Ripper

by Michael Slade

  Lyric shivers as he unlocks the cage.

  Snorting coke or squirting wine from a communal goatskin, the masked debauchers watch him drag a woman from inside. She, too, is naked and shudders from fear or the cold, her mask the rictus of terror on her face. Kicking and struggling, she is pulled toward the open trunk, which contains a surgeon’s knife and five bloodstained ties.

  The ties are like the one the “Go” Lyric met wore.

  Mister Tuxedo.

  Mister Chloroform.

  Her nausea and headache are aftereffects of the drug.

  Grasping the surgeon’s knife and closing the lid, the fat man bends the flailing woman facedown over the trunk, holding her while others lash her arms and legs to rings screwed into the rock. The rings tip the four lower points of a blood-trough pentagram.

  Suddenly what’s happening flips upside down, then all Lyric sees is the woman’s silent scream. Pale light jumps across her contorting face, as the owl-man carves a flesh pentagram into her back.

  Withered and wrinkled, with genitals shaved, an old hag lights a pair of candles off the nearest torch, dripping black tallow on the tied woman’s rump, using the wax to stick the wavering tapers to her buttocks. Knife in hand, the he-witch grabs her by the hair, yanking back the woman’s head to expose her throat.

  A blur of steel.

  An arc of blood.

  As black and white goes black.

  Then a shriek explodes in the room, making Lyric jump.

  And ropes bite into her ankles and wrists.

  The beam of a projector traversed her bare chest, replacing the silent black-and-white film the German Expressionist had shot on Deadman’s Island in 1925 with an eerie infrared image. Above the projector and makeshift screen, seven stuffed owls were mounted on the walls, talons extended to rip out Lyric’s guts. A great gray owl with a large “earless” head, its beady eyes surrounded by concentric rings, its plummage dark except for a white “mustache” broken by a black “bow tie,” its wings broad, its toes feathered with long, slender claws. A pure white snowy owl with black beak and talons, its lemon-yellow eyes the only color visible on silent arctic hunts. A screech owl. A hawk owl. A great horned owl. Joined by the spotted owl above Lyric’s feet, its attack aimed at the lid of an open trunk. The last a common barn owl with a heart-shaped facial disc, the claw of each middle toe split like a comb, its loud shreeee hissed and garbled in flight silenced forever by the taxidermist’s gun.

  But not on-screen.

  The infrared film is of an owl attack. To capture a mouse in the pitch dark, the owl turns its facial disc toward the prey. Zeroing in on the target entirely by sound, it flaps its wings to reach the mouse, legs swinging back and forth like a pendulum until it’s overhead. Then its feet jut forward, talons spread, as its wings shoot up for the plunge. Head thrown back to align its claws with the sound below, the raptor descends for a vicious strike. The mouse—temporarily stunned by the impact—is killed when the owl’s beak crushes its neck. Head swiveling quickly, the raptor looks around, then, twenty seconds later, carries off the prey clutched in its talons.

  Skull walking through the beam made Lyric jump again. The shriek she uttered joined those on-screen.

  Skull was naked, except for his face. The talon-clutched mouse wavered across his chest as he moved from the pulpit above Lyric’s head, down one side of the table on which she was tied, toward the open deed-trunk at her feet. Eyes darkly smudged to sink them in their sockets, Skull’s face was chalked white as a skull, zigzag bone sutures drawn in black, owl feathers radiating out from his hair. A pentagram was carved in the taxidermy table, like the blood-trough in the silent film. Lyric’s wrists and ankles were roped to rings screwed into the lower points of the star, her head in the fifth point ending at the pulpit. Skull stopped just beyond her spread-eagled feet, one arm in the trunk that was in the silent film, from which he withdrew a bloodstained tie. The blood was so old it powdered to dust when he tied the tie around his neck. The shrieks from the owl, the shrieks from Lyric, made his penis jump.

  The silent film repeated.

  It is spliced to begin with Satan’s graven image, cloven hooves screwed to the floor, rump to the room. The hindquarters are those of a goat, hairy with a puckered anus and bestial balls. Ever-erect, the wooden penis is pointed like a sword. Above the stubby tail and scale-covered spine, leather wings soar toward the ballroom’s galleries. The roof is supported by columns that arch to form a vault, the pillars painted with mythic Indian totem art. A vivid flash of lightning reveals the Devil’s face, craned over one shoulder to survey the crowd. Crowned by goat’s horns, the smirking mouth curls in a rapist’s leer as one by one the revelers approach in turn, masks raised to bestow a posterior kiss between the wooden buttocks. As each steps back, the robed man points to a trapdoor behind Satan’s hooves. Down steps, feet, body, and head disappear.

