Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

We were in a canyon of darkness, as darkness was general all over Whitechapel, the city elders being ungenerous with gaslights for their poorest district. There seemed to be a little action across the street; I saw lighted windows at the Anarchists’ Club, where I’d visited on my scout. We drifted across Berner, passed by the club’s front under the sign International Men’s Educational Club, Yiddish translation in smaller letters below. We were out of the glare of those second-story windows because we were too close to be emblazoned. From above, I could hear indications of great rambunction and knew that throaty, endless choruses of “The Internationale” could not be far away.

We passed, the hubbub of politics not quite dying out but subsiding to a low murmur. We reached a gap in the building fronts that held, a few feet back, a double gate in darkness, scribbled with indecipherable lettering in white. Because I had scouted well, I knew what it contained: a few houses immediately across from the south wall of the club, and the “yard” where a cart manufacturer and a sack manufacturer had set up shop; next to that an abandoned building that once contained a forge and then a stable but now housed only rats.

This would be my lovely’s destination. The gates were not locked, and we slid through, opening them, and entered a channel between the club building and some kind of tenement housing not fifteen feet apart, where, off the street just a bit, it was dark as Erebus. We were swallowed and my darling took my arm – I was careful not to let her feel the knife in my hand – and pulled me closer as she glided to the wall just inside the arc of the hinged gate. Her breath was close and she pretended excitement, good actress she, playing the part till the end, and I smelled a bit of cachous on her breath, a little spice the gals would nibble to sweeten their mouths for whatever duties lay ahead.

Her face was pale before me, an apparition out of a painting by one of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, perhaps Ophelia lambent in her drowning pool – Elizabeth Siddal in her most famous pose for Mr. Millais – so natural and so ghostly at once, beautiful yet not quite knowable, shielding her mysteries well and radiating no pain, no fear, no dread, only the countenance of relaxed content. I made the traces of a smile upon that face, not forced but real, for she knew that the coin I would give her would earn her a room in a doss house for the night, to begin tomorrow’s struggle refreshed, or a glass of gin, to forget today’s struggle temporarily, the poor dear.

I believe this was my best stroke yet. I am indeed improving. I hit her hard with the belly of the blade, and it sank deep, an inch, maybe more, and I felt the tremble of impact ride my bones up to the elbow. I drew, rather artistically, almost like a Spanish fencer, the blade around the half-circumference of her neck, pivoting as I opened her. Then an odd thing happened. She died. She simply died. Well, yes, I had cut her throat, but somehow in the power of my stroke, I had launched a bomb into her arterial system, and it hit home in seconds, exploding her heart. That, at least, was what my instincts told me, for she went into the instant repose of death and her heart’s energy failed, so there was no propulsion to the system to drive, as before, the first trickle zigzagging across the neck’s lovely contours, then the gush, the tide, the wave. Not at all – no pump, no evacuation. She lay in a small puddle, as if I’d spilled a glass or two of cabernet on the pavement.

She was more or less resting against the wall, the better to receive my entry and offer friction amid the lubrication in right proportions, and had no idea it was a blade that would enter her, not a penis, and yet her face never bore distress, much less fear or pain. It was as if – or possibly I flatter myself – she wanted to die at my hand. I would at least make her famous, maybe not such a bad bargain, given her day-to-day.

Of the ones so far, hers was the easiest; there was no mess with the choke hold, no crush of clamping hand, no shove or push. With my other hand I grabbed her shoulder, to keep her from thudding or falling forward, and guided her down to earth, she rotating downward until she came to rest next to and exactly parallel to the building. I knelt to her, put my hand to her heart to feel its absence of beat, looked to her soft, relaxed face and gently closed eyes, and knew that she was gone.

My next task was her chemise, for I had use of a garment, and as I slithered down her still body just a bit to reach under her skirts for my trophy, that was where my luck both soared and crashed at the same time.

It soared in that, moving and dipping, I lowered my profile deeper into the dark, so that a man standing but ten feet away could not see me.

It crashed in that a man did stand but ten feet away.

What alerted me was the sudden bluster of a beast, and I looked up to see not three feet from me the face of a pony who knew that I was there, his animal senses being sharper than any human’s. He clomped twice, foot heavy against the cobblestone of Dutfield’s accursed yard, but locked his legs in refusal to move, for he was as scared of me as I was of him. He was in harness, and behind him, barely identifiably by outline, he pulled what appeared to be a cart of some sort, and over his rear haunch, I could see the profile of a man standing in the cockpit of the vehicle.

He snapped his buggy whip at the animal’s flank; the animal tossed his head, shivered, flinging mane into commotion, but resolutely stayed where he was, all the while his big eyeballs lancing directly into mine. He snorted and I felt the cascade of warm, slightly moist air from his lungs wash across me, with an odd musk of grass woven into it. He breathed heavily, wheezily, now and again shivering, and when he shivered, his tack rattled and jingled. I could not crouch any lower over Ophelia in her small ruby pond, but I did have knife in hand, and my first thought was to plan an attack. If the fellow got out of the cart and came snooping, he would come upon me, and I would rise like the devil reborn and plunge blade into throat, aiming for a spot a whisker off the larynx (thank you, Dr. Gray), and rip through that structure so that no cry would accompany its owner’s exsanguination. Then I would bolt the yard and disappear.

He climbed down and stood in the narrow space between the wagon and the wall, my only escape route.

“Vas ist? Gott verdammt! Vas ist?” I heard him ask of the pony, about whose welfare he was clearly not sentimental. The pony was equally unsentimental, as he remained in his place, his joints having alchemized into steel fixtures by suspicion of whatever life-form he smelled (he would have smelled her blood as well) and whatever life-form he made out with those huge billiard-ball eyes.

A match flared in the darkness, and its circle of illumination reached my fingertips but no farther; I was out of the zone of visibility by a hair’s width. The man held it tremblingly, unperturbed as it burned toward his fingers, and began to rotate to see what its light revealed. As he turned his shoulders to the right, he drew the cone of light with him, and my love’s dark clothes were revealed, as were her shoulder, and then her pale, serene, beautiful face, and next to it, crimson as the blood of the Lamb spilled off that Golgotha cross, the satiny pool of her own life’s fluid. It was so red. I’d never seen their blood in full light before, only by the quarter-moon’s low-power beam.

“Mein Gott!” I heard him expel. He seemed to shiver in confusion up there on his contrivance, as he tried to make a decision, and then he made it.

I gripped the knife hard, collected my muscularity as I slipped into a raider’s crouch, ready to spring and bring the man down hard and dead, and indeed, he nearly plunged through to his death at my hands. In the last second he pivoted not forward, toward me, but backward, toward the gate.