CHAPTER TWO

Jeb’s Memoir

This is a most peculiar volume. It consists largely of two manuscripts which I have entwined along a chronological axis. Each manuscript presents a certain point of view on a horrific series of incidents in the London of fall 1888. That is, twenty-four years ago. I have edited them against each other, so to speak, so that they form a continuous vantage on the material from its opposite sides, an inside story and an outside story. I do so for the sake of clarity, but also for the sake of story effect, and the conviction that everything I write must entertain.

The first narrative—you have just tasted a sample—is that of a figure known to the world as “Jack the Ripper.” This individual famously murdered at least five women in the Whitechapel section of the East End of London between August 31 and November 9 of that year. The deaths were not pretty. Simple arterial cutting did not appease Jack. He gave vent to a beast inside of him and made a butcher’s festival of the carcasses he had just created. I believe somewhere in police files are photographs of his handiwork; only those of steel stomach should look upon them. His descriptions in prose match the photos.

I have let Jack’s words stand as he wrote them, and if he defied the laws of the Bible, civilization, the bar, and good taste, you can be certain that as a writer he has no inhibitions. Thus I warn the casual: Make peace now with descriptions of a horrific nature or pass elsewhere.

If you persevere, I promise you shall know all that is to be known about Jack. Who he was, how he selected, operated, and escaped the largest dragnet the Metropolitan Police have ever constructed, and defied the best detectives England has ever produced. Moreover, you will believe in the authenticity of these words, as I will demonstrate how I came to have possession of Jack’s pages, which he kept religiously. Finally, I shall illuminate the most mysterious element of the entire affair, that of motive.

If this portends grimness, I also promise as a counterweight that most romantic of conceits, a hero. There is one, indeed, although not I. Far from it, alas. A fellow does appear (eventually) to apply intellect in understanding Jack, ingenuity in tracking him, resilience in resisting him, and courage in confronting him. It is worth the wait to encounter this stalwart individual and learn that such men exist outside the pages of penny dreadfuls.

I have also included four letters written by a young Welsh woman who walked the streets of Whitechapel as an “unfortunate” and was, as were so many, subject to fear of the monster Jack. They offer a perspective on events otherwise lacking from the two prime narratives, which are filled with masculine ideas and concepts. Since this was a campaign directed entirely at women, it is appropriate that a female voice should be added. You will see, in the narrative, how I came to obtain these items.

Why have I waited twenty-four years to put this construction together? That is a fair question. It deserves a fair answer. To begin, the issue of maturity—my own—must be addressed. I was unaware of how callow I was. Lacking experience and discrimination, I was easily fooled, easily led, prey to attributes that turned out to be shallow themselves, such as wit, beauty, some undefinable electricity of personality. This force may be as ephemeral as the random set of a jaw or shade of eye; it may be found in the words of a man to whom words come easily; it may or may not be linked to deeper intelligence simply by the random fall of inherited traits, which, after all, left us with both a nobility and a royalty, and we’ve seen how well that has worked out!

So I was ill prepared to deal with that which befell me, and I lurched along brokenly and blindly. That I survived my one meeting with Jack was high fortune, believe me, and had nothing to do with heroism, as I am not a heroic man in either my own comportment or my dreams of an ideal. I do not worship the soldier, the wrestler, the cavalryman (this Churchill is a bounder, up to no good, believe me), or even this new thing, an aviator, who serves only to proclaim the stupidity of mankind and the lethality of gravity. I didn’t know what I was then, which means I was nothing; now I know, and it is from this promontory that I at last can survey these events.

So: I was shallow, industrious, grotesquely charming, smart on politics (ignorant, I must add, of women, whom I then didn’t and still don’t understand), indefatigable, and hungry for the fame and success that I thought were mine by inheritance of a superior being. The fellow Galton, Darwin’s cousin, has written at length about those of us of “superior” being and orientation, and even if I hadn’t read him yet, I intuitively grasped his meaning. There is a German chap as well, whose name I could never hope to spell, who also had a formal belief in the superman. On top of that, I had an incredibly fertile motivation: I had to escape my loathsome mother, on whose stipend I lived, under whose gables I dwelt, and whose disgust and disappointment I felt on a daily basis, even as I did my best to repay the wicked old lady in kind.

There is another issue beyond my simple gaining of wisdom. It is my current ambition. I have in mind a certain project, which I believe to be of extraordinary value to my career. I cannot deny its allure. I am too vain and weak for such. But it draws upon the Jack business and what I know of it. It uses characters, situations, incidents, all manner of those behaviors deemed “realistic,” which I must arrange, soothe, disguise, and cogitate.

Since so many cruel deaths were involved, I must ask myself: Do I have the right? And to answer that question, I must face again the Autumn of the Knife and reimagine it as exactly and honestly as I can. Thus this volume, as a part of the process to prepare and examine myself for the next step in my ambition.

But as I say, I will get to that when I get to that. As did I, you must earn that knowledge the hard way. It will be a fraught voyage. As the old maps used to say: Beware. There be monsters here.

CHAPTER THREE

The Diary

August 31, 1888 (cont’d)

My work was not done. I could not halt myself any more at that moment than I could at any moment.

I pulled up her dress, not the whole thing but rather a section of it. I did not hack or flail. I was not indiscriminate or promiscuous in my movement. I had thought too long about this, and I meant to do it as I had planned, savor it for the pleasures it offered, and at the same time not attract attention by flamboyant action.

I quickly cut a gap in the twisted white cotton of whatever undergarment with which she shielded her body, finding it thinly milled, easily yielding to the press of blade, and the bare flesh itself was exposed. So sad, that flesh. Flaccid, undisciplined by musculature beneath, perhaps stretched by passage of a child or nine. It seemed to have fissures or signs of collapse already upon it, and was dead cold to touch. I placed the tip of my fine piece of Sheffield steel into it, put some muscle behind it, felt resistance, pushed harder, and finally skin and muscles and subcutaneous tissue yielded and the tip punctured, then slid in an inch or two. The sound of entry had a liquid tonality. Now having the purchase and the angle, I pulled hard toward me, again using the belly of the blade against the woman, and felt it cut. The shaft of the knife produced exquisite sensations. I could actually imagine the subtle alteration in rhythm as the edge engaged differing resistance while at the same time each region of blade had a differing response to what lay before it. Thus the progress, with these two factors playing against each other, ran from the slippery, gristly, unstable coil of the small intestine, all loose and slobbery-like, the thinnest part of the blade more sensitive to the instability, until it became firm and meaty, as the cutwork descended to the stouter and lower end of the blade, stabilized by my pressure against the bolster, this last sensation as it interrupted the outer raiments of the body, the skin, the muscled underneath.