Tales of Jack the Ripper (13 page)

The lack of sleep was making me feel inebriated. I stopped by the hospital and asked Tom, one of the nurses, to grab me some Xanax. He just told me that I looked like shit and to get some rest. I had a six-day-old beard by that point and my eyes were bloodshot from staring at a computer screen for that long.

I resolved to sleep in the office. On my way there I found myself stopping at the morgue and contemplating cutting up a female cadaver. If Francis was family, the only way I could know anything about him was to do what he had done. I’d dissect a body and pull out the internal organs one by one. Some of the bodies had already been used as practice autopsies, so it was not like I would get caught, and if I did, no one would think I was doing anything other than practicing. Could I imagine this woman as my victim, putting myself inside my ancestor’s head? I would dress her. Yes, that would bring more realism to the illusion. Melissa kept an extra pair of jeans and a few nice shirts for when she was going out directly after work. I could pretend I stalked the body, seduced her, and then cut her while she was still alive. What better way to understand the man inside me than to bring him to the surface?

I opened the door to the office and froze as the light in the hallway caught the edges of Death’s face as she slept on the cot. My initial thought was that this had been a sign to back up and get out of the morgue and leave my curiosity in the past. However, still lacking sleep, medication, and sensibility, my unhinged mind rationalized the situation in a different direction; I had to work twice as hard to get anywhere, from living in assisted care when my mother died, to putting myself through medical school with multiple jobs. The curse pushed me to take the risk. Death was the temptation.

I was able to swipe a vial of sedative and a few syringes. I covered her eyes as I jabbed the needle into her neck. The doctor was in scrubs so I thought about changing her into Melissa’s clothes, but Dr. Death was a flesh and blood specimen that I found. I no longer needed the illusion. I wrapped her in Melissa’s lab coat and carried her limp body to the lab, straining against the dead weight as I plopped her onto the autopsy table. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but the feeling of power over her was intoxicating.

Seeing the doctor on the slab created quite a manic feeling. I had left behind mere curiosity and there was no turning back, so I decided to enjoy myself. I went into the bathroom and shaved off what I had of my week-old beard until all that was left was the outline of a thin, pointed mustache. Had I more foresight, I would have gone all the way: grabbed a nice fitted jacket and a top hat to complete the iconic Ripper look. I also considered that, if I was able to get away with this much, could I commit murder for real? You can’t burn in Hell twice.

I threw away my reservations and allowed my forefather to the forefront of my mind. Whatever he wanted to happen would happen.

I undressed the doctor and found myself quite embarrassed with how attracted I was to her. She had a more youthful figure then the hard lines of her face let on. Looking down at her nude, limp body brought up thoughts of my mother. On several occasions I had to strip my mother down and wash off the puke that accumulated during one of her drunken binges. She would be covered in the filth of her own transgressions. After washing her and draining the tub I wondered how someone who looked so pure on the outside could have so much internal chaos.

I put the scalpel to Death’s chest and contemplated making a long cut down her abdomen. I wouldn’t kill her, but I would cut her. The woman would wake up and never know how she got that scar, but she had seen that kind of incision so many times that she would know how it was made. She would always wonder who had cut her…

I could feel my forefather’s disappointment in me, so I tried to push back my hesitation and just kill her like he wanted. This woman might have sabotaged my career anyway, so what kind of future did I have to look forward to? Besides, it was poetic. Francis Tumblety was wanted for murder and fraud in two different countries, but existed without persecution until he died. Francis’ work lived on in infamy, and through a history that resided inside of me. I was responsible for carrying on his legacy…

A bright discoloration on the floor caught my attention. Melissa’s pink ribbon from the inside of her jacket had detached and fell from the table. It triggered the memory of the day that she asked me to confirm what she had found inside of her body. My hands explored Melissa’s skin, my fingers pushing into her until I found a gross lump underneath her breast. An ugly thing resided and grew inside of her. Her cancer was the same as my curse. It grew and infected until it overcame the host.

Melissa beat her disease. Could the curse, like the cancer, be eradicated as well? If my father, and for all I knew all the men in my family, were burdened with the fallout generated by one man’s choice to murder, had any of them ever tried to make up for that evil? Had they been keeping the darkness alive all this time by passing the burden down without trying to push against its influence?

It had plagued me, for sure, but until that moment it had yet to corrupt me like it did to all of the Tumblety men. In fact, every time I fought against it, something good happened. I had to work twice as hard, but I did work, and I was still alive and successful. The men in my family were weak, and so continued to feed the curse. I wanted to fight, to become a healer.

I was responsibility for putting an end to his legacy.

I took the scalpel off of the doctor’s chest and took a step back from the slab. My anger toward this woman was fierce, justified, and natural, but my actions were not. Even in the changed state of mind I did not want to hurt this person, proving that I’m not a product of my past. Even though my past influenced my life I wasn’t about to let my forefather take me down like he did to all the men that came before me. Even if life was harder because of where I came from I would gladly work twice as hard to be better than Death.

I placed Dr. Carmine back on the cot and left the hospital. I gave myself a shower and a shave and a few days to recover. When I awoke well rested, I had considered how close I came to hurting another human being. I thought of suicide, but that would just be a way out of the curse, a coward’s way out. I wanted to heal the horror brought upon my family by the evil of Francis Tumblety, Jack the Ripper.

A few years have passed, and if the curse still haunts me I seem to be doing well with my fight against it. Melissa and I are engaged. She asked me. Her one condition was that I had to stop dissecting my food. A month after the incident we each received an email from Dr. Henry Clemenson, welcoming us into the hospital’s family of healers.

“Maddy always said,” he concluded in his letter, “that there’s ‘something about Dr. Tumblety,’ and I trust her instincts. If she thinks you are a worthy investment, then you must be.”

