A Study in Red - The Secret Journal of Jack the Ripper Page 17

  He has no recollection of his previous seizure, or his insane 'confession' to a murder no-one has any knowledge of. He does however, this time confess to a hatred for the woman who infected him with the syphilis, and all her kind, and has stated that he will not rest until all her kind are gone from the earth. He is fixated with the need for the trade of prostitution to be eradicated from the streets of London, though his language is quite coarse whenever he makes reference to this subject.

  On my second visit, he once again 'confessed' to having rid the world of what he calls 'the whore pestilence', but this I take to be the ramblings of his dementia. He has no doubt been reading the horrific tales of the atrocious crimes currently being committed in Whitechapel, and I fancy that in his delusional sate, he may believe himself to be the murderer which all London is now calling Jack the Ripper! I fear that if he fails to show improvement in a short time, Doctor Malcolm may recommend him for committal to the asylum, and, in truth, as I am not in fact his physician, I will be unable to prevent such measures being carried out.

  I have advised him on yet another visit to cease his rantings, to believe that he is hallucinating as a result of an excessive intake of laudanum, and to accept medication to help alleviate the worst symptoms of his other illness, on the premise that by so doing he may achieve his discharge from the hospital and be allowed to return to his normal life, though I fear for the length of time that is left to him before the syphilis begins to eat away at his body, as it is already doing to his mind.

  He has, I believe, listened to my entreaties, and Doctor Malcolm professes himself much satisfied with his progress. I too found him much improved, though not particularly talkative; though this I took to be a part of his desire to recover from his illness by refraining from his previous nonsensical rantings. Malcolm suggests that if such progress remains evident, the patient may be allowed to return home in two days, to which suggestion I concurred, and offered to keep a watchful eye on him after discharge, which benevolent gesture was much appreciated by Malcolm, and, it seemed, by the patient.

  He was subsequently discharged from the hospital after a stay of almost two weeks, quite a long time in my opinion. I will endeavour to pay occasional visits to his home, and have asked that he will see me in my consulting rooms on a weekly basis, to which he has agreed.

  Another added note followed, again in the darker ink:

  Oh, what a fool I was, to fail to recognize his words for the truth. I will be forever damned, and my name would surely be held in vile scorn by the whole profession of physicians were I to confess my transgression. Believe me, whosoever reads this, that this journal did not come into my hands until it was too late, had I known the truth, I would have acted sooner, though that is of no consequence nor help to anyone now. Whatever blood is on his hands is without a doubt shared by mine, I am complicit by my shame, and I am broken into many pieces by the force of the knowledge I must take to my grave. My wretched soul will surely burn in Hell, as unquestionably as will his, if that is any consolation.

  I placed the journal down with trembling hands. My heart was heavy with sorrow and a sense of grief directed toward my great-grandfather. Whatever else he may have been, I was sure he was no fool, and yet, it appeared as though he had allowed the Ripper to walk free from the hospital, after hearing him confess not once, but twice to his crimes. I was sure that his humanitarian instincts and his belief in the fact that the man was simply delusional had clouded his judgement. Added to that was the as yet unrevealed connection between himself and the Ripper's mother. Whatever that connection may have been would also, I was sure, have given him an added incentive to attempt to treat the man in the hospital, rather than see him admitted to an asylum, surely a most dreadful fate for any person in those unenlightened days.

  Yet I couldn't escape from the thought that my ancestor could at least have discussed these strange 'confessions' with Doctor Malcolm, or indeed with the police, bearing in mind that the Ripper was not actually his patient. At least if he had done so, and the authorities had believed as he had, that the confessions were mere delusions, he would at least have been absolved of the terrible burden of guilt to which he obviously fell prey on discovering the truth.

  I was experiencing the terrifying sensation of being somehow drawn into the nightmare world of Jack the Ripper from simply handling his infernal writings. Was it therefore not possible that my poor great-grandfather, exposed as he was to a first hand personal relationship of sorts with the man, could have been completely taken in by his words, by his voice, which, though I hadn't heard, I somehow imagined to be quiet soft and hypnotic, not at all threatening and monstrous as some may imagine the Ripper's voice to have been? No, I was certain that his voice would have been soft and inviting, capable of captivating and charming his poor victims into the awful, final embrace of death. If the mere feel of his journal in my hands could elicit such a response of fear and terror so long after his death, what beguiling, charismatic qualities must he have possessed in life?

  My great-grandfather may not have been a fool, but I was sure, knowing what I had already learned from my exposure to the journal, that he may well have been fooled. The Ripper was knowledgeable and intelligent; I had no doubt on that score, so his confessions may have been a clever ruse. By confessing in such a way that he would be thought to be delusional or hallucinating, he would have the pleasure of openly admitting his crimes, boasting of them in fact, safe in the knowledge that the doctors wouldn't believe him, so granting him a twisted, warped sense of satisfaction, and above all superiority over those self-same doctors who thought they knew their profession, and who to some extent he was granting the power of life and death over him. I couldn't escape the feeling that Jack the Ripper was playing a kind of Russian roulette with his physicians, and he was winning!

