by C. R. Berry
The man further down was breathing heavily, noisily and fast. An occasional moan slipped into each breath.
Curious, Harriet crept silently out of her pew and slunk along the north aisle flanking the nave towards the man. She had no shoes – that helped.
The man had his back to her, head down, but she could see he was a thin, small-framed man wearing a smart black suit and top hat. Stooping low to the ground, she sneaked between the pews behind him, tiptoeing in his direction.
Repetitive sounds added to the man’s deep breathing and moaning – the fast swish of material rubbing together, the persistent click of a belt buckle. The man’s left arm was juddering rapidly.
Surely not. Surely he can’t be doing… that.
Harriet moved out of the pew into the central aisle next to him. As she came around to his side, she saw that his mouth was open, his eyes squeezed shut and, confirming her fears, his trousers were open and he was moving his hand up and down his penis with increasing speed.
“What are you doing?” Harriet blurted out, the stony echo of her voice swirling around the arches.
The man’s hand froze. Harriet looked away as he tucked his penis back into his trousers. Then he stood up, faced her and tipped his hat, saying as if they’d just passed each other on the street, “Good evening, ma’am.”
His boldness baffled her. She examined his face. Long, but not unsightly. Dimple in his chin. Green eyes. A smile that girls would melt for.
And yet he’d just been fetching mettle inside a church. Not just a church. Her church.
Harriet thought she’d left the filth and degradation outside but here it was, standing in front of her, casually defiling her sanctuary.
“Do you not realise you’re on hallowed ground?” said Harriet. “How can you be so bold as to do that in our Lord’s house?”
“It’s quiet here,” said the man, looking around, completely unrepentant.
Harriet was dismayed. “Who are you?”
The man gave a smile that at this point couldn’t be anything but eerie. “Van Deen. Henry Van Deen. And you are?”
She wasn’t sure whether to give her name or not, but in the interests of gleaning more information from this vile heretic… “Harriet.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Harriet.” Mr Van Deen held out his left hand to shake hers – the one he’d been using to masturbate.
She recoiled in disgust. Was he making a sick joke? Or had he simply lost his mind?
“Do you not fear God’s judgement, sir?”
He lowered his hand and mused on this. “There are other things I fear more.”
“More than God?”
“More than God.”
Harriet didn’t understand him at all. “I will pray for your soul, sir.”
He smiled softly. “Thank you.”
This was clearly an ill man. One that didn’t grasp the gravity of his sin. Harriet thought it best to leave him be. Then she noticed his briefcase. It was tall and made from a light brown leather and was on the seat next to him. Her attention was drawn, in particular, to the dried bloodstains around its rim.
“What’s in the case?” she asked.
The man shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”
“There’s blood on it. Why?”
“I reiterate what I just said.”
But she did. Curiosity killed the cat, her mother would say if she were here. Yes, but cats have nine lives, Harriet would always respond.
“Tell me or I’ll scream,” she said.
Mr Van Deen shrugged. “Fine. Look for yourself.” She stuck her unblinking eyes to him as he lifted the case and approached her, her hand in the pocket of her pinafore, fingers clenched around the handle of her knife.
He held out the case to her. She bent forwards slightly, carefully, unstuck her eyes from Van Deen’s slender frame and peered inside.
An acrid odour assaulted her nose. Her eyes met a collection of body parts. Shrivelled, wrinkly sacks of yellowy-green flesh mottled with black, and one that was pink and bloody, fresher than the others. Harriet spun away from the briefcase, unable to quell the upsurge of vomit that erupted from her throat and splashed across the floor tiles.
“I did warn you,” Van Deen said.
Doubled over, leant against the nearest pew, Harriet took long breaths, eyes tracing the lines around the tiles, mind racing.
Organs.
Trophies.
Trophies from his victims.
Lord have mercy.
She straightened her back and faced Van Deen, pulling her knife from her pocket and pointing it at him, chest pounding. “You’re him… You’re… Jack.”
“What?” He frowned. He seemed surprised. “I’m who?”
