Immortal From Hell

by Gene Doucette

  “Hullo gents,” she said, “hi Jackie, what’s your fancy?”

  She squeezed my arm and leaned in a little too close for a sober person, which she was not.

  “I’m told you saw him,” I said.

  “What, the Apron?”

  As I said, Leather Apron was another name for the killer. It possibly didn’t catch on because there were more men walking around East London with leather aprons on, than were walking around with the name Jack. It wasn’t a helpful description, I’m saying, although if it was an accurate description, it did narrow the identity of the killer to one of the locals.

  “I’m told.”

  “Yah, no it weren’t me, it were Mary Ann that seen him. I passed it on is all. Well-dressed fella, she says, came and went in a carriage. Saw ‘im off Dutfield’s the night he got Lizzie. Clear as you see me now, she says.”

  “How’d she describe him?” I asked.

  “Just like you, luv,” she smiled. I must have gone a little pale at this suggestion, because in the few seconds that followed, I was busy planning my escape route.

  “Aww, look at ‘im!” she said, laughing. “I’m kidding you, Jack, Mary knows your face all right. Man she saw weren’t you.”

  “Coppers don’t care,” Rob said. “She told ‘em, yeah?”

  “Oh sure,” Marie said, “Told ‘em straight away, but they don’t bother. Think they don’t know who the Ripper is? Oh, they know.”

  “They’ll let him kill us all,” Eric said, shaking his head. Given the killer had exclusively targeted women, I didn’t think he had much to worry about.

  “Yeh,” Marie agreed. “Nothing to be done. So, Jackie, what’s hidin’ in your pocket on this fine evening?”

  Much later, after a substantial portion of the day laborers had called it a night, I decided to trade a few of the coins in my pocket—I had no silks this time—for Marie’s company.

  (I feel like I have to defend myself for this, even though it was one of the most common transactions imaginable for a significant stretch of human history. I like to think of sex as recreational, but most of the time it was transactional, and that’s just how it went.)

  Marie claimed to have a private room not far from the pub, which was a refreshing change from the usual back-alley fumbling, and so I agreed to head with her in that direction. At minimum, I could say I got her home safely on a night when the Ripper was still at large.

  We only made it halfway, before her friend Mary Ann spotted us and came running.

  “Mary, I seen him,” she said, breathlessly.

  Marie—or Mary, I guess depending on who was talking to her—was by then quite loudly drunk. It wasn’t a surprise her friend knew she was there, because Marie had been singing a shanty a few seconds earlier.

  “What, I know, Mary Ann,” she said, “you tol’ me.”

  “No, again, I seen him again, just now, round the corner.”

  “Around what corner?” I asked. “Is he still there?”

  Mary Ann jumped back, because I guess she hadn’t seen me. This was sort of fair given it was the middle of the night and the ‘fog’ was thick. (London fog is the pretty title for what was actually factory smog.)

  “Yes sir,” she said. “Up ‘round the corner, as I said. Swear, on my mum.”

  “Can you show me?”

  She looked terrified, which was enough of an answer already.

  “Jest as soon head that way,” she said, pointing in the opposite direction, “if you mind, sir.”

  “Right. Mary Ann, is it?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Can you see about getting Marie to her bed for me? I think I’ll have a look around that corner for myself.”

  Marie was leaning heavily on me, and muttering the same stanza of whatever song from her childhood was stuck in her head.

  “That’s a right lot of trouble, sir,” Mary Ann said. I knew what she meant, so I pressed a coin into her palm and handed over Marie without waiting to see if Mary Ann upped her price. This wasn’t the time for a negotiation.

  Around the corner from where we stood was Whitechapel High Street, the largest thoroughfare through this part of town.

  One of the efforts currently being undertaken to clean up the nastier sections of London was to forcibly evict the working-class poor from their tenements and shanties by building roads through their homes. Probably half of the major roadways outside of London proper were created in this way. It had the advantage of improving commerce by making travel easier, while at the same time moving the poor to…well, to somewhere else, anywhere else. It was a little narrow-minded, but that was one of the things that made London special.

  Whitechapel High Street and Whitechapel Road (they connected, so I don’t know why they had different names) wasn’t that kind of road. Rather, it was the kind of road other areas used as a model for what they wanted to build themselves. It was established by the Romans as a way to get out of the city and to the docks. Probably. It was eminently practical, anyway, which was exactly the kind of thinking made the Romans equal parts efficient and dull.

  It was well past one in the morning when I rounded that corner onto High. There were very few carriages about, in this part of town or any other part of it, really. So it was easy enough to spot what Lizzie described, and easier still to see the man she thought was the Ripper.

  Seeing his face? That was difficult.

  As I said, there was the fog to contend with. The street lamps, when they existed at all, did almost nothing but light up the fog and make it even harder to see. The carriage did have a lantern hanging by a crook next to the carriage man, and that was my best bet at seeing the gentleman’s face. I just needed him to turn in the right direction at the right moment.

