A Study in Red - The Secret Journal of Jack the Ripper

by kindels

  Whatever the answers that would surely reveal themselves as I delved ever deeper into the journal, I knew that the case of The Jack the Ripper murders was probably far more complex than many scholars and Ripperologists had previously thought. Was I the first to think that perhaps The Ripper was as much a victim of his own crimes as those he so brutally murdered and mutilated? The purists would probably think me as insane as he undoubtedly was to even suggest such a thing! Yet, that feeling wouldn't leave me; it grew with every passing minute, with almost every word I read. I couldn't, wouldn't, ever try to excuse his crimes, oh no, but, in light of what I was learning about his state of mind, the terrible diseases of the brain with which I was becoming more and more sure he was afflicted, the more I could perhaps begin to understand what lay behind the crimes of Jack the Ripper.

  16th September 1888

  Vigilantes in the streets! Jews, butchers, cobblers, all accused, ha! What next? Shall I join the throng, like before? Scream at the police, at the poor unlucky butcher's boy as he passes in the street wearing his blood-stained leather apron?

  I grow tired of this game, my head hurts again, I feel dizzy, expectation crowds my thoughts, and I think the public too have expectations of me. They wait to see when I shall strike again. They want to see and hear of my work. They pretend to fear my flashing blade, yet deep beneath they want to hear and read of bloody murder. They won't admit it, oh no, they won't, but I know it's what they want. They want me to rip the next whore, but I'll keep them waiting, bide my time, the next whore won't bleed until I'm ready, then the river of red will flow once more, and I'll stain the streets with the blood of the foul-tainted whores. The crowds are too much; one cannot go about one's business without being accosted by the great unwashed, seeking retribution, ha, as if dead whores need revenging. Let them die, let them bleed, let them cower from my cold, hard steel as it slices through their warm sticky flesh, I want to see the horror on a whore's face as she gurgles and gags and chokes on the blood in her throat. The last one was too quick, too easy, let the next one die a little slower, yes, and let me taste her fear, foul despicable whore! I shall go on a journey, where? Tomorrow I'll decide. Let London sweat, let the whores wait, just a little longer, but wait, shall I take my flashing blades upon this journey? Shall I let the streets of some new town run red, there are whores everywhere are there not, and do they not deserve to die also? My head hurts so much, I must try to sleep, tomorrow will be soon enough to decide such weighty questions. I feel sick, I need to sleep, to close my eyes, to rest.

  His words seemed to reverberate inside my head. His chilling, matter-of fact references to the gory blood-letting of his killings, his apparent amusement at the public reaction to his deeds, and his obvious distaste for the crowds thronging the streets of London seeking the killer, as though they, not he, were the cause of public nuisance. He was becoming exasperated with the mob, with their need to find him, to exact revenge for the murders. After all, to his mind the victims; those poor unfortunate women who had fallen into the lowest of professions were barely human, and so undeserving of public sympathy. They were after all 'only whores', and, as he'd previously written in an earlier entry, he was surprised to know that whores actually had names. They were nothing, little more than the 'raw material' for his 'work'. As an artist utilizes his canvas, and applies his paints diligently with his brushes, so those poor women were his canvases, his knives, his brushes, and the resulting carnage he wrought with those blades became in his mind his masterpieces of creation, his 'work'.

  Even more unnerving, as I sat reading this diabolical text in the dead of night, was his stated desire to watch the face and hear the horrendous 'gurgling and gagging' of his next victim as her life ebbed away. Killing another human being in cold blood was one thing, but to take pleasure from his victims last agonizing painful moments was truly callous in the extreme. Despite his obvious psychological disorders I felt a positive sense of revulsion for the man who had written these terrible words, who had already killed three times, at least, and was destined to kill again, even more horrifically.

