by F. G. Cottam
I barely survived the first session. It cost me a broken nose and two teeth. His blows were crude flails through the air but he was as quick as a cobra and quite inhumanly strong. We closed with the seconds counting down so I could gather breath and clear my head for a moment and the skin of his torso between my forearms felt rough and scaly like the hide of some primitive beast.
He was toying with me. His tongue lolled hotly on my shoulder in the clinch and he chuckled and his breath was a sulfurous stink. ‘You’re hell-bound’, he murmured, easily pushing me off and stiffening me with a brutal right before the tolling rescue of the bell.
I stuck to my strategy. I put the metal bottle in my corner to my lips and tipped back my head and swallowed. I screwed the lid back on and toweled the blood from my nostrils and fair bounced across the canvas for the second round. I formed my damaged features into a look of relish and licked my lips and winked at him and he frowned and circled me before resuming his attack.
The second wasn’t the one-sided pummeling the first had been. I’d learned something in those opening five minutes about the style of him. You couldn’t stay outside, where his speed and power could find their damaging range. You had to get close-in. That meant enduring the loathsome heat and touch of him. But it gave me a chance to counter with a combination to the body.
They were my first telling punches of the fight. And they were my last. They had no physical effect on him at all and I knew that I hadn’t a hope of hurting him. They were a show of defiance only, that rattled tattoo of shots, a show to invite a flicker of doubt or suspicion into the mind of a habitual schemer.
He clubbed me viciously under the heart in response and I felt the searing agony of ribs popped and all the breath escaped me with a blackening sigh. My body begged me to take the knee and gain the respite of a count but I couldn’t show weakness or pain. To do so would signal the end of me. Destroyed inside, I acknowledged the quality of the blow with a casual nod at my opponent.
I slipped a right and left and looked to dodge inside and his head dipped with a viper’s suddenness and I felt the raw shock of flesh sheared between his teeth from off my chest. He’d bitten me. I groped at the spot but couldn’t call the foul without a referee and he took the chance to hit me with a shuddering hook to the temple. I was fighting by now from memory. I felt dead on my feet but needed to stay upright and affected a jaunty trot back to my corner when the mercy of the bell finally rescued me again.
Blood trickled hotly down me. I looked and saw only a purpling gouge where my left nipple had been. I was as certain that he hadn’t spat it out as I was that he’d bitten it off. My dulled senses couldn’t really make much sense of the mutilation.
He watched me while I smacked my lips and tipped my drink once more. A sort of dark fury contorted his features and in the lamplight and seclusion he looked on his stool just for a moment like a squatting gargoyle. A train wearied overhead on clanking lines. The five minutes I had left to survive to win the bet might as well have been five years. I was utterly spent. The broken ribs made breathing agony. I sneaked another look at Caul. He was staring at the bottle in my grip. I grinned and winked at him like someone raising a carefree toast in the winner’s enclosure at the races.
He bounded and loomed. He was across the ring in two spasmodic strides. He snatched the bottle from my grasp and said, ‘Let’s even things up. This tonic’s an unfair advantage, Irishman, whatever it is.’ He raised it to his lips and drank. And it occurred to me through the swooning pain that there might be a God in heaven after all.
The effect on him was near immediate. He walked back to his corner to wait for the bell but when he turned to answer it for the third a few seconds later he blinked heavily and his eyes were crimson. He steadied himself with his hands on the top ropes and his back against his corner stanchion. He chanced a step towards me and his legs buckled and he was on his knees. He raised his head and roared, then, a louder and more savage expulsion than I believe a man has been made to endure hearing since primeval times.
The tongue lolled, drooling out of his head. It was a fat serpent of an organ and it spilled from his mouth almost to his chest.
The tongue retreated into him and he said thickly the one word, ‘Touché,’ before unconsciousness overcame him and he slumped with a thud onto his side where I performed the formality of counting to ten aloud.
