Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper

by David Barnett

  “I do hope Miss Maria doesn’t get any strange ideas about going out alone.… You will go with her tomorrow, Mr. Bent?”

  Bent stretched his legs and waggled his toes at the fire blazing in the hearth of the parlor. “’Course I will. But you ain’t seen her in action, Sally. It’s easy to forget that she ain’t a flesh-and-blood girl, but you ought to see her punch.… She laid one of them horrible Children of Heqet flat out at the Embankment, and old Louis Cockayne, God rest his soul, nearly had his jaw broken by her. She can look after herself.”

  Mrs. Cadwallader puttered around the parlor, turning up the gas lamps. Bent watched her for a moment and patted the sofa next to him. “Why don’t you clock off, Sally? Come and sit down.”

  She sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t be so forward, Mr. Bent. It’s not appropriate for you to speak to me with such familiarity.”

  “Oh, tosh, Sally,” said Bent. “Come on, we’re both adults. We’ve both been around the block.” He paused then said, “We’re both lonely.”

  She raised an eyebrow in horror. “Oh, Mr. Bent! All this … the flowers, the baths … Oh, Lord. I do believe you’re courting me!”

  He shrugged. “What of it, Sally? You’re a damned handsome woman. I have needs, Sally. We both do.”

  “Needs, Mr. Bent? I thought you sated your hunger at—oh. Oh, now it all becomes clear. You think I don’t read the newspapers, Mr. Bent? Think I don’t know that those harlots you frequent in the East End have withdrawn their services?”

  Bent put his hand on his chest. “Sally, no, it’s not that—”

  She laid a frosty gaze upon him. “I believe it most certainly is, Mr. Bent. I have never been so insulted in all my life. I think I will, as you suggested, clock off now. I will be in the study, listening to some music. I trust you can see to your own needs, whatever they may be, for the rest of the evening. There is food in the pantry and drink in the icebox. I’m sure you can sort yourself out.”

  Mrs. Cadwallader slammed the door to the parlor shut as she left. Bent stared at the flames in the grate for a long moment, until the thunderous strains of Wagner struck up from the study, and then murmured, “That went well.”

  * * *

  I’m going to die without even knowing my own name.

  He struggled, of course, and gave a good account of himself, taking down at least two of the thugs with his well-placed blows. But there were more of them, and the weight of their numbers pressed on him, pulling the noose tight. One of them tossed the rope up and over the lamppost in one fluid movement. The windows of the dingy tenements looked down on him, blankly. If there was anyone watching from behind the shutters, they didn’t offer any help.

  “Say your prayers to whatever god you fancy,” said the one called Henry.

  But a sharp whistle, sounding three times, put any peacemaking on hold.

  “Shit, the coppers,” spat one of the mob.

  “Run!” yelled Henry, and the rope went slack. He pulled it loose and over his head, and without really knowing why, fled in the opposite direction from the approaching footsteps and the scattering thugs.

  He didn’t stop until he was back on the street where he’d met the girl, ducking into a tight alley and peering out from the shadows at the two policemen who had paused in the small square, shining their lanterns up at the bodies that hung like grisly Christmas baubles from the gas lamps.

  Why had he run from the police? He had done nothing wrong. He was the victim of that fracas. But something they had said … Jack the Ripper. The memory bobbed tantalizingly around, just out of reach, like an apple in a barrel at a children’s party. They had thought him to be Jack the Ripper. But he couldn’t remember who Jack the Ripper was, or guess why Henry and his thugs would have thought he had anything to do with it.

  His heart leaped as he spied, across the square and beyond the knot of policemen, an unmistakable shape framed in lamplight. That girl, Lottie. He felt a surge of something, desire and … more. He felt fiercely protective of her, felt as though his heart would melt at the mere sight of her. Was this love at first sight? He seemed to know her, deep inside, but she had showed no recognition of him.

  And then another figure loomed behind her, thick and black, even its head, as though it was covered by a tight hood or cowl. And the dull lamplight glinted off something in its hand. A blade.

  Suddenly, he remembered all about Jack the Ripper.