  Skull passed through the film to return to the pulpit, the osculum obscenum flickering on his face. Hellfire burned in his eyes.

  Behind the pulpit was a shelf of dusty ancient books, the tarnished plaque along its edge: LUCIFER’S LIBRARY. The books on the pulpit were removed from the shelf, leaving gaps like knocked-out teeth. Lyric couldn’t see them because the pulpit sloped away from her eyes, but if she could the subjects would mean little to her. One was Tautriadelta’s first draft of The Patristic Gospels. The second was a 14th-century grimoire with the Latin title De Occultus Tarotorum. The third was a medieval Bible, also in Latin, open to Apocalypsis, Caput XIII. Each volume was marked with a different Tarot card: the Hanged Man, Judgement, and the Devil.

  Through Lyric’s hoarse beseeching, the incantation began.

  “Hellish, Earthly, Heavenly … Tautriadelta … God of the Crossroads and the Closed Path … King of Night, Guiding Sight, Enemy of the Sun … You who rejoice to see blood flow … You who wander the streets at dark … Thirsty for the terror in harlots’ souls … Lord of the Hellhounds’ Bark … Helon Taul Varf Pan Pentagrammaton … Bring me Jack the Ripper … He Who Knows The Way …”

  Again Skull walked from the pulpit to the trunk, passing through the Nootka idols rotting in the cave. This time he withdrew the surgeon’s knife. Then his other hand dipped for the mask.

  The mask was made from Brigid Marsh’s face, with hair as wild as a witch’s still attached. Skull had taken a plaster impression of her face, then had filled the mold with wax to reproduce her features. Hollowing out the back to fit any woman, he’d joined the edges with elastic bands. Carefully skinning Marsh’s face on this table, he’d soaked the flesh in formaldehyde before smoothing it over the waxy features. I-our coats of lacquer, and it was finished. Now he fitted the Mother Mask over Lyric’s face.

  Lyric jerked her head about in a last-ditch attempt to remain who she was. The stench of death filled her nose as her ryes went blind, for Brigid Marsh’s eyelids were lacquered shut. Lyric’s screams were muffled by the mask, for Brigid Marsh’s lips were lacquered shut, too. As she struggled against her bonds, a ticklish brush painted crossbones on her heaving chest. A sound she knew, but couldn’t place, approached the wooden table. Lyric sensed someone else in the room.

  “Skull,” the newcomer said. Whispered reverence.

  “Crossbones,” Skull said. With authority.

  “Is she mine?”

  “If you fulfill the Guillotine.”

  “Master.”

  “Slave.”

  “What is your will?”

  “Here’s your end. Here’s the knife. Service me.”

  Lyric felt a garrote being looped around her throat, the other end in someone else’s hand.

  Then she heard the unmistakable sound of her profession, a diligent cocksucker at work as the cord snapped tight.

  Tight …

  Loose …

  Tight …

  Loose …

  The sucking went on, the garrote contracting and expanding with synchronized pulls.

  Lyric thrashed.

  Skull g
runted.

  Crossbones screamed.

  As the knife plunged down through Lyric’s womb, pinning her to the table as her torso jackknifed.

  “Fuck you, Mother!” was the last thing she heard.

  PART II

  OWLS

  When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul,

  Then nightly sings the staring owl,

  Tu-who; Tu-whit, to-who.

  —Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost

  TAUTRIADELTA

  Manhattan

  Friday, December 4, 1992, 10:00 A.M.

  DO NOT FEED THE PIGEONS read a sign in the gardens out front, IT CREATES A HEALTH HAZARD AND IS CONSIDERED LITTERING. Pissed-off pigeons pecked the barren ground. The steps beyond were flanked by crouching marble lions, green wreaths with red bows looped about their necks. Mayor LaGuardia once dubbed them “Patience” and “Fortitude,” joking he liked to come here “to read between the lions.” The elaborate marble lobby within—the Astor Hall—had square pillars soaring to Romanesque arches. A sweeping double staircase rose from the candlelit Christmas tree, pine boughs and poinsettias decorating the bust-lined steps. DeClercq climbed to the McGraw Rotunda on the third floor, a child’s voice singing “Old MacDonald’s Farm” somewhere above luring him. Murals around the rotunda told “The Story of the Recorded Word” from Moses’ tablets of The Law to Mergenthaler and his Linotype machine. By the time DeClercq crested the stairs he was definitely in a scholar’s mood.

