The Big Book of Jack the Ripper

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

  Mayhew looked at the body for some time before he realized that he did not see the knife. He started to bend down to search and sensed an odd coldness in his back. Reaching up, he encountered the hilt of the knife projecting acutely above his shoulder. Bracing, he pulled it free. Strange, he thought, that there was no pain. He knew he did not want to be found outside Louise’s door like this; he wanted her to come home of her own volition. And she would, he pledged, she would.

  —

  The Thames was vague behind the ceaseless drizzle. Each easy pull on the oars made Mayhew grind his teeth. His shirt, under the shiny tarred coat, was soaked in blood. He had grown tired and cold, almost as cold as the burden he carried wound about in his weighted nets. He could see the dull shine of the watch where he had tied it securely to the nets. The Tower Bridge loomed out of the rain like some great broken limb, making Mayhew think of bones rather than iron. He guessed that this was the spot more or less where he had discovered the watch. He shipped the oars and crawled back to the body. Listlessly, he took the gun, the blade, and tossed them over the side. In the coach that had carried him and his “drunken” companion to Lambeth, he had looked over at the face and wondered who the man was, what he had been. Now he no longer cared.

  With the last of his energy, he grabbed onto his nets and dragged the body up over the lip of his boat and let it slide gently into the Thames. The ripples of its passing spread out across the water, disrupting all of those from the rain. Finally accepting exhaustion, Mayhew slumped back and closed his eyes, envisioning the two bodies rotting together in the coach on the bottom, the watch and the evil it contained buried in muck for all time. The tide was going out. Mayhew let it take hold of him. Slowly, he drifted beneath the jagged overhang of the bridge, cutting off the rain. He blinked the drops away like tears as the darkness crawled up him.

  An Awareness of Angels

  KARL EDWARD WAGNER

  Beginning his career as a writer of sword and sorcery novels in the tradition of Robert E. Howard’s Conan series by creating a similar hero in Kane, the Mystic Swordsman, Karl Edward Wagner (1945–1994) is said to have revitalized the genre by imbuing his character with intelligence and humor—scarce characteristics in most barbarians.

  It was common for Kane, one of the most important and memorable antiheroes in fantasy fiction, to encounter supernatural adversaries, leading Wagner eventually to move his career into the horror genre. In addition to being an award-winning author (he won the World Fantasy Award in 1983 for his vampire/reincarnation novella “Beyond Any Measure” and three British Fantasy Awards for his short stories), he was a successful editor who collected (and published) single-author collections of stories by Manly Wade Wellman, Hugh Cave, and E. Hoffmann Price, and edited fifteen volumes of The Year’s Best Horror Stories (1980–1994).

  Wagner was deeply involved with Howard’s work, both as an inspiration and as a champion. He edited three volumes of Conan stories, restoring the work to the form in which it was originally published; wrote a full-length pastiche of Conan titled The Road of Kings (1979); wrote a novel featuring a different Howard character, Bran Mak Morn, Legion from the Shadows (1976); and wrote an unproduced screenplay for Conan III.

  “An Awareness of Angels” was originally published in Ripper!, edited by Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper (New York, Tom Doherty Associates, 1988).

  AN AWARENESS OF ANGELS

  Karl Edward Wagner

  He surrendered so meekly. It was over so quietly. It was anticlimactic.

  Sheriff Jimmy Stringer certainly thought so. “Please.” And there were tears quavering his voice, but his hand with the .357 was steady. “Please. Just try something. Please try something.”

  But the killer just stood there placidly in the glare of their lights, blood-smeared surgical gloves raised in surrender.

  In the back of his van they could see the peppermint-stripe body of the fourteen-year-old hooker, horribly mutilated and neatly laid out on a shower curtain. Another few minutes, and all would be bundled up tidily—destined shortly thereafter for a shallow grave in some pine-and-scrub wasteland, or perhaps a drop from a bridge with a few cinder blocks for company. Like the other eleven they had so far been able to find.

  “Please. Do it,” begged Stringer. One of the eleven had been an undercover policewoman, and it had been Stringer’s idea. “Come on. Try something.”

