“This is a fucking waste of time!” Stringer muttered—then responded: “Beg pardon, ladies,” to Dr. Gottlieb’s angry “Shh!”
To Stringer’s disgust, Dr. Hodgson seemed to be taking it all in. “Why do you think they only take the shape of women?”
“We’ve considered that,” Norbrook said. “Possibly for some reason only the female body is suited for their requirements. Another reason might be a genetic one: only female offspring can be produced.”
“When you say ‘we’ do you sometimes feel that there are others who have these same thoughts as you do?”
“All right, I didn’t really expect you to accept what I’ve told you as fact. I asked you to keep an open mind, and I ask that you continue to do so. I am able to prove what I’m telling you.
“By ‘we’ I mean my great-grandfather and those of our family who have pursued his original research.”
“Could you tell me a little more about what you mean by research?”
“My great-grandfather made his initial discovery quite by accident—literally. A prostitute who had been run over by a carriage was brought into his surgery. She was terribly injured; her pelvis was crushed, and she was unconscious from skull injuries. Her lower abdomen had been laid open, and he worked immediately to try to stop the profuse bleeding there. To his dismay, his patient regained consciousness during the surgery. His assistant hastened to administer more ether, but too late. The woman died screaming under the knife, although considering the extent of her injuries, she could hardly have noticed the scalpel.
“Her uterus had been ruptured, and it was here that my great-grandfather was at work at the moment of her death. His efforts there continued with renewed energy, although by now his surgical exploration was clearly more in the nature of an autopsy. When his assistant set aside the ether and rejoined him, my great-grandfather described a sort of lesion which he characterized as ‘an amoeboid pustulance’ that had briefly appeared under his blade at the moment of her death agony. The lesion had then vanished in the welter of blood—rather like an oyster slipping from the fork and into the tomato sauce, to use his expression—and subsequent diligent dissection could reveal no trace of it. His assistant had seen nothing, and my great-grandfather was forced to attribute it all to nervous hallucination.
“He might have dismissed the incident, had not he been witness to a railway smash-up while on holiday. Among the first to rush to the aid of the victims, he entered the wreckage of a second-class carriage where a woman lay screaming. Shards of glass had virtually eviscerated her, and as he tried to staunch the bleeding with her petticoats, he again saw a glimpse of a sort of ill-defined purulent mass sliding through the ruin of her perineum just at the instant of her final convulsion. He sought after it, but found no further trace—these were hardly ideal conditions—until other rescuers drew him to the aid of other victims. Later he conducted a careful autopsy of the woman without success. It was then that he learned the victim had been a notorious prostitute.
“Despite my great-grandfather’s devotion to medical research, he was a man of firm religious convictions. In deliberating over what he had twice seen, he considered at first that he had witnessed physical evidence of the human soul, liberated in the instant of death. I won’t bore you with details of the paths he followed with his initial experiments to establish this theory; they are all recorded in his journals. It soon became evident that this transient mass—this entity—manifested itself only at the moment of violent death.
“Prostitutes seemed natural subjects for his research. They were easily led into clandestine surroundings; they served no good purpose in the world; they were sinful corrupters of virtue—undeserving of mercy. Moreover, that in both cases when he had witnessed the phenomenon the victims had been prostitutes was a circumstance not lost upon my great-grandfather—or Jack the Ripper as he was soon to be known.
“He was unsuccessful in most of his experiments, but he put it down to imprecise technique and the need for haste. Fortunately for him, not all of his subjects were discovered. Mary Ann Nichols was his first near success, then nothing until Catherine Eddowes. With Mary Jane Kelly he had time to perform his task carefully, and afterward he was able to formulate a new theory.
“It wasn’t the human soul that he had glimpsed. It was a corporeal manifestation of evil—a possession, if you prefer—living within the flesh of sinful harlots. It was an incarnation of Satan’s power taken seed within woman—woman, who brought about mankind’s fall from Grace—for the purpose of corrupting innocence through the lure of wanton flesh. This malignant entity became fleetingly visible only at the instant of death through sexual agony—rather like rats fleeing a sinking ship, or vermin deserting a corpse.”
Norbrook paused and seemed to want to catch his breath. “I use my great-grandfather’s idiom, of course. We’ve long since abandoned that Victorian frame of reference.”
Dr. Hodgson glanced toward the two-way mirror and adjusted his tie. “How did you happen to come into possession of this journal?”
“My great-grandfather feared discovery. As quickly as discretion allowed, he emigrated to the United States. Here, he changed his name and established a small practice in New York. By then he had become more selective with his experimental subjects—and more cautious about the disposal of their remains.
“He was, of course, a married man—Jack the Ripper was, after all, a dedicated researcher and not a deranged misogynist—and his son, my grandfather, grew up to assist him in his experiments. After my great-grandfather’s death shortly before the First World War, my grandfather returned to England in order to serve as an army field surgeon in France. The hostilities furnished ample opportunity for his research, as well as a cover for any outrage that may have occurred. Blame it on the Hun.
