“If I came to love you, Albert,” she said very slowly, “I would still not accept a penny from you for father’s memorial, for I would know that you did not give it in admiration and repentance. If I loved you at this moment,” she went on in a voice that sounded strange to herself, and which indeed seemed to speak all on its own, “I should at this moment vow never to see you again after I have got home tomorrow, and never to open a letter from you until I had in my hand three thousand pounds of my own, for father’s monument.”
The two young people for a minute remained face to face, both very pale and grave. Then she walked past him and out of the house.
She walked for a long time before she could collect her thoughts sufficiently to realize that she had won her war and fulfilled her mission. That all was well, and that all was over.
At last she stood still; her dizziness had gone; now she felt the cold round her. She had walked so far that she had lost her way, and it was growing dark. She turned and tried to remember the road by which she had come.
She did not recognize it; there were a lot of high fences everywhere, and she had to walk alongside them to find the stiles. Had they all been there on her way out? She suddenly remembered that she had denounced Westcote Manor and all it contained, and wondered if the house had taken her at her word.
At last between the trees of the park she caught sight of lights, and made for them. In the avenue she was surprised to see a figure coming toward her. For a moment it looked very big in the mist, then it grew small. It was Uncle Seneca with a large umbrella in his hand.
He seemed happy to see her. “I was quite worried,” he said, “because you did not come back. I thought it was going to snow, so I brought my umbrella.”
Melpomene knew how seldom Uncle Seneca went out, and how scared he was of cold weather. She was vaguely touched by his kindness, and at the same time vaguely pained by the memory of how she had once before, long, long ago, been offered an umbrella by a gentleman.
“Eulalia,” said Uncle Seneca, “had to go out to see a neighbor. Albert took her in his gig. You and I will have tea by ourselves.” They walked up the avenue side by side under the umbrella.
When they came in, tea was ready in front of the fire. The pink-shaded lamps shone on the silver and the china. The gardener must have brought in heliotropes from the hothouse; their scent was strong and sweet in the room.
Uncle Seneca gave two or three little sneezes and looked slightly feverish in the lamplight, as if he might have waited too long in the avenue and have caught a chill on his gallant expedition.
He moved his chair closer to the fire and said, “I forgot to put on my galoshes. Perhaps I really ought to go and change my shoes.”
But he did not go. He did not speak for a while either, but gazed at his hands and then smiled at the girl above his teacup. For a long time there was a silence in the room, for Melpomene was too tired and too absorbed in her own thoughts to speak.
“It is an honor and a pleasure,” Uncle Seneca began at last, “for an old sedentary person like myself to talk to a young lady who knows the world. People, I suppose, will have been talking to you of almost everything.”
“Yes,” said Melpomene, who had hardly heard what he said.
“People,” he repeated cheerfully, “will have been talking to you of drunkards and opium smokers?”
“Yes,” she said again.
“Yes, yes,” he said, cheering up more and more. “And of pickpockets and burglars?”
“Yes,” she said.
“And of worse than that,” he continued, this time a little timidly. “Of creatures sunk still deeper, who really ought not to exist?”
“Yes,” said the girl, still in her own thoughts.
“And of murderers?” asked Uncle Seneca.
Something in this queer catechism at last caught Melpomene’s attention. She slowly raised her eyes to the old man’s face.
“Do you know,” he asked, “who Williams was—the man who wiped out two households within a fortnight?”
“Yes, I believe so,” said Melpomene.
“Do you know,” he inquired again, “who John Lee was—the man who could not be hanged?”
“Yes, I believe so,” said Melpomene.
“Do you know,” asked Uncle Seneca, “who Jack the Ripper was?”
“Yes,” Melpomene answered.
Uncle Seneca gave such a sudden little titter that the girl stared at him. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I did not mean to be rude. It only struck me as a curious thing that you should say that you knew who Jack the Ripper was. For that is the one thing that nobody ever knew.”
There was a pause.
“I am Jack the Ripper,” said Uncle Seneca. “I was quite struck,” he said, “when you told Eulalia that you were born on the seventh of August, 1888. For that was the date of the first of them.” He thought the matter over for a moment. “And,” he said, “nobody knew. Nobody in all the city of London. Nobody, in fact, in all the world. It is,” he continued, “a very strange sensation. You walk down a street full of people. None of them looks at you. And yet every one of them is looking for you.” He sneezed again, and blew his nose in a large white handkerchief. “I have never known many people,” he went on; “my family was most particular about our circle of acquaintances. But upon that time it might be said that everybody knew me. They gave me a name, ‘Jack.’ It is a frisky name, a name for a sailor. Friskier than Seneca, do you not think so? And then, ‘the Ripper.’ Is not that brisk as well…smart? I was pleased the first time I heard that this was the name they had given me. I thought it quite bright of them. And nobody knew….You young people nowadays,” he remarked thoughtfully, “say ‘ripping,’ do you not, when something is really pleasant?…The second,” Uncle Seneca said, after another pause, “was on the last day of the month. The third was a week later. It took a cool hand to come out again to work so quickly, do you not think so? That third one was skillfully done. Some other day, when we have got time, I shall tell you more about that third one.
