Jaclyn the Ripper (14 page)

He was already aware of the murder at the Getty Museum, yet was fascinated by the coverage: coroner deputies taking the body away, then thirty seconds of the blood-splattered men's room, a chalk outline marking where the victim had been found. Unfortunately, that was not all. A second reporter in the Brentwood hills less than a mile from the museum was going on about a second murder occurring later that morning. Both victims had been badly mutilated. A third reporter was outside the West LAPD division headquarters asking Lieutenant Casey Holland if the crimes were related. Too early to tell, he replied, but given their grisly nature—the victim at the Getty had her kidney surgically removed—he thought that a serial killer, a true psychopath, was at work. The TV went back to the anchorwoman, who questioned the reporters for more details, but they had none.

H.G. gaped at the screen and recalled his thought from the night before. He told himself it wasn't possible, that his intuition was dead wrong, but he couldn't ignore a coincidence that was no longer a coincidence. Both murders were the work of a madman—no doubt the monster he had chased through time and sent to hell.

Jack the Ripper.

As the anchorwoman wrapped up the news, H.G. fell back on the bed, his mind racing, calculating the real time traveled. At three years per minute, Amy's trip to 2010 had taken thirty-four minutes, and since she had forgotten the special key,
The Utopia
would have been back at its home hour in the lab an hour and eight minutes after she had left.
Yet, when he had come to the lab late the next afternoon, the engine was still warm, so his machine had taken much longer to come home, meaning that a jaunt to infinity was not out of the question. In fact, that was probably why he had arrived over nine hours later than Amy. The Destination Indicator hadn't been up to a trip of such magnitude and had lost calibration.

He held his head and groaned.
Amy, oh, Amy, love of my life, not only did you leave your purse in the cabin, but rather than take the special key so that the machine would stay where it was, you pulled the declinometer and sent
The Utopia
to infinity
.

Though he knew he still had the special key, he succumbed to a flash of panic, riffled through his pants hung over the chair and took it out. Holding it filled him with a sense of well-being, but only for a moment. He still had to find Amy. And worse, the possibility that Leslie John Stephenson had somehow survived. . . .

Wait.

In his mind, infinity equaled the end of time which in turn equaled the end of the world—not necessarily an Armageddon, but when the sun died. According to the best scientific minds of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that cosmic event wouldn't happen for another five thousand million years, so if
The Utopia
were traveling at three years per minute, it would take fifteen thousand years of real time to make the round trip. So Jack the Ripper couldn't be here in 2010. Unless . . .

He shut his eyes tightly and didn't want to think it, but couldn't stop the inevitable questions: Aside from global warming, what if there had been an Armageddon? What if mankind had annihilated itself and blown up the planet? Then Earth would indeed be some toxic syrup of gamma rays and dark energy coexisting in a gigantic black hole with the lost souls of good men and evil alike. H.G. made another uneasy, albeit rough, calculation. If Amy had pulled the declinometer just past midnight and sent his machine to infinity and it somehow returned to the Getty in four or five hours . . . Yes, it was possible. It was horribly possible.

If the world ended in a mere three hundred years or so.

Suddenly depressed, he put on his shirt and underwear and stood in the window, but couldn't escape his thoughts. First global warming and now this. He imagined Atlas being crushed by the weight of the heavens, yet still standing tall, and he, himself, a pale Edwardian imitation. Happy, busy sounds came from the streets below, making him wonder how he could ever hope to warn mankind of its impending doom and be taken seriously. True, he was well known; he had been received by heads of state; he did have a substantial following, including a fair number of enemies, plus critics and suffragettes. Perhaps when he went home, he could persuade people to listen.

I must try. I must spend my life trying
.

Someone knocked. He considered not answering, but didn't have a chance. Amber opened the door with her spare key and came in wearing a hotel robe tied loosely at the waist. She closed the door with a click and stood there, eyes downcast, her hands twisting in her robe.

“I am
so
sorry,” she said.

