TimeRipper

by D E McCluskey

  He removed his gloved hand from her face to adjust something on the sphere, and she had time to utter one, small word, before the green beam from the sphere enveloped her, rendering her immobile.

  ‘No!’

  The man, or woman, from the next-door yard stopped their advance on the house. They must have heard her and were looking around for whoever it was in trouble. With the bang that accompanied the door to the house shutting, the slim hope of rescue died with the sliding of a lock.

  ~~~~

  Annie felt the cold of the stone floor biting into her as she looked up at her attacker. He had a slight frame and a thick, fashionable moustache that was curled out towards the sides of his face. It was waxed to perfection. She could just about make out his eyes, as the dim light of the nearby streetlamp cast most of its illumination over next door’s yard. They were wide, and focused, but they didn’t look crazed, like she would have expected. She thought there was a distinct look of fear in them, as if they had seen, and done, more than they had wanted to. She thought it maybe a weakness to exploit, if she ever got the chance.

  ‘It doesn’t have to end this way,’ he hissed. ‘Just give me what I need.’

  She looked at him; she couldn’t speak, so she was trying to communicate with her eyes. She widened them as if to say she was open to listen to what he wanted.

  ‘All I want are the transponder codes. Once I have them, I’ll take you all back to our time. There, you’ll stand trial for your crimes. You and your friends can either spend your life in prison, or you can die here tonight, on this filthy stone floor. It’s your choice,’ he whispered from his close vicinity.

  Annie blinked her eyes, twice.

  He moved his face closer to her. ‘You’ll give me the codes?’

  She blinked twice again.

  He pointed the spherical device, and she felt blood rush back into her hands, her feet, then her throat. Even though she could now move, she stayed motionless as the man leaned into her. ‘Do you have the codes for me, Annie? Will you give them to me now?’

  She nodded and closed her eyes. The man was so close that she could smell him. It was a familiar smell; there was something about it, but once again, she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.

  As he leaned in, Annie opened her eyes and lunged at him.

  Although surprised by the attack, he was agile enough to dodge it. For maybe five seconds, Annie had an advantage, as he stumbled backwards.

  It was an advantage she didn’t take, therefore sealing her doom.

  Instead of attacking him, and attempting to disarm him, she struggled to her feet, turned on her heels, ready to run out of the yard. Opening her mouth ready to let out a blood curdling yell, she was suddenly shrouded in the green light again.

  Shit was her only thought, as she felt the pain of something cold, sharp, and terrible rip into her flesh.

  The agony was immeasurable.

  She couldn’t move.

  All she could see was the red glow of the light beam. Her immobility, unfortunately, didn’t numb her senses, and she could feel every moment of searing torture as the beam bit into her stomach, cutting away swathe after swathe of flesh. In her mind’s eye, she could see the vivid images of the light cutting with precision through her skin. She opened her mouth, she needed to scream, but there was only silence. Her eyes rolled in her head as the agony doubled, and her vision blurred as the beam continued to chase the purple blip that was rushing through her stomach. Intense, white pain made her eyes bulge, they felt like they were ballooning, swelling, too large for their sockets, as the heat of her innards, her brain told her they were probably her intestines, spilled forth. She could smell her own filth; the stench overwhelmed everything, the grime of the back yard, the constant stink in the air that hung over Whitechapel, the smell of her attacker. She wanted to move her head, to look up at the man preforming these atrocities upon her but couldn’t.

  A gagging noise, it was coming from him, it told her that he was taking no pleasure from the activities he was performing.

  Finally, she reached the point of intense agony where her body’s defences took over, and mercifully, thankfully, she went numb from her abdomen down. Unfortunately, it didn’t steal her lucidity from her, and she was forced to continue to be a witness to her own demise. Her eyes stung as they filled with bloody tears, which dribbled down her cheeks, leaving pink traces in their wake. The cold stone beneath her was warmer now as her life blood ebbed from the open, and the steaming, wounds to her stomach. She was slipping away. She thought that, in the end, after the initial pain and shock had subsided, it wasn’t as bad as she expected it would be. It was almost peaceful, in complete contrast to the violence that was being inflicted on her body.

  From her blurred, peripheral vision, she saw her murderer lean over her. He placed something on her shoulder, something wet and heavy. Then the strange sensation of something inside her stomach moving, cutting, was back.

  Through her dying eyes, she could just make out the face of the mystery man. His features caught her attention. That’s why I recognised the smell! she thought with a sad smile.

  This was her dying thought. She watched through dimming eyes as her attacker held up a small, purple, glowing object and looked at it. Blood clung to it as it passed by her face.

  It was her own blood.

  The world swam in a deep grey before the darkness came. It was blessed, welcomed. With it, came peace.

  41.