  “He’s there!” he yelled. The policemen looked up in unison, squinting through the darkness at him. He pointed frantically to the alley far behind them. “Over there! Jack the Ripper!”

  Incredibly, they didn’t turn to pursue the villain, but began to lumber toward him, blowing their whistles and raising their lanterns. He ducked back into the alley. Damn. Stupid, stupid idiots. Jack the Ripper was getting away, and now they were pursuing him. He ran back into the darkness, tripping over a metal dustbin and sending foul-smelling rubbish spilling across the alley. He picked himself up and ran on, skidding on the icy metal circle of a manhole cover, before he came up tight against a solid brick wall.

  A dead end. The whistles of the policemen drew nearer, and he saw flashes from their lanterns at the end of the alley.

  “Who’s down there? Come out, now. No funny business,” called one.

  He could hear other voices, as well. Where the street had been as quiet as the grave before, people had seemingly arrived from nowhere.

  “Who are the coppers after?” shouted a man.

  “Only Jack the bleeding Ripper!” answered a woman.

  The wall was straight and bare and hanging with sheets of ice. He would never get up it. And somehow he trusted the police about as much as he would put himself at the mercy of Henry and his mob again.

  Before him, in the ground, was the manhole cover. If he couldn’t climb up …

  The footsteps were shuffling cautiously down the alley, behind the lantern light, by the time his frozen fingers finally pried the iron disc from its housing. He scraped it back and glanced into the utter darkness below. There was the sound of sluggish water and a stench so foul as to wake the dead. But the police and the mob that had assembled were picking over the rubbish he had disturbed earlier. He slung his legs over and his feet found the rungs of an iron ladder. Quickly and quietly he let himself down into the underworld, dragging the manhole cover back over him and shutting off even the meager light from above.

  It is only when you are in complete darkness, he thought, that you miss so much, even the tiniest flame.

  The odor was almost more than he could bear. Carefully he began to descend the ladder. Perhaps he would only have to wait here moments while the police search moved on. But even as he thought it, the ladder pulled away from the curved wall with a sickening lurch and a shower of brick-dust. He felt himself hanging in air for a moment, before his weight brought down the ladder and he fell heavily to a hard, filth-slicked surface, banging his head and losing consciousness.

  * * *

  Across the square, the girl watched the commotion with interest. Lottie. She rolled the name around her tongue. Lottie. It wasn’t right. Almost, but not quite. The police were there. She half-thought that she should go to the officers, ask them for help. But help for what? She was nothing but a common prostitute! Why should she need the help of the police?

  A common prostitute. Again, that didn’t quite feel right. Besides, weren’t prostitutes supposed to earn money? She didn’t have a penny in her purse. And she was hungry. Lottie didn’t remember much before Wednesday, when she’d run, run, run from that place where the mad people had locked her in a room and brought doctors and all sorts of others to look at her. Rich men, mainly, and she’d tried to come on to all of them, but none had given her the time of day.

  She counted off on her fingers. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday … four nights she’d been out on the streets, so that made today Sunday. She suddenly thought she should have gone to church, and that made her upset. She pushed it away. Common prostit
utes didn’t get upset. They were hard as nails, tough as old boots. Still, she was hungry and cold. And nobody had done with her what prostitutes do for money. People were scared. And it occurred to her, distantly, that this thing that prostitutes do … she wasn’t quite sure what it was, exactly. But that was silly, wasn’t it? She was a common prostitute. Of course she must know.

  She had to get some money soon. She’d slept in doorways, glad of her thick skirts and jacket, but felt as though she might be getting a chill. She’d found a place giving soup out to homeless wretches a few streets away, and been back every day. But it hadn’t been there today, probably because it was Sunday.

  Lottie felt like someone was watching her. She looked around sharply, but she couldn’t see anyone. But when she turned back to the square there was suddenly a face up against her that made her shriek.

  “’Ello, darling,” said the man. He had a big head that put Lottie in mind of a potato, his mouth full of black stumps of teeth.

  She looked him up and down. A common sort. But then, so was she. “Hello yourself.”