“It was my grandfather’s opinion that the phenomenon was of an ectoplasmic nature, and he attempted to study it as being a sort of electrical force. He married an American nurse at the close of the war and returned to New York, where my father was born. By now, my grandfather’s researches had drifted entirely into the realm of spiritualism, and his journals, preserved alongside my great-grandfather’s, are worth reading only as curiosa. He died at the height of the Depression—mustard gas had damaged his lungs—discredited by peers and remembered as a harmless crank.
“It was intended that my father should follow the family tradition, as they say. He was working his way through medical school at the time of Pearl Harbour. During his college days, his pro-Nazi sentiments had made him unpopular with some of his class-mates, but like many other Americans he was quick to enlist once bombs and tanks replaced political rhetoric. His B-17 was shot down over France early on, and he spent the remainder of the war in various prison camps. After the fall of Berlin, my father was detained for some time by the Russians, who had liberated the small prison camp where he was assisting in the hospital. There was talk of collaboration and atrocities, but the official story was that the Russians had grabbed him up along with all the other German scientists engaged in research there. My father was a minor Cold War hero when the Russians finally released him.
“He left the Army and resettled in Southern California, where he married my mother and spent his remaining reclusive years on her father’s citrus farm. His manner was that of a hunted fugitive, and he had a great fear of strangers—eccentricities the locals attributed to the horrors of German and Russian prison camps. His journals recounting his wartime experiences, fragmentary as they are, show that he had good reason to feel hunted. By the time I was born, a decade after the war, there were rumours of newly declassified documents that linked my father to certain deplorable experiments regarding tests for racial purity—performed under his direction. I’m afraid my father was rather obsessed with the concept of Aryan superiority, and his research was vitiated by this sort of tunnel-vision. It was about the time they got Eichmann when they found him hanging in the orange grove. They ruled it suicide, although there was talk of Na
zi-hunters. I know better.
“So did my mother. She sold the farm, bundled me up and left for Oregon. I heard that afterward the whole place was burned to the ground. My mother never told me how much she knew. She hardly had the chance: I ran off to San Francisco early in my teens to join the Haight-Ashbury scene. When I hitched my way home five years later, I found that my mother had been murdered during a burglary. There was insurance money and a trust fund—enough for college and a medical education, though they threw me out after my third year. Her lawyers had a few personal items as well, held in trust for my return. My great-grandfather’s Bible didn’t interest me, until I untied the cord and found the microfiche of the journals tucked into a hollow within.
“I suppose they got the originals and didn’t concern themselves with me. In any event, I covered my tracks, got a formal education. Living on the streets for five years had taught me how to survive. In time I duplicated their experiments, avoided all the blind alleys their preconceptions had led them down, formed conclusions of my own.
“It’s amazing just how really easy it is these days to pick up a woman and take her to a place of privacy—and I assure you that they all came willingly. After the first it was obvious that the subjects had to want to be fucked. No, kidnapping was counter-productive, although I had to establish a few baselines first. They’re all the same wherever you go, and I should know. Over the past few years I’ve killed them all across the country—a few here, a few there, keep on moving. In all this time I’ve been able to establish positive proof in about one case out of twenty.”
“Proof?”
“Portable VCRs are a wonderful invention. No messy delays with developing film, and if you draw a blank, just record over it on the next experiment. You have to have the camera exactly right: the alien presence—shall we consider it an inhuman ovum?—exudes from the uterus only in the instant of violent death, then dissipates through intracellular spaces within the dead tissue. I’ve come to the conclusion that this inhuman ovum is a sentient entity on some level, seeking to escape dissolution at the moment of death. Or is it trying to escape detection? I wonder.”
“There were videocassettes found in your van.”
“Useless tapes. I’ve put the essential tapes in a safe place along with the microfiches.”
“A safe place?”
“I’ve already told my attorney how to find them. The judge tried to appoint a woman attorney to defend me, you know, but I saw the danger there.”
“You say you allowed yourself to be captured. Wasn’t some part of you frightened?”
“I have the proof to expose them. My forebears lacked the courage of their misguided convictions. Personal safety aside, I feel that I have a duty to the human race.”
“Do you see yourself as handing this trust on to your son?”
“I have no children, if that’s what you mean. Knowing what I do, I find the idea of inseminating any woman totally abhorrent.”
“Tell what you remember most about your mother?”
Norbrook stood up abruptly. “I said no psychiatric games, Dr. Hodgson. I’ve told you all I need to in order to establish my sanity and motives. That’s all a part of legal and medical record now. I think this interview is terminated.”
The door opened as Norbrook arose. He turned, with cold dignity permitted the deputies to cuff his wrists.
Stringer stopped the psychiatrist as he followed the others into the hallway. The sheriff scowled after Norbrook, as his deputies led him away to the car.
“Well, Doc—what do you think?”
“You heard it all, didn’t you?”
Stringer dug out a cigarette. “Craziest line of bullshit I ever listened to. Guess he figures he can plead insanity if he makes up a load of crap like that.”
Dr. Hodgson shook his head. “Oh, Matthew Norbrook’s insane—no doubt about it. He’s a classic paranoid schizophrenic: well-ordered delusional system, grandiosity, feelings of superiority, sense of being persecuted, belief that his actions are done in the name of a higher purpose. On an insanity scale of one to three, I’d have to rate him as four-plus. He’ll easily be found innocent by reason of insanity.”
