A Study in Red - The Secret Journal of Jack the Ripper Page 18

  What exactly is madness? Is it a permanent state of mind, caused by a combination of internal and external forces, can it be temporary, or is it inherent in the sufferer, always there, though perhaps not always manifesting itself outwardly? Does madness exist at all? Just because another human being fails to live according to what the majority of us perceive as 'normal' should they necessarily be classified as 'mad'? Perhaps in some way we are all slightly 'mad', able to be influenced by various events and pressures into behaving in ways deemed abnormal to our fellow beings. Whatever the answer, I had to carry on, complete my strange passage through the pages of the Ripper's words, and reveal the secret held for so long by my various ancestors before I could entertain any hope of finding once again the peace of mind that had been mine such a short time ago. Until then, I was trapped in this strange time-warp, one minute sitting cosily my own study, sipping a fine malt whisky, researching the events of long ago, the next whisked away into a world inhabited by the ghosts of those times.

  There, I could almost see and hear the sights and the sounds of a bygone age, smell the stench of the Victorian sewers, the cheap perfume of the ladies of the night, and feel the grip of the river fog as it drifted landward from the reaches of the Thames. Perhaps worst of all, I was totally convinced that somehow I was being led by the words of the Ripper, as a parent leads a child, to be a witness to his gruesome crimes, and my eyes suddenly welled up with tears, as the faces of those long-dead victims rushed from nowhere to fill my mind with sadness and melancholia.

  Those faces, (I had seen only the mortuary photographs, apart from Annie Chapman), whirled around in my head, as though part of some grotesque merry-go-round. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind, another figure suddenly appeared; at first dark and shadowy, growing clearer as it came closer, until the figure of a cloaked, half-masked man superimposed itself onto the grotesque montage in my head. As the figure got closer to the back of my eyes, (that's how it felt in my brain), despite the mask, I could see the eyes. They chilled me to the bone, and shocked me to the core of my soul. I screamed into the room, I was alone, but not alone. I felt as though someone was watching me and laughing from somewhere far away as that recognition hit home like a spear through my heart. Those eyes burned bright, with an intensity of resolute determination, and a blazing hatred emanating from them, directed at everything and everyone in their sight, But the most frightening thing about the awful apparition that almost overwhelmed me in the midst of this appalling and dreadful waking dream was that those eyes, those terrible, hate filled, murderous eyes, weren't the eyes of a stranger, they were mine!

  Chapter Thirty

  And So To Bed

  Exactly how long I sat in stunned silence I'm not sure. Eventually, a sort of calmness asserted itself over my trembling limbs. My mind cleared as though I was escaping from the grip of an icy fog, and I slowly regained a modicum of composure. As reality replaced fantasy, and the dreamlike images faded from the forefront of my mind, I shuddered with the remembrance of that terrible image, those eyes peering deep into my soul…my eyes! Why should my own eyes have manifested themselves into those of the Ripper? I had killed no-one, had never had a violent thought towards anyone in my life, and yet, there was no denying that as I'd seen that terrible vision of the Ripper, the face behind the scarf had been mine

  Was it a dream, or could it be that in my own state of disturbance I had started to hallucinate? Was I somehow seeing what the Ripper wanted me to see, feeling things that were being implanted in my mind by a power far beyond my own imagination? That was nonsense, and I knew it! The Ripper had died a hundred years or more ago, and there was no way he could have projected his soul into the twentieth century to terrorize a new generation so long after his demise.

  Feeling weak and deeply troubled, I rose from my chair and walked, stooped and weary, into the kitchen. I poured myself a large whisky, and virtually fell into the waiting softness of the fireside chair. I sipped the golden liquid slowly, savouring the taste upon my tongue, and the fiery warmth as it hit my throat on its way to my empty stomach. Much as I knew I should, I couldn't bring myself to eat. I felt a strange sensation of detachment, as though I were looking down on myself from another place, seeing the enactment of my struggle to cope with the journal's contents as though watching some grotesque stage play, with myself as the sole cast member. There was a grim reality about the images which the journal had superimposed upon my usual rational mind, combined with an unnatural feel to everything else that was happening to me, here in the so-called sanctuary of my own home. I remember wishing that I'd never set eyes upon the journal, though it was far too late for such thoughts by then.

