A Study in Red - The Secret Journal of Jack the Ripper (11 page)

These facts were inescapable. I could at last identify with one of the victims. Annie had become quite real to me. The photographs in particular seemed to call out to me. They evoked happy days in the life of a young family. In those grainy, sepia-toned images there was no hint of the tragedy that would soon overtake those pictured. So far, in the course of my journey through the journal, I had only seen the events through the eyes of the writer, and through my own thoughts. Now I was able to think of the victims themselves, not just as the Rippers' victims, but as very real, quite ordinary people. Having read and digested the details of poor Annie Chapman's life and death, her marriage, her children, eventual grief and degradation, I knew for sure I would be able to find similar circumstances if I were to look into the backgrounds of the other victims, and, indeed, I promised myself that I would do just that.

The room was becoming stuffy, and I opened the window, just a crack to let some much-needed fresh air into what had become quite an oppressive atmosphere. I read the final details about the funeral of Annie Chapman, and the fact that her grave was long buried over, which I found quite sad, and as I gently laid the information sheets on the desk in front of me, my heart felt heavy with sadness for that sad, lonely victim of Jack the Ripper.

I decided that I'd been putting it off long enough. My hands reached out to take up the journal once more, but, as I did, a minor draught from the window must have caught the Chapman pages, and they rustled slightly where they lay on the desk, and almost hovered above the surface. Using one hand, I reached out and gently patted them down onto the desk, putting a paperweight on them to keep them in place. Were there other-worldly presences in the air that night? I was definitely in a receptive enough mood to feel their presence. Trying not to let my nerves get the better of me, I returned to The Ripper's words. Where, I wondered, would those words, his mind, take me next, on this dark, windy, sleepless night?

Where is Hell?

13th September 1888

The road to Hell is a one-way street, once entered upon the path, there's no way back. I walk the same path each day, following the whores as they too stagger blindly towards the oblivion I provide. Their deaths are pre-ordained, each one foretold by the voices that guide me on the way. Their blood must flow; their lives must end on the streets where they ply their filthy bodies, their rancid flesh. I shall continue my work, until the whores are gone, and the filth is gone, washed clean.

14th September 1888

I dare not leave the house. The temptations are too great, but I cannot work whilst I suffer such pain. The latest supply of laudanum seems not so strong as the last. I need more and more just to hold the pain at bay. I want the pain to stop. I could but slay just one whore tonight, but I cannot. I must wait until the sleeping voices rise within and give me strength and purpose. The whores must wait. Let them think they're safe.

15th September 1888

I wish I could avoid the pain I know must come, yet every day I must live with that knowledge. It's easy for the damned whores. Their pain is brief, as I dispatch them to eternal Hell, while I must live in my own version of that foul wretched place. There is so much more to come, yet every day I wake with the fear, the knowledge of certainty of the end which one day must be mine. No one knows, nor can they, I must suffer alone, for my sins, my earthly indiscretions that now must take me deeper into the foulest depths of despair.

So, something at least was different. For the first time The Ripper, (I shall dispense with 'The Writer' now), had placed three entries on one page of the journal. All the previous entries, no matter how short, had each had a whole page devoted to them. For whatever reason, he had chosen to place these three short entries together. Was he short of paper? He'd written that he'd been unable to go out, or was it that he was simply placing them together because they so closely followed on from each to the other. Perhaps there wasn't any deep reason for it; he'd just changed his writing format. Whatever the reason, the entries were revealing.

He was on a rapidly descending path towards destruction, and he knew it. His vision of a living hell was evident in virtually every word he'd committed to the paper. Strangely, he appeared to see himself as sharing a common road towards his ultimate oblivion with his victims, guided along the way by his voices. Would the voices therefore tell him when it was time to stop, or when it was time he ended his own personal hell? The first entry concluded with yet another threat to the 'whores', intimating that their deaths must take place in the very places where they sold their bodies for a pittance. As far as he was concerned, they were already in Hell, with him! That he wanted to kill again, and badly, I was in no doubt, and he was almost desperate to return to his deadly task. Yet, he was held in check by his pain, the headaches were growing worse. He thought the laudanum was weaker; in fact it was probably no different to that he'd taken before, his body simply accustomed to the drug and it's effects. He could now absorb larger quantities of the opium-based drug before feeling any effects at all. He was probably so intoxicated by the drug that he couldn't 'hear' his voices. They were 'sleeping', perhaps his hallucinations were also lying dormant, he was certainly in a state of some confusion, and felt his life to have become nothing more than a living Hell. I felt he was reaching a point of deep desperation.

