A Study in Red - The Secret Journal of Jack the Ripper (23 page)

We said our goodbyes, and I sat in the chair for a good two minutes before I rose and replaced the wall phone on its cradle. The tiredness in my body was all encompassing, there didn't seem to be a muscle or a joint that didn't ache. I felt awful, though it wasn't just the effects of the tiredness. I felt guilty at the thought that I was misleading my wife into thinking I was perfectly all right, when in fact, I was anything but. I tried to console myself with the thought that in some way I was protecting her, though from exactly what I wasn't sure. I just didn't want her worrying about me, and at the same time I was glad she was at Jennifer's and nowhere near the influence of the journal, whatever that might be. If I'd been a patient of my own at this moment I would have thought I was heading for some sort of breakdown, and would probably have prescribed a strong sedative and a course of anti-depressants.

I needed to keep Sarah away from what was happening to me, at least until I had some answers, and that meant completing my reading of the journal. If she could see me now, immersed in an unholy quest to discover some hitherto unknown family secret tied into the Jack the Ripper murders of over a hundred years ago, she would probably have thought me quite mad, which, at the time, I perhaps was!

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!

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 5
^th
October, the Ripper had written no more until the 26
^th
, 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 16
^th
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 'stage' 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.

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.