by Tim Marquitz
We followed the energy along the walk until we came to the front of one of the ragtag apartments near the end of the building. It only took a moment then to realize we hadn’t been tracking a person. On the wall of the apartment, little more than a few scratches to an untrained eye, was a tiny sigil set just inches from the doorframe. Warmth flooded me as we stared at it, innate magic pressing against my senses.
The symbol was a concealment ward, meant to obscure an object, make it harder to identify or even notice without concentrated effort. It had been drawn hastily, recently even, which made its energies ebb and flow, giving it away. That was why I’d connected it to the man I’d followed out of the bar. His presence was leaking from the ward because of the sloppy nature of its construction. While the spell might have kept the humans from examining the room, the drip, drip, drip of magical energy only drew our attention. Up close, it practically screamed for us to look at it. There was no doubt we’d found something we weren’t meant to.
My eyes unconsciously glanced up at the painted number above the door. Its gloss had long since faded, but it could still be read easily enough. Scarlett and I sighed in unison.
The number was thirteen. There was no way that was a coincidence.
“You see?” She pointed at the number as though I could have missed it, reiterating my own thought. It didn’t mean Hell was involved, but I definitely understood why she might think so.
My senses stymied by ward, no matter how badly crafted it was, I couldn’t get a bead on anything on the other side of the door. “Anyone inside?”
She shrugged.
“Great.” I glanced around to see if anyone was out on the street, but it remained dark and quiet. It being Saturday night, I expected more folks out on the street but the area was desolate, deserted. There weren’t even any cats or dogs prowling about. Maybe the ward was working on a subconscious level to keep the locals away. I was pretty knowledgeable in sigils, having had them drilled into my head by Baalth and my uncle, but each instance was influenced by the will of the caster. There was no telling what twists he’d imbedded when he slapped it on the wall.
No one around to see us, it was time to stop skulking and do what I do best: make noise and break things.
A swift kick to the door split the wood at the handle and knocked it loose from the frame. The sigil flickered, burning a reddish-orange before fading to a charcoal gray. The door swung open with a creak. The tangy scent of charred metal quickly gave way to something else…something horrible.
No longer contained by the ward, the smell of rusty copper and rotting meat spilled from the room in putrid waves. Scarlett and I covered our noses with our hands and glanced inside. There on a small cot in the corner of the room was a bundle of shredded cloth bathed in red. I inched forward only to realize the bundle was actually a body. My stomach lurched. Scarlett gagged at the doorway and stumbled off as I just stood there, frozen in place, staring at the ruin in the bed. There was no mistaking what I was looking at.
The Ripper had struck again.
Eight
Up to that point, I’d only seen photographs of the carnage the Ripper had left behind, the horror suffused by distance and the grainy nature of the photos. Here, standing at the foot of the bed just feet from where his latest victim lie hacked up as if by a deranged butcher, there was no way to escape the brutality of the act.
Able to tell the body was that of a woman—due only to the killer’s history and the vaguely recognizable dress stuck moistly to the legs—I could feel my mother’s disgust welling up inside me. The woman’s face had been sliced at random angles, a sharp blade having cut the flesh down to the bone, the cartilage of her nose hacked away and hanging in shreds. There was nothing left of her to identify, the damage too extensive. Her dress had been torn away, her breasts, stomach, and groin cut apart, bits and pieces scattered wetly about the bed and nearby floor. A partial set of red boot prints stood out against the darker shadows of the floor, the toes coming to a bit of a point. Jack had stood right over the woman as she died.
There was so much blood I could taste it, so I turned away. As much as it sickened me, there was nothing I could do for her. She was beyond help. All that was left was revenge.
Resisting the urge to draw a breath, I glanced about the room and realized the sigil outside hadn’t been the only one at work. A number of them had been drafted upon the walls, but none with the hasty hand of the one outside. The killer had taken his time inside. Unable to tell what had been done, I stepped closer to the first and noticed the absolute silence that enveloped me.
I glanced at the door to see Scarlett just outside. She held her hand over her mouth, coughing into it, yet I couldn’t hear a sound. I called out to her, but she didn’t respond. My pulse thrumming in my veins, I ran over to her. The moment I cleared the doorframe, her hacking cough slammed against my ears. She started and spun to glare at me, one of her swords coming up.
I raised my hands to ward her off. “Easy, Scarlett.” A glance back into the apartment set a bitter sickness bubbling up in my guts. “I know how he’s getting away with it.”
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and hitched her chin at me.
“He has silencing wards inside.”
Scarlett’s shoulders slumped, her gaze rising to the sky. There was no doubt she was thinking exactly what I was, but I doubted God was on the same page. Turn the other cheek, and all that.
Able to cut off the apartment from the rest of the world, the Ripper could do anything he wanted to his victim and no one would hear any of it, no matter how loud or long she screamed. A cold chill prickled the skin of my arms. He’d done just that, slicing the woman to pieces while she lay in her own bed, just feet from her neighbors on each side and they hadn’t heard a thing. The other wards had kept the stench of her rotting body down as she lay there for who knows how long. Jack had invaded her home and killed her where she lived.
