Tales of Jack the Ripper (6 page)

As you stare at the new orange paint on the door you wonder what you’re going to say. You have some idea and surely enough money, but will she respond to that? You understand some prostitutes refuse to talk rather than act. You can hardly explain your interest in the Ripper. You’re still wondering when she opens the door.

She must be in her thirties, but her face has aged like an orange and she’s tried to fill in the wrinkles, probably while waiting for you. Her eyelashes are like unwashed black paintbrushes. But she smiles slightly, as if unsure whether you want her to, and then sticks out her tongue at a head craning from next door. “You rang before,” she says, and you nod.

The door slams behind you. Your hand reaches blindly for the latch; you can still leave, she’ll never be able to pursue you. Beneath your tongue a pulse is going wild. If you don’t go through with this now it will be more difficult next time, and you’ll never be rid of the Ripper or of your dreams. You follow her upstairs.

Seeing her from below you find it easy to forget her smile. Her red dress pulls up and her knickers, covered with whorls of colour like the eye of a peacock’s tail, alternately bulge and crease. The hint of guilt you were beginning to feel retreats: her job is to be on show, an object, you need have no compunction. Then you’re at the top of the stairs and in her room.

There are thick red curtains, mauve walls, a crimson bed and telephone, a colour TV, a card from Ibiza and one from Rhyl. Behind a partition you can see pans and knives hanging on hooks in the kitchen area. Then your gaze is wrenched back to her as she says “Go on then, tell me your name, you know mine.”

Of course you don’t. You’re not so stupid as to suppose she would display her real name in the window. You shake your head and try to smile. But the garish thick colours of the room are beginning to weigh on you, and the trapped heat makes your mouth feel dry, so that the smile comes out soured.

“Never mind, you don’t have to,” she says. “What do you want? Want me to wear anything?”

Now you have to speak or the encounter will turn into a grotesque misunderstanding. But your tongue feels as if it’s glued down, while beneath it the flesh is throbbing painfully. You can feel your face prickling and reddening, and rooted in the discomfort behind your teeth a frustrated disgust with the whole situation is growing.

“Are you shy? There’s no need to be,” she says. “If you were really shy you wouldn’t have come at all, would you?” She stares into the mute struggle within your eyes and smiling tentatively again, says “Can’t you talk?”

Yes, you can talk, it’s only a temporary obstruction. And when you shift it you’ll tell her that you’ve come to use her, because that’s what she’s for. An object, that’s what she’s made herself. Inside that crust of makeup there’s nothing. No wonder the Ripper sought them out. You don’t need compassion in a slaughterhouse. You try to control your raw tongue, but only the throbbing beneath it moves.

“I’m sorry, I’m only upsetting you. Never mind, love,” she says. “Nerves are terrible, I know. You sit down and I’ll get you a drink.”

And that’s when you have to act, because your mouth is filling with saliva as if a dam had burst, and your tongue’s still straining to raise itself, and the turgid colours have insinuated themselves into your head like migraine, and tendrils of uneasiness are streaming up from your clogged mouth and matting your brain, and at the core of all this there’s a writhing disgust and fury that this woman should presume to patronize you. You don’t care if you never understand the Ripper so long as you can smash your way out of this trap. You move towards the door, but at the same time your hand is beckoning her, it seems quite independent of you. You haven’t reached the door when she’s in front of you, her mouth open and saying “What?” And you do the only thing that seems, in your blind violent frustration, available to you.

You spit into her open mouth.

For a moment you feel free: Your mouth is clean and your tongue can move as you want it to. The colours have retreated, and she’s just a well-meaning rather sad woman using her talents as best she can. Then you realise what you’ve done. Now your tongue’s free you don’t know what to say. You think perhaps you could explain that you sneezed. Perhaps she’ll accept that, if you apologize. But by this time she’s already begun to scream.

You were so nearly right most of the time. You realised that the stolen portions of Mary Kelly might have been placed in the box as a lure. If only you’d appreciated the implications of this: that the other mutilations were by no means the act of a maniac, but the attempts of a gradually less sane man to conceal the atrocities of what possessed him. Who knows, perhaps it had come from Egypt. He couldn’t have been sure of its existence even when he lured it into the box. Perhaps you’ll be luckier, if that’s luck, although now you can only stand paralysed as the woman screams and screams and falls inertly to the floor, and blood begins to seep from her abdomen. Perhaps you’ll be able to catch it as it emerges, or at least to see your little friend.

Abandon All Flesh

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The chamber of horrors. The cobwebs and the torture instruments and the lights. And Jack. She loves Jack most of all. He stands in a corner, past the mummies and the witches, in his cape and stylish top hat. Black satin. Gloves. Right hand raised, knife gleaming. He sports a wicked smile.

If you stand in front of Jack all you can see is the smile. The angle of the hat wraps the rest of his face in rich shadows. However, if you move to the side and step a bit forward, against the velvet ropes, you can look at him up close.

The quality of the wax sculptures varies. The older ones are good and the newer ones are less detailed. But Jack. Jack is not good, he is
great
. The one who crafted him did so with exquisite detail, labouring over the eyes and the skin, striving to approximate life as much as one can within the confines of a wax mold. The result is a face that seems alert, capable of speech, of drawing a breath. The fingers curl around the knife with true strength, the body tenses, ready to leap down from its dais.

Even the background of this exhibit is flawless. Behind Jack there is a bed, unmade, the sheets splattered with blood. The subdued lighting reveals a brick wall and a shuttered window.

Julia stands in front of Jack and touches the sleeve of his jacket. She is fourteen. During class she draws skulls and dragons in the margins of her notebooks. In the afternoons, she does her homework with more haste than effort. Twice a week she walks the wax museum, pausing before Jack and admiring him.

