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
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.
The blade made its pilgrim’s progress through Sweetie’s abdomen toward her notch, which I had no need to observe and left for other women on other nights. For now it was enough to watch as, in the blade’s wake, a jagged, blackened crevice lay revealed to me as the two edges of the wound separated, yielding the structures below. There was no blood. She had already bled out; her heart, starved of fuel, had already ceased to beat, and so no pressure propelled internal fluids outward. It was just a raw wound, a hideous rent in the flesh that would have caused oceans of pain had anyone been home to notice them. It was a fine piece of handiwork, that. I felt some pride, for I had been curious about the yield of flesh to blade postmortem. Not neat, not a bit of it, just ripped and mangled — mutilated, one might say.
I put another one into her to pursue the strange delight it gave me and was equally pleased with the knife’s work and my own skill and attention to detail. At this point the odors of elemental reality and extinction had produced sensual epistles. It was a mad stench of the metallic, from the copper-penny musk of the blood, to ordure from food alchemized until it became shit for expulsion at the further end of the coils, and finally to piss, which somehow, some way, had slopped across everything, as if I’d nicked a tube in one of my awkward strokes. I inhaled it greedily. Delicious, almost ambrosial. A cloud of dizziness filled my head, and I had half a sensation of swoon come across me.