Apart from all else, The Ripper was deeply depressed, his unhappiness and his fear screaming out from the page. Fear? Yes, he was afraid of pain, afraid of dying. He wasn't referring just to the pain from the headaches either, of that I was certain. I'd suspected earlier, and now I was sure that he was suffering from the later, (tertiary) stages of syphilis, probably contracted as I'd previously suspected from some long ago liaison with one of those ladies of the street he now so despised. If that were the case, he was in all probability suffering from painful lesions on various parts of his body, his very tissues beginning to break down as sores developed on his face (though perhaps not yet), hands, and other extremities. (That was why I'd seen the vision of a facial mask over the bottom of his face in my dream). In my subconscious dream-state I'd anticipated the syphilis! He was possibly severely brain damaged by this point, and without doubt the man was gradually going insane. I'd begun to believe that he was an intelligent man, and would thus have known the prognosis of the disease, adding to the terror he felt, knowing exactly what was happening to him, yet being unable to do a thing to prevent it. How strange to think that today the disease can be effectively treated with modern antibiotics. Then, it was akin to a death sentence.

Perhaps, also, he refused to leave the house, particularly in daylight, because of those physical deformities by which syphilis would make him easily recognizable as a sufferer. He had, however, recently paid a social call on my great-grandfather, so I thought that unlikely.

These three entries convinced me The Ripper was not a married man. Surely no wife would have missed the symptoms he must be exhibiting. His words screamed of loneliness and a life of solitude. Perhaps he had been married at some time in the past, but I was sure he had no partner in life at the time he wrote this sorry journal of his. After all, by his own words, he must suffer alone for his sins and indiscretions, or worse still, by Victorian standards, a homosexual dalliance?

Whatever the answers that would surely reveal themselves as I delved ever deeper into the journal, I knew that the case of The Jack the Ripper murders was probably far more complex than many scholars and Ripperologists had previously thought. Was I the first to think that perhaps The Ripper was as much a victim of his own crimes as those he so brutally murdered and mutilated? The purists would probably think me as insane as he undoubtedly was to even suggest such a thing! Yet, that feeling wouldn't leave me; it grew with every passing minute, with almost every word I read. I couldn't, wouldn't, ever try to excuse his crimes, oh no, but, in light of what I was learning about his state of mind, the terrible diseases of the brain with which I was becoming more and more sure he was afflicted, the more I could perhaps begin to understand what lay behind the crimes of Jack the Ripper.

16
^th
September 1888

Vigilantes in the streets! Jews, butchers, cobblers, all accused, ha! What next? Shall I join the throng, like before? Scream at the police, at the poor unlucky butcher's boy as he passes in the street wearing his blood-stained leather apron?

I grow tired of this game, my head hurts again, I feel dizzy, expectation crowds my thoughts, and I think the public too have expectations of me. They wait to see when I shall strike again. They want to see and hear of my work. They pretend to fear my flashing blade, yet deep beneath they want to hear and read of bloody murder. They won't admit it, oh no, they won't, but I know it's what they want. They want me to rip the next whore, but I'll keep them waiting, bide my time, the next whore won't bleed until I'm ready, then the river of red will flow once more, and I'll stain the streets with the blood of the foul-tainted whores. The crowds are too much; one cannot go about one's business without being accosted by the great unwashed, seeking retribution, ha, as if dead whores need revenging. Let them die, let them bleed, let them cower from my cold, hard steel as it slices through their warm sticky flesh, I want to see the horror on a whore's face as she gurgles and gags and chokes on the blood in her throat. The last one was too quick, too easy, let the next one die a little slower, yes, and let me taste her fear, foul despicable whore! I shall go on a journey, where? Tomorrow I'll decide. Let London sweat, let the whores wait, just a little longer, but wait, shall I take my flashing blades upon this journey? Shall I let the streets of some new town run red, there are whores everywhere are there not, and do they not deserve to die also? My head hurts so much, I must try to sleep, tomorrow will be soon enough to decide such weighty questions. I feel sick, I need to sleep, to close my eyes, to rest.

