Jacqueline shook her head. ‘There’s no way I’m going to give a mad bitch like you a way back to twenty-two-eighty-eight. Believe me, I’d sacrifice him and me to stop that. You know I would.’ There was a small quiver in her voice.
Carrie noticed it straight away.
‘Was that doubt in your voice then, little girl? Your tells have given you away. You care for this man, don’t you?’ With the question, Carrie grabbed one of his arms and raked her fingers down his sodden flesh. The scream from Vincent was loud, unmerciful, and wet. ‘I believe that this poor man has only a few precious moments left before the paradoxical law tears him apart. Give me your tech, and I’ll let him go. I’ll take him to a time where he doesn’t already exist. If you don’t, he dies, right here, and his last few moments will be filled with unbearable pain.’
She raised the wand that Kevin had given her. ‘Do you want this?’
Carrie nodded. ‘Yes, give it to me,’ she demanded, holding her hand out.
She switched the first trigger, the one that sent the enzymes into the frontal lobe of the brain, the ones that brought the memories of the murders, still yet to happen in this time, to the fore, and give the recipient reoccurring nightmares. She nodded towards the madwoman. ‘OK, if you want it, you can have it.’ She pressed the trigger and was about to point it towards Carrie when the noise of a door opening startled her. She turned, pressing the button on the wand as she did. A luminescent, blue beam emanated from the nozzle and arched overhead, it hit a man who was walking through the door.
It hit him between the eyes, and he screamed in shock as he fell back through the door.
He raised a bandaged hand to block the beam from hurting him, but when he realised that there was no pain, he dropped it.
Jacqueline got the surprise of her life.
Standing before her was Aaron Kosminski. His other bandaged hand, the one not protecting his face, was around a timid looking blonde woman who had many injuries to her face. Mostly bruises and cuts.
‘Get that thing out of my face, you whore,’ he screamed.
He dropped his arm and looked around the corridor, sheepish, due to his unmanly scream. He quickly noticed that he was the only one on the ward apart from the two strange women and a man on a bed, who was shaking and moaning. Without looking back, he pushed his timid, beaten, wife back through the door they had just appeared from and scurried away, behind her.
Vincent screamed again. The wetness of this scream sounded thicker than before. She guessed that his blood was now congealing in his throat. She knew that she had to get him back to twenty-two-eighty-eight as soon as possible.
‘Tick tock, young lady,’ Carrie sang. ‘We may have all the time in the world, but your lover here has precious little. Give me your tech, and I’ll leave him alone.’
Jacqueline dropped her head and her shoulders fell. She sighed, a slow release of breath. ‘You win,’ she whispered. ‘Let him go and you can have my tech.’
‘That’s the spirit, now hand it over and you can take…’ she turned to look at Vincent. He looked to be visibly shrinking on the gurney. She was sneering as she looked back at Jacqueline. ‘…this with you.’
Jacqueline stepped forward, and reaching into her cape, took out the orb that produced the holding beam. Carrie laughed as she held out her hand, accepting it. ‘That’s it, it’s not that hard, now is it? Give me what I want and maybe you get to keep your…’
Jacqueline took hold of the outstretched arm and lifted the wand. Carrie tried to pull away, but the younger woman had the element of surprise, and pulled her towards her, knocking the taller woman off balance. Carrie flinched as the wand touched her skin. Expecting something more painful than the small pinch she felt as the trigger was released, she laughed again and pulled away.
‘Whatever it was that you wanted to do there, failed,’ she laughed, grabbing the orb. With it concealed on her person, she turned, and ran out of the corridor. Jacqueline considered giving chase, but there was no point. What she had wanted to do, was done. ‘We’ll see,’ she whispered as the door at the other end of the corridor swung closed.
‘That’s it, you did it,’ Kevin’s voice spoke from her wrist. ‘We can trace the locator in her bloodstream, she’ll be dead in a few days anyway. Either from the slug, or when the paradoxical laws catch up to her. Now, get Vincent and get out of there.’
Jacqueline turned to where Vincent was lying on the gurney. His face was a single contortion of agony. His skin was covered in large, unsightly, red and yellow blisters, and his eyes were almost completely white. Thick saliva was trickling from his mouth, turning pink where it mixed with the blood from his nose and tear ducts.
‘I have him, he’s in a bad way. Can we get a medical team to meet us as soon as we material…’
Vincent’s hand grabbed hers and pulled it away from her mouth, effectively severing the communication between her and Kevin. She looked down at him. His skin had peeled away from his face where he had been raking it, and his cheeks were hollow.
‘Did we do it?’ he whispered to her. ‘Did we get them all?’
She couldn’t bear to look at him, but she couldn’t bear not to either. She wanted to see him as the twenty-five-year-old she’d fallen in love with, what felt like five minutes ago, but she also needed to see him as the distinguished, older man who had been so heroic, helping her complete her mission. Tears filled her eyes as she held his emaciated hand. His claw-like fingers attempted to grasp hers, and a ghost of a smile shadowed across his torn lips.
‘Yes, we did it! We got every last one of them.’
‘Earth is… safe?’ he whispered.
