I, Ripper

And the women, of course. By law they could not stop. If they stopped, the coppers could nick them, and it was off to the tank for a night, a night without the comforts of gin, and the quick blast of jizz to pay for it, and finally, hard earned, the lice-infested bed at a doss house. So walk the poor dearies did, in a great circle, up Commercial to Whitechapel, down Whitechapel to Brick Lane, then Brick Lane to Hanbury, which led them back to Commercial. It was said by the Metropolitans that there were at least fifteen hundred Judys on the streets and, in the dark avenues off the lighted concourses, sixty-six brothels, perhaps for a higher class of girl and a higher class of customer. The street girls, however, were the permanent feature of the Whitechapel experience.

Which brings me to the core of the issue: the presence of all those streets and alleys. That was what made the whole thing go, that was what turned Whitechapel into a square-mile outdoor brothel where the grunts and squeals and gasps of the sex dance were never far from the ear, and if you turned as you walked by a dark passageway off the boulevard, you could often make out the shadowy figures of those seeking oblivion in the final spurt of the act.

Whitechapel was so fully laced with dark roads off the main stem, which functioned as “rooms” in the imaginary brothel of which I speak, that you could almost smell the jizz and cunny in the air. The stage design of the immense show was structured along elemental lines: It was simply dark vs. light, each being intensified by the presence of the other, and perhaps many came simply to appreciate the sharpness of the divide between those two worlds. I know I found it fascinating and could not stop turning it over in my mind, believing it had to mean something more than it did.

The light was commerce, family, order, civilization; the dark was raw sex, violence, and by implication the end to civilization. I took as premise that our fellow, our mad butcher, our fiend with a knife, was a creature of the dark, and as such had a kind of mythical significance few could articulate but all could appreciate, for it quivered the marrow of the human bone.

He was what we left behind when we moved indoors, he was the beast of the heart, he was a creature of pure will without interest in, much less an obedience to, all those rules we agreed upon when we put ourselves under roof. Mercy? Pity? Cooperation? Civility? Brotherhood? The hallowed temple of the soul? Bah, he pushed them aside with a single brutish swipe. He was out of the Cimmerian darkness, mangy, hairy, quick to slash and cut and exult in the spillage of blood. He cried havoc, he let slip the dogs of depravity and murder, but even more loudly he cried, Not so fast. With your modern age, your railways, your steel ships and machines of war and deep penetrations under the earth for a fuel to drive it all – not so fast, you blighters. Here is the message I deliver for you to contemplate. I am anarchy. I am fear. I am carnage, slaughter, destruction for its own sake. I will remind you: It is your vanity to believe you have come so far and left me behind. You will never leave me behind. Don’t you see it yet? I am you.

That, really, is why I knew he’d strike again.

And he did.

CHAPTER SEVEN The Diary

September 7-8, 1888

left my dwelling at nine P.M. and took a hansom to city center, and had a repast in a public house, aware that I had my Sheffield in my belt at my hip, under the shirt and the frock coat I chose to wear on these expeditions. It gave me a nice shiver of bliss to be sitting there amid men of business and journalism or whatever, serious men, being seemingly one of them, and them not knowing what lay beneath my coat, them not noticing me at all or if so only in passing, them never guessing in a million years that eight inches of just-sharpened steel held tight in a grip of fine English maplewood pressed against my flesh, rather uncomfortably but not without its own measure of pleasure. A man with a good knife feels king of the world, that’s for certain!