Her father works for the museum. He spends his days in a cramped, windowless office. Julia brings him his dinner on Mondays and Thursdays. Sometimes she also visits on Fridays, if mother is too preoccupied with the twins. Julia suspects Father does not take his meals at home in an effort to avoid his six children, not because he is too busy to depart from his post.

Julia sets down the tin containers filled with food and goes behind the ropes, standing on her tiptoes to look at Jack. It’s Monday and the museum is closed but Father still goes to the office. It’s Monday and it means there is no one to interrupt her. She removes Jack’s hat. She sets it on her head.

She tilts her head and stares at him. She brushes the knot of his necktie.

Finally, she sets the hat back on his head, jumps down and continues on to Father’s office.

The teacher speaks of the Aztecs. Speaks of sacrifice. Of the
tonacayotl
, the spiritual flesh-hood. We only exist thanks to the sacrifice of the gods. There is a constant cycle of death and rebirth. The Aztecs pierced their body with maguey thorns, drawing blood from their tongues, their ear lobes, their feet, their genitals. Offerings written in blood.

Julia draws a snake. It curls on the page of her notebook, growing in size. She adds details: tiny little crosshatches for the skin, a forked tongue.

The teacher assigns partners for a project. Julia will work with David.

David lives four blocks from Julia’s house. His father owns a small convenience store. Julia has seen the boy there, with a green apron tied around his waist, assembling pyramids made out of soup cans.

David proposes that they consult his leather-bound encyclopedia for the project and Julia agrees. Julia sits on the floor of his living room while he turns the pages. An image of a sacrifice taken from a codex catches her attention and she places her palm upon the page, staring at it.

David turns on the radio. He pours her a glass of soda.

He has no siblings. The music echoes through his apartment without the wailing of a baby punctuating it in the background. She finds that odd.

While she looks at the picture, David’s hand falls upon her knee, brushing the hem of her skirt.

He should not touch her and she should remind him of this. She makes no effort to move the hand away. The touch irritates her, but she is also curious. She wonders whether he will attempt to move his hand higher. The hand remains at her knee and eventually she stands up, tossing the remains of her soda in the kitchen sink.

David walks Julia home a few times. She does nothing to encourage him or to refuse him. They walk together but she feels as though he was at a great distance. Curiosity and indifference mix together.

Twice a week David’s father has him come in to the store to work the cash register. One afternoon, David gives her a grand tour of the premises. He takes her to the storage room and they sit behind a pile of cardboard boxes. He runs a sweaty palm across her knees, touches her. Julia stares at a box filled with tuna cans. She leaves half an hour later, after purchasing milk and coffee for her mother.

In her bed that night she thinks about the tonacayotl. Everything is but one flesh. The world is but an illusion. Omeyocan. The dual space, the dual time. Everything is immaterial, innate, eternal, without beginning or end. We are but the manifestation of the gods, a fleck in the double pupil of Ometeötl. Everything dies, everything is abandoned, everything exists again and remains.

If time and flesh are an illusion…well, then…

Julia lays still upon the bed and relaxes her limbs. She breaths slowly, until her body feels very light. Until her body seems to drip onto the bed, through the bed, down. It sinks. The sounds of the city morph into sounds of carriages and horses. An unusual cold drifts into the room. She hears the patter of the rain upon cobblestones. Her bedroom window seems narrower and fog whirls outside, hiding the buildings and the sky.

A shadow drifts across the room, towards her. He stands in the ghostly light that filters through the yellowed curtains.

She knows his face. She knows his smile.

He lowers the knife, plunging it deep into her stomach.

She screams.

In the morning she wakes to find blood on her thighs. Her period has arrived.

She showers and when she emerges the bathroom is filled with steam. The mirror has clouded. She traces a serpent upon its surface, then wipes it off with the palm of her hand. She observes her reflection.

The bodies of war captives were carefully handled. The locks to the captor, the heart to the Sun, the head skewered onto a skull rack. David’s encyclopedia provides facts, words, pictures, but no knowledge.

Julia sits cross-legged, turning the pages. She asks David for the J volume, asks him if he’s heard about Jack Ripper. David turns the volume of the stereo higher, making the walls of the apartment reverberate.

He rubs her legs and touches her arms. She feels like a doll that is being maneuvered into different poses. Her body feels like it is made of rubber or wax.

She asks David if he believes that all flesh is but an illusion but the music is loud and he isn’t listening.

Julia sinks into the sheets, drowns upon the bed. Her whole body dissolves, ceases to be, is assembled again. She resurfaces in the room she’s seen before—his room—to the scent of incense, the sound of rain upon the streets.

He comes into focus, a blurry figure at first, his face growing clearer. Jack’s eyes narrow when he sees her.

She breaths slowly.

Her mouth is dry.

He nicks her with his knife. He cuts her arm. Tiny, sharp, little cuts.

But she doesn’t mind. This is the art of sacrifice. Thorns and bones and blades to make the body sing.

There’s an anatomical illustration of a man and a woman, their skin removed, that she enjoys looking at. The illustration consists of several layers of acetate that you can flip on or off. Flip and you reveal the muscles. Flip again and see the veins. Flip to see the naked skeleton.

Peeling layers of reality. This is exactly what the Aztecs understood.

David looks at her with a bored expression as she spreads his books on the floor. He has no use for books. Those are his parents’ things, tomes that contain no useful lessons for him.

Julia agrees. The pages cannot hold knowledge. Only the body—fragile, immaterial as it is—can hope to transmit a hint of truths.

David understands only the body. She does not fault him for it. The language of hands, nails, tongue is as honest as any saga upon the printed page.