Ripper

by Michael Slade

  “Get in!” his dad ordered, roaring up in the car.

  Not a word was spoken as they drove for twenty miles, not until they parked beside a hundred-acre field. “Get out!” his dad ordered.

  Father and son marched side by side halfway across the pasture, then a swinging roundhouse slammed Garret’s jaw. The next punch clipped his ear before he hit the ground. “Get up!” his dad snarled, in a boxer’s stance.

  The thrashing Garret took that day “made him into a man,” the phrase his dad repeated after every punch. Once the youth was bleeding from his nose, mouth, and ears, his dad said, “When you’re ready, I’ll be in the car.”

  The Great Escape.

  Steve McQueen.

  He hobbled the other way.

  And hadn’t been home except once, a decade later, to kill his dad.

  That was the first “mission” he undertook after Vietnam.

  When he was still on drugs before his drug was the Altered State.

  The state he was in now.

  Thanks to mastering pain.

  “Evil,” Garret realized, tripping in the desert years ago, is “live” spelled backward. Therefore “evil” is “antilife,” and antilife is anything that thwarts who we are. The pivotal change of this century is the wholesale de-individualization of man. This occurred through the insidious medium of TV, which stole unique identity while we were fearing Reds. TV, the viral tit we suck for security.

  What is a virus? he asked the LSD. Merely genetic material—DNA or RNA—which invades our cells to undermine who we are. Attached to our unique genetic code, the virus tricks us into reproducing more of its kind through the process we use to replicate our own genes. The sabotaged cells not only fail to perform their function, but are forced to help the invader multiply.

  Same with TV.

  During the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Garret reasoned, television viruses invaded who we are, colonizing our memory cells until they were filled with billions of mass-market images to the exclusion of unique experience. Now we all share a common memory bank, from the rides of Disneyland to walking on the moon, and ape common role models like Marilyn Monroe and Schwarzenegger. When everyone’s thinking is as unique as the latest commercial or McDonald’s restaurant, how do you identify who you are? How do you know who’s you?

  The only way, Garret concluded, is through self-torture and pain.

  Personal experience of pain is unique. So it’s the standard by which we judge authenticity and depth of thought. Conquering pain alters our outlook on life, physically, mentally, and spiritually. The term marathoners use is “hitting the wall.” They run until they’re exhausted and their bodies cry “Quit!”, then on until the pain they feel vanishes in a fog, on until they’re no longer aware of their pumping legs and hearts, at which point consciousness escapes from its physical shell.

  Garret experimented.

  And took escape much farther.

  Every rite of passage has four essentials, be believed. It must be physical, painful, bloody, and leave a mark. As a kid he’d learned to shift attention from the doctor’s bite, separating what he thought from what he felt, thereby removing consciousness from his mortal flesh. Building on that ability, he passed the toughness test of Watergate’s G. Gordon Liddy, holding his finger in a flame until it charred. Soon he could torture his body at will and feel no pain—hanging weights from his nipples, cock, and balls; sleeping on a bed of nails or razor-sharp blades; piercing himself until he bled like a human pincushion; Kavandi-bearing the “Spears of Siva” the East Indian way.

  The greater the pain, the greater the escape.

  Until one day, tripping induced the Altered State.

  Corke was in the desert hooked to the hanging tree, ripped on a volatile mixture of acid and cocaine, escaping, escaping, escaping, his consciousness winging at warp speed, when suddenly he was engulfed by glare and the stench of rotting dead. Along the border of his mind a graveyard steamed, the light beyond beckoning him to the realm where life met death. Where am I? he whispered. The Astral Plane. The voice of God and Satan combined in a hiss. Who am I? The stalker of the realm. Our disciple. The only man alive. What are my orders? Fill fifty open graves. He saw the pits yawning at the brink of consciousness. And if I do? You will enter the Light. What’s in there? Eternal life.

  Forty-one graves filled.

  Nine to go.

  Mission #42 the killing of DeClercq.

  Corke surveyed the Graveyard.

  With his mind’s eye.

  “Next,” the customs officer said, calling him forward.

  Standing in the Visitors line right of Residents, Corke was in Customs Primary at Vancouver Airport. Summoned, he crossed the mark on the floor that kept aliens back, approaching the woman dressed in blue. The RCMP officer behind wore brown.