  Orbital Platform One. 2288

  ‘HOW ARE THINGS progressing with those transponder codes?’ Youssef asked as he entered the lab. The four portal experts were pouring themselves over transcripts from the information they lifted from Inverness Castle. One of the technicians raised her head in recognition that he was there and then nudged the others. As they all jumped to attention, he marvelled at their ages. None of them could have been any older than twenty-one. Was I ever that young? He thought the answer must have been no.

  ‘It’s OK, you don’t have to stand to attention when I come in. I just need to know what progress you’re making.’

  ‘Well, sir, we haven’t found any transponder codes as such, but the syntax in the blog is a little obscure.’

  ‘In what way?’ Youssef cocked his head as he leaned in to look at one of the stations. He had asked Jacqueline to set these interns the job of locating transponder codes, or any reference to transponder codes, within the retrieved data. He had not given them any information about why they were looking for them.

  ‘We’ve found reference to transponder codes, but the codes themselves are encrypted none of us have ever seen the depth of them.’

  ‘Do you think you can break it?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. We’ve split into two teams. Two of us are working on the syntax and the others on the encryption, this way we can get the job done faster. We’ve drawn a blank up to now on the encryption.’

  He liked the use of the term ‘up to now’, it showed that they were willing to keep at it. He marvelled to himself at the tenacity of the EA personnel.

  ‘In the texts, there are a lot of references to London, England,’ the technician continued.

  ‘London? Can you be a bit more specific?’

  ‘I can be a lot more specific. It’s London, Whitechapel, to be exact. The part that jumps out at us is the historical aspects to the references. It looks like they were mapping out an area of about five square miles in Whitechapel, in eighteen-eighty-eight.’

  Gotcha! Youssef thought, smiling to himself. ‘Fantastic work, guys. Keep it up on the encryption, and I’ll be in touch.’ He burst out of the lab in a run, and the young portal experts watched him leave before returning to their duties.

  He rushed into another room where Jacqueline and Vincent were sat at a table working something out on a portal. Both jumped up as the doors opened. There were guilty looks on their faces.

  ‘Ah, Youssef! We were just, erm…’ Jacqueline stuttered.

  Youssef
didn’t care what they were doing, this news was more important than anything else right now. ‘We know when they are, and I think your kids on the portals know where they are,’ he announced. ‘London, Whitechapel. Eighteen-eighty-eight.’

  She sat for a moment taking in this information. ‘London, eighteen-eighty-eight? Isn’t that a little downbeat for them? Either they’re living it up with very little money they took with them, or they’re on the poverty line.’ She was shaking her head. ‘There was no middle class in them days.’

  ‘If I was them, I’d be mixing it up with the lower classes,’ Vincent replied. ‘Think about it, it’s a perfect cover. The lower classes around that time would have been almost transient, coming and going as they pleased. Disease was rife, so there was always a lot of death around, and very few official papers to carry. It’s the perfect hiding spot.’

  Youssef and Jacqueline were looking at him as if he had two heads.

  ‘Who are you, and what have you done with Vincent?’ Jacqueline asked with a playful frown.

  Vincent began to laugh. ‘I can read a book, can’t I? Actually, back in school, I had a real interest in history, that and fighting.’

  The two scientists shared a look. ‘Soooo,’ Youssef drew out. ‘It looks like this mission is officially on. I just need to get Kevin up to speed, and then it’s onward and backwards, as they say.’ He paused for a moment, waiting for them to get onto his small joke. When it became obvious that they weren’t going to get it, he continued. ‘So, suit up, sir, we have a mission to complete and a world to save.’

  42.

  London. 1888

  AARON KOSMINSKI AWOKE on a chair in a small downstairs room behind his barber shop. He was tired, and in a foul mood. The sounds of his wife cleaning up in the rooms above aggravated the pulsing in his head, which in turn pushed his anger further and further to the fore. Since this whole situation had begun, he had not been able to look at her. Every time he did, he saw the face of one of the dead women, or of that witch Annie. It brought his rage back.

  He stormed up the stairs, his vision swimming in a pink mist. He paused as he saw her in the bedroom changing the covers on their marital bed, the one that she had been sleeping in alone for the last few months. Breathing rapidly through his nose, he strode purposefully into the room and grabbed her from behind, pulling her hair, which had been tied back while she did her chores. She screamed in surprise, and in pain, at the mauling.

  He then proceeded to beat her.

  He couldn’t help himself.

  Mrs Kosminski was no stranger to a beating, not long-ago he’d had to take her to the hospital due to the severity of one of his beatings, but the one he was giving her now, this was the mother of all the beatings he had ever administered.

  His bloody knuckles were cracking and snapping from how tight he was flexing them as he threw the punches into the poor woman’s face. The cartilage in her nose shattered with the ferocity of the blows. Every time he hit her, her face changed, morphing into one of the witches’ faces. All of them laughing at him, defying him. It took almost five minutes for her to fall unconscious, and limp, onto the floor, but not before he had damaged her permanently. Her nose was shattered, and at the very least, two teeth were now missing from the front of her swollen, bloodied mouth. The mutilation around the socket of her left eye was so bad that he thought she might never see from it again.

