The Words of the Mouth

by Ronald Smith

  ******

  Charley was a vacant-faced local youth who had hung about the Mill for years, battening onto us like a leech. He was always around somewhere; in the kitchen, in the yard, in the sitting-room if there was a gathering of any kind. In the company of other people, he said nothing, gave nothing, just sat there looking miserably from face to face.

  He was standing beside the kitchen table watching me, as I put down the phone after saying 'No' to The Exploited.

  "Look, you bastard," I burst out in irritation, "you just stand there like a drain. If you don't contribute, you're out on your ear," He looked as if he were about to cry, and sloped off in the direction of the sitting room, where Mairi was entertaining some friends.

  Several days later, I came back from a trip and Mairi came up to me as I entered the kitchen, full of concern.

  "Charley's in the bedroom. He thinks he's the Yorkshire Ripper.He arrived last night and he's been up there ever since. He wants you to hypnotise him."

  "Well, I'm not going to see him," I fumed, "All he wants is attention so he'll feel important."

  "You can at least talk to him, get him out of my bedroom," she insisted.

  "He's a weirdo and should be locked up."

  "Talk to him!" She was becoming more assertive and autocratic with me every day.

  "All right," I relented. I called up the stairs, "Come on down, Charley'"

  His eyes were red and swollen as he entered the room apprehensively, like a beaten dog. After a smoke, he confessed to having periods of amnesia which coincided with lurid dreams about two of the Ripper's recent murders, in which a hammer had been the murder weapon. He had become convinced that the police were hunting for him and had seen his car, a Morris Minor, so he had driven it down to the edge of the River Tay and pushed it into a deep pool. Now, he was about to go on the run.

  I cut him off irascibly. "Listen, Charley, I don't want to bloody know. I think this is really boring. There's nothing exceptional about your dreams. Thousands of people think the same thing."

  Charley was a very weak person, incapable of standing up to a man of his own size, but quite capable of being a tyrannical bully to a woman weaker than he was. He had lived with several girls and had been rejected by them. One of them had even punched him, whereupon he had collapsed and wept like a child. His frustrated desire to hurt these women had simply emerged in his dreams and gave him a sense of identification with the Ripper who assaulted prostitutes, women he despised.

  I started thinking about the Ripper, myself. In a dream, I saw him standing by a dockside, draped in chains, his head crimson with blood, waiting for a galleon prison ship to take him on board. All the little windows at the stern of the galleon were TV screens.

  The meaning of that dream became clear to me when the Ripper was caught and talked about his reasons for the killings. He claimed that he received messages from God and from various people.

  I felt that he actually did get messages, that he was psychically connected with the thousands of men who had followed his crimes in the media, horrified but at the same time fascinated by it all, because of their violent hatred of women. The Ripper was like the head of a boil, a bloody Christ who took other people's sins on himself and made them manifest by doing what many other men secretly wanted to do to women.

  Charley believed that he was psychic, and in a way it was true. He was so scattered that he was hardly in the here and now; he was like a radio tuned into the Ripper during his amnesia, picking up his murderous thoughts.