Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

The bullet struck him in the shoulder, exploding a mist of wool fiber and atomized flesh, destroying it. He spun, dropping the knife as his beautiful tweed sleeve went limp, began to pulse and leak as it absorbed a tide of crimson, while the echo bounced and died along the bricks, dust fell from vibration and the rats, their tiny eardrums dashed by the sound, began to chitter and frisk.

The colonel stepped from the darkness, his Webley smoking in his hand. “You are arrested, sir,” he said.

Jack the Ripper looked upon us, the blood running through the fingers that tried to stanch its flow. “A trap, then,” he said. “Artfully done, between writer and soldier who engineered another miraculous escape. My compliments, Huw, but then you always were the hero. And I loved you, Huw, as I loved her, but the two of you hurt me and thwarted me to the full extent of that love.”

“Thomas, I loved you as well, but your genius turned to madness and evil. I could not save you. Now, sir, you must pay.”

“Not at your hand. I believe the dark prince already sends his minions to fetch me.”

He was right. The skittering turned to a scrabbling and then a clamor as five hundred clawed sets of feet advanced in their regiments and battalions, engorged by the smell of fresh blood. The vermin army hit him hard and began to scale his legs.

Squriming, seething, raging, Jack-mad in their own bloodlust, the vermin surrounded him and began to mount his legs, to crawl up his coat, to slip under his jacket and into his shirt. They crawled upon each other’s backs in their greed of flesh, becoming a new beast, featureless like a surge of animate pelt heaped at his legs, alive with squirm and slither and scrabble and squeak and chitter. It was as if he were being swallowed in the maw of some inchoate predator, in ravenous action so malleable and supple that its form was liquid. And though he beat at them, his blows were useless against the blood-mad truth of nature, raw, cruel, indifferent. The rats swarmed to and overwhelmed his face and began to eat it. He screamed, and such a cry it was, containing encyclopedias, whole languages, of pain and horror.

Colonel Woodruff shot him in the head and down he went, still.

I blew out the candle and we made straightaway to the ladder and in seconds were back to the surface of the known world, where December had declared its early darkness. We exited the club, where the chorus of song had drowned out what traces of gunshot might have made surface, went from Dutfield’s gates, and made our way toward Commercial, where, among the bright lights of the costers’ stalls of apples and cheeses and bright cloth, the hubbub of the beer shops, the jostle of the ladies and their suitors, made even more vivid by Christmas excitations, we reentered what was called civilization.

“All right, then,” said Colonel Woodruff, “it is done and you have your story.”

“I am not sure I will write it,” I said.

“It’s a free country, sir. Write or not, as you choose. But let me push an argument against you. It’s one thing if Jack is a foreign monster, a mad Russian or Jew, one of the them we seek to educate and civilize, charging only everything they’ve got. It is quite another when he’s one of us , of fine family, produced by our best universities, born on high and lived on high in a fine house on a fine street, published, respected, influential. For that man to have been raving evil might provoke some to sense corruption in the system. And I am wise enough, it may surprise you, to understand the system is indeed corrupt. But it is also necessary, at least for now, while our species is in its infancy. So if a smart lad like you and an old buzzard like me know it, no harm is done. If the ignorant, thus far obedient, but ever volatile masses know it, mischief is loosed. And who knows where mischief leads?”

“I will consider,” I said.

Twenty-four years have passed, and I have finally made up my mind.

I got to the professor’s house well after midnight. I had no keys, for who would have checked what was left of him? But the door gave to my shove, and I paused in the foyer, listening. If his Scots housekeeper were there, she was sleeping. Gingerly, I climbed the steps and turned in to his study.

I did not dare light a candle or turn up the gas jet. In time, however, my eyes adjusted to the dark, and what I did not see in detail, I saw in memory. I recalled all the gizmos he’d designed to help overcome his fellow man’s speech pathologies, whether a terrible accent that anchored one forever to the bottom of society, or a stutter that made a man gobble like a turkey in getting a simple declarative statement into the ether. Such a noble calling, so perversely betrayed.

I made my way to his desk. All the drawers slid open save one, and with a screwdriver picked up for that reason, I pried and poked, felt wood splinter, and it popped open. Inside was nothing but a single volume.

I picked it up, made my way to the window, and by the wan light of gas lamp from Wimpole outside, made out that it was a journal, perhaps a diary, with dates setting off each entry. It took no genius to comprehend that the dates aligned with the murders.

“When I cut the woman’s throat, her eyes betrayed not pain, not fear, not but utter confusion. Truly, no creature can understand its own obliteration.”

That was how it began.

I paged through, seeing accounts of them all, Polly, Annie, Long Liz, Kate, and finally and most horribly Mary Jane. Even a poem! Four letters were folded into its pages; they seemed to be from some poor girl to her mum. Later I would learn who she was.

I rolled them up, slid them into my jacket, and quickly exited.

The night was fresh and clear. I didn’t look for a hansom but walked the mile and a half to my mother’s house, considering what to do next. I had the world at my fingers with the diary. I could reveal and publish and become rich, famous, powerful, godlike, whatever.

Yet the colonel’s words weighed heavily on my mind. Thus my decision: I leave the volume to my estate, and if it sees the light of day, it is on my descendants.

On the other hand, I give myself this gift. Having wrung it out in my own mind, I have decided I will proceed with my project. Art is made from life or it is no good, and all this happened to me, so it’s mine to use, even if I must force it into comedy to escape its darker implications. I will use the characters, the root situation, and avoid the slaughter: Distilled toward purity, it will be a tale of ambition, intellectual vanity, even relentless will, but also courage, the dignity of unfortunates, the wisdom of soldiers. It will end long before the murders begin, and to me at least, it will explain how such a thing could have happened. No one else will so understand. I will call it Pygmalion.

As for Dare, he lies undisturbed in the tunnel, if the tunnel lies undisturbed under the Anarchists’ Club and hasn’t been ruptured by the constant reconstruction of London. That I do not know. The fuss over his disappearance ended swiftly, and it seems he is forgotten, even if Jack, his creation, will never die. But that is a fraud, cake for the masses, so what difference does it make?

Indeed, only in one quarter does the memory of Thomas Dare persist, and it is not he that is remembered but the flavor of his flesh. For he can be commemorated only by his brethren, the other creatures of the dark Londontown Beneath, the black rats.

Ripperologists will note, I hope, that in most cases I have stayed well within consensus regarding the Autumn of the Knife. There are a few “willed” inaccuracies that I had to insert to sustain a dramatic structure. In acknowledging them, I hope to stave off penny-ante criticisms.