Tales of Jack the Ripper (32 page)

“Do ye feel that, then?”

It’s Catherine who asks. She pulls herself past Elizabeth, Annie, and Polly, to curl around the wreck of my shoulders as I stand staring. I can almost hear the drip of her blood, can feel its warmth around my feet as it pools. We should be bled dry by now, bodies drained to husks, but no. Our blood still runs the cobbles of these streets, the tatters of our flesh.

Outside the building where I once lived stands a woman. She is Polly’s age at most, time gently lining her face the way it never would mine. She is now the age of all them who had gone before—but for me. I was youngest, made prettiest for always.

Elizabeth sobs; it is a strange sound, sudden and unexpected and she tries to break free from our group, but Annie holds her firm. Elizabeth crushes herself into Annie, buries her face; the rose at Elizabeth’s breast shatters fresh scent through our huddle.

Ghosts are best seen when you stand still. If you move they flicker like a lamp when the gas is turned down. Flicker, flicker, gone.

They still call this the worst street in London, and people are fools for coming. Without revolver or knife, visitors are sure to find a poor end in this alleyway. They warn of coming here. They always have, they almost always certainly will. You don’t want to see the ghost of a dead girl, you don’t want to hear the cries of “murder!” in the depth of night.

Oh—But you do.

’Tis only a room, let to someone else who never knew the horrors it contained.

This is the lie I tell myself as I move across the cobbled street, toward the building that has gone blue in the gloaming light—

(they know, because there’s push to be made, living in the room where the young dollymop was nobbled—dismembered—oh girl, did he drink ye? They say he couldn’t help himself, having tasted Catherine. How long did your heart’s blood mark his mouth after he kissed that warm flesh? No one would believe the truth—he never buried you under floorboards. The thought of concealing your beauty was intolerable.)

—toward the girl who lingers at windows. She peers inside and I do not dare. ’Tis but a deadlurk. Yet, there are walls and a ceiling yet, which define a space that beats with a heart that was once my own. My hand seeks the hollow of my chest, empty and tattered all these years, dripping scarlet to the stones. He took my breasts, my heart, and these he placed under my head as if to make a prayer of them. As if some fairy would come and collect them in the night. There were no fairies that night, nor any other.

The glass beside the door has been fixed. Still, I slip my hand through and make as if to unlatch the door as I always had—

She’s humming. The girl has a song in her mouth and it’s a song I know and once heard in this very doorway.
Scenes of my childhood arise before my gaze, bringing recollections of bygone happy days…

How can she know—

Despite the closeness of the other women, these women who have raised me all these years and taught me to not be afraid of the beautiful thing he made me, I feel that familiar ache, a pull toward someplace else. A need to go even though I cannot.

“Who are ye?” I whisper.

And she hears me, for her gaze turns from the window and falls upon me. Plain as day and twice as fair. I know her eyes.

Should you see a ghost, the worst course of action is panic or flight.

Do not fear them—this is not common advice, but if you go looking for a thing, you should not show aversion if you truly find it.

Ghosts cannot harm the living—this is common advice and poorly given, because it’s the worst kind of falsehood. This fragment of a woman before me did not flicker mercifully into the shadows. She had no face, nothing the living might recognize as a body, he had mutilated her so. She was forever the wreck he made of her, her chemise ever torn and bloodied.

Her chest is hollowed, as empty as a nest in winter but for the blood that trickles from her. It is this which makes me cry, stumble, flee.

Nose and fingerprints smear the window glass. I can see the ghosts of lookers lined up, some only children, pressing up on their toes to see the room.

“Come away with me.”

He never spoke those words to Elizabeth, though Elizabeth swears over and over he did, oh he did bid her come away. She knew him best, she whispers, and twirls in her black coat. The scent of her rose spreads but cannot completely obliterate the damp stench of the street. She refuses to look at any of us, spinning until the world blurs. This fantasy is better than the reality of the woman who runs.

“Come away with me… come, come.”

He wasn’t so tall, the cove. I invited him inside and latched the door behind as best I could. The room was still finer than I could afford, and I wanted a fine room for him. He wanted to take time in his pleasure, he said. Would make it worth my while and the rent was needed. He seemed eager; I remember the way he surveyed the room, the way he seemed pleased with its walls, its privacy. Often such a thing was done in alleys, with haste.

The collar of his ebon overcoat was velvet—

(watch for the blade he carries up his sleeve, you gulpy haybag—ye always lose yerself in the collar, that fucking collar)

—and it still feels like a whisper between my thumb and forefinger. I couldn’t stop touching it once I’d drawn the overcoat from his shoulders.

When he cut me—

(when he killed ye)

—I would remember the feel of the velvet,

—and when they all turn their dead eyes on me,

—and when Polly reaches a shaking hand for me—

There is only the feel of the ebon velvet.

“Keeper of me own name,” Polly whispers. Her arm encircles the ruin of my waist and there is no longer rosemary, but the stench of rot that rises from her. She lifts a hand to my face and does not touch me. “Who are ye, then?”

She asks the same question I asked of the woman at the door, and while I know the answer to these riddles, Polly does not. Can not.

Should you flee a ghost, they will not follow. This is another falsehood, made to comfort the children we once were.

’Tis but a deadlurk, child, an empty room without so much as a shadow. No ghost may hide here.

As adults, we know that ghosts can never be escaped. They may stand in brightest daylight and look you dead in the eye. I crossed an ocean and still this one drew me back, to look upon that room, to admit what had been done. It was a simple thing—no one could have known or should be blamed.

