Tales of Jack the Ripper

by Laird Barron

  Before he realized what he was doing, Blake was bounding for the shack. The door stood open and the policeman was already inside, frozen with horror at the bloody tableau before him:

  A pile of pillows on the dusty floor, soaked with blood, atop of which the corpse lay.

  Her head cleaved in half, clear down to the chin, exposing brain and skull and a pool of syrupy blood.

  Eliza Shelley wore only her nightdress, badly torn to expose both her breasts and her nether regions. Like Mollie Smith before her, Eliza had been outraged.

  In a dark corner a child whimpered and wept. The policeman raised his lantern to illuminate a trembling colored boy, grasping a blanket tightly and staring with wet, wild eyes at the mutilated corpse. At once Blake deduced the boy to be Eliza’s son. He put a hand to his mouth, horrified that this child must have seen the entire horrible spectacle.

  “You, get out of here!” the policeman roared at him. “Go on, get out!”

  Blake obliged, having seen more than enough of the abused remains of the woman who served him soup mere hours earlier. In the yard Dr. Johnson paced nervously like a new father, a pipe in his hand and a fretful scowl on his face. More policemen arrived, including an imperious man with a walrus mustache and a high brown bowler. Blake recognized him from the Mollie Smith event the previous winter. The man shot a squinting glance at Blake on his way to the shack. Blake stole away to the street, his cheeks flushed hot and his heart racing. Behind him, the mustachioed man shouted, “Who is that man?”

  But Blake kept on. Soon he found himself at the batwing doors of a saloon where a tinkering piano clinked away at a clumsy tune. He leaned against a lonely corner of the bar and drained a bottle of rye whiskey into his gullet as quickly as possible, ignoring the sloshing spittoon by his feet. When he saw through the bottom of the bottle he demanded another one. The barman brought it over as a pockmarked roughneck sidled up to the bar and declared, “Another nigra got kilt!”

  Blake promptly vomited into the spittoon and collapsed onto the sawdust covered floor.

  V.

  The implication was clear. He failed to wrap his addled mind around it, to comprehend how it was possible or why it should be, but Blake could see plainly now that his love for Eula Phillips was dangerous.

  Love, he now knew, had its consequences, though he knew not how it could be. His sorrow—all-consuming as it was—not only haunted him like an ever-present black cloud, but that cloud seemed to deal out bloody strikes wherever his nightly wanderings took him. Absurd, yes, but inescapable. Even if Blake was no murderer, murder appeared to precede him. His heart was filled with the horror of solitude, and in the largely inebriated weeks that followed the gruesome death of Eliza Shelley, he could sense the horror spreading, ever outward.

  On the twenty-first of May, Blake once again espied Luly in the company of her rakish husband, sucking oysters by the street-side window at Bulion’s restaurant, and his misery ran rampant. He stomped directly to Guy Town from there, sucked down a gallon of strong beer in the tavern before climbing atop a table and pronouncing his intent to take the first whore who caught his eye. Unaware that tears spilled from eyes while he shouted thus, Blake dropped to a stoop and scanned the rowdy assemblage until his eyes fell upon none other than the pretty, ashen-faced harlot Delilah. A cruel grin cut across his face, whereupon he announced, “And it came to pass that he loved a woman whose name was Delilah!”

  The whore blanched, her mouth agape, and scuttled back behind the bar while cowboys guffawed and the tinkerer at the piano resumed his tuneless key pounding. Blake laughed too, but in a moment his eyes blurred and his head reeled like a child’s top—his shoes slipped out from under him and he dropped freely backward, meeting the hard-packed dirt floor with a shower of twinkling sparks that heralded the end of his consciousness.

  He awoke, piecemeal, to cool water trickling down his brow. Blake had never been in a sporting girl’s boudoir before and was surprised to see, through narrowed eyes, how clean and conservative everything looked, never mind the lingering tang of male sweat and seed. There was lace atop every surface, from dresser to end-tables, and a vaguely Oriental-looking basin sat sloshing in the lap of the bedside girl, who dipped a kerchief into the clear water and let it drip, drip, drip onto his flushed face. His head was half-sunken into a mound of feather-stuffed pillows and his body covered with a pink and yellow quilt. He turned his eyes toward the girl beside him, and for the briefest moment bethought her to be Luly—a dream vision that dissipated like mist in the sun when the girl leaned close and smiled with what few teeth she had left.