A single tear dripped down her cheek, landing on the off-white bed linen, momentarily making it darker than it had been. ‘Thanks to you.’
‘And you too, kiddo.’ The small smile made it all the way this time, cutting into his paper-thin skin, causing his lips to bleed.
‘Vincent,’ she whispered, moving her face closer to his. ‘I love you, and I always will.’
‘Hey, I know…’ he replied, wincing, but she could see he was determined to finish what he started to say. ‘Twenty-six years… I never thought… I would see you again. Jacqs, in my head… I, I married you every… single… day!’
She held her brave man in her arms as he succumbed to the struggle of one of nature’s fundamental laws.
After a few moments, the familiar purple light began to shine from her stomach, and she disappeared, leaving the body of the bravest man she would ever know, four hundred years behind her.
74.
London. 1888
TEN DAYS LATER, Annie Millwood, as she was now known, was taking a break in the back yard of the factory where she had managed to gain employment, mainly washing dishes, and pots, after the men had eaten. The factory manufactured small parts for agricultural machinery.
She had taken the orb that powered the holding beam and had been attempting to bastardize it, to send a signal back home to Inverness, twenty-two-eighty-eight. It was very nearly complete. Power had been her biggest problem. As this orb had been cellular, the power was almost depleted, but she’d managed to retain enough to send a message back, just one, so she knew that she had to make it count.
It had to be today that the message was sent.
She had kept meticulous records of how time was moving in twenty-two-eighty-eight, and she had a good idea that someone would be monitoring all lines of communication. Maybe not from the castle in Inverness, but from the cave in Fiji.
‘This is Carrie Millwood, this message is for anyone from The Quest, can you hear me?’
A small cackle of static ensued, then a voice from the future, a voice she knew and trusted, spoke to her. Her heart almost missed a beat.
‘Carrie, this is Brian Malone. We can hear you loud and clear. The EA stated you were dead.’
‘Not dead,’ she cried into the small orb. ‘They thought I would be by now. Are you able to lock onto my signal and perform an em
ergency extraction?’
‘I don’t see why not. I’m locking on right now. Is it possible to boost your signal?’
At that exact moment, the seeker that had been placed in her bloodstream by Jacqueline’s wand located its prey. It enveloped itself around the quantum slug and expelled an electro-magnetic pulse, rendering the slug expired.
The shock rippled through Carrie Millwood’s central nervous system, killing her instantly.
As some of her newfound work colleagues watched, Carrie, or Annie as they had come to know her, dropped like a stone, in the back yard of the factory.
‘Carrie, we’ve lost your signal! Can you hear us, your signal has degra—’
One of her friends, in a rush to help her, accidently trampled on the device she had dropped, crushing it underfoot, into the dirt and dust of eighteen-eighty-eight.
Carrie Millwood was dead.
As was The Quest, and their mission.
75.
Earth. 2288
ACTING UPON INTELLIGENCE received from their two prisoners, and from information recovered from the castle in Inverness, an EA expedition led by Youssef Haseem made its way to Fiji. Within the exact co-ordinates given, they found a hidden cave beneath a volcano. Inside the cave was a vast underground farm that stretched out as far as the eye could see. There were multiple forms of sustainable crops growing from a seemingly source less energy.
‘The Higgs Storm is the most destructive force known to man, but it’s also a powerful terraforming tool,’ Youssef whispered to Jacqueline as they, and their team, entered the cave.
EPILOGUE
London. 1888
Aaron Kosminski began having nightmares about witches and people travelling to and from the future, the same night he took his wife home from the hospital, after beating her severely. The next night he took up hiding outside the Ten Bells pub, waiting for the bastard who was fucking his wife.
This started the strangest chain of events, that would forever shape his destiny.
~~~~
After the events were over, and Abberline and the witches were out of his life, forever, he managed to make his escape from London, handing ownership of his barber shop to his cousin Antonowicz Kłosowski.
He found that the witch, the one who had gotten into his head, still resided there. She was always there, in his dreams, haunting him. For some reason, when the time inevitably came for him to change his name, he felt himself compelled to take hers.
He continued his life, illegitimately, as George Chapman.
Aaron Kosminski became one of the most wanted men in England. He was the number one suspect for the Whitechapel atrocities and was subsequently blamed for hundreds, maybe even thousands, of other murders in and around the Whitechapel area of the East End of London.
None of them were ever proven.
Due to the notoriety, and the infamy, of Whitechapel for its violence and immorality, plus the international scrutiny that came with the crimes Kosminski was wanted for, the East End of London found itself in the spotlight, on a world stage. Parliament, grudgingly, passed a motion to plough money into the area as the depravity and squalor had become something of an embarrassment to the city, and the country at large.
George acted upon his murderous impulses twice.
He finally got to ‘rip’ his women. Using the same motives as the time travelling woman, who had been pretending to be a man, he took the two bodies he needed to balance everything out in his head, and to quell the nightmares that afflicted him.
He killed the first woman on November 20th, and the second, one month later, on December 20th. Both women were prostitutes, both were alcoholics, and he did enough damage to both their bodies to make identification almost impossible.
