“I will consider,” I said.
Twenty-four years have passed, and I have finally made up my mind.
I got to the professor’s house well after midnight. I had no keys, for who would have checked what was left of him? But the door gave to my shove, and I paused in the foyer, listening. If his Scots housekeeper were there, she was sleeping. Gingerly, I climbed the steps and turned in to his study.
I did not dare light a candle or turn up the gas jet. In time, however, my eyes adjusted to the dark, and what I did not see in detail, I saw in memory. I recalled all the gizmos he’d designed to help overcome his fellow man’s speech pathologies, whether a terrible accent that anchored one forever to the bottom of society, or a stutter that made a man gobble like a turkey in getting a simple declarative statement into the ether. Such a noble calling, so perversely betrayed.
I made my way to his desk. All the drawers slid open save one, and with a screwdriver picked up for that reason, I pried and poked, felt wood splinter, and it popped open. Inside was nothing but a single volume.
I picked it up, made my way to the window, and by the wan light of gas lamp from Wimpole outside, made out that it was a journal, perhaps a diary, with dates setting off each entry. It took no genius to comprehend that the dates aligned with the murders.
“When I cut the woman’s throat, her eyes betrayed not pain, not fear, not but utter confusion. Truly, no creature can understand its own obliteration.”
That was how it began.
I paged through, seeing accounts of them all, Polly, Annie, Long Liz, Kate, and finally and most horribly Mary Jane. Even a poem! Four letters were folded into its pages; they seemed to be from some poor girl to her mum. Later I would learn who she was.
I rolled them up, slid them into my jacket, and quickly exited.
The night was fresh and clear. I didn’t look for a hansom but walked the mile and a half to my mother’s house, considering what to do next. I had the world at my fingers with the diary. I could reveal and publish and become rich, famous, powerful, godlike, whatever.
Yet the colonel’s words weighed heavily on my mind. Thus my decision: I leave the volume to my estate, and if it sees the light of day, it is on my descendants.
On the other hand, I give myself this gift. Having wrung it out in my own mind, I have decided I will proceed with my project. Art is made from life or it is no good, and all this happened to me, so it’s mine to use, even if I must force it into comedy to escape its darker implications. I will use the characters, the root situation, and avoid the slaughter: Distilled toward purity, it will be a tale of ambition, intellectual vanity, even relentless will, but also courage, the dignity of unfortunates, the wisdom of soldiers. It will end long before the murders begin, and to me at least, it will explain how such a thing could have happened. No one else will so understand. I will call it Pygmalion.
As for Dare, he lies undisturbed in the tunnel, if the tunnel lies undisturbed under the Anarchists’ Club and hasn’t been ruptured by the constant reconstruction of London. That I do not know. The fuss over his disappearance ended swiftly, and it seems he is forgotten, even if Jack, his creation, will never die. But that is a fraud, cake for the masses, so what difference does it make?
Indeed, only in one quarter does the memory of Thomas Dare persist, and it is not he that is remembered but the flavor of his flesh. For he can be commemorated only by his brethren, the other creatures of the dark Londontown Beneath, the black rats.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Ripperologists will note, I hope, that in most cases I have stayed well within consensus regarding the Autumn of the Knife. There are a few “willed” inaccuracies that I had to insert to sustain a dramatic structure. In acknowledging them, I hope to stave off penny-ante criticisms.
—Mr. Diemschutz said in testimony that he went in the side door of the Anarchists’ Club, not the front door on Berner Street, as I have it. I had to move him out of the yard so that Jack could do what Jack did.
—The journey of the missing half of Mrs. Eddowes’s apron was more complicated (and more tedious) than the streamlined version I have provided, but it came to the same thing. Readers should thank me.
—No evidence was ever encountered suggesting a tunnel from the Anarchists’ Club.
—Contra my account, the newspapers paid no particular attention to Annie’s missing “wedding rings.” Also, all the headlines and news copy are of my own invention.
In one area I am apostate. That is the method of Jack’s attack on his first four victims. Consensus has decided that he knocked them to the ground first, muffled their screams with his left hand, and cut their throats, beginning under the left ear, with his right.
I believe, as I have dramatized here, his angle was directly frontal; he faced his victim as if to purchase service and attacked suddenly with a sideward snap of arm and wrist and essentially drove the blade into the throat under the ear in a vicious chop, then rotated about the stricken woman to draw it around as he eased her to the ground. I hope to find a forum to say more on this issue at a later time.
Now on to thanks. Lenne P. Miller was instrumental in the composition of I, Ripper. He researched it to breadth and depth, as the bibliography should make clear, and he read, reread, and rereread the manuscript, hunting for the errors someone as notoriously sloppy as I am is prone to make. It took at least three drafts for me to figure out how to spell “teetote.” If the book is as remarkably accurate as I believe it to be and as accurate as any fictional account, that’s because of Lenne. If there are mistakes, that’s because of me.
I should also mention the remarkable website Casebook: Jack the Ripper. Scrupulously maintained and scrupulously fair, it provided quick answers to basic questions and deeper answers to deeper questions, and gave me the sense that someone was watching over me. Hope the boys enjoy what I’ve done with their labors.
Besides his research, Lenne also came up with a great idea for the plot, which helped me keep it ticking along. Mike Hill, another good friend, pitched in with a keen idea, very helpful. I am notoriously prone to ignoring other people’s ideas, if I can even summon the patience to listen to them, but in these two cases, the ideas were so good, and so much better than anything I had or would come up with, I had to acquiesce. Guys, the check is in the mail.
One of the early champions of my take on Jack was James Grady, the thriller writer and a good friend; his enthusiasm actually carried me for years while I tried to work out a way to tell the story as it had occurred to me in a flash one night. Bill Smart was another early and vociferous backer, and his enthusiasm was such a help. Any writer stuck in a plot hole or a character swamp or an editor jam knows how much it helps to have a guy who’ll back you up, pull you out, tell you you’re the best (even if it’s not true!), and send you on your way. Bill was that guy for me.