by Andy Conway
He crawled on up the steps, around the corner of the stairwell, knowing what he would find. On the first floor landing, the dim outline of a body. A woman, short, plump, lying in a pool of blood, her hands to her side. Her entire torso covered in stab wounds.
He gagged and reached up to hold her hand, finding her fist clenched tight, and felt himself slipping, falling back down the stairs.
To roll on the floor and stare up at the night sky. It was red. Rain on his face. A lightning flash. A smell of burning. A different night. A different place. Thunder rumbled.
He climbed to his feet. Come on, get a grip. Be strong. You can do this. His head swam. He was on a long, dark street, different to the one he’d been in before. A sign said Buck’s Row. The sky was red and the bitter tinge of burning made him choke. Something on fire somewhere.
Two men walking off in the distance, lit by the single gas lamp at the far end of the street. His eyes fell on something lying nearby. It looked like a tarpaulin at first, but he groaned as he realized what it was.
A woman wearing a black straw bonnet, lying on her back, eyes to the sky. He rushed to her and felt her hand, still warm. But the blood was already oozing into the gutter at her side.
Footsteps approaching. The bull’s eye lantern of a policeman down the street. He stared into its light and the ground shifted beneath him.
The burning smell was gone. The sky was black, not red. He was in a back yard framed by dilapidated fences. Something shuffled in the blackness. He stepped towards the sound, certain it would be Bury, about to kill again.
A black shadow hunched over a woman’s pale face.
“No!” he croaked, catching a flash of the woman lying there, cut open like a pig in an abattoir, her insides flung over her shoulder.
The black shadow shoved him and he fell against the wooden fence. He winced and felt a strange, almost pleasant, ache in his belly. His hand probed under his jacket and felt it, slick and warm.
Blood.
He was stabbed.
And then he wasn’t in the pitch black back yard any more. He was lying in a puddle under a gas lamp. He staggered to his feet.
The pain in his belly was not great, but he could feel his own blood warm on his fingers. How long before he succumbed and fell down dead? Did he have enough time?
He was on a long street lit by gas lamps, cobbles shining iridescent with rain. A woman screamed down the road and a man shouted, “Lipski!”
He stumbled towards the commotion, his fist jammed into his side. Two men running towards him, startled. A Jewish man, all in black, with beard and hair curls dancing, eyes wide with fear.
Danny didn’t see the man behind, both of them fleeing the scene. He ran on towards where the woman’s screams had sounded. A cartwheel sticking out above the entrance to a yard, the gates open. Dark inside. He ran straight in, not caring what he encountered, knowing it would be Bury.
He hit a brick wall and fell, winded, twisting his wrist on the cobbles. Not a brick wall. Someone had barrelled into him, knocking him over. The man ran out into the street and he saw the outline of his deerstalker.
Bury.
Of course, I was silhouetted against the street light. He could see me. I couldn’t see him.
Danny rolled over and found a woman’s hand. Still warm. A brief flutter of hope that he had saved this woman, that he had stopped him. Her face was turned towards the wall, knees curled up to her, as if sleeping. But he knew she wasn’t sleeping. He knew she was dead.
He got to his feet, thinking that he could chase Bury up the street. Find him. Kill him.
Horse’s hooves clopping along the cobbles. Someone coming in a horse and cart.
A pony appeared, a young man in a cloth cap steering the cart into the yard. Danny shrank back into the shadows, trapped. The pony reared up. The man whipped at it but it whinnied and shied away, refusing to enter the yard.
It knows there’s a dead woman just in front of it.
The man dropped from the cart and pushed into the darkness, the last of the light from the street fading from his face, so he became a shadow too. Danny crept back further into the shadows. I am going to be found here. They will think I’m the Ripper.
The man probed with his whip, still silhouetted against the light from the street outside, the street that might offer Danny freedom. Should he run past him right now? He would surely surprise him and be able to push past the cart. But what if the man grabbed hold of him? What if he raised the alarm? What if people gave chase and thought he was Jack the Ripper?