My chest tightened as I went back into the room. As much as I didn’t want to be there, I still had work to do. My uncle had sent me here to catch a killer. Up until right then, it had just been a job. I was there because Lucifer wanted me to do something. Now, it was personal. Seeing the savaged remains of Jack’s victim was a greater motivation than anything else. Anyone who would carve up an innocent like that needed to be taken out, needed to be offered the sharp end of a knife just as he showed this poor, young woman.
The silence only amplified my fury. Unable to hear the breath spilling from my lungs or the creak of the floor as I walked gave me no respite from my thoughts. While the ward assured me no one would hear me as I investigated the apartment, I couldn’t handle the absolute quiet. My heart thumping without sound inside my chest, I went over to the silencing ward and sank my fingers into the moist wood. A quick scrape cut lines through the sigil, pieces of wood and old paint peeling up beneath my fingernails.
The world crashed into my ears.
One moment it was utterly silent, the next, the rumble of distant thunder sounded as though it exploded in my head. Scarlett’s pacing boots were a cannonade; her muffled coughs the barks of wolves. The floor screamed beneath my weight and the clock on the wall droned, every second a snapping twig.
It was a few, very uncomfortable moments before the world settled and my hearing adjusted. When it did, I drew a deep breath despite the stench, just to hear the sound. My nose hated me right then, but the fetid stink of dead flesh chased the anger from me, replacing it with disgust. A quiet, steady hum rang in my ears.
I looked to the body once more, and then let my gaze slide away. For all the damage Jack had done, the poor woman wouldn’t be telling me what happened. No, if there was to be anything useful in the room, it would be there alongside the wards. They alone were proof that there was more to these killings than anyone had known.
The papers hadn’t mentioned any strange symbols drawn upon the walls near the other victims, but then again they hadn’t been killed in their homes. Maybe Jack
had murdered them elsewhere and only dropped their bodies where they could be found. If that was the case, he could likely go on doing it forever. No one would think twice about a man walking along with a drunken prostitute. He could dump the bodies anywhere and then just stroll away, never to be recognized. Worse still, if he knew enough magic to keep his crime scenes from being found, what else was he capable of?
I didn’t really want to know. He simply needed to die.
I followed the wards from one to the next, circling the small room to look at each of the five sigils set upon the walls, a few, faint footprints led the way with crimson trails. At the last of the wards, a thought struck me. Turning so my back was against the wall, I traced the location of the wards with my eyes, sighing as a mental image formed. They’d been arranged at five points. If I were to stretch a rope between the points, it would form the shape of a pentagram.
Add that to the ominous room number and it was clear this wasn’t just some random murder or sadistic release. It had been a ritual.
I swallowed hard at the realization. Lucifer might not be involved in any of this, but given the evidence, I couldn’t be sure someone else from Hell wasn’t involved somehow. Was that why I’d been sent? Had Lou or Baalth suspected?
My gaze drifted back to the footprints. Jack clearly hadn’t expected anyone to find his little abattoir. However, something nagged at me while I examined the prints. They hovered near the closest wards, toes facing the wall, but that struck me as strange seeing how he would have drawn the wards first. Why then were there bloody footprints near them? The sigils were an early part of the ritual process, placed and forgotten. Maybe Jack had checked them after not getting a response to his message.
But if Jack had been worried about his work enough to double check it, what other mistakes had he made? I looked to the prints near the bed once more and noticed something I hadn’t earlier. A quick scan of the others confirmed it. There’d been more than one person in the room.
The prints that encircled the apartment were broader across the toes than the ones beside the bed. That’s why the blood had been dragged about the room. It wasn’t Jack who was worried about the wards, but someone else with him. We weren’t just looking for one killer, but two. That realization sunk into my stomach like a stone.
I glanced back at Scarlett. She paced in a tight circle, her eyes always avoiding the apartment, her gaze dropping to the ground as she turned past the open doorway. It was one thing to let her know we were facing someone with magical ability, but it was something entirely different to mention the ritualistic nature of the murder or that we were chasing more than one suspect.
People didn’t spill blood and draw pentagrams to draw the favor of God or the Choir. No, they only did that to curry favor with Satan, good ol’ Uncle Lou, or one of the other lieutenants of Hell. Scarlett might not be the brightest star in the sky, but she would understand exactly what all this meant…if I were to tell her.
Before she could work her nerve up to come inside, I went out and pulled the door closed behind me.
She stopped her pacing to watch me. “We need to inform the authorities.”
I shook my head. “Not yet.”
She started toward the apartment. “But you can’t just leave her there.”
“Scarlett.” I blocked the way to the door. “She’ll be found soon enough, I promise. There’s nothing we can do for her, but if we raise the alarm, the bobbies will shut down the area and we’ll never find these…this guy,” I corrected. “We can’t have that. He needs to think he’s in the clear.”