He was careful to leave evidence pointing to the identities of his victims. His first murder was identified as Annabelle, or ‘Annie’ Farmer, and his second as Rose Mylett. In the course of these killings, he found that he didn’t quite have the stomach for murder that he thought he might, but the hideous dreams he had been suffering began to abate after the second.
He took the cash that Abberline had left him, a princely sum, and relocated to The New World, taking passage on a steamship travelling to America.
Aaron Kosminski was dead, and George Chapman was never again to visit the shores of England.
He might have been gone, but in his wake, he left a legend, a legacy, and the eternal mystery that would forever be known as:
Jack the Ripper.
Author’s Notes
Picture, if you will, a dark, wet night in London’s East End. The fog is lying thick in the air. The streets are deserted, as the party revellers and heavy drinkers have finally staggered home, after enjoying themselves, in some cases too much, for most of the day and all of the night.
A lonesome figure cuts a shadow through the mist, illuminated by a single gas-powered streetlamp.
It’s a woman.
She’s cold, and she’s terrified as she runs along a narrow lane, pulling her shawl around her shoulders, staving off the chill of the night. Her frantic eyes search the night as she stumbles onwards, attempting to evade the menacing figure who is following her.
It is a man.
She can only see him in silhouette. He is wearing a tall, top hat and a cape. He is carrying a cane in one hand and a large black bag, the kind a doctor might carry while out on his rounds, in the other.
He is relentless in his pursuit of the woman through the dirty, close streets of London’s notorious East End.
***Insert sound effect of a needle being dragged along a vinyl record***
This is all fiction… a narrative that the media have enforced to sell us the legend of Jack the Ripper. And I know, before you all start shouting at me, I’ve used quite a bit of this imagery in this tale, but it’s all for dramatic licence.
On the nights of the killings, be it of the ‘canonical five’ or the extended eight, that many others chalk up to his hand, there was no fog, or smog. The nights were apparently both crisp and clear.
Another reason this imagery couldn’t be correct is because of the location.
Imagine Whitechapel, the worst, most depraved, run down area of the already deprived East End of London. There are street gangs, truncheon happy police, drunken revellers falling out of the many pubs in the area, at all times of the night. There are prostitutes on every corner, enticing the many drunken sailors from the dock yards, or the soldiers out for a good time. Now, can you imagine a well-to-do man, dressed in a cape and a top hat, carrying a surgeons bag and a cane? This man wouldn’t have lasted two minutes in those streets before being rolled and robbed, and possibly even murdered himself, for whatever money he held within his expensive pockets, or for the contents of his bag; or even for just the warmth of his cloak, maybe even his boots.
Life in the East End of London, in those days was cheap.
He would have been easy pickings as he strolled the back streets of dirty, filthy, London, standing out from the crowd, possibly still covered in the spatter of blood from his five (or eight, or even more) victims.
Also, when you think about how the murderer ‘disappeared’ into the night without even a trace. This implies a thorough knowledge of the area he stalked, including the multiple rat-runs and back alleyways of the time. A gentleman in a cape and top hat would never have been able to get away from the scene using these escape routes.
In my opinion, all these factors point to a local of the region. Someone with a comprehensive knowledge of the area, and a hatred of women, or prostitutes. Also, I would wager, someone unhinged and possibly even marginalised from the community. Of all the theories, of which there are probably thousands of, my best guess (and I stress that it is a GUESS, this goes out to any ‘ripperologists,’ amateur or professional, who may read this and want to argue my theory) was that it was a local barber, a man called Aaron Kosminski.
But, don’t take my word for it… go and study it for yourself!
&nbs
p; ~~~~
I have been in love with the legend of Jack the Ripper for many years. I love the fact that it will probably never be solved. As soon as one theory is produced to disclose the identity of the killer, then another emerges to counter that discovery! There is far too much money to be made in the mystery for it to ever be solved.
In the research of this book, I undertook the ‘ripper tours’ around London maybe fifteen times—I think the people running them might have gotten bored of seeing me there, asking questions and generally being a smart-arse.
I also read many books on the subject. Some of them stated just the facts of the case, and others offered up their own theories.
I have to give a huge shout out to the one book that started this journey for me, and that was ‘…From Hell!’ The graphic novel by Alan Moore, illustrated by Eddie Campbell. The way the story weaves the thrill and the romance of this mystery with the history of London just blew me away! If you’re that way inclined, go find yourself a copy of it and read it. (disclaimer- stay as FAR AWAY from the movie that was made of the book with Johnny Depp, as possible- it’s atrocious!)
One of the most outstanding books I read as part of my research was The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold. This is a fantastic, and well researched, investigation into the five victims of this murderer and how they found themselves to be destitute in London during eighteen-eighty-eight. It’s a fascinating read, and well recommended by my good self.
Another good book I read was Naming Jack the Ripper by Russel Edwards. This is the guy who is in possession of Catherine Eddowes’s shawl, and how he managed (or claimed, depending on the multiple theories disclaiming it) to find DNA evidence of Jack the Ripper on the shawl. This guy also conducts Ripper Tours around the sights of the East End, and of all the ones I attended, I think I took the most information in during his.
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