Tales of Jack the Ripper (14 page)

And so we studied as we fought and learned as we died, finding that the servants of the Dark Man are dedicated, and not merely human. Things that slither, scuttle across the dust, and swim in lightless waters heed the call of this ancient numen, who happened across our reality incalculable eons past, before human and mammal, before the birds and thunder lizards and bright things of the sea. He has been with us since before the beginning, and much like us, named a thousand labels. One for each tribe. Trickster, Loki, Lucifer. He isn’t any of these things, yet is all of these things. He is older than the gods of the Israelites and the Babylonians and the Sumerians and more powerful still, yet somehow bound by strictures outside our comprehension, inscrutable to even his followers, who bow low to the riddles. And blessed be these barriers, as without them, none would need my services, because no one would be around. Marbles.

Years we have battled, as the corpses stacked high. I followed their migration, driving them out of Cathar country, before they turned their sights on London. Old black pudding London, gem of the western world.

In between assignments, I enjoyed my stay in The Square Mile. I took tea and the sights, moving through halls of royalty and libertine gutters. Dipping my toes into the Thames, wondering how many skulls were staring back at me. All the while waiting out the stars. Like both sides had always done. The cosmic chess game played on a terrestrial board. I sniffed the air, avoided the food and sampled the humanity around me, which is a relatively painless process. Relatively. By way of my rather unconventional initiation, I was intimately familiar with the flavor of tainted meat, fouled by whatever their side brought through from far-off places and unleashed on our unprepared feedlot.

I had been stationed in London for several uneventful months, when I finally found the scent, which led me into the East End and the warren of brothels that serviced the bent desires of prim English gentlemen of Queen Victoria’s empire. Following instructions taught to them in dreams, the Dark Man’s followers utilized discarded street girls to spread their fungal stain into London’s population. Death from trash, wrapped in a silken doily, this time using humans as the mules instead of fleas like centuries before. Prostitutes were hired and used, servicing clandestine orgies to keep the master plot hidden. Never one at a time, never kidnapped, as that would draw too much attention amongst the working women, and one can never kill the spread of gossip without sacking a city. They took their hosts from off the streets, and deposited spores into vaginas, mouths, eyes, organs, in a closely scrutinized mating ritual guised as fantasy play. Practicing their miscegenation in plain sight, lit by black candle and smoking brazier. After the wounds were washed and bustles retied and before the drugs wore off, the women were set free to spread what they now carried to the thousands of locals and global travelers that took full advantage of the daylight whore trade of fabled London. Catch and release, to grow the herd.

So I cut those mules apart, finding the bad bits and disposing of the disease as only my people know how. Spores were not just left in the womb, but could be anywhere, depending on the vagaries of the copulation, and the physical capabilities of the sire. Behind the cheekbone, spinning in the intestines, buried in the heart. The hosts didn’t need to be quality, just female, and alive long enough for the spores to mature into polyps, and then into something more. Those unfortunate Brick Lane dollymops were just incubators, spider sacks to be sucked dry by the grand scheme of tiny parasites who dreamed of rising tall like their fathers. Prodigies from beyond the stars.

That just wouldn’t do, so I sniffed them out, tracked them down, and did my business before disappearing into the fog.

Upon seeing my handiwork, draped proud and messy, the local authorities assumed rape, as they always do, but those poor drabs had been raped a thousand times before I ever found them. I was sending a message. To Them. Fucking cunts. This wasn’t about murder, this wasn’t about a scandalizing of the local whores. That was just collateral damage. My work was about protection, the careful removal of the next generation of those things that lived in the hills and other forgotten spots now shunned by humanity. The intelligent bacteria from far off Yuggoth, that did terrible and unpredictable things when acquainted with human ingredients.

