by Thomas Emson
It was a fragile hope. But Wilks had a Plan B. It involved slowly turning Charlie Faultless into a vegetable.
You’ll be sucking mush through a straw and shitting through a tube by the time I’ve finished with you, he thought.
Now he came to Faultless’s cell. He threw open the door. He nearly fainted. Faultless had gone. So had the cell’s floor. In its place, a huge hole. Heat came up from the hole. Its edges were red hot. Wilks broke out into a sweat. He rocked from side to side, feeling drowsy.
Then he saw an old man, standing at the edge of the abyss.
They looked each other in the eye, and Wilks knew exactly who he was. His gaze seemed to drill into him so he could almost feel it in his body like a wire slicing through him.
The old man said, “You’re one of his, aren’t you.”
And then Wilks knew he was nearly home.
Chapter 99
BLOODSPORT
“I wish I could kill you myself,” Jack said. “Rip it out of you with my own hands. But I can’t. I can’t because that’s how it was spoken. I have to call out to a ripper. I have to find a really dark heart. I thought I’d found one in Hallam, but he is more sick than evil. He is wrong in so many ways. And Spencer, I knew would never do. Too weak. Convenient for me to be freed from my prison, of course. Easily tempted to kill his friend. But not a ripper. Not the prince of monsters I need. He’s betrayed me, the little fucker, and he’ll pay for that. He will die very badly.”
Tash ached. Her head throbbed. She knew she was bleeding from her scalp. When Hallam attacked her with the hammer, she thought he was killing her. He’d come to get Jasmine, she’d thought, so she had to fight to protect her daughter. That’s why she’d told Jasmine to run. But Hallam had come for her, not for Jasmine.
She sat up quickly, gasping for breath. She looked around, not knowing where she was. It was dark and cold.
“You’re thinking, Where am I? ain’t you,” Jack said. “Well, you’re nowhere. But I’m going to take you somewhere. And on the way, I’m going to show you things—I’m going to show you how everything happened. You and your sort have caused me great torment. But now it will end. Your death will mean my life. The world will fear me. It will see me in all my glory.”
Tash was still looking around. Unable to see anything, she focused on her sense of touch. The ground where she lay was rocky. Was she on a mountain or down a mine? It could be anywhere. Not knowing scared her.
Jack went on.
“There’s a little piece of me in every human. Evil lurks in them all. It was put in there when you were made. It is sin. Initially, it was dormant. But then it became alive, because one man disobeyed God. And men after that made good use of it. But it will be nothing compared to what I do when I am free of this ordeal. This is a bloodsport. It’s been a long war. But with you dead, and my Ripper returning with his treasures, it’ll soon be done.”
“Would it do any good if I begged you to let me go?”
“Do you think I have compassion? It’s not part of my design. Now, we’ve got to go. We’ve got to get to the place where you’ll be killed and I’ll be born. On the way, I’ll show you things—that’ll be my one and only gift. I’ll show you how things became what they are.”
He grabbed her hand. She gasped as a surge of energy shot up her arm into her body, slamming into her heart.
Tash jerked. Her chest locked up. She struggled to breathe. Her vision swam. In the dark, she saw a tiny, white dot. It grew, expanding till it became a ball of fire—still small in the vast blackness, but the sole object in this endless space.
And then the ball of fire exploded. Red heat fanned out. It spread across the darkness, filling it with light. Debris sailed off from the center of the eruption, whirling in the flaming landscape.
Tash found her breath and let out a gasp.
“I’m taking you back to the beginning,” Jack told her. “All the way back.”
And as Tash watched, worlds formed.
Chapter 100
CREATION STORY
Birth is brutal, Tash knew that. Every birth is the same—whether it’s a mouse or a universe.
It’s always an ordeal.
And Tash experienced it—the pain of every birth that had ever been, from the first to the last.
She learned about this birth and this pain through Jack. The knowledge flowed from him and into her. He was there, very nearly at the beginning, so everything she experienced was true; she knew that.
She felt the heat from the explosion—the explosion that made everything.
She witnessed what followed—galaxies and solar systems materializing, stars being born, planets forming.
The sun was made, and she stared right at it without blinding herself and knew immediately that like everything else that had been born, it would die.
Hurtling through a sky that went rapidly from dark to light, she surveyed a world of green beneath her. Forests sprouted from the soil and spread over the planet. Mountains tore themselves out of the ground, the groaning world splitting as the great rocksreared up. Water gushed out from the cracks in the earth andwashed across the land in great oceans.
As she viewed creation, Tash had a sense that everything she was seeing had a supernatural hand guiding it. It was certainly not a natural event. She became more convinced of this as more life developed.
After the trees and the plants came the animals, the fish, and the birds. She couldn’t name some of the creatures she saw. They were strange. Behemoths slicing down jungles with their tails. Leviathans sweeping through the seas. Clouds of insects, miles wide, darkening the skies.
The earth bloomed. It was beautiful. But one part of it was more beautiful than the rest—it was greener, more brightly colored. It was a garden. And stumbling through it, two people. A man and a woman. They were naked, and their bodies were bloody, as if they had just been born.
