Be advised! A true history of blood and villainy surrounds many of the exhibits you are about to see.
Katie flicked Toby’s hand away, but he stayed close as they moved through a cell like the one in which Jack the Ripper would have spent the last hours of his life had he been caught.
Inside the cell, Katie was startled by how real it felt. Duskily lighted, the small room was a grim hovel, with the original door from Newgate, heavy with rusty bolts. The walls had been reconstructed from the original stones, with a small, barred window showing a shadowy glimpse of the gallows in the distance. On the side wall was a display of actual manacles, leg-irons, and instruments of torture used on the condemned, with framed broadsheets of famous executions from the nineteenth century and grisly ink drawings of the criminals walking to the gallows, below the words “God Save the Queen.”
A creak of the floorboards and a faint groan made Katie shiver. Toby took her hand again. Such a show of machismo would normally have irritated Katie, but at this moment, in this gloomy reconstructed cell, it felt reassuring. A real prison smell of dampness and decay seemed to cling to the dusty stone walls, as did a sense of the despair that must have infused it more than a century ago.
Moving quickly out of the Newgate Prison cell, Katie felt instant relief, as if she herself were escaping the gallows. They walked past shrunken-faced, wax effigies of prisoners in ragged clothes about to be executed, and farther on, those same figures lying in coffins. The bodies suddenly sat up in their caskets in a pathetic attempt to scare. Katie couldn’t shake the feeling of gloom that had begun to engulf her.
A hologram of a woman’s severed head turned slowly, suspended in a giant glass globe. This was a re-creation of the Demon Duchess of Devonshire, the famous Victorian ax-murderess. Strained faces appeared, then disappeared, sweeping past on a wave of grey mist. Some looked crazed, some drunk, others frightened.
A rise, stamp, and fall of organ music floated in the air.
When the next set of doors swung open, Katie, Collin, Toby, and a dozen others stepped into smoke-filled darkness. At the far end of the misty corridor they came upon a bank of elevators, where they squeezed into an already packed compartment. The uniformed operator pressed a button, and the doors rattled closed.
At first the elevator descended normally. Then it lurched and began to plummet in what felt like free fall. Katie’s stomach dropped along with the elevator, followed by a rise of nausea.
The elevator shuddered to a halt. Somebody screamed. It went pitch black. A man behind Katie flipped open his cell phone and held it up for light. Several others followed.
The elevator operator turned slowly. “Welcome,” he grinned, his face transformed by a fright mask complete with blood-shot eyeballs, flubbery lips curled around massive buckteeth, and a lolling rubbery tongue. “The chamber is not for the squeamish,” he chuckled. “Enter ye brave souls into the dark crypt of Madame Tussauds. Let the living nightmare begin . . .” He laughed, a silly cackling sound, more Disney World than horror chamber.
Katie turned to Collin and rolled her eyes. The cell phone man muttered under his breath, “Bloody stupid stunt. Scared the bejesus out of me—er, my wife here.”
When the elevator doors rattled open, everyone pushed forward in a panic to get out. Katie was jostled from behind, then shoved forward. Toby took her elbow to steady her, but let go when she flicked her arm in annoyance.
After the crush of the packed elevator they stepped into more smoke-filled darkness and followed a greenish light that flickered over what looked like rough stone walls on either side of a dark passageway. Katie walked behind Collin, beside Toby, down a pebbled path that swam in greenish twilight from a source Katie couldn’t see. Like a pea-soup fog, it distorted the stone walls on either side, where waxwork figures stood motionless behind iron bars, peering out. Some were cartoonish. Others were amazingly lifelike, with twisted facial features, despair etched forever on their wax faces. A London police officer, a bobby, stood stiffly to the side. Was he real? Katie wondered.
They continued along the corridor, the slow green tentacles of light picking out iridescent slime and moss on the rock formations. Grim pools of light punctuated the darkness ahead, illuminating a tall waxwork man in a red opera cape and glossy stovepipe hat. As the three teenagers approached, the man’s robotic lips began to open and shut above a grey, rat-tail beard.
His voice, a kettledrum baritone, boomed forth like a circus ringmaster’s. His wax fingers beckoned.
