Most of the houses around her was full of whores, most of the windows boarded, and opposite Miller’s Court was that doss with three hundred beds, filled every night. Her pretty face kept her busy—Jack counted several customers a night. She was always working Aldgate and Leman Street. She had a broken window, stuffed with a rag, and Jack had seen her reach through, push back the ragged muslin, and unlatch the door several times the past few days. Looked like she’d lost the key.
Maybe he best be careful; never afore had he hung around so long. But no one knew what he looked like. He’d heard he was pale, then he was swarthy, slight moustache, heavy or none, long dark coat, red coat, hunter’s coat, light waistcoat with a thick gold chain, trousers and garters, red handkerchief, a foreign look, a twinkle in the eye—every man Jack of em seed something different, suspected a different neighbor or renter, father or doctor or reverend or husband‑to‑be. Anyone could ha’ done them crimes—that’s what drove em all crazy.
Jack had visited Mary Kelly’s window the past few nights for a peek, when he knew she was gone. A bed, a chair, two tables. That was all. Some lace hung up by the window, a touch of the girl still in her. He caught himself wondering what it might be like to be living there with her. It made him angry with hisself; he might as well hope to be an angel up in Heaven.
He thought she might be pregnant. He had a special sense about such things. He could smell it on her.
Here the babies was all dying and the slut was bringing another dead child into the world. Jack could see it dangling blue‑faced from its cord, wrapped around her waist like some prized belt. He reminded himself—this harlot was like all the rest.
In the darkness of the filthy street a child was softly crying. Jack looked around but could not see the babe. He wondered if it was drowning, half‑dead under a pile of filthy rags, left abandoned in some darkened doorway, or what. The young ones had no chance. Their dead mothers was raising a nation of children with no one, a nation of staggerers wandering them alleys alone. They had to be stopped.
Teeth grinning a blade, scummy eyes shining under the gaslight. The lad had returned, standing in the darkness behind him. Happy Jack whirled about and reached for him. The boy was starved, and the largeness of his hunger stopped Jack. The boy’s eyes burned, pushing him.
“Do it,” the boy said.
“No, not tonight.”
“Don’t be a mewler, Jack. You’re going to feel good with this one. You’re going to feel quite a bit more than yourself.”
Mary Kelly wandered back from the public houses on Commercial Street about quarter to midnight. She couldn’t manage more than a drunken wobble. She had with her a short, fatty pig of a man, ragged sleeves and a billycock hat, thick moustache, still carrying his beer from the inn.
“Goodnight, Mary,” someone said out of the darkness. A woman’s voice, but it could ha’ come from anywhere. Jack’s own head maybe? But he couldn’t be bothered thinking on it, so busy he was watching his love and his hate dancing around with the filthy bulldog of a man.
“Goodnight,” Mary called out. “I’m going to have a song.” She then began to sing “Only a violet I plucked from my Mother’s Grave when a Boy.” It was ugly and off-tune but it was still like a needle going into Jack’s heart.
Happy Jack watched her reach through the broken window and unlatch the door, then drag the fat sack of meat in with her. A short time later the pig stumbled out and went his way.
Jack turned toward the shadows. Tiny teeth gleamed. And somewhere a child was crying. At that moment he doubted Mary Kelly would resist; she wouldn’t have it in her. For she was already dead, now wasn’t she? And Happy Jack had come. Death would be too beautiful for her to refuse.
The paving stones beneath his feet was slick with human filth. He felt hisself stumble, and a pale arm come out of the filth and righted him. As far as he could see: dead bodies lolling in the alleys and doorways, their pale flesh beautiful in the moonlight. He and the lad stepped over them easily, the soft body parts rubbing against their progress. He and the lad. Happy Jack and the babe. Duly ordained and intent on their mission.
Happy Jack. Happy Jack. He walked to the broken window and reached through the space into the darkness of Mary Kelly’s room. He unlatched the door, stepped there, and was through.