  That didn’t happen right off. They weren’t leaving straight away—a conversation was taking place, and not between the driver and his passenger. It was between the passenger and someone I couldn’t see inside the carriage.

  If I wanted to force the issue, I could have just charged the carriage. That would have afforded me a clean look at the well-dressed man’s face before he had a chance to disappear into the back of the carriage. But I suffered a modest lack of nerve—one didn’t run up on an upper-class gentleman in the dark in the middle of the night, whether he was a murderer or no—and held back. Instead, I made my way down High Street as if I were a local, wandering home from the pub.

  I got a clean look at the man in the carriage first. The two of them were in a heated discussion, but the details of that discussion weren’t audible. Sound carried all right in the pea soup pollution, but the interior of the carriage was eating up their voices. The man inside leaned out in the midst of emphasizing a point, and showed himself to the world in the driver’s lantern.

  I didn’t know him. He was thick, wide, and disheveled, was missing some teeth, had a dirty face, and was definitely a human. He looked a lot more like what I’d expect to find in the back of a butcher’s shop, than in the back of a hackney.

  He caught a look at me, muttered something to his compatriot in the nice clothes, and disappeared into the interior again. Then the gentleman turned…not all the way, just enough to side-eye me, which was why I didn’t think he knew who he was looking at. I did, though.

  It was Herman.

  In the days that followed, I tried to put together how it was that I ended up becoming friends with Herman in the first place, because that suddenly seemed terribly important. For instance, if we had mutual friends, and those friends were connected enough to put me into trouble, what would be the consequences of accusing him of something?

  And I mean anything. I was reasonably certain he wasn’t the actual Ripper, although knowing what I know now I couldn’t say where this certitude came from. But my impression of the Whitechapel killer was that of a brute savage who’d gotten lucky in not having been caught, and he just didn’t seem to be that kind of person.

  (I liked to think I didn’t seem like that kind of person either, an
d yet I’ve killed a ton of people in my lifetime—albeit mostly in wartime or for self-defense—so this was perhaps also an ill-conceived assertion.)

  However, for someone who stridently insisted no true gentleman would show his face in Whitechapel for any reason not pertaining to their role as captain of industry or something—and then, certainly only during the daylight hours—there had to be an explanation for his presence there in the middle of the night. And I wanted to know what that explanation was.

  After a good deal of consideration, I decided we were friends because he reminded me of someone else. Or, multiple someone elses, I guess.

  When you get to know as many people as I’ve known, you become accustomed to a certain…type. I don’t know how to put it better than that. Essentially, I can figure out pretty fast if someone I’m talking to is going to be a friend, a guy I sort of know, or a person I’m going to avoid because of how annoying they are. (This is for men. I have a similar sliding scale for women, only lover is one of the options.) Setting aside that we appeared to have nothing in common, in temperament or worldview, something about him felt familiar enough to be likable. Maybe we were only friends so that I could figure out what that something was. It was hard to say, because of course alcohol was a factor.

  I also began interrogating how I’d arrived at that corner at that time of night in the first place. I was relying upon the word of a friend of a friend, who insisted this well-dressed man was none other than Jack the Ripper. Her evidence seemed to be that she saw him around the area where Elizabeth Stride was murdered, at around the right time to have done it. It wasn’t exactly unlikely for there to have been several men matching that description in the right place at the right time, and further, that none of them necessarily would have been the killer.

  She essentially identified a man who didn’t look like he belonged where he was, and concluded that he must be the Ripper.

  It wasn’t actually that much of a leap, provided one felt confident that this Jack was preying upon people outside of his normal circle. As I think I’ve proven, I’ve known a fair number of murderers. One thing most of them had in common was an ability to separate themselves from their victims in some logical (to them) way. Whether they’re killing people of a different ethnicity, or gender, or social standing, it was always easier to see themselves as a thing that was different from what they hunted.

  Mary Ann had a good point, then: the fellow who didn’t belong was in-profile for the man who would be capable of slicing up local girls. Unfortunately, as I’ve said, I fit that profile pretty neatly too. I liked to think otherwise, especially when exchanging pleasantries with the local roughnecks at the pub, but my clothes and business and money marked me as an Other. The only way that would change would be to give up all my money and start working in one of the factories. That seemed extreme.

  Anyway, I had solid reasons to doubt her, not the least being that she’d pointed out a friend of mine. At the same time, he really didn’t belong where I saw him. And I had no idea who was in the carriage with him that night.

  I didn’t end up seeking Herman out to get the answers I wanted, but mostly because I couldn’t. We had no standing appointments, and I didn’t know where he lived. We crossed paths two or three times a month, usually at the pub but sometimes out and about. I could recall accidental encounters with him in shop-heavy areas like Piccadilly Circus and Charing Cross but—and it only came to me in this moment that this was odd—if I had to actively find him, I wouldn’t know where to begin. We always just…ran into one another.