“Enter, ye who dare, into a bygone era where you will come face to face with the verisimilitude of evil. Each waxwork victim you are about to encounter is an exact replica of the actual young woman, painstakingly assembled by Madame Tussauds’ team of forensic artists using death masks, old photographs, and cutting-edge digital technology.”
The mechanical man gave a hinged bow and pointed the way into a dark passageway whose walls swelled in and out. Katie felt the pinch of claustrophobia. Just the effect the museum wanted, she reminded herself.
“Like being in a bleedin’ Edgar Allan Poe story,” Toby whispered, as they moved through a foggy sort of mist until they came to a giant hologram of a woman floating in a halo of silvery light. Her grey hair was tucked under a lace cap, her soft-looking skin wrinkled like an overripe apple’s.
“Come. Follow me,” came the hologram’s disembodied voice, high and raspy like an old church organ.
Katie, Collin, and Toby followed as the holographic woman floated backward.
“Imagine if you will,” quavered her shrill voice, “that you are entering the Victorian world of horse-drawn carriages, flickering gaslights, cobblestone streets, and steam-engine locomotives.”
A black-and-white projection of a fast-moving train tore toward them, making Katie and Collin duck as the three-dimensional optical illusion howled past, puffing great, billowing clouds of black smoke.
“The industrial age is reaching its zenith,” the apple-skinned woman continued, her face floating overhead. “Queen Victoria has just celebrated her Golden Jubilee. Hot air balloons, bear baiting, and Punch and Judy shows are all the rage. Young men in shiny top hats saunter down the boulevards of Mayfair and the Strand, accompanied by fashionable young ladies wearing the latest Parisian bonnets and bustled skirts.”
In the distance the train whistle shrilled, echoed, and died away. An odor of boiled potatoes wafted through the air.
The hologram woman continued. “Steam-powered technology has brought progress and prosperity to the middle class, making for an attitude of self-satisfaction and smug complacency. Londoners, from the most regal duke to the humblest chimney sweep, feel that, in the British Empire where the sun never sets, ‘God is an Englishman.’
“But all this is about to change, isn’t it, Doctor Llewellyn?” twinkled the hologram woman.
“Yes, Mrs. Llewellyn,” boomed the rat-bearded man, popping out from a blanket of darkness to their left, his mechanical arms moving jerkily up and down. “Yes, indeed. On the last day of August, in the year 1888, under a bright, treacherous, full moon, Jack the Ripper began his one-man reign of terror, murdering and disemboweling girls in the Whitechapel district of London.”
“Starting with poor, dear Mary Ann Nichols, whose body was discovered in the gutter of Buck’s Row, isn’t that right, Doctor Llewellyn?” asked Doctor Llewellyn’s holographic counterpart.
“Indeed, Mrs. Llewellyn.” Again, the hinged fingers unfurled to point the way.
The teenagers walked toward a glint of fake moonlight that spilled over the hunched shoulders of a large, hooded man who stood in the doorframe of what looked like a narrow little house. Dead vines clung to the brickwork around the door. A crooked window sagged overhead.
As they approached, the cloaked figure’s snakish, beady eyes peered out at them through the slits of his black mask. His arms were wrapped around the wax figure of a girl in a low-cut velvet gown.
Wavering lamplight glinted across the rise and fall of the girl
’s pale breasts. The visitors inhaled a puff-cloud of cloying perfume.
In the brief flicker of hissing gaslight, Katie could just make out the silky gleam of the girl’s black hair. Again, the man’s bloodshot eyes fixed on her, glared, and turned away.
Collin was standing on one side of Katie, Toby on the other. Together they watched transfixed as the waxwork man dragged the head of the girl to his chest, and mechanically rumpled her hair. Swinging shadows threw brightness on the bulging outline of a knife handle sticking out of his waistcoat pocket. And as he swiveled and pivoted, the torn mouth of his mask showed a smiling ridge of discolored teeth.
A rattling creak came from the crooked window overhead as it swung open, and a woman’s face popped out. “Who goes there?” she hollered. “State yer business, or be off with you!” The woman’s marble eyes peered out, searching the street corner below. A heavy silence ensued, followed by the clang of a rusty bolt as her head popped back inside.
The hooded man leered up at the window, then down at the wax girl. Moonlight shone on the lower part of their waxwork faces. The man raised his arm, drawing a gloved finger across the girl’s throat. As if by a conjurer’s trick, a knife appeared in his hand.
