Tales of Jack the Ripper

by Laird Barron

  He collapsed onto the crisp, yellow grass of somebody’s sideyard and vomited up a belly full of liquor. “Luly…”

  He blacked out, and the night reassembled itself, shard by jagged shard. Only it was not the same night as before, before it cracked apart and took Blake’s soul with it to Hell. This night was much blacker, and though it did not return with his soul, it came back with purpose. Seconds later, or perhaps hours, he found himself being shaken roughly and a tenor voice shouting at him to rouse himself, to go back to whatever reprobate hole in the earth from which he crawled. Blake opened his eyes to thin slits and beheld the grey-haired man looming above him. The man’s face was pinched with annoyance. He wore a dressing robe and cursed enough to bring the law down on himself for coarse language in public. Blake had seen a dozen people hauled off to jail for saying considerably less.

  In time, he sat up. His skull pounded, felt much too small, and his stomach roiled again. He pressed his fingers hard against his temples and focused narrowly on the scars the night bore from its reconstruction.

  He said, “I am sorry, sir.”

  “Just fuck off, trash,” the man grumped and he stomped back into the house. Blake watched him go, and when the door shut and the lamp went out, the moonlight illumined the woodpile beside the house, and the broad chopping stump before it, and the well-used ax protruding from one of the stump’s many clefts.

  His head stopped hurting him. So he rose up and went directly to the ax.

  “Moses?” came a tinkling voice from back of the house. “Mose? What is it?”

  “There is no devil,” Blake whispered, yanking the ax free. “Only me.”

  He went boldly around to the backyard, where he discovered the voice’s owner: a birdlike woman clutching a heavy red cape to her throat.

  “Moses?”

  “Only me,” he repeated for her benefit, hefting the ax. He grinned through his tears and took three long strides to close the distance between them. “And I am from Hell.”

  Though dulled from overuse, the blade cleaved through the top of the woman’s skull with relative ease. Its trajectory halted halfway down, at her nose, and she emitted a hissing noise like steam from a teapot before falling limp. Blake planted his right foot at her groin and gave the corpse a shove; the ax came free and Moses’ wife crashed to their winter-dead lawn.

  Blake wiped the tears from his eyes with his free hand and squatted beside the dead woman. Her head was an impossible tangle of hair and blood, bone and brain. The selfsame moonglow that showed the ax to him now brought a sparkle to a hairpin, having come loose from the now bifurcated head. He pinched it between forefinger and thumb, examined it closely as though it were some artifact from an undiscovered civilization. Blake had never before given much thought to the accoutrements of feminine beauty, something he always took at face value, so to speak, but he thought now of Luly’s heavenly locks and how high she usually wore them on her head. The work of hairpins, he did not doubt.

  A small, sad smile formed at his cold-chapped lips. He then jammed the hairpin deep into the corpse’s brains, pushing it all the way in with his thumb until it vanished completely.

  “Merry Christmas,” he said.

  IX.

  Hell came to the Phillips’ house round about midnight.

  Blake stood at the foot of the couple’s bed, breathing slowly through his nose and watching them sleep, man and wife. There was frost on the bedroom window and the faint odor of cinnamon in the air. The smell was stronger on the first floor, near the modest Christmas tree in the main room, yet somehow the reek of heart-rot overwhelmed this erstwhile pleasant sensation. Eula’s rot permeated everything.

  It even poisoned her marital bed—mere hours after fucking some John of May Tobin’s custom, here she lie beside her lawfully wedded husband (worm though he was) in defiance of everything noble about the world before the night smashed to pieces. Sleeping like a milk-sated babe, her small hands pressed palm to palm beneath her snowy cheek as if in supplication to God.

  “I am down on whores,” Blake said aloud, causing Jimmy to rustle the blankets. “I will rip you, my lady.”

  “Whuh,” muttered Jimmy Phillips, turning his head on the pillow and sucking in a sharp breath. “Who—who’s there?”

  Blake moved round the bed and brought the flat end of the ax down upon the back of Jimmy’s head. The blow thudded dully and Jimmy moaned, quick and low. Thereafter, he questioned Blake no more, so Blake lifted his weapon high above his head to finish the job but he froze dead away when Eula shrieked, “NO!”