She wore a thin chemise to bed. He couldn’t see her face in the darkness. He suddenly thought he might swoon with the power he had over her‑‑he didn’t know how he could bear it. Once again the world was his and everyone had to know this. She didn’t know she was already dead. Happy Jack had a duty to tell her. He had a way to excite her.
With each stroke he felt he was erecting something higher, building a monument in his heart with each thrust and twist as the blood thickened and raced, ran up his veins and exploded out to mend the world.
Once, maybe twice, maybe even a third time she said it. “Oh! Murder!” But very softly, as if she really didn’t care. Jack doubted anyone else could hear her.
The first thing he knew of it there was two chunks of flesh lying on the table in front of the bed. How had it happened? Where had they come from? Then he looked back at his love in her white jawbone, white cheekbone, white-tooth grin. Smiling at his love for her. Wanting to reach down inside her and seize that love, bring it out for all to see, embrace her in a way she had never been embraced before, as he had never, ever been embraced. The throat had been cut clear across with a knife, nearly severing the head... but letting loose her grin. Both meaty breasts sliced off the trunk, and he started to go into the belly.
And the boy was asking him for the knife.
Jack stared at the boy with his grin, puzzled, thinking how wrong it’d be. Then handed him the knife.
The boy was all grin, thrilled with participation, as he began the work: hacking and slashing until the nose was all gone, and Happy Jack thinking Mary was lucky she didn’t have to smell the chapel no more, didn’t have to smell her own dying. The left arm hung, like the head, by a flap of skin only.
Mary Kelly’s leg was suddenly grinning at him, speaking with harsh white and red sounds, and Jack seed the knife digging a trench to her bone. Happy Jack moved closer as the belly was slashed across and down, reaching in desperately to find the babe drowning in his mother’s filth, digging frantically, sure the lad would kill the new baby as well.
He had to pause once he was inside her, feeling the soft, warm wetness of her. Soothing as a baby’s touch, as old silk underwear falling apart in a trunk, as an old felt hat caught between the fingers. Again he bit into his lip and brought up some salt taste for comfort. He reached for the baby, for Mary Kelly’s love, determined to hold it, keep it, take it back with him to keep in his secret place under the ground.
He could not find the child alive in all that bloody flesh, even though he heard again and again its soft cries for help. He pulled away from the corpse‑mother, suddenly afraid of the boy with his knife. Jack looked down at the flesh in his hands, Mary Kelly’s liver, and placed it ever‑so‑gently on the bed between her feet, as if it was the babe. The boy looked back over his shoulder at Jack, grinning foolishly. And for some reason Jack found himself thinking of Christmas, and how a boy belonged with his toys and not in a Hell like this, and Jack giggled crazily, and reached in, and deep inside him Daniel managed to close his eyes, refusing to look.
When Daniel opened them again Happy Jack was staring into Mary Kelly’s face. Only the eyes were human. He’d ha’ blotted out the eyes too, their stubborn insistence on life turning his insides into a tortured twist, but he didn’t dare step past the grinning boy. He stepped back as the boy held the bloody knife out to him.
And then he had the knife in his hands, Mary Kelly’s eyes was on him, and the boy had again disappeared. Happy Jack sobbed as the barbed legs and mandibles raked away at the back of his skull in almost frantic rhythm. Something was breaking away here.
“My name...” he cried and fell to his knees, sobbing, unable to complete the sentence
or look at the bed.
Instead he gazed at the window. At dark mandibles and barbed lobes rising into two shadow faces framed by large, multi‑faceted eyes.
5
DANIEL WOKE UP on the floor by his bunk. He had his hands up and in front of his face. He stared at the red line as it moved down his right forefinger and began to spread across his knuckles, widening gradually until it was a thick swatch of blood. He turned. Mary Kelly’s entrails steamed on the floor beside his head. He could feel the heat coming off them. What he did... He bit his lip and tasted salt. “My God!”
“Daniel!”
What he’d done, he’d ripped her, he’d felt inside her, touched inside her, touched... “My god!” The things he’d touched... “My god my god!”
