The Whitechapel Demon

by Josh Reynolds

  “This is no longer your concern,” Eddowes snarled. “Ketch, please break her neck if he moves.”

  “Ms. Gallowglass, please shoot Mr. Eddowes, if he breaks her neck,” St. Cyprian said.

  Gallowglass grinned. “Right,” she said. She sprang off of the counter suddenly, her hand dipping towards her shoulder holster. As he’d hoped, the men gave back, startled by the sudden move.

  Ketch let go of Wilde, shoving her aside. St. Cyprian left Andraste’s side and vaulted over the counter in one smooth motion even as Ketch began to reach into his coat for something. He planted both feet into Ketch’s chest, knocking him backwards. Ketch slammed back against the door, and St. Cyprian grabbed Wilde and pulled her away, even as he delivered a kick to the knee of the man with the club. The latter fell with a yelp, and St. Cyprian sent him scrambling with a boot to the rump.

  Gallowglass caught ice-knife a clout on the side of the head with her Webley, dislodging his mask, and likely a few teeth as well. As he fell, Eddowes turned and began to drag the revolver out of his pocket. Gallowglass was quicker, however, and levelled hers before his had cleared cloth. She cocked the Webley-Fosbery with her free hand, jerking the hammer back as far as it would go. “This,” she said, in a conversational tone, “is a Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver, produced by Webley and Scott of Birmingham. Its single-action, centre-fire and has a six-shot capacity, of .455 calibre. The first shot is, due to the recoil mechanism, quickly followed by the next five. Which means that if you twitch, it’s going to turn your noggin into a red mist, innit?” Gallowglass’ grin was as sharp as a blade. She shot a look at Ketch, who looked ready to leap, and he hesitated. “So go ahead and twitch, yeah, because I’ve been gagging to shoot someone all day.”

  Eddowes froze. Then, slowly, he let his weapon sink back into the fold of his pocket. He raised his hands. “You seem to have me at a disadvantage. What—ah—what now?” he said.

  “Now, you gentlemen vacate these premises, post-haste, before we ring the constabulary,” St. Cyprian said. He waved aside the particles of flour that choked the air. “We’ve had our fun. Threats were exchanged. Toddle off now.”

  “This isn’t over,” Eddowes said.

  “No, I rather think not,” St. Cyprian said. “Bugger off.” He waved lackadaisically. The men backed out of the bakery. He watched them go and then said, “Oh, ‘this isn’t over’. Trust a Cambridge man to go for the hackneyed.” He looked around at the bakery, and then at Wilde. “Quite a bit of cleaning to do,” he said, smiling weakly. “Shame we can’t stay to help, but I rather think it’s a good idea to get Miss Andraste out of here.” He turned and cursed as he saw Andraste sliding down the wall, her face contorted in a grimace, as she clutched her stomach. St. Cyprian lunged to catch her, and helped her to sit. He pressed the back of his hand to her brow and said, “The sooner the better, in fact.”

  “She’s ill,” Wilde protested. “Perhaps a doctor…”

  “It’s not that sort of malady, I’m afraid.” He looked at Gallowglass. “Pull the Crossley around. We need to get her back to Cheyne Walk and quickly.” Gallowglass nodded sharply and darted for the door, slipping slightly in the flour and dough scattered across the floor.

  “What about those men?”

  “They were after her. She’s right, by the by…if she’s not here, they have no reason to come back,” he said.

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Wilde said, “Can you keep her safe, Charley?”

  “Yes,” he grunted as he got his arms under Andraste and hefted her. She weighed almost nothing, which, for a woman of her build and height, wasn’t an encouraging sign. She wasn’t unconscious, but she was close. Her head lolled against his chest and she mumbled something he didn’t catch. Wilde grabbed his shoulder. “Will she be all right?” she asked, quietly.

  “I don’t know, Bobbie. But I intended to do my damndest to see that she is,” St. Cyprian said. “I—I’m sorry about the bakery. The tea-cakes were quite lovely, really, very nice. I shall spread the word far and wide, have no doubt.” He stepped past Wilde, cradling Andraste to his chest.

  “Be careful, Charley,” Wilde said.

  He paused in the doorway, and smiled at her. “Always am, Bobbie.” And then he was out the door.

  10.

