Tales of Jack the Ripper (15 page)

When Derek came back from the bar with a glass of beer in each hand, we got to talking, and that’s when we learned that we both lived in Kansas City. If you spend any time at all in any kind of niche hobby, you quickly figure out that it’s a small world. Anyone who does anything in it gets to know almost everyone else, and that goes double if you live in the Midwest, rather than New York or LA or someplace. It may not have been a lot, but it was enough to get us talking that night at the convention, and that was enough to get things started.

Derek stood out. He was what you’d call gregarious, though it also didn’t take him long to put people off. He spoke like a lecturer, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that he’d been an attorney before going on disability due to an undisclosed condition. He walked with a slight limp, but rumor had it that it was a psychological malady that kept him from practicing, rather than a physical one. Whichever it was, Derek never shared the nature of it with me.

He’d written two books on Jack the Ripper, one on Ed Gein, one on H. H. Holmes. All of them nonfiction, none of them really about the murders themselves. Instead he concerned himself with the cultural repercussions of the crimes, the narratives that had been built up around them. The ties between Ed Gein and
Psycho
,
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
, and our modern idea of the serial killer, that kind of thing. “People like to compare actors and superheroes to the gods and demigods of Greek myth,” he said in a lecture at that same convention, “but really it’s the murderers who form the backbone of our cultural mythology. What does that say about us?”

He was at the convention peddling his second Ripper book, and from talking to him I quickly learned that, while he had come to Ripperology rather late in his career as a ghoul (his word), it had rapidly become the focus of his mania. He’d gotten his start in the field as a collector of murder memorabilia. The old-fashioned wire glasses that hid his dark eyes were actually part of his collection, worn by a clerk who worked the Holmes case in 1893, painstakingly restored and fitted with Derek’s prescription. “No reason to assume that they saw anything to do with it, of course,” he told me once, leaning conspiratorially over his beer, “but then again, no reason to assume they
didn’t
, either.”

The first time I went to Derek’s big house on Holmes Street—not an accident, he told me—it was to see his collection. I was writing my third and longest book for Cold Blood Press, purveyors of local-interest true crime fiction, about the Bloody Benders. When Derek learned that, he told me that he had, in his collection, several pieces from the old Bender Museum in Cherryvale, from when it got shut down and turned into a fire station.

Derek was a bachelor, with a grown daughter from a marriage that had ended fifteen years before I met him. His house was nice, clean and meticulous, filled with books and real wood furniture. He had a wine cabinet, though I only ever saw him drink wine on two occasions.

He kept his collection in the basement. It wasn’t at all dim or disordered, like it would have been in a police procedural or a scary movie. Derek was a collector, not a hoarder, and his collection was as meticulously organized as a museum vault. Carefully preserved, coded and catalogued, grouped together by murder and ordered by year. Nothing very new, aside from a few Ed Gein pieces left over from when he was researching his first book. Mostly, he was fascinated with murders from around the turn of the century. But there weren’t any Jack the Ripper pieces in his collection.

When I asked him about it, he just shrugged, but then he brought it up again, out of the blue, later that night. “I don’t really know why,” he said, suddenly, in the midst of a lull in conversation. “My mania for collecting just seems to have petered out about the same time my mania for the Ripper really came on. Not that Ripper memorabilia is exactly easy to come by, anyway.”

He may not have known why, but privately I think that it was just the evolution of his obsession. While he may have started out as a collector, it was always the way that we mythologize killers that really interested him. His collection was just an entry point to understand that process, beginning with fetishizing the accoutrements of the crimes, and moving from there to the metaphysics of the crimes themselves. Though Ripperology was never my thing, I’d read a few books on it before, and I read both of Derek’s, and Derek was the only Ripperologist I ever knew of who didn’t have a theory as to Jack’s identity. In fact, Derek seemed to think that there was more to the Ripper mythos than any one identity could ever contain. That was essentially the thesis of his second Ripper book,
Every Man Jack
.

After Derek’s death, the police asked me if I was his friend, and I wasn’t sure how to answer. I guess that I was probably the best friend he had. We were both bachelors, both writers, both in the same field. We lived twenty minutes away from one another, in good traffic. I went to his house a few times, he came to mine more seldom. We used to meet for drinks at a bar on the Plaza called Sullivan’s. I knew him for six years, but I never met his daughter, he never even told me the name of the firm where he used to work. When we got together it was our interests we talked about, not our lives. For the first two years, I assumed that Midwinter wasn’t even his real last name, just something he put on because it looked better on the cover than Jones or Meyers, until I happened to see a utility bill on his kitchen table addressed to it.

Unlike my grandfather, Derek didn’t die quietly in his sleep. And unlike my grandfather, I wasn’t the one who found his body. He had a lady who came in twice a week to dust and vacuum and do the laundry, and she found him sitting in a chair in his basement, surrounded by his collection, a cutthroat razor in his lap and both of his hands nearly hacked off. The wrists not just slit, but sawed through, cut all the way around to the bone, as though he was trying to remove his hands like gloves. The coroner said that the tendons were severed in both hands. They had no idea how he’d managed to hold the razor at the end. The working theory was that he gripped it in his teeth.

He left behind no note, no indication of why he had done it. The police conducted an investigation, but there was no sign of forced entry or burglary, and they had no leads. Derek kept a careful catalog of his collection, and every item in it was accounted for. All signs pointed to a bizarre and inexplicable suicide, case closed. It’s what everyone assumed, his daughter included, and in their assumptions you could hear, unvoiced, the old refrains about his undisclosed mental condition, about the morbidity of his hobbies. I was asked only cursory questions during the investigation, and I didn’t have anything to add that would shed any light.

