Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

It’s a happy time down here. It’s been such a while since Jack has been about, we girls are sure he’s gone. They say he favors a quarter-moon, coming or going, but he’s missed a couple now.

Maybe he’s gone to try his luck in America! Maybe Sir Charles’s Peelers have done scared him off, as they’re everywhere these days. Maybe he fell in a hole and got eaten by rats, the cheesy bugger.

Joe says we are quit of him, and that he’s a lucky lad, because if Joe had gotten ahold of him, he’d of hammered and chopped him so bad, wouldn’t be enough to put on sale at the fish market.

Anyhow, thought you’d want to know.

I did get a little rowdy tonight after my gins, but didn’t have no customers, as it’s raining. I sang too loud and Liz upstairs pounded on the floor to get me quiet. Sorry, Liz! Hope I didn’t wake Diddles the cat! Sorry, Diddles!

Anyhow, I’m feeling right safe and good now. It’s pouring out and not even the Ripper would go out in that cold soaking. I’m locked in my little room, I’ve had my gin, the fire’s burned low and tomorrow’s a new day and I am full of hope.

Best and love, Mum.

Your loving daughter,

Mairsian

Igot there around five A.M. If the world was expecting dawn, that was not yet evident. A gloom had clapped itself across the city and scored the night with bitter rain. A wind blew nails through the air, to chill the skin and the soul. The streets, even in the hustle-bustle of Whitechapel, where the ever rotating wheel of sex walk dominated, were quiet. Only now and then could a pedestrian be sighted in the shrouded element; all the Bobbies had retreated to warmer climes. Only a madman would be walking about with impunity.

Equally, Miller’s Court, a city in its own way, was empty of humanity. All the bad little girls, their thighs smeared with goo, their mouths slack and distended by cocks, were abed for a little peace and dreams of prosperity. Working families, of whom there were a few so unfortunate as to share whoretown with the Judys, had yet to arise for their twelve to sixteen hours of routine exploitation in whatever form of hired slavery it was their fate to endure. I went swiftly to the window of No. 13, reached in, feeling as my fingers found the lock button. I pulled it and heard the click that indicated the spring had sprung.

That easily I was in. Her little cave was dark, though embers glowed in the fireplace. It was no more than twelve by twelve, and whoever would consign a human being to so small a space was himself criminal, though since it was Mary Jane’s own fondness for the laudanum of gin that brought her there, it was she herself who was largely guilty of the crime against Mary Jane. Character, as much as system, was in play in this case. I was soon to add my meager share of woe upon the lady, but it was she herself and the society in which she existed that had engineered such colossal cruelty. I was merely the last in a long line of criminals who feasted on their victim’s weakness.

I slid off my overcoat as I stood there, then slid off my frock coat. I rolled up my sleeves, letting my eyes adjust to the dark. In time, they accommodated and I saw her, her flesh translucent and delicious as she lay in slumber, breathing gently in the wan light, slightly tilted to her left, pinning that arm beneath her, her nubbin nose and pouty fount of lip oriented likewise to left. She was, however brief it would last, a picture of beauty. I could see her clothes neatly folded on the table next to her bed, along with a few folded pieces of paper, letters, evidently. She had been reading them prior to slumber.

She was not naked. She guarded her sweets against the curiosity of strangers with a flimsy chemise that fell in soft, tantalizing disarray to reveal as much of Mary as any would need to want to see more of her. I could identify the hollow of her throat, the smoothness of her shoulders, the alabaster glow of her skin, the mild flattening effect that gravity had on her two voluptuous, ripened breasts, which lay toward me, constructions so gelid of flesh and so perfect in distribution that it was all one could do not to approach and demand suckle, anything that would draw a lad close to those eternal udders and their awesome whisper of the bounty and pleasure of life.

I pulled on my gloves and snapped them tight so that the leather glowed. They had been through much, and I had one more ordeal for them to protect me from. I reached back and slipped the butcher from the belt that had secured it against the flat of my back, under my jackets. I stood there for who knew how long, lost in computation. Which angle, which hand, a cut or a stab, a hand to mouth, or would the first wound be powerful enough to buy silence through the few seconds of the dying? Would she thrash, kick, buck, twist? She looked so formidable that I doubted she’d take her passage easily.

Decisions made, I stepped to the side of the bed.

I stood over her, heard the soft murmur of her lungs as, beneath her breasts, they processed oxygen into life fuel for her, watched her occasional twitches or shudders as, unknowing, her body evinced its aliveness in its incapacity to achieve the perfection of stillness, heard a swallow, a gulp, a sniffle, perhaps some of the other ablative sounds of a body functioning properly in sleep, stretching, bending, unwinding in tiny degrees here and there. I felt the radiation of her warmth, I smelled the sweetness of her body.

I cut her throat.

I pressed her face with my right hand down deep into the mattress, and with my left – though not as strong and educated as my right, which I had so come to rely on, I found it clever enough to do the job – I began low and cut hard and high, feeling the sharpness of the blade as it bit and sliced through the layers of muscle and cartilage, the skin being nothing of an obstruction. I had grown sensitive to the feel of the blade as it engaged and vanquished tissue and felt the subtle textures of each structure of the throat as the blade intercepted them.

She struggled, and with my stronger right, I forced her facedown into the mattress and could see it distended and distorted by its friction against the yielding cotton sheets and whatever underlay to render the mattress soft. Her right hand, unregimented by her body weight, clawed a bit, grasping for life, but ever more feebly. I cut again, nearly in the same track, and her muscles fought me, she bucked and died harder by far than any of the first four, that arm whipping out in final spasm, her leg straightening, then reloading to straighten again. She was a strong girl, no doubt about it, full of life and dreams but no match for the prim efficiency of Sheffield’s best steel as it glided through the ensheathed arteries and veins. Again, curiously, more blood by far than before, and I felt her struggle against the pinioning leverage of my strength, and desperate if muted noises issued from her crushed mouth. Her heart pumped her empty before it quit.

And then she was gone. It took nearly a minute. The blood soaked the mattress, and it looked as if she lay in the midst of a strawberry pastry, melted and collapsed and turned squalid by the passage of hours since the party broke up.

Now to work. Now to give London and the world what I felt those two corrupt entities demanded in their despicable way, and who was I but their humble servant? I would give the shopgirls much to natter about for a few days.

Where there was flesh, softness, ripeness, the quiver, the undulation beneath the skin, the sense of heaviness and softness, I cut. I cannot remember much about it, only that once started, the temple once desecrated, all restraints were magically removed, and whatever darkness has wormed its way to the center of my brain had full vent and expression. I was in a delirium of destruction, as if the body were an insult to the philosophy of my life, and only in destroying it could I reclaim my sanity.