I had won the bout. I had won the bet. He had taken the tonic voluntarily. He had stolen it. It had not been forced on him. I had been drinking copious drafts of an opiate bought at a den in Wapping with the bottle firmly stoppered by my tongue. It had been but a mime. When he raised it to his own mouth it was still quite full and he’d greedily emptied it. It was a brew potent enough to have cost me the better part of five pounds to buy from the Wapping Chinamen.
It was all I could do with my winded body and broken ribs to climb out of the ring. The blood had clotted in my nose, forcing me to breathe through my mouth, where my gums throbbed. My senses were not entirely scrambled, but I had the pillow-brained sensation that comes as a consequence of taking heavy blows to the head.
I disinfected my chest wound with rubbing alcohol and dressed it with clean gauze from my bag. I put my overcoat around my shoulders. I was cooling down quickly and had begun to shiver slightly, though that might of course have been less the temperature of the railway arch than shock. I walked to the door and unlocked and opened it. On the cobbles beyond, it was raining heavily.
In the bleary light of a gas lamp on the other side of the road, a Hansom waited. I waved at it tiredly and presently two passengers got out. They walked steadily towards me and quite formally shook my hand before entering the door built into the archway.
‘He’s dead,’ I said. My voice sounded strange to me, talking around the missing teeth.
‘If only that were true,’ Jeffries said. He took off his ulster. Underneath it he wore a brown habit stitched from some coarse cloth. There was a large crucifix around his bare neck. It was a cold night as well as a wet one, but he wore only leather sandals on his feet.
I looked towards the ring. I could not tell whether Caul was breathing or not. I said, ‘The amount of opium he’s consumed would kill anyone.’
‘He isn’t anyone,’ Anderson said.
I said, ‘He’s your killer, isn’t he?’
They looked at one another. It was as plain as day.
‘You could have arrested him,’ I said to Anderson.
‘We’d no evidence,’ Anderson said.
I looked at Jeffries. I said, ‘You told them he was the murderer. It was you discovered him. Who are you really? And how did you do that?’
‘All I can tell you,’ Jeffries said, ‘is that three of my brethren have been consigned to hell trying to stop him. That’s three brave and pious souls eternally damned. Sometimes it takes fate to intervene. You were here and you had the necessary credentials.’
‘He’s killed again,’ I said, ‘hasn’t he?’
‘This morning we discovered a 25 year old victim named Mary Jane Kelly,’ Anderson said, ‘nobody important, slain for a lark. When you read about what he did to her, you’ll be content with tonight’s work.’
‘He arrived here exuberant,’ I said, ‘with her blood under his fingernails.’
‘When he revives you’ll tell him to come with us,’ Jeffries said. ‘That’s your sole request and he’ll honour it.’
‘You’re sure?’
Jeffries, whoever Jeffries was, smiled at me. ‘It’s the nature of the beast,’ he said.
‘And then we’ll give you your money, Mr. Barry,’ Anderson said.
I’d been thinking about that. ‘I don’t want the 20,000 pounds,’ I said. ‘I’ll take only a seventh part of it. That will amount to almost 3,000 pounds and is a substantial enough sum.’
Anderson glanced at the figure lying across from us. He said, ‘I take it the fraction has some symbolic significance?’
‘Money can always be earned,’ I told
him. ‘A man’s luck is priceless.’
More men arrived. They wore the same brown habit the individual I’d known only as Father Jeffries wore. He was a man of the cloth and the cloth could not have been more humble but the gathered brethren were deferential before him. He was exalted among them, without doubt their leader. Anderson went and sat in a corner and took snuff and contemplated the face of his pocket watch. His own dial gave less information away.
The seven brothers knelt and incanted prayers in Latin. They lit candles and burned incense and held crosses before them. They were members of some holy order I thought probably existed only in a condition of secrecy. Their liturgy was strangely unfamiliar to my Catholic ears. They had come there prepared, though. There was no question of that. They had come there heavily armed with the weaponry of their faith.
