A Study in Red - The Secret Journal of Jack the Ripper (9 page)

I was concerned most of all by his threat to taste the blood of his next victim. Shades of Count Dracula, I thought at the time. Though I was sure he wouldn't go as far as to drink the blood, I felt he was beginning to personalize the murders a little more by this threatened action. Once the blood of his victim came into contact with his mouth, once he felt and tasted the warmth of his victim, he would feel in total possession of the body, she would be his to do with as he liked, and, as history has revealed to us, the worst was yet to come.

Finally, I was now sure of one thing. The writer of the journal was an intelligent man, well-schooled, as his words, phrases, and use of the English language were demonstrating to me. Assuming that he was indeed The Ripper, in my mind I was able to dismiss as suspects the Polish Jew Kosminsky, the boot maker Pizer, and the Pole Severin Klosowski, another suspect I had read of but not previously mentioned. To my mind, the words of the journal were those of an educated man writing in his own language, as he displayed so much familiarity with the phraseology of his English. A foreigner, no matter how well educated would surely not have played so adeptly with his sentence construction as the writer of this incredible journal. No, this was a home grown killer, of that I was now sure.

That was it, it was now almost ten thirty. I'd been so engrossed, so carried along by this strange and macabre day that time had almost lost it's meaning for me. As I placed the journal on the desk, relieved to be taking my leave of the dark and murderous world of Jack the Ripper for a few hours at least, I remembered that I'd unplugged the phones earlier. Sarah may have been trying to call me back as she'd promised. I plugged them back in, checked for messages, and there she was, just a quick "Hi darling, presume you're busy, I'll call tomorrow, goodnight. I love you," before I climbed the stairs, quickly undressed and found my way under the warmth of the duvet, and quickly fell into a deep, though disturbed and dream laden sleep, haunted by dreams of the dark, blood-soaked world of terror that was the realm of The Ripper.

From Hell?

Throughout my life, I've always been fascinated by the human brain, by its sheer capacity for achievement. Though relatively small in stature it is without doubt one of the wonders of creation. Like a great computer, the brain has many functions. It generates the subconscious signals required by the body to maintain temperature, breathing and blood flow, it tells us when we're hungry or thirsty, thus acting as a fuel reserve indicator. It has the in-built facility to absorb and store myriad items of information, cataloguing them in order of priority, some being required as instant recall items, others to be stored away for future use, somewhere within its vast and largely unknown memory banks. It never sleeps, never rests, a constant stream of data impulses being produced to maintain and regulate the life of its host, the human body.

Unseen, without physical form, made up entirely of little understood electrical impulses, chemical markers and countless thought processes, the mind is the great unknown; compare it to an iceberg, with less than ten percent of its form above the surface, the majority hidden, mysterious. It is the one thing that individualizes us, makes us different from one another. The mind, in its similarity to an iceberg, is composed of three sections, the conscious, which is the part floating just above the surface, which we can see, sometimes smooth, sometimes shards of daggers bearing witness to the shearing forces that so shaped it, and then there is the preconscious - alike to torpor, the rippling water of the surface where items are on the tip of conscious recollection; and then, lastly, there is the vast and unimaginable unconscious which stretches into the abyssal depths, unfathomable and dark, where we store all the data we cannot consciously recall, or repress the memories that pain us so. It is the breaking off of fragments of repressed memories which bubble to the surface and become neuroses - manifesting themselves in some outré manner, seen or unseen, to the detriment of the individual, and on rare occasions - those unfortunate to find themselves in the company of such an individual.

Psychiatrists and psychologists who use fundamentally different approaches to reaching into the mind to identify and treat the causes and effects of mental illness will often work hand in hand for many years in order to alleviate the symptoms of just one patient's neuroses. None of the information and resources available today was available in the 1880s, when a faulty or malfunctioning brain had little or no chance of repair by the medical profession.

Unfortunately, when these neuroses rise to the surface it is possible that, as in a computer, there are times when the mind itself acts as though infected with a virus. Its programming exhibits signs of being scrambled or interrupted, normal functions are disturbed and disrupted, and the result can manifest itself in what we term mental illness, disease of the mind. Psychiatrists and psychologists have spent decades attempting to understand the workings of this most complex component of human nature, the psyche, the thing that makes us who we are, yet even today, we've barely scratched the surface. An imbalance of chemicals in the brain, a 'short circuit' in the brain's electrical impulses, can all lead to various aberrations and breakdowns in the thought processes that keep us on life's even keel. In extreme cases, meltdown can occur, and the sufferer can descend into ever deeper troughs of illness and psychosis, what was once termed unsympathetically, 'madness'. Such is the frailty of 'the mind'.

