Riptide (8 page)

The leaves of the book had yellowed with age. Their edges were brittle, breaking off in powdery fragments. A few starbursts of gray mold mottled the edges of the pages, but the fungus did not appear to have made further inroads.

Carefully she opened the book. On the flyleaf pasted to the inside front cover was a heavy horizontal smear of ink. Something had been written there—an inscription or a signature, perhaps—and then blacked out. Once she got a replacement light fixture for her UV lamp, she might be able to fluoresce the hidden writing.

She turned past the flyleaf. Handwritten notes stretched neatly across the unlined paper. The entries, neither signed nor dated, were written in a neat, scholarly hand, with ornate Victorian flourishes. She estimated there were sixty pages in all. The early pages were missing, having fallen out or been torn loose, and the diary now began in the middle of a sentence.

—
of my strange dreams lately. Dreams of blood. More precisely of women’s blood rushing out from between their legs and bathing my bare hands. Ghastly images. I wake in a fever. I shiver as though with ague. What is worst of all, the women all have the same face. It is Kitty's face. She haunts me.

Elaborate diction, rendered in meticulous copperplate, though with a paucity of punctuation. The writer seemed averse to commas, perhaps a sign of a racing mind.

I have taken to drink in the evenings. Without a touch of spirits, sleep eludes me. I fear to sleep, fear the dreams. The women who are Kitty with their bleeding female parts. It must be the onset of cerebral disease. I see a dread prevision of myself in a lunatic asylum, a jabbering maniac. This I fear above all.

Kitty is to blame. I feel certain of it. She infected my soul, planted an evil germ. Perhaps it is her revenge on me, her curse. But this too is madness.

The dreams have not visited me for some time but now they start again. It is because of the incident last Friday. The fallen woman in the street. She so much resembled Kitty from afar. I was certain it was she. Only when I drew near did I apprehend my mistake.

Yet how could I have been so self-deceived? Kitty is no whore. Whatever else she may be, she is above suspicion in that respect.

Dare not sleep. Perambulate all night. In my rooms at first, but later in the streets. Thrice I've been accosted by harlots. Each time I was briefly persuaded the woman’s face was Kitty's.

Perhaps I should not have broken off with her. Perhaps I should have proceeded with arrangements. She would now be my bride, and I would not be hounded by phantoms and phantasies.

Can not rid myself of these horrors. They harry me incessantly. There is a permanent shudder in my blood, a finger of ice running always along my spine. I live with a perpetual smothering anguish. I fear the night. I endure the day.

Wisp has noted my condition. The fool believes I merely need to quicken my circulation with activities outside the school. He has no inkling of my nocturnal torments.

Difficult to maintain mental concentration on my classes. As always surrounded by fools. Despicable creatures. People speak of the innocence of children but it is not innocence, rather it is the bovine blankness of stockyard animals. I hate them all, their oily faces, their pink hands. They plague me, squealing for the sow’s teats.

He had nicknames for the children.

Vole was especially stupid today, fumbling through his Virgil like an illiterate farm boy. Weed and Splotch did no better.
Arma virumque cano—
Splotch thought it was something about a dog.
Cano
not
canis
you blind fool. Weasel got it right but I cannot abide his obsequious fawning as if to translate a few verses
ex tempore
would earn my eternal gratitude. I did not make Feeble translate at all, there’s no point, even the sport of seeing him fail has grown tedious.

He was a schoolteacher, obviously. All his students seemed to be male. An all-boys school?

The headmaster was the man nicknamed Wisp. He flitted in and out of the entries, a perpetual nuisance to the diarist. But then, everyone was a nuisance to him, “a plague and a contention” as he wrote. The diarist hated everybody—students, employers, colleagues, people he passed on the streets.

His seething hostility perhaps found expression in his bloody dreams. If so, the imagery of violence was intimately bound up in his mind with the symbolism of sex. Possibly it was his struggle to avoid facing the full implications of the dreams that caused them to return night after night. He did not want to admit that he could have fantasies of violence. He did not want to unleash the killer inside.

But the killer was there. The writer needed only to unlock the door to his deepest urges. In the next entry he had found the key.

I know now why I see her face in my dreams and in the streets. It is a message to me, flashed as if by semaphore. An intuition of the truth.

To-night as I walked the streets, I came upon her lodgings. I felt I must see her at once, despite the lateness of the hour. I pounded on the door until a woman answered, Amelia her roommate. I enquired after Kitty. Amelia amazed me by saying Kitty was not at home. She was not expected back at any particular time. No purpose would be served if I were to wait.

What decent woman would be out and about in the dead of night?

I saw it then. I saw her true nature, and how narrowly I had escaped disaster.

She
is
a whore. She walks the streets at night, taking coins from eager customers. She sells herself for the price of a pint, shameless as an alley cat.

I see now that in my heart I always knew. It was why I threw her over. At the time I had no clear conception of my motives. Now all is clear.

She was whoring even then, behind my back. She and Amelia also. Their virginal modesty is a sham. They are as chaste as goats. Pure as ditch water. Clean as soot.

In his paranoia and delusion he had misinterpreted the roommate's understandable reluctance to let him enter. Most likely Kitty had been there all along, and Amelia was simply covering for her. But he couldn't see the obvious truth.