  As a glimmer of clear thought returned to me, I had a nagging notion there was something missing from the journal, something of significance in the reported history of the crimes. Had the Ripper omitted to record some detail of note from his writings, and if so, what was it? With a new air of determination in my heart I decided to return to the study, and delve into my printed notes to try to identify whatever was disturbing me.

  An involuntary shiver ran through my body as I re-entered the study, as though the temperature had fallen by about ten degrees just by passing from one room to another. There was a definite air of oppression in the room, and it took quite an effort on my behalf to force myself to approach my desk once more. The journal still lay there, bathed in the wash of the light from my desk lamp, and it seemed to be calling to me, willing me to pick it up, to read the next instalment in its tale of malevolent and insane murder and blood-letting. It took an immense amount of willpower for me to resist its unearthly temptation, but I forced myself not to look directly at its terrible, inviting pages, and instead reached across to take up the pile of notes lying a few inches away from it.

  After the entry of 5th October, the Ripper had written no more until the 26th, so I concentrated my search on the dates between those two days. If something significant had occurred while the Ripper was in the hospital, it might help to prove or disprove some of the theories that abounded with relation to the murders. It took me less than five minutes to find what I was looking for. It was the kidney!

  On the 16th October, 1888, Mr. George Lusk, the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee had received by post a human kidney in a square cardboard box, which was accompanied by a letter, supposedly from the Ripper, describing it as having belonged to Catherine Eddowes. The letter, which I reproduce here, intimated that the writer had fried and eaten part of the kidney, and when knowledge of this reached the public, the news hacks of the day almost exhausted themselves with the race to publish in great banner headlines, 'Cannibal in London', 'Jack the Ripper Eats Victim's Kidney', and so on.

  Medical opinion of the time was divided in its verdict on the kidney. Despite the fact that Dr. Openshaw, curator of the Pathology Museum at London Hospital declared it to be the 'ginny' kidney of a 45-year-old woman afflicted with Bright's disease, Dr. Sedgwick Saunders the City pathologist stated to the press that the age and sex of the bearer of a human kidney could not be determined in the absence of the remainder of the body, and so the argument went on. From further examination of the notes, and the opinions of many of the leading doctors of the time, I tended to agree with the majority that this was not the kidney of Eddowes, and was more likely a hoax, possibly perpetrated by a medical student, or someone with a severely perverse sense of macabre humour.

  The letter read as follows:

  From hell

  Mr Lusk

  Sor

  I send you half the Kidne I took from one women

  prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very

  nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you

  only wate a whil longer

  signed Catch me when

  you can

  Mishter Lusk

  Surely no-one could have taken this letter seriously. It was such an obvious fake, and with such a poorly disguised almost 'st
age' Irish accent built into its wording. The letters sent by the writer of the journal were disguised, yes, but in an intelligent and calculated fashion. This was just a mish mash of deliberate misspellings and quite laughable in its almost childish lack of sentence construction. The earlier Ripper letters displayed a calculating and mocking tone towards the reader. This, however, was simply the work of a braggart, an attention seeker, and to my mind, a definite hoax! As to the true owner of the kidney, there were many ways in those days for a medical student or anyone employed in a hospital to obtain human organs, and thence to preserve them as this one had been before its mailing to Lusk. I concluded it had probably come from some poor soul who had died within the walls of a hospital and the kidney removed for examination and then spirited away by the perpetrator of the hoax. It was a typical medical student's prank!