  But already there were uniformed bodies crowding into the light. Handcuffs flashed and clacked, and someone began reading the kid his rights.

  “Steady on there, Jimmy. You’re not Clint Eastwood.” Dr. Nathan Hodgson’s grip on his shoulder was casual, but surprisingly strong.

  His own hand suddenly shaking, Stringer slowly lowered his Smith & Wesson, gently dropped its hammer, and returned the revolver to the holster at his side. His belt was a notch tighter now, needed one more. He’d lost fifteen of his two hundred pounds during the long investigation, despite a six-pack every night to help him sleep.

  More sirens were curdling the night, and camera flashes made grotesque strobe effects with the flashing lights of police and emergency vehicles. They’d already shoved the killer—the suspect—into one of the county cars.

  Stringer let out a shuddering breath and faced the forensic psychiatrist. Dr. Hodgson looked too much like a television evangelist for his liking, but Stringer had to admit they’d never have nailed this punk tonight without the shrink’s help. Modus operandi was about as useful as 20-20 hindsight: Hodgson had been able to study the patterns and to predict where the psycho most likely would strike again. Like hunting a rabbit with beagles: wait till it runs around by you again—then, bang.

  “Suppose now that we caught this little piece of shit, you’ll do your best to prove he’s crazy, and all he needs is some tender loving care for a couple months.”

  Stringer’s freckled face was sweaty, and he looked ready to hit someone. “Darn it, Nate! They’ll just turn the fucker loose and call him a responsible member of society. Let him kill and kill again!”

  Dr. Hodgson showed no offense. “If he’s guilty, then he’ll pay the penalty. I don’t make the laws.”

  An old excuse, but works every time. Stringer tried to spit, found his mouth too dry. The bright flashes of light hurt his eyes. Like kicking over a long-dead dog on the side of the road. Just a bunch of wriggling lumps, all bustling about a black Chevy van and the vivisected thing in its belly. Lonely piece of two-lane blacktop, an old country road orphaned by the new lake. Old farm fields overrun with cedar and briar and a couple years’ growth of pine and sumac. Probably a good place to hunt rabbits. He had half a beer in his car.

  “Neither do I,” Stringer said heavily. “I just try to enforce them.”

  Right off the TV reruns, but he was too tired to be clever. He hoped some asshole deputy hadn’t used his beercan for an ashtry.

  —

  His name was Matthew Norbrook, and he wanted to make a full confession. So they’d only found a dozen? He’d show them where to look for the rest. If he could remember them all. The ones in this end of the state. Would they like to know about the others? Maybe the ones in other states?

  Too easy, and they weren’t taking chances on blowing this case due to some technicality. The judge ordered a psychiatric examination for the next morning.

  Dr. Nathan Hodgson was in charge.

  —

  There were four of them in the observation room, watching through the two-way mirror as Dr. Hodgson conducted his examination. Morton Bowers was the court-appointed defense attorney—a gangling black cleanly dressed in an off-the-rack mill outlet suit that didn’t really fit him. Cora Steinman was the local D.A., and her businesswoman’s power suit fit her very well indeed. Dr. something Gottlieb—Stringer hadn’t remembered her first name—was wearing a shapeless white lab coat, and alternated between scribbling notes and fooling with the video recording equipment. Stringer was wearing his uniform for a change—none too neat, and that wasn’t a change—partly to sho
w that this was official business, but mainly to remind these people that he was in charge here, at least for now. A further reminder, two of Stringer’s deputies were standing just outside in the hallway. In charge for now: the state boys would be crowding in soon, and probably the FBI next.

  Stringer sipped on his coffee. It reminded him of watching some bad daytime drama on the big projection TV they had in the bar at the new Trucker’s Heaven off I-40—actually their sign read “Haven,” but try to tell that to anyone. Stringer wished for a smoke, but they’d all jumped on his case when he’d earlier pulled out a pack. It had all been boring thus far: preliminaries and legal technicalities. Stringer supposed it all served some purpose.