  Eula—Luly, his erstwhile love—sat up straight-backed and wide-eyed, her face radiantly silver in the moonlight sifting through the window. She trembled all over and moved her thin lips as to speak, though she made no sound. Slowly Blake lowered the ax until it rested softly on the bed. He met her terrorized gaze head on, a challenge. He did not blink. And when Eula began to quietly cry, he felt his own eyes spill warmly over his face.

  She rasped, “It was you. You murdered those girls.”

  “They did not deserve it.”

  “And Jimmy. My Jimmy.”

  “Will you mourn him?”

  A small sob shook her and she whispered, “No.”

  “I loved you,” Blake said, as matter-of-factly as one speculating on the weather.

  “I don’t know you.”

  “Still.”

  “I want only to get away,” she said, her voice nearly too hushed to hear, each word tremulous. “Stow enough to make it out west, California maybe.”

  “You earned every penny.”

  “God,” she moaned, and Blake said, “He is not here to help you. And the devil never came. When Hell opened up, it belched me out. And you have earned this too, darling Luly.”

  He roared then, an animal sound, and in a deft movement swung the ax in a wide arc at her. Eula sprang from the bed at the roar, and the blade merely nicked her shoulder, though the cut bled liberally. The ax blade drove into the headboard, sending a shower of splinters into the air, and while Blake jerked it free his quarry bolted screeching from the room.

  Blake groaned with frustration, spun about to look upon the spotty trail leading from the bedroom to the stairs. Proper red stuff, he thought with some queer satisfaction at the sight, and he gave chase.

  The blood spattered the steps and the cold floor of the foyer, then angled sharply to a hall that led to the kitchen. Blake sped over the gore, clutching the ax and huffing, and he burst into the kitchen in time to see Eula pass through a back door. Blake followed, light on his feet, and could only barely make out her shadow in the dark back alley beyond. She kept ahead of him, just out of reach. So Blake reared back and flung the ax at her; it spun head over handle into the pitch until a resounding crack filled the silence and Eula screamed. The scream struck his heart like a hot needle. He paused, winced, and went gradually to where she fell in the alley.

  Her back was wet to the touch, tacky with blood. He seized her by the shoulders, turned her over and brushed her cool face with his sticky fingers. She shuddered from cold and fear, and sobbed, “Why?”

  “Because no one else will,” he explained. “And so it falls to me.”

  Clinically, he commenced stripping her of her nightclothes, down to the birth-state in which she enjoyed her work at May Tobin’s whorehouse. He now had his own work to do, and in the doing he saw how this job undid the sin inherit in every other killing he had made. This time, now, in the inky dark of an unlit alley, Blake Prentiss was saving his own life by snuffing hers out.

  Eula struggled then, thrashed beneath him. He grimaced and, spying a pile of timber at the end of the alley, got up and dragged two lengths back with which he pinned her to the ground. She screamed again and Blake screamed with her. Somewhere in the night a hound howled plaintively. Eula shook her head from side to side, burbled like an infant. Her skin so white and eyes so large and brown, filled with faux innocence and a helpless desire to go on living…

  The sa
llow man pumping away, his beady black eyes and piggish nose and rotten slouch hat, a clown thrusting into her, and she with her tendrils of shiny brunette and hands so small, so delicate, clutching the edges of the bed…

  Blake smashed the side of the ax against her brow, crushing the bone. Her eyes sank in and he hit her again, this time caving in her face. Tears and blood and pretty, pretty hair…

  Luly, sweet Luly, demoness Luly, was finished. Flushed with madness and fury and grief, Blake set the ax down beside her and lay atop her for a long while, brushing the blood-soaked hair away from her demolished face and telling her, softly, that Austin would be safe now.

  X.

  John Prentiss wept openly in front of his son for the first time Christmas morning upon discovering his lost boy asleep on the divan. The elder Prentiss fell upon Blake and kissed his face, waking the younger with a start.

  “My boy, my darling boy,” the old man sobbed. “You’ve come home.”