“Daniel, you’re back in the barracks. It’s over.” Daniel moved his eyes, saw Falstaff hovering over him. “Who were you last night?”
“The Ripper. Jack the Ripper. Or whatever his real name was.”
“Oh. Upsetting stuff. He was like a shark, wasn’t he? A human, butchering shark.”
“How he saw women... I couldn’t bear to think I had even a shred of those feelings inside me. I adore my wife. I loved my mother. I...”
He saw women’s torn and bloodied lingerie hanging from the ruined ceiling, jeweled with cobwebs and spider eggs. Discolored and fake-looking manikin parts. A baby hung from the webs.
“You were playing a part. Now you have to shake it off. Many of us have ghosts of those feelings, stray notions and longings, but it doesn’t mean we would do those things. We’re not the people whose parts we’re forced to play. You and I, we have food prep duty this morning. That’ll help take your mind off it.”
It seemed ridiculous that the roaches with their advanced technology should still require hands-on food preparation. Until Falstaff explained it to him.
“You’ve noticed they have humans handling the food? They never let roaches handle the food?”
“How do we know that roaches didn’t handle the food before it got to us? It’s just some kind of paste-more like mechanic’s lubricant than any kind of proper food. It certainly looks like the kind of thing that a roach would have handled, or made, or thrown up, actually.”
Falstaff made a face. “Don’t be grotesque. Humans need to eat, they expect to eat—things go wrong if they don’t eat—but they don’t like thinking about where their food came from. But if they were to see the roaches handling the food, theywould probably turn it down. They might even starve themselves.”
“How do you know this?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. The roaches don’t even train us to do the job—it’s passed down human to human.”
The paste came out of three different dispensers: one with the symbol of a cow, one with the symbol of a fish, one with a leaf symbol. All the paste was of an identical, slightly grayish color, but the textures and flavoring varied. The vegetable paste tasted of greens. The fish paste tasted fishy. And the meat paste could have been chicken, beef, or pork—depending on your mood. To further individuate the offerings, the “cooks” cut the paste into a variety of shapes as it solidified, then ran it through a dye-and-flavor apparatus one batch at a time.
“Wait,” Falstaff said. “That was vegetable paste.”
“Yes.”
“You applied the meat dyes to it.”
“I doubt it makes much difference. It all tastes oily and greasy anyway.”
“We’ll see. I’m not greatly enamored of roach cuisine, either,” Falstaff said. “But at least they’ve solved the food problem for themselves.”
“I’d still like a good steak from time to time.”
“Have you ever heard the expression, ‘Meat is murder’?”
Daniel stared at the entries assembling into individual packages. “I won’t argue with the ethics, but people have to eat. You were right. People don’t like to think about where their food came from.”
HE’D BEEN A summer child, Daniel’s son. Oh, he was born in winter and might one day die in winter for all Daniel knew, and the last few years before Daniel had been yanked off to Ubo, Gordon had had the look of winter hanging about him. His hair was dark and fuzzy in a way that reminded you of coal, skin pale and translucent as plants grown with too little sun. And frozen eyes, shiny with their hard layer of ice, unmoving eyes that could accuse you like no other.
But he really should have been a summer child. He would have been had Elena and Daniel been able to make love that cold October when Daniel lost his job and Elena had first understood that the life she was going to have wasn’t the one she’d signed up for. It was the first time they had gotten into trouble with their marriage, the first time they had been unable to talk each other out of worry, make each other feel safe again. From that moment on their pain had taken them down separate paths.
Although Daniel had been sure the marriage would be good again—it had to be, as he could not imagine a life without her—the estrangement shook him. He went back over the things he had said, the things he had done, determined to fix anything he had cracked or broken.
And so Gordon was conceived the first week in June during a hot spell in Miami. They’d gone there so that Daniel could look for work. The air conditioning in their cheap motel had broken down. They’d stripped but still couldn’t get to sleep. And although things between them would get much better over the next few years, Daniel would never forget that they’d had Gordon simply out of frustration and a desperate need for comfort.