There was one more entry into the account. Jacob had to pause and take a breather before reading it. He couldn’t believe the phlegmatic courage of the writer, his stoicism in the face of diabolical odds.
Except that he could, because every word of what was written had to him the pure-sounding note of authenticity. It rang entirely true. Either this journal dealt with the facts, or its writer was convinced it did. Either Daniel Barry had really accomplished what he had, or had been so deluded by insanity that it had been real life to him.
They’d confined Edmund Caul. In the 1930s they’d shown their captive to Monsignor Dubois, whose Vatican brief had been to liaise with them. But Caul had got away again, had escaped now into circumstances better suited to his purpose with the strength and maturity to properly exploit them.
Jacob knew that if the cardinal thought he was a man in the mold of Barry, he was sorely mistaken. He also knew that Caul, whatever he called himself now, would have learned the lesson of a petulant mistake. He would not fall again for so elementary a trick. He’d been back then the man-child in his impulsive nature Barry had described. But he’d been given the time since for growth and reflection.
Jeffries was the clincher. Barry had been shrewd as well as tough. He’d been a Pinkerton man, a pursuer of outlaws and a trained investigator. But he had not been able to discover the priest’s real identity or the nature of the brotherhood he served. Jacob had. They were the Most Holy Order of the Gospel of St. John. They were the Sacred Keepers of the Gate.
They were based at an isolated priory built in the middle ages in the high Pyrenees. They had lost their charge a little over eight weeks ago, compromised by something the cardinal had forced them to do, or more likely to stop doing. Jane Sullivan was looking for a demon she was powerless to catch. The End of Days was upon them. The Lazarus Prophecy was finally coming to fulfillment.
Jacob got up from where he sat reading and walked out of the room and opened his front door. The late afternoon was becoming early evening. He had read methodically, as he had promised Jane he would, making notes as he did so.
A walkway ran the length of every floor in his block. He stood on the section outside his door with his arms rested on its wall. He could hear sirens. They had always been a fairly ubiquitous sound in this volatile part of Kennington but to him their wail seemed almost a constant now. He thought of the shrill of trumpets, the tumbling walls of Jericho in the old bible story.
There was trouble on the streets. It was the age of the flash mob, the age of Twitter, the age of internet rumour and accusation spreading with epidemic speed. Anderson’s police force had rubbed their killer’s boasts and claims and accusations off the walls of his murder scenes before they ever got close to the public domain. That couldn’t be done anymore and the killer they’d now dubbed the Scholar well knew it. He was getting better too, wasn’t he, at picking his targets.
Inside the flat, Jacob heard his phone ring. It was Jane.
‘How’s the reading?’
‘Heavy. Why have you called?’
‘To keep you in the loop, Jake, that’s all.’
‘Sorry.’
‘He’s been telling me all along he’s back in Lambeth. I figured he’d be living rather more opulently than Caul ever did. And Charlotte Reynard said he wasn’t a man without charm.’
‘Go on.’
‘I studied the list of residents at Julie Longmuir’s apartment building. There was briefly a man renting there by the name of Dan Luce.’
‘It’s an anagram of Edmund Caul.’
‘It’s a partial anagram, what’s called a sub-word. I re-read Julie’s diary. He took her to dinner, twice. According to staff at the building, he matched the description Charlotte gave. I believe we have our killer’s name.’
‘Congratulations.’
‘We also have an occupation, if you can call it that. According to the concierge there, Dan Luce is a professional gambler.’
Their conversation concluded. Jacob pondered on it. Julie Longmuir had been elegant, refined and intelligent. She would not tolerate the crude swagger of the character Daniel Barry had described. Not twice, she wouldn’t.
