Jaclyn the Ripper (2 page)

“What in the hell do you think—”

Growling, a blur of movement, the woman grabbed and propelled Teresa forward, slammed her headfirst into the mirror.

“Don't you know who I am?!”

Stunned, Teresa staggered back, but the woman jerked her forward. Windmilling her arms and kicking, Teresa tried to free herself from the iron grip, but was no match for the woman's strength.

“Don't you know who I am?”

The woman slammed Teresa into the mirror again, then grabbed her by the hair, forced Teresa to look into her eyes.

“Don't you recognize me?!”

Teresa tried to say something to save herself, but the woman rammed her into the glass twice more in quick succession, splitting her lip and breaking her nose. Blood sprayed on the mirror, the sink, the floor.

“Don't you know who I am?!”

Again, she slammed Teresa into the mirror, this time with such force the glass cracked. Teresa went limp.

“An eternity ago that bloody little fool your museum is celebrating sent me to the end of time!” the woman shouted. She pile-drove an unconscious Teresa into the mirror until it finally shattered and shards of glass rained on the metal sinks and tile floor. “For an eternity, yours truly has been—has been—”

Has been what? Where?
Her chest heaving, she stopped, let go of Teresa, watched her crumple to the floor. Her last conscious memory was of that fateful day in 1979 when H. G. Wells pulled the declinometer from the time machine and everything exploded into an oblivion echoing with one last agonized scream.
Mine.
She had no clue how many years had—or hadn't—passed since then.

Has been what? Where?

 

She hadn't known that on the event horizon of the black hole once called Earth were trillions of entities: other-universe forms that resembled protozoa in a variety of shapes, colors and designs. She hadn't known that one in particular possessed the seed of her resurrection—at least in part—and that this one elongated entity was thin enough to move easily in the dense yet vast gravitational field. It looked like a scaled pennate diatom, was both unspeakably ugly and beautiful in its symmetry, and possessed X and Y chromosomes that spiraled within its frustules, those indicators some three billion years old in the universes. More important, the entity had instincts, and when the time machine materialized in the endless sea of forms, this thing slipped eel-like between the door and the cabin and festooned itself to the chair, at long last insulated from the silent, profound blackness that stank of burnt plastic.

Had it been three hours ago or four?

She hadn't known that there was no time in that cesspool of nothingness, that residue of life squandered, so the question mattered not. Then the entity had sensed movement. Consciousness. Life. Even purpose.
Inexplicably, a mind had been reborn in the time machine's chair, then senses. Instinct had given way to reason and, alas, feelings.

Except she had been a “he” then.

And then the machine had tumbled end-over-end in an endless, colossal limbo. He had no clue that in this black hole once called Earth he and the machine had already been crushed by gravitational force to specks floating in a molecule-sized solar system. He had no clue how that had changed him from an unspeakably ugly and beautiful entity—or if it had at all. That he and the machine remained whole at all was due to the indifference, the dark energy that ruled the universes.

The Current Year Indicator had read 2353. If that were the end of time, then in the year of our Lord 2353, the human race had finally blown itself up. Moreover, the fact that the machine had traveled on its own to infinity meant that somewhere in time Wells had made a grave error.

The “he” was aware of the chair in the cabin, the crumbling switches and cracked dials, was aware of his existence again and wondered what sublime Omnipotence was behind his rebirth. Then his form had brushed something. He had assumed it was one of those sludge-crabs Wells wrote about that supposedly existed at the end of time. If true, he was famished and would eat it, but no, instead of a crab it was the prism-shaped device sparkling from within—that nasty, elongated declinometer. Some fool had pulled it and not put it back in its proper place, so indeed, there it was, resting on something dark like a pillow. Had he smiled then? Of course. Instead of sustenance, the mistake had been his salvation, for if the declinometer had been in place, the time machine would not have traveled to infinity.

Entities outside the craft had fallen away, dissolved, and the blackness became a temporal gray mist. His memory had come back, and he vaguely recalled the diagrams in Wells's laboratory from that fateful night in 1893—that unless one overrode the Rotation Reversal Lock, the time machine automatically returned to its home hour after a ninety-second delay. But
only
if the declinometer was in place. Without that “rudder,” the machine could only travel to when it had come
from, and the Time-Sphere Destination Indicator read: year, 2010; month, June; day, 20; time 12:01
A.M.