Nowadays, when I google my name, the links on the first few pages attach to my accomplishments in the medical field. The name of Jack the Ripper, Francis Tumblety, doesn’t show up until page four, and who looks that far back anyway?

The Truffle Pig

T.E. Grau

I am a ghost, a curl of smoke, a whisper told to children to shut stubborn eyes until sleep comes to take them from their sheets. A shadow of a thing that casts none.

I am the wave that washes away the sand castle when the father turns his head. I am a saboteur, a tracker. I am a killer of women, and of men. But so many women.

I am reviled by all who don’t know me and hated by the very few that do. And I am the only thing that stands between how our world remains, and how it could be. No one wants to know how it could be, because it will mean the end of everything.

I have been given many names from many quarters, yet none that matter. Bloodhound. Monster. I know myself as the 42nd of my kind, and the success of my art is the last barrier that keeps us from falling into the soundless crush of the eternal abyss.

Presently, I am on the deck of a ship tossed by the North Atlantic, following those whom I and my forbearers have always followed, keeping six measured steps behind, which is close enough to see but not be seen. They never know who I am, or when I am going to strike, although I see them clearly. That is my edge, and the only reason why we are all still alive.

I would kill every last one of them if I could, but I am one, and those behind me very few. We must keep our numbers low, as secrets abhor a crowd. Yet there are so many of them, with their numbers multiplying around us, while ours dwindle in private, as all rare things do. Total eradication was attempted in the 7th century, and our order was nearly wiped out when we emerged from the shadows, drunk on hubris and the lotus of righteousness. We were cut down like chaff and chopped to pieces. Souvenirs made of our bones. So now I follow them like a bloodline curse, do not engage, and destroy their work in whatever way I can.

They make their rounds, and so do I, tailing them on their circuit of ancient outposts, established before time had meaning. After a stint in the red hill country of Southern France, they recently arrived in London, blending in with the bustle of the shrouded city, close enough to their communication base at Solsbury Hill and those things that still live deep in the Pictish Highlands above the Antonine Wall. The calculating Romans never built a wall without reason, let alone two. They knew what was lurking in those caves, what howled from the bottom of deep crags. But those bulwarks had crumbled with forgetfulness, while what they were built to repel waited for the stars to sing to them in melodies none of us could hear.

My work in London attracted more attention than we anticipated, as none of us could foresee the butchery of a few random spares igniting a national scandal that soon spread across the globe. Information moved so quickly these days, and we were guilty of underestimating the modern lust for depravity. During times past, such events would be muttered across a tilled row, accompanied by a sign of the cross or prayer to an ancestor. Murder was still hot in primal limbs back then, and untimely death was an unfortunate neighbor to every house. It was endured, a wintered dip in daily lives. But in these days of lace and buttermilk, death was marched into sitting rooms and made to dance, as a brush with oblivion became exclusive to the point of aristocratic fetish.

Accordingly, in a matter of hours, London exploded with interest in the first girl I took apart. This made my remaining task more difficult, demanding a hastily prepared misinformation campaign to distract the insatiable thirst of pen and populace from my bloody casework on the cobblestone of Whitechapel. Make it appear isolated, spiced with a bit of royal intrigue, so no broad-minded Scotland Yardies would put the pieces together. Princes, Freemasons, palace doctors. Occulted journalists and Polish Jews. A smear of horseshit over the lens, ensuring that the puzzle would remain scattered upon the floor while the full picture bled invisible into the planks underneath.

They who continually force my practiced hand year after year are followers of the Dark Man, who was last documented by public record—since destroyed—striding out of a screaming Egypt after blanketing the land with pestilence three and a half millennia ago, before fading into the sand at a Delphic place still marked by the wandering Kharga of the great Western Desert. He had punished his former hosts for turning their backs on him in the name of river superstition buoyed by slave theology, while his legacy of plague was co-opted by various holy books in the years that followed. The Dark Man cared not for the truth or the lies, waiting for his next re-emergence on a timetable only he knew, dictated by the stars and those things that lay in wait far beyond them. In his absence, a growing coterie of acolytes disappeared underground with him, anticipating his next mission of celestial cataclysm, and often taking initiative, sowing anarchy to pave a path of advent. Multitudes went with him. Houses were cleared. Villages. Families within families that kept alive the Elder Ways, and those willing to sacrifice everything they knew to learn. The allure of the glinting black is irresistible to anonymous eyes choking on the monotony of the neverending gray.

That is when we were born, like seeds fertilized by rotting flesh, rising delicate into the morning air, yet still tasting death in our veins. We grew in secretive greenhouses, shaped by the blade, and then were released one at a time to follow across the planet the spoor of the Dark Man and those followers who glorified in his peculiar taste for destruction. But chaos begs for order, and order can only live to stabilize chaos, as water looks for the glass. And so I and others before me were tapped and trained, called by forces that no one fully understood yet dared not question, as the reality presumed by the rational mind is just an onion skin surrounding the deeper mysteries spiraling at the core. We were trained in the secret fighting arts and built a mental foundation grounded in the philosophies of dead moons, before graduating to anatomy and vivisection, memorizing the human form inside and out, as this was the battlefield on which our modern wars would be waged. The flesh. It always came back to the flesh. To hone our skills, we leaned on esoteric surgical techniques far in advance than those of contemporary physicians employed in the enterprise of saving lives, as our craft was always practiced in the pursuit of death. Removal of corruption on such a minute level could end in no other result, for the sake of the infected and the greater world. Much like the Romans and their concealed knowledge of what lay north of their Britannia walls, we had to keep in place a shade over our work and real reasons why we willingly play this game of fox and goose, hoop and stick. Marbles. Bloody fucking marbles.