The Big Book of Jack the Ripper

by The Big Book of Jack the Ripper (retail) (epub)

  “Well met!” he cried on recognizing us. “This way! We have him, unless I miss my guess!” Practically at a run, he swept us north along Crispin Street to Dorset, the very ground I had patrolled not long before.

  The scent trail was stronger now, but remained curiously diffuse. “How do you track with such confidence?” I asked.

  “That is much blood, escaping but slowly to the outside air,” Titus replied. “I think our quarry has taken his atrocious games indoors, in hopes of thwarting us. He has been—you will, I pray, pardon the play on words—too sanguine in his expectations.”

  His proposed explanation so precisely fit the spoor we were following that I felt within me the surge of hope I recently described as lacking. A much-battered signboard on the street read “Miller’s Court”; it was the one from which I had earlier heard song. A light burned in Number 13. From that door, too, welled the scent which had drawn us; now that we had come so close, its source could not be mistaken.

  As our tacit leader, Titus grasped the doorknob, Norton and I standing behind him to prevent Jack from bursting past and fleeing. Jack evidently had anticipated no disturbances, for the door was not locked. On Titus’s opening it, the blood smell came forth as strongly as ever I have known it, save only on the battlefield.

  The scene I glimpsed over Titus’s shoulder will remain with me through all my nights. Our approach had taken Jack unawares, he being so intent on his pleasure that the world beyond the squalid little room was of no import to him. A picture-nail in his hand, he stared at us in frozen shock from his place by the wall.

  Both my eyes and nose, though, drew me away from him to the naked flesh on the bed. I use that appellative in preference to body, for with leisure at his disposal Jack gained the opportunity to exercise his twisted ingenuity to a far greater and more grisly extent than he had on the streets of Whitechapel. The chamber more closely resembled an abbatoir than a lodging.

  By her skin, such of it as was not covered with blood, the poor wretch whose abode this presumably had been was younger than the previous objects of his depravity. Whether she was fairer as well I cannot say, as he had repeatedly slashed her face and sliced off her nose and ears and set them on a bedside table. The only relief for her was that she could have known none of this, as her throat was cut; it gaped at me like a second, speechless mouth.

  Nor had Jack contented himself with working those mutilations. Along with her nose and ears on that table lay her heart, her kidneys (another offering, perhaps, to George Lusk), and her breasts, his gory handprints upon them. He had gutted her as well.

  Not even those horrors were the worst. When we interrupted him, Jack was engaged in hanging bits of the woman’s flesh on the wall, as if they were engravings the effect of whose placement he was examining.

  The tableau that held us all could not have endured above a few seconds. Jack first recovered the power of motion, and waved in invitation to the blood-drenched sheets. “Plenty there for the lot o’ yez,” said he, grinning.

  So overpowering was the aroma hanging in the room that my tongue of itself ran across my lips, and my head swung toward that scarlet swamp. So, I saw, did Titus’s. Norton, fortunately, was made of sterner stuff, and was not taken by surprise when Jack tried to spring past us. Their grapple recalled to our senses the Senior and myself, and I seized Jack’s wrist as he tried to take hold of his already much-used knife, which, had it found one of our hearts, could have slain us as certainly as if we were mortal.

  In point of fact, Jack did score Norton’s arm with the blade before Titus rapped his hand against the floor and sent the weapon skittering away. Norton cursed at the pain of the cut, but only for a moment, as it healed almost at once. The struggle, being three against one, did not last long after that. Having subdued Jack and stuffed a silk handkerchief in his mouth to prevent his crying out, we dragged him from the dingy cubicle out into Mitre Court.

  Just then, likely drawn by the fresh outpouring of the blood scent from the newly opened door of Number 13, into the court rushed Martin, and the stout fellow had with him a length of rope for use in the event that Jack should be captured, an eventuality for which he, perhaps inspirited by youthful optimism, was more prepared than were we his elders. We quickly trussed our quarry and hauled him away to obtain more certain privacy in which to decide his fate.

  We were coming out of Mitre Court onto Dorset Street when I exclaimed, “The knife!”

