by Thomas Emson
She looked up at the adults. Faultless was thinking about what she had said.
What were they dealing with here?
Was it human?
Not from what he was hearing. This killer, the one who’d called himself Jack, was some kind of angel, according to Jonas and Richard Troy. He’d been around for centuries.
The creature from the Garden.
What did that mean?
The Garden . . .
No way, thought Faultless. It couldn’t be true. He wouldn’t accept that. There had to be a rational explanation.
“So,” said Tash, “he wasn’t actually Jack the Ripper.”
“Jonas says he took on the name,” said Jasmine, “but he didn’t actually do the killings. He . . . ” She was studying another word, her brow creasing. “Or . . . orch . . . orchest . . . ”
“Orchestrated,” said Faultless.
“Then who was the Ripper?” said Tash.
Chapter 68
THE HOLE
WHITECHAPEL—5:01 AM, NOVEMBER 9, 1888
Detective Inspector Walter Andrews dragged on the cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs.
He breathed out. Smoke filled the dark little cell. The smell of tobacco mingled with the smells of damp and piss that saturated the air. He studied his surroundings.
This was the hole, one of five punishment cells that lay deep in the bowels of the building in Whitechapel Place, home to Great Scotland Yard.
As you headed down towards the punishment cells, it grew hotter and hotter. The men joked it was because you got nearer to hell. It was a bad joke. It was bad because some of them thought it was true.
The iron door had no window. There was a gap between the bottom of the door and the stony floor. They slipped your food through the gap. Stale bread and a cup of water. Once a day.
Men went into the hole fat and proud. They came out thin and broken.
If you were confined in the cell, you shat and pissed on the floor. And you lived with the stink till they let you out. That could be three days, it could be thirty. It could be till you died. After they removed a body, or hauled out a hardly-living prisoner, they washed the cell. But it was only a cursory wipe. It didn’t get rid of the odor.
Andrews felt gloomy being here. He’d brought a chair down and was sitting on it. He looked at the other man, who was huddled in the corner, shivering.
Blood covered virtually every inch of the fellow’s body. His clothes were drenched. His hair was matted. His eyes were set white and wide in his blood-dark face.
Andrews dropped his cigarette and crushed it with his shoe.
He asked the question he’d wanted to ask for hours.
“Why?”
The wide, white eyes flickered over to him. But the man in the corner said nothing. Just stared at Andrews.
“Tell me,” he asked.
The man trembled.
“You were a clocksmith before you joined up, weren’t you?” said Andrews.
Again the man failed to respond.
“That’s a delicate trade. Requires dexterity. Skill. Care and attention. Did cutting open those women require dexterity?”
The man stayed quiet.
Andrews said, “We chased him. Mr Troy and myself. Ten others. We cornered him and bound him, cast him down. He failed, my friend. He failed, and so did you.”
Andrews considered the man. Jonas Troy’s words came to mind.
“We all have evil in us, Andrews. The great challenge is to contain it, keep it leashed. Especially if we are called by darkness.”
This man had been unsuccessful. He’d succumbed. He’d weakened. The voice from the pit had whispered in his ear, and he’d been seduced.
But there had been no promises, Andrews knew that. No gifts handed over. No money. No women. No drink. Nothing. There was no need of bribery.
As Troy would say, “Evil is within us. It is part of our nature. All that is required is a trigger. And he, the evil one, knows what that trigger is. He awakens the need in us to be cruel and violent. He unearths it from our deepest, darkest places. He uses it for his own gain. He calls out to the evil, Andrews. He calls out for a ripper. And a Ripper comes.”
And a Ripper comes.
But who would have guessed it would be this man.
When Andrews and a colleague had brought him in nearly four hours earlier, they had to provide a false name and also lied about why they had arrested him. His true identity had to be kept hidden for now. The blood covering him made it difficult for the desk sergeant and other police officers who were milling around to recognize the man. But soon they would know. Before they did, Andrews had to deal with the situation.
“You are a seer,” Troy had told him. “You keep this secret, and you guard it with your life. This is what we do. We hunt this evil, and we deal with its aftermath.”
Andrews had always had visions. When he was a child growing up in Suffolk, his mother would hide things, and he would find them. If he concentrated, the hiding places would appear in his head.
His mother would tell him, “We are special, Walter. We have a gift from God, and we must use it to protect people.”
He joined the Metropolitan Police Force in 1869 and was soon using his gift to solve crimes. Nine years after he joined, he was promoted to Inspector. Two months ago, he’d been sent to Whitechapel to investigate the Ripper killings.
When he arrived, he knew immediately who was truly responsible for the murders.
His visions grew more vivid, more violent. He met Jonas Troy and the others. He learned more about his past, about his calling. He learned that the victims of the Ripper crimes were seers like him.
“They are your family,” Troy told him. “We are blood. We are made by God to do this work.”
Now he thought, What am I going to do with this man?
In reality, he was a murderer. He should hang. It was that simple.