The man struck a match and Danny saw his face lit up like a Caravaggio, gasping in surprise. He had found the woman. He was only a couple of yards from Danny, who was scared to breathe now.
Upstairs, men were singing. The man dropped the match and clambered forward in the dark, passing Danny by inches. If he’d reached out he would have touched him. But he edged his way on up the long yard and found a door. A flash of light illuminated him as he opened the door, and the burst of song flared for a moment. The door slammed and Danny tried to leave, but his feet were rooted.
The pony whinnied and clopped uneasily on the wet cobbles, still scared.
Now was the time. He could sneak out. The open wound in his belly was stinging now. He could feel the blood running down his leg, inside his trousers. He felt himself fainting. He slid down the wall and felt like he was sliding into the gutter and down the drain to be washed away.
In the blackness. The darkness. Cold night air on his skin. He turned all around, searching for light, searching for some feature that might tell him where he was.
A pinpoint of yellow far off. A gas lamp. His eyes growing accustomed to the blackness now, he could make out the passageway beyond it, dim light bathing its walls. A barrel under the street light. The broken down corpse of a wagon, a wheel shattered like a dead gull. Puddles on the ground. Cobbles. He was standing on wet cobblestones. A square, hemmed in by tall buildings on every side. He could make out the windows now, but there were no lights in the windows.
Has this happened before?
Another street lamp to his left, and another entrance to an arched alleyway. He turned, looking for another way out. There. The square opened out to a road that ran parallel. No traffic. No sound at all. It must be the middle of the night.
Mitre Square again. This time I’ll stop you.
A presence. Something that broke the silence. Over there to the left on the pavement that curved around the square’s darkest corner. Something there. A presence. Something that breathed.
No, don’t let it be exactly like before. Let me change it this time.
He crept forward to the dark shape emerging from the blackness. A man, on his haunches, crouching over something.
Over Catherine Eddowes.
He grunted with effort and there was a sucking sound, then a rip of fabric.
Danny tried to run forward, his feet stuck to the cobbles as if his own blood was a glue that was sticking him to the ground.
Catherine’s face.
Bury turned, sudden and vicious. A flash of the knife in his bloody hand. Danny fell back and scrambled out of reach and sprang to his feet, chasing him across the dark square, determined to get him.
And he was running. He was running away down cobbled streets, chasing him, his legs pounding the cobbles, carrying him onward.
And the sky turned white.
He stumbled to a halt. A bright morning. Daylight. A different street. A man in a deerstalker turned at the far end of the street where a marble needle stood guard over a churchyard. Too far. He was gone.
Danny looked to his left at an arched ginnel between the shabby terraced houses. The sign above said Miller’s Court. Something about it dreadfully familiar.
Another one. He’d killed again.
From inside the dark ginnel, footsteps rushing. The arch vomited out a man, smartly dressed, wearing a black derby, bow tie and a dark moustache, clutching a handkerchief to his mouth. “Oh God
,” he said. “Dear God alive.”
Too late.
The man staggered into the doorway that stood right next to the ginnel’s entrance. A chandler’s shop.
Danny walked into the narrow alley, his head light, so light he thought it might roll right off his shoulders. A yard at the end. A room to the right. A door marked 13. White painted walls. He peered around the corner to the uneven window. A dirty broken pane of glass.
Hadn’t he heard that the last one was inside, unlike all the previous? He half remembered it now. A terrible scene of butchery and carnage. His hand reached through the broken pane of glass to lift the curtain.
No, he didn’t want to see it. He’d failed. Jack the Ripper had claimed his victims. Danny had failed to stop him. It was all useless.
He sank to the floor, pain knifing his knees, tears pricking his eyes. The sound of footsteps coming down the ginnel. Two men. They would see him. He no longer cared. He closed his eyes.