  “What of it? Let it be,” Titus said. Norton grunted in agreement.

  On most occasions, the one’s experience and the other’s sagacity would have been plenty to persuade me to accede to their wishes, but everything connected with Jack, it seemed, was out of the ordinary. I shook my head, saying, “That blade has fleshed itself in you, Norton. Men in laboratories are all too clever these days; who knows what examination of the weapon might reveal to them?”

  Martin supported me, and my other two colleagues saw the force of my concern: why stop Jack if we gave ourselves away through the mute testimony of the knife? I dashed into Number 13 once more, found the blade, and tucked it into the waistband of my trousers. I found coherent thought in that blood-charged atmosphere next to impossible, but realized it would be wise to screen the horrid and pathetic corpse on the bed from view. Accordingly, I shut the door and dragged up a heavy bureau to secure it, only then realizing I was still inside myself.

  Feeling very much a fool, I climbed to the top of the chest of drawers, broke out a pane of glass, and awkwardly scrambled down outside. I hurried to catch up to my comrades, who were conveying Jack along Commercial Street. As he was most unwilling, this would have attracted undue attention from passersby, save that we do not draw men’s notice unless we wish it.

  We turned off onto Thrawl Street and there, in the shelter of a recessed doorway, held a low-voiced discussion. “He must perish; there is no help for it,” Martin declared. To this statement none of us dissented. Jack glared mute hatred at us all.

  “How then?” said I. I drew forth Jack’s own knife. “Shall I drive this into his breast now, and put an end to it?” The plan had a certain poetic aptness I found appealing.

  Martin nodded approvingly, but Titus, to my surprise, demurred. He explained, “Had I not observed this latest outrage, Jerome, I should have no complaint. But having seen it, my judgement is that the punishment you propose errs in the excessive mercy it would grant.”

  “What then?” I cast about for some harsher fate, but arrived only at the obvious. “Shall we leave him, bound, for the sun to find?” I have never seen the effects of sunlight on the flesh of our kind, of course; had I been in position to observe it, I should not now be able to report our conversation. Yet instinctively we know what we risk. It is said to be spectacularly pyrotechnic.

  Jack’s writhings increased when he heard my proposal. He had dared the sun to kill for his own satisfaction, but showed no relish for facing it without choice. Our Senior coldly stared down at him. “You deserve worse.”

  “So he does,” Norton said. “However much the sun may pain him, it will only be for a little while. He ought instead to have eternity to contemplate his failings.”

  “How do you propose to accomplish that?” asked Martin. “Shall we store him away in the basement of the Sanguine Club? Watch him as we will, one day he may effect his escape and endanger us all over again.”

  “I’d not intended that,” replied Norton.

  “What then?” Titus and I demanded together.

  “I say we take him to the Tower Bridge now building, and brick him up in one of its towers. Then every evening he will awaken to feel the traffic pounding close by, yet be powerless to free himself from his little crypt. He will get rather hungry, bye and bye.”

  The image evoked by Norton’s words made the small hairs prickle up at the nape of my neck. To remain for ever in a tiny, black, airless chamber, to feel hunger grow and grow, and not to be able even to perish…were he not already mad, such incarceration would speedil
y render Jack so.

  “Ah, most fitting indeed,” Titus said in admiration. Martin and I both nodded; Norton’s ingenuity was a fitting match for that which Jack had displayed. Lifting the miscreant, we set off for the bridge, which lay only a couple of furlongs to the south of us. Our untiring strength served us well as we bore Jack thither. His constant struggles might have exhausted a party of men, or at the least persuaded them to knock him over the head.

  Although we draw little notice from mortals when we do not wish it, the night watchman spied our approach and turned his lantern on us. “ ’Ere, wot’s this?” he cried, seeing Jack’s helpless figure in our arms.

  We were, however, prepared for this eventuality. Martin sprang forward, to sink his teeth into the watchman’s hand. At once the fellow, under the influence of our comrade’s spittle, grew calm and quiet. Titus, Norton, and I pressed onto the unfinished span of the bridge and into its northern tower, Martin staying behind to murmur in the watchman’s ear and guide his dreams so he should remember nothing out of the ordinary.

