Riptide (32 page)

But
she
had seen him. Almost caught him, too.

What was worse, in the chase he’d dropped his souvenir. He’d wanted it. Maura had died so nicely, and the aftermath had been so fine. He never danced, not anymore, but in her living room, awash in the slippery muck, he had danced like a shaman, danced naked, as Jack himself must have danced in Mary Kelly’s flat.

Mary then. Maura now. Perfect.

He wished now that he had disemboweled the others. It would not have been practical, given the circumstances—outdoors, in public places, where anyone might come along. And it would have set the authorities on his trail much sooner. Yes, there were sound logical and logistical reasons not to have done it, but irrationally he wished he had, because—well, because it was so goddamned much
fun
.

Jennifer would never understand that kind of fun. She had no soul, that one.

But she did have courage. To come after him, into the stacks, was bold enough. To pursue again, even after her ordeal in the supply closet...

He almost respected her for it. But he respected no one. Except Edward Hare.

He didn’t underestimate her, though. That was why he’d burned the family papers, torching them methodically in the flaming pyre of a metal wastebasket. There was information in those papers that might have helped a clever, crafty, sly little trollop like her.

He burned it all, the entire contents of the file cabinet, with one exception. He kept a newspaper clipping from a few years ago, a yellowed scrap torn from a local rag. Under the small black-and-white photo ran the caption: “Local Realtor Maura Lowell and Dr. Richard Silence were among the attendees at the Venice Historical Society’s charity ball.”

Two smiling faces. A long time ago.

The scrap of newspaper had gone into his pocket, but all the rest had been fed to the flames. A shrewd move. It had bought him time. But now the hounds were baying. His revels were nearly done.

One more adventure, one more ritual of predation and purgation, was all he would be allowed.

Until now he had paid homage to his ancestor, re-creating the crimes as closely as he dared. Parallel names, similar locations. But he was through with all that. His last murder would be his original creation. His days as an apprentice were over. Now he was a full-fledged master of his art, ready to carve his magnum opus and emblazon his signature across an appalled world.

It would be Jennifer, of course. Who else
could
it be?

He would take her and he would kill her, but in this one case he would do it slowly. It would not be a dissection, but a vivisection. She would be alive and aware as he turned her inside out and sliced and diced her and left her obscenely exposed. She would
feel
it, every last plunge of the knife, every excision of her vital parts, until the glorious climax when he wrested the seat of life itself from her chest and left her lifeless and hollow.

He had lost Maura’s bracelet, but soon he would have a new and better token.

1904

Hare sat at the bar, nursing a drink and a toothache. The ache throbbed in his lower jaw and progressed like a hot wire up his cheek and into his ear. He would have to see a dentist. The prospect worried him. They were butchers, dentists.

The toothache had put him in a foul frame of mind, and a night in Chinatown had done nothing to improve his humor. For two hours he had played chuck-a-luck in a back room of this saloon, losing steadily, feeling the slow escalation of his wrath. The damnable rice eaters took his money with nary a word. How he hated them, with their skullcaps and pigtails, their mocking faces, their air of inscrutable superiority.

Even so, he found himself spending much of his time in their company. Of late he had not been sleeping well, and he had taken to exploring the nocturnal dives of Los Angeles, most often in Chinatown, where liquor flowed at fifteen cents a glass and fan-tan, pie gow, and chuck-a-luck could divert a restless man.

For patrons of establishments like this one, there were other diversions in the form of porcelain-skinned harlots, graceful as geishas, eager to please. Hare never partook of their services. He had, however, slaughtered two of them, some months apart. Though he left both bodies in the street, cunningly dissected and readily found, neither crime made the papers. The police had made few inroads here, and the locals preferred to keep such matters quiet.

He finished his drink and ordered another, communicating in curt gestures. The new drink was poured. He sipped it, tasting its fire and watching a blank-faced opium fiend drift past. Not one of the coolies; this was a white man. He had the blank stare and pallid countenance of an undead creature, Mr. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, perhaps. Hare knew he was in no position to cast aspersions. He himself had become a vampire of sorts, haunting the darkest corners of the night.

He wondered if he had lost his immortal soul, or indeed if he’d ever had a soul to lose. He was agnostic about such things. But suppose a life after this one did await him. How would he be received? Would he be honored as a saint for his holy work of purification, or condemned to everlasting punishment for the suffering he had inflicted? Would he stand in judgment before God—or before the harlots he’d suppressed?

These were strange thoughts, unnatural. He was not ordinarily so pensive. He must be well in his cups to muse this way. Best to be getting home to his loving wife. The thought made him grimace as he rose unsteadily and made his way out of the bar into a street lined with red lanterns.

A few steps down the street, he became aware of voices in the gloom. He paused, wary, but it was only a whore and her john standing at the entrance to an alley, one of countless side passageways that ramified the district.

Ordinarily the Chinese whores plied their trade in bordellos, but sometimes a man with money in his pocket would hire one as an escort, roving from one saloon or dog-fight pit to another, finally consummating the deal in a bed or back alley. The two ladies of joy Hare killed had been returning from excursions of that kind.

As Hare watched, the girl reached for the man with a pleading gesture. He shook her off and finished buttoning his trousers. “You’re no use to me,” he snapped. “Good riddance and be glad I don’t have you whipped!” She clung to him. He shook her loose and stalked off.

“You all right, miss?” Hare inquired.

The girl spun at the sound of his voice, then stood trembling.