His words seemed to reverberate inside my head. His chilling, matter-of fact references to the gory blood-letting of his killings, his apparent amusement at the public reaction to his deeds, and his obvious distaste for the crowds thronging the streets of London seeking the killer, as though they, not he, were the cause of public nuisance. He was becoming exasperated with the mob, with their need to find him, to exact revenge for the murders. After all, to his mind the victims; those poor unfortunate women who had fallen into the lowest of professions were barely human, and so undeserving of public sympathy. They were after all 'only whores', and, as he'd previously written in an earlier entry, he was surprised to know that whores actually had names. They were nothing, little more than the 'raw material' for his 'work'. As an artist utilizes his canvas, and applies his paints diligently with his brushes, so those poor women were his canvases, his knives, his brushes, and the resulting carnage he wrought with those blades became in his mind his masterpieces of creation, his 'work'.

Even more unnerving, as I sat reading this diabolical text in the dead of night, was his stated desire to watch the face and hear the horrendous 'gurgling and gagging' of his next victim as her life ebbed away. Killing another human being in cold blood was one thing, but to take pleasure from his victims last agonizing painful moments was truly callous in the extreme. Despite his obvious psychological disorders I felt a positive sense of revulsion for the man who had written these terrible words, who had already killed three times, at least, and was destined to kill again, even more horrifically.

I shuddered, and realized the lateness of the hour. My eyes were heavy, and I'd reached that point of half-sleep-half-waking state, when the eyes start to lose their ability to focus, the words on the page begin to dance in a macabre ballet, and the brain begins to play mind tricks upon the unwary. Perhaps that was why I now felt as though the words on that awful page were changing shape, lengthening and swelling, swaying in front of me until they seemed to be oozing and dripping with small rivulets of blood, slowly trickling down the page, towards my fingers where they held tightly to the journal.

I quickly shook myself into wakefulness, and simultaneously dropped the journal onto the desk as though it were red hot in my hand. I realised I was far, far too tired to be reading at this time of night. The disturbance in my mind caused by my earlier attempt to sleep, and the ensuing nightmares that had accompanied the effort were nothing compared to the painful fears and visions that now crowded into my mind, as though someone had opened a floodgate of irrationality in some deep corner of my psyche. This was worse than the dreams that come with sleep, for now I was in that awful place where reality and fantasy are too closely entwined to separate. Pictures of dark, shadowy figures flitted across my vision, though my eyes seemed unable to focus, it was like trying to see through a fog, a red, impenetrable fog, cloying, sticky, and the blood that formed the fog was itself filled with a life of its own, screaming at me in despair and agony!

I was awake, the room was normal, there was nothing to fear, and then, the strange dancing letters of the journal filled my head again, the fog grew ever thicker, and now, instead of the screams from within the dense cloud that gathered round me, the screams I heard were real, they were mine!

My head hit the desk with a dull thud. I had collapsed in a fit of nervous tension, and the impact of my forehead on the hard wooden surface brought me back to reality. I was shaking and, I was ashamed to admit, almost in tears. The whole process of my journey through the journal was becoming a trial for which I appeared to be singularly unprepared.

I needed Sarah. I wasn't one to feel lonely at the absence of my wife for a few days. It was quite usual for her to drive off to the Cotswolds from time to time to spend weekends or even a week with her sister. I had never felt the need to spend every minute of my life with her, nor she with me. We were in love, and that was enough. The time we were together was as precious and as special as any couple could hope for, and the occasional absence by Sarah had never bothered me until now. I'd never felt more afraid or lonely in my entire life than now. What was happening to me? I wanted to pick up the telephone, call her right now in the middle of the night and tell her to come home, tell her how much I missed and needed her…but I couldn't. How would I have been able to make her understand that I was afraid of some papers my father had left me, that I was so very frightened by the fact I was sitting here alone in the dead of night reading the words of Jack the Ripper, and afraid of every word in that awful journal? How could I explain to my wife that it was as if he were there with me, watching me, making sure I didn't miss a page, a single word?