  “I’m finished with all that, Father,” said Blake, his voice gummy with sleep. “I’m sorry to have worried you so.”

  No explanations were demanded and none given. Duck was served for Christmas dinner and there was pudding and rum punch, and even Jake and Helen Slaughter, old friends of Blake’s dearly departed mother, dropped in for a toast and a bit of yuletide cheer. Blake washed up and shaved and presented himself as fine a young gentleman as ever, wiping away his time gone and that was all in the past anyway, so far as Father John was concerned. He spent as much of the day grasping his son’s hands or squeezing his shoulders as Blake would allow him, and resisted letting the lad get on to bed for hours into the night.

  And on the morning, as news of the nightmare slaughter of two white women spread like a blaze across Austin—BLOOD! BLOOD! BLOOD!—neither John nor Blake cared a whit for it. The world, as both of them knew, was restored.

  Epilogue.

  August in England was a marked improvement over the tyrannical heat of late summer in Texas. Most evenings were cool enough by then to be deemed brisk. For Blake, it felt like a sort of reward for surviving his first English winter, and he celebrated by throwing open the windows in his small rented room to feel the night air on his face and neck. The stink of Thrawl Street below was ripe in his nostrils, but no worse than the myriad odors of Guy Town, back home. Blake was a slummer, it was in his blood, and he was more than accustomed to the vile odors and noises and faces and threats that came along with that. Indeed, once he had overcome the initial shock of the strange, often incomprehensible accents and bustling, well-paved streets—and by Christ, those bridges!—Blake decided that the East-End of London was not very different from Austin’s First Ward at all. The streets were stacked with animal shit, drunken men beat each other bloody, and wanton women lifted their skirts at anyone who dared to glance their way.

  Home sweet home.

  Shifting his gaze from the rabble on the street to the tintype of his father on the desk, still vibrant and healthy, before the cancer ravaged his body and left him wasted and dead the summer previous, Blake sighed. He missed him deeply, more than he had ever missed his mother, and felt terribly lonely in this room in a foreign city five thousand miles from home. He came because he was done with Austin, and with Texas, and with the whole of America. He wanted to start anew, be born again, and the first ship he found in Galveston was bound for Europe and that was all he wanted to know. Now an ocean separated him from the graves of everyone he ever loved. The distance eased the loneliness to some small degree. But not the nightmares, nor the heat he felt in his blood.

  At half past one in the morning, an argument broke out directly beneath Blake’s window. One of the two voices he recognized instantly: it belonged to his landlady, Mrs. Neely, who barked, “Fourpence, you wanta kip ’ere to-night. Elsewise leave me be.”

  The other voice, also a woman, drawled drunkenly, as voices in Whitechapel very often did. “I’ll ’ave your fourpence, you wretched bitch, and more besides. Me new bonnet’ll ’ave the lads lookin’, and me cunt’ll do the rest, won’t it?”

  Mrs. Neely growled, “Bloody ’ores,” and Blake wrinkled his nose. Shouts and clopping hooves filled the night all around, and the foul-mouthed whore laughed raucously as the landlady slammed the door shut.

  Blake leaned over his desk and peered down at Thrawl Street. Below him, a grey-haired woman in a cheap, tattered blue dress staggered away from the rooming house. His temples throbbed; the hair of his neck stood out straight. A squat man in a tall black hat shouted out to the woman, and she babbled something back at him before turning on her heel to face him. The man squeezed his crotch and leered. The woman reached into her bodice and scooped out her left breast so that it flopped over the top like a dog’s ear.

  “Wot, then?” she challenged him. The man chortled as he made his way across the street to her.

  “Ah, Mary Ann, Mary Ann,” the man cooed, taking her in his arms and kissing her roughly, “’ow I love ya, ya saucy bitch.”

  She was thick about the waste and not a day younger than forty, this Mary Ann, yet when Blake narrowed his eyes he nearly swore he was looking down at the spirit of Eula Phillips. For this reason, though not this reason alone, he reached into the top drawer of the desk and withdrew the long, razor-sharp knife he kept there. He had never used the knife, not since he procured it from a street vendor in February, a peculiar whim he could never quite fathom until now. For now, standing up and secreting the blade away beneath his black topcoat, Blake Prentiss recalled the last words dandy Jimmy Phillips heard before the ax head knocked him down—

  “I am down on whores.”