  “Proof of citizenship, please.”

  The birth certificate he produced was as phony as his passport.

  Wrinkling her nose, the customs agent glanced up. Did she smell the Graveyard, too?

  “Customs declaration.”

  He handed her the card, noting she put more markings on it than those ahead in the line.

  Stamping the card, she handed it back, and summoned the next person.

  The Mountie behind pointed toward the baggage carousel.

  Corke had packed the switchblade in the suitcase he had checked, stuffed in an open pocket on the side. Grabbing the bag from the carousel, he palmed the knife and tucked it up his sleeve.

  Sure enough, they stopped him in Customs Secondary.

  “Open the bag, sir.”

  Corke obeyed.

  The customs inspector winced like he smelled a fart.

  Once the bag was searched, Corke zipped it up, slipping the switchblade back inside.

  He held his arms out for a body check.

  “That won’t be necessary, sir. Welcome to Canada.”

  Corke cleared Customs.

  Stupid Canucks.

  12:39 P.M.

  Standing out front of the airport in the Arrivals zone, Zinc had a disturbing flash of déjà vu. The stench he smelled took him back to the lair of the Ghoul, and the Red Serge Ball after the case. There are three kinds of sweat: the sweat of work, the sweat of fear, the sweat of insanity. In the lair and at the ball, he’d encountered the goatish odor of the last kind, which seeps from pores during florid psychosis. He whiffed it now.

  Around him were a dozen people waiting for rides. Only one was on the move, approaching a van. The cowboy wore a Stetson and a red-checked shirt, a green down-filled vest with gray Wrangler jeans, and a pair of anaconda boots. He climbed into the van and stored his suitcase at his feet.

  “Yoo-hoo, Inspector.”

  Zinc turned left.

  A Yoda-looking woman waved from the window of a cab.

  “Miss Franklen, I presume?”

  The van pulled out of the Arrivals zone, heading for Grant McConachie Way and the Arthur Laing Bridge. Both left and right, soggy fields stretched to the river, Sea Island wedged between the Fraser’s North and Middle Arms. Skull was driving. Lyric was in back. Her naked corpse wrapped in a moth-eaten rug.

  “Shitty weather,” Corke said.

  “Fits my plans.”

  “Where we going?”

  “To the harbor. Gotta catch a plane.”

  “What do I do with the van?”

  “Burn it after.”

  “Can’t be traced?”

  “Not to me. Chop-shop job.”

  “Where’s the woman?”

  “Rug in back. You can hang her from any tree.”

  “Address?”

  “Here.” Skull passed him a map.

  “Where’s the kill now?”

  “In New York. Back tonight, the papers say.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. Do it like this.”

  By chance, the men had met through Corkscrew’s ad in Foreign Legion, and each had forged his fantasy in a different cauldron, but ps
ychologically Corke and Skull were astral twins. In what drove them to serial murder, they were Doppelgangers. Both men wanted ritual access to the Astral Plane.

  Skull handed Corke the last page torn from Jolly Roger.

  . .. the ax hit the cop before he turned. The thick V-blade cleaved his skull like a soft-boiled egg. His arms shot up as if he were a Sunday-morning preacher, all hallelujah and sucking brain. First came the blood, then pink tissue, ballooning around the ax-head like bubble gum. “Take that, fucker!”

  His legs did a spastic jig as his ass hit the ground, then his entire body went into convulsions. The steel squeaked on bone when I wrenched it from his skull.

  One of his eyes kept blinking like the guy was flirting with me. “Take this, fucker.” I hit him again. This time the ax-blade caved in his face. The cop stopped dancing.

  Well, there you have it. So ends the beginning. One thing you can’t accuse me of is not playing fair. Other cops will find the bitch and their nosy buddy, so that’s why

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  I’m laying out the cards.

  THIS IS AN EXIT …

  The Tarot cards Skull gave Corke were the three at the end of the book. “Tuck them under his body so they don’t blow away.”

  “I’ll need an ax.”

  “Under your seat.”

  Corke withdrew the hatchet from behind his suitcase. “The carvings in the handle? What do they mean?”

