The Big Book of Jack the Ripper

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

  “Well, it’ll be in the papers by noon, I suppose.”

  “What will?”

  “That the Ripper’s back. Killed him a woman last night in Whitechapel, just like before.”

  Mayhew set down his pint. “Where? Where’d it happen?”

  “Castle Alley’s the street as is being given. Here, where you going?”

  Running at breakneck speed, past fruit vendors, fish vendors, beggars, and drunkards, Mayhew dashed headlong across London Bridge and into the East End. The visions of the day before tinged everything he saw with evil. Louise, turning from woman to carcass to bone, and in the background, Demming, always Demming. Now he forgave her, now he whined her name and begged God to forgive him for all the hateful things he had thought about her; it was really only her mother he condemned, and it always had been. Onto Whitechapel Road, shoving desperately through a line of people who waited in their own desperation outside a casual ward house to get a bed for the night. He skirted other such lines, except once to get directions to the street. The backstreets were narrower, and clogged with carts, wagons, and horses. He ran past row houses, and the wide wooden gates of pungent stable yards, then at last into the cramped corridor of Castle Alley. Wagons and carts lined one side of the road. The smell here was much worse than that by the stables. Halfway along, three policemen stood on drier stones, on small islands in the excremental sea. Mayhew grabbed onto one of them, babbling his questions between breaths. The other two pulled him off and shoved him up against a wall with a nightstick under his jaw. Mayhew began to cry. The policemen looked at one another, embarrassed to be sharing this. The one with the nightstick eased back and said “What’s the matter, then? She your strumpet?”

  “Strumpet?” Mayhew rubbed at one eye.

  “Yeah, you know old ‘Claypipe’?”

  “You was a customer, then,” suggested one of the others in the hope of lightening the mood. “Must a’ been a good piece to set a man weepin’.”

  “I—what was the name of the woman killed?”

  “Alice McKenzie. She’s known round here as ‘Claypipe Alice.’ What, did you think it was somebody you knew?”

  He nodded, wiped at his face with both hands and tried to regain some equanimity. “My daughter. I heard that there’d been another murder—the Ripper.”

  “Oh, there’s been that, right enough. His handiwork, all right. Through the throat, ’e got her, just like before. Found her between two vans, right up there.” He pointed. The third policeman, silent till now, moved forward, close to Mayhew, and said, “So, you heard about a killing and you decided that it was your daughter got done. Gawd, people do go on, don’t they?” He shared a laugh with the other two.

  Mayhew’s hand trembled and he shoved it into his pocket. He dared not tell them about Demming, about what he suspected, about his dream. They would jail him for his part in it all, he was certain. “My daughter, she lives on this street. Her name’s Louise—Louise Mayhew.”

  He sought for their recognition and got more than he wanted. One of them became beet red and turned away as if to scrutinize the alley. The policeman who had questioned him said flatly, “Number twenty-three.” He stepped back, rubbing his thumbs against his fingertips. None of them would meet his eyes now. They stepped from the walk and clomped off toward where the body had been found. Murder they could live with, but the father of a whore—the notion even that whores had families—was something they could not allow for.

  Mayhew sniffled and moved quickly on to twenty-three. Not until he had his hand raised to knock, did he hesitate, turning away suddenly in indecision, pressing again to the wall. What was he going to say to her now that she was alive? His thoughts had been for a dead girl. Anything he said to her here would only shame her. If he left her alone, she might come home again; but if he left her alone…His wild thoughts collected like bees, and he realized for the first time what he was thinking: Demming was Jack the Ripper. How could this be coincidence—Castle Alley of all the winding corridors in the East End? Somehow, some poor bastard had discovered this—had discovered that a gold watch helped him, or made him do it, or something that Mayhew couldn’t even guess at—and Demming had been unable to continue without it. That hateful watch, everything was tied to that watch; and he had retrieved it. He started back out of the grimy street, ignoring the odd glances of the police.

  He wandered distractedly most of the day. Mayhew was not a man of action, nor a particularly skilled thinker. All he knew were nets and grappling hooks and the cold waters of the Thames. But he had to do something—Demming was going to kill Louise, of that much he was certain.