It’s that simple if you don’t know the truth, thought Andrews. And the truth made things more complicated.
“Why didn’t you fight it?” he asked the man, exasperation in his voice.
It was easy for Andrews to say that. Easy for him to fight the evil. He was chosen. He had a gift. He had something inside him that kept evil at bay. Something the evil one claimed from all the victims. Something this blood-soaked man had ripped out of them.
But he still thought, Why don’t they reject the darkness?
Then the man spoke. “I am only human, Andrews.”
“You are a murderer.”
“He made me do it. You know this is true. He told me about you, Andrews. He said I should kill you because you were a seer. You could hunt him. You had . . . you had within something he wanted, something he craved.”
Andrews nodded.
“So you see,” said the man. “You can ward off the evil he speaks, the evil he is. You can parry it away. I cannot. I am merely human.”
“So am I.”
“No, you are more than human. He told me this. You are more.”
They lapsed into silence. Andrews thought about things. After a while he asked, “What shall I do with you?”
“You know I shan’t kill again. Not now that you have contained him. He is no longer in my head.”
“He can get into your head again, my friend. He can reach you from his confines. He can and does. This is how he releases himself. He calls out to the evil in men, and they kill for him. They spill blood. Then he is released, and so begins another hunt, another quest to kill five seers.”
“I am sorry, Andrews,” said the man.
“I know you are. Do you see what would have happened if he had succeeded?”
“I realize now, but . . . but you will never understand what it is like to feel evil within you, feel it corrupting your . . . your soul.�
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“The world will die if he is freed from the curse.”
“I know . . . I know.”
“He will destroy everything.”
“Yes, I realize . . . ”
“His influence is already strong in the world. Evil is everywhere. It always has been. But it will be nothing to what will be unleashed if he ever kills five, and this game is concluded. The damned game.”
The man shook his head and wept.
Andrews said, “I don’t know what to do with you.”
The man shuddered and cried.
Andrews spoke again. “Tell me, my friend, what do you say? If you were standing where I am standing, and you had Jack the Ripper in this cell, what would you do?”
Detective Inspector Frederick George Abberline lifted his head and looked Andrews in the eye.
Chapter 69
WHO AM I?
WHITECHAPEL—11:44 AM, FEBRUARY 28, 2011
Charlie Faultless was reeling. His head swam.
Who am I? he thought.
It was terrifying, not knowing.
His past was now a big, empty hole. There was nothing there. Just a void. A pit. A grave. And he teetered on the edge of the abyss, looking down, hoping to see something he could grab on to when he fell.
But there was nothing. No mother. No father. Nothing.
Hands buried in the pocket of his top, the hood pulled down over his face, he stomped through the streets.
It was still rainy. Dark clouds filled the sky. They were bruise-black. Heavy and foreboding.
Who am I? he thought again.
He kept walking. He was going nowhere. Just thinking, trying to work things out. He had come here to write a book, to dig into four unsolved murders. But now he was going to have to dig even deeper. Mine another seam of history. A forgotten seam. An undiscovered stratum that would hopefully contain the answers to his heritage.
But where to start?
He knew where. With the old man. The one he’d seen outside Costcutter on that first day. The one he’d seen cloaked in fire when Graveney was trying to kill him. The one he’d seen lay him down on the cold, hard concrete outside Patricia Faultless’s house in 1977.
Was he Faultless’s dad? It made sense if you were looking for the most logical answer, the simplest explanation. But nothing had been logical or simple over the past few days. He touched his shoulder, where Graveney’s thug had blowtorched him. He had been healed. No mark. No scar. How had that happened? Nothing made sense. Nothing at all.
He stopped in front of the pub. Two blokes loitered outside, smoking cigarettes. They were soaked through.
“What’re you looking at?” said one of the smokers.
Faultless tensed. He was ready to go, but he stopped himself. Ten years ago, the man’s question would’ve been an invitation to fight. Two days ago, it might have triggered a verbal assault from Faultless. But now, it made him cower. He turned his back and walked on, the smokers laughing behind him.
Who am I?
Everything had been taken away. His strength. His courage. His balls.
He wasn’t Charlie Faultless anymore, and that name meant so much. It had caused tremors in the community. It had made men tremble. His name was wrath in years gone by. His name was vengeance and fear. You told a fella that Charlie Faultless was on his way over, you already had him on the back foot. You might even see him leg it, wanting to be as far away as possible from the man with that name.
But now even his name had gone. He wasn’t Charlie Faultless anymore. Your parents gave you your name. But if they weren’t your parents, what did that mean? The name meant nothing, that’s what. It was just two words.
He walked on, shaking with nerves.
He thought about his father. He’d never known him. “He was a lazy cunt,” his mother had said. “You’re better off without him. He’d get on your tits. You’d want to kill him, darlin’.”
Now he knew that was a lie. His mother was a lie. His life was a lie.
He had never believed there was a point to anything.
The only meaning to him was Charlie Faultless.