  “Took you a nasty spill there,” she drawled. Her breath smelled like caramel and gin.

  Blake lifted his head and felt it slosh, his brains liquefied, just like the water in the basin. He was still drunk as Cooter Brown.

  “Nobody cares about them, you know,” he rasped, the reverberations of his own voice like hammers crashing against the inside of his skull.

  “Who, darlin’? Who don’t they care ’bout?” She kept on with the kerchief and water ran in rivulets, spilled over the ridge of his brow and into his eye. He did not so much as blink.

  “Negresses,” he explained. “By Christ, you whores will be next. Why, were it my Luly, old John Ireland himself would hunt the bastard down.”

  “What’s all this ’bout Negresses and Gov’nor Ireland, sugar? You’re plum drunk and you ought to see a sawbones on account o’ that fall you took.”

  “By Jesus, you whores’ll be next,” Blake said.

  VI.

  The end of summer brought subtle relief from the stifling heat, and also a fresh spate of killings. An eleven-year-old colored girl was discovered in a backyard wash house, ravaged by her attacker and ended with an iron rod that entered one ear and exited the other. When Blake heard the news, he laughed even while tears rolled down his drink-reddened cheeks. He had not been to the apothecary in weeks by then, selecting instead a series of gambling dens and cathouses for the working hours. Proper Austin life was all but behind him now; Blake had transformed into a resident citizen of Guy Town.

  The child, name of Mary Ramey, engendered as much outrage as the city could muster, considering. Yet when the next servant girl met her end, no one whispered Mary’s name—it was already forgotten in light of the phantom murderer’s freshest victory. Of poor Gracie Vance’s state upon discovery in the stable back of the boss’s house, the Austin Daily Statesman roused most of the capital’s horror with lurid descriptions of the woman’s jellied brains, spilled out of her split skull. Said the sporting girl whose bed Blake shared the night of the Vance killing: “At least her husband hasn’t got to mourn her—he took an ax to the back of the head.”

  Still no one seemed to inquire as to who was behind the savagery, nor what could be done to put a stop to it. Not seriously, at any rate.

  “Dime novel fascination,” he muttered furiously, slipping away from the boudoir in search of a bottle. The girl remained where she lay in a blur of dust motes suspended in the dim lamplight, the Statesman spread out before her as though it was a map to secret treasure. “Damn your eyes.”

  Outside the clammy air of the whorehouse, the warm September night embraced Blake like a mother. He paused beneath a streetlamp and glanced back at the building, the same “hotel” to which he had trailed Luly nearly a year hence, the night the first of what were now six bloody murders took place. Blake rolled on his heels, grasped the lamppost for support, and squeezed his eyes shut while he tried to remember all of their names. Molly and Eliza and Irene and wee little Mary and Gracie (and poor Orange Washington too). He did not really have to try at all.

  Christ Jesus, but what was she doing here? he wondered, peering at the window through which he watched her—her and that strange, reedy man. Her, an heiress to founding Texas families for the love of God, secreted away to a stinking knocking shop…

  The whores will be next, he reminded himself.

  Blake reached up to scratch around h
is collar and was surprised to find he wasn’t wearing one. In fact, he stood on the street, some time past midnight, in his shirt sleeves like a vagrant. He shook his head, still feeling the spectral irritation from a collar that was not there, and somewhere distant a crackling report sounded. Rowdy cowboys, Blake knew, raising hell. Elsewhere, Austin’s gentry—perhaps Jimmy Phillips and his bride Eula among them—toasted their gilded glasses to this new Gilded Age for Texas.

  And still elsewhere: a devil crept the night, punishing Blake Prentiss and his overburdened conscious for the crime of adoring an unattainable heart. Fraught with horror at this knowledge, he dropped to his knees and wept into his hands, hands that might as well have dripped with the blood of six butchered corpses.