  —

  A drizzling rain rustled the leaves in St. James’s Park and made the air smell of earth and decay. Prostitutes of a much higher class strolled by under umbrellas. One murmured to him as he passed. He kept his left arm pressed against his body to keep the item in his sleeve from slipping out. It had been a short boat hook not two days earlier; Mayhew had used a rasp file to sharpen the broken point into a needle. When a policeman appeared ahead, he ducked instinctively from sight, but in the rain Mayhew hardly looked different from anyone else in the park.

  He reached Demming’s street and, as he drew near the house, he saw the door open and a figure come out. The figure—a man dressed as if for a party—walked purposefully past him. Mayhew made a quick glance to determine that the man was not Demming. He glimpsed a pale, sweaty face and round, glassy eyes beneath the brim of a tall silk hat. Demming’s door thumped shut. The street was silent, no one else about.

  Mayhew went up to the door and rapped the knocker. A few moments passed before the door opened a crack and one eye stared out at him. It was Demming himself. The door opened wide, and the doctor stood cavalierly before him. “Well, this is a surprise. Come to hobnob, Mr. Mayhew?”

  “You’re Jack the Ripper.”

  Demming spluttered a surprised laugh. “Am I?” He was about to go on but paused to look past Mayhew, out into the gaslit street where Mayhew could hear footsteps. “Why don’t you come in and tell me about it?” Demming let him in, then led him perfunctorily up the stairs into the same office they had stood in the day before. A chair now sat before the desk, as if he had been expected. The leather was warm, and Mayhew recalled the visitor who had passed him. “Now,” said Demming, “I’ve done a great deal of work with lunatic delusions. Why don’t you tell me yours and let’s see what I can do to help.” He opened a box on the desk and with a steady hand took out a cigar, closing the box without offering one to Mayhew. He leaned back against the desk, his ankles crossed. “How am I the—the infamous Ripper?”

  Mayhew raised his head to meet Demming’s conciliatory stare and said simply, “The watch.”

  For a fraction of a second, Demming faltered. If Mayhew had not been staring hard at him, he would have missed the twinge. Then Demming laughed and replied, “Mr. Mayhew, you are either drunk or mad. If the former, I advise you to go home and sleep it off; if the latter, you must accompany me to Bethlem this very evening.” He moved around the desk and leaned for emphasis on the blotter, his cigar still unlit between his fingers.

  Mayhew could only shake his head. He had entertained doubts till now, moments all the way here from Lambeth when he drew up short, thinking himself insane, his notions absurd at best. But he did not need to be a specialist in “lunatic delusions” to see that the doctor was lying, and prodding him to reveal what he knew in order to determine how he should be dealt with.

  “You killed Alice McKenzie last night. But you were looking for Louise.”

  “Absurd, sir. I was at the theatre and a dinner party last night. A Gilbert and Sullivan musical. I went nowhere near your lovely daughter.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “How many witnesses will be needed, Mr. Mayhew, to prove it?”

  “The watch, then. Somehow the watch let you do it. When Louise wound it, I went to sleep, and you were in the dream—”

  “You let her wind it?” The
facade was gone: first the doctor showed fearful amazement; then his eyes narrowed with determination. He drew open a drawer and pulled out a pistol, aimed it at Mayhew, who pressed back into the creaking chair as if to escape. “You saw some things, but you haven’t all the facts. Still, your zeal might be enough to set the police on me, and we can’t have that, not when we’re so close.”

  “Close to what?”

  “To opening the gates, to giving me some peace. What do you do on the river, Mayhew, spend hours just sitting and thinking?” He said this with an air of humor, a hint of admiration. “I’ll tell you, then—as a reward of sorts.