  Which he was. Even after he slit Mary Ann Nichols’ throat and sliced up the body’s abdomen he was. And the notice that went up on every wall and door in Whitechapel in the coming weeks only strengthened Blake’s resolve, his need, his hellbound duty.

  GHASTLY MURDER

  IN THE EAST-END.

  DREADFUL MUTILATION OF A WOMAN.

  Because when Hell broke loose, there was nothing anybody could do to send it back again.

  Where Have You Been All My Life?

  Edward Morris

  The sailor awoke before dawn. Something was wrong. Like he’d wound up on the wrong side of the city, on a map no cabbie could read.

  His work had been interrupted. Here lay the Winter of Nepenthe.

  Across the room, a single gas lamp burned low, sticking out of the wall above the battered chestnut vanity like a beckoning finger. Simple things. Almost familiar. Gray walls, wood floor. A men’s rooming-house, Spartan, nearly bare, with a piece of dirty white muslin draped across the dresser. Atop the muslin was a washbasin full of dirty, soapy water; beside it, a shaving-mug and brush, and a little pearl-handled French razor and strop.

  This is how it begins. Anew, now, but always the same. He rubbed the long, twisting scar etched across his stubbly scalp, unsure where the thought was coming from. In the dark. In a one-night cheap hotel and restless, or under a bridge, or even a cozy doorway in the middle of that great, roaring dark, full of coal smoke and the clopping of hooves on cobblestones and the fog. The fog. The fog—

  But this darkness was different. The fog outside his open window smelt different, tasted different. The air was so much cleaner. He could smell shite, and coal-gas, but the breeze beneath that had a smell which made no sense to him whatsoever. Above the window, most of the smoke was gone from the puffy blue-white cumulus clouds.

  Even the sky made no sense. It was too blue, blue as cobalt glass, bright as a hateful operating-theatre where there were always slop-buckets of guts to cart to the incinerator, nurses with mobcaps and round arses and skin as pale as cream…

  Green girls, all, within, who nonetheless scowled at him as though they knew. And the damned sniping doctors he could have been, once, whose looks were far more imperious, their every order barked at their little resurrection-man with a mop, their whipped Quasimodo who nightly quaffed the same Nepenthe that got him there in the first place.<
br />
  “It were the drink that did for you,” Mollie and Mum always said, but Mum was long in her grave from the bad heart she had, and Mollie was—

  Oh, but his head was coming undone, or perhaps fusing back together in this refiner’s fire that crawled along the scar from within. This healing, healing itch where there’d but been a rift.

  A rip. In his sour-milk-sweat-stained undershirt and the drawers to a set of long-handles, all stinking of whisky, he trembled out of bed and put his head out the window.

  “Better,” he rasped, breathing that clean, clean breeze that tasted of little he knew. He was in a long block, by the look, with many other windows like his above and below. Most were shut. Occasionally, one was propped open with a pine board or a piece of lath.

  There was snow in the air. He could smell opium sweet as perfume, and tsa tsui cooking someplace.

  “I’m in Piccadilly, most like,” he mumbled as the headache took his eyes and he rubbed them, backing away. “Cor. How long’s it… How long’s it been? Needs must, I s’pose, but… What kind of piss I been out on, t’come to’n such a state?”

  But he knew everything he was mumbling was wrong. It was the fog that told him, the air, the sky… and the cold, cold room. More than that, it was the other occupant of the bed. A woman.

  A woman. He shuddered. No woman had fouled his bed, not since Memory permitted. But Memory was slowly permitting now.

  Not since Mollie went off her head and tried to do for me, all that time ago, the dirty bitch. His lower lip trembled. All that time ago, when I was still me. Before me own blushing bride took me own razor to my… to my… When I was sleeping, she…

  His hand dropped to the other scar, and the damage there. The incomplete damage that still half-worked. She were mad, Mollie were. I were never no whoremonger. Never done what she said, what she shrieked, before I bent her wrist back and took back me razor and I—