Tales of Jack the Ripper

by Laird Barron

  A bright discoloration on the floor caught my attention. Melissa’s pink ribbon from the inside of her jacket had detached and fell from the table. It triggered the memory of the day that she asked me to confirm what she had found inside of her body. My hands explored Melissa’s skin, my fingers pushing into her until I found a gross lump underneath her breast. An ugly thing resided and grew inside of her. Her cancer was the same as my curse. It grew and infected until it overcame the host.

  Melissa beat her disease. Could the curse, like the cancer, be eradicated as well? If my father, and for all I knew all the men in my family, were burdened with the fallout generated by one man’s choice to murder, had any of them ever tried to make up for that evil? Had they been keeping the darkness alive all this time by passing the burden down without trying to push against its influence?

  It had plagued me, for sure, but until that moment it had yet to corrupt me like it did to all of the Tumblety men. In fact, every time I fought against it, something good happened. I had to work twice as hard, but I did work, and I was still alive and successful. The men in my family were weak, and so continued to feed the curse. I wanted to fight, to become a healer.

  I was responsibility for putting an end to his legacy.

  I took the scalpel off of the doctor’s chest and took a step back from the slab. My anger toward this woman was fierce, justified, and natural, but my actions were not. Even in the changed state of mind I did not want to hurt this person, proving that I’m not a product of my past. Even though my past influenced my life I wasn’t about to let my forefather take me down like he did to all the men that came before me. Even if life was harder because of where I came from I would gladly work twice as hard to be better than Death.

  I placed Dr. Carmine back on the cot and left the hospital. I gave myself a shower and a shave and a few days to recover. When I awoke well rested, I had considered how close I came to hurting another human being. I thought of suicide, but that would just be a way out of the curse, a coward’s way out. I wanted to heal the horror brought upon my family by the evil of Francis Tumblety, Jack the Ripper.

  A few years have passed, and if the curse still haunts me I seem to be doing well with my fight against it. Melissa and I are engaged. She asked me. Her one condition was that I had to stop dissecting my food. A month after the incident we each received an email from Dr. Henry Clemenson, welcoming us into the hospital’s family of healers.

  “Maddy always said,” he concluded in his letter, “that there’s ‘something about Dr. Tumblety,’ and I trust her instincts. If she thinks you are a worthy investment, then you must be.”

  Nowadays, when I google my name, the links on the first few pages attach to my accomplishments in the medical field. The name of Jack the Ripper, Francis Tumblety, doesn’t show up until page four, and who looks that far back anyway?

  The Truffle Pig

  T.E. Grau

  I am a ghost, a curl of smoke, a whisper told to children to shut stubborn eyes until sleep comes to take them from their sheets. A shadow of a thing that casts none.

  I am the wave that washes away the sand castle when the father turns his head. I am a saboteur, a tracker. I am a killer of women, and of men. But so many women.

  I am reviled by all who don’t know me and hated by the very few that do. And I am the only thing that stands between how our world remains, and how it could be. No one wants to know how it could be, because it will mean the end of everything.

  I have been given many names from many quarters, yet none that matter. Bloodhound. Monster. I know myself as the 42nd of my kind, and the success of my art is the last barrier that keeps us from falling into the soundless crush of the eternal abyss.

  Presently, I am on the deck of a ship tossed by the North Atlantic, following those whom I and my forbearers have always followed, keeping six measured steps behind, which is close enough to see but not be seen. They never know who I am, or when I am going to strike, although I see them clearly. That is my edge, and the only reason why we are all still alive.

  I would kill every last one of them if I could, but I am one, and those behind me very few. We must keep our numbers low, as secrets abhor a crowd. Yet there are so many of them, with their numbers multiplying around us, while ours dwindle in private, as all rare things do. Total eradication was attempted in the 7th century, and our order was nearly wiped out when we emerged from the shadows, drunk on hubris and the lotus of righteousness. We were cut down like chaff and chopped to pieces. Souvenirs made of our bones. So now I follow them like a bloodline curse, do not engage, and destroy their work in whatever way I can.