  She tried not to flinch as the man took a pinch of her hair in his dirty fingers. “Pretty little miss, ain’t you?”

  “I get by. What’s your name?”

  “Henry. Henry Savage. What do they call you?”

  “Lottie,” she said. And even as she uttered the next words, she felt suddenly sick to her stomach. “Do you want to do the prostitute thing with me, Henry Savage? For money?”

  He grinned, his warm breath washing over her. “You don’t half talk funny.”

  He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back into the shadows. “Do the prostitute thing, eh, Lottie?”

  And suddenly he was grasping at her skirts and pushing himself against her. She wanted to cry out, but that wasn’t what common prostitutes did, so she let him force his knee between her legs and part them roughly, while his hands crawled over her, grasping at her bosom.

  “Please,” she said, suddenly very afraid. “I don’t—”

  “Get your hand down there, Lottie,” he grunted, pushing his face into her neck. “Get a good hold of that, it’s all right, I’m nearly hard, just need a little…”

  “Henry Savage, you stick that thing in that girl and I’ll chop it off and shove it up your arse.”

  The man was off her quicker than a dog out of a trap, or so she supposed, not being sure if she’d ever seen such a thing. Behind him was a woman with a face as mean as the tarnished hatchet she was carrying, her hair piled up on top of her head, the cut of her tattered frock showing more flesh than Lottie had ever seen before. She was flanked by three other women.

  “Lizzie,” said the man, suddenly as meek as a kitten. “I wasn’t going to pay her, ’onest.”

  “So you was going to rape her then, Henry Savage?” said the woman, crossing her arms.

  “I wasn’t going to do nothing,” he said miserably. “It’s just … for God’s sake, Lizzie, I never had a wife. I never needed one. I always got what I wanted at your house and besides, look at me, who’d marry a face like that?” He dropped his voice to a wheedling tone unbecoming, Lottie thought, of such a big man. “I’m desperate for a fuck, Lizzie.”

  “Well fuck off and catch Jack the Ripper, and you can have one on the house,” she sneered. “Balls, I’ll do you myself if you catch him. Now skedaddle.”

  As Henry buttoned himself up and sidled out of the alley, the woman he’d called Lizzie looked Lottie up and down. Eventually she asked, “And what’s your game, pet?”

  Lottie held her head high, though she was as terrified of this woman as she had been of Henry Savage. “I’m a common prostitute, just plying my trade. Who are you?”

  There was a collective intake of breath from the three women, and their leader put her face close. “I’m Lizzie fucking Strutter, my love, and you are pissing on my manor. I don’t know what you’re up to, but I think you and me need a friendly little chat.”

  INTERMEDIO: A CESSPIT OF SUCH VILENESS AND ROT

  He knew this much: He hated London. Detested it. Felt trapped, imprisoned, caged. Yes, the walls of his cell were distant; he could barely walk from the north one to the south in a single day. But it was no less a prison for that. It was only when he slipped and sank into what he had now come to always refer to as the “intermedio” that he felt somewhat unshackled, as though he had given his jailers the slip, or they were turning a blind eye to his actions, just for a few hours.

  He hated London because he was submerged in it, and had been for so long. He had almost forgotten that any other place existed, could almost believe that the reports he read in the newspapers of far-off lands were mere fiction. It was as though London were the only place in the world, and sometimes that seemed the only explanation for its power, reach, and influence. How could a cesspit of such vileness and rot really rule the world?

  He slipped back into the shadows to watch the grimy little passion play unfolding in front of him. The big man had been about to ravish the young woman, but now four other, harder-looking women had turned up to spoil his fun.

  It was all rather entertaining, in a somewhat squalid way, for him and those like him. Those who traveled by the tunnel of night, those who clothed themselves in darkness.

  He had come close, tonight, but the jagged teeth of his instruments had yet to taste blood. His black soul puckered as though blindly demanding to be fed. He turned away from the little scene at the end of the alley and carefully made his way back through the darkness, the intermedio heightening his senses, taking him unerringly onward in search of prey.