  Pain was the whole of her world, and like no pain she had ever felt. Andraste bit back a groan as a slow bubble of agony swelled within her, filling her with the slow scrape of glass on flesh and the crush of brick on bone. Everything hurt, every joint felt inflamed and every exhalation of breath brought a new ache. The world spun around her, and every jolt of the Crossley’s wheels brought fresh hurts rising to the surface. They’d carried her out of the bakery, taken her to the automobile, and they were going—where? They’d told her, she was sure, but there was no room for the memory in her head, only the raw throb of her soul being unravelled. Her ears ached with the sounds of carriage wheels on cobbles and her nose and mouth were gummed up with the stink of East End alleyways and the Thames.

  She could feel—the Ripper’s anger was acrid and stinging, like sparks cast up from a stirred fire. The water of the Thames, on the other hand, had been cold and less than inviting and—a raw, scraped out feeling in her gut and her fingers—touched his scalded face and he hissed as bits of ectoplasmic flesh sloughed away—felt swollen and they fumbled uselessly against each other as—the wormlike strands of not-flesh were caught and carried away by the January breeze—she coughed, trying to clear her throat of the invisible force that clogged it.

  She could see things, just out of the corners of her eyes, blurry street markers and jittery human shapes, like on a film coming loose from the reel. She could feel the Ripper moving, and she could feel him pawing away at her, rooting around inside her as he drew her life from her with predatory diligence. She could see him looming over her. He squatted in her mind like a goblin from a Fuseli painting. His cloak flapped around him like the wings of a flock of ravens, his face a foggy nothing, pierced through by his hell-bright eyes and tiger’s smile. Fingers like meat-hooks tore through the dark places of her soul, and stickpin teeth snapped together on ghostly morsels with greedy aplomb.

  She was being eaten alive, from inside out. She wouldn’t leave a ghost behind when she died, because the Ripper was going to eat that first and hollow her out. She thrashed, trying to free herself, but the claws only tightened and a moan escaped her lips.

  “She looks like she’s having a bloody fit,” Andraste heard the young woman called Gallowglass say, as the latter leaned over the back of the seat and looked down at her where she writhed on the Crossley’s backseat. For a moment, Andraste saw a cat’s head superimposed over the girl’s, and heard the whine of flutes and the rumble of voices raised in supplication, but the sounds and sights were washed away by a red tide of pain that squirmed through her. The medium moaned. Sweat dappled her face and her clothes were sodden through. She felt hot and cold at the same time. She felt as if the Ripper’s knife were digging through her vitals.

  “It’s not a fit,” the man called St. Cyprian said. He sounded concerned—and truly concerned at that. It was a good sound, one she’d rarely heard from the opposite sex. He’d sounded worried at the bakery as well, though he’d tried to hide it. He was strong as well, in the way that she was strong, and Jadwiga had pretended to be for the punters. Lying in the back, sweat burning her eyes, she could see a faint glow about him, like silk rippling in a breeze. There were faces too, real ones, not the penny dreadful phantasms she conjured with the help of photos and newspaper clippings. She wondered if he could see them, clinging to him like limpets, their hollow faces contorted in grief and other, more indefinable expressions. He looked back at her, and part of his face seemed to slide away, revealing the skull beneath as he said, “She’s dying.”

  Dying—the thought fluttered against the surface of her mind like the wings of moth at a window pane. She was dying, like Jadwiga had died and like all the others had died. Sh
e was being eaten, shucked empty like an oyster on a platter. Eyes closed, she tried to marshal her will against the pulling, prying thing within her as—

  He pried loose the lid of the place he had buried what was left of Stride’s still-screaming brain and shook it, to see what nuggets of explanation might come loose. Stride had known a great many things, and they fluttered about the Ripper’s prying thoughts like a school of fish scattering before a shark. Strange symbols and the titles of forbidden texts, tools and anecdotes, faces, dates and names—all of it spun and squirmed as the Ripper hunted for what he wanted—needed—to know.