Everyone says these words, but in this case, they are true: it should have been me. This ghost should have been me.

They wrench me through the bloodied streets, careless of where we go. Their hands are as merciless as his own were, but they leave no mark. They strike me, pull my hair, push me down into the sodden trash.

It is Polly who cries most, she who loves me best. Elizabeth only says that she knew I was ever amiss, could not be who I was. Catherine holds me after and Annie presses her hands around mine. They are cold against my feverish skin. A ghost should not feel this warm—’tis only a deadlurk.

Ye blower.

You Judy.

Ye filth.

Only the feel of the ebony velvet.

Softly, Catherine’s voice.

“Does it matter her name? He had her, no mistake.”

Polly and Elizabeth shriek and flee down the alley. Their distance makes we three cringe. Five pieces of a whole. Did it matter, my name? To them, it did. Catherine kisses my sunken forehead, and I close my eyes (though I cannot, ever, ever), and I think I have for so very long been someone I am not—

It did not matter to him; he had no personal claim on any of us. We were but whores, flesh for cutting. He held each of us close only to draw his shiv across our throats—Elizabeth says he danced her, slid a warm hand ’round her waist and rocked her as if there were a band playing—but he cared not who we were, who we might yet be.

And Mary? Oh Mary, what you must have thought.

Returning to the place you saw a ghost may often disappoint; sometimes they linger, sometimes they are well and truly fled, never to be seen again. In the end, one must acknowledge that the behavior of ghosts is less predictable than that of swallows in their movements against spring skies.

Should you return—

Of course I return. That alley and those windows draw me as if on a tether. I press my nose to the glass and peer in, much like the morning after. The morning I returned home and found her in bloody tatters. My room was a ruin and she—

And she—

She asked to use my room, for it was far more fair than her own. My rent was overdue and she said she had a toff cove, someone who wanted a quiet place. A place he might take a drink—

—from her heart.

A place he might undress her slow—

—with the length of his blade.

Of course I return—these rooms were my own—and so too does she.

It should have been her. They all say it, until it transforms to a litany. The words have a presence and weight, a heat that coils like blood. The words carry me back to the alley, only Catherine at my side. The others would rather endure the pain of our parting than come with me, me who they thought they knew.

It doesn’t matter who I am, Catherine whispers—like him, she says it doesn’t matter, because we are all the same, nameless, possessing nothing so distinctive to set us apart. One whore is like another, isn’t it so? We all spread open so easily, our bodies coming apart in the same fashion under his shiv. This curve is like that curve, this flesh bleeds as that does. No matter that we dreamed, that we birthed children who yet roam this world, that we ached to learn what we never would (why
are
skies so blue in the autumn?). It did not matter who occupied the room. But it does matter, Elizabeth says, and stares at me as if she can dismember me all over again.

Catherine pulls me down streets and smells like lilies and daisies that have soaked in the rot of the streets we move through. That scent is enough to choke me, though I’ve no throat, no nose. This body yet remembers, though, and there is a small and distant sob the closer we come to the room.

Catherine releases me when we near and I drift, letting myself become untethered for once. Mary Kelly lingers in the shadowed doorway and her eyes find mine as soon as I reach for the gutter spout. I cannot feel the metal under my hand, my thumb yet bleeds.

“Who are ye?” I ask even though I know.

Her chin lifts—oh she is scared, because we both know why she’s come at all, and it—It—

“It should hae been me.”

Her voice breaks on that word—have. I move through the window glass, into the room which is cold as a grave. Here, my tattered skin rolls with a shudder and the blood flows more certainly than ever to flood the floor. I will flood this room if we stay overlong.
’Tis but a deadlurk, child—

The door latch has been repaired, but for me it moves as if still broken, the door creaking inward so that I may look upon Mary Kelly again. She stares and I wonder what she sees. Does she see me as I was that morning? Shuttering images fill this empty room: the blood, the ruin, the neatly folded clothes upon the chair. Barnett cried—oh he cried over the loss of you, Mary. How far away were you then?

She kicks off her shoes, steps over the threshold, into my pooling blood.

Ghosts cannot harm the living—they will tell you this over and over as they smooth the hair from your feverish head, and they will be wrong.

This room is ever as it was; my feet don’t trod upon the bare floor, but sink rather into the blood of that morning. They thought she was me—they all did. Maybe it did not matter—did Barnett pay the rent or were such trivial concerns forgot in the wake of the blood?

I reach a hand for the figure of the girl—the girl who is ever twenty and five, flayed open and bleeding still. I have grown to forty-three and miss the girl I was. The girl I should have been. She is cold, as cold as this room in the winter—it is now January—and she latches the door behind me.

There were clothes upon a chair. Though there is no chair now, I fold my clothes into a neat pile, every corner just so. They will think it a dare, someone at play. They will never understand the absolution.

I have brought a blade with me—her eyes widen. How like his? Blood cascades out of her in a sob. The bite against my throat—

It was once November.

Silver Kisses

(for Mary Jane Kelly, Whitechapel 1888)

Ann K. Schwader

To know his best-beloved one completely

Must be each lover’s prayer; yet how absurd

That I must woo by night, & most discreetly

For taking such fond wishes at their word.

No scarlet sorrow of my lady’s heart,

No mystery murmured vital in the vein

Escapes my longing as a charm apart—

So jealousy must judge such love insane.

Four fairest friends before thee, sweet street sparrow,