  His mind reeled with hazy images of the frail, alabaster brunette whose utter perfection brought apocalyptic judgment to those who deserved it least. For love, for grief, for terror, Blake sobbed at the night.

  “Luly…Luly…Luly…”

  VII.

  If it had been boiling up, beneath the surface, those last twelve months, Hell broke loose on Christmas Eve.

  Whilst the Good Reverent Snoot sermonized his flock at First Presbyterian on the birth of Christ and the gifted voices of unseeing children were heard to raise carols to the heavens at the Institute for the Blind, the lower sort remained in Guy Town and those lower still huddled for warmth on the periphery of the railyard. Blake Prentiss, former apprentice pharmacist, huddled amongst them, waving his red raw hands at the guttering camp fire near the tracks. The yard bulls bothered these transients little on the night before Christmas, left them to their quiet misery for once, though sharp eyes were kept upon them lest any man of their number try to jump a moving box car outward bound.

  When the rye ran out someone produced a bottle of Laudanum, from which Blake took a deep belt before the next man wrestled it away from him.

  “This chippie’s half-Indian,” the man barked to a round of phlegmy chuckles.

  Blake grunted and pulled his coat closed around his sunken chest. The filthy, bearded men with whom he had kept company these last several nights were brutes at best, vagrants and criminals who boasted of taproom killings and bank robberies and rapes. One of them, a small and wizened man with a shock of white-blond hair, even confessed to killing President Garfield and pinning it on Guiteau. No one listened, no one apart from Blake who drank in every word the unfortunate tramps about him spoke lest the devil’s instrument be uncovered before his eyes.

  But though many murderers surrounded him during his days at the railyard, none was the murderer he sought. The devil, it seemed, was slyer than that.

  Round ten o’clock the wizened man started to bellow “A Babe Was Born in Bethlehem,” inciting a tremendous bear of a man called Joshua to suppurate and announce his every sin before God.

  “By Jesus it kilt my mama, the things I said and done,” Joshua burbled, tugging at his great, tear-sodden beard. The singer interrupted himself to assure Joshua that there was no God left to tally his misdeeds, and when fisticuffs ensued Blake removed himself from the assemblage to begin his stumbling trek back into town.

  He made it as far as Fifth and Guadalupe, his left foot throbbing from the silver-dollar-sized hole in the sole of his shoe, when Delilah came swaying through the batwing doors of the tavern with an arched eyebrow and a canted smirk.

  “May’s looking for you, you know.”

  “I guess I owe her some money.”

  “I guess she don’t want to forgive it, even though it’s Christmas and all.”

  Blake nodded and Delilah said, “I’d ask you to come inside out of the cold, but I don’t work on no credit.”

  “A girl’s got to eat,” he said, averting his attention to a pair of mongrel dogs feasting on a bloated dead pig. Everything in the First Ward was looking for something to scavenge, something to violate, but that, Blake reckoned, was just how things were here. The status quo. It was the landed gentry who had cause to worry, even if only for their servants’ well-being. The devil was not punishing the whores and gamblers and adulterers and dope addicts; he selected outrages that would be noticed but quickly forgotten. The devil played his fiddle well with Blake for a bow. And Blake was growing weary of that catgut sting.

  He teetered for a moment, the opiate squeezing his brain like a gigantic hand, and he tucked his chin further down into his coat for the march up to Congress Avenue. His breath came out in uneven bursts of grey mist, the sweat on his brow felt like ice against the skin. He checked the contents of his pockets along the way, ensuring that he was flush enough to see his errand through—ten dollars to May Tobin to settle his debt, another dollar and a half for a roll with one of May’s girls, and however much it took for a man to drink until he plain gave out.

  The final count came to twelve dollars and a nickel. He sighed and halted, sat down on the ground beside the road and counted again. The count was the same—enough for the first two tasks, but with nothing left for the end. Blake sighed heavily and stared down the length of the street. A pair of policemen was pounding on a woman on the corner of Lavaca; plenty of people were watching, but no one moved to help her. Blake made a thin line of his mouth and hoisted himself back up again. His head seemed to keep going up, even after he reached his full height. Christmas, Christmas, he thought.