As I slept, my own subconscious mind swept me away into the vast untapped world of dreams. Less understood than the mind, the power to dream is, in some specialists' opinions, a safety valve, a means of releasing the conscious tensions and anxieties of the mind while the body lies in its recuperative, self-refreshing state, sleep. That night however, was anything but a release. Disturbed in my waking hours by the horrific and graphic tableau being played out in the pages of the journal, my dreams were a series of ghastly vivid nightmares. The faces of the victims and the suspects, all recognizable from the printed internet facts I'd obtained earlier, floated in a never ending grotesque merry-go-round in front of my eyes; victims screaming, bleeding from the throat, from their mouths, the suspects all laughing a crazed, high pitched laugh as they brandished gleaming knives, slashing wildly at my face as they were carried past my line of sight by an unseen demonic wind. At times, victims and suspects almost melded into each other, until the faces became indistinct, a blur, fading in and out of focus, dissolving into fog, into nothingness.

As the last of this grotesque gallery finally receded from view, I found myself standing alone in a typical nineteenth century East End street. I looked upwards, the street sign at the corner proclaimed it to be Dorset Street. I was rooted to the spot, just outside the door of a public house, its name clearly displayed as The Britannia, one of the haunts of at least one of the Ripper's victims. From within came the sounds of music, an out-of-tune piano by the sound of it, accompanied by raucous laughter and singing. Try as I might I couldn't move, and then the doors of the pub opened towards me, and instead of the light from within flooding out to meet me, there poured a river of blood, a deluge that swept me off my feet and carried me along the street. Screaming in terror, my arms flailed about in an attempt to find some hand hold, anything to grab in order to pull myself from the mad torrent of sickly sweet, copper-scented blood. I was being swept along at such a speed the buildings of the street were indistinct. My eyes, my mouth, my nose were rapidly becoming filled with the terrible red liquid that carried me inexorably towards …towards where? I knew that I was drowning, drowning in the blood of the Ripper's victims, and I screamed, and screamed, and screamed, but no-one heard.

Just as my lungs were on the point of bursting, as I felt I could take no more, a hand grasped mine. Slowly, with a great strength behind it, the hand pulled me from that thick, viscous ocean of blood. As is the nature of dreams I suddenly found myself standing, completely dry and unsullied by the blood which moments ago had saturated my clothes and my body, in the grounds of the hospital where I had worked for five years, and there, beside me was my old friend and mentor, Doctor T. J. O'Malley. O'Malley had taught me almost everything I knew about modern-day psychiatry, and had been my teacher and my friend until his untimely death from cancer three years before. Now here he was, rescuing me from the blood, from the terror, from the fear. I reached out to touch him, to thank him, and he just wasn't there anymore, he was gone!

There were other, less distinct dreams, but all of a similar nature, the theme never varying from the all-encompassing terror of the murders, and then, suddenly, I was awake.

I hadn't heard the window opening, hadn't felt the wind blowing the curtains into the room, or sensed the shadowy figure that now stood towering above me, oozing menace. In the darkness I could just make out the outline of the figure of a man, leaning over me, his eyes as red as the blood of my dreams. The eyes seemed to glow in the dark, they penetrated into my very soul, and the fear and terror I felt in that moment were indescribable. He was clad in black from head to foot, the bottom half of his face masked by a black silken scarf. On his head he wore a black top hat, and in his hand he carried a long, gleaming, wicked looking knife.

I was paralyzed with fear. I couldn't move. He leaned ever closer to me, and he spoke with a voice direct from the grave.

"So Robert, you know me, do you not? You know who I am. You know too much Robert, far too much. As you have seen inside my soul, so have I looked into yours. I cannot let you go any further, you are mine now, Robert, mine forever."

Before I could reply, he swiftly raised his left hand and swept the scarf from his face. As it fell away, I was gripped by the greatest sense of shock and revulsion I have ever experienced. I peered into Hell itself. The man opened his mouth, and there appeared a huge gaping maw, and the smell of rancid decay and putrefaction poured from within that chasm, and I knew that he was death itself. His right arm rose, and even in the darkness of my bedroom I could see the flash of the blade as it came down swiftly towards my throat. As the knife pressed into my trembling flesh I tried to scream, and then….