  I supposed I could find him at Bedlam, but that was a large building with lots of men who called themselves doctors. One couldn’t simply look up one of them in the directory at the entrance, because we didn’t have directories then—too large a portion of the population was illiterate to make one useful—and goodness knew what the public entrance even looked like. Besides, I’m an immortal man with no traceable family history. I wanted nothing to do with an asylum. It wasn’t a rational fear, but the idea remained, that I might get jumped and locked up until one of these ‘doctors’ figured out how to convince me I wasn’t in fact immortal. I didn’t even want to be in the same part of the city where such a place existed.

  So that was out.

  I decided to just wait until the next time I saw him, as that would surely be happening any day.

  I’d also like to take a moment to note that this was yet another chance I passed on, to flee the country before things got dangerous.

  When we did run into one another again, it was in the closest thing the city had to a place I called home.

  I belonged to a gentlemen’s club. Several, actually, but I only kept a room in one of them. (Two still exist, and I technically remain a member at both, although I doubt they’d accept my bona fides.) These clubs popped up all over the place in the late eighteen-hundreds, for some reason. I think at one point there were something like four hundred, and London’s just not that huge. The better ones—and by better, I mean older, more prestigious, and harder to get into—had such high entry hurdles and long waiting lists that eventually the people who couldn’t get in decided to form their own clubs. Then those clubs ended up gaining prestige and long waiting lists, and so new clubs were formed as a consequence of that, and on it went until the city ran out of gentlemen who were actively interested in getting away from their wives.

  That wasn’t really the full functional intent of the clubs, but sometimes it seemed that way. It was as if London had been struck by a powerful distaste for women, to a degree I hadn’t seen since the height of Athens. Different reasons—I think—but similar approach. Members with families routinely deposited their wives and children in one part of town (or in their country estate) while they stayed in the club all week. In some clubs, this was advantageous for business reasons, especially if the other members of the club happened to be important, but “making important business contacts” was more often than not an excuse for the wife and not a truly solid explanation.

  I had no wife to hide from. I was there because this was easily the most convenient way to exist in the city.

  The club I stayed at was actually pretty basic. It had a large study with enough books to keep me content for quite a long time, a laundry service, a full kitchen, and a staff that could bring over a drink at any time of the day to any part of the building. There was also a billiards room, but other than the quarters—which were all little more than a bed and a dresser—there wasn’t a lot more to it. Mostly, it was clean, it was exclusive, and it offered all the privacy I could ask for.

  What it didn’t offer, was women. I’m making that point for a couple of reasons. First, if you read gentlemen’s club and thought strip joint, that’s because strip clubs borrowed the term semi-ironically a long time ago. Second, there were clubs in the city that did cater to certain proclivities, and this wasn’t one of those places.

  Some of those proclivities were very much in line with what was going on in Athens back in the day, but others were actual (hetero) sex clubs. These were not places to conduct business or stay overnight. In a couple of ways, they were even more exclusive, only because you didn’t have to be a member to know the existence of (for instance) the St. James Club. It was right out in the open. But it was difficult to join a sex club about whose existence you were unaware.

  Clubs were also useful for certain species. Vampires had at least two, one of which I was an honorary member of (vampires routinely mistake me for one of them), and there was at least one for elves. I heard tell of an underground club for goblins, but never confirmed that. And you would think that succubi and incubi would have something, but so far as I know they never did. They aren’t really social creatures, at least among their own kind.

  I was a legacy member of the club I called home. That meant I inherited my membership from my father, who was one of the first members, which is to say that I was one of the founding members and so far as the British Commonwealth was concerned, I was
my own son.

  It was extremely exclusive. According to the stories about the place, actual royalty had been turned away at the door on more than one occasion, for attempting to enter without an invitation from a member in good standing. It was also said that Scotland Yard’s jurisdiction ended at the door. This wasn’t true, but it made for as good a story as the one about royalty being barred, so it was oft-repeated.

  I felt safer there than I had in all but a few places on the planet during my lifetime. It was therefore the last place I expected to run into Herman.

  “It seems I’ve discovered your other favorite hideaway,” he said. The statement was delivered from behind, as I sat in a large leather chair with a high back, near a fireplace that was full-on hunting-lodge-chic. It even had a rug in front of the hearth made from the pelt of a dead tiger. The whole set-up made me feel particularly comfortable, as someone who used to hunt large cats and wear their hides. This one was a lot cleaner than the kind I used to wear.

  It was also all a ridiculous fire hazard. The fireplace was open, and we were surrounded by wood. In hindsight, I’m surprised we didn’t all die there.

  I jumped when he spoke, and turned awkwardly to see if it was possible that the voice I was hearing was actually who I thought I was hearing. Thus, my greeting was somewhat flat.

  “Herman. Hello.”

  “Hello to you, Jack!” he said, shaking my hand, which was only accidentally outstretched. He took the seat beside mine, with a table between us for the drinks the staff had been bringing all afternoon. “Or is it Lord Jack in here?”

  It was actually Lord Davis in this club. A byproduct of my legacy appointment was being stuck with the surname I used when the club opened. They didn’t know me as Jack in the place, nor did they know anything about my mercantile business. The people in this club weren’t supposed to be so uncouth as to have to work for a living.