And the footsteps ceased.
He opened his eyes to bright night, the sky lit by a full moon, and climbed wearily to his feet, knowing Miller’s Court was not the last one. Was there to be no end to this? Was he doomed to repeat it for all time? Forever one step behind Bury. Forever failing to stop Jack the Ripper.
A woman cried out.
He shuffled toward the noise.
This time. Let it be this time.
A gap between two houses. Clarke’s Yard. A strangled cry. He ran into the darkness and came into a large yard.
A woman, floating in the air, hovering inches above the ground, a ghost in moonlight.
Danny stared, spellbound by the sight of her.
She was arched back and the hand she held at her throat dropped to her side, and only then did he see she was being choked from behind.
“Bury!” he yelled.
Bury dropped the woman and squinted into the blackness.
“Who knows me?” he cried in panic, and hurled himself forward, one hand covering his face, the other slashing at the air with his knife.
Danny dived out of the way and Bury fled.
He rushed to the woman. Blonde. Lying on her side, wearing a dark tweed jacket.
“Are you all right?” he whispered, clutching her warm hand.
She didn’t answer, her dead eyes staring at the full moon.
“Oh God. Oh please God, make it stop.”
He wanted to stay with her but felt himself slipping away once more, knowing he had failed, knowing he was going to die now.
Bury had done it. He had carved his name in legend and no one had stopped him.
— Epilogue —
HE WAS AWARE OF THE fetid stench of rotten flesh, and on the wind the faint, ripe tang of boiling cabbage. It was cold, bitterly cold, and he hugged himself.
The blackness became blue. Looking up, he felt rain on his face. Gentle rain. No, not rain. The blueblack sky was alive with a swarm of crystal flakes.
Snow.
It was snowing.
His eyes adjusted to the dark, with the luminescence of the snow, falling all around and gathering thick on the ground. A great dark wall before him. No, there were windows in the wall. He was standing at the rear of a grubby tenement block.
An ash pit to the side. The wind howled and he felt it keen in his bones.
Before him, dirty stone stairs led down to the basement room of the tenement. Candlelight glowed down there through a dirty blind.
He stepped down and paused at a chalk message across the turn of the stairs, in a misspelt, childish scrawl:
Jack Ripper is in this sellar.
Terror and hope thrilled through his spine. Bury was here. He could still be stopped. This was another chance.
Down he went, to the old door, its paint flaking. Another chalk inscription across the door, written in the same hand.
Jack Ripper is at the back of this door.
He didn’t stop to wonder who had written it. He pushed the door open.
William Bury was perched on a stool warming his hands before the fire grate, his face now covered in a bushy beard. He looked up, flinched, a knife in his hand, then he recognized the intruder.
“You,” he said, as if he’d expected him.
Danny closed the door behind him, keeping one hand in his pocket, clutched tightly at his side.
Bury stood and placed his knife on the windowsill above the fire grate, next to the candle that lit the room. Danny stared at it, its blade stained with blood, and bits of flesh and hair.
“I knew you’d come,” said Bury. “When it snowed.”
He doesn’t recognize me from all those times I tried to stop him. He only knows me from Birmingham.
The room was dark and cold, the fire giving out a miserly warmth, and Bury was shivering. It seemed that he’d burned the furniture, because there was almost nothing in the room but the stool on which Bury sat, and a large white wooden box, clothing piled on top.
The floorboards around the box had been scrubbed clean. It was the only part of the floor that wasn’t filthy. But whoever had scrubbed the floor had missed the red stain at the corner of the box.
Blood.
Danny was aware of the blood running down his leg, collecting warm in his boot now, leaking from him, just like the blood leaking from the box.
Books, pamphlets and clothes were scattered around the floor. Bury scooped up a corset and threw it onto the fire. He was burning the clothes for warmth.
“What’s in the box?” Danny said.
