The Big Book of Jack the Ripper

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

  Thus I left her, feeling that my work was done, going downstairs as I had come up, without impediment or even seemingly, in the slightest degree, attracting the attention of the other inmates of the house, who rushed in their night-dresses towards the bedroom from whence the screams were issuing.

  Into the street again, with that coin in one hand and my dagger in the other I rushed, and then I remembered the man whom I had seen looking up at the window. Was he there still? Yes, but on the ground in a confused black mass amongst the white snow as if he had been struck down.

  I went over to where he lay and looked at him. Was he dead? Yes. I turned him round and saw that his throat was gashed from ear to ear, and all over his face—the same dark, pallid, pock-marked evil face, and claw-like hands, I saw the dark slashes of my Kandian dagger, while the soft white snow around him was stained with crimson life pools, and as I looked I heard the clock strike one, while from the distance sounded the chant of the coming waits. Then I turned and fled blindly into the darkness.

  My Shadow Is the Fog

  CHARLES L. GRANT

  As Mount Judge, Pennsylvania, was to John Updike in his Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom novels, so was Oxrun Station, Connecticut, to Charles Lewis Grant (1942–2006) in his novels of quiet horror. The prolific Grant, who wrote more than forty novels under the pseudonyms Geoffrey Marsh, Lionel Fenn, Simon Lake, Felicia Andrews, Steven Charles, and Deborah Lewis, as well as thirty under his own name, produced twelve books (eight novels and four collections of novellas) set in that quiet suburban town.

  Unlike many contemporary writers of horror fiction, Grant eschewed the ultraviolence that filled the pages of Clive Barker’s books and the writers who followed with graphic descriptions of torture, beheadings, eviscerations, and the like, soon echoed in such movie series as Halloween and Friday the 13th.

  Instead, like Shirley Jackson, Algernon Blackwood, and others who preferred the more subtle depiction of terror engendered by the unseen, Grant appreciated the notion that the anticipation of a terrible act is often far more chilling than descriptions of gore, body parts, and overtly depraved behavior. As both a joke and an homage to the great Universal horror movies, Grant wrote three books that featured a vampire count (The Soft Whisper of the Dead, 1982), a wolfman (The Dark Cry of the Moon, 1985), and a mummy (The Long Night of the Grave, 1986), and placed them in Oxrun Station. Grant also was noted for editing an outstanding series of anthologies, Shadows (1978–1991).

  “My Shadow Is the Fog” was first published in Ripper!, edited by Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper (New York, Tom Doherty Associates, 1988).

  MY SHADOW IS THE FOG

  Charles L. Grant

  The wind was strong that day. I remember that much. It was strong. And it was cool.

  The fog wasn’t there.

  Not at first; not until later.

  But there were whitecaps on the bay and great masses of white clouds and a distant white haze that veiled the low hump of South End from the beach where I sat and threw handfuls of pebbles into the dark water. The chair that I used was of the folding kind, and the coat that I wore was barely enough to keep me warm, though it was still September and the walk from my room had put a mirror of nervous sweat along the ridge of my brow.

  I had arrived just after noon, and stopped in front of a low deserted building whose function I’ve never learned, not in all the years it’s waited for me, doors nailed shut and windows shut with nailed planks. Facing the water was a wide platform—a loading dock, I think—raised above the beach and walled with concrete. I have no idea what was beneath it; I only knew that I was higher by at least a yard than the land around me, and it was a chore to climb up there, to hoist myself from the stony beach to the battered wooden flooring with its whorls and sighs and scrabblings of blown sand.

  No one who saw me paid me any heed. I was, after all, only another old man come to take in what there was of a pale, waning sun. Nothing special, nothing different. A face scraped with the chisel of too many decades living, hair the colour of old straw thinned in useless harvest, shoulders slightly rounded. My hands were gloveless, my feet in lightweight boots, and the cardigan I wore under the caped black coat was one I’ve had for what seems like a hundred years.

