Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

We stopped in the corner against a wooden fence that seemed to cut off some more room, perhaps forming a yard within a square. I had no idea why it was there or what its function was. There was no illumination from the usual quarter-moon, as clouds covered and produced a fine mist, near to but not quite a drizzle. She halted, pivoted to face me, and upped her skirts.

“There now,” she whispered – we were so close – “let’s get it done, Old Cock, and be on our ways, you a fourpenny lighter, meself the same heavier.”

Of the stroke I will not say much. It was better than some and worse than others, being a passing middling effort. It was not nearly so poetic as the Spanish duelist’s thing of beauty back against the Anarchists’ Club wall forty-odd minutes ago, but it was solid, straight on, dead to target. She stepped back, seemed to lose balance, coughed delicately, looked at me with beseeching eyes, which in eight seconds’ time, as the blood emptied from her brain, ceased to beseech and commenced to lock hard on a faraway nothing. I did not strike her a second time because I felt that the first had been so solid, going deeper than most, and there was no need of the redundancy. Down she went, quiet as a mouse, me nursing her to earth. And there she lay on her back, her sightless eyes open and not a trace of pain nor fear on her square face. She could have been asleep as easily as freshly murdered.

I had much to accomplish and no idea how much time I had. It was better, I knew, to assume little and discover much, rather than the other way around. The first business was her apron. With my knife, I opened a cut at the bottom, then ripped upward, almost halving the thing, and when, near her waist, I encountered a seam, I nicked another bit to change the direction of the rip, and continued to pull it apart. I daresay the noise of the cloth ripping was greater than the noise of the woman dying.

Once I got the rather large segment free, leaving the missing piece so obvious that even the most obtuse copper idiot would be sure to notice, I wetted it with blood, then wadded it into my pocket. Now to the night’s real work.

I situated myself at her middle, perpendicular to the body’s length, and rolled up her garments to lay bare that which was indecent. She was a scrawny thing, ribs all slatlike against her skin, breasts like shrunken cookies. These poor girls are rarely heavy because their access to food is so inconsistent. I put the knife into her and cut her good, straight down the middle, and laid open her guts. I had need to make a show, as my mad plan required an increase in frenzy at each stop along the way. Gloves on, of course, I reached in and disconnected the guts. It was slippery and squirmy in there, and nothing seemed stable at all; organs squirted from my fingers as if unwilling to be cut. But cut I did, sawing through tubes whenever I came upon them, and when I adjudged my efforts enough, I set down the knife and reached both hands into the slithery mess, took a heaping handful in both left and right, and pulled them out, dripping, and flung them over her shoulder, where they made a kind of a wet plop against the stones when they hit. The smell of feculent matter reached my nose, as did the tang of urine, and I realized that a nick somewhere had let those unpleasant reminders of the biological reality of our species out to play. Where once it had thrilled me in its perfervid illicitness, I was by now so old-salt at this business that it meant nothing. I looked and a long tangle remained, evidently untouched in my butchery, so I sliced it through at one end and laid it like a dead snake between her body and her arm.

I needed a trophy, something that would get them talking, as they had after Annie Chapman’s sweetbreads turned up missing. (Deposited, if you must know, in the River Thames, never to be heard from again.) I reached in and, owing to my study of Dr. Gray’s epic work, took hold of something, then, securing it with one hand, cut it free with the other. I pulled it out, whatever it was – spleen, kidney, maybe displaced heart, uterus, some other womb part, whatever – and slid it into a pocket. And then I looked up, and across the square, holding a lantern, was a copper.

I froze instantly, though I doubted his eyes could have penetrated the darkness that cloaked me. He stood at the head of what looked to be a sort of passageway between buildings of whose existence I’d had no suspicion. His circle of light seemed to capture with great precision the texture of the brickwork that was his backdrop. It was a moment of high dread. If he advanced, in a very few feet the limit of his lantern’s illumination would reveal me, red of hand, crouched over opened body, viscera everywhere like the remains of a gaudy party. Then he would instantly go to whistle, his shrill blasts filling the night air and bringing aid from all quarters. More distressingly, he was too far away for me to bring down fast, as I had planned to do with the man on the pony cart. Plus, in physical affray, he would indubitably prove a wilier opponent than a man who drives a pony cart for a living. He would know tricks, blows, holds, be well versed in pugilism and knockabout play. He would net me sure. Thus did the angel of death’s wings flap o’er me, so vividly I felt the noose tightening and sensed the crowd’s ardor as I stood on the trembly platform of the Newgate Gaol gallows.

It seemed like an eternity. He stood there, peering about, but did not take one step closer. The odor of my lovely’s shit must not have reached him yet, nor the penny-bitter smell of her blood.

He turned, he retreated, and soon even his light was not in evidence as he departed by that narrow passageway.

I felt the rush of air from my lungs, as I had just had another escape so near it was disorienting. Disaster that close, so close you can hear the whisper of the ax, is an unsettling thing.

And perhaps that is why my next reaction, unbidden, unexpected, was rage. It was as if I had my guts clenched in a giant fist, and when whoever held it tight let me go, what rushed in was anger, the urge to hurt, to smash, to kill that which had been killed. Someone in science should make a study of what secret fluids race to a man’s brain in extreme moments. Whatever they were, they did not leave me calm and collected, capable of wit or irony. Instead they turned me – perhaps this would surprise a reader if ever, by chance, this volume should come to light – insane. Insan er , this theoretical reader might say, but I reply, No, no, I was perfectly sane through it all, except this one moment. Forgive me, unknown unfortunate, it was not you upon whom I was spending my wrath, but it – the universe, the empire, the system, the nearness of my own destruction, the whimsies of fate and chance, in short, all those permanent entities that no man may affect – upon which I felt the need to rain destruction. Alas, your freshly murdered body was the only vessel available.

I destroyed that which had been heretofore sacrosanct. I took the dear lady’s face from her. It took but a minute, a sharp knife being an instrument of great utility when properly applied. I had been until then a cutter, but now I sank another grade deeper into human depravity and became a stabber. I stabbed her face, feeling the blade puncture and slide off the hard mass of skull below, then slide through the flesh, ripping and tearing and removing immense pie-shaped units of skin with each drive. I could not stop myself and was almost sobbing in hysteria. I cut her eyes, even, driving the blade through the lidded orbs, feeling what lay beneath go all slippery and slidey, like grapes in a bed of mechanic’s grease.

And I chopped, another new thing. I chopped strong against her nose, cutting through the cartilage that gives that organ shape, and before I could stop myself, I slightly rotated the blade, yanked hard, and the whole damned thing came off. I went for her ear, sawing like a laborer, and was not rewarded with so smooth a response as from the helpful nose. The ear fought me hard, and I never got it off cleanly, leaving it hanging on a gristly ribbon of cartilage.