  The New York Public Library is one of the world’s most complete research facilities. Marx used the British Library; Trotsky worked here. Room 315 off the rotunda is known formally as the Public Catalog Room, but called by librarians “the coldest room in New York.” Under chandeliers suspended from the ornate ceiling, rows of tables with gold lamps and stools ranged down the left. Shelved on the wall beside them were 800 large black books: the Dictionary Catalog of the Research Libraries 1911-1971. Carrying Volume 386 J to Jagem, DeClercq found space to sit at the far table.

  The breeze blowing through the room bussed his cheek. The woman sitting opposite sniffled from a cold.

  Jack the Ripper was on page 75.

  With every subject known to man buried in its stacks, the New York Public Library has more than five million books. A wooden box of pencils sat beside the inkwell hole, dry since the advent of ballpoint pens. Selecting one, DeClercq pushed the black book aside, filling the space with twelve blue-and-white call slips. Pencil moving through the pool of lamplight on the table, he copied a dozen titles from the Catalog. Whittington-Egan, Richard, A Casebook on Jack the Ripper. Harris, Melvin, Jack the Ripper: The Bloody Truth. Wilson, Colin & Robin Odell, Jack the Ripper: Summing Up and Verdict …

  Finished, he crossed to the other side of the room and found a seat among the computers near the rotunda door. CATNYP—the online CATalog of the New York Public Library—lists additions to the collection since 1972. Punch S, the menu said, for the subject index, then he typed Jack the Ripper. One of the titles listed referred him to a 100-copy private printing in Cambridge in 1988. Aleister Crowley and Jack the Ripper he wrote on another slip.

  The Information Desk hubbed the Catalog Room. A black woman with dreadlocks manned the zip tube at the far end. “Too many,” she said curtly when DeClercq passed her his slips. “You’re not the only one reading today.”

  Flashing his shield got the comment, “Where’d you buy that? The Five-and-Dime?”

  The oldest librarian peered over glasses perched on the tip of her nose. “Feeling our usual cheery self, are we, Sophie?”

  “Come on! Come on!” the yarmulka’d Jew behind DeClercq goaded. “Do I have a living to make? You’re killing me, lady.”

  “Shiiiit,” Sophie said, but stuffed the pneumatic tube. Begrudgingly, she gave DeClercq an indicator number.

  Ah, New York, he thought.

  The door at the back of the Catalog Room led to a massive, high-ceilinged chamber that spanned the width of the building. The Delivery Desk—almost a pillared room itself—divided the Main Reading Room into North and South Halls. The Indicator Board in the South Hall flashed DeClercq’s number in red when his books came up. He watched the book elevator, like a water wheel, dump the requested volumes onto trays. The flurries of the night before having passed by dawn, pale diffused light seeped through the multipaned arches overhead, graying the carved wooden tables that served 550 readers. Spotting a vacant chair, DeClercq joined the rustling throng.

  The reader to his left looked like Iggy Pop.

  The reader to his right smelled like B.O. Plenty.

  The reader facing him belonged in a Clive Barker film.

  One thing about New York, it widened your scope of “normal.”

  Chairs scraped the floor.

  DeClercq cracked the books.

  Tautriadelta.

  He jotted notes.

  Fog filled the room.

  Someone coughed.

  London after midnight.

  Stalking the Ripper.