He turned back to the window, annoyed that she had broken into his thoughts, that she was here. He spied his trousers on the chair and fought his way into them.

“I went downstairs and had some drinks after you left last night. . . . I kept wondering what it would be like.” She sighed. “I think my mind got hung up on the out-of-time part—or something.” She shrugged. “So I told myself that I should just do it—that you would like me—and that it wouldn't really matter because it wouldn't be part of anything.”

“In my century,” he said acidly, “if someone wants something, usually they ask.”

“I said I was sorry.” Her voice quavered. She started crying. “I didn't want to hurt you or Amy or anyone, no matter what you think! I suppose in some primal part of my brain, I wanted to find out if you were really real!”

Her tears became sobs. They melted his resolve, making him anxious to somehow stop her emotions, to reassure her even though he was the one who had been violated.

She sat on the bed and put her face in her hands, and the words kept coming. “And, and now I don't know what to do—I had this stupid
speech worked out about something glorious in the cosmos sending you through time to me, but, oh God, that's
so
dumb!”

“Amber—”

“And now the only thing I can think of is that if you took us back through time to last night, I'd probably do the same damn thing all over again!” She pushed off the bed and started for the door.

“Amber, please. . . .”

One hand on the door handle, she turned. “This is so . . . This is so lame! All I wanted to do was apologize, but then I look at you and I fall apart all over again!”

“Will you please get hold of yourself?!”

He gripped her firmly by the shoulders, gave her a little shake, then saw the tears welling up in her eyes again. He relented and embraced her, felt her sobs against his body—not an entirely unpleasant sensation—then was amazed at how quickly his mind had been wrenched from a dilemma of staggering proportions to the downright trivial. Such was the power of a woman.

Amy swam through his brain, reminding him that she had been his lover-shadow once and hopefully would be again. Yet he wasn't reassured, for according to his theory, his reasoning, everyone had a lover-shadow, and like this Amber Reeves had declared last night, he just might be hers. The thought made him nervous and giddy, and he found himself distracted by her glossy black hair that lay in piles of natural ringlets. He stroked it and whispered, “Medusa.”

“What?”

“Your hair is like the Medusa's.”

She wasn't sure what he meant, but smiled hopefully.

“So I'm calling you 'Dusa.”

“I'm still your assistant?”

“You're still in my employ, yes.”

She tried to kiss him, but he pushed her away.
I must forget about lover-shadows
.

“Don't worry. . . . I'm not gonna try to come between you and Amy.”

“It's not about Amy,” he replied.

He sat her down in front of the TV and didn't say a word till Fox
News had rerun the “Brentwood Murders” story. Then he told her about Jack the Ripper stealing his time machine and coming to 1979, and how he had followed, tracked the monster, met Amy Catherine Robbins, finally one-upped the Ripper and sent him to infinity, then returned to his own world with the love of his life.

“
That's
why I had a problem with his DNA!”

“He wants the special key.” H.G. held it up for emphasis. “He hasn't a clue where I am—he may think that I'm still in the nineteenth century—but he does know that Amy is here because he would've seen her purse in the time machine's cabin. . . . He'll look for her hoping to find me.”

“I'm gonna call the lieutenant.”

“He'll think you're mad.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” She smiled shrewdly, her eyes dark and bright. “He knows I'm a freak for the nineteenth century. I'll tell him that this Leslie John Stephenson is a Jack the Ripper copycat.”

H.G. lifted his eyebrows, but wasn't encouraged.
I'm not sure it will make one whit of difference
.

She'd already taken out her phone and pushed a button.

He gazed out the window again.
If I had invented push buttons and could have imagined this world, I would have burned the formula
.

“Smashing, how simply smashing!” Jaclyn exclaimed. She was watching the KTLA morning news break. “They think I'm a man.”

She curled her toes and stretched, quite refreshed after a deep, satisfying sleep brought on by the murders from the day before, undisturbed by the phone ringing last night and this morning as well. She had no intention of answering and complicating things when she was just beginning to cozy up here.

She changed channels and stopped on an interview with a pretty congresswoman from an Eastern state who was proselytizing her audience to help stop the AIDS scourge, now a pandemic that had engulfed the entire Third World. Intrigued, Jaclyn watched, and upon learning that the disease was primarily transmitted by sodomy, she chuckled.
Thank you so much for the education, Channel Seven. I indeed belong in this dangerous new world, so obviously amoral and homogenous that men, women and animals copulate at will, and one wonders how the whores make a living
. Her attention went back to the congresswoman, who was repeating herself now, much like the actors who sold products every few minutes. Since they all appeared and sounded similar, Jaclyn questioned if they were actually human or
human replicants. She fantasized about sodomizing this congresswoman with, say, a broomstick, then slashing her throat and observing wires and electronics spilling out. She frowned. She preferred blood.

She wrinkled her nose. A stench from Heather Trattner's kitchen lingered in the air, reminding her of a surgery that orderlies had neglected to clean.
But I did tidy up
, she told herself, going into the kitchen, inspecting the sink, the body parts in bags stacked neatly on the counter.
It must be the stagnant air, the humidity in this part of the world
. Still, she couldn't tolerate the smell. Unaware that she'd already spent more time in a kitchen than Leslie John had ever done, she donned an apron, found a cookbook and ingredients in the pantry, turned on the oven, then mixed up a kidney pie using Heather's—which seemed relatively fresh though they had sat out all night.
Wait, dear heart. Something's missing
. She ran to the bedroom and returned with Teresa Cruz's kidney—now black and foul—and added it to the pie as the pièce de résistance.

As the dish baked, filling the house with its sickly-sweet organ smell, Jaclyn carried the body parts out to the Mercedes in the garage and stacked them in the trunk. As an afterthought, she threw in designer jeans and T-shirts from Heather's closet in case she got careless and needed a change of clothing.

Back in the kitchen, she still wasn't happy with the odor from her pie, so she filled a pot with water, laced it with tablespoons of ginger and nutmeg and put it on to boil—as the maid used to do at home when Mummy's kitchen smelled foul from butchering poultry.

The kidney pie needed another thirty minutes, so rather than watch television, she sat down at the secretary, deciding to celebrate her sojourn in the twenty-first century by writing a little ditty—something that Penny used to do rather than keep a diary. She gazed off, reflected on her transmogrification into a female form. While she hated women—hence, herself—she couldn't ignore that the female gender had certain advantages: Sexual attraction rather than suspicion opened doors and left her free to do as she pleased without recrimination; an arsenal of smiles, from the innocent to the insouciant to the coy to the knowing, could make men act in silly and predictable ways. Leslie John had always appreciated the wiles of women before he murdered them. Therefore, did
she not now have the best of both worlds? She glanced down at herself. Alas, no.
As long as I have an odiferous hole between my legs, I shall feel turned inside out, and if someday I cut up myself, I will bleed buckets of rage
. She chuckled, her introspection having brought forth the Muse, then—in perfect handwriting—began composing on Heather's pink-and-roses stationery.

Jack & Jill came back to kill
The girls who went before them.
Jack got mixed and Jill got switched
So Jill, not Jack would have to kill
The girls who went before them
.

Delighted at her creation, her laugh light and musical, she imagined reciting at a tea or a poetry reading—if such niceties still existed in the T-shirt, tattoo and smart-phone world of 2010.
Perchance I'll do a collection of poetry and then find a university or a ladies' club or bookstore where I can woo them with my verse and then carve them into sculptures should they pique my fancy
.

Wait. She looked at her ditty again, cocked her head, chewed on the pen. Shouldn't the third line read: Jack got changed and Jill, deranged . . . ?
No, no, that alters the rhythm, yet it's not too terribly bad, except it takes the verse somewhere else entirely, and we don't yet know where that is
. She stared off thoughtfully.
Wells. He would know, wouldn't he? He knows all about writing books and poetry and the like, that smug little bastard. After I've captured and humiliated him, I'll have him write a second verse for his epitaph
.