  One thing was certain, the writer of the journal, Jack the Ripper, could neither have written the letter, nor mailed the kidney to Lusk. He was in the hospital at the time of its delivery, and therefore unable to have been the sender. What's more, the fact that he made no reference to the kidney in the journal tended to confirm my belief that, at the time of his latest entry, he knew nothing about it, having not had time perhaps to read the newspapers covering his time while in the hospital. More likely he was merely concerned with 'now', and would merely have been satisfied that his name was still on the lips of almost every citizen within the city of London. As he prepared for his next and most gruesome murder to date, I very much doubted that Jack the Ripper would have time to 'catch up on his reading'.

  At least now I was satisfied that I had put to sleep the niggling thought in my mind. I knew there'd been something and now I knew what it was. Not only that but I'd solved, to my own satisfaction at least, one of the abiding puzzles associated with the Ripper case. I just wondered, not for the first time, if I would ever be in a position to reveal all that I'd learned, to perhaps be remembered as the man who'd solved the Ripper murders after all these years. Then again, my father and grandfather had had the chance to do the same thing, hadn't they? Something, and as yet I didn't know what, had prevented them from doing so. Would I also find that secrecy was the prudent path to follow?

  Tiredness was now enveloping me like a dense fog. I felt as though my eyelids were weighed down by rocks, such was the effort involved in trying to keep my eyes open. My arms and legs were leaden, my head too heavy to be supported by my neck, and I felt a strange fluttering in my chest, and a trembling deep inside that spread throughout my entire being. I was exhausted, both mentally and bodily, despite not having exerted myself physically at all apart from a walk to the village and back that day. Although I felt a need to return to the journal, to pry its secrets from within its pages, the need for sleep proved greater in my befuddled mind, and, leaving the lights on, and everything where it was downstairs, I wearily climbed the stairs. Staggering into the bedroom, I collapsed fully clothed onto the bed, where I fell asleep in seconds.

  Chapter Thirty One

  And so to Sleep, Perchance to Dream

  As I slept that night, I was again transported to that nightmare world of terrifying images and unspeakable terrors. The face that had haunted me in the study was back, taunting and terrorizing me, drifting in and out of focus, a nightmarish caricature made up of part me, part apparition. Its black cloak swirling and trailing like a giant bat wing in its wake as it sped towards me from some indistinct fog shrouded horizon. Each time the figure receded it was replaced instantly by the images of the victims, this time appearing as barely corporeal wraith-like figures, floating on an unseen breeze, as though caught in a constant whirlwind, circling in a perpetual spiral. Their mouths opened in a cry of silent torture, screaming silently into the wind, and from the place where the diaphanous robes that covered their mutilated bodies ended, a steady shower of fresh, dark red blood dripped towards the unseen ground, until the flow of red from the tortured corpses blotted out the light behind them. The sky slowly darkened from blue to match the redness of the dripping blood. Somewhere amongst these terrible images the face of John Ross appeared to me, his face a contorted mask of hate, his mouth open in a demonic grin, showing deeply incised canine-like teeth, which also dripped with the blood of his victims. And there behind him, being dragged by a chain held in his right hand, were the two young women so recently slaughtered, writhing in the agonies of violent death, their screams, like those of the Rippers' victims, silent and quickly swept away by the steadily increasing wind that continued to sweep the whole menagerie of death into a continually changing panorama of pain and suffering.

  The surreal imagery of the nightmare now gave way to a new dreamscape, which, though peaceful by comparison, was equally as terrifying. I now seemed to be floating above the ground myself, slowly traversing an overgrown, deserted cemetery. As the thing that was me hovered ever closer to the ground, the headstones, row upon row of weathered and dilapidated memorials to the dead, gradually came into focus. There, in sharp relief, were the names of Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly, and, beneath each of their names, in large letters, the single word, WHORE. As I stared in horror at the despicable and ungodly vista below me, I saw a cloaked and slightly stooped figure approaching the row of graves. He carried an old-fashioned wooden-handled spade, one of those that appeared to be attached to a broom handle with no hand grip. The figure moved slowly along the line of graves and then, to my horror, he swung the spade like a weapon and I heard not the clang of metal on stone as it struck the first headstone, but instead there was a dull thud, rather as though the spade had made contact with a human head. To my ultimate horror, the gravestone of Mary Ann Nichols began to bleed!