  “And where’s my pudding?”

  He chortled and missed a step, stumbling over the paving stones until he regained his balance, and then continued on to May Tobin’s bordello. The front room was in full swing when he arrived, let in by a half-dressed mulatto girl no older than fourteen.

  “My debt,” Blake mumbled, stabbing a fist stuffed with paper notes at the madam of the house.

  May accepted the payment with a thin smile and an ironic curtsy.

  “And a merry Christmas to you, Mr. Prentiss.”

  The girl from Blake’s last appearance at the house of assignation appeared at his elbow, winding herself around his middle like a snake, and May scrutinized what little money was left in his hand. Blake shrugged, and May said, “Oh, what the hell—it’s a special night, isn’t it?”

  “And a bottle of—anything,” he added to the bill on his way to the back rooms, veritably dragged by the girl.

  Together they sat and drank, he ten times as much as she, from the jug of cheap rotgut May had sent back to them. The girl made several attempts at idle conversation, each rebuked by Blake in turn, as were her clumsy overtures that they get to the business at hand. At times he feared that he would begin to weep again, but he was successful in maintaining composure apart from a violent shiver that rocked his bones. The girl politely pretended not to notice.

  When the liquor was gone and the clock struck ten, Blake left the room without a word, leaving the bored and frustrated prostitute to breathe a sigh of relief. His heart slammed unevenly against his ribs, his hairline spilled sweat in rivulets that slicked his unshaven face. He found himself facing the hallway window through which he had peeped a year before, and right beside the door to the room in which he spied Luly Phillips and her startling escort.

  Was she in there now? With the same cadaverous man, or another, or whom?

  For a moment, Blake considered the dubious wisdom of kicking the door down to see for himself. Instead, he lurched toward the window, hefted it open, and climbed out into the cold black night. A pervading sense of déjà vu overwhelmed him, a mirror to the past wherein he crept alongside the dark hotel as would a thief and rose only high enough to peek through the window into the lamplit boudoir. And his heart stopped.

  For on the narrow bed beside the fluttering flame of the sconce, a sallow-skinned man Blake had never seen before was grunting like a rooting hog while he rutted with Blake’s beloved Luly. The man—his eyes small and black, his nose upturned to an almost comical degree—wore a battered slouch hat and black stockings on his feet that were riddled with holes. As for Luly, she was stark naked, her chocolate hair undone and spread out over the pillows lik
e tentacles. Her small breasts, so white that the skin was webbed with translucent blue veins, shook violently as the man rammed into her, baring his teeth and gripping the bedposts tight.

  Blake whimpered like a beaten pup. He dropped back down to the cold, damp ground and pulled his knees up to his chin. The night seemed to shatter all around him like obsidian glass and fall away, with nothing left but him and sweet, frail Luly who was neither sweet nor frail but filthy—degenerate and dripping with sin.

  And Blake hissed aloud, “You whores will be next.”

  VIII.

  A scant few carolers were to be seen on the streets of Austin this Christmas Eve; most of the capital’s women remained at home behind locked doors while their husbands eyeballed strangers passing by or joined up with armed militias to prowl the shadows in hope of putting down the “servant girl annihilator.”

  To a one they all felt certain that the killer lurked somewhere among them. They traveled only in pairs and groups, firing suspicious glances at one another and whispering sotto voce whenever Blake passed near. He paid no mind.

  He floated up Congress, a man possessed, his eyes streaming tears and lips gibbering madly after the loss of love and life, the betrayal of Luly and his own heart and everything that made the slightest bit of sense to him. Pure and chaste she was, belonging by right and fate to that violin player, that rake. All lies: the devil did not walk in Texas. Just a murderer, whose madness and motivations were his own and had nothing at all to do with the hell through which Blake had walked, burned, loved, hated, wanted desperately to die. He had given up his livelihood, his standing and his sanity, and for what? A dream? That his love for the girl who needed his father’s potions to flush the life from her womb was so wretched the whole world needed to be punished for it?

  But what to do? What to do?

  For worship of a false idol, Blake had nearly died…