  He didn’t care about any of this.

  As she lay unconscious on the wooden floor, moaning and twitching in a pool of blood, he stormed around the room grabbing her, and their children’s things, and stuffing them into a large suitcase they kept underneath the bed. When it was full, he carried it downstairs. He then went back and dragged her body downstairs, dumping her by the door.

  He then took their two, small, screaming, children and thrust them out of the door as well. He was done with all of them.

  That was when, out of the blue, an idea hit him.

  He was going to write a letter.

  He considered himself to have a bond with this killer—or killers, he thought, thinking back to the night in the yard when he had witnessed one of the women kill the stranger, only for him to return moments later. They were both going in the same direction. He felt like he was obligated to help wherever he could. A little bit of misdirection could go a long way. He wanted the police to stay off the scent of the mission. If I can’t kill them, he thought, then someone else might as well!

  He had rather enjoyed the fact that the public had thrown all their suspicions onto the Jewish community, and specifically to a man they were calling ‘Leather Apron.’ Kosminski thought, with more than a little amusement, that whoever that man was, he was in a world of trouble when they caught him.

  He sat down at his desk to begin his letter. Before long, he had written almost sixteen different versions of it, using different inks—blue ink, black ink, and finally deciding on red. The red reflected his mood rather accurately.

  Another idea came to him. Nice and creepy, he thought. He attempted to harvest his wife’s blood from the floor. Unfortunately, it had a habit of drying up on him before he could finish the words, and the rest of it was already thick and gloopy. He managed to write a few words, but when it dried, it turned brown and flaky, mostly useless, so he reverted back to the red ink.

  Eventually, from downstairs, he heard his wife pick herself up from the floor. He shouted to her, rather coldly, that her things were packed, and she should leave, and take the infernal children with her. He recalled telling her that it was for her own safety, because he couldn’t, and wouldn’t guarantee he wouldn’t beat her again like he had done today.

  She had left willingly, collecting the shaking children from the doorstep, where he had dumped them. Aaron Kosminski never saw her, or his two boys, ever again.

  This suited him fine!

  Free at last, he opened a bottle of cheap whiskey, and taking a long swig, he stuffed the finished letter into an envelope and sealed it. ‘Who should I send it to?’ He was giggling like a schoolgirl as he spoke aloud. ‘The police? The press? Ah, what about the friends of the victims?’ This last thought was particularly gruesome to him, but then he thought that they all deserved what was coming to them.

  He wanted to make as big an impression as he could with this letter, so after taking another long swig of his firewater, he made up his mind. ‘The press should have something like this, something to prove that we believe in what we’re doing and that we mean to carry it on until they’re all dead and gone,’ he spoke aloud, and alone, in his bedroom. He was holding the lapels of his jacket as if he were addressing a large, formal crowd. He took another swig of his drink and began to laugh again.

  He wrote the address on the envelope in the same ink he used for the contents and addressed it to:

  The Boss,

  Central News Office.

  London City

  He left his house to purchase a stamp and post it. He was giggling merrily all the way.

  43.

  Dear Boss

  I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shan’t quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the lady’s ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn't you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife's so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck.

  Yours truly Jack the Ripper

  Don’t mind me giving the trade name

  PS Wasn’t good en
ough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it No luck yet. They say I'm a doctor now. ha ha

  44.

  ‘HE WAS UP on the bar, knocking over drinks and waving a long sword around in the air, shouting die witch, die. That’s a direct quote from someone actually in the bar?’ Abberline asked Bellis.

  ‘Yes, sir. The Ten Bells was busy that night, and there are a lot of witnesses saying almost exactly the same thing.’

  ‘Aaron Kosminski, eh? I think we need to bring this fella in to have a little chat. Do we know where he lives or works?’

  ‘Not far from Spitalfields Market. He owns a barber shop, and get this, sir, the shop is located not one hundred yards from where the Tabram woman was found.’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Inspector Frederick Abberline addressed the room of police officers ‘We may have found our first major suspect.’

  Abberline had forced his standing, and proven record of accomplishment at this sort of investigation, down his superiors’ necks and gotten himself exactly what he wanted: re-assignment to Whitechapel division. He had gained himself a reputation for something he called ‘hunches’ regarding high profile murders, and he had used his considerable political leverage to manoeuvre himself into positions of advantage for these investigations.

  This case intrigued him more than any other, and he had followed it closely from day one, ever since the photograph of the body of the Tabram woman had fallen on his desk. The coincidence of her being the woman he witnessed appearing from out of nowhere, and killing the journalist he was following, was just too much.

  ‘Do you want me to bring this fella in, sir?’