  They make their rounds, and so do I, tailing them on their circuit of ancient outposts, established before time had meaning. After a stint in the red hill country of Southern France, they recently arrived in London, blending in with the bustle of the shrouded city, close enough to their communication base at Solsbury Hill and those things that still live deep in the Pictish Highlands above the Antonine Wall. The calculating Romans never built a wall without reason, let alone two. They knew what was lurking in those caves, what howled from the bottom of deep crags. But those bulwarks had crumbled with forgetfulness, while what they were built to repel waited for the stars to sing to them in melodies none of us could hear.

  My work in London attracted more attention than we anticipated, as none of us could foresee the butchery of a few random spares igniting a national scandal that soon spread across the globe. Information moved so quickly these days, and we were guilty of underestimating the modern lust for depravity. During times past, such events would be muttered across a tilled row, accompanied by a sign of the cross or prayer to an ancestor. Murder was still hot in primal limbs back then, and untimely death was an unfortunate neighbor to every house. It was endured, a wintered dip in daily lives. But in these days of lace and buttermilk, death was marched into sitting rooms and made to dance, as a brush with oblivion became exclusive to the point of aristocratic fetish.

  Accordingly, in a matter of hours, London exploded with interest in the first girl I took apart. This made my remaining task more difficult, demanding a hastily prepared misinformation campaign to distract the insatiable thirst of pen and populace from my bloody casework on the cobblestone of Whitechapel. Make it appear isolated, spiced with a bit of royal intrigue, so no broad-minded Scotland Yardies would put the pieces together. Princes, Freemasons, palace doctors. Occulted journalists and Polish Jews. A smear of horseshit over the lens, ensuring that the puzzle would remain scattered upon the floor while the full picture bled invisible into the planks underneath.

  They who continually force my practiced hand year after year are followers of the Dark Man, who was last documented by public record—since destroyed—striding out of a screaming Egypt after blanketing the land with pestilence three and a half millennia ago, before fading into the sand at a Delphic place still marked by the wandering Kharga of the great Western Desert. He had punished his former hosts for turning their backs on him in the name of river superstition buoyed by slave theology, while his legacy of plague was co-opted by various holy books in the years that followed. The Dark Man cared not for the truth or the lies, waiting for his next re-emergence on a timetable only he knew, dictated by the stars and those things that lay in wait far beyond them. In his absence, a growing coterie of acolytes disappeared underground with him, anticipating his next mission of celestial cataclysm, and often taking initiative, sowing anarchy to pave a path of advent. Multitudes went with him. Houses were cleared. Villages. Families within families that kept alive the Elder Ways, and those willing to sacrifice everything they knew to learn. The allure of the glinting black is irresistible to anonymous eyes choking on the monotony of the neverending gray.

  That is when we were born, like seeds fertilized by rotting flesh, rising delicate into the morning air, yet still tasting death in our veins. We grew in secretive greenhouses, shaped by the blade, and then were released one at a time to follow across the
planet the spoor of the Dark Man and those followers who glorified in his peculiar taste for destruction. But chaos begs for order, and order can only live to stabilize chaos, as water looks for the glass. And so I and others before me were tapped and trained, called by forces that no one fully understood yet dared not question, as the reality presumed by the rational mind is just an onion skin surrounding the deeper mysteries spiraling at the core. We were trained in the secret fighting arts and built a mental foundation grounded in the philosophies of dead moons, before graduating to anatomy and vivisection, memorizing the human form inside and out, as this was the battlefield on which our modern wars would be waged. The flesh. It always came back to the flesh. To hone our skills, we leaned on esoteric surgical techniques far in advance than those of contemporary physicians employed in the enterprise of saving lives, as our craft was always practiced in the pursuit of death. Removal of corruption on such a minute level could end in no other result, for the sake of the infected and the greater world. Much like the Romans and their concealed knowledge of what lay north of their Britannia walls, we had to keep in place a shade over our work and real reasons why we willingly play this game of fox and goose, hoop and stick. Marbles. Bloody fucking marbles.

