles, the old woman decided it would be best to just go to bed early, but as she got up to do so, she heard a strange noise. It wasn't an unusual noise - just strange and untimely - as she had had no maids at her home for several hours and shouldn't be hearing the sound of the mail slot clink or the thud that ensued right afterward.

In fact, she'd let her maid leave early to be able to get ahead of the storm that was building several hours ago. That, and the fact the the storm was very severe by this point in the evening made the old lady wonder very much about who could possibly be delivering mail in the beastly weather!

She walked to the door, unafraid - more concerned about whoever had delivered a package in the ever-worsening foul weather than she was about her own safety.

When she retrieved the package and unbound the strings of it, she was ever so pleasantly surprised to find that under the package wrapper was a brand new jigsaw puzzle!

No picture was afforded on the box - only the words "JIGSAW PUZZLE," and the old woman set to work putting the puzzle together right away...

She was so happy with her puzzle and started it in the usual way, by determining border pieces and finishing the border, then proceeding to fill the middle in...

After she had worked for an hour or so on the puzzle, she still couldn't tell what the picture in the jigsaw was, but she took a little break for 10 minutes, prepared a tea, then got right back to her puzzle solving.

After a few more minutes, with eyes refreshed, the old woman had almost completed the puzzle and she began - with a disturbing start - to realize what the picture was about.

At the picture's borders, appeared the outlines of a room very much like the one she was sitting in, from the same angle, too...she placed a few more pieces into the middle of the puzzle, then sat up straight, looking around with great nervousness...

The middle of the puzzle showed a woman sitting at a table, her back to the onlookers...

The woman looked exactly like the old woman who loved jigsaw puzzles.

She decided right away that, she didn't like THIS jigsaw puzzle much at all, however, old habits die hard and she still had about 5 pieces of the puzzle to place, in an area just off-centre in the puzzle.

When she placed the final pieces into the puzzle, the picture, in its entirety now, showed the old woman's room, with the old woman's back facing...the last 5 pieces showed a terrible madman standing outside a side-window. He was staring into the room and was holding a very large axe!