  The other three of us fell to with a will. The bricklayers had left the tools of their trade when they went home for the night. “Do you suppose they will notice their labour is farther advanced than when they left it?” I asked, slapping a brick into place.

  Titus brought up a fresh hod of mortar. “I doubt they will complain of it, if they should,” he said, with the slightest hint of chuckle in his voice, and I could not argue with him in that.

  Norton paused a moment from his labour to stir Jack with his foot. “Nor will this one complain, not while the sun’s in the sky. And by the time it sets tomorrow, they’ll have built well past him.” He was right in that; already the tower stood higher than the nearby Tower of London from which the bridge derives its name. Norton continued, “After that, he can shout as he pleases, and think on what he’s done to merit his new home.”

  Soon, what with our unstinting effort, Jack’s receptacle was ready to receive him. We lifted him high, set him aside, and bricked him up. I thought I heard him whimpering behind his gag, but he made no sound loud enough to penetrate the masonry surrounding him. That was also massive enough to keep him from forcing his way out, bound as he was, while the cement joining the bricks remained unset. He would eventually succeed in scraping through the ropes that held him, but not before daybreak…and the next night would be too late.

  “There,” said Norton when we had finished, “is a job well done.”

  Nodding, we went back to reclaim Martin, who left off charming the night watchman. That worthy stirred as he came back to himself. He touched his grizzled forelock. “You chaps ’ave a good evenin’ now,” he said respectfully as we walked past him. We were none too soon, for the sky had already begun to pale toward morning.

  “Well, my comrades, I shall see you this evening,” Titus said as we prepared to go our separate ways. I am embarrassed to confess that I, along with the rest of us, stared at him in some puzzlement over the import of his words. Had we not just vanquished Jack? Seeing our confusion, he burst out laughing: “Have you forgotten, friends, it will be Club night?” As a matter of fact, we had, having given the day of the week but scant regard in our unceasing pursuit of Jack.

  On boarding my train at St. Mary’s Station, I found myself in the same car as Arnold, who as luck would have it had spent the entire night in the eastern portion of Whitechapel, which accounted for his nose failing to catch the spoor that led the rest of us to Jack; he had entered the train at Whitechapel Station, half a mile east of my own boarding point. He fortunately took in good part my heckling over his absence.

  After so long away, our return to the comforts of the Sanguine Club proved doubly delightful, and stout Hignett’s welcome flattering in the extreme. Almost I found myself tempted to try eating cheese for his sake, no matter that it should render me ill, our kind not being suited to digest it.

  Despite the desire I and, no doubt, the rest of us felt to take the opportunity to begin to return to order our interrupted affairs, all of us were present that evening to symbolize the formal renewal of our weekly fellowship. We drank to the Queen and to the Club, and also all drank again to an unusual third toast proposed by Titus: “To the eternal restoration of our security!” Indeed, at that we raised a cheer and flung our goblets into the fireplace. A merrier gathering of the Club I cannot recall.

  And yet now, in afterthought, I wonder how permanent our settlement of these past months’ horrors shall prove. I was not yet in London when Peter of Colechurch erected Old London Bridge seven centuries ago, but recall well the massive reconstruction undertaken by Charles Lebelye, as that was but a hundred thirty years gone by; and there are still men alive who remember the building of New London Bridge in its place by John Rennie, Jr., from the plans of his father six decades ago.

  Who can be certain Tower Bridge will not someday have a similar fate befall it, and release Jack once more into the world, madder and more savage even than before? As the French say, “Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse”—everything passes, everything perishes, everything palls. We of the Sanguine Club, to whom the proverb does not apply, know its truth better than most. Still, even by our standards, Jack surely will not find freedom soon. If and when he should, that, I daresay, will be time for our concern.