  I remember the wind, and the bay, and the feel of Whitstable at my back, aged enough I suppose to rightfully want a bit of peace at the end. I don’t really know. I never asked, and people never told me.

  But damnit, I do remember the wind, and I remember sitting in the death of the summer sun most of the afternoon throwing pebbles into the water and nearly falling out of my chair when I heard someone say, “Hello.”

  I looked over, looked down, and there was a little girl with short brown hair and a short tartan skirt blowing about her legs snug in white tights. A red sweater a size too large, hanging to the middle of her thighs, billowing and slapping when the wind slipped beneath. She smiled at me, her eyes squinting from the sun’s glare.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Are you waiting for him, then?” she asked, her head slightly tilted to one side.

  “I don’t know,” I answered with a smile. “Am I?”

  “You look as if you are.”

  My smile widened. “Then I suppose I am.”

  She turned to face the bay, one hand to the side of her red-cheeked face to protect it from the wind. “I don’t think he’s coming.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh no, I don’t think so. May I throw one of your stones, please?”

  I handed one over—it was round, sea-smooth, mottled, and dry. Without a word of thanks, she raised her arm, sighted, and threw it as hard as she could. It didn’t go very far, barely past the first waves, but it was far enough to make her giggle and ask if she could do it again.

  “Your hands will get dirty,” I said in gentle admonition as I handed another one over. “Your mother will be angry.”

  “No, she won’t,” the girl said. “She never gets mad at me.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Never?”

  She threw the second stone, a bit farther than the first. “No.”

  A gust made me close my eyes, and when they opened again she was staring closely at me, like a bird trying to decide if I was part of the chain that provided it with meals at the end of a spring shower.

  I waited for her to say something.

  A gull cried overhead.

  At last she shrugged and jumped down to the beach, walking very carefully over the stones to the edge of the water. Though the waves here were quite low because of the wood-and-rock breakwaters spaced along the shore, I wanted to call a caution to her. Instead, I only watched, marvelling at the way she kept her balance while the wind kicked at her skirt, at the loose ends of her sweater, and lifted her hair until she turned a youthful gorgon.

  She pointed then to the eastern horizon and, without turning around, called, “Do you know France is over there?”

  “I do,” I called back, cupping a hand to the side of my mouth.

  “Do you know a lot, then?”

  I smiled. “I used to,” I said. “I don’t remember it all now.”

  “Pity,” she said. Just like that—pity.

  “I suppose it is.”

  “He doesn’t always remember either,” she said, not sadly. “He’s terribly old, you know.” She looked at me, an odd look, and I wondered if she was comparing my age with her friend’s. “Terribly old. Sometimes, when he’s lost, I think he doesn’t remember me at all.” The look changed then, from odd to almost sly. “Do you remember?”

  I was getting weary of shouting, but she showed no inclination to turn around, and I didn’t have the strength to climb down beside her.

  “This man,” I said then. “Who is he? Is he from around here?”

  She nodded. “Yes. But you’re not, are you? You talk funny.”

  I had to smile. “You’re right. I’m not. I’m from a long way away.”

  I had to smile, because I wasn’t sure.

&nb
sp; “America,” she decided, and nodded once to agree with herself. “I could tell. I’m good at telling things like that, I’m almost always right.” Then she looked at me over her shoulder and gave me the brightest, most loving smile I had ever seen. “He’s a cleaner, you see.”

  I wasn’t sure I heard her properly and shook my head. She lifted her hands in a sigh and came back to me, leaned on the top of the wall and repeated herself, her tone telling me frankly that I should have known that.

  “I see,” I said. “And just what does he clean?”

  “Everything, I guess. For goodness’ sake, don’t you remember anything?”