  Terms and descriptions of things he did not understand surfaced beneath his frenzied ministrations and he hissed in frustration. What was left of Stride writhed and squealed as the Ripper took out that frustration on his captive soul. He stopped short of simply rending the pathetic remnant to wisps and carefully returned it to its captivity. The Ripper paused, momentarily overwhelmed. He staggered against the alley-face, thrusting out a hand to brace himself. Solidity was a disturbing sensation for something that was used to flowing through solid shapes. Breath whistled harshly through his abused lungs as he forced the body he had acquired to breathe. Stride wanted to die, was in fact dying, but the Ripper knew how to keep his hosts moving. Stride’s body would last long enough. And when the time came, there was another waiting for him. There was a whole world full of them.

  This body was in a fragile situation. Fragile, was that the right word? Possibly; he flicked the thought away, like a horse shaking off a fly. His hold on the world was tenuous at best, and actively slipping at worst.

  He had gorged, but his true prey yet remained un-eaten, and that was simply not cricket. The Ripper didn’t know what a cricket was, or why not being one was considered an unhappy circumstance, nor did it care. The not-crickets must be eaten. The stuff of him, the stuff that held fast to the diminishing Stride, grew frail. And if there were things that could hurt him, he must be bolstered.

  Eating the one called Jadwiga had provided replenishment, of sorts, but his ectoplasm had been puny and undernourished, even as his physical body had been weighed down by the opium it had ingested. Not like the one who had hurt him. No, that one had been fit for several meals. The Ripper’s tongue slithered from out of the reef of his grin and scrubbed across his thin lips. That one he’d tasted before, but not quite.

  To the Ripper, time was not linear, but a series of intricately intersecting angles. Were he not bound to Stride’s form he would simply slip through them. The Ripper had hunted in such a way before, nuzzling out cracks in the spheroid dimensions and feasting on the energies of the unwary psyches that had aroused his ardour. Thus, he knew that he had seen that one before and yet not. He had tasted of his ectoplasmic caul and found it…delicious…

  The images faded, and she reached up, fastened her hands around St. Cyprian’s throat and lunged, mouth wide.

  The Crossley’s wheels skidded as St. Cyprian momentarily lost control. She clawed at him, her mind a roiling cloud of hunger and need. She could see that what she was doing was mad, even as he yelled in surprise and grabbed for her, but she couldn’t stop herself. She was hungry, but not with a physical hunger. Instead, it was something deeper. Her strings were being pulled, and she couldn’t muster the strength to yank them out of the puppet-master’s hands.

  She snapped her teeth in the general direction of St. Cyprian’s throat. “Get her off of me,” he shouted, trying to control the now-wildly veering automobile with one hand, while he shoved against her cheek with the other.

  “First time I’ve heard those words come out of your mouth,” Gallowglass said, slithering over into the back seat and wrapping her lean arms around Andraste’s neck and head. “Leave off,” she barked, as Andraste twisted around with an alacrity that had her disjointed consciousness wincing in anticipation of the ache and grabbed for Gallowglass. They tussled in the back as St. Cyprian regained control of the car. “She’s stronger than she looks,” Gallowglass coughed, as Andraste’s elbow caught her in the stomach.

  “I don’t think that’s her, precisely,” St. Cyprian said, darting a look over his shoulder. Andraste met his gaze, and wondered if he could see past the froth and into her mind. His ghosts watched her, and they stretched gauzy fingers towards her as she bucked and thrashed like an epileptic. She weaselled out of Gallowglass’ grasp and went for him again, unable to stop herself.

  Inside her head, the Ripper was chortling as it ate at her soul. She caught at St. Cyprian’s collar and hissed, “I…SEE…YOU.” It wasn’t her voice. The words forced their way past her lips like razorblades. St. Cyprian must have seen something, because his eyes widened in a sudden panic, and his ghosts fluttered about him, like frightened birds.

  “Miss Gallowglass,” he yelped.

  “I said leave off,” Gallowglass snarled. Something heavy crashed down on the back of Andraste’s head and she fell back, all of her strength leaving her at once. The world spun in a sickening fashion and she heard the Ripper’s frustrated snarl, somewhere down deep inside her. She felt Gallowglass climb over her and back into the front seat. The knock she’d taken hadn’t put her out, but the ache had receded.

  “I say, did you have to bash her noggin quite so hard?” St. Cyprian asked.

  “You were the one screaming for help,” Gallowglass said.

  “I was hardly screaming,” St. Cyprian protested.

  “Shrieking,” Gallowglass said.