Gordon was born in Denver in March, during the worst snow storm in ten years. People talked about how global warming was obviously a fraud when they still could have such temperatures. The car lodged in a snow bank on the way to the hospital and Daniel was sure the baby would be born right there in the freezing automobile. But Gordon waited for the hospital to make his entrance, and from then on avoided the cold. Daniel could tell even in that initial cry—sluggish and forced out, as if he were afraid the winter would force its way into his body through his open mouth—that this child would hate the winter.
Gordon wanted to be a summer child: it was there in the set of his shoulders as he concentrated on a new project full of artificial color and light, in the tentative corners of his smile on the first really sunny day of spring, in his eyes the first time they saw a drive‑in movie together, just the two of them, Daniel and his boy Gordon.
But all these gestures of promise and light were finally absorbed in the paleness of skin, a certain flaccidity of tissue that erased the boy’s smiles. As Gordon grew older he settled into being a quiet and somber child. The cold organism that had wrapped itself around Gordon’s heart had decided to smother anything else, and no wishes, lies, or dreams were able to stop that.
This boy here, the youngest resident Daniel had seen in Ubo—where there were no fathers or sons—had the same dark hair, the same paleness of skin, but the ambient light gave the skin a reddish, healthier tint. The black hair shone as if sprinkled with tiny jewels, from silica trapped in the strands, he guessed, and infrequent washing. The boy pretended to be at the beach with the bright blue sand bucket he carried and the short-handled shovel. Daniel went up to the roof of Ubo every day he could, which was where he first met him.
The boy glanced up at Daniel and the resemblance to his son snatched his breath. Then he pointed at the object between his feet, half‑covered with filthy debris. It was the corpse of a small aquatic bird, its beak open, eyes closed, left wing bent awkwardly underneath. Birds sometimes crashed onto the roof. Few flew or walked away. The boy poked the bird’s body with the shovel.
“Bird’s dead,” the boy said.
Daniel nodded, not sure how to handle this. But he thought he should say something. “Too bad. How did it happen?”
“I didn’t do it!” The boy looked up at him defiantly, his lower lip puckered out.
“I didn’t say you did... son. I just thought you may have seen it happen.”
“No... I was just here,
then there it was by those old cans. Dead. It won’t ever move again, be alive again.”
“That’s right.”
“Why can that happen?”
“It just happens, I’m afraid. It just happens that way.”
The boy nodded. Then with an irritated little grimace he began digging up the debris around the bird as if trying to bury it in the roof. There was a great deal of dirt and debris here, but Daniel didn’t think he could get deep enough to bury even a small bird. Finding damp, darker dirt underneath, the boy began to dig more violently. It seemed to Daniel a primitive reaction.
Daniel nodded again, feeling incredibly stupid. “That’s too bad. Are you going to bury it?”
The boy bent over the bird with knitted brow, as if this were an extremely difficult question. “Maybe. I guess so. But maybe I oughta ’xamine it first, though.”
Daniel crouched beside the boy, looking at the dead bird intently, as if he were just as interested as the child. And maybe he was. He reached and, absentmindedly, began to pick sand grains out of the boy’s thick black hair. The boy looked up briefly, then turned back to the bird, apparently not minding.
“Why did it die?”
Daniel shifted uncomfortably, then sank his knees onto the roof and leaned closer. “I don’t know... disease most likely. Maybe a heart attack. I’ve heard that birds have a lot of heart attacks...”
“Where’s the blood? Didn’t it have any blood in it?”
Daniel touched the bird gently with the boy’s shovel. The blood appeared to be gone, and he’d seen animals in this state before, usually off the side of the road. But he couldn’t really explain it—the question, a very good question, had caught him off guard. “I’m... not sure. I think maybe they get dehydrated. That means the sun dries them out once the heart isn’t pumping anymore, or the lungs breathing. They turn... sour, I guess is the word. Like if you take a tomato out of the refrigerator and forget and leave it on the windowsill.”
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