  I shuddered, and realized the lateness of the hour. My eyes were heavy, and I'd reached that point of half-sleep-half-waking state, when the eyes start to lose their ability to focus, the words on the page begin to dance in a macabre ballet, and the brain begins to play mind tricks upon the unwary. Perhaps that was why I now felt as though the words on that awful page were changing shape, lengthening and swelling, swaying in front of me until they seemed to be oozing and dripping with small rivulets of blood, slowly trickling down the page, towards my fingers where they held tightly to the journal.

  I quickly shook myself into wakefulness, and simultaneously dropped the journal onto the desk as though it were red hot in my hand. I realised I was far, far too tired to be reading at this time of night. The disturbance in my mind caused by my earlier attempt to sleep, and the ensuing nightmares that had accompanied the effort were nothing compared to the painful fears and visions that now crowded into my mind, as though someone had opened a floodgate of irrationality in some deep corner of my psyche. This was worse than the dreams that come with sleep, for now I was in that awful place where reality and fantasy are too closely entwined to separate. Pictures of dark, shadowy figures flitted across my vision, though my eyes seemed unable to focus, it was like trying to see through a fog, a red, impenetrable fog, cloying, sticky, and the blood that formed the fog was itself filled with a life of its own, screaming at me in despair and agony!

  I was awake, the room was normal, there was nothing to fear, and then, the strange dancing letters of the journal filled my head again, the fog grew ever thicker, and now, instead of the screams from within the dense cloud that gathered round me, the screams I heard were real, they were mine!

  My head hit the desk with a dull thud. I had collapsed in a fit of nervous tension, and the impact of my forehead on the hard wooden surface brought me back to reality. I was shaking and, I was ashamed to admit, almost in tears. The whole process of my journey through the journal was becoming a trial for which I appeared to be singularly unprepared.

  I needed Sarah. I wasn't one to feel lonely at the absence of my wife for a few days. It was quite usual for her to drive off to the Cotswolds from time to time to spend weekends or even a week with her sister. I had never felt the need to spend every minute of my life with her, nor she with me. We were in love, and that was enough. The time we were together was as precious and as special as any couple could hope for, and the occasional absence by Sarah had never bothered me until now. I'd never felt more afraid or lonely in my entire life than now. What was happening to me? I wanted to pick up the telephone, call her right now in the middle of the night and tell her to come home, tell her how much I missed and needed her…but I couldn't. How would I have been able to make her understand that I was afraid of some papers my father had left me, that I was so very frightened by the fact I was sitting here alone in the dead of night reading the words of Jack the Ripper, and afraid of every word in that awful journal? How could I explain to my wife that it was as if he were there with me, watching me, making sure I didn't miss a page, a single word?

  I closed my eyes, leaned back in the chair, (I was afraid to go back up to bed), and I allowed a sudden, deep, dark sleep to overtake me. This time I slept without dreaming, or, if I did dream, they were those dreams that come in the deepest sleep, the ones you can never remember dreaming.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Morning of the Second Day

  I awoke, stiff and aching, feeling drawn and extremely tired. My body felt as if I hadn't slept at all, though a quick glance at the clock showed me it was just before seven, a fact confirmed by the rays of weak early morning sunlight invading the study through the window. I'd probably slept for about two and a half to three hours. The wind and rain of the night before had gone, the house was still and quiet, and for a moment or two, I felt relatively calm, almost my normal self.

  Then, the realizatio
n hit me. I remembered exactly why I was here, sitting in my study chair, stiff and aching from head to foot. How could I have forgotten, even for a moment? There it was, the journal, on the desk in front of me, exactly as I'd left it. In the light of day it looked fairly innocent and innocuous, and yet, as I sat staring at it, it almost felt to me as if there was a malevolence about the thing. It almost seemed to me to be throbbing slightly, as though it held a life of its own. Was there a malicious spirit at work somewhere within the hidden depths of its words? Was I being irrational? In time I hope that you, the reader, may be the judge of that. Berating myself for my foolishness I forced myself to return to a sense of reality, and it was then I realised just how awful I felt.