“Don’t play dumb with me. I’m not stupid. I know exactly who you are. You’re Jack the Ripper.”
Jack the Ripper?
James Rawling froze, staring blankly at Harriet. Perhaps he should’ve been reading the newspapers.
Rawling knew precious little about Victorian history and hadn’t brushed up on it because there was no time. He’d heard of Jack the Ripper, though. Of course he had. But he had no idea who he murdered, how many, or when.
What had he done? He’d been killing prostitutes – nobodies – because they were the safest bet, unlikely to be of importance to the timeline. But he was kidding himself. Jack the Ripper was Britain’s most notorious serial killer. The whole fucking world knew about him. People studied him, for God’s sake. How could he have been so reckless?
Rawling’s heart started to race. What will Mother think? She loved him no matter what, he knew that. And once he’d explained the situation, she’d understand. Surely she would.
A more pressing concern was Miss Morgan. She was counting on him to fix the timeline, not fuck it up more. He was supposed to be proving himself to her, after Skinner had failed her so miserably. Talk about getting carried away.
Wait a minute.
Jack the Ripper was in the history books long before Rawling got here, long before this crisis even started. If Rawling really was the Jack the Ripper, that meant his actions in 1888 were supposed to happen.
Shit.
Everything was starting to make sense.
Rawling wasn’t changing history.
He was becoming part of it.
“How could you?” shrieked Harriet, eyes wide. “How could you do that to those women? It’s unspeakable!”
Rawling felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. Once Harriet had finished shrieking, its buzzing was audible to both of them in the silent church.
“What’s that?” she frowned.
“I have to go,” said Rawling softly. “Lovely talking with you, Harriet.”
“You’re not going anywhere. I’m fetching a policeman.”
She hurtled down the nave of the church towards the doors. After she was gone, Rawling took out his phone. Miss Morgan. Hopefully she was calling to tell him that the timeline was restored and he could return home.
“Mr Rawling, are you still in 1888?”
There was an irascible edge to her voice. That meant one of two things. A loose end connected to The History of Computer-Aided Timetabling for Railway Systems – last seen hurtling into a storm drain – needed tying up. Or Rawling’s trickery with his phone hadn’t worked. Over two months had passed for him, but only minutes should’ve passed for Miss Morgan – if he’d got the settings right.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Rawling quietly. “Shall I return to the future?”
“No.”
Rawling felt a tightening in his stomach. “Is this timeline still…?”
“Fucked? Yes.”
It seemed his temporal tinkering had worked, but he wasn’t out of the woods just yet.
“What do you ne –” Rawling started.
“Where’s the book?”
He paused, unsure how to respond.
“Rawling, I know you failed to destroy it. So where is it?”
Shit, she knows. But how
much? He swallowed. “I was attacked by the man who stole it, and it” – he took a nervous breath – “it fell into a drain.”
She dryly repeated his words, “It fell into a drain.”
“Yes, ma’am.” An attempt at mitigation, “So it’s as good as destroyed.”
“No, Rawling, it isn’t. Someone has it.”
It was official. He’d screwed up. Worse than Robert Skinner? Maybe. Miss Morgan would definitely send him to the Room for this.
Then she said, “Fortunately for you I know who.”
A reprieve?
As soon as she’d launched out of the church, Harriet realised that she ought to watch where Henry Van Deen was going. The police would only lose him if she didn’t give them some idea of his direction.
She turned and went back through the outer doors into the small vestibule that exited onto the nave. She ducked down and peeked through the glass panels in the inner doors.
Mr Van Deen was still standing where she’d left him, but he was holding a slim, black, rectangular object to his ear and talking to it.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Shall I return to the future?”
Harriet gasped. The future?
“Is the timeline still…?”
Harriet tried to wrap her mind around what she was seeing and hearing. She’d read about those new machines – telephones, she thought they were called – that could transmit people’s voices across vast distances. Could Van Deen’s device be something like that? Was somebody else talking to him through it? She’d seen a couple of pictures of people using these telephone things but Van Deen’s looked nothing like them.
More importantly, what did he mean by ‘timeline’? And how does someone ‘return to the future’?