Sweating, shaking, and trembling uncontrollably I really woke up. It had been that most terrifying of experiences, a dream within a dream. I reached out and turned the bedside light on. The reality of that last encounter had been so utterly terrifying that it took me more than ten minutes to regain some semblance of composure. At last, I felt confident enough to remove myself from the bed, and make my way tentatively down the stairs to the kitchen, where I turned the lights full on, and switched on the kettle. I needed a very strong cup of coffee.

Sitting at the kitchen table in my shorts a few minutes later, I concluded that the journal had taken some sort of hold over both my conscious and subconscious mind. I had become totally absorbed into the strange and murky world of Jack the Ripper. Nothing had ever affected me so profoundly before. There was something other-worldly about these sheets of old paper, the faded ink, the wild rantings of the words placed on each page. I felt as though he was there with me, in the house, in my head, in my mind. Although I knew it to be wholly irrational, and without sense or logic, somehow I was tuned in to, and in the presence of a great evil. Though I knew no-one would ever understand what I meant, I knew I was not alone in the house that night. I looked at the clock. It was only 2.30 a.m. I'd barely slept three hours, yet I knew I must return to the journal, I had to continue the journey, had to see it through to the end. I would start to read again, there and then in the dead of night, quietly and carefully, watched over, so I thought by the soul of the man I was now sure was……Jack the Ripper!

I made my way to the study; coffee in hand, turned every light in the room on, and once more settled myself down at the desk. With my hands trembling far more than I would have thought possible just a few hours ago, I reached out and took up the journal once more.

Relative Calm

12th September 1888

What a night! No sleep, just dreams, red dreams, warm, cloying redness everywhere. The headaches are worse than before. Even the laudanum didn't stop them. See what these foul whores have done to me. Now they've robbed me of my sleep, my rest. They'll pay, oh yes, I'll make them pay. I walked miles today, no cabs, and the streets were filled with little insignificant people, worms and insects. The smell of the streets was an assault on my senses, but I had to go. If the laudanum won't work any more, I need something else, must stop the pain. Thought of visiting 'T', but he knows me too well. Instead found myself on the street where Cavendish lives. What a grand façade, he does live well. Presented myself and was shown to the drawing room. He seemed pleased though surprised to see me. We're not close of course, I often wonder how he sees me, and we hardly know each other after all, though we've spoken often. Told him the laudanum wasn't enough, the headaches are worse. He pried into other 'symptoms' which I denied, and said I should make an appointment for a proper consultation. Did he think me foolish when I refused, said I just wanted something to help the pain? Do I care, no, I do not. He suggested I take the air somewhere, the country perhaps. Shall I see the coast, the sea perhaps? I think I may. No good ripping whores if I can't take pleasure from the work. Get rid of the pain, and then gut the foul bitches again. The voices agree, let's rest awhile. They'll return when the time is ripe, when the whores' blood is ready to spill again.

This had been one of the Ripper's longest individual entries. It struck me as strange that he was describing a night of dreams almost on a par with those I had just experienced. The link was almost too close for comfort. What bizarre quirk of fate had brought me to this page immediately after undergoing the series of nightmares from which I'd just escaped? There was one significant difference however. He had written, 'no sleep, just dreams' and I thought that he was perhaps referring to hallucinations. Certainly, in his drug fuelled state of mind, true sleep would have been difficult, and he had probably lain in a waking dream state for hour upon hour, his head filled with one vivid image after another, until the pain in his head would have made him feel as though it were about to explode. He thought that the laudanum had failed to stop the headaches; in fact we now know that, due to the amounts he was consuming, it was actually helping to perpetuate them by inducing the terrible hallucinations from which he was suffering. He was on a never-ending downward spiral of drug abuse, such as is often experienced by modern-day addicts. He must have been existing in a half-world, somewhere between sleep and consciousness, beset by terrible blood-soaked dreams, a constant reminder of the orgy of destruction into which his life had been plunged by his rapid descent into multiple wildly obsessive murder. That spiral would almost inevitably lead him into a helter-skelter style whirlpool of self-destruction. For the Ripper, there could be no going back, never again for him a normal life, an ordinary day. He'd already passed the point of no return.