  My head ached, my tongue was dry and furred, virtually every muscle in my shoulders, arms and legs was stiff and aching, if I hadn't known better I'd have sworn I had a hangover. No way, I'd only consumed a couple of whiskies the night before, certainly not enough to induce such feelings. In fact, the headache was quite severe, bordering on the intensity of a migraine, something from which I'd suffered very rarely in the past. I rose from the chair, stretching myself to try to induce an increase in blood flow to my tired and weary extremities. I staggered rather than walked from the study to the kitchen, reached for the first aid box and extracted a couple of paracetamol tablets, downing them quickly with a glass of cold water. Maybe they'd help with the headache. I sat in one of the kitchen chairs, resting my chin on my clenched right hand, and I sighed a heavy sigh. My chin was rough against my hand, I was in desperate need of a shave, and I daresay that if I'd looked in a mirror at that moment, my unkempt hair would have added to an overall visual impression of a rough looking homeless vagrant. I rubbed my eyes; they stung. I was glad at that moment that Sarah wasn't there to see me looking as I did. My worst fears were confirmed when I mounted the stairs a few minutes later, made my way into the bathroom, and barely recognized the face that stared back at me from the mirror.

  I showered, shaved, dressed in fresh clothes, until I resembled the me I was used to seeing in the mirror every morning, then, once more made my way to the kitchen. My stomach was empty; perhaps I'd feel better with some breakfast inside me. Somehow, though, when I surveyed the contents of the fridge nothing took my fancy. Food held little interest for me despite the pangs of hunger gnawing at my insides. I decided to settle for toast and coffee on the basis that something would be better than nothing, and I managed to consume three slices of hot buttered toast and two cups of steaming hot coffee before letting my mind return to the document that was waiting for me in the study.

  It was strange to think that it had been less than twenty four hours since I'd first laid eyes on the journal. Less than a day, and yet here I was, feeling more disturbed and aggravated than I could ever remember feeling in my entire life, such was the profound effect of its contents upon me. I thought about it for a moment. I'd read until I was exhausted, tried to sleep, been beset by outlandish dreams, given up on sleep, carried on reading, only to be haunted by what I could only describe as a series of waking nightmares, until I'd eventually collapsed into that dark slumber, more a state of exhaustion really, then I'd finally awakened this morning in this appalling state of both mind and body. All this in less than a day! What was happening to me? I was, after all, not a man prone to delusions or neuroses, I was a man of science, for God's sake! I was a psychiatrist, not a patient, not one of those poor unfortunate souls who visited me for my own considered professional opinion. How would I diagnose myself at this time I asked myself? I didn't answer my own question. I couldn't. Whatever had happened to me in the hours since I'd come into contact with the journal defied any rational conclusion. I failed to understand how reading a few pages of aged and crumpled paper could have had such a deeply profound effect on my mind. It was illogical and unthinkable that the journal itself could manifest such feelings within my mind, wasn't it? They were just words written on paper, they couldn't house any external power, couldn't possibly be the depository for any lingering malevolence imbued upon the pages by the writer. The evil that was Jack the Ripper was not infused into the pages of his journal.

  I remember thinking to myself there was nothing to worry about. Why didn't I just go marching back into the study, pick up the journal, and read it to the end in one swift session, read great-grandfather's accompanying notes, then just return the whole thing to its wrappings and consign it to the safe or whatever, and just forget about it? Even as the thought crossed my mind, I knew that option was an impossible one. The journal wouldn't allow me to do that, I know that sounds stupid, but it's how I felt. Even the occasional break from the journal to study the facts I'd downloaded from the Casebook and other sources seemed to me to be part of the journal's plan, a need to be understood at every point along the way, for me to be aware of the facts of the case in a precise chronological fashion, as though to give the journal a solid foundation in my mind, in order that I might understand the mind that had controlled the hand that had written the diabolical words upon each terror-laden page.