Knuckles popped as Scarlett clenched her fist about her hilt.
“We got lucky stumbling across the killer and forcing his hand.” I gestured to the sigil on the outside wall. “He drew this in a hurry to keep people from finding the body. He might not know who’s on to him, but he clearly suspects someone is.” The fact that I’d caught a whiff of his presence meant he probably sensed me in return.
“Won’t he just hide; hunker down until we’re gone?”
“I don’t think so.” What I didn’t tell her was why I didn’t think Jack and his buddy would disappear. Like with most beliefs, the Devil’s Laws were passed down from practitioner to practitioner, the idiocies and blatant falsehoods becoming canon as time went on. According to the lore, you didn’t start the process and walk away. If Jack was looking to summon Uncle Lou, he needed to stick around until he got an answer, not that he ever would, least not with parlor tricks. You didn’t summon the Devil, he summoned you.
But if that’s what was going on, why did Jack run off when we were in the bar together? Even the most amateurish of wannabe Satanists couldn’t be so dumb as to think Lucifer himself would pop in for a chat. He had to know my uncle would send a minion if he bothered to respond at all. Then again, I couldn’t be sure it was Jack I’d run into. It could well have been the second guy; the one pacing about the room as Jack did the deed. It’s not like I’d had time to measure his feet.
Someone had checked the wards in the kill room as if they didn’t trust them. That paranoia was probably why the guy had run off and sketched the new sigil on the apartment wall after he’d spotted me. He was worried I would stumble across it before they moved the body so he tried to protect their secret.
A smile crept to my lips. It wasn’t Jack I’d run across, but someone I could take advantage of. This guy was the weak link. His fear had led us right to the body, his abilities nowhere near those of Jack’s. He was how we’d track down the Ripper.
“What do we do now?”
I glanced down at my palm, and then looked up to grin at Scarlett. “I have an idea.”
Oddly enough, she didn’t seem happy about that.
Nine
We’d circled through the streets of Whitechapel for hours, Scarlett asking me over and over where we were going. I waved her off each time because I wasn’t even sure myself. Finally she gave up, and I reveled in the relative peace of the chilly, London night.
The smart folks had fled the streets, but there were still people out and about, though few and far between. It made my search more difficult but I knew the general area so I figured I’d stumble across what I was looking for sooner or later. It was, unfortunately, later as it turned out.
A quiet giggle floated through the air as we approached a corner we’d probably passed fifteen times in our travels. I stopped and hugged the wall.
“What are we looking for?” Scarlett asked again. There was no missing the sharpened edge of her simmering fury.
I waggled a finger in her face to shut her up and peered down the adjoining street. Quickly snatching my hand away before she could rip something off, I turned and gave her a triumphant smile.
“He’s who we’re looking for.” I motioned around the corner with my eyes.
Scarlett crept up to the edge and glanced down the walk before turning back to me. She raised her arms in a silent question. Why?
“You’ll see.” I looked again, waiting until the giggling woman wandered off with her date, and then waved Scarlett forward. “I need you to do something.”
She sighed and gave me her ‘No’ look. “We’re family, Frank. It’s never going to happen.”
“Not that.” Though I had to admit, now that I was thinking about it… “Anyway, just step around the corner and call out for Wally. And try not to scare the guy.” I motioned to her blades.
“Wally?” She raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been in town two days and you already know the local pimp’s name?”
“What can I say? It’s a gift,” I answered. “Just do it, please.”
“Is this our killer?”
“No, but he might lead us to him.” I hoped she’d leave it at that.
She did. Scarlett groaned under her breath and tugged her sword belt off, handing it to me before stepping around the corner and calling out to the pimp. Had it been me she was shouting for, I’d have run for my life, but Wally apparently didn’t have an ear for danger. Th
ere was nothing remotely suggestive or seductive about the tone of Scarlett’s voice. In fact, it sounded like a harpy mother calling a boy home for a spanking.
But then again…
Wally sauntered over without hesitation, boots scraping over the cobblestones and telling me exactly where he was. “Do I know you, girl?” he asked.
I didn’t hear Scarlett’s answer so I assumed she just shook her head. That didn’t stop him from walking right up to her, fool that he was. Despite her tone, one look at Scarlett put all the other women in his life to shame. Even dressed down like a ragamuffin, she was the most beautiful woman he’d likely ever seen, even in his dreams. If for no reason other than to take a closer look, he’d respond to her. That’s what I was counting on.
His boots thumped to a stop in front of Scarlett, and I knew I had him. I dug my Webley out and darted around the corner, burying the barrel in his cheek. My other hand wrapped around his throat.
“Keep your mouth shut and I won’t blow a hole in your face. Understand?”
He swallowed against my palm and nodded, eyes bouncing between Scarlett and me. I dragged him around the corner and out of sight just in case one of his girls came back. We needed some quality time together, and I didn’t want any interruptions.
“Who is he?” Scarlett asked.
“This is Wally.”