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.
It was just possible that the diary in her hands was written by Jack the Ripper.
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.
But the man who had lodged with her was not in police custody. He had disappeared. Only his name was known, or at least the name signed in the hotel registry: C. Kniclo.
The police had surmised how Kniclo made his escape. He could not have left via the hotel’s main door, locked as it was after midnight. Apparently he opened a trapdoor in the ceiling of his room, which led to the roof; bloodstains were found on the scuttle. From the roof he descended to the street via a fire escape. Later that night a bloodstained man matching Kniclo’s description appeared in the lobby of the Glenmore Hotel a few blocks away. Told there were no accommodations, he tried to use the lavatory to wash up, but was ejected from the premises.
Kniclo must have regained consciousness only to find himself covered in blood in a room with a murdered woman. Rather then panicking as expected, he had proved distressingly resourceful.
His disappearance was bad enough. Worse was speculation in the press that Kniclo might not be the killer at all. It was suggested that he had left the hotel earlier, and that some other party had attacked Carrie Brown when she was alone in her room. Accordingly, suspicion had fallen on the other guests of the hotel that night, especially those who had lodged on the fifth floor. This included “Mr. Wilson,” the impromptu alias Hare adopted when the hostess, Mary Miniter, filled in the registry.
There was nothing to connect Hare to the name Wilson, but Mary Miniter had gotten a good look at him, and from news accounts it was obvious she was talking to the authorities. She could provide them with a good description. He had admitted to being a Brit. If the steamer records were searched, and the authorities in London were contacted...
The damnably elusive Mr. Kniclo had put a crimp in a Hare’s plans, opening the door to exactly the hysteria he had hoped to avoid.
The headline of the New York Times on April 25 framed the matter concisely.
Choked, Then Mutilated
A Murder Like One of ‘Jack the Ripper’s’ Deeds.
Whitechapel’s Horrors Recorded in an East Side Lodging House.
The Herald, not to be outdone, countered with its own headline.
Ghastly Butchery by a ‘Jack the Ripper’
Murder and Mutilation in Local Whitechapel Almost Identical with the Terrible Work of the Mysterious London Fiend
Strangled First, Then Cut to Pieces
Not only did the press trumpet this alarum, but the police seemed to take the connection to Whitechapel quite seriously. The coroner told reporters that the crime could be the work of “the fiend of London.” There were rumors of transatlantic cables flying between the New York Police Department and New Scotland Yard. A manhunt was underway throughout the city, far surpassing the effort that would be made in any ordinary slaying.
It was ironic. He had come to the States to escape the attention of the authorities, and on his first night he had stirred up a new hornets’ nest. And all for a gray-haired crone who in a saner world would never be mourned. A crone, he learned to his amusement, who was known to her few friends as “Old Shakespeare” for her habit of reciting doggerel.
It was said Old Shakespeare came to New York seeking fame on the stage; failing in this ambition, she gave herself up to drink and debauchery. Well, she occupied the limelight now.
The situation was grave. All thirty-five hundred members of the NYPD had been mobilized to search every hotel and flophouse for anyone who’d lodged at the East River Hotel on the night of April 23.
After leaving the scene of the crime, Hare took a room at a doss-house four blocks away—a safe enough distance, he thought, given the certainty of the blond foreigner’s arrest. But there was no arrest, and he had to leave the doss-house the next day, forfeiting the two bits he’d put down in advance for his second night. He had seen plainclothes detectives going from door to door in the neighborhood.
He relocated outside the Fourth Ward, believing that the dragnet would not extend beyond the precinct. But he had barely settled into a slum boardinghouse called the Anderson Inn when he heard rapping on his door. More police officers, these in uniform. He answered their questions smoothly, claiming to have arrived by ship that very day, but he wasn’t sure he persuaded them. Once they were gone, he went on the run again, surrendering another two bits.
He passed that night in an alley. On the following day he took the ferry to Jersey City, where he found another boardinghouse. There he hoped to be undisturbed, but reports appeared in the press of a possible Jersey City connection to the killing. He had no way to know if the police were on his trail, or if this new investigative avenue was merely a coincidence.
Either way, it was obvious the furor was not diminishing. The chief of police was under mounting pressure. Hundreds of possible “suspects” had been rounded up. It seemed as if every foreigner in the New York area was at risk of arrest. If he were caught up in the general melee, and then identified by that bitch Mary Miniter...
His heart was racing all the time. He could scarcely sleep. He awoke at every stray noise. He expected capture at any moment.
Every day he bought a full complement of newspapers—the Times, the Sun, the World, the Herald, the Tribune, the Broadway Eagle, the Morning Journal. He read and reread every article, obsessively teasing out hidden meanings.
A hunted Hare, he joked grimly to himself. That was what he was.
Matters could not continue down this
road. Disaster lay in sight.
On Monday, April 27, he returned to New York City, retrieved his baggage from the storage locker, and took a taxi to Grand Central Station, where he boarded a New York Central train bound for Chicago. He carried little with him except some clothes, his London diary, and a handful of keepsakes acquired through the years. There was a white handkerchief from Polly Nichols, the first whore gutted by his knife, and a miscellany of items belonging to the others: a small tin of sugar, a comb, a pawn ticket never redeemed, and two brass rings pulled from Annie Chapman’s hand.
The train bore him north through New York state, branching west at Albany and continuing through lush valleys that bristled with the first green shoots of springtime. He passed Syracuse, Buffalo, and Detroit, heading into the nation’s great open spaces, its prairies and grain fields. An endless horizon beckoned. By the time he reached Chicago he was refreshed. The world was made anew, and all things were possible.
Even so, he kept an eye on the news from New York, less from concern than from curiosity. The case had turned amusing, and it appeared a foreigner would pay for the crime after all. Not the blond Swede or German or whatever he had been, but a different foreigner altogether. The prevailing attitude seemed to be that one was as good as another.
The suspicions of the police had fallen on a certain Algerian, Ameer Ben Ali, who had the misfortune of taking room 33, across the hall from the murder site, on the fatal night. Ali was the sort of character one encountered everywhere in dockside slums, a drifter, possibly a small-time hoodlum. It was claimed that a trail of blood led from Carrie Brown’s abattoir to Ali’s room, though more sober reports suggested that the crowd of reporters themselves had tracked the blood across the hallway.
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