A flicker of light picked out his jerky arm movements as the blade slashed across the wax girl’s throat. Red liquid spurted from the gushing wound.
A peal of bells rose in the distance, and the scene was transformed by a host of gilded mirrors swinging forward from all sides, blinding Katie with flashing, tinfoil glints of fake lightning.
Multiplied by the mirrored slivers, the man’s robotic eyes began to glow in duplicate and triplicate as the head he cradled to his chest tilted and jerked, the scene replicating itself over and over in the long mirrors, a seemingly endless card-flip of quivering reflections. Finally, the girl’s image split, and she fell to the ground, her glass eyes staring blankly up at the three teenagers.
In the mirror closest to Katie, the hooded man was laughing grotesquely.
The lights went out.
Katie turned and tried to hurry away. But in that instant of darkness she lost her sense of direction and stumbled. Somebody— Toby?—caught her by the elbow. She took a deep breath of musty, damp-smelling air.
The hologram of Mrs. Llewellyn appeared before them in a soap bubble of golden light, her church organ voice rising and falling: “Such a pity. Poor Mary Ann Nichols deserved better from life, as did Annie Chapman, ‘Dark Annie’ as she was called, who died eight days later . . .”
A green-edged spotlight picked out the face of another girl standing in the gloom a little farther down. Wearing a long, white dress and lace shawl, she looked like a demure bride, her cheeks circled with bright spots of rouge. The hooded man sprang up behind her.
A gas lamp burned murkily overhead.
The hooded man’s bloodshot eyes, like dull marbles, seemed to grow round and then shrink, like a beating pulse. He rumpled the girl’s hair, making it fluff up in all directions. He dragged his gloved hand across her throat with the edge of a butcher’s knife, causing a red gash and a spurt of flame-colored liquid, followed by a gurgle and rattle as of someone gasping for breath. Again came the pungent, cloying scent of cheap perfume as the second victim’s face dipped, and appeared, and dipped again, swallowed by the mist.
“Such a pity about Dark Annie.” The apple woman’s voice radiated out from the diaphanous cocoon of her hologram. “The Ripper snipped off Dark Annie’s ears and sent them to the police. Then he saved some of her blood in a ginger beer bottle to write a missive to the newspapers, but it grew thick as glue and he had to use red ink instead.
“After the murder of Dark Annie, all of London, including the Queen, became fixated on these vicious attacks, especially when they began to escalate in brutality. Isn’t that right, Doctor Llewellyn?”
“Yes, my dear, quite right. And I should know, because I was the surgeon who officiated at the autopsies of these poor unfortunates.” The robotic Doctor Llewellyn could now be seen sitting in a leather armchair just ahead. “Shall I give our guests some clues, Mrs. Llewellyn, to help elucidate the peculiar facts of the case?” He crossed and uncrossed his mechanical legs with a click-clacking, whirring sound.
“Oh, yes, Doctor Llewellyn. Do tell,” twinkled Mrs. Llewellyn, smiling like an apple-cheeked fairy godmother in her floating soap bubble.
“Come closer, right this way, and I shall present the clues forthwith.”
The teenagers moved along the smoky passage as fans in the ceiling tore blotches and rifts in the fake fog.
“On September thirtieth, in the year 1888, Jack the Ripper committed a double murder. First, Molly Potter in Berner Street, Whitechapel, and then, shortly before midnight, Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square, Aldgate—both within earshot of police officers. After the double murder of Molly Potter and Catherine Eddowes the habits of East Enders changed overnight. No one dared venture outside after nightfall, so great was their fear of the Ripper. And those unfortunate few who had no choice were instructed by Scotland Yard to walk in pairs. Hark ye, Mrs. Llewellyn, in pairs.
“Suddenly Jack the Ripper’s butchery was being debated in the House of Commons, as well as in front of every blazing fireplace in all of England.” A spurt of fake fire rose in a hearth next to Doctor Llewellyn, rippling cellophane tongues of orange and red.
“Londoners were outraged that in the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth such savagery was allowed to go unchecked. Newspapers and politicians denounced Scotland Yard for its ineptitude. Roaming mobs of vigilantes and clerical do-gooders took to the streets to hunt down the hideous monster.
