“Do it,” the boy said.
“No, not tonight.”
“Don’t be a mewler, Jack. You’re going to feel good with this one. You’re going to feel quite a bit more than yourself.”
Mary Kelly wandered back from the public houses on Commercial Street about quarter to midnight. She couldn’t manage more than a drunken wobble. She had with her a short, fatty pig of a man, ragged sleeves and a billycock hat, thick moustache, still carrying his beer from the inn.
“Goodnight, Mary,” someone said out of the darkness. A woman’s voice, but it could ha’ come from anywhere. Jack’s own head maybe? But he couldn’t be bothered thinking on it, so busy he was watching his love and his hate dancing around with the filthy bulldog of a man.
“Goodnight,” Mary called out. “I’m going to have a song.” She then began to sing “Only a violet I plucked from my Mother’s Grave when a Boy.” It was ugly and off-tune but it was still like a needle going into Jack’s heart.
Happy Jack watched her reach through the broken window and unlatch the door, then drag the fat sack of meat in with her. A short time later the pig stumbled out and went his way.
Jack turned toward the shadows. Tiny teeth gleamed. And somewhere a child was crying. At that moment he doubted Mary Kelly would resist; she wouldn’t have it in her. For she was already dead, now wasn’t she? And Happy Jack had come. Death would be too beautiful for her to refuse.
The paving stones beneath his feet was slick with human filth. He felt hisself stumble, and a pale arm come out of the filth and righted him. As far as he could see: dead bodies lolling in the alleys and doorways, their pale flesh beautiful in the moonlight. He and the lad stepped over them easily, the soft body parts rubbing against their progress. He and the lad. Happy Jack and the babe. Duly ordained and intent on their mission.
Happy Jack. Happy Jack. He walked to the broken window and reached through the space into the darkness of Mary Kelly’s room. He unlatched the door, stepped there, and was through.
She wore a thin chemise to bed. He couldn’t see her face in the darkness. He suddenly thought he might swoon with the power he had over her—he didn’t know how he could bear it. Once again the world was his and everyone had to know this. She didn’t know she was already dead. Happy Jack had a duty to tell her. He had a way to excite her.
With each stroke he felt he was erecting something higher, building a monument in his heart with each thrust and twist as the blood thickened and raced, ran up his veins and exploded out to mend the world.
Once, maybe twice, maybe even a third time she said it. “Oh! Murder!” But very softly, as if she really didn’t care. Jack doubted anyone else could hear her.
The first thing he knew of it there was two chunks of flesh lying on the table in front of the bed. How had it happened? Where had they come from? Then he looked back at his love in her white jawbone, white cheekbone, white-tooth grin. Smiling at his love for her. Wanting to reach down inside her and seize that love, bring it out for all to see, embrace her in a way she had never been embraced before, as he had never, ever been embraced. The throat had been cut clear across with a knife, nearly severing the head… but letting loose her grin. Both meaty breasts sliced off the trunk, and he started to go into the belly.
And the boy was asking him for the knife.
Jack stared at the boy with his grin, puzzled, thinking how wrong it’d be. Then handed him the knife.
The boy was all grin, thrilled with participation, as he began the work: hacking and slashing until the nose was all gone, and Happy Jack thinking Mary was lucky she didn’t have to smell the chapel no more, didn’t have to smell her own dying. The left arm hung, like the head, by a flap of skin only.
Mary Kelly’s leg was suddenly grinning at him, speaking with harsh white and red sounds, and Jack seed the knife digging a trench to her bone. Happy Jack moved closer as the belly was slashed across and down, reaching in desperately to find the babe drowning in his mother’s filth, digging frantically, sure the lad would kill the new baby as well.
He had to pause once he was inside her, feeling the soft, warm wetness of her. Soothing as a baby’s touch, as old silk underwear falling apart in a trunk, as an old felt hat caught between the fingers. Again he bit into his lip and brought up some salt taste for comfort. He reached for the baby, for Mary Kelly’s love, determined to hold it, keep it, take it back with him to keep in his secret place under the ground.
He could not find the child alive in all that bloody flesh, even though he heard again and again its soft cries for help. He pulled away from the corpse‑mother, suddenly afraid of the boy with his knife. Jack looked down at the flesh in his hands, Mary Kelly’s liver, and placed it ever‑so‑gently on the bed between her feet, as if it was the babe. The boy looked back over his shoulder at Jack, grinning foolishly. And for some reason Jack found himself thinking of Christmas, and how a boy belonged with his toys and not in a Hell like this, and Jack giggled crazily, and reached in, and deep inside him Daniel managed to close his eyes, refusing to look.
When Daniel opened them again Happy Jack was staring into Mary Kelly’s face. Only the eyes were human. He’d ha’ blotted out the eyes too, their stubborn insistence on life turning his insides into a tortured twist, but he didn’t dare step past the grinning boy. He stepped back as the boy held the bloody knife out to him.
And then he had the knife in his hands, Mary Kelly’s eyes was on him, and the boy had again disappeared. Happy Jack sobbed as the barbed legs and mandibles raked away at the back of his skull in almost frantic rhythm. Something was breaking away here.
“My name…” he cried and fell to his knees, sobbing, unable to complete the sentence or look at the bed.
Instead he gazed at the window. At dark mandibles and barbed lobes rising into two shadow faces framed by large, multi‑faceted eyes.
5
DANIEL WOKE UP on the floor by his bunk. He had his hands up and in front of his face. He stared at the red line as it moved down his right forefinger and began to spread across his knuckles, widening gradually until it was a thick swatch of blood. He turned. Mary Kelly’s entrails steamed on the floor beside his head. He could feel the heat coming off them. What he did… He bit his lip and tasted salt. “My God!”
“Daniel!”
What he’d done, he’d ripped her, he’d felt inside her, touched inside her, touched… “My god!” The things he’d touched… “My god my god!”
“Daniel, you’re back in the barracks. It’s over.” Daniel moved his eyes, saw Falstaff hovering over him. “Who were you last night?”
“The Ripper. Jack the Ripper. Or whatever his real name was.”
“Oh. Upsetting stuff. He was like a shark, wasn’t he? A human, butchering shark.”
“How he saw women… I couldn’t bear to think I had even a shred of those feelings inside me. I adore my wife. I loved my mother. I…”
He saw women’s torn and bloodied lingerie hanging from the ruined ceiling, jeweled with cobwebs and spider eggs. Discolored and fake-looking manikin parts. A baby hung from the webs.
“You were playing a part. Now you have to shake it off. Many of us have ghosts of those feelings, stray notions and longings, but it doesn’t mean we would do those things. We’re not the people whose parts we’re forced to play. You and I, we have food prep duty this morning. That’ll help take your mind off it.”
It seemed ridiculous that the roaches with their advanced technology should still require hands-on food preparation. Until Falstaff explained it to him.