He possessed charm. He had taught himself manners. His intellect had grown and his tastes developed. He would certainly prefer now, Jacob thought, the Wilde play to the Punch and Judy show. They wouldn’t find him betting a stack of used twenties at an underworld Walthamstow dog fight promoted by word of mouth in dubious pubs. It would be ivory chips on the green baize of a Mayfair gaming table.
November 10th 1888
I am going to leave London just as soon as my ribs heal sufficiently. I had a surgeon set and splint my nose as soon as the swelling left it. The two molars I lost did me a favour, the dentist I consulted said. My mouth was overcrowded with teeth, he told me. The remainder will likely even out better and my smile is unaffected, a consideration for a single man looking to alter that lonely state of affairs at some point in the near future.
London has become a fraught place since the death of the poor Kelly woman. Anderson showed me a photograph taken at the scene and it was pitiful. He had slashed her neck down to the spine and skinned entirely her lower stomach and thighs. He had removed her every organ and scattered some about and taken others away. Her head rested on her liver on the bed where he laid her after his blood work. There was barely an inch of the woman left unmolested.
The CID chief is right in his assessment that he did it for a lark. It was a diversion only for him. Unlike the ladies he has slain, with their noble causes and improbable fates, she was a person of no consequence, obviously butchered.
She had nothing. Her life had declined into drink and prostitution in the sort of hovels made the only refuge when drunken behaviour has resulted in eviction from more respectable lodgings. She was a pitiful creature. It is entirely symbolic that on her last living day she pawned her shoes to buy a pint of gin.
Yet she has achieved momentously in death. There is a pall of terror not just over the East End but over the whole of the capital. People are afraid to venture out after dark. In Bow a butcher was tarred and feathered two days ago and chained to a lamppost while the contents of his home were piled in the street beside him and burned. The note around his neck suggested his crime was being a Jew from Lithuania.
It will stop. The Kelly killing is the last. The mystery of who the Ripper was will endure and sustain the legend I suppose through the decades to come. Learned criminologists will speculate on his identity. One day the conspiracy concerning his more dignified victims might be uncovered and the case gain fresh impetus as a consequence.
I don’t know. I am not in possession of a fortune teller’s crystal ball. But I believe the mood will change over the coming weeks and months now that the spree has been arrested. People are resilient, Londoners industrious and buoyant by nature, optimism the prevailing mood when circumstances encourage it even slightly.
I won’t be here to witness the restoration of normality. I have the means now to go back to the old country and settle there. I have a hankering for a plot of land with a view of the Wicklow Mountains. I might try my hand at farming. I would find it satisfyin
g to plant and grow and harvest crops. I could keep chickens and pigs and perhaps even breed horses. I travelled a fierce distance in the saddle in my American years and have missed the exhilaration of the gallop.
I haven’t yet described what happened when the creature masquerading as a man named Edmund Caul regained his senses. He did so after only an hour of narcotic slumber. By that time I believe their rituals had bound him quite firmly in their spiritual chains. They were wary of the demon’s power, but I had the sense that this was a procedure familiar to members of the brotherhood through long and even ancient tradition and I saw only a grim stoicism on the faces of its seven brethren in the night gloom of the railway arch.
On waking, he half-rose from where he had lain and slouched against the bottom rope, his considerable weight tautening the hemp and making the rigging around the canvas square quite thrum and sing with tension.
He was an ordeal to look upon. Still torpid from the drug, he looked less human than I supposed he generally remembered how to be when his senses were alert to witnesses. His crimson eyes had black pupils that were vertical ovoid slits, like those of a lizard or some species of snake, giving them an expression coldly unreadable.
The scales erupted rudely under the skin across his torso and limbs and the fingernails on his hands were horny and curved like the cruel talons of some monstrous bird of prey. I remembered what Jeffries had said about the nature of the beast. It occurred to me he had actually been describing the nature of the Beast.
For a while he just leaned there on his haunches, silently. Then he began, softly, to sing. He crooned out sea shanties and popular ditties from the music hall while the brothers prayed in a low and ceaseless babble of Latin around him.