His next entry explored his epiphany. The neat penmanship of earlier passages was gone. Now she saw many of the distinguishing traits of criminal handwriting. Dot grinding, the deep indentation of periods and similar shapes produced by jabbing pen into paper. Variable pressure, as the writer at times allowed his pen to flow lightly, then abruptly bore down. Extreme angularity, the script slanting hard to the right. Harpoons—fishhook-shaped strokes originating well below the baseline.

The stroke analysis suggested an explosive personality, boiling with rage.

I find my mind so crowded with thoughts—strange new linkages of ideas all unifying into a comprehensive overview. I see—everything. The world is a sump of vice and filth, women lowering themselves like beasts, men sharing their degradation--illness and debauchery! Pestilence and pollution! We are fleshly things. What is the female? What gives her this power? The blood in her which is her life. They are called the weaker sex, the gentle sex—a
lie
! If they are so weak why do they rule us with their cunts?

We’re told it is conscience that distinguishes Mankind from lower animals. A sanctimonious lie. Conscience is but a weakness imbued in us by those who would control us. Remember poor Augustine: ’Give me chastity and continence but not yet!’ Conscience places the natural man at war with himself, his hardy spirit made impotent by social doctrine, strait-jacketed. Meantime what of the men who break free? They are made to wear actual strait jackets, confined to hospitals, shut up in cages.

Can not keep it to myself. It is my calling, my mission.

The others won’t know—no one will know. It will be my secret. My private undertaking
ha ha
there’s a good word. I am the undertaker indeed. I will give the penny-a-liners something to write about and the public some better entertainment than Mr Mansfield’s play.

Absurd that a worthless piece of baggage like Kitty should have got me thinking clearly for the first time in my life. Or had I worked it out already without knowing? Like Moliere’s middle-class gentleman who spoke prose without realising, have I been dreaming murders my whole life long all unaware? Those continental alienists are right, the mind is a fascinating instrument, we shall never plumb its depths.

I am laughing. It is all so comical, a fever dream, brain fever as the doctors call it—but I need no doctor. It is humanity that ails and I am to provide the succour.

Whirling thoughts, weird associative leaps, unfocused hostility.

Schizophrenia. That was where the clues pointed. He might have been experiencing his first psychotic break. If so, he’d been no older than his mid-twenties. An Englishman—that much was obvious from Britishisms like
penny-a-liner
, as well as spellings like
succour.

Her great-grandfather, Graham Silence, had immigrated from England to America sometime in the late nineteenth century. And schizophrenia ran in the family.

To-night I do it. There will be no backing down. If I am a man I write my next entry in blood.

She felt a slow chill move through her, as though these words had been whispered in her ear, not set down in writing by a man long dead. She found herself touching the long rope of scar tissue beneath her shirt sleeve.

The next undated entry recorded a kill.

Deed is done. Dead is done. Dead is deed, deed is death—indeed.

My thirsty knife swallowed up her life.

I’m a rhymer and a two-timer.

I make verse—and worse.

And laughter...after!

I must maintain my self-possession. But it is all so hilarious and wonderful. I had not expected—I hadn’t guessed—there was not much blood, the creature was nearly dead before I cut her throat—tilted her head away from me so I wouldn’t be splashed—got none on me, not a drop. Not then. But unsexing her—messy work. Much blood. I drained her dry, every drop. Blood is life. All her power, all her life washing my hands as in my dreams. I left her hollow as a gourd.

So damnably
easy
. I had thought it would be hard but she put up no struggle, merely twitched and shook as I squeezed her neck from behind. A thousand times I’ve imagined what could go wrong, every miscue and disaster but my imaginings were airy foolishness. I could kill a dozen a night and no one would ever spot me. Maybe I will kill a dozen next time. I am so eager to start again, my knife’s so sharp, it cuts so well and makes no sound. Opening her up—like slicing gabardine. I can still feel the warmth of her insides as the folds of flesh parted. Could’ve toasted cheese in that heat. A bit of her—how would she taste? She smelled good inside like stew.

She drew a breath. She realized she was shaking.

Was it poor Kitty he'd murdered, or Amelia? She almost didn’t want to know.

The entry that followed was brief and factual, and it surprised her.

Written up in the papers today. Mary Ann Nichols was her name. Called Polly by friends.

So he hadn't targeted his fiancée or her roommate. He had gone after a stranger.

In the following pages he entertained himself by mocking the police—“such tremendous fools, such splendid jackanapes.”

Halfway through the diary, she turned a page and saw a string of unpunctuated, uncapitalized words, scrawled in a feverish hand.

claimed another whore

Below it lay an irregular rust-colored blot and a second spidery line of script.

fresh out of whitechapel a few drops from my knife

It came together for her like a door slamming. England, Whitechapel, blood, knife, whores.

Jennifer looked up slowly.

1891

The poet Robert Burns was right. The best laid plans o’ mice and men, and all that.

Hare had expected to read of the foreigner’s arrest in the first news accounts of the murder at the East River Hotel. Instead he encountered quite a different story.

The dead woman had been found in the morning by the hotel staff. She was known as a regular patron of the establishment, a certain Carrie Brown.