He came closer. “Everything all right?”

She nodded.

“Not very nice, the way that fellow treated you. I’ll be more of a gentleman, I promise.”

Her eyes were large. “You...pay?”

Hare produced a billfold, still retaining a few dollars he hadn’t lost to the pigtails. “I’ll pay plenty. You give me a good ride, yes?”

She held out her hand. Suddenly she was all business. “Pay first.”

He peeled off a bill and pressed it into her palm. Her fingers closed over it like a trap.

She pointed down the street. “House.”

“No house. Right here.” He gestured toward the alley.

Her mouth tipped downward. “No.”

“Yes.” He dangled another bill in front of her.

With a sigh she acquiesced. He gave her the bill, then led her into the alley. Trash moldered in the far corners, rustling with rats. Hare recalled hearing that Chinamen ate rodents. If so, this passage could supply a veritable banquet.

The whore lifted her dress over her hips. Deftly he stepped behind her, the knife in his hand, and with one stroke he parted her throat.

In his London outings he strangled his victims, but as his finesse with the knife improved, he had learned to cut a throat so skillfully that no blood would touch him. It was all a matter of taking the victim by surprise.

She made a strangled sound, an attempted scream that never rose higher than her severed windpipe. A bright splash of blood decorated the alley wall, the dirty pavement, but Hare, strategically positioned at her back, was left unsoiled. The arterial spray geysered briefly, then slowed to a dribble as her heart gave out. She went limp in his arms.

No one had seen or heard. He could take his time with her, unsex her wholly, explore her inmost parts.

He lowered her to the ground and knelt, throwing back her skirt. He was surprised to see she wore an undergarment of some kind. Most whores did not. Looking closer, he saw that it was no garment, merely a wadded rag, stuffed inside her private parts like a cork in a bottle. He pulled at it, and it came free, clotted with blood. For a baffled moment he wondered how a wound to her throat could have made her bleed down there. But of course it couldn’t have. This was menstrual blood.

He knew something of a woman’s tidal changes, though the subject was never discussed in polite society. Vaguely he knew that Maddie wore some such garment as this for a few days each month. Naturally he had not laid eyes on her in that condition. He was careful never to see his wife in any state of undress, a practice greatly simplified by their separate bedrooms.

Now he understood why the john hadn’t wanted this one. Having discovered she was bleeding, he’d given her the brush-off. Normally a whore would not proffer her services when she was bloody, but this one must have needed the money more than most.

Curious, he unfolded the rag for a better look at what it contained.

So much blood.

The blood of her reproductive parts, the blood that would nourish new life in the womb. Her lifeblood, far more so than her heart’s blood, because this was the seedbed of the race.

A mother’s blood.

He allowed himself to touch it, feel its wetness. It tingled on his fingers’ ends.

His dreams came back to him, the dreams that started it all. In the summer of ’88 he was plagued by dreams of dark red blood spurting like ichor from between women’s thighs, dousing him, staining his hands....

On impulse he lathered his hands with the rag, swabbing the rich scarlet elixir over his fingers and knuckles and palms. He poked inside her and his fingers came out steeped in blood. He inhaled its odor. Life in its chemical essence. The mystery of creation, the secret power of the female. Nutritive, generative, miraculous.

He knelt for a long time, hands dripping, the knife forgotten on the pavement. Finally he roused himself, aware of a brightening, the arrival of dawn.

He looked at his hands, coated in gore. A line of Shakespeare recurred to him:
And almost thence my nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand
.

Quickly he wiped his hands on her clothes, recovered his knife, and escaped from the alley, having left her body intact and undefiled.

A few blocks away he caught a Red Car trolley. He headed north, then east, changing cars more than once. In South Pasadena he got off and completed his journey on foot. The sun was up, and no doubt his wife had risen with it.

They lived in a rented house, a situation that was merely temporary. Business reversals had delayed his acquisition of a home of their own. For the moment the little bungalow with its two bedrooms and its small garden would have to do. Maddie seemed pleased with it, even if she was pleased with nothing else.

He reached the house and entered through the front door. In the kitchen he found Maddie frying eggs on the stove. She glanced at him, her face registering a mixture of regret and contempt.

“Out tomcatting again,” she said. It was not a question.

He stopped a few feet away. He stared in silent fascination until she turned.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Are you bleeding?”

“What did you say?”

“Is it your time of the month?”

“You can’t ask such a thing. It’s horrid.”

“Just tell me.”

“I certainly will not.” She turned back to her eggs on the stove. “The very idea. You must be sotted, as usual—”

He seized her from behind, as he had seized the Chinese whore, and tilted up her head so her eyes stared into his.

“
Are you?”

She hitched in a gasp. “Yes, if you must know.”

It was what he wanted to hear. What he had hoped for, fairly prayed for, throughout his ride home.

He threw her to the floor, straddling her, unhooking her nightgown, his fingers fumbling until in frustration he tore the damned thing off. He removed the sanitary towel she wore in lieu of a rag and cast it aside, smelling blood, the intoxicating odor of it, the scent of birth and life.

She chattered in hysteria. “My God, what are you doing,
what are you doing
—”

“Taking you,” he grunted, “as my wife.”

He thrust inside, his manhood spearing her. She cried out, a sound that was very nearly a scream, and he shot his hot seed in a surge of painful pleasure that left him spent.

He pulled free. She trembled all over, dazed and scared.

“There,” he said with satisfaction. “
Now
we’re joined in holy union.”