  And so we studied as we fought and learned as we died, finding that the servants of the Dark Man are dedicated, and not merely human. Things that slither, scuttle across the dust, and swim in lightless waters heed the call of this ancient numen, who happened across our reality incalculable eons past, before human and mammal, before the birds and thunder lizards and bright things of the sea. He has been with us since before the beginning, and much like us, named a thousand labels. One for each tribe. Trickster, Loki, Lucifer. He isn’t any of these things, yet is all of these things. He is older than the gods of the Israelites and the Babylonians and the Sumerians and more powerful still, yet somehow bound by strictures outside our comprehension, inscrutable to even his followers, who bow low to the riddles. And blessed be these barriers, as without them, none would need my services, because no one would be around. Marbles.

  Years we have battled, as the corpses stacked high. I followed their migration, driving them out of Cathar country, before they turned their sights on London. Old black pudding London, gem of the western world.

  In between assignments, I enjoyed my stay in The Square Mile. I took tea and the sights, moving through halls of royalty and libertine gutters. Dipping my toes into the Thames, wondering how many skulls were staring back at me. All the while waiting out the stars. Like both sides had always done. The cosmic chess game played on a terrestrial board. I sniffed the air, avoided the food and sampled the humanity around me, which is a relatively painless process. Relatively. By way of my rather unconventional initiation, I was intimately familiar with the flavor of tainted meat, fouled by whatever their side brought through from far-off places and unleashed on our unprepared feedlot.

  I had been stationed in London for several uneventful months, when I finally found the scent, which led me into the East End and the warren of brothels that serviced the bent desires of prim English gentlemen of Queen Victoria’s empire. Following instructions taught to them in dreams, the Dark Man’s followers utilized discarded street girls to spread their fungal stain into London’s population. Death from trash, wrapped in a silken doily, this time using humans as the mules instead of fleas like centuries before. Prostitutes were hired and used, servicing clandestine orgies to keep the master plot hidden. Never one at a time, never kidnapped, as that would draw too much attention amongst the working women, and one can never kill the spread of gossip without sacking a city. They took their hosts from off the streets, and deposited spores into vaginas, mouths, eyes, organs, in a closely scrutinized mating ritual guised as fantasy play. Practicing their miscegenation in plain sight, lit by black candle and smoking brazier. After the wounds were washed and bustles retied and before the drugs wore off, the women were set free to spread what they now carried to the thousands of locals and global travelers that took full advantage of the daylight whore trade of fabled London. Catch and release, to grow the herd.

  So I cut those mules apart, finding the bad bits and disposing of the disease as only my people know how. Spores were not just left in the womb, but could be anywhere, depending on the vagaries of the copulation, and the physical capabilities of the sire. Behind the cheekbone, spinning in the intestines, buried in the heart. The hosts didn’t need to be quality, just female, and alive long enough for the spores to mature into polyps, and then into something more. Those unfortunate Brick Lane dollymops were just incubators, spider sacks to be sucked dry by the grand scheme of tiny parasites who dreamed of rising tall like their fathers. Prodigies from beyond the stars.

  That just wouldn’t do, so I sniffed them out, tracked them down, and did my business before disappearing into the fog.

  Upon seeing my handiwork, draped proud and messy, the local authorities assumed rape, as they always do, but those poor drabs had been raped a thousand times before I ever found them. I was sending a message. To Them. Fucking cunts. This wasn’t about murder, this wasn’t about a scandalizing of the local whores. That was just collateral damage. My work was about protection, the careful removal of the next generation of those things that lived in the hills and other forgotten spots now shunned by humanity. The intelligent bacteria from far off Yuggoth, that did terrible and unpredictable things when acquainted with human ingredients.