  Trouble was, you could be damn sure that the purpose was to make certain this murdering little pervert got off scot-free. Stringer just wished they’d leave him alone in a room with the filthy creep—two-way mirrors or not. He might be pushing fifty, but…

  “Before we go any farther,” Norbrook was saying, “I want it perfectly understood that I consider myself to be entirely sane.”

  He was wearing orange county jail coveralls—Dr. Hodgson had insisted that they remove the handcuffs—but he still managed the attitude of having kindly granted this interview. His manner was condescending, his speech pedantic to the point of arrogance.

  Some bright little college punk, Stringer judged—probably high on drugs most of the time. About thirty, and tall, dark and handsome, just like they say. He’d have no problem picking up girls: Let’s climb into my van and snort a little coke. Here, try on this gag while I get out my knives. Stringer knotted his heavy fists and glared at that TV-star nose and smiling mouth of toothpaste-ad teeth.

  “Are you sometimes concerned that other people might not think that you are entirely sane?” Dr. Hodgson asked him.

  The psychiatrist was wearing a three-piece suit that probably cost more than Stringer’s pick-up truck. He was almost twice the age of the suspect—of his patient—but had the distinguished good looks and grey-at-the-temples pompadour that seemed to turn on women from teeny-boppers to golden-agers. Stringer had heard enough gossip to know that Hodgson was sure no fairy, and maybe there was a dent or two in the old Hippocratic oath back up north that had made the doc content to relocate here in a rural southern county.

  Norbrook’s smile was supercilious. “Please, Dr….Hodgson, is it? We can dispense with the how-do-you-feel-about-that routine. My concern is that the story I propose to tell may at first sound completely mad. That’s why I asked for this interview. I had hoped that a psychiatrist might have the intelligence to listen without preconception or ignorant incredulity. All Sheriff Andy of Mayberry and his redneck deputies here seem capable of understanding is a body count, and that rather limits them to their ten fingers.”

  Stringer dreamed of sharing Norbrook’s ten fingers with a sturdy brick. Afterward they’d slip into those surgical gloves just like Jell-O going into a fancy mould.

  “This story you want to tell me must seem very important to you,” Dr. Hodgson said.

  “Important to the entire human race,” Norbrook said levelly. “That’s why I decided to surrender when I might have escaped through the brush. I didn’t want to risk the chance that a bullet would preserve their secrets.”

  “Their secrets?”

  “All right. I’m perfectly aware that you’re fully prepared to dismiss everything I’m about to tell you as paranoid fantasy. And I’m perfectly aware that paranoid schizophrenics have no doubt sat here in this same chair and offered this same protest. All I ask is that you listen with an open mind. If I weren’t able to furnish proof of what I’m about to tell you, I’d never have permitted myself to be captured. Agreed?”

  “Suppose you begin at the beginning.”

  “It began a hundred years ago. No, to be precise, it began before history—perhaps at the dawn of the human race. But my part of the story begins a century ago in London.

  “My great-grandfather was Jack the Ripper.”

  Norbrook paused to study the effect of his words.

  Hodgson listened imperturbably. He never made notes during an interview; it was intrusive, and it was simpler just to play back the tape.

  Stringer muttered, “Bullshit!”—and crumpled his coffee cup.

  “I suppose,” continued Norbrook, “that many people will say that madness is inherited.”

  “Is that how you sometimes feel?” Hodgson asked.

  “My great-grandfather wasn’t mad, you see—and that’s the crux of it all.”

  Norbrook settled back in his chair, smiling with the air of an Agatha Christie detective explaining a locked-room murder.

  “My great-grandfather—his identity has defied discovery all these years, although I intend to reveal it in good time—was a brilliant experimental surgeon of his day. Because of his research, some would have condemned him as a vivisectionist.”

  “Can you tell me how all of this was revealed to you?”

  “Not through voices no one else can hear,” Norbrook snorted. “Please, doctor. Listen and don’t interrupt with your obvious ploys. My great-grandfather kept an extensive journal, made careful notes of all of his experiments.