Tash gazed at the oasis. She felt jealous that these two humans were allowed to live in such peace and beauty.
Then she spotted something else.
A shadow.
It moved through the undergrowth, taking on the form of a serpent.
Tash felt sick. Its vileness made her skin crawl.
The first evil, she thought and wondered how she could’ve known such a thing.
And a name came to her. Was it . . . pillow? Yellow. Something like that?
Pillow . . . pillow . . . up-elo . . .
Tash’s chest tightened.
Down in the garden, the serpent beckoned the woman. Tash tried to warn her, but she had no voice. The woman reached for a bright red fruit hanging from a tree.
The images whirled. Tash saw the woman give the fruit to the man, telling him to eat it. And when he did, darkness filled the sky. Suddenly, everything decayed. Weeds sprang from the earth. Thorns wrapped themselves around the trees. Animals that had lived together harmoniously began killing each other.
There was blood, and there was hate.
Tash wept.
She saw two brothers, clad in animal skin. One worked hard, skinning a goat. The other lurked nearby, watching—and the shadow clung to his shoulder.
It whispered in the brother’s ear.
Tash heard the words, Murder him and I will make you king.
So brother killed brother. He mutilated his sibling’s dead body. Soon the killer was coated in blood and gore. He dug his hand into the corpse and lifted something out of it, holding it up triumphantly.
Tash blinked. It was a golden orb. It shimmered. The shadow took the orb and swallowed it and the light dimmed and gloom fell across the land.
The shadow flashed away and raced over the earth, and wherever he went, there was savagery.
Tash cried because of all the suffering she witnessed.
Cities were built. The evil stain passed over them. Men k
illed. They built armies. They raided other cities. They made slaves of the conquered peoples. They raped women and murdered children.
Empires rose and fell, and blood stained the world.
There was nothing but darkness, nothing but pain.
But then the heavens opened, and what Tash could only describe as angels fell down to the earth. All across the world they mated with human women, and their offspring had light coming from their eyes. Tash felt an affinity with these children of angels and humans. She felt she was one of them. She knew she was one of them.
“Who are you?” she heard herself ask. “Who are we?”
We are nephilim, came the answer from somewhere.
The nephilim were all gathered together, and a voice Tash thought she recognized told them, “You are my new creation. You have sight beyond man. You are seers born as adversaries to the up-elo. Find him and curse him. But if he kills you in five, the world will be his. It’s my bargain with him.”
After their arrival, the world, although not perfect, became better. Evil was still on the earth, but it was counterbalanced by more goodness.
Tash saw the seers hunt the shadow. Many times they caught him and imprisoned him with a curse. But he got free each time, because he was able to persuade someone to kill for him. And then he’d hunt the seers, and although he wasn’t allowed to kill them, he could employ someone to murder for him. Murder and rip. So many times he’d been close to killing five. So many times the world teetered on the brink of chaos. So many times the seers saved the day.
But how long could this go on for?
The voice she thought she’d recognized came again, saying, “I made a terrible world. What kind of God am I?”
Tash wanted to scream, “Don’t abandon us,” but she had no voice.
Time swept by. Tash felt sick and dizzy. Suddenly beneath her, a city appeared. Dark and vast. The streets seemed familiar to her, but she was convinced she’d never seen them before.
The closer she got, she realized the place was London. Whitechapel. And the people wore Victorian clothes.
Everything was dirty and smelly, and corruption soiled in the air.
A man she recognized from the illustrations in Jonas Troy’s notebooks raced through the narrow streets. At his shoulder was the shadow again.
The man carried a knife that glinted in the moonlight.
The man, Tash knew, was Frederick Abberline.
The Ripper.
As if watching on fast-forward, Tash saw him savage four women. From the bodies of three, he tore out organs, and he salvaged a golden orb, exactly like the one she’d seen the brother hold up. He had killed one woman and was about to disembowel her when a group of men appeared in the alley.
Elizabeth Stride, thought Tash.
The Ripper slipped away before the men saw him. He slipped away before he could rip.
A fifth woman waited in a grubby, little room. She looked scared, waiting for death. She sang a song.
Sweet violets sweeter than the roses covered all over from head to toe . . .
Tash wanted to comfort the woman and found herself calling out to the her, despite not knowing who she was. But then she did know.
“Mary,” she heard herself say, “Mary . . . ”
The shadow came to the woman’s door and went in, and it was soon followed there by Abberline.
Terrified, Tash watched him murder Mary and eviscerate her, removing the golden orb from inside her body. He handed it to the dark figure, who swallowed it whole.
The door burst open. Men spilled into the blood-stained room. They were angry. They pinned the Ripper Abberline to the floor. But the shadow fled, despite being stabbed and assaulted.
Some of the men, including Jonas Troy, chased the shadow through the streets.
They called his name . . . up-elo . . . up-elo . . . up-elo . . .
They cornered him and cursed him and threw him down a well.