  “Not that either. Possibly warbling and I’ll even admit to yelping, but certainly not screaming,” he insisted. “She just surprised me is all; or, rather, he surprised me.”

  “What?” Gallowglass said. She whirled about to glare down at Andraste in suspicion.

  “The Ripper, I mean. That was him. Or part of him, at least. He’s inside her, hooked like a parasite, and he’s growing stronger. But I think I can dislodge him.” He glanced back at her. Aife wanted to speak, to say something, anything, but no sound came, just the red tide rising up again to sweep her under.

  As the darkness took her, she wondered if this time, it would be for good.

  11.

  “Well, that was a sodding disaster, excuse my language,” Pitezel said, scraping dough off of his coat. “Women shouldn’t be allowed in bakeries, as my dearest mother used to say. It’ll be the ruination of the species.”

  After encountering heavier-than-expected resistance, they had retreated in good order back to the car and piled in like a something out of a film, arms and elbows and feet everywhere, at least in the case of Pitezel and Stack. Eddowes and Ketch had kept their dignity, if little else, the former hoped. From where they sat, they could see the woman being bundled into the black Crossley. Eddowes frowned and straightened his tie.

  “Did you see that one dressed like a chappie? She nearly bloody took my head off with that damned hand-cannon of hers,” Stack said, prodding at the cracks in his mask despondently. “And they threw a damned cat at me. Who does that? That’s not cricket! Not cricket at all. I’m seriously considering writing to my MP about it.”

  “I say, who was that fellow in there? Did anyone recognize him?” Pitezel said, prodding his knee. “He had a good kick on him I’ll say that for the blighter.”

  “Looked like Chaz St. Cyprian,” Stack said. “One of the old Cheyne Walk set, if I’m not getting my cliques crossed up. He was in the Carnacki crew back before the War, with that ass Arkwright, and the scribbler Dodgson. Bloody annoying lot of ponces, I thought, always going on about cold drafts and plum-bobs and such.”

  Eddowes frowned. “Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, the one in the Idler?” he said.

  “That’s the sausage,” Stack said. “We invited Carnacki to join the club, back before the War, I think, but he sent old Stott off with a flea in his ear. Something about us being a blight on society, what? I know Chaz is a member in good standing of the Drones, which tells you everything you need to know right there, frankly.”

  “Or nothing at all,�
� Eddowes said. “Why was he there?”

  “Who cares? Maybe he’s one of those fellows who enjoy sniffing around suffragettes,” Pitezel said. “Stott isn’t going to be happy, Eddowes.”

  “Shut up,” Eddowes snapped. Pitezel was right, which only made it more galling. He’d assumed that they could just walk in and demand that the woman be handed over. When he’d gone back to the garret to hunt for some sign of where Jadwiga and the woman might have gone, it had been locked up as if nothing had happened, despite the mess and the smell. He hadn’t thought about it much at the time, but now it was nagging at him. He hadn’t been the first—the garret had been searched, he could tell.

  When he’d found the suffragette flyers and the circular for the bakery, he’d seized on it as the most likely spot a woman like Andraste might go. He’d researched her thoroughly, while establishing her bonafides, and he knew her habits well enough. She was no blue-stocking, but she had plenty of acquaintances who were, and it was a strong possibility that they’d give her shelter, if she went running. And he’d brought the others, because four men were more intimidating than two, even if one of the two was Ketch.

  He looked at the latter. Flour dusted his shoulders and jacket, but he seemed otherwise placid, despite the constant flexing of his fingers. It put Eddowes in mind of an impatient raptor. “You heard? His name’s St. Cyprian. There can’t be many of those in the book,” he said. Ketch grunted. “Follow them. Call when you’ve found them.” Ketch nodded silently. The strangler stepped out of the car and stuffed his hood into the pocket of his coat as he trotted away, in the direction the Crossley had gone.

  Eddowes was confident in the doorman’s ability to run their quarry to ground. From what little he knew of Ketch from before he’d been hired to guard the threshold of the Whitechapel Club like a singular Cerberus, the man had been in the War, like Eddowes himself. Unlike Eddowes, who’d been a lieutenant and thus above the worst of blood and mud, Ketch had been member of a black-hand gang—a trench-crawler. He’d slithered into enemy trenches, strangler’s cord in hand and knife between his teeth.