“ ‘Who is Jack the Ripper?’ was heard on every street corner throughout the land. How was he able to murder and slice up his victims when the entire Metropolitan Police force was patrolling every inch of Whitechapel? And, most troublesome of all, why did the Ripper’s victims never cry out for help when help was so very close?”
“Oh, look!” the floating Mrs. Llewellyn chirped, bobbing happily now alongside her waxwork husband. “There’s Molly Potter! Molly-Dolly is positively bursting with pride, pregnant as she is with her first child. A baby girl, they say, or so it appeared after the infant was ripped from Molly-Dolly’s womb—”
“Er, that will do, Mrs. Llewellyn. No need to open up a Pandora’s box of horrors, or dwell on the morbid details of these revolting acts of bloodshed, which occurred, after all, a century and a half ago.”
“But our guests do need to know the facts. After Molly Potter was murdered, Catherine Eddowes was butchered just before midnight that same evening. Then it was Elizabeth Stride’s turn, followed by Mary Jane Kelly, so very, very beautiful she was. A Marilyn Monroe look-alike. Then poor Dora Fowler, slashed and eviscerated near the rookery where she sold parrots, and half a block from where her fiancé was hurrying on his way to meet her. And last but not least a young woman from the nobility, the Duke of Twyford’s granddaughter, and the most brutal of all the murders. Lady Beatrix Twyford was carved up like a—”
“Ahem. Let us leave the dead in peace, shall we, Mrs. Llewellyn?”
“Yes, my love. Quite right. But do tell our guests about the curious incident of the girls’ eyeballs! They shan’t want to miss that historical tidbit.”
“Indeed, my love. I almost forgot.” The wax man’s head bobbed and swiveled like a giant Kewpie doll, his robotic jaws clamping open and shut. “At the time of the murders the assistant deputy of the CID, Scotland Yard, Major Gideon Brown, gave the orders for Dark Annie and Dora Fowler’s eyes to be photographed in the hope that their retinas might retain the image of their killer. There was a popular belief during the early years of plate-photography—started by a short-story writer — that when a person died, the last scene he witnessed would be imprinted on his retina. Superstitious rubbish, of course, but these early sepia photographs proved invaluable to Madame Tussauds’ present-day team of forensic artists who compiled the wax likenesses of these unfortunate girls.”
As she scurried toward the flashing exit sign, another waxwork tableau swiveled to life, depicting the double murder of the pregnant Molly Potter and Catherine Eddowes.
Against a backdrop of glaring strobe lights, Katie glanced briefly at Molly Potter’s flannel petticoats peeking out from under her swirling skirts, and then at the fur-trimmed cape Catherine Eddowes had actually worn on the night she died, or so the sign said. But Katie wasn’t interested. She turned and scooted away. If I see one more wax statue of a girl being slaughtered . . . I swear I’ll kill someone!
Katie hurled herself toward the blinking exit sign. She didn’t know where Toby and Collin were, but she couldn’t wait for them. Her muscles felt jittery; her knees, wobbly. I’ve got to get out of here!
The life-sized double-murder diorama of Molly Potter and Catherine Eddowes was followed by Elizabeth Stride, Mary Jane Kelly, and Dora Fowler. But then came the most horrific disembowelment of them all. The scene was so gruesome, Katie jerked to a halt, stopping dead in her tracks.
Trying hard not to look at the carnage, she kept her eyes focused on the brass plate below, and silently read the inscription:
On the 7th of December in Miller’s Court, Dorset Street, Lady Beatrix Twyford, age twenty-three, met with the most ghastly death of all at the hands of Jack the Ripper.
An authentic broadsheet announcement, bordered in black, hung nailed to a lamppost:
GROTESQUE
MURDER
IN THE EAST-END.
DREADFUL MUTILATION
OF YOUNG WOMAN
Katie tried to avert her eyes. But it was no use. A sepia three-dimensional projection of Dorset Street rose up the wall, shadowed by the needle spire of a church.
Turn The Corner If You Dare!
THIS EXHIBIT IS NOT
FOR THE SQUEAMISH OR FAINT OF HEART.
PROCEED AHEAD TO THE EXIT DOORS
Ripped, a Jack the Ripper Time-Travel Thriller Page 3