And the only purpose was also Charlie Faultless.
Nothing else. Everything was down to chance—and you had to take yours while you could.
But now that “Charlie Faultless” had been stripped away, it left him feeling lost and scared.
He had no identity. He was nothing. He was no one. He belonged nowhere.
Not even here, where he thought he was made.
Not even the Barrowmore Estate.
The Barrowmore Estate. Crawling with cops. Stained in blood. Haunted by a monster.
Two options confronted him. He could run, or he could find the old man. He was trying to make a decision when the car skidded to a halt next to him and a voice said, “Faultless, what the fuck . . . ”
Chapter 70
THE GOSPEL OF DEATH
It was better to be living here in the house of Hallam Buck.
Menace corrupted the air. Evil lingered in the atmosphere. Jack felt more at home than at Spencer’s hovel.
He had certainly savored the decay over at the youth’s squat. But it lacked the malevolence of Buck’s apartment, which was the result of the resident’s true dark nature.
It was also very near to the child and its mother.
The seers.
Jack tingled with anticipation. One of them would be the fifth. Four had been conveniently killed fifteen years before. The man who killed them was now on the estate. Jack sensed his evil. It shone brightly. That man had prepared the way for Jack’s homecoming. Four dead, only one to go. It would be far easier than chasing down all five as he had done in the past. Finding rippers was always straightforward. Man had a dark heart. He was tarnished by sin from the beginning. Tapping into that brutish nature was usually simple. But you had to find the right killer. Some men, although desperate to shed blood, couldn’t go through with murder. Some turned away from evil. But Jack had found a powerful ally in the ripper now roaming Barrowmore. He had mercilessly killed those four seers fifteen years before. Killed them for Jack. Killed them and ripped out from each the gift. It didn’t matter if that ripper killed the fifth seer or not. Hallam would act as the butcher if need be. But he had to be reached so he could bring Jack the gifts he had taken from the women, and stowed. He had to be beckoned.
After he arrived at Buck’s place, Jack set about turning it into hell. He was a whirlwind. He tore down the walls, tossing plaster and hardboard everywhere. Dust and dirt covered everything. Doors were ripped off their hinges. Appliances were yanked out of their sockets. The lights were smashed.
He laid waste to the apartment.
After he had finished, Buck asked, “Why did you do that?”
“I’m frustrated,” said Jack. “Would you prefer if I tore you apart?”
Buck blanched and shook his head.
Jack said, “I need my freedom. Have you found me my ripper?”
Buck shook his head again.
“And what about Spencer, has he?”
Buck shrugged.
“Will you be my ripper, Hallam?”
“Me?”
“Yes. You’ll follow in the footsteps of great men. Men who have worshipped me. Men who have washed my feet. Do you worship me? Would you wash my feet?”
Hallam nodded.
“Then you’ll be my ripper?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“I handed you your first victim, Hallam. Did I not give you the strength to kill it? To kill the child? To do with it what you dreamt of doing?”
Hallam nodded.
“Then you should do something for me. Be my ripper.”
“What . . . what is that?”
“The child below,” said Jack. “She’s a seer. She has so
mething in her that I must have. It gives me power over them. It gives me the strength to break free of my curse. Are you listening? Do you understand?”
Buck nodded.
“I must have the girl. Or her mother. Either one. And they must be ripped.”
“Why . . . why can’t you do it?”
Jack shuddered. “They are seers. I can’t kill a seer. It’s a curse that I can’t, but I can’t. Those are the laws.”
“Laws?”
“The laws that were carved in the fabric of creation.”
“Creation?”
“Stop repeating what I say, Hallam, or I’ll cut your tongue out. You won’t need it to be my ripper.”
Buck’s mouth dropped open.
Jack shut his eyes and listened. He could hear them breathe in the flat below. He could hear their heartbeats. The child and its mother.
A fifth, at last. He would have the child killed. Hallam would do it.
And then all he had to do then was find the previous ripper and retrieve the tokens he surely took from the four seers he butchered.
He seethed for a moment.
Why was he forced to start all over again after being resurrected? All the work he’d done in previous centuries meant nothing once he was bound. He always had to wangle his way out of the curse, reaching out to the sin embedded in every human. And once he’d done that, he had to seek another ripper and find the seers—or wait for them to find him.
He let out a breath. This time it was different. This time he’d found a strong collaborator. Years ago, he’d reached out from his lonely confinement and found that beautiful sample of evil in the deeply corrupted heart. And when the time came, he had unleashed it.
Four dead, he thought. One more. Just one more. It will be so easy.
He opened his eyes, and Buck was still standing there, a loyal servant.
“Do you know what will happen when I’m freed of this curse, Hallam?”
Buck shrugged.
Jack said, “I will be like a sword. I will set son against father and father against son. Mothers will kill daughters. Children will murder parents. A man’s enemies will be his friends, his family. Bloodshed shall reign, Hallam. All will hate. All will kill. All will spread my gospel. And my gospel is death.”