With the device still pressed to his ear, Van Deen continued talking. He mentioned being attacked by a man who’d stolen something and that this something had fallen into a drain. It really did seem like Harriet was hearing one half of a conversation.
Van Deen asked for instructions. After apparently receiving them, he lowered the device from his ear, tapped it with his finger and slipped it back into his pocket.
He glanced around, picked up his case of body parts and skulked through one of the arches flanking the nave, disappearing into the church’s south aisle.
Compelled to follow, Harriet quietly pulled open the inner doors and tiptoed into the south aisle. She couldn’t see him. She walked up the aisle, heading for the large room at the end where relics of the old church were displayed. Suddenly a bright white light flashed from inside the room, quick as lightning.
She froze. Her head was telling her not to go any further. Her feet had other ideas.
Heart racing, she walked slowly into the room.
Huh?
There was nobody there – which didn’t make sense. The room had no other door and there was no way Van Deen could’ve crawled out of either of its slim windows.
So where in the world did he go?
Harriet turned and ran from the church to Leman Street Police Station, telling policemen there that she had found Jack the Ripper and that they needed to come quick. The police were sceptical but they carried out a search of the church and the vicinity anyway, unwilling to leave any stone unturned.
As Harriet feared, they found nothing. They accused her of wasting police time and said that next time they’d arrest her.
After that, Jack the Ripper stopped killing. The police continued to investigate his crimes but he eluded them at every turn.
Harriet couldn’t help but wonder if she was the only person in the world who knew why. She remembered Van Deen’s words in the church. His talk of the timeline and returning to the future. And how could he have got out of that room? It was like he’d vanished into thin air.
Or perhaps to another point in time.
Eventually Harriet convinced herself that the reason the police hadn’t found him was that he was gone, not just from Whitechapel, but from 1888.
Jack the Ripper had gone back to the future.
21
October 13th 2021
“Fuck,” said Jennifer, as Toasty Clements slid up her naked body and poked her head out of a thick, damp cloud of duvet, before dropping down next to her on the bed. Her whole body weak and tingly, Jennifer stared at the ceiling and waited for her heart to slow. Then, turning to Toasty, “Can you do that again?”
Toasty smiled lovingly and kissed her lips, then looked past her to the clock on Jennifer’s bedside table. Playfully, Jennifer threw her hand over Toasty’s haunting blue eyes. “No, don’t look at the time. Let’s just stay here and do that all day. Yeah?”
Toasty chuckled. “Wouldn’t that be fabulous? Unfortunately, you know… life.” Toasty sat up and swung her legs out of bed.
Jennifer sighed, conceding inevitable defeat. “I know. Boring fucking life ripping you away from me. And that fucking magnificent tongue.”
“You can have it back later.” Flashing Jennifer her bedroom eyes, she stood up, skipped into the en-suite bathroom and hopped in the shower.
Jennifer rolled out of bed, walked over to the window and pulled back the curtains, squinting as a wave of light crashed over her. These were decent, thick curtains that actually darkened the room, not like the ones in her last place. She looked out over Trafalgar Rise, a residential road in Kemptown where she and Toasty had been living for nearly five months. It was a narrow, one-way street full of dips and potholes, with cars parked on both sides, where any car that dared to squeeze down it was in danger of shearing off dozens of wing mirrors. They were a stone’s throw from Kemptown’s amenities and at the bottom of Trafalgar Rise was Brighton’s seafront. Jennifer couldn’t see the sea from the window but she could hear it, just. And when the window was open she could smell the salt on the air. Sometimes, when Toasty was working late, she would go and sit alone on the pebbles at the water’s fringe, dip her feet in the froth, or walk to the end of Brighton Pier and just stare across the endless waters. The sea made her feel safe. Free. It soothed her, something she was often in need of these days.
The house was a two-bedroom rental with a damp problem in the middle of a long terrace. The rooms were small and a bit beat-up, it had no front or back garden – just a tiny, high-walled rear courtyard – and there was nowhere to park; there weren’t any permits left for the road so Toasty had to park her car ten minutes away. Still, it was a far sight better than the shared house setup Jennifer had had before. Warts and all, this house was theirs.