  “You see, those prostitutes—those creatures—that he killed. Their deaths were not the random murders of a deranged fiend. On the contrary, they were experimental subjects for my great-grandfather’s early researches. The mutilation of their corpses was primarily a smokescreen to disguise the real purpose for their deaths. It was better that the public know him as Jack the Ripper, a murderous sex-fiend, rather than as a dedicated scientist whose researches were destined to expose an unsuspected malignancy as deadly to humanity as any plague bacillus.”

  Norbrook leaned forward in his chair—his face tense with the enormity of his disclosure.

  “You must understand. They aren’t human.”

  “Prostitutes, do you mean—or women in general?”

  “Damn you! Don’t mock me!”

  Stringer started to head for the door, but Norbrook remained seated.

  “Not all women,” he continued. “Not all prostitutes. But some of them. And they’re more likely by far to be hookers or those one-night-stand easy lays anyone can pick up in singles bars. Liberated women! I’m certain that they engineered this so-called sexual revolution.”

  “They?”

  “Yes, they. The proverbial they. The legendary they. They really are in legend, you know.”

  “I’m not certain if I follow entirely. Could you perhaps…?”

  “Who was Adam’s first wife?”

  “Eve, I suppose.”

  “Wrong.” Norbrook levelled a finger. “It was Lilith, so the legend goes. Lilith—a lamia, a night creature—Adam’s mate before the creation of Eve, the first woman. Lilith was the mother of Cain, who slew Abel, the first child born of two human parents. It was the offspring of Lilith that introduced the taint of murder and violence into the blood of mankind.”

  “Do you consider yourself a Creationist, Mr. Norbrook?”

  Norbrook laughed. “Far from it. I’m afraid I’m not your textbook religious nut, Dr. Hodgson. I said we were speaking of legends—but there must be a basis for any legend, a core of truth imperfectly interpreted by the minds of those who have experienced it.

  “There’s a common thread that runs through legends of all cultures. What were angels really? Why are they generally portrayed as feminine? Why was mankind warned to beware of receiving angels unawares? Why are witches usually seen as women? Why was mankind told not to suffer a witch to live? Why were the saints tormented by visions of sexual lust by demonic temptresses? What is the origin of the succubus—a female demon who copulates with sleeping men?”

  “Do you sometimes feel threatened by women?”

  “I’ve already told you. They aren’t human.”

  Norbrook leaned back in his chair and studied the psychiatrist’s face. Hodgson’s expression was impassively attentive.

  “Not all wom
en, of course,” Norbrook proceeded. “Only a certain small percentage of them. I’m aware of how this must sound to you, but consider this with an open mind.

  “Suppose that throughout history a separate intelligent race has existed alongside mankind. Its origin is uncertain: parallel evolution, extraterrestrial, supernatural entities—as you will. What is important is that such a race does exist—a race that is parasitic, inimical, and undetectable. Rather, was undetectable until my great-grandfather discovered their existence.

  “They are virtually identical to the human female. Almost always they are physically attractive, and always their sexual appetites are insatiable. They become prostitutes not for monetary gain, but out of sexual craving. With today’s permissive society, many of them choose instead the role of a hot-to-trot pick-up: two beers in a singles bar, and it’s off to the ball. Call them fast or easy or nymphos—but they won’t be the ones complaining about it on your couch, doctor.”

  Dr. Hodgson shifted himself in his chair. “Why do you think these women are so sexually promiscuous?”

  “The answer is obvious. Their race is self-sterile. Think of them as some sort of hybrid, and you’ll understand—a hybrid of human form and alien intelligence. To reproduce they require human sperm, and constant inseminations are required before the right conditions for fertilization are met. It’s the same as with other hybrids. Fortunately for us, reproduction is difficult for them, or they’d have reduced humanity to mere breeding stock long ago.

  “They use mankind as cuckoos do other birds, placing their eggs in nests of other species to be nurtured at the expense of natural hatchlings. This is the truth behind the numerous legends of changlings—human-appearing infants exchanged in the crib for natural offspring, and the human infant carried away by malevolent elves or fairies. Remember that elves and fairies are more often objects of fear in the older traditions, rather than the cutesy cartoon creatures of today. It’s hardly coincidence that elves and fairies are usually thought of as feminine.”