“There was an odd little circumstance about the matter,” he said. “People talked about Jack everywhere, but very few people talked about him to me. My family, I am pretty sure, must have talked a good deal about him, but they never mentioned him to me. They used to put away the papers when they had read them. There were big headlines in the papers those days: Who is Jack the Ripper? Where is Jack the Ripper? I sat and read them by our tea table, which was just like this one here, and I could have answered at any moment, ‘Here he is.’ In one paper they wrote: ‘The great skill points to someone with real anatomical knowledge,’ and in another: ‘It is possible that after having done the deed Jack put on gloves.’ So Jack did.”
He sat for a while in silence.
“It all began,” he said, “with my dreams. I have always had very vivid, lifelike dreams. Now I began to dream that I did it. I dreamed that I came down a street at night, and that these persons were there and that I did it. Night after night I dreamed it, and I began to walk about in London to find the street. I bought a map to find it. My dreams grew more and more vivid, and in the end I understood that I had to do it.”
Again he was silent.
“A name!” Uncle Seneca said, and suddenly looked straight at Melpomene. “You spoke last night of a name. Of a person who ought to have an immortal name to him. Here is an immortal name which, one might say, ought to have a person to it. My family had often teased me because I liked to look into the glass. At that time I looked more frequently than before into the glass, and at the person in it, who looked back at me.”
He was perfectly still for a long time. Melpomene, too, sat still; she could not even move her eyes away from his face.
“Your father,” Uncle Seneca said, “was indeed a great actor. We went to see him in Macbeth. That was in between the third and the fourth. The bard is always magnificent, of course. Still, he, too, can make mistakes. ‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this lit
tle hand.’ ” He looked at his hands. “That is a mistake,” he said. “They will. I understood you last night,” he went on, “although Eulalia and Albert did not. I understand that your father will want his monument. For with him it has never been anything but acting. With him it has never been the real thing. ‘As they had seen me with these hangman’s hands.’ He must have a monument to have his name remembered. It is a strange thing,” he said, after a pause, “that I should, late in life, meet a young lady like you, who knows these places of mine and, just like me, has walked down Berners Street. I have been happy to meet you, Miss Melpomene….And nobody knew,” he said.
Suddenly his face changed; little nervous twitches ran over it, and his wide-opened eyes sought Melpomene’s. “There they are,” he said, “back already. I had hoped that we might have had half an hour more to ourselves.”
The rumble of wheels was heard on the drive. The front door was opened and voices sounded in the hall.
Melpomene got up from her chair; she went out through the library and slowly mounted the stairs to her room. She lay down on her bed with her face in the pillows. She told the maid who brought the hot water that she had a headache and could not come down for dinner.
Next day she went back to London. Aunt Eulalia embraced and kissed her niece even more tenderly at her departure than she had done at her arrival.
“My darling,” she said, “it has been lovely having you here. Now we are looking forward to your return to Westcote Manor.”
Albert shook hands with Melpomene in a friendly manner, but with a pale face. Uncle Seneca did not appear. He was in bed with a cold.
In the carriage and in the train, Melpomene kept her mind fixed on her father and her home. When she got back to them, she found the rooms very untidy. The fire had gone out and her father had remained in bed to keep warm.
Felix Mulock had been looking forward to hearing his daughter’s report of her visit, and had prepared little biting gibes, in his old manner from Hamlet, with which to accompany it all through. Now he was disappointed that he had to drag the account from her word by word. In the end, he lost patience.
“Well,” he cried, “I suppose they have told you they have given me money that you did not know of!”
“No,” said Melpomene, “they did not tell me.”
“If you had not had all your mother’s stubbornness, my girl,” he went on with a little bitter laugh, “and of course all those freckles, you might have made Cousin Albert fall in love with you. That would have been a sweet revenge! What a perfect rehabilitation to have the house into which I was never admitted belong to us!”
The idea delighted him. All through the evening he amused himself by depicting in detail his conquest and triumphal occupation of the enemy’s camp.
The week that followed on her return seemed very long to Melpomene. The December cold became part of a loneliness that she had never known before. She dared not think of Albert; she dared not think of her father’s monument. In fact, she found that she dared not think of anything at all.
One night she woke up with a strange new sensation of happiness and warmth. She sat up in bed, for suddenly she realized that her one place of refuge on earth and her one happiness was in Albert’s arms.
The idea overwhelmed her; her whole body ached with it. She did not care for immortal fame. What she longed for, with every drop of her blood, was an easy, carefree existence, one day just like the other, little pleasant talks about nothing, a walk with the dogs.
All through the night she remained sitting up in her small bed in the dark room, her face wet with tears. She felt herself to be a very small figure in all the city of London, in all the world.
“This one little short life,” she cried in her heart, “is all that I can be sure of. And I have thrown it away. I have vowed never to see Albert again. I have told him that I would never open a letter from him, so that now he will never, never, write to me.”