  I stretched my aching limbs and looked up for a moment to see that all was dark outside my window. The rain commenced and the feeling I wasn't quite alone in the study entered the room once again. With a sense of mounting trepidation, an irrational fear of what was to come, I slowly turned to the next page…

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Confused thoughts

  26th October 1888

  Jack's back! What fools, what stupid blundering fools, to have me there and then to let me go? They know nothing. Even that blind fool Cavendish, I told him of my cause, my great mission, and he still thinks me mad! So I'm hallucinating am I? I'll show them. I'll show them all! My voices speak to me of blood, rivers of flowing blood, and ripped flesh upon the floor. I will outdo myself on the next occasion. The next job shall be my greatest yet. They shall never take me, for I shall wear once more my cloak of invisibility, and disappear as quickly as I appear from the filthy streets where the whores walk. I am cursed forever by the thing inside me which even now eats away at me. My head hurts, but now my body festers as I breathe, and I must be wary of being seen. The pestilence the whores have wrought has made me a monster, so I will chose the youngest, prettiest little piece of whore-flesh I can find, and I shall rip, gut, and fillet the slut as she lays spread before me. This one shall be hand-picked, for sure. The streets are filled with me, my name spoken and shouted on every corner. The newshounds smell a good one, and they shall yet receive still more. The people fear me; they gather in huddles in every public house and tremble in their hovels as they whisper my name. Soon they will scream my name in louder tones, and I shall grip their hearts in an icy vice, and all the world will know all too soon, Jack's back!

  The threat and the menace contained in this latest entry sent shivers through me. Though not perhaps as dark and ranting as his previous entries, this was in some ways all the more chilling because of that. There was a premeditation about those words causing me to believe the Ripper knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that his own days were numbered. There was the usual mocking of the medical profession, who, my great-grandfather included, in seeking to help and understand his illness, had in fact released the monster back in
to the world, the fox being given free run of the hen-house. It was now clear to me why Mary Jane Kelly had been his last victim. He was beginning to suffer from some of the worst effects of his syphilis. Though he failed to describe them in detail I knew he would by now have visible lesions on his face and body, which eventually would become open, suppurating sores, making him appear as the monster he now described himself as. People would turn from him in the street, cross the road to avoid him, and only by wearing a scarf or some other device over his face could he hope to disguise his grievous appearance from the world. My thoughts went back to my own horrific dream, when he appeared to me wearing just such a scarf, and the shakes returned to my hands, a panic gripped my heart, and I felt as though I had really been visited in that disturbed night, only two nights ago. It was as though he were unable to find rest, even in death, and that he was somehow able to reach out from beyond the grave, across the years, and steal a way into my thoughts, my dreams, and my life.

  Returning to my thoughts of Mary Kelly, I felt she was chosen purely because she was young and attractive, not the usual description to be applied to a Whitechapel whore of that era. Most of the poor unfortunates who fell into the dark and sullied world of prostitution were old before their time, often riddled with disease, and with their best years, and their looks long gone. Kelly was different; she still had a youthful prettiness, and described as vibrant, attractive, and full of a zest for life. Her meeting with Jack the Ripper would put an end to that life, and leave a lasting impression on all those who were unfortunate to witness the evidence of his last and most gruesome killing. The Ripper now appeared eager for fame, as though the insanity which accompanied his terminal phase now began to take a firmer hold of him. His voices were louder, his head probably felt as though ready to burst apart, and his mind filled with the image of 'rivers of blood, and ripped flesh upon the floor'. I thought that, even allowing for his state of mind, such images in themselves would have served to unnerve even his disturbed mind, and lead him further down the path towards total breakdown. The rising corpses of the dead women from his earlier hallucinatory dream leaped into my mind, and I found myself wondering just how any human being could cope with such mental imagery without going totally insane. My own mind was in such a ferment as I attempted to assimilate the information it had been receiving over the last two days that I knew I was becoming unnerved and disturbed myself, so what of the Ripper himself? He had actually experienced and lived through these terrible seizures of the mind, he had to have been so deranged and confused that he would barely have recognized himself. Would he have condemned himself if he could have been a spectator to his own descent into the Hell that was by then his path toward oblivion?

  My own thoughts were reeling. I was trying to make some sense of it all. Thinking about my Great-grandfather and his involvement in the life of the Ripper came to the forefront of my consciousness. The Ripper only had one more murder left to commit. How much more would be revealed by great-grandfather's notes, assuming them to be tucked elsewhere into the ever dwindling pile of pages that made up the journal? What was his connection to the killer? That question still hung perilously close to front of my mind, so far without satisfactory explanation. I couldn't escape the thought that the wildly deranged and degenerate murderer of women whose name still haunts crime researchers today could be a relative of mine, however distant. Why else would my great-grandfather have gone to such pains not only to try to help the man through his illness, but to seemingly do all in his power to prevent him being admitted to an asylum, where, though his treatment may have been brutal by today's standards, he would at least have been prevented from committing further atrocities upon the women of Whitechapel? But of course, my great-grandfather believed the Ripper to be merely imagining the murders as a result of his addiction to the laudanum, intermingled with his syphilis and what today would be termed a pathological hatred of prostitutes. Oh, how I wish my ancestor had delved a little further into the mind of the man, or just simply believed that his story might have been the truth, and brought in the police. Of course, he didn't, and the result was the terrifyingly grisly murder of yet another woman. Though still refusing to blame him for his actions, I just wished he'd done things differently.