  My conspicuous message did the trick, and the fellowship of the Dark Man uprooted again in the middle of the night, booking passage to America by way of Arkham, with private train portage to Chicago in the middle west of the country. They thought that I was unaware of their plans, and especially their end destination, but just as they have tentacles, I have tendrils, and the concentrated wealth of the very few and very old can buy a mountain of classified information. Money can substitute for numbers on many occasions. Not on the field of battle, per se, but in the close quarters of global commerce, which is all that the world cares about these days anyway. That and their appetite for murder, just so long as it will shuffle out the door in time for brandy and cigars. These church pew sadists probably didn’t deserve my work, but orders are orders, and our papers say keep them safe while giving them a circus. The clowns always draw the eye away from the cracking whips and creaking chains behind the tent flap.

  I’ll give them their circus, and do, because it suits my needs, and thwarts those of the Dark Man. It did the trick in London, and has moved the game west, across the frozen sea, following the path taken by so many English three hundred years before. Of course, the circumstances seemed different then, but the roots cause is not dissimilar. The exodus of faith.

  A shout goes out, startling me, which is an unfamiliar sensation. I am on edge, and try to blame my seasick stomach. Yet I know something isn’t right about the speed of their departure from London, but my pride hides the truth from me. A force bigger than my art and my kind is at work. I will tell myself that it was what I did on those East End streets that tore them from the city, but I know that I am wrong. Gods help me if I’m startled again. Gods help all of us.

  Land is sighted and a crowd moves to the rail. New England off the starboard bow. The ship creaks southward past the lightless blot that makes up queer Innsmouth, bearing west again into the harbor, flanked by Kingsport and Martin’s Beach to each side. We head up the sluggish Miskatonic to Arkham, where a waiting train will take them to the middle of the country and the expo that will bring in a million pilgrims a few years from now. What the docks did for London, this World’s Fair will do for Chicago. Attracting flies of every species from every country on the planet. I will follow my six measured steps behind, and they will not know I am there, until they set up shop again, and I am there. Once again, in the shadows, sniffing the air.

  Snow begins to fall, slicking the deck. It’s Christmas time in the dying weeks of 1888, but no one seems to remember. No carolers stroll the streets of Arkham. No be
lls ring in the church houses.

  The ship docks, and I disembark down the gangplank, slipping with my seventh step. A sailor catches me by the arm. “Watch yourself, miss,” he says with a grin, revealing a sporting history in several missing teeth. “Don’t want to drown yourself a foot from shore.”

  I just nod, feigning a coquettish blush that hides the burn of anger at my unsteady stride. For stumbling, even slightly, while the black seawater waits and watches below me.

  “You arrived from London, then?” the sailor asks while escorting me to the pier, stepping lightly on the plank so as not to disturb my balance.

  “Yes,” I say, scanning the wharf.

  “Terrible business happening there, with that Jack the Ripper running the streets.”

  The name snaps me back to attention. “Indeed, sir. A woman is lucky to make it out alive.”

  “Old Bloody Jack wouldn’t like your type, I don’t reckon.”

  I shoot him a look.

  “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” he sputters. “Just meanin’ that you bein’ such a fine lady and all, not like those brothel slags who got carved up proper.”

  I say nothing, as there is nothing to say.

  “A bird’s gotta keep her eyes open back home. Never know if Jack’s headin’ your way.”

  I can’t help myself. “What if he’s headed your way?”

  The sailor is about to respond, but swallows his words. He tips his cap and hurries back to his ship. The fear has spread, as the game continues.

  I called myself Jack in Londontown, but that’s not who I am. That was just the latest mask, the newest nickname, and just as insipid as the others. And there will be others.

  My name is the Truffle Pig, hard trained to root out the fungus. I am your protector, the 42nd of my kind. I was yours truly, and I will be again soon.