  The Adventure of the Grinder’s Whistle

  HOWARD WALDROP

  The off-center science fiction author Howard Waldrop (1946– ) has an unusual history with Jack the Ripper. To celebrate (an odd locution, when one thing and another is considered) the centennial of the Ripper murders of 1888, an anthology of stories about Red Jack was planned for publication. Invited to participate, Waldrop began work on “The Tale of the Fierce Bad Gentleman,” which described the meeting of Jack the Ripper and Beatrix Potter—a combination that might not have occurred to others. The publication deadline, however, was too imminent, and the story couldn’t be completed in time, so Waldrop’s tale was never written. Ironically, the publication was delayed, but by then it was too late to restart the writing process.

  Best known as a short story writer, Waldrop has published twelve collections, beginning with Howard Who? (1986); the most recent volume of tales is Horse of a Different Color: Stories (2013). His most familiar work is “The Ugly Chickens,” about the extinction of the dodo, which won the 1981 Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for best short story; it also was nominated for a Hugo, a Locus, and a Balrog Award.

  “The Adventure of the Grinder’s Whistle” was planned for an anthology of stories by fictional authors (Gene Wolfe, for example, wrote a story that was bylined David Copperfield) that was never completed. It was first published in Chacal 2 (Spring 1977); it was first collected in book form in Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop (Kansas City, MO, Ursus Imprints, and Shingletown, CA, Mark V. Ziesing, 1990).

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE GRINDER’S WHISTLE

  Howard Waldrop

  (Writing as Edward Malone)

  Author’s Foreword: Retelling events which happened when one was seven years of age, from a vantage point eighty-six years removed, is a dangerous undertaking. Events blur and change in the mind, and one summer or fall, one neighborhood and another, this vista and that bit of scenery become confused.

  I confess this is normally so. There is one singular event in my life which has never, and will never, lose its sharp edges. Of that, I am sure. Those which came later, the adventure with Professor Challenger in Maple White Land, the aftermath of the comet, and with the earth needle, were surely excitement enough for any man’s life. That I was privileged, during the last war, to write the history of His Majesty’s part in the development of the fission bomb was an additional boon which time gave me.

  My part in the affair of which I write was small, and will not detain the reader for very long. My agent has insisted that I commit this memory to print. I am, I believe, giving an account which has not been told before.

  A few words of explanation. I came to Lo
ndon with my mother soon after the death of my father in the late summer of 1888. We were living with my aunt’s family, and I was very happy at the time since I was held out of school for that fall term. How I fell in with the rough gang to be described is not important. It involved several fistfights, most of which I won, and an initiation which, if my widowed mother had ever known about, would have assured that I had been returned to the halls of academe forthwith.

  Let us go back, then, to the era of fog and gaslights….

  —

  It was a foggy night, and we were following around behind the lamplighter and turning off the gas.

  Jenkins, our leader, was a gangly lad of fifteen. He towered far over me, as he did the others, all except for Neddie, who was a big lug, if ever there were one.

  We’d sneak behind the lampman, old Mr. Soakes. Very quiet-like, Jenkins would lift one of the younger of us (sometimes myself or Aubrey) up and we’d twist off the supply and all be gone giggling and laughing down the alleyways.

  (I sometimes came home those days with traces of soot behind my ears I’d failed to clean off, and would suffer my mother’s reproofs.)

  We were having to be very careful for constables. What with the Ripper murders and all, they’d doubled the force in our district.

  My mother and I had a discussion about that, too. One which I’d won by shocking her Calvinistic upbringing. She said I wasn’t to go out at night because the Ripper was about. I told her that no one who wasn’t a lady of easy virtue had anything to worry about from the fiend.

  Us fellows had had talks about the Ripper. He was the topic of conversation in London, even in our circles, which were none too high. Some of us thought he was a fine-dressed gentleman who came down to Whitechapel to work his way with the ladies. Some thought him a butcher gone mad, or to be like old Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street some years ago. Jack Leatherapron, people were calling him, and we could envision him all covered in blood from head to foot, carrying off the heart of his victim. Others supposed he was one of the mad Russian socialists who lived all together in the big house over in Seldon Row West, out killing capitalists. He was sure starting at the bottom of the money ladder if he were, we agreed.