The world reeled on after that, and Tash followed its evolution—technology, wars, famine, she witnessed it all at high-speed. Finally, life slowed, and she stared in horror at a familiar scene.
Her dad in a flat with Spencer Drake. Outside the flat, a dark figure lurked. Tash cried out, trying to warn her father. But he couldn’t hear. And he answered the door when the stranger knocked.
She grabbed her hair and screamed as the ugly, strange looking trespasser pummeled her father with a hammer, before Dad’s own snake coiled itself around his throat and strangled him.
Tash shrieked. And then Tash felt she was falling. She gasped for breath and flailed at the air. She started to scream. Gravity dragged her towards the earth, and the ground rushed up to meet her.
She crashed on to a bed, the springs creaking under her weight. She rolled over quickly and took in her surroundings.
“No,” she said, “no, please . . . ”
It was the room where Mary Kelly had been murdered in 1888.
Chapter 101
THE GOLDEN ORBS
Don Wilks, who had been labeled the New Ripper by the press fifteen years before, entered his home in Shoreditch. It was a detached property on a newer estate. All the houses were the same. Three stories in red brick, with slate roofs. A living room, lounge, and kitchen. Three bedrooms and a bathroom.
And an attic.
And as he thundered upstairs now, that’s where he was headed. His secret life was hidden there. His dark past stowed away.
He yanked down the ladder and climbed up, lifting the hatch.
The coldness hit him. And the smell. It was musty and old. He’d not been up in the attic in years. It was the place where he kept the monster. The place where he filed away the voice that called him out all those years ago—the voice of Jack the Ripper, he was sure of it.
I am the lord who gapes . . . I am the lantern of the tomb . . . I am the moth eating at the law . . .
He shivered now, eyes adjusting to the gloom. After waiting until he could see better, he went up.
The chill embraced him. The darkness swallowed him. The voice greeted him.
I have been waiting for you . . .
Wilks, shaking with fear and excitement, sought out the light switch and flicked it. The attic lit up. The back of his neck tingled, and his bladder felt heavy.
He looked around, gawping as if this were the first time he’d seen the attic. Debris covered the floor. Chunks of wood and bits of masonry. Cardboard boxes were stacked high against the far wall. They contained LPs, books, Christmas decorations, and shoes—boxes of everything his ex-wife had left behind when she went back to her mother’s twenty years ago. He should have got rid of them, but they were useful—you could hide things behind them.
He went to them and started to shift them out of the way, and soon the freezer came into view.
Well hidden, he thought. Out of the way. Out of sight . . .
But never out of mind.
I am the lord who gapes . . . I am the lantern of the tomb . . . I am the moth eating at the law . . .
Wilks stiffened. The voice again. But louder now. It made his legs weak. It made him groggy.
Kneeling in front of the freezer, he groaned. He opened it slowly. It hummed as if greeting him. The ice was thick. He clawed it away. He saw the newspaper, buried there. It was like an artifact. Something ancient uncovered.
His pulse quickened. Despite the cold, a sweat broke out on his back. He scrabbled at the ice. Some of it came away, but the freezer, not having been defrosted for fifteen years, was not going to give up its treasure that easily.
Wilks scrabbled around, frantic. He grabbed half a brick and started smashing the ice. Slowly it gave, shattering and sprinkling the floor, where it melted and made Wilks’s knees wet.
Finally he was able to tug the newspaper bundles out of the freezer. Also crammed in the ice was a piec
e of cloth, rolled up. He took it out and looked at it. It was frozen stiff. But holding it brought everything flooding back. It made his stomach churn. He remembered the thrill of the kill.
He stood up, panting. There was one more thing he needed, and he found it in one of the boxes. It was a file folder, which he took back downstairs, along with the frozen cloth and the newspaper bundles.
He defrosted the parcels and the frozen cloth in the microwave. In the living room, he laid the soaking newspaper on a blanket on the floor, and while it dried, he opened the file.
All his notes about Jack the Ripper. The murders had intrigued him from childhood. It was when he first heard the voice in his head.
I am the lord who gapes . . . I am the lantern of the tomb . . . I am the moth eating at the law . . .
Looking through a notebook filled with his childish writing, he remembered telling his aunt that Jack had sent part of a kidney taken from one of his victims to Mr Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Society.
At the time his mum had scolded him.
. . . little boys shouldn’t be thinking about those things . . .
But he did think about them. They had polluted his brain. And the voices kept calling out to him.
Finally, he became the New Ripper.
He stared at the newspaper parcels. They contained what he’d taken from the bodies of the four women he killed in Whitechapel in 1996. At the time, he had no idea why he’d mutilated them. He was convinced his savagery had meaning, but he wasn’t sure what that meaning could be.
In his fury, he’d gutted the bodies, and the voice in his head was saying, Dig, boy, dig. Find the treasure. Find it for when I return . . .
Now he picked up one of the bundles. It was soft and wet, and it dribbled water all over his trousers. He started to unwrap the parcel. The newspaper was soggy and came apart in his hands. But he persevered. And after a little peeling, he saw the golden light shimmer.