  The trickle of blood from the stone rapidly became a flood until the grass surrounding the headstone was soon stained red by the river gushing from the stone. As I watched, detached yet feeling close enough to reach out and touch the figure in black, he moved along the row of headstones, performing the same act of vandalism on each, with the same result. As the blood from the final headstone joined that of the others, the ground around the graves opened up, and with a terrible sound, like a thousand anguished souls rising up in torment, the twisted, mutilated wreckage of the departed rose from beneath the blood soaked turf. In a grim and fearful resurrection, each one wailing in resemblance of their final agony, they surrounded me as I floated above the gruesome scene, reaching out, trying to touch me as I tried to twist away in abject terror. I had to escape, for to let them touch me would have tainted me forever, that's how it felt. I kicked out, and attempted to manoeuvre myself away from the howling discord of the dead, then suddenly, I was alone in a new and quiet part of the cemetery, staring down once more, this time at a single grave with an unmarked stone. Not a single word adorned that singular stone, though as I floated closer and closer, I saw at the very bottom of the stone, almost overgrown by the grass that had sprung up around it, a short set of words that, innocent enough in themselves, sent a chill through me even in my dream state. 'Unknown Whore, Edinburgh, 1888'. Even in the midst of my nightmare, the poor Scottish girl received no recognition, no remembrance. The figure returned, swung the spade once more, and the headstone exploded into a volcano-like eruption of blood, spurting upwards in a terrifying arc, until, unable to escape the force of the tide rushing towards me, I was struck by what felt like a tidal wave of warm, sticky, human life-blood. And then, by the greatest of mercies, I woke up!

  I was cold, still fully clothed, and lying on top of the bed, where I'd collapsed into that deep nightmare infested sleep. My head still held the violent and horrific images from which I'd just escaped by virtue of waking up. As my mind retreated further from the horrors induced by the nightmare, and the trembling in my body and the palpitations in my heart slowly dissipated, I looked across at the digital clock on the bedside table. It read 4.15 a.m. How long I'd slept I couldn't say, I had collapsed into bed too exhausted to notice the time. Either way, the
exhaustion that had accompanied me up the stairs to the bedroom had only been compounded by the fiendish nightmare I'd just endured, and, far from feeling refreshed from whatever sleep I'd managed to achieve, I felt worse than I had before I'd ascended the stairs.

  It was still dark outside, and the wind had gained in intensity as I'd slept. I heard the whispering of the leaves on the trees in the garden, as if the voices in my dream had crossed into the real world, mocking me through their chorus. As I lay unmoving on the bed, the sounds from outside my window were without doubt the saddest sounds I'd ever heard. It was as though nature itself mourned the souls of those poor wretched women. Or was it the sound of the Ripper mocking those souls, delighting in their torment, and whispering his triumph on the wind?

  My mind was in turmoil. I knew I had to leave the bedroom, make myself return to a semblance of reality, and leave the nightmare behind me for good. It took an amazing amount of willpower just to move my legs from that safe, tucked up position. I was like a new born creature struggling from the womb as I slowly stretched my legs, forced myself up on one elbow, and gradually swung myself over the edge of the bed until my feet touched the floor.

  Ten minutes later I was in the kitchen, with every light still blazing as I'd left them earlier, and already downing my second mug of steaming hot coffee. I'd often wondered how Sarah could drink tea or coffee so hot, laughingly telling her she'd got an asbestos palate, but that night I admit to being able to swallow the hottest coffee I'd ever tasted without feeling the heat at all. I think that was a measure of how numb I'd become, both physically and mentally.

  I couldn't go back to the bedroom, I was afraid that if I fell asleep on the bed again the nightmare would return. I could have taken more of Sarah's sleeping tablets of course, but decided against it. I wanted to avoid that hung-over feeling they induced, and I knew I had to conclude my study of the journal in the next day or so, before she returned, so I wanted to be as alert as I possibly could.