  “Tau tria delta,” the Canadian said:

  CROWLEY’S TRUNK

  Manhattan

  11:59 A.M.

  No doubt about it—Santa Claus lives in New York. Walk this street in December, and you’ll see ample proof.

  With an hour to spare before lunch with Brigid Marsh’s editor and biographer at the Russian Tea Room, DeClercq strolled up Fifth Avenue from the Public Library to Central Park. Like the Star of Bethlehem, a giant snowflake above the 57th Street intersection beckoned him. Once the site of mansions owned by the city’s wealthy elite—the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Rockefellers—this was America’s most glittering promenade. Saks Fifth Avenue, Cartier, Gucci, Tiffany & Co. (Who could forget Audrey Hepburn emerging from a cab at dawn to stand here in an evening gown window-shopping with a coffee and Danish in hand?) Trump Tower, Bergdorf Goodman, Van Cleef & Arpels. Here people were taller, healthier, less hounded, and better dressed than elsewhere in New York. Each shop window was one-upped by the next: from red Christmas dresses worn by hourglass shrubs, to checkered harlequins juggling emeralds, sapphires, and rubies. “Fifth Avenue,” a wit once said, “is a street where a lot of people spend money buying things they don’t need in order to impress people they don’t like.”

  Amen.

  Grand Army Plaza borders Central Park. Beyond the statue of Abundance in the Pulitzer Fountain, General William Tecumseh Sherman stood mounted guard. Next door was the stately Plaza Hotel, site of DeClercq’s most outrageous night in New York. Kate was acting on Broadway in 1966 when she smuggled him into Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball. The memory occupied his mind as he crossed Central Park South, then honking horns and squealing brakes yanked him back. Horse-drawn carriages bedecked with tinsel intermingled with cars, and one of the mares had slipped and fallen to the street. DeClercq blocked traffic—the ultimate sin—while he helped it up, prompting several motorists to flip him the bird.

  Ah, New York.

  Was Jack the Ripper a black magician? DeClercq wondered, fleeing the urban hustle for the sanity of the park. Assume Stephenson/D’Onston/Tautriadelta was the Ripper. As stated in his article “Who Is the Whitechapel Demon (By One Who Thinks He Knows),” Nichols, Chapman, Stride, and Eddowes were killed to form a cross. That explains the tau part of his occult name, but how does the death of Mary Kelly fit the ritual? Unlike the others, she was butchered indoors. It must have something to do with the “three triangles” part of his name. Is Tautriadelta the formula for the ritual itself?

  And what about Crowley’s trunk?

  It was Crowley who popularized the theory the Ripper was a magician. The passage from his Confessions quoted in Jolly Roger was expanded in an essay he wrote for The Equinox, later published in Sothis, the modern Crowleyan magazine, volume 1, number 4, 1975. The essay retells the story of Vittoria Cremers, Mabel Collins, and the bloody ties in more detail. Crowley identifies the Ripper as “Captain D’Onston,” asserting the purpose of the murders was to extract organs at sites that ritually formed a cross. He confirms discussing his theory with Bernard O’Donnell, the “crime expert of the Empire News.”

  O’Donnell’s interest in the Ripper was piqued in the 1920s when he interviewed both Cremers and Betty May, the woman whose husband died at Crowley’s Abbey in Sicily. Baroness Vittoria Cremers, then in her late sixties, lived at 34 Marius Road, Balham, England. O’Donnell described her as a “diminutive figure with short-cropped grey hair and a pair of dark, quizzical eyes.” The story she told him was:

  In 1886, when she was in her twenties and married to Baron Louis Cremers of the Russian Embassy in Washington, she read and fell under the spell of Mabel Collins’s Light on the Path. Collins was a follower of Madame Blavatsky, the occultist who cofounded Britain’s Theosophical Society. Bewitched by Collins’s book, Cremers joined l he American branch.

  Widowed by 1888, the baroness journeyed to London where she called on Madame Blavatsky in Holland Park. Cremers became the business manager of Lucifer, the Theosophical Society’s magazine. Tall, slim, Titian-haired, and thirty-seven years old, Mabel Collins—ten years her senior—was associate editor. The two were soon in bed.