  I frowned. Her cheerfulness was gone now, replaced by the impatience a child has for one like me, who has nothing but patience left and no way to use it. I didn’t care for her company anymore. I was like that, a dubious privilege of old age—judgements that come and go like the nightmares that warn me just how much longer I have to live, how much more I have to endure before I can have peace. They aren’t premonitions, I don’t believe in things like that, but it’s why I returned to Whitstable—an old town and an old man, waiting for someone to decide what should be done with them before they turn into embarrassments for the future.

  But I do remember the wind, and the sun, and the matter-of-fact way she looked at me again, then walked to the near breakwater and climbed it, looked back at me and grinned before walking out to the end.

  It was narrow.

  It couldn’t have been more than a foot or so wide, and there she was, out at the tip and balanced on one leg.

  I was so stunned I couldn’t move, and I didn’t dare breathe lest she lose her balance and fall.

  Fool, I thought; you stupid little fool, you’ll kill yourself out there.

  She laughed. Her arms spread wide, her fingers spread to the wind, and she glanced over her shoulder and called something to me. I couldn’t hear. My ears were stoppered in anticipation of her falling screams. She called again, and spun around, and I found myself rising, though my legs were too weak to carry me fast enough, my voice too weak to call out for help, for someone to stop her. I looked frantically behind me but there was no one in the parking lot beside the pub where I’d had an early lunch, no one in the narrow streets, no one in the windows. My arms flapped uselessly at my sides, my mouth opened, closed, opened again, and when I reached the breakwater’s edge I kept stepping forward, stepping back, a fearful dance of indecision that soon dropped me to my knees.

  The wind brought the clouds, hid the sun, and I watched her little game, gasping, until she tired of it and came back as easily as if she were walking a wide pavement. I leaned forward anxiously, one hand thumping against my chest to force my lungs to work, the other reaching out as if to help her.

  “Can you do that?” she said when she reached me at last. “It’s not very hard.”

  I rolled and staggered to my feet and backed away from her. My chair had toppled over and I fumbled for it, with it, cursed it until I could set it right again and drop into it, panting.

  “Who are you?” I asked, wiping my mouth, brushing back my hair.

  “Delia,” she said. “Delia Travers.”

  I looked away from her, into the sun.

  “Who are you?” she asked quickly.

  “Jack,” I said finally. “Jack Light.” My voice sounded hoarse, and distant, certainly not my own, so I cleared my throat and gave my name again. And as I waited for a response, and for my heart to calm and my lungs to take air without burning inside, I glanced at her from the corner of my vision.

  And blinked because suddenly I thought I knew who she was. I had seen her before.

  But only in fog.

  She giggled.

  I looked at her sharply.

  “The cleaner’s name is Jack,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said slowly. “I know.” And frowned because I wasn’t sure I was right.

  She nodded, crossed her arms on the top of the wall and tucked her chin on one wrist. “That’s two Jacks I know,” she said. “Do you know two Jacks?”

  I shook my head.

  For a moment the sun again pulled a cloud over its face, and the beach grew too cold for me to endure. As I fumbled into a pair of worn black gloves, I thought of leaving, of heading for the pub where I could go downstairs, to the back corner, and drink myself to nightfall. I could think just as easily in there, with the warmth and the chatter and the laughter all about me, certainly more easily than I could out here, in the cold and the wind-silence, where the waves slanted away from me as if they knew who I was.

  Footsteps on the stones, then.

  The girl turned as I did, to watch a quartet of young people walking awkwardly toward the water, holding each other, laughing in each other’s shoulders, glancing at us once and grinning as if to include us in their fun. Delia waved shyly; I nodded and looked away.

  I didn’t want to watch them.

  There was too much noise, too much life, and I didn’t like the way the little girl kept watching me not watching them. Her expression was knowing, and finally it was sly again, and I couldn’t help wishing her friend would come along and take her away.

  She made me nervous.

  I didn’t know why.

  But when the laughter and squealing grew, I watched the young people anyway, and squinted so hard there were tears in my eyes. A hand brushed hard over my face, and I looked away from the setting sun. Time to go, I told myself; you’ll catch your death if you wait.

