Jacob (The Hitchhiker)

Jacob is the antagonist in the Horowitz Horror story The Hitchhiker. Jacob is the mentally ill son of a couple who had just lost their other son on a train accident. Jacob says he never liked his brother but it was bad he had been killed. Jacob tried to argue against picking up the hitchhiker, because he thought the man was a killer. His dad picked up the man, who said he was a gardener, and Jacob was alarmed because they were near the asylum center in Suffolk. But Jacob had to sit near the man and he saw what he thought was blood on the man's sleeve. The man said his name was Rellik and that he was from Norfolk, but Jacob thought this was increasingly odd. When Jacob believed Rellik mouthed "I'm going to kill you" to him and when he wrote Rellik on the window, revealing killer backward, Jacob saw the man reach into his pocket for a cigarette but he believed it was a knife, so Jacob pushed the man in the chest and kicked him repeatedly until he was thrown out the door and got run over by a truck.

Then Jacob was shown to be a patient of the Suffolk asylum and his parents took him back there because he had seemed normal. Jacob was shown to have a passion for murder and had in fact thrown his brother onto the tracks. But Jacob believed everyone was lying and he was innocent.