My conspicuous message did the trick, and the fellowship of the Dark Man uprooted again in the middle of the night, booking passage to America by way of Arkham, with private train portage to Chicago in the middle west of the country. They thought that I was unaware of their plans, and especially their end destination, but just as they have tentacles, I have tendrils, and the concentrated wealth of the very few and very old can buy a mountain of classified information. Money can substitute for numbers on many occasions. Not on the field of battle, per se, but in the close quarters of global commerce, which is all that the world cares about these days anyway. That and their appetite for murder, just so long as it will shuffle out the door in time for brandy and cigars. These church pew sadists probably didn’t deserve my work, but orders are orders, and our papers say keep them safe while giving them a circus. The clowns always draw the eye away from the cracking whips and creaking chains behind the tent flap.

I’ll give them their circus, and do, because it suits my needs, and thwarts those of the Dark Man. It did the trick in London, and has moved the game west, across the frozen sea, following the path taken by so many English three hundred years before. Of course, the circumstances seemed different then, but the roots cause is not dissimilar. The exodus of faith.

A shout goes out, startling me, which is an unfamiliar sensation. I am on edge, and try to blame my seasick stomach. Yet I know something isn’t right about the speed of their departure from London, but my pride hides the truth from me. A force bigger than my art and my kind is at work. I will tell myself that it was what I did on those East End streets that tore them from the city, but I know that I am wrong. Gods help me if I’m startled again. Gods help all of us.

Land is sighted and a crowd moves to the rail. New England off the starboard bow. The ship creaks southward past the lightless blot that makes up queer Innsmouth, bearing west again into the harbor, flanked by Kingsport and Martin’s Beach to each side. We head up the sluggish Miskatonic to Arkham, where a waiting train will take them to the middle of the country and the expo that will bring in a million pilgrims a few years from now. What the docks did for London, this World’s Fair will do for Chicago. Attracting flies of every species from every country on the planet. I will follow my six measured steps behind, and they will not know I am there, until they set up shop again, and I am there. Once again, in the shadows, sniffing the air.

Snow begins to fall, slicking the deck. It’s Christmas time in the dying weeks of 1888, but no one seems to remember. No carolers stroll the streets of Arkham. No bells ring in the church houses.

The ship docks, and I disembark down the gangplank, slipping with my seventh step. A sailor catches me by the arm. “Watch yourself, miss,” he says with a grin, revealing a sporting history in several missing teeth. “Don’t want to drown yourself a foot from shore.”

I just nod, feigning a coquettish blush that hides the burn of anger at my unsteady stride. For stumbling, even slightly, while the black seawater waits and watches below me.

“You arrived from London, then?” the sailor asks while escorting me to the pier, stepping lightly on the plank so as not to disturb my balance.

“Yes,” I say, scanning the wharf.

“Terrible business happening there, with that Jack the Ripper running the streets.”

The name snaps me back to attention. “Indeed, sir. A woman is lucky to make it out alive.”

“Old Bloody Jack wouldn’t like your type, I don’t reckon.”

I shoot him a look.

“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” he sputters. “Just meanin’ that you bein’ such a fine lady and all, not like those brothel slags who got carved up proper.”

I say nothing, as there is nothing to say.

“A bird’s gotta keep her eyes open back home. Never know if Jack’s headin’ your way.”

I can’t help myself. “What if he’s headed
your
way?”

The sailor is about to respond, but swallows his words. He tips his cap and hurries back to his ship. The fear has spread, as the game continues.

I called myself Jack in Londontown, but that’s not who I am. That was just the latest mask, the newest nickname, and just as insipid as the others. And there will be others.

My name is the Truffle Pig, hard trained to root out the fungus. I am your protector, the 42nd of my kind. I was yours truly, and I will be again soon.

So next, Chicago.

Ripperology

Orrin Grey

“It is a blessed condition, believe me.

To be whispered about at street corners.

To live in other people’s dreams, but not to have to be.”