  “Do you know,” the girl said suddenly, turning her back on the others, “that Jack is even older than you?”

  “Is that possible?” I said, smiling.

  “Oh yes. He’s older than everybody!”

  She grunted and puffed her way to the top of the wall and sat crosslegged, her back to the drop, rocking on her bottom. “Did you know what he did when he was a man?”

  “No,” I said, curiously uneasy because I thought I knew and didn’t much care for the way she’d put the question.

  Old men, you see, aren’t men at all; they’re relics in museums, ghosts that walk the earth to remind real men of what they would become, because once they got there they never would remember.

  The sun dropped to the horizon; the warmth and wind died. The bay was empty, South End gone in a twilight shadow, and there was only one of the young people left on the beach. A woman, kneeling at water’s edge and poking at something with a pale stick.

  The girl hunched her shoulders and leaned forward, her secret obviously not for anyone but me. “He killed people.” Then she looked side to side, up to the clouds, back to my face. “He really did. He was horrid.”

  And she crossed her eyes and laughed.

  The young woman looked up, startled, and returned to her prodding.

  I pushed out of the chair and walked over to the girl, stiffly, in anger. I crouched in front of her and pulled off my left glove. She stopped laughing when she saw my hand thrust at her face.

  “Do you see that?” I said.

  She nodded, slowly.

  It was an old hand, liver spots and high veins and the knuckles more prominent than the fingers they started.

  The wind pushed at my back, pushed hair into my eyes, and I used my free hand to balance me on the platform.

  “A hand can kill, little girl,” I said grimly, softly, holding her gaze with mine and pleased at the fear I saw there at last. “A hand with a gun, a knife, a razor, a club…it can kill, and it isn’t something to laugh at. Not now. Not ever. A hand kills. Do you understand me?” I took a breath; she didn’t speak. “It is horrible, to kill. I don’t care how young you are, child, it’s not right to laugh.”

  My hand trembled, from the cold, from my anger, and I watched it trace a pattern in front of her eyes before I jammed it back into its glove and dropped the rest of the way to my knees.

  The girl blinked, wiped a hand over her eyes, and blinked again. “I’m sorry, Jack,” she whispered, and looked over her shoulder. “I’m sorry,
” she said again, and ran over to the woman, knelt beside her and watched her until the two of them were laughing, sharing a secret and once in a while glancing over at me.

  I felt the fool.

  And I felt a stirring. A remembering. As intangible as the fog that now drifted in behind me. I hadn’t noticed it before, sneaking and ducking behind the swells, filling the hollows, waiting until the wind died and the sun died before climbing into the twilight. Touching the back of my neck like the kiss of an old friend, curling around my throat like the caress of an old lover.

  When I looked to my left, the village was gone, grey in its place and shimmering blotches of light where the pub’s windows ought to be, echoes of footsteps and the muffled cough of an engine.

  Delia and the young woman were nearly invisible when I looked back; all I could see was the red sweater, all I could hear was the laughing—soft, and low, and a comfort to my ears, so much so that I managed to climb down to the stones without embarrassing myself by falling.

  I straightened.

  The fog deepened, and I took a deep breath.

  The fog held me, and I swayed, and spread my fingers to catch it.

  Spread them. And flexed them. Felt the strength return, and the knowing.

  And the light was nearly gone when Delia came back and took my hand.

  “Jack,” she said. “I have a new friend.”

  I nodded.

  “Do you remember?”

  It was only a few seconds before I nodded again.

  She gave a small cry and threw her arms around me, hugged me, pressed her cheek to me, burrowed into me then looked up to show me the tears filling her eyes. “I didn’t think you would,” she said.

  I didn’t always want to.

  That was something she couldn’t understand, could never understand—that it took more than a wishing to make a dream come true, that it took more than a wanting to make a friend come to stay, to save you from dying when dying should have been.