In this she was wrong. The day before Christmas she received a letter from her cousin.
Albert’s letter ran as follows:
Westcote Manor,
22 December, 1906
Dear Cousin Melpomene:
I am afraid that you will be angry with me for writing to you. But you will receive, one of these days, a letter from our old solicitor, Mr. Petri, and it seems to me that I ought to prepare you for it. So I hope that you will forgive me this one time.
I first of all have to tell you that Uncle Seneca has died. He got a bad cold, nobody knows how, for he used to take very good care of himself. It turned into pneumonia; for three days he had high fever and was strangely changed, so that he did not seem to be himself at all. But in the end he passed away quite quietly.
You were very kind to him when you were down here. I think you will be glad to feel that at the end of his life you gave him a pleasant time. He was much upset when he heard that you had gone back to London. All through his feverish days he talked of getting up and going after you. But his mind was not clear; he kept on telling us that he would follow you, and be sure to find you, in some street of which nobody has ever heard the name.
Last Thursday, however, as his temperature went down, he lay for a long time without saying a word, just looking very pleased with himself. In the evening he told us to send for Mr. Petri, and when he arrived, Uncle Seneca informed him that he wanted him to draw up a new will for him.
Mr. Petri will come round to see you next week, and you will hear all about the matter from him. I just want to give you here, before Christmas, the good news that Uncle Seneca has left all his money to you. You will now be able to put up the memorial for your father, of which we talked the last day in the hall. Do not believe that I now mean to hold you to your word from that same talk of ours. You may have changed your mind. But I mean to tell you here that I have not changed mine, and shall never change it.
Mr. Petri will inform you that there is a curious stipulation in Uncle Seneca’s will. According to that, you must get your father’s monument put up, and you must lay the foundation stone with your own hand. And on this stone, which will, of course, never be seen, because the whole monument will be on the top of it, should be cut the following inscription: IN MEMORY OF J. T. R.
I know no more than you what these letters mean, and I can see you smiling quite ironically as you read them here. For one would naturally take them to stand for something romantic, perhaps for the name of a friend or sweetheart. And you will be sure to think Uncle Seneca a lonely old person who cared for nobody, and could never have had a friend, and his whole life too conventional and commonplace for a romance. All the same, since you seemed to like talking with him when you were down here, I suppose you will not mind carrying out what people would call his last wish, nor having his stone to be, so to say, forever part of your father’s monument.
Until quite lately—in fact, until the time when I met you—I myself should have laughed at the idea of anything romantic ever having happened to Uncle Seneca. I should, in fact, have been quite sure that it had happened only in his own dreams. For he was always extraordinarily keen on his dreams. These last years he did not talk much about anything, but when I was a small boy, he would talk to me for a long time of his dreams and of the things he had done in them.
But when something really romantic and wonderful happens to oneself, one somehow feels that it may have happened to other dull fellows as well. Their dreams, too, may have come true. So now I think it quite possible that Uncle Seneca has meant something to people he has met in life, perhaps to women long since dead.
It is a curious thing that I shall probably miss old Uncle Seneca a good deal more than I ever expected. In fact, I was quite sad today when I remembered his little habit of looking thoughtfully at his own hands.
I should like to write a great deal more to you. But I shall not do so until I hear from you.
Your cousin,
ALBERT ARBUTHNOT
Knucklebones
TIM SULLIVA
N
The multitalented Timothy Robert Sullivan (1948– ) is a polymath with careers as a science fiction writer, actor, screenwriter, and motion picture director.
In addition to scores of short stories, he has written several novels, beginning with three novelizations of the television series V, which is set in an America that has been taken over by aliens (some have suggested this may not be fictional). His first original novel, Destiny’s End (1988), is set on a distant planet and draws on Greek mythology. This was followed by The Parasite War (1989), which describes a coterie of humans battling an alien invasion; The Martian Viking (1991), which features a human prisoner who escapes from Mars and travels through space and time with, yes, Vikings; and Lords of Creation (1992), a fantasy populated by dinosaurs, aliens, and, perhaps most terrifying, a televangelist.
Two of Sullivan’s stories were shortlisted for major awards: “Zeke” (1981) was nominated for a Nebula and “The Comedian” (1982) for a Locus.
Sullivan largely stopped writing in the early 1990s to focus on his acting career as he played roles in numerous small-budget science fiction and horror films, perhaps most notably Camp Blood (1999) and Camp Blood 2 (2000), slasher films written and directed by his friend Brad Sykes; both movies went directly to video.
“Knucklebones” was first published in Ripper!, edited by Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper (New York, Tom Doherty Associates, 1988).
KNUCKLEBONES
Tim Sullivan
“Watch this,” Maurice Turner said, holding up the tiny guillotine.
The kids who weren’t playing basketball gathered around him, curious about what this new kid was up to. Maurice, shorter than most of them, held the guillotine up so that the sun glinted off of it. Even the basketball game stopped for a minute, the guys who were playing wanting to see what was going on as much as the rest of the kids.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 32