Karl Wagner: The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

She repeated the chord sequence. The crowd was dancing en masse, many of the fans shouting the lyrics along with her as she sang.

Liz and Dark Annie kicked the rhythm into high gear for the chorus. The song’s tempo suddenly, dramatically doubled.

All three of the musicians were singing now, the rhythm section backing Jackie on the chorus.

In eleven months of intense rehearsals, Jackie and the Rippers had never sounded as good as they did right now. And they knew it. They were smiling at each other, their instruments locked in perfect union, the music flowing like liquid magic from their hands.

Backstage after their set, Liz and Dark Annie hugged each other as they tumbled elatedly against the cold walls of their dressing room. Gary popped a champagne cork and Karl passed around the glasses. He had one left over.

“Where’s Jackie?”

About fifteen minutes later they found her at the bar across the street, surrounded closely by a group of admirers. Gary shooed them out the door. Karl made sure they stayed there.

Jackie set her can of malt liquor down on the counter. There were two more beside it, one of them already drained dry. “Christ, did you see that guy out there tonight? Christ, did you see him?”

“What’d he look like?” asked Liz. “I couldn’t see anything from back behind the cymbals. The glare, ya know.”

“He looked… well… he looked creepy. Like one of those devils in those old-time pictures, those whatchamacallits, uh, woodcuts.”

They walked back across the street together, bootheels clicking on the asphalt. It was late. The moon loomed large and bright in the clear night sky, stars winking.

“This dude you saw,” said Liz, “did he do something, or was it just the way he looked?”

“Both,” Jackie answered quickly. “The worst was when we were playing ‘Venus in Furs.’ He pointed at me.”

“Big fat hairy deal,” groaned Liz. “Everybody in the whole fuckin’ club was pointing at us.”

“Not like this,” said Jackie. She shivered and took another slug from her malt liquor can. “It was a real mad kind of pointing. Like he was out to get me or something. He made me break a string,”

“You always break strings. It’s that note-bending you do.”

“The first time was note-bending. The second was him.”

“What was this cat wearing?” asked Gary. “Did he have a mask on or something?”

She shook her head. “No, he had a real face. And he was wearing a cape and a Sherlock Holmes hat.”

“A deerstalker,” Gary muttered. “Sounds like this cat was dressed as Jack the Ripper.”

Jackie nodded. “Yeah… yeah! He was Jack the Ripper!”

Their van, a bright red Ford Econoline painted with the band’s logo on each side, was parked out behind the auditorium. It listed grotesquely to one side. Three of its tires had been slashed.

“I bet it was The Wandering Jews,” said Liz.

“No,” Jackie said, shaking her head slowly. “It was Jack the Ripper.”

Dark Annie crouched down by the left front wheel. “Eh, what’s this shit? Somebody wrote something down here—scratched it into the paint.”

Gary pushed her aside. “It says: ‘Yu better stop playing mi songges’. ”

“See there,” said Jackie. “I told you. It was Jack the Ripper.”

Gary shrugged. “Well, you know where I got those lyrics for your songs, don’t you?”

Liz shrugged. “From that little paperback about Jack the Ripper, right?”

Two weeks later Jackie and the Rippers played their first headlining gig. Gary wanted The Wandering Jews to open the show for them, but the Jews’ manager never returned his phone calls. The Yellow Snowmen did the honors.

“I went out and took a look at the crowd,” said Dark Annie as she walked into the dressing room. “I think your friend with the itchy index finger is back.”

Jackie dropped her beer bottle. It shattered on the concrete, spreading hissing foam across the floor. “He is?”

Dark Annie nodded, her skeleton earrings rattling. “Yep. And he brought his brothers this time. All five hundred of them.”

“What do you mean?”

Dark Annie shrugged. “Well, I mean that about half the guys in the crowd are dressed like Jack the Ripper, most of ’em with rubber knives. At least I hope they’re rubber. Security must be goin’ apeshit. It’s a madhouse out there. Real horrorshow.”

The band went onstage a few minutes early. The Yellow Snowmen had been booed off midway through their set.

The girls opened with “Streets of London” and from the first note the crowd was theirs. It was an almost perfect show—new, well-oiled drumsticks and heavier gauge guitar picks (and high E strings) prevented midperformance accidents, although Karl was kept quite busy retuning Dark Annie’s custom skeleton bass. The only noticeable false note in the performance that night came during the final verse of “Lonely Nights in Whitechapel”:

On the final line, Jackie’s voice seemed to catch on the name “Jack”—and as she made the first downstroke in the salvo of power chords at the lyric’s conclusion, the tip of her guitar pick completely missed the strings. Fortunately Dark Annie’s bass was miked loud enough to take up the slack, keeping the chop-chop rhythm steady.

“What happened out there at the end?” Long Liz asked afterwards during the backstage hubbub, adding, “Don’t tell me it was Jack the Ripper.”

Jackie took a slug from a bottle of Wild Turkey before she answered. “That fucker pointed at me, just like the last time.”

“Forget it, Jackie. He’s probably just some geek working for The Wandering Jews. As long as you keep letting him break your concentration during shows, even if it’s just for a second, you’re giving him exactly what he wants.”

Jackie took a long, deep draw from the bottle.

Long Liz stood up. “And givin’ head to that Turkey isn’t gonna help anything.”

Jackie walked out of the dressing room, bottle in hand.

It was the last time they ever saw her alive.

Half an hour later Karl found her in the stairwell at the far end of the backstage area, “with her belly opened up like it was a suitcase.” The Fulton County coroner later determined she’d died before the mutilations began. Somebody’d strangled her. They used a guitar string.

A high E.

On the wall beside her corpse, the murderer had written something in her blood: “The Jews are nott the bande that will be blamed for nuthing. ”

The detectives working the case immediately descended on the four members of The Wandering Jews, but cleared them within hours. The Jews had been playing a sold-out date at a club in South Carolina at the time of the killing. Their alibi was irrefutable. They had 623 witnesses.