“Damn!” Stringer muttered, watching Norbrook enter the elevator.
“The good news, at least from the patient’s point of view,” Hodgson went on, “is that paranoid schizophrenia so easily responds to treatment. Why, with the right medication and some expert counseling, Matthew Norbrook will probably be out of the hospital and living a normal life in less than a year.”
Stringer’s hand shook as he drew on the cigarette. “It isn’t justice, Nate!”
“Perhaps not, Jimmy, but it’s the way the law works. And look at it this way—the dead don’t care whether their murderer is executed or cured. Norbrook may yet live to make a valuable contribution to society. Give me one of those, will you?”
Stringer hadn’t known the doctor smoked. “The dead don’t care,” he repeated.
“Thanks, Jimmy.” Hodgson shook out a Marlboro. “I know how you must feel. I saw a little of what was on that one videocassette—the one where he tortured that poor policewoman, Sherri Wilson. Hard to believe she could have remained conscious through it all. Guess it was the cocaine he used on her. Must have really been tough on you, since you talked her into posing as a hooker to try to trap him. It’s understandable that you’re feeling a lot of guilt about it. If you’d like to come around and talk about it sometime…”
Hodgson was handing back the cigarettes, but already Stringer had turned his back and walked off without another word.
Cora Steinman, the district attorney, stepped out from the doorway of the observation room. She watched the elevator doors close behind Stringer.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said finally.
Dr. Hodgson crushed his unsmoked cigarette into the sand of a hallway ashcan. “I know my man.”
From the parking lot, the report of the short-barreled .357 echoed like cannonfire against the clinic walls.
“Morton, you’ve taken care of the journals?” Hodgson asked.
The black defense attorney collected his briefcase. “I took care of everything. His collection of evidence is now a couple books on Jack the Ripper, a bunch of S&M porno, and a couple snuff films.”
“Then it’s just a matter of the tape from the interview.”
“I think there’s been a malfunction in the equipment,” Dr. Gottlieb decided.
“It pays to be thorough,” Steinman observed.
A deputy flung open the stairway door. He was out of breath. “Norbrook tried to escape. Had a knife hidden on him. Jimmy had to shoot.”
“I’ll get the emergency tray!” Dr. Hodgson said quickly.
“Hell, Doc.” The deputy paused for another breath. “Just get a hose. Most of the sucker’s head is spread across your parking lot.”
“I’ll get the tray anyway,” Hodgson told him.
He said to the others as the deputy left: “Must keep up appearances.”
“Why,” Steinman wondered, as they walked together toward the elevator, “why do you suppose he was so convinced that we only exist as females?”
Dr. Hodgson shrugged. “Just a male chauvinist human.”
A Most Unusual Murder
ROBERT BLOCH
Robert Albert Bloch (1917–1994) began his writing career in the horror genre, being heavily influenced by H. P. Lovecraft. It was with the story “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (1943) that his own style is first in evidence, combining terror, murder, and violence with humor. During his long and extremely prolific career, he continued to write tales of terror and dark fantasy, but he also became drawn to the mystery and suspense genre, most famously with Psycho (1959).
In addition to three short stories, a novel, and a teleplay about Jack the Ripper, Bloch frequently wrote about other serial killers much like Red Jack but set in contemporary times. His first novel, The Scarf (1947), featured the first-person account of a multip
le murderer, and most of his subsequent novels, as well as many of his more than four hundred short stories, were devoted to examinations of violence in society, generally in the form of a single individual who wreaks atrocities on others. Other novels that illustrate that compelling scenario include Spiderweb (1954), The Kidnaper (1954), The Will to Kill (1954), Shooting Star (1958), The Dead Beat (1960), Firebug (1961), The Couch (1962), Terror (1962), and The Night of the Ripper (1984). When Bloch reread The Scarf, his first novel, twenty years later, he was astonished at how much the perception of his protagonist had changed: “I wrote him as a villain—today he emerges as an antihero.”
“A Most Unusual Murder” was first published in the March 1976 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in Out of the Mouths of Graves (New York, Mysterious Press, 1979).
A MOST UNUSUAL MURDER
Robert Bloch
It all started outside an especially curious curiosity shop in London’s Saxe-Coburg Square…and ended in a shabby lodging at 17 Dorcas Lane, the two friends drawn there by a famous mystery and themselves becoming part of the terrible legend…
Only the dead know Brooklyn.
Thomas Wolfe said that, and he’s dead now, so he ought to know.
London, of course, is a different story.
At least that’s the way Hilary Kane thought of it. Not as a story, perhaps, but rather as an old-fashioned, outsize picaresque novel in which every street was a chapter crammed with characters and incidents of its own. Each block a page, each structure a separate paragraph unto itself within the sprawling, tangled plot—such was Hilary Kane’s concept of the city, and he knew it well.
Over the years he strolled the pavements, reading the city sentence by sentence until every line was familiar; he’d learned London by heart.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 161