  Vittoria Cremers returned to the States in 1889. March of 1890 saw her back in London, but Mabel Collins had moved to Southsea. Cremers arrived to find Collins living with Captain D’Onston. Fascinated by his article in Pall Mall Gazette describing how he defeated an African witch doctor with a talisman, Collins had written to him. D’Onston’s reply from hospital said he was too ill to write, but would contact her on his release. “He’s a marvellous man, Vittoria. A great magician who has wonderful magical secrets.” The three set up house.

  The snow was gone, but not the wind of the night before. Winter’s breath had stripped the trees of leaves in Central Park, their crooked limbs skeletal against the iron sky. DeClercq stood on the terrace overlooking Wollman Rink. Below, a counterclockwise mingle of colors slipped around the ice, bodies bumping boards adding bass to the shrill squeals of children. A purple glove stuck on the picket of a nearby fence waved at him like a disembodied hand. The man beside him muttered today was the coldest day so far, while a sign above the city beyond advertised Hitachi. Steam curled from the terrace grates like fog. A skater below did a triple spin, drawing oohs and aahs from the crowd. The sound system paused between music for another annoying announcement. From Center Drive to one side and East Drive to the other, came the clop-clop-clopping of horses’ hooves.

  East End carriages.

  No escaping Jack.

  From his coat DeClercq withdrew a folded sheet of paper. He spread it to reveal the picture of Stephenson/D’Onston/ Tautriadelta he had photocopied at the library.…

  D’Onston, Cremers told O’Donnell, was “a tall, fair-haired man of unassuming appearance. A man at whom one would not look twice.” “Nil—absolutely nil” in personality, and “uncannily silent in all his movements,” he gave the impression he “would remain calm in any crisis.”

  “It was his eyes that impressed me most. They were pale blue, and there was not a vestige of life or sparkle in them. They were the eyes which one might expect to find set in the face of a patient in the anemic ward.”

  The perfect stalker. The perfect Ripper, thought DeClercq.

  From Southsea, D’Onston, Collins, and Cremers moved to London’s Baker Street where they jointly opened the Pompadour Cosmetique Company. “Tautriadelta” wrote a piece for Lucifer, prompting Cremers to ask D’Onston what his pen name meant? “A strange signature,” he agreed, “but o
ne that means a devil of a lot.” Explaining the symbols to her, he added, “There are lots of people who would be interested to know why I use that signature. In fact the knowledge would create quite a sensation. But they will never find out—never.”

  Collins’s infatuation with him was replaced by fear. “I believe D’Onston is Jack the Ripper,” she told Cremers. The reason was “something he said to me. Something he showed me.” That’s when Cremers entered D’Onston’s first-floor rear bedroom adjoining the offices, and, finding a suitable key, picked the lock on his large black enameled deed-trunk. Inside, she found the bloodstained ties and “a few books.” Describing the ties to O’Donnell forty years later, she recalled them as black, not white like Crowley wrote. Nor was D’Onston lured away by a fake telegram. She simply waited until he was out.

  Early in 1891, the press began speculating the Ripper was back. Dismissing the rumor, D’Onston told Cremers, “There will be no more murders.” Then he added, “Did I ever tell you that I knew Jack the Ripper?” He said they met at the hospital around the time Collins wrote to him. “He was one of the surgeons, and when he learned that I had also been a doctor we became very chummy. Naturally, we talked about the murders … One night he opened up and confessed that he was Jack the Ripper. At first I didn’t believe him, but when he began to describe just how he had carried out the crimes I realized he was speaking from actual knowledge.

  “At the inquests it was suggested that the women had been murdered by a left-handed man. All those doctors took it for granted that Jack the Ripper was standing in front of the women when he drew his knife across their throats. He wasn’t. He was standing behind them. The doctors at the inquest made a point of mentioning that the women did not fall but appeared to have been laid down. This is about the only thing right about their evidence. Everybody was on the lookout for a man with bloodstained clothing, but, of course, killing the women from behind, my doctor friend avoided this. When he took away those missing organs, he tucked them in the space between his shirt and his ties. And he told me that he had always selected the spot where he intended to murder the woman for a very special reason. A reason which you would not understand.”