  “I’ve spent much of my life studying the diseases that can afflict the mind, Mr. Mayhew, while you rowed aimlessly about the Thames. I had begun working with hypnosis to treat patients. I found in a few of them a curiously recurring set of images amidst their twisted fantasies—images of other worlds and their concomitant demons, much of which sounded like the reflections of some barbaric priest upon his drug-induced ‘journeys.’ Among those patients caged in Bethlem Hospital, I found one who was susceptible both to hypnosis and to this uncanny tapestry of images. I used a rather unusual watch to put him in a trance where he could describe his demons. It’s Swiss, it was a…I once thought it was a gift. Have you ever heard the name Cagliostro? No, of course not. He was a sorcerer who followed in the footsteps of Mesmer, in Paris. The Catholics claimed all sorts of satanic things about him—even that he had feasted with the dead. The man who gave me that watch told me that it had reputedly been fashioned for Cagliostro by a corpse through the practice of necromancy, subsequently had fallen into the hands of Eliphas Levi, another infamous villain, and had passed to my acquaintance after Levi’s death in ’75. A corpse—we joked about it. Such a wild, absurd tale. And I—I wore the watch, here, in my vest. For years I wore it with not so much as a hint of its…God, of its power. It took a madman to do that.

  “What I expected, I can hardly remember. Of course I had him stay here rather than at ‘Bedlam.’ Outwardly, he was passive and I felt sure he would be safe. It wasn’t until the third murder that I discovered the—the connection. The watch turned up missing, you see, and while searching I found that my patient was not in his room. I did not find him that night. But early the next morning—I could not sleep—I discovered him unconscious in his bed. He had climbed in the second-floor window, which still lay open. He was wearing one of my suits, and his face, his chin and nose, had warts on it that I could not remember him having. The watch was in his—my—breast pocket. It was not ticking. I picked it up without waking him, to take it, and turned the stem just a little, casually, thoughtlessly. With a cry of absolute agony, my patient snapped bolt upright. I dropped the watch and he lay back down.

  “Later that day I put him in a trance and got from him a story that I then found hard to believe. He said that the watch had spoken to him in his trance state, that it took control of him, that the fantastic demons of his dreams could not compare with the real ones inhabiting the watch. They were making him perform terrible crimes. Here it was, then: I had unleashed Jack the Ripper upon the East End. Worse, he had worn my clothes and used my surgical knife. I considered returning him to the hospital but I decided against this, mostly out of fear that someone else might discover what I now knew. I finally resolved to keep the watch from him while trying to cure him of his delusion. These were only East End trollops he had used in his aborted rituals—the world could do without a few of them—but I had never wanted this to happen, never. I do not know if he wrote any of the letters that the police collected.

  “You will already know that I failed. He disappeared and with him went my watch. To this day I have no idea how he escaped. My suspicion is that one of my staff unknowingly wound the watch. I sought him everywhere, discreetly of course, but had no luck. Then, after the last one, the woman Mary Kelly, he returned here. I hardly recognized him. His eyes were shot with blood, and the warts had grown in clusters across his cheek. I feared that he might actually be leprous. His mind had gone, and he babbled out that he had been moments away from completing some task, from bringing the demons of his dreams into the real world, when some other spirit, as of reason, took hold of him—which I presume means that the watch had stopped. He saw what horrors he had wrought under the demons’ influence and he tried to destroy the watch in Mary Kelly’s hearth. It revealed the extent of its power then, and instead of being destroyed, it erupted with some terrible energy. I still believed that this was all some dark corner of his mind, with no anchor in reality. Only later did I discover that some of the things on the grate in Mary Kelly’s house had actually melted, that some unaccountable force had been unleashed. At the time, as I said, I dealt only with him. He had been burned rather severely on one arm. His mind collapsed finally even as I injected him with a soporific, careful not to touch him directly. The things he said afterwards made no sense whatsoever. I could no longer keep him here, and I dared never return him to ‘Bedlam.’ ”

  “You killed him.”

  “In point of fact he was still alive when I pushed the rented hansom off the Tower Bridge. Your river murdered him, not I.”

  Mayhew shook his head at this rationalization. “Then why dredge him up when he was safely put down? And that devil’s own watch,” he said, but the realization dawned on him even as he asked it. “You can’t mean to try again?”