I went to Derek’s house for the last time when the estate sale was happening. His daughter lived in Seattle, and while she flew down for the funeral, she had everything sold through an agency. Derek’s collection went up on an online auction site and brought quite a bit of money. I didn’t buy anything from it, though I bought a chair from his house at the regular auction, one that I used to sit in next to the bay window when we would drink and talk about crimes committed before we were born.

They moved most of the furniture out onto the lawn to sell it. Somehow, doing that divorced it from him, made it into just stuff, all disarrayed and random. Like a dissection or an anatomical chart, just shapes now with numbers tacked on, nothing left that resembled a person, resembled a life. People were wandering through it in the fall weather, kicking dead leaves off the lawn and pulling the drawers out of dressers. I was standing on the front walk, looking up at the house, and my glance fell on the cupola window above the front porch, where Derek used to sit and watch the traffic go by when he couldn’t sleep. A figure was standing there, just a shadow against the glare of the window, but one that I knew instantly, though I had never seen it before. It was a figure that anyone alive would recognize. Tall and indistinct, in a top hat and cape, his white-gloved hands crossed at his waist.

Maybe I should have gone in then and investigated. Maybe I would have found that it was just some eccentric collector, another enthusiast come to gather memorabilia from Derek’s old life. But seeing that figure there, feeling his unseen gaze on me, I felt sick, like the sidewalk was buckling under my feet, and I turned and walked away, sat sweating in my car on the side of the road until I felt well enough to drive home.

The day after the estate sale, I got a package in the mail from Derek, postmarked the day that he’d killed himself. I called the post office, and they said he’d left instructions to delay postage. They’d assumed that it was a birthday present or something.

Inside there was no note, no explanation. Nothing to clarify the nightmare jumble of his death. Just one object, carefully wrapped and sealed, something that hadn’t been listed on his exhaustive collection manifest. A single white opera glove, with a brownish-red stain around the cuff.

That night, I had a dream. In it, I watched myself sleeping from a vantage point somewhere up near the corner of my ceiling. From there I couldn’t see the glove extract itself from its nest of packaging on my kitchen table, but I heard the rustling and I saw it appear like a plump, pale spider in my bedroom doorway. Bodiless as a dreamer, powerless to intervene, I watched it creep across the floor and up my sleeping body. When it fastened itself around my throat I felt its grip, dry and smooth.

That was the last night that I slept. I spend a lot of time now sitting and looking out my own window at the street below, waiting for a familiar shadow to cross my path. In life I was fascinated by Derek Midwinter. In death, he terrifies me. I guess maybe now he’s become the monster after all.

Hell Broke Loose

Ed Kurtz

HELL BROKE LOOSE,

————

Could Not More Appall the Good

People of the Capital

City

————

Than the Dark and Damnable Deeds

Done in the Blackness of Night

By Fiends.

—Headline from the
Fort Worth Gazette
,

December 26, 1885

I.

BLOOD! BLOOD! BLOOD!

So screamed the headline Christmas morning, bellowed by news agents on every street corner, howled mournfully by a thousand terrified neighbors. So screamed his brain the night before, Christmas Eve, as he staggered between houses and through dark alleys, avoiding the streetlamps lest they betray the slick, dripping red that coated his form, stains that could never be washed clean. His hot breath shot gusts of steam from his gasping mouth, each wheezing huff expelling her name into the erstwhile silent night:
Luly!

Out came the dogs, the policemen’s hounds sent free and wild, snarling into the shadows in pursuit of the annihilator, the killer of girls, now a chimera none of them could fathom. Heretofore the fiend slaughtered colored servants only, a heinous crime but nothing to overly concern the society ladies when they lay in their dark bedchambers at night. But now…

The muscles in his back and legs burned with exertion, tightening and tiring as he pressed on, dodging the lamps and lanterns and frightened gasps as the news rapidly spread—the annihilator had murdered again. Sweat boiled out of his skin, mixing with the blood spattered on his face and sluicing down to sting his eyes. His voice whined through hitching breaths, the hobnails in his shoes scratched at the hard dirt of the unpaved lanes he desperately traversed.
Did you hear? Did you hear?
cried voices he doubted were real, phantoms risen from his fear- and guilt-addled mind. The too-bright moon sent spears of silver light to the earth, illumining the pink-white stones piled around the nascent capitol building at the head of Congress Avenue, firing at him like Jupiter’s thunderbolts. He scrambled south, ever sliding through the pitch as insects that fear the light, tumbling into the city’s terror until at last he reached the comforting embrace of the First Ward.

II.

Blake Prentiss threw back his head to finish off a glass of beer; he had his hand up at the serving girl before he swallowed the last gulp. The girl, a pale complexioned beauty named Delilah, gave a sharp nod and bustled to the bar to pour another glass. All around Blake in the dim, smoky tavern rowdy men sang and cursed and groped the half-dressed girls squirming in their laps. Farmers and lawyers alike, they rose one by one to palm a dollar to the bearded attendant guarding the darkened back rooms, the sporting girl of their choice in tow. Such was the pattern and purpose of the First Ward—
Guy Town
—though this was not what drew Blake to this noisy, lascivious sector of Austin. He wanted nothing more than to drink until he blacked out, and though he could do that practically anywhere he wanted, Blake deigned to do it in an assignation house’s first floor saloon for the anonymity it afforded him.

Delilah came sweeping through the dense, odorous throng with Blake’s beer glass in hand, floating carefully so as to not spill a single drop. She deposited the glass on the table and immediately eased herself onto his lap, her face the picture of gloom, whereupon she locked eyes with him and awaited his reaction.

“No, not today, my dear,” Blake said apologetically.

Delilah pouted and knitted her paper-white brow.