  Robert Donston Stephenson was born on April 20, 1841, at 35 Charles Street, Sculcoates, Yorkshire, England. His father partly owned the mill of Dawber & Stephenson, and there was money on his mother’s side. Little is known of his background from official sources, but in the aftermath of the Ripper and signed “Tautriadelta,” he wrote a piece for Borderland, W.T. Stead’s spiritualist magazine. “I was always, as a boy, fond of everything pertaining to mysticism, astrology, witchcraft, and what is commonly known as ‘occult science.’ ” Age eighteen in Munich, he studied chemistry at the University of Giessen under Dr. Allen Liebig. There he and another student named Karl Hoffman carried out “successful experiments in connection with the Doppelganger phenomenon.” A Doppelganger—also called an “astral double”— is said to be the ghostly counterpart of a living person. Tautriadelta wrote: “I became obsessed by the idea that the revelation of the Doppelganger phenomena would make me an instrument of the Gods; henceforth, on occasion, I would destroy to save …”

  DeClercq made a note: Astral double? The subject was mentioned in the books he’d read while flying here. Something about the Tarot being “the Key to the Astral Plane.”

  From Munich, Stephenson traveled to Paris to study medicine. “As a medical student my interest in the effects of mind upon matter once more awoke, and my physiological studies and researches were accompanied by psychological experiments.”

  In Paris, he met the son of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, the English occultist who was the most popular author of his day. Bulwer Lytton was a friend of Eliphas Levi, the Frenchman who made the Tarot-Kabbala connection. “The end of procedure in Black Magic,” Levi wrote, “was to disturb reason and produce the feverish excitement which emboldens to great crimes.” Stephenson was introduced to Bulwer Lytton: “The one man in modern times for whom all the systems of ancient and modern magism and magic, white or black, held back no secrets.

  “I suppose Sir Edward was attracted to me partly by my irrepressible hero-worship of (him), and partly because he saw that I …was genuinely, terribly in earnest.” Stephenson was directed to a secret place. “I entered, he was standing in the middle of the sacred pentagon, which he had drawn on the floor with red chalk, and holding in his extended right arm the baquette, which was pointed towards me. Standing thus, he asked me if I had duly considered the matter and had decided to enter upon the course. I replied that my mind was made up. He then and there administered to me the oaths of the neophyte of the Hermetic Lodge of Alexandria … Hermetics have to know all the practices of the ‘forbidden art’ to enable them to overcome the devilish machinations of its professors.”

  From then, 1863 on, Stephenson rode the rails of a Hellbound train. Under family pressure, he took a Customs job in Hull, but was soon fired. Breaking with his family, he changed his name to Dr. Roslyn D’Onston and moved to a life of drink and drugs in London. There he sought work as a freelance journalist, writing for Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette and other publications. Was he the Robert Ste
phenson/ Stevenson charged at Thames Magistrates Court with assault in June 1887, and indecent assault on October 30, 1888? By then he’d spiraled down to squalid rooms in Whitechapel, the Ripper’s hunting ground.

  For twenty-five years he had dreamed of a Great Occult Event, something he would initiate through magic and will.

  In early 1889, he published a piece as “Roslyn D’Onston” in Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette. Concerning African devil-worship in the Cameroons, the article shows Stephenson thought of himself as a black magician. He boasts of using a talisman from Bulwer Lytton to vanquish a female witch doctor named Sube, the Obeeyah. A similar piece, signed “Tautriadelta,” appeared in Lucifer, an occult magazine. “The necromancer,” Stephenson wrote, “must outrage and degrade human nature in every conceivable way. The very least of the crimes necessary for him to commit, to obtain the powers sought, is actual murder, by which the human victim essential to the sacrifice is provided.”

  Motive, means, and opportunity, wrote DeClercq. A black magic doctor living in Whitechapel during the Ripper murders.

  Stephenson covered the Ripper for Pall Mall Gazette. Stead, the publisher, later wrote: “For more than a year I was under the impression that he was the veritable Jack the Ripper; an impression which, I believe, was actually shared by the police, who at least once had him under arrest, although, as he completely satisfied them, they liberated him without bringing him to court.” Mary Kelly, the Ripper’s last victim, died on November 9th. Three weeks later, on December 1st, “Who Is the Whitechapel Demon? (By One Who Thinks He Knows)” appeared in the Gazette. Though unsigned, other evidence shows Stephenson wrote the piece.

  The article begins with a discussion of the Goulston Street Graffito, one of the more puzzling aspects of the Ripper case. When Catharine Eddowes, the fourth victim, was found in Mitre Square, half her dirty white apron was missing. The bloodstained material was found an hour later in the doorway of Wentworth Model Dwellings in Goulston Street. The only physical clue the Ripper ever left, the apron was discarded there as he made his escape. Written in chalk on the brick wall above was The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing.