“Possibly, then, I was wrong. I seem to have been right in all other interpretations, if I recall correctly.”
“Indeed. It comes to nothing, does it? Oh, unless one knew that the colonel was slight, and inserted that condition into the profile as a means of specifying him among the others.”
“I must say, this seems an odd direction.”
“I have learned some things since last we spoke, which will perhaps explain the oddness of my tangent. I have learned, for example, that under your commanding personality and capability to light up a room, you are an angry man. You have been exiled from the polite society of academics and intellectuals on account of unsavory rumors concerning your behavior. They now shun you and pay you no attention.”
“I bear them no animosity, I assure you. Our ideas diverged. They’re too reformist, and they find me too cynical. It was always an uneasy fit.”
“Not as I hear it. The precipitating event of your exile was a bizarre ‘experiment’ that you undertook several years back, rumor of which left many uneasy. You invited a London street girl—a whore, certainly, like Annie and Long Liz and the others—into your home. You and a colleague labored with her night and day for well over six months, and it was desperately hard work for both you and the girl, a Miss Elizabeth Little, I believe. It brought you to the point of madness and violent anger. Assumptions include beatings, sexual improprieties, various profligacies. As for your colleague, you attacked him at one point. That, too, frightened off all your friends. They abhor physical violence. He now seems to have vanished.”
“So he has,” said the professor.
“So, too, has the girl. Did she flee to the country, go to America, commit suicide? No one knows, but it seems like the old Greek tale of Pygmalion, where the sculptor fell in love with his sculpture. Except in your version, you had much congress with the poor child.”
“This is beginning to disturb me. Are you making accusations?”
“Another question might well be: Who was your colleague? I believe it was Colonel Woodruff, who had come to you upon mustering out from mutual fascination with the mechanisms of language. He lived with you while you were working with Elizabeth. When he saw how you were abusing Elizabeth, he objected, and under his advice—and I’m betting with his money—she fled.”
“I loved them both. They betrayed me. That is all. Not much of a tale.”
“It never occurred to you that she might fear you rather than love you. It never occurred to you that Colonel Woodruff would—selflessly, as was his style—send her away because he feared what you might do to her. That is why you attacked him at the university.”
“So dear Jeb isn’t as simple as I thought. Not simple but slow, too slow.”
“You see how it follows. You devise a ‘profile’ for the crimes that indicates no one but Woodruff, down as far as the two rings he carried with him since 1857. So detailed were your plans that you approached me even before you had unleashed the J-U-W-E-S clue, which you used to snag me. And how snaggable I was. But in order for the proof to hold, there must be murders. What good is the profile without the murders? It follows that the murders were informed by the profile, not the other way around. That being the case, there can be only one killer.”
He said nothing.
“Dr. Ripper, I presume,” I said.
“At your service,” he said.
“Your madness and your brilliance are in perfect syncopation. Your madness kills to express your rage at her betrayal, and your brilliance finds use for it by constructing a ‘Ripper’ who terrifies the city and whom you track and vanquish. You get everything. You take everything from the weakest of all women on earth, the most powerless and degraded. You have your revenge on the colonel, who besides being murdered is then to be eternally damned in history. You want credit as the man who discovered and killed the Ripper, and it is my job to hand it to you. You get everything in return and make yourself in a society that has exiled you.”
“It’s too bad you’re so late to understanding,” said the professor. “Elizabeth was, too. She never quite apprehended me. My score isn’t five, it’s six. She was the first. She will not step out of the shadows to reveal my friendship with Colonel Woodruff. Nor will you. A few others got in the way. The colonel, of course, a bully here, a bartender there. All done in a good cause, I assure you.”
I saw his hand disappear under his coat and reappear with a butcher knife.
“I will find another newspaper fool,” he said rather calmly, as with the weapon he was controlling the action. “I will get what I deserve, as I have paid back those who betrayed me.”
“You, sir, are despicable.”
“Who are you to judge me, you tiny man? You offer the world nothing. I offer everything, from my genius to my higher morality to my designs of utopia. But to employ them I must rise, and rise I will and rise I have.”
I beheld him then: creature of nightmare, avatar of destruction, murderer from the dark hole of the Beneath, radiant in self-love and madness. Jack flagrante, Jack in excelsis, Jack gloria mundi, Jack rampant, Jack fortissimo. He was all that and more. It was Jack the Ripper, fully bloomed and unleashed, the butcher knife in his right fist, held high as he meant to step forward and drive it deep into me, knowing his strength was so much greater than mine, knowing how and where to place the blade, knowing that he had the physical skill to make the thrust and cut a hundred times out of a hundred.
“Look on me, you fool. Know who I am. It is worth your life to enjoy the privilege of a meeting with Jack. You are nothing before him. I, Ripper, now take your meaningless life and go on and on and on. Jack is forever.”
He had never been Sherlock Holmes. He had always been Mr. Hyde.
He stepped toward me, cocking his arm for the killing blow.
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 w
ere 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.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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.
—Mr. Diemschutz said in testimony that he went in the side door of the Anarchists’ Club, not the front door on Berner Street, as I have it. I had to move him out of the yard so that Jack could do what Jack did.
—The journey of the missing half of Mrs. Eddowes’s apron was more complicated (and more tedious) than the streamlined version I have provided, but it came to the same thing. Readers should thank me.
—No evidence was ever encountered suggesting a tunnel from the Anarchists’ Club.
—Contra my account, the newspapers paid no particular attention to Annie’s missing “wedding rings.” Also, all the headlines and news copy are of my own invention.
In one area I am apostate. That is the method of Jack’s attack on his first four victims. Consensus has decided that he knocked them to the ground first, muffled their screams with his left hand, and cut their throats, beginning under the left ear, with his right.
I believe, as I have dramatized here, his angle was directly frontal; he faced his victim as if to purchase service and attacked suddenly with a sideward snap of arm and wrist and essentially drove the blade into the throat under the ear in a vicious chop, then rotated about the stricken woman to draw it around as he eased her to the ground. I hope to find a forum to say more on this issue at a later time.
Now on to thanks. Lenne P. Miller was instrumental in the composition of I, Ripper. He researched it to breadth and depth, as the bibliography should make clear, and he read, reread, and rereread the manuscript, hunting for the errors someone as notoriously sloppy as I am is prone to make. It took at least three drafts for me to figure out how to spell “teetote.” If the book is as remarkably accurate as I believe it to be and as accurate as any fictional account, that’s because of Lenne. If there are mistakes, that’s because of me.
I should also mention the remarkable website Casebook: Jack the Ripper. Scrupulously maintained and scrupulously fair, it provided quick answers to basic questions and deeper answers to deeper questions, and gave me the sense that someone was watching over me. Hope the boys enjoy what I’ve done with their labors.
Besides his research, Lenne also came up with a great idea for the plot, which helped me keep it ticking along. Mike Hill, another good friend, pitched in with a keen idea, very helpful. I am notoriously prone to ignoring other people’s ideas, if I can even summon the patience to listen to them, but in these two cases, the ideas were so good, and so much better than anything I had or would come up with, I had to acquiesce. Guys, the check is in the mail.
One of the early champions of my take on Jack was James Grady, the thriller writer and a good friend; his enthusiasm actually carried me for years while I tried to work out a way to tell the story as it had occurred
to me in a flash one night. Bill Smart was another early and vociferous backer, and his enthusiasm was such a help. Any writer stuck in a plot hole or a character swamp or an editor jam knows how much it helps to have a guy who’ll back you up, pull you out, tell you you’re the best (even if it’s not true!), and send you on your way. Bill was that guy for me.
Others include usual suspects Jeff Weber and Barrett Tillman. Newcomers (but old friends) were Frank Feldinger, Dan Thanh Dang, who supplied me with a crucial woman’s view of the proceedings, and Otto Penzler. Walt Kuleck, author of the Owner’s Guide and Complete Assembly Guide series of firearms books, provided invaluable expertise on a host of non-firearms issues. David Fowler, M.D., the Maryland Medical Examiner and a friend, advised on technical issues. My great friend Gary Goldberg kept the technical aspect of the operation going brilliantly. Someday he’ll have to explain to me exactly what “digital” means. My wife, Jean Marbella, brewed 240 pots of coffee, which got me up and got me upstairs. My thanks to them all. I am a fortunate man to have such folks in my circle.
One question you might have: Steve, since you’ve done all this research for a novel on Jack the Ripper, do you know who he really was?
My answer: Of course I do. Watch for it. It’s going to be fun.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© KELLY CAMPBELL
Stephen Hunter has written twenty novels. The retired chief film critic for The Washington Post, where he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, he has also published two collections of film criticism and a nonfiction work, American Gunfight. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
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