The machine gathered speed, spun into a sea of quantum foam, was vaporized and hurtled along the fourth dimension. Years later, as traveler and machine took on substance and form, as their mass expanded, the “he” had savored the ride, confident of a smooth transmogrification.

Trucido ergo sum
had been his first coherent thought. He imagined Wells as a bloody, eviscerated corpse, and—though he was no devotee of Shakespeare—he mused:
All's well that ends badly
.

Then something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

 

She stole a glimpse of her lovely face in the mirror, turned her back on herself again, still numb with unanswered questions. She didn't know about reformulation errors. She didn't know that no one had ever come back from infinity before, and that given the length of real time traveled, the quantum foam had altered
his
chromosomes. In genetic terms, a pitifully weak Y chromosome from his foppish father had been mysteriously trampled by a full-blown X chromosome from an yet-to-be-identified source. A classic Turner syndrome. No, she hadn't known that on Sunday, June 20, 2010, shaped by the mysteries of dark energy and emerging from the temporal mist of the fourth dimension, Jack the Ripper would be reconstituted as a woman.

Teresa moaned. The woman who had attacked her stepped back and observed critically, as if taking in an unfinished canvas. Teresa moaned again. Moved by an instinct not lost in her metamorphosis, the woman straddled the little security guard and started strangling her. Teresa twisted, bucked. Surprised her victim still had the will to resist—angry her hands weren't big and strong enough to end it quickly—the woman picked up a shard from the broken mirror and slashed Teresa's throat.

Sighing, the woman straightened up, appreciating the blood pooling around Teresa like spilled paint. She closed her eyes, and in her mind's eye saw a red rose opening in the sun. Then she frowned. This Teresa was no East End alley slut. Money had not changed hands, there had been no penetration, no thrusting, no sweet slime—where was the
pleasure in this? The woman smiled a pretty, disarming little-girl smile as the answer came.
Necessity has always been the mother of invention, so as long as we find ourselves in this dubious year of 2010—as long as we must kill—why not take pleasure in the pure simplicity of the act not fouled by an ejaculatory release?

Somewhere a thermostat clicked, interrupting her thoughts, and a breeze wafted in through the restroom vents. Chilled, the woman hugged herself, reminded of her rags, her gooseflesh, her nipples embarrassingly hard. She took Teresa's keys and cautiously ventured out the door.

She hurried across the alcove, rode the elevator down to the service floor, pleased that pushing buttons had replaced the accordion gates and straps of nineteenth-century lifts.
We must be in a new, modern art museum, not one of those decrepit salons or cathedrals of Europe. True, the place was featuring the dubious accomplishments of H. G. Wells, but surely they must have paintings by Goya, works like David's
“The Death of Marat.”

In the employee women's lounge, the woman located Teresa Cruz's locker, looked askance at her wardrobe.
Where on God's earth are we that people wear clothes like this?
Having no choice, she dressed, then regarded herself in the mirror.

The faded blue jeans were tight, yet strangely comfortable, but what drew the woman's eyes was her midriff showing, then her ample breasts, provocative in a gray T-shirt two sizes too small. She wondered if other women looked like this or if Teresa Cruz was a prostitute in her leisure hours. Preoccupied with her image, the woman didn't focus on the yellow happy face on her T-shirt, and the inane “Have a nice day” printed below. Instead, she tucked her glossy black hair up inside Teresa's cap, blue with a silly red heart on it, figuring that would give her a shred of respectability. She slipped her feet in Teresa's sandals, then rode the elevator back up to the courtyard level intending to get the special key from the time machine. When she reached the men's restroom, she hesitated, vaguely dissatisfied.

Jack would've never left a woman murdered so anonymous, so mundane. We would've sung to the world that we'd been out and about, we'd
have left something for the boys of Scotland Yard. After all, are we not in a museum? Do not artists sign their work?