  And what of me? Was I really in a position to pass judgement after all those years? I was, after all, blessed with the power of hindsight, and backed by the knowledge and experience that modern day psychiatric training gives to the medical profession. Despite that, I was beginning to believe the wildest theories imaginable; I was seeing things I knew to be impossible and sensing the presence of an entity I knew to be unreal and a fantasy of the mind. I had begun to manifest somatic, (physical) symptoms of these delusions, (and that was the only word for them), such as the tremors in my hands and body, the irrational fear that was growing in intensity with each passing hour, and the frightfully lucid and very real dreams that transported me to a nightmare dimension that must have been so close to the one encountered by the Ripper himself. In short, I was falling under the spell of the journal, if a spell it was, and despite my better judgement, despite all my powers of logic and reason, I couldn't stop myself. I was as much on a downward descent as the Ripper had been, except that I wasn't going out at night murdering innocent women, was I?

  I was losing track of time, and soon realised that evening had given way to night. I was aching all over. I felt cold and stiff from sitting in the chair for so long, and hunger had begun to gnaw at my stomach. My headache had intensified to such an extent that my temples felt as though they were throbbing, and the muscles in the back of my neck were hard and contracted from the joint acts of sitting for so long. I needed to rest, to eat, to regain some strength and composure. The journal would still be there after I'd refreshed myself, I knew that, and yet, as I looked at it yet again as it lay on the desk, I couldn't help but feel as though a malevolence of awesome proportions was slowly emanating from its pages, and like an invidious virus against which I had no control, was seeping slowly into my every thought and action, and I was becoming addicted to its words, its grisly gruesome tale, and I had to physically force my eyes to look away from the infernal thing.

  Before I knew it, I'd made it out of the study, and I stood trembling uncontrollably, propped up with my back against the kitchen door, as though its solidity could keep at bay the demonic thing that I felt was contained within the pages of the journal. I moved to Sarah's fireside chair, meaning to sit and relax for five minutes before getting something to eat, but, such was the state of nervous exhaustion into which my own mind had descended, I fell into a deep sleep. It was to be almost three hours before I woke to the shrill imploring sound of the telephone ringing.

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  A Time to Wake, A Time To Sleep

  The sound of the telephone boring into my brain brought me out of my slumber with a start. I had that feeling of disorientation one sometime gets on such occasions, not being quite sure where I was, or even what day of the week it was. I literally stumbled from the chair, walked across to the wall, and lifted the phone from its cradle as though it were a thing on fire. Holding it with just my fingertips, I gingerly held it to my ear.

  "Robert, darling, are you there? Are you all right?"

  "Hi, Sarah, my gorgeous darling, Actually, I was just lying down." I lied, not wanting Sarah to know the exact circumstances surrounding my latest sojourn into that cavern of deep, dark, dreamless sleep.

  "You sound awful, darling, I'm sorry I woke you. Why don't you try to get back to sleep? I only called you to say that I'm having an early night myself. Little Jack had worn Jennifer and I out, he's been quite fractious poor little mite. I suppose he's still feeling a bit unwell, but we've just got him off to sleep, so we thought we'd get some rest while we can."

  "Good idea," I replied. "You do that, and yes, I'll do the same I think."

  "That's good, darling."

  "Sarah?"

  "Yes?"

  "I miss you, d
arling."

  "Oh, Robert, I miss you, too. I'm sorry; you must be feeling a bit lonely there all on your own."

  I tried to sound as upbeat and cheerful as I could.

  "Don't worry, darling, as I said before, I'm just tired, that's all, I'll be a lot better after a good night's sleep."

  "Of course you will. Now, off you go, and remember how much I love you. It won't be long until I'm home, and then we can make up for lost time together."

  "I love you too, Sarah, more than you know, you sleep well, my darling, and I'll talk to you in the morning."

  We said our goodbyes, and I sat in the chair for a good two minutes before I rose and replaced the wall phone on its cradle. The tiredness in my body was all encompassing, there didn't seem to be a muscle or a joint that didn't ache. I felt awful, though it wasn't just the effects of the tiredness. I felt guilty at the thought that I was misleading my wife into thinking I was perfectly all right, when in fact, I was anything but. I tried to console myself with the thought that in some way I was protecting her, though from exactly what I wasn't sure. I just didn't want her worrying about me, and at the same time I was glad she was at Jennifer's and nowhere near the influence of the journal, whatever that might be. If I'd been a patient of my own at this moment I would have thought I was heading for some sort of breakdown, and would probably have prescribed a strong sedative and a course of anti-depressants.

  I needed to keep Sarah away from what was happening to me, at least until I had some answers, and that meant completing my reading of the journal. If she could see me now, immersed in an unholy quest to discover some hitherto unknown family secret tied into the Jack the Ripper murders of over a hundred years ago, she would probably have thought me quite mad, which, at the time, I perhaps was!