  Demming twisted the pistol away in his sharp gesture. “I’ve no choice now. Those vile things of his madness have come creeping into my own dreams. Oh, faint at first, very vague; but in the past few months I haven’t dared to sleep without morphine. I would never have sought you out, except that the fiends even managed to crawl through that barrier. God knows what they really are. The painting in the watch hardly begins to suggest…Mr. Mayhew, they’re like worms burrowing into your brain, eating their way right through it. If you fail them, deny them, the excrutiation they can induce—Cagliostro died in a madman’s anguish, in prison, and I know—I know why.”

  After a moment, he went on more calmly. “I knew I was going insane. All they wanted—all they demanded—was that I retrieve the watch and continue what had begun. For any chance at peace, I hired you, I found another at Bethlem, and I set him to it just like before.”

  “The watch,” Mayhew said, “the fella I passed coming in here—he’s got it.”

  “You don’t think I’d carve her up. What if she looked at me, what if the image of my face were caught in her retina for the photographers to find? Let them have some other face to identify in the dead woman’s gaze.”

  “But why my Louise?”

  “It’s the damned watch, don’t you see? You let her handle it, and it lives by these murders. I tried to clean all traces of her off the damned thing—you saw me do that! But the demons—their energy, their substance, must have drunk of her life in just those few moments. I’m sorry. It knows her.”

  “How will you kill me, Mr. Demming? That’s a gun, not the Thames, you got there.”

  Demming looked down at his hand. “Yes,” he said in sad agreement. At that moment, Mayhew flung his short spear across the desk. It smashed an inkwell on its way, throwing blackness across Demming’s face, a wide gash of shadow. The point entered him below his neck and Mayhew leaped up and shoved it with all his might. Demming sprawled back, slammed into the glass cabinet of skulls, shattering it, then fell forward across the desk. Mayhew stole the gun from his twitching fingers, then made himself withdraw the boat hook from Demming. The doctor flailed briefly, then lay on his side, gasping. Underneath him, spurting blood pooled and mixed with the ink on the desk.

  Mayhew did not wait to see if the doctor died. His concern was with the monster already out and prowling the night.

  He ran to Pall Mall and hailed a cab, giving the driver one of his gold coins in advance for the fastest ride to Whitechapel the man could manage. The delighted driver asked no questions, and his coach skidded every turn on two wheels, plunging through the rainy
night.

  No one was guarding Castle Alley; the police knew well that the Ripper did not work so regularly and never returned to the exact same location. Not before tonight.

  Mayhew leapt from the coach, twisting his ankle on the ordure-slick stones. He ignored the pain and ran into the narrow street. At the other end of it, walking steadily, stiffly on, was the well-dressed man he had met outside Demming’s. Mayhew slowed up, his heart and mind racing, then started ahead on the same side of the road. Twenty-three lay directly between them. He increased his pace to ensure that the Ripper did not reach it before him. With every step, he considered what to do and how to do it.

  Steam rose from the sidewalk, a stench of decay. Mayhew hurriedly removed his heavy black sou’wester and balled it up around his arm. The approaching man still seemed to take no notice of him. They were close enough together now that Mayhew could see the droplets of rain on the brim of the top hat, the point of a crooked nose, the whites of shadowed eyes that continued to stare straight at number twenty-three.

  The Ripper noticed him only at the last moment. Mayhew saw the face twist with hateful recognition. The Ripper’s hand drew from a coat pocket a huge knife—the one that had appeared in his dream. The Ripper raised the knife and lunged at the same instant that Mayhew jumped forward and rammed his wrapped hand into the Ripper’s chest. Demming’s pistol made four thumping noises, quieter than if he’d knocked on a door. The Ripper stumbled back a step, staring down at himself, then up at the acrid smoke curling out from the coat. Part of his face held onto the evil scowl, but one corner of his mouth turned up as if in a grin. “Just like that,” he said. He giggled, then fell over on his side. His head cracked loudly against the cobblestones and the gold watch skittered out on its length of chain, as if trying to escape into the gutter.