Of course, if Toasty had had her way, it would’ve been theirs for a lot longer than five months. It was after only three months of dating that Toasty first mentioned the idea of them moving in together. Jennifer had put it off as long as she could but Toasty eventually wore her down. Okay, that wasn’t quite true. Jennifer did want to live with Toasty. She just didn’t want to rush into anything. Even though she’d been called impulsive since she was a kid, that impulsiveness had never extended to relationships. She’d always been a bit more tentative when it came to those. More cautious. Daddy issues, perhaps.
Million Eyes had only made it worse, turned her into a full-on commitment-phobe. Convincing herself that Toasty wasn’t a secret Million Eyes operative was the first hurdle she’d had to get over. And even though she believed that Toasty was ‘clean’ – as they say on TV – even now something made her want to be careful and not get too close.
Jennifer heard the yelp of the shower tap, bringing the splatter of water to an end. A moment later Toasty called, “Shower’s free.”
Jennifer went into the bathroom, saw Toasty bent over, her beautiful naked arse on display as she towelled her lower legs. Jennifer felt an irresistible urge to stroke it.
“Oi, that’s my bum,” Toasty smirked.
“Damn fine one at that.”
Jennifer got in the shower as Toasty finished drying herself and brushed her teeth.
Then, as she started out of the room, Toasty said hesitantly, “Vicks…” which Jen
nifer barely heard over the shower.
“Yeah?”
“We do need to talk. About… you know, what we talked about last night.”
Shit. They’d drunk a lot of wine last night. Now the memory of one particular conversation came back like a punch in the tit.
The ‘B’ word.
“Yeah,” said Jennifer. “We will. Give me a couple of days to get my head together on it, then we’ll talk.”
Basically, Toasty wanted to know where Jennifer was on the subject of babies. Not that she wanted to have them right now, but Toasty – who was three years older – had felt the need to talk seriously about the possibility of having them in the future. It was something that had caused the wine to start flowing faster into Jennifer’s glass last night, and it wasn’t long before a potent mix of alcohol and sex had shelved the discussion before Jennifer could think too deeply on it.
The simple fact was that Jennifer didn’t know. She’d always thought she’d have a baby some day, but not like this. No way. Her whole life was a fake. What she had with Toasty was real, but it was the only thing that was. And Jennifer wasn’t willing to lie to her own child.
Plus, was it even fair to bring a child into this world? A world in which Big Brother was real and took the form of a time travelling global computer company that secretly controlled the government and was quite willing to kill people – past and present – to further its goals?
Having a baby wasn’t an option, not till she’d dealt with Million Eyes and got her life back. And even though it was two years since she’d run away, she still hadn’t a fucking clue how she was going to do that.
So, Jennifer did know exactly how she felt about the prospect of having a baby. What she didn’t know was how to tell Toasty.
Just before 9.00am, Jennifer arrived at Willow’s Antiques, a ten-minute walk from her house. There she worked as a retail assistant with her now friend, Sarah Myers. The manager/owner was Willow Hopkins, an ageing eccentric who’d been an antique dealer since – as he regularly reminded them – Jennifer and Sarah’s mothers were in nappies.
Sarah was awesome. She was Toasty’s friend from uni, the red-haired hottie Jennifer had met in the Grindstone on the same night she met Toasty, although Jennifer liked to think that Sarah and her were now equally as close. That night Sarah had mentioned working in an antique shop in Kemptown and that her boss was looking for a second shop assistant, having just extended the shop into the empty retail unit next door. Before the excruciating phone call with her mum earlier that day, Jennifer had been content with her lonely warehouse job at Tesco’s, but after, she realised she needed people, distraction and perhaps a little bit of affection in her life. Toasty and Sarah came along at just the right time – probably saved Jennifer from a nervous breakdown. Sarah got her an interview with Willow (a pretty weird experience; the guy spent the whole half hour talking about his extensive collection of mustard pots) and the rest was history.