  He passed out from the mouth of the alley to a brightly lit thoroughfare he would have to cross to melt into the night again. A long, soot-blackened brick wall curved to the right; on it, someone had painted foot-high white letters, a message in broad, blocky brushstrokes.

  COPPERS GET JACKY T. RIPER OR WE WILL & WE DONT CARE WHO WE KILLS WILE WE DUZ IT.

  He knew he was taking a risk walking the streets of Whitechapel while the vigilante mobs prowled. He had already seen their handiwork, the bodies strung up from the gas lampposts, the freezing weather keeping them fresh and preserved, their faces frozen in the final, horrified expressions of claimed innocents.

  I’m not him, they would have screamed, as men like that ravisher in the alley punched them in the stomach and slipped a noose over their necks. I’m not Jack the Ripper!

  Of course you are not, he thought to himself as he crossed the filth-strewn road without incident and disappeared into the yawning maw of another alley, the lights in the street behind him quickly fading from view. Of course you are not Jack the Ripper.

  Up ahead, he heard the scuff of heel on cobble, a quick step that could only belong to a woman.

  There is only one Jack the Ripper.

  Without breaking stride, he quietly unclipped his bag.

  10

  TAIT AND LYALL

  He awoke in darkness—close, choking darkness that stank to high heaven. Water lapped at his boots, and his head roared with sharp, stabbing agony. For a moment he thought something heavy lay across him, so tight was his chest, so trapped and immobile did he feel. Something bobbed up from the blackness within him, a dim memory of being carried, as a child, out of tunnels into the sunlight and gentle wash of the sea against a pebbly shore. Then he realized it was fear and panic that kept him frozen to the damp, slimy bricks.

  Your fear is a lie.

  He tried to latch on to the thought, but it popped like a bubble on the surface of a black lake. He tried to sit up, and something skittered on the stone beside him, claws scrabbling for purchase and a heavy black shape sliding into the sluggish river that flowed by. A rat, a big one. His eyes became more accustomed to the gloom, because it was not total blackness that surrounded him. High above he could see a tiny crescent of white light that allowed a grayness to dilute the darkness. He rubbed his head. Of course. The manhole cover, in the alley where he had fled the mob. He must be in the sewers.r />
  With some effort, because panic still hung around him like a pall of smoke, and his head—he must have hit it when he fell—ached terribly, he rose to a crouch. Around him were the petrified remains of the ladder he had begun to descend … last night? That must be daylight above, so he must have knocked himself unconscious and lain there, among the rats and filth, for hours. The ladder had rusted almost to crumbs, collapsing with his weight and bringing him down onto the narrow ledge that ran on either side of the stream of effluent. He wrinkled his nose. There was no way up; the wall was too smooth and slimy for him to climb. But there must be another manhole, a ladder in better condition, farther along the curved tunnel.

  As he considered the crescent of light tantalizingly out of reach, there was more chattering behind him. More rats, and he didn’t have so much as a stick to defend himself. He had heard—though he didn’t recall where, of course—that London’s sewers were home to huge, vicious vermin which, when they gathered into packs, could kill a man. Just like the streets above.

  But it was not a rat that chattered behind him. He turned to see, on the opposite ledge, a tiny figure with pinprick eyes chewing thoughtfully on a scrap of food, perhaps a nut.

  It was a monkey.

  The thing kept its eyes, which reflected the dim light most curiously, upon him as it tossed the fragments of its snack into the stinking water, and despite the stench he felt his stomach rumble. When had he last eaten? The monkey cocked its black and white head and scratched its arm absently. It wore a faded little red waistcoat, braided with thick gold thread, and its tail slapped, serpentlike, on the stone ledge as though it were impatient to see what he would do next.

  The monkey suddenly turned its head toward the darkness. He hadn’t heard anything, but … yes, there it was. A faint noise … singing? And the palest of lights, illuminating the brickwork of the curving sewer tunnel. Someone was coming.

  When he looked back, the monkey had gone. But whoever was down with him was coming closer, because he heard clearer the sonorous voice, even made out the words as they drifted through the cold, fetid air.