Bury sat back down before the fire and giggled, then scowled, then rocked to and fro on his stool. He dug into his pocket and examined something in his dirty palm. Rings. Two rings.
“My wife,” he said. “She knew it was me. I think she knew all along, really. But she let me bring her here, to Dundee. Had to get out of London. The last one, someone recognized me. But she never said a word. Not until we were here, and she started telling the neighbours how old Jack was resting now. And I could see them thinking How does she know that? Eh?”
Danny looked at the knife on the windowsill again and wondered if he could snatch it up and stab Bury before he might act.
Bury prodded the fire with the poker.
“And then she says I can’t sell her jewellery, and if I do she’s going to tell. Because she knows all about me. She knows what I am.”
Danny looked at the box, and the little red stain at its corner. Bury’s wife, all cut up. He wondered if it was her who’d written the chalk messages at the rear of the cellar. Did Bury even know they were there?
“So she had to go. Like the rest of them. Seven in Whitechapel, and the two in Birmingham makes nine. Divine completeness. The number of finality. Christ died at the ninth hour. Day of Atonement is the ninth. Leviticus 23:32. And the fruits of God’s Holy Spirit: Faithfulness, Gentleness, Goodness, Joy, Kindness, Long suffering, Love, Peace and... one other. I forget. Galatians 5:22. Five and two and two is nine. It is accomplished. Is it accomplished?”
And Danny knew now that it wasn’t over. Bury would continue. He would carry on murdering wherever he went. Nothing would stop him.
“What are you going to do?” he asked, trying to breath, trying to hide the terror in his voice.
Bury looked up, dumbfounded. “Haven’t you come to tell me that?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you! You’re the one who started me on this! You’re the messenger! You showed it to me. With your paintings. You showed me what I had to do. Then you protected me, from those men trying to shoot me, at the station. So I could return to London, to Whitechapel, to do your work.”
Danny felt his stomach lurch. He was going to faint. There was nowhere to sit.
“That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? To tell me what to do?”
“Give yourself up.”
Bury laughed, as if Danny had cracked a joke, and picked up a framed photograph and tossed it into the flames. A Victorian gentleman seated, his wife standing at his side, her hand on his s
houlder. Bury and his wife curled and warped in the flames, like two souls burning in Hell.
“I’m after taking that trunk to the docks,” said Bury, nodding to the wall behind him, beyond which, presumably, the docks lay. “I could throw it overboard as soon as we’re out to sea. Or just take it to Dundee station and put it on the train back to Whitechapel. You see, by the time someone opens it, I could be in the wilds of America.”
He was going to escape. He had left Whitechapel knee deep in blood, and he’d come here, to Dundee, and couldn’t stop killing. And now he was going to escape once more and go on killing. There would be no end to it. And that, thought Danny, is why I’m here.
One last chance to stop him.
He glanced at the knife on the windowsill again, and at the poker Bury had gripped in his hand. The poker he’d no doubt used to smash his wife’s skull in.
He was too weak. Faint-headed. The blood oozing from him. The best thing to do right now would be to lie down and sleep. Just rest.
“But if you run for it,” Danny said, “the world will know you’re Jack the Ripper.”
“What care I for that?”
“You would... you would be a hunted man. For the rest of your days. Hunted down like an animal. They would find you in the end, wherever you ran to.”
Bury looked up, fear in his face. “You think so?”
“It would amount to a confession. They’d be after you. They’d chase you to the corners of the Earth.”
“They never caught me in London.”
“They never knew who they were looking for.”
Bury pocketed the rings and his hand went to his throat. “I can’t very well stay here. Not with that.”
This was how he’d get him, Danny thought. This was how to make him fall into the trap. Violence wouldn’t work. It had never worked. Bury was stronger. He would always fight it out. He had to persuade him to give himself up. Had to make him think it was the cleverest thing to do. “Nobody would expect Jack the Ripper to stay and brazen it out, though, would they?”