  Now, you may think me fanciful to use such a term as 'terror-laden', yet to me that's exactly what the journal had quickly come to represent. I was involved, almost against my will, (after all, I hadn't asked for the damned thing, had I?), in a journey into the mind, the thoughts and the twisted terrifying conclusions that had been wrought as a result of those thoughts, the thoughts of a deeply disturbed and very, very sick man. I supposed that most people, expert or laymen, had probably lost sight of the fact that Jack the Ripper, whoever he may have been, was still after all, just a man, someone's son, perhaps someone's husband, brother, friend. Though his crimes may have been monstrous in both their substance and their execution, he was capable, at one time at least, of feeling love, affection and deep emotions, after all, it had to be remembered that his crimes themselves were committed whilst he was under the influence of an extremely deep emotional state, however warped and twisted it may appear to the rational mind. I was, I thought, bound tightly by the words of his journal to what I now realised to be the final few weeks in the murderous career of Jack the Ripper, I was tied to the history of his crimes, and believe me when I say to you that I had never known such terror, whether it be real or imagined, I was very, very, afraid of the revelations that may yet reveal themselves to me as the Ripper's blood-soaked testimony continued.

  I wished I could talk to Sarah, but I thought it too early in the day. Though I'd no doubt that she and Jennifer were up and about, the early morning demands of the baby would probably keep them occupied for quite some time. Perhaps in an hour or so I'd try calling, I knew that talking to Sarah would be the best therapy I could prescribe for myself.

  Before returning to the study, I remembered something from my last night-time encounter with the journal, something that had been niggling away at the back of my mind. Half-forgotten since my awkward slumber in the chair, it came back to me as I cleared away my plate and refreshed my coffee cup.

  He mentioned he was leaving London! Why! Where was he going? Obviously, if the Ripper had left London early in September it would explain why the slaughter on the streets of the East End had been interrupted, why there were no further attacks until the night of the dreadful double murder. If that had been the case however, the question remained. Where had he gone? Had he perpetrated further atrocities elsewhere during his absence from the capital? From a comment made in his last entry, it appeared to me that he was incensed by the public's reaction to his crimes. The apparent sympathy of the press and the public for his victims seemed to infuriate him; the posses of Londoners thronging the streets in search of the murderer genuinely amazed him. I thought that he probably found some amusement in the antics of the mob in the beginning, hence his originally joining in with the crowds; now the public outcry was becoming an irritation to him, and the sheer numbers of potential vigilantes on the streets were perhaps instrumental in his coming to the decision to leave the city, if only for a while. I may have been
wrong, but the thought bore some weight of reason in my mind.

  I decided that my first task should be to continue my factual investigations. I would try, by using the information provided by The Casebook and other websites, to ascertain if there were any Ripper style murders anywhere else in Britain during September 1888. Then the thought struck me that he may have left the country altogether. It was not implausible that he could have travelled to France, Holland, Germany perhaps, and laid low for a time, or used the time to perfect his 'art' by killing in a foreign land. Though this would perhaps be harder to establish, I promised myself that I would try to learn what I could about any related murders on the continent, if of course the journal confirmed that The Ripper had indeed left these shores.

  What on Earth would I do however, if he failed to indicate his whereabouts during the days following his last entry? Would the journal inform me, or misdirect me? Would there be one of those gaps, days missed out, left blank, simply because he had nothing to say, or because he had left the journal at home, and had had no way of keeping it up to date? Would he suddenly return to it after an absence of days or weeks, ready to assault the pages with yet more bloody revelations? My head still throbbed, but I felt I could put it off no longer. I made myself a promise to phone Sarah in exactly one hour, no matter what the journal may be revealing to me at that time. The questions in my mind were beginning to absorb my thoughts, I wanted answers, I needed to know what happened next, to fit the next piece of the jigsaw into place. So, finally making my way to my chair once again, temporarily fortified by food and drink, and at least partially refreshed, I took up the journal once more knowing there was only one way I was going to find out.