—
Candyman,
screenplay by Bernard Rose

It was my grandfather who taught me the difference between a man and a monster. I remember him saying, “When a man dies, that’s the end of his power. A monster is different. When a monster dies, its power is just beginning.” We were watching Bela Lugosi as Dracula at the time, on the big old black-and-white, wood-panel TV that sat in my grandfather’s living room until the day he died.

He died in his sleep. Nothing terribly dramatic. They said that his heart just stopped. Though he had always seemed old to me, he never seemed weak or sick. In his last years, he often sat very still, staring off at nothing, or at something only he could see. He seemed like a golem, like a figure carved roughly from stone, hard and unyielding.

My grandfather was Jewish, by birth but not by practice. He had survived the Holocaust, had a number tattooed on his wrist and everything, just like in a movie. My mother said that he had been religious when he was a boy, but that the Holocaust had knocked his faith right out of him. I asked him once if he still believed, and he told me, “I believe in the God of Abraham, and that God is a motherfucker.”

My mother and I lived in his house when I was growing up, until he died. When I broke one of his rules, he would whip me with his belt. I can remember the sound that belt made when he took it off; a clear, purposeful sound. I was afraid of him, but I was also enthralled by him. When he told me something, I listened as I never listened to anyone else, before or since.

When he died, my fear and my fascination died with him. I guess he was just a man, after all.

Why do we have a name for the study of Jack the Ripper? Why are men fascinated by him after all these years? Why the books, the movies, all of it? Jack the Ripper killed five people. Just five. And that’s assuming that all were killed by the same hand. Others have killed more, in much more spectacular fashion, before and since. Sawney Bean and his clan, eating people in the Scottish hills of the 15th Century. Just five years after the Ripper murders, H. H. Holmes killed as many as two hundred people in ways a thousand times more fanciful and grotesque than anything the Ripper was ever accused of, but hardly anyone knows his name today. What’s the difference?

It’s really quite simple. With Holmes we have a name, a face, a photograph. We feel that we know him. We can say, “He did these black deeds, but he was still only a man.” The power of the Ripper comes from the fact that he isn’t a man. The hand that held the blade may have belonged to a man, or a woman, or to several people. That isn’t important. It doesn’t matter if the name was Sir William Gull, Lewis Carroll, or Mary Pearcey. That is why the legend of the Ripper is immune to every explanation, every suspect. No theory will ever satisfy, because the Ripper was much more than the hand that held the knife. Something that probably didn’t yet exist at all when the first throat was cut. Something that may not have existed yet even when the last woman was dead. Its first faint stirrings could be felt when the killer was given a name. The heartbeat quickened as letters began to pour into police stations and newspapers, claiming to be from the Ripper. Suddenly, the Ripper was no longer just a killer, but had become something that was alive in every heart, sending letters out not by human agency, but from Hell itself.

No theory, no proof, will ever quench men’s thirst for the Ripper legend, because the Ripper can never be contained by any one suspect, or conspiracy, or narrative. In Madame Tussauds’ Chamber of Horrors he is represented only by a shadow, the last and final word on the Ripper’s legacy.

—from
Every Man Jack
, by Derek Midwinter

Derek’s table was next to mine at the Ghosts and Gangsters Convention in Chicago. During one of the many lulls between people walking by and listlessly fingering our books before moving off without buying a copy or asking for an autograph, he leaned over and introduced himself. “I need a beverage if I’m going to make it through this,” he said. “You watch my table, and I’ll bring you back something?”

He wore a three-piece suit, even though most of the other people aimlessly making the rounds were dressed in black t-shirts and jeans. His hair was long and white, with a beard to match, though he seemed to only be in his energetic fifties. When I shook his hand, I noticed that it felt strangely dry and smooth, like worn leather, like he was wearing an expensive glove. When I notice things like that, I try to imagine myself writing them down in a notebook in my head, so that I’ll remember them later, when I’m back in front of my computer. I picture the words appearing in the notebook, written down by a phantom pen,
like an expensive glove
. It’s my process; it works for me.