In the restroom, she locked the door, then pulled Teresa's corpse to the stalls and propped it up on one side. With a shard from the mirror, she meticulously cut away the little guard's uniform shirt, then began a surgical procedure first learned in anatomy class and later practiced on Penny, her sister. The woman longed for the gold pocket watch with Penny's likeness inside the lid, lost in 1979. She missed its music box playing an innocent French lullaby. Nevertheless, she hadn't lost her touch, and with a few quick, practiced incisions, excised Teresa's kidney. Smiling, she rinsed it off in the sink and put it in the pocket of her jeans, then washed her hands as if finishing up in a surgery. Her smile grew larger when she saw that as before she had avoided getting bloodstains on her clothes. If nothing else, being a comely lass hadn't affected her expertise. And all with a shard of glass, too.

She unlocked the door, looked both ways and headed across the rotunda toward the courtyard and West Pavilion, formulating a plan. She would stay in 2010 long enough to track down and cut up Wells. Then—with the special key—she'd have carte blanche to choose her victims regardless of history. Perchance she'd travel back to mid-nineteenth-century Turkey and, say, disembowel that do-gooder Florence Nightingale, who was tending to the flotsam and jetsam of the Crimean War. She smiled.
Perhaps a trip into the past will make me a man again, and I can rape her as well.

Halfway across the rotunda, she heard footsteps and glanced up. A security guard was coming down the circular staircase. The woman tensed, ducked in the shadows, walked faster.

“Hey!”

The woman spun around, started running back the way she had come.

“Hey!”

Panicked, the woman looked for escape, finally saw an emergency exit beyond the men's restroom. Without breaking stride, she hit the bar on the door and burst out on an expanse of stone.

The alarms went off.

The awful noise reverberated off the buildings, the stone, resounded in her ears. She vaulted over a wall, fell into a hedgerow, rolled, fell again and landed on a manicured lawn. Unmindful of her scratched and bleeding arms, she got up and ran for the safety of an arid hillside ragged with smog-dusted scrub.

H. G. Wells and a soft-spoken constable from Sandgate talked at the front door, the constable raising his voice over the muffled roar of the surf from below the cliffs. The police had been looking, had made inquiries, yet had turned up nothing, and there was no evidence of foul play. The constable promised they'd go on searching, then said good day and Godspeed, his words lost in the wind. Upset and worried, H.G. watched him avoid a hodgepodge of croquet wickets on the lawn, mount his bicycle and start back to town.

“What did he say, sir?” asked the housekeeper, wringing her hands in the foyer, though she had heard every word.

“Nothing we didn't already know, Mrs. Vickers.”

His wife was missing.

No one had seen her since dinner the night before. They'd been having another festive weekend at Spade House. Joseph Conrad, George Bernard and Charlotte Shaw, the Henry Jameses, the Webbs, the Blands, and a host of others were down from London to welcome H.G. home from his first tour of America. They'd had the usual literary banter during the croquet games, the usual political arguments at tea, the usual speculative theories at dinner. The only cause for raised eyebrows had
been W. K. Chichester arriving late from a pub and demanding to know if Wells had witnessed the earthquake in San Francisco. No, H.G. had replied, he had been in Chicago. After Chichester's recitation of a ruined city on fire, H.G. had tuned out the seismologist's grandiose claims of having predicted the quake, turned a deaf ear to his prattle about using revolutionary scientific methods to predict even bigger earthquakes in the future. H.G. was tired of science. He was more interested in charades; he was more interested in seconds of bread pudding and cognac. He was
most
interested in finding his lover-shadow—that other consciousness, that perfect woman who mirrored everything he held good and true, who matched him sexually and intellectually, that soul mate he thought he had found in Amy. Alas, no. His lover-shadow had vanished shortly after they were married.

Ironically, Amy's charade had been the highlight of the evening. Full of fun, a picture of loveliness, she had taken center stage in the parlor, was urging clues from the guests, making them laugh and grumble, holding them spellbound as they attempted to guess the name of a modern novel. At that